Dealing with the Devil

East Germany, Détente, and Ostpolitik, 1969-1973

M. E. Sarotte

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807849156, 9780807825990
• eBook ISBN: 9780807860274
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

Using new archival sources — including previously secret documents of the East German secret police and Communist Party — M. E. Sarotte goes behind the scenes of Cold War Germany during the era of detente, as East and West tried negotiation instead of confrontation to settle their differences. In Dealing with the Devil, she explores the motives of the German Democratic Republic and its Soviet backers in responding to both the detente initiatives, or Ostpolitik, of West Germany and the foreign policy of the United States under President Nixon.

Sarotte focuses on both public and secret contacts between the two halves of the German nation during Brandt’s chancellorship, exposing the cynical artifices constructed by negotiators on both sides. Her analysis also details much of the superpower maneuvering in the era of detente, since German concerns were ever present in the minds of leaders in Washington and Moscow, and reveals the startling degree to which concern over China shaped European politics during this time. More generally, Dealing with the Devil presents an illuminating case study of how the relationship between center and periphery functioned in the Cold War Soviet empire.

Notes

Abbreviations

This list explains the abbreviations used in the endnotes. For more details about the nature and characteristics of the various collections cited (particularly the Stasi sources), see the Bibliography. Some less used and self-explanatory abbreviations (such as the shortening of “Sonderablage Stoph” to “Stoph” or “Büro Kohl” to “Kohl” on second reference) are not included.

Abt.

Abteilung (Department)

Allg. Abt.

Allgemeine Abteilung (General Department, i.e., the SED archival collection that holds records of GDR-Soviet correspondence)

BA-V

Bundesarchiv-Abteilung V (Federal Archive, Department V, i.e., the former GDR state archive)

BStU

Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des ehemaligen Staatssicherheitsdienstes der DDR (Federal Commissioner for the Files of the Former State Security Service of the GDR, i.e., Stasi Archive)

EBD

Egon Bahr Depositorium

FES

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

Gen.

SED abbreviation for “Genosse” (Comrade)

HM

Hauptamtlicher Mitarbeiter (“official coworker” of the Stasi)

HS PA

Helmut Schmidt Privatarchiv

HV A

Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (main administration, surveillance, i.e., Markus Wolf’s department)

IM

Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (“unofficial coworker” of the Stasi)

IntVer Abt.

Internationale Verbindungen (Department for International Relations, i.e., the department of the SED Central Committee that kept records from German-German negotiations)

“Kalbslederband”

This is a collection of papers that Erich Honecker had stored in his private steel office storage case (“Panzerschrank”). In 1989, he took out these papers and had them bound in artificial “Kalbsleder,” or calf-leather. Hence the volume has the nickname “Kalbsleder-band,” or “calf-leather volume.” Unfortunately, the pages of the “Kalbslederband” are not numerated. As it is a bound volume with fixed pages, however, one can number the pages oneself from the first page to the end (page 171). Hence the page numbers cited from this volume (identified as “my page no.”) are the result of my own numbering; they may be easily used to find a page in the bound volume by counting forward from the first page.

MfAA

Ministerium für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten (East German Ministry for Foreign Affairs)

MfS

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security, i.e., Stasi; see Bibliography for list of departments)

NG

Niederschrift aus dem Gedächtnis (protocol written from memory, akin to a “memcon” in U.S. parlance)

Pz

Panzerschrank (private filing cabinet)

SAPMO

Stiftung-Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR (Foundation/Archive of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR, i.e., the former SED archive)

SdM

Secretariat des Ministers (minister’s office)

SN

Stenografische Niederschrift (stenographic protocol)

SPK

Staatliche Plan Kommission (State Planning Commission, i.e., the central authority for economic planning in the GDR)

StS

Staatssekretär (state secretary, not equivalent to U.S. secretary of state)

WHY,

White House Years first volume of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs

WVS

Warschauer Vertragsstaaten (Warsaw Treaty States, East German abbreviation for states of the Warsaw Pact)

VdM

Vorsitzender des Ministerrates. SED files tend to use full titles on nearly every single reference. Hence “Willi Stoph” is usually referred to as “Vorsitzender des Ministerrates der DDR Willi Stoph (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the GDR Willi Stoph).” This has been abbreviated to “VdM Willi Stoph” throughout.

vorl.

vorläufig (temporary)

ZA

Zentrales Archiv (Central Archive)

ZAIG

Zentrale Auswertungs- und Informationsgruppe (Central Assessment and Information Group)

ZK

Zentralkomitee (Central Committee)

Note on Usage

1. Henry Kissinger, WHY (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 97; Charles S. Maier, “West Germany as Subject … and Object,” Central European History 11 (Dec. 1978): 384. See also the suggestion of two political scientists that one should refer to East Germany as part of an “informal empire”: Alexander Wendt and Daniel Friedheim, “Hierarchy under Anarchy: Informal Empire and the East German State,” International Organization 49 (Autumn 1995): 689–722.

