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Reassessing Germany's Ostpolitik. Part 1: From Détente to Refreeze

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Noel D. Cary
Noel D. Cary
Affiliation:
College of the Holy Cross
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Central European History , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 235 - 262
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Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2000

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References

1. Things looked different only one year later. With Soviet conventional superiority in Europe now augmented by possession ot the atomic bomb, there was widespread fear in Western capitals that North Korea's invasion of the South might presage a similar development in divided Germany.

2. Despite admitting it is “bizarre,” Treverton (pp. 49–50) is even “tempted to harbor” the out-landish “hypothesis” that the convenient timing of Stalin's Berlin blockade for Western advocates of a North Atlantic alliance might indicate that the Soviet leader “wanted the alliance to succeed.” Contrast Kissinger, Henry, Diplomacy (New York, 1994), 444.Google Scholar

3. For a semiconfessional admonition that the costs were both justified by the nature of the threat and have been overestimated by American diplomatic historians who fail to place the gap between American aspirations and moral failings in comparative historical and international perspective, see John Lewis, Gddis, “The Tragedy ot Cold War History: Reflections on Revisionism,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 1 (1994): 142–54Google Scholar. Gaddis's article is a revision of his presidential address to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1992. For a fiercely contrasting view, see Chomsky, Noam, Deterring Democracy (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. See also Richard Ned, Lebow and Janice Gross, Stein. We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, 1994).Google Scholar

4. For a spirited, relentless defense of the totalitarianism thesis and a trenchant analysis of Soviet ideocracy, see Malia, Martin, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; for a recent concise statement crediting Western resolve and above all Ronald Reagan, see Pipes, Richard, “Misinterpreting the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 74 no. 1 (1995): 154–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Contrast Brandt, , My Life, 370–74Google Scholar; Schmidt, Helmut, Die Deutschen und ihre Nachbarn: Menschen und Mächte II (paperback edition, Berlin, 1992), 17–18, 94–95Google Scholar; Hans-Dietrich, Genscher (German Foreign Minister under Chancellors Schmidt and Kohl), Rebuilding A House Divided: A Memoir (New York, 1998), 68–69, 90, 98, 110–11, 252Google Scholar; and Genscher's longer German edition, Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1995), 489–90Google Scholar (all discussed in Cary, “Part 2”). Pipes's essay is a scathing review of Raymond, Garthoff's massive The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, 1994)Google Scholar. Here and in an earlier, equally detailed volume, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, 1985)Google Scholar, Garthoff analyzes the Cold War as driven less by substance than by the dynamics of competition. In this view, freezes and thaws derived more from misperceptions and accommodations than from ideologies and interests. This view was by no means shared by all practitioners of détente; compare Kissinger 1: 116–27 (Genscher is more evasive). Much more radical, of course, is Chomsky, for whom the “Soviet menace” was consistently a “pretext” for maintaining and enhancing the “highly ramified Pentagon system” of “public subsidy and a state-guaranteed market” (and for whom the notion that “‘the real rivals’ of the United States are Japan and Europe, not the USSR” was “obvious” and “the merest truism”): Deterring Democracy, 2, 65. A recent history of the totalitarianism concept is Gleason, Abbott, Totalitarianism (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. For one example of the Wilhelmian analogy — interestingly, from a high Carter-administration official who had refined the totalitarianism concept as an academic but who had also been an early advocate (with Griffith, William) of “Peaceful Engagement in Eastern Europe” (Foreign Affairs 39 no. 4 (1961): 642–54Google Scholar ) — see Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor 1977–1981 (New York, 1985), 353.Google Scholar

5. See the path-breaking speech by Bahr, Egon, “Wandel durch Annäherung. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag in Tutzing, 15 Juli 1963,” in Dokumente zur Deutschtandpolitik, ed. Bundesministerium, für innerdeutsche Beziehungen, series IV, vol. 9, 572–75.Google Scholar

6. Besides che books by Garton Ash and Hacker, see McAdams, A. James, “Revisiting the Ostpolilik in the 1990s,” German Politics and Society 30 (Fall 1993): 49–60Google Scholar; the review of Hacker by Felix Philipp Lutz (Mainz), Ibid., 115–17; allegations of Social Democratic complicity in the East German regime's efforts to tame dissent, Der Spiegel 34 and 35, 24 and 31 August 1992; and Genscher's vehement defense of Ostpolitik in his memoirs (see note 4). For an intimation that American abandonment of détente retarded the collapse of communism, see Kissinger III; 283, 867.

7. A case in point concerns the famous Soviet notes of 1952 offering reunification in return for German neutrality — often seen as the quintessential “lost opportunity” in postwar German history. In 1984, 53 percent of the respondents to a West German poll favored reunification in a “bloc-free” Germany — “a Germany,” writes Steininger, Rolf, “such as Stalin offered in 1952.” Eine vertane Chance: Die Stalin-Note vom 10. März 1952 und die Wiedervereinigung (Bonn, 1985)Google Scholar. quoted by Garton Ash, 6. Criticizing Steininger, Garton Ash observes: “As if the West Germany to which Stalin made his offer was the West Germany of 1984 — prosperous, stable, experienced in democracy, embedded in countless nonmilitary structures of Western association and cooperation. Here the historian's task is to point out how different things then were.”

8. Both Garton Ash and Kissinger use the hostage analogy in a variety of valid, though not always clearly distinguished, ways. Kissinger (II: 145) refers to the whole East German population as Soviet hostages. But he also says of Brandt: “Psychologists have remarked that prisoners sometimes ease their captivity by endowing their jailers with extraordinary qualities; hatred and a strange kind of respect coexist. There was an element of this in Brandt's journey from endurance to conciliation” (p. 144). Garton Ash refers to “the hostage half-city — West Berlin” (p. 154 and elsewhere; emphasis added). But he also cites pleas for help by captive Easterners as an “example” of why German-German negotiations “resembled one of those conversations over the radio with aircraft hijackers. Whatever you do, say the hijack experts, you must keep them talking” (p. 150). Elsewhere, he writes (p. 213): “There is a well-known psychological phenomenon — sometimes called the Stockholm syndrome — in which hostages come to identify with their captors, or at least to show extraordinary appreciation of their ‘humanity.’ Now West German policy-makers, while not themselves hostages, were nonetheless … acutely conscious of negotiating on behalf of hostages — the hostage city West Berlin, and die Menschen in the GDR. In a sense, from 1961 to 1989 Germany lived through a twenty-eight year long hostage crisis. It is quite difficult to work with people over many years … and still regard them as criminals. For if they are criminals, what am I doing shaking their hand and paying them compliments and hard currency?” (For yet another usage, see Strauss, 280: when West Germany joined NATO in 1955, Western occupation forces became transformed into “hostages for the security of Germany.”)

9. See also DePorte, A. W., Europe between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance (New Haven, 1979, 1986)Google Scholar. Compare Eisenberg, Carolyn, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949 (New York, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Loth, Wilfried, Stalins ungeliebtes Kind: Wamm Moskau die DDR nicht wollte (Berlin, 1994)Google Scholar. Loth controversially argues that Stalin consistently favored a unified, neutral, nonsocialist parliamentary democracy in Germany, but was pressured by the zealous German communist leader, Walter Ulbricht, to accept partition. The Western powers, in this reading, were more in tune with their partition-minded protégés than the Soviets. A more differentiated exploration of early Soviet thinking regarding their German options is Naimark, Norman, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, 1995).Google Scholar

10. Compare Gillingham, John, Coal, Steel and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955 (New York, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Consider Brandt's words of 25 November 1960: “Today we call for resistance to every form of rule by force. We assume that among the people of the zone [he did not say “the GDR”] there is a readiness to engage in spiritual and moral resistance. … We consider it a pledge of the future unity and freedom of our fatherland that in the zone, German patriots engage in resistance and as a result land in prison or leave their home. … [T]he battle against communist inhumanity is a patriotic duty.” Quoted in Herf, Jeffrey, War By Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles (New York, 1991), 30Google Scholar. One could cite many similar examples.