2. The author thanks Peter Jukes for his help in rendering the poetry of Faust into English. Excerpts from Faust are taken from the 1887 edition, reprinted by Reclam Verlag (Stuttgart, 1986). The translations given here were informed by, and in part drawn from, the Philip Wayne English-language edition (London: Penguin, 1949).

Introduction

1. Letter from Brandt to Stoph, 25 March 1970, in DC20-I/2-1341 (Ministerrat) BAV. Goethe was apparently a topic of conversation at various points during the day as well. He was discussed both during the lunch—see “Vermerk über Gespräche während des Mittagessens, das der VdM am 19.3.1970 für den Bundeskanzler der BRD und Mitglieder seiner Delegation gab,” p. 5, in DC20-4682 (Stoph), BA-V—and at the end of the day; see “Vermerk über die Begleitung des westdeutschen Bundeskanzlers auf der Rückfahrt von Erfurt und die Verabschiedung des Bundeskanzlers am Grenzkontrollpunkt Gerstungen,” 20 March 1970, p. 29, in DC20-4681 (Stoph), BA-V.

2. Indeed, Walter Ulbricht seems to have believed that West Germans had lost the right to say they spoke in Goethe’s language. As he announced at the thirteenth plenary session of the Central Committee in June 1970, “Man kann … nicht mehr von der Gemeinsamkeit der deutschen Sprache sprechen. Zwischen der traditionellen deutschen Sprache Goethes, Schillers, Lessings, Marx und Engels, die von Humanismus erfüllt ist, und der vom Imperialismus verseuchten und von den kapitalistischen Monopolverlagen manipulierten Sprache besteht eine große Divergenz.”(“One can no longer speak of the commonality of the German language. A large divergence now exists between the traditional German language of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Marx, and Engels and the manipulated language that has been corrupted by imperialism and manipulated by capitalistic, monopolistic publishers.”) In IV 2/2/408 (ZK), SAPMO, on the page with the handwritten page number 175.

3. “Die DDR öffnete Goethes Sarkophag, Geheimaktion im November 1970,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 March 1999, 1.

4. The East German archives show, quite unsurprisingly, that real political power in East Germany was in the hands of the Politbüro, not the state apparatus. For further discussion of the power structure of the GDR, see A. James McAdams, Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

5. This assertion differs from the argument advanced by Hope Harrison in 1993 that, in the early 1960s, Ulbricht did do a certain amount of “wagging.” She argued that Khrushchev felt forced by Ulbricht into building the Wall; see Hope M. Harrison, “Cold War International History Project: Ulbricht and the Concrete ’Rose,’ New Archival Evidence on the Dynamics of Soviet-East German Relations and the Berlin Crisis, 1958–1961” (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Working Paper No. 5, May 1993): 7. Further details on specific documents are available in Hope M. Harrison, “Inside the SED Archives: A Researcher’s Diary,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 2 (Fall 1992): 20, 28–32; and Hope M. Harrison, “The Berlin Crisis and the Khrushchev-Ulbricht Summits in Moscow, 9 and 18 June 1959,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998): 204–17.

6. One of the main reasons European powers were willing to enter into what became World War I was their fear that, were they to wait, their enemies might become too powerful to defeat in the future. On this topic, see David Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

7. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 286.

8. Alexander Wendt and Daniel Friedheim, “Hierarchy under Anarchy: Informal Empire and the East German State,” International Organization 49 (Autumn 1995): 689–722.

9. Robert H. Jackson and Carl Rosberg draw a useful distinction between “empirical” sovereignty or legitimacy, which is conferred by an electorate, and “juridical” sovereignty, which is conferred by other states and does not require empirical sovereignty as a precondition. See Jackson and Rosberg, “Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood,” World Politics 35 (1982): 1–24. See also Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Another significant book on this subject is Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

10. Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Nam...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dealing with the Devil
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps and Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Usage
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Opposing Devils
• One: Setting the Stage in 1969
• Two: Speaking Civilly Face-to-Face in the First Half of 1970
• Three: Discovering the Perils of Bargaining in the Second Half of 1970
• Four: Expediting Negotiations in 1971
• Five: Achieving Initial Aims in 1971–1972
• Six: Sealing the Bargain in 1972–1973
• Conclusion: The Costs of Dealing with the Devil
• Note on Sources: The Bureaucracy of Evil
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index