12. Note the assessment by Moscow's long-tenured ambassador in Washington. Anatoly Dobrynin: “It was first of all Berlin and Germany that Kennedy always had in mind when speaking with Khrushchev and Mikoyan about the importance of maintaining the status quo. But the status quo at that time no longer suited the leaders in Moscow, who aimed at the creation [in 1961!] of two German states, thus consolidating and legitimizing the partition of Germany.” Dobrynin, , In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador lo America's Six Cold War Presidents (New York, 1995), 117Google Scholar. What Kennedy (contrary to Brandt) may not at first have understood is how much the Wall transformed, not “tidied up,” the status quo. See also Mayer, Frank, Adenauer and Kennedy: A Study in German-American Relations, 1961–1963 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar, and the earlier work of Prowe, Diethelm, including “Der Brief Kennedys an Brandt vom 18. August 1961,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 33. no. 2 (1985), 373–83.Google Scholar

13. Schmidt, , Die Deutschen, 20.Google Scholar

14. On the “Austria solution” and “Saar-statute analogy” regarding East Germany, the Globke plan, and Adenauer's ten-year “civic truce” proposal, see: Garton Ash, 52; Strauss, 203, 207–8, 236–42; Schwarz I: 690–710 and II: 161–68, 228–34, 419, 425–37, 478–88, 497–98, 559–60, 750, 767, 773, 843–46, 850–53, 894–95 (and the same author's superb analytical overview in Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 3: Die Ära Adenauer 1957–1963, Stuttgart [1983], 378–82)Google Scholar; Morsey, Rudolf and Repgen, Konrad, eds., Adenauer Studien, vol. 3: Untersuchungen und Dokumente zur Ostpolitik und Biographic (Mainz, 1974)Google Scholar; Globke, Hans, “Überlegungen und Planungen in der Ostpolitik Adenauers,” in Konrad Adenauer und seine Zeit, vol. 1, ed. Blumenwitz, Dieter et al. (Stuttgart, 1976), 665–72.Google Scholar

15. See Schwarz I: 910 and II: 192, 370–71, 420 (quotation), 492–94, 556–57, 651–66, 701–4, 730–33, 843–46. Having experienced their own totalitarianism, Adenauer remarked in November of 1950, Germans knew that “one can conduct negotiations” with the totalitarian Soviets once the West was “as strong, if not stronger” than the adversary (quoted in Herf, , War, 19Google Scholar ). Western “strength” leading to “fruitful negotiations,” he repeated in March of 1958 (and many other times), “was always the goal” (quoted in Schwarz II: 424). Of course, much depended upon the practical definitions of “strength” and “fruitful.”

16. Brandt to Kennedy, 16 August 1961, quoted in Brandt, 3. In “Sources of Soviet Conduct” (Foreign Affairs 25 (1947): 566–82)Google Scholar, Kennan had projected that containment might have to last ten to fifteen years. Ten years later, Kennan — to Adenauer's horror — proposed disengagement negotiations. In 1952, Adenauer still averred that definitive negotiations over Germany might come in five to ten years (Schwarz I: 914). But in July of 1958, as the stormclouds gathered again over Berlin, Adenauer admitted that his original time horizon for reunification had been utterly mistaken and that it had been “absolutely unrealistic to believe” that the question could be resolved “unless there was a general relaxation in the world situation” (Schwarz II: 436). This was an admission not that his policy of vigilance was wrong, but that the misplaced Soviet preoccupation with global ambitions instead of peaceful economic regeneration had proved even more incorrigible than he had anticipated. The consequences of this admission were: continued Western and German vigilance (with no end in sight), and a cautious search for a provisional German contribution to “relaxation” that might coax the Soviets without compromising such vigilance (hence the “Austria solution” and “Globke” initiatives).

17. E.g., Brandt, xxii; Genscher, , Rebuilding, 139, 344.Google Scholar

18. The theme is as important as the many West German variations. When sovereignty was restored on 5 May 1955, Adenauer summarized his government's goal: “in a free and united Europe a free and united Germany” (quoted in Garton Ash, 49). On 20 December 1990, Brandt stated that Germany's free reunification left his life's work unfinished; he awaited “the day when all Europe is united” (quoted in Brandt, xxiii). Strauss earlier put things in his own idiosyncratic way: “Bavaria is our beloved homeland [Heimat], the Federal Republic of Germany our democratic state under the rule of law [demokratischer Rechtsstaat], all of Germany our fatherland, and Europe our hope” (quoted in Strauss, 192). Whether Brandt's cosmopolitan idealism was any less sentimental than Strauss's unabashed provincialism may be doubted. When Schmidt became chancellor, the world, in his view, “seemed largely satisfied with the division of Germany; paradoxically, it was far less content with the division of Europe.” Schmidt, , Men and Powers (New York, 1989), 18Google Scholar. Garton Ash (p. 23) rejoins: “To rebuke the world for being illogical was marvelously characteristic of Helmut Schmidt. It was also not entirely logical.”

19. Kissinger similarly justified his own more hard-nosed version of détente. Kissinger I: 61–63, 123, 801, 840–41: II: 243: III: 100–2.

20. Kissinger II: 245. See also: I: 116–22; II: 237, 242.

21. Quoted in Herf, , War, 165.Google Scholar

22. Brandt, 205–9, 439–41. “It made me angry,” the imprisoned Michnik commented in 1984, “that Willy Brandt had so quickly forgotten how bitter is the taste of that prison food on which in his youth the Social Democrats had been fed.” Quoted in Garton Ash, 306.

23. After Bavarian Minister-President Strauss negotiated huge new credits for the GDR in the mid-1980s, automatic shooting devices along the border were dismantled, and travel permits greatly increased. According to Garton Ash, East German documents support Strauss's claims that he procured specific quid pro quos. Garton Ash, 155–59; Strauss, 521–36.

24. See Potthoff, Heinrich, Die “Koalition der Vernunft”: Deutschlandpolitik in den 80er Jahren (Munich, 1995).Google Scholar

25. “How different the situation might have been,” McAdams continues, “if the opposition Social Democrats had been able to muster a competing conception” by the end of 1959 (he dismisses their “Germany Plan,” which called for four-power withdrawal, as nothing new). What a new conception amid the Berlin crisis might have entailed, however, McAdams does not say. Apparently, though, it would have entailed more than the American concessions that the Soviets rejected: German-German negotiations to precede all-German elections, and East German monitoring of Soviet-guaranteed transit routes to Berlin. For a subtler analysis of the Berlin crisis, see Kissinger, , Diplomacy, 568–93Google Scholar. Also relevant is the role of China in Khrushchev's and Adenauer's thinking. See Malia, , Soviet Tragedy, 341–46Google Scholar, and Kissinger, , Diplomacy, 588–89.Google Scholar

26. Expanded and published in 1992, Lemke's original manuscript (1986) had not passed the East German censor's muster.

27. This fear about the Ostpolitik was shared by Bonn's prodétente European and American allies. Kissinger I: 408–16, 422–24, 529–34, 922, 964; II: 143–48, 731; III: 604. Unlike the fundamentalists, though, Kissinger professed to be reasonably confident that the risk could be managed.

28. Lemke points to a joint Bundestag resolution, passed after Barzel's failed vote of constructive no confidence and officially accepted by the Soviets, which asserted that Brandt's treaties with Moscow and Warsaw were not to be construed as compromising the policy of reunification and the German rights of freedom of movement and self-determination. Partially authored by Strauss, this resolution briefly brought him to the verge of recommending that the Bundestag approve the treaties. Lemke also emphasizes Kohl's support for the failed effort within the Union to endorse passage ot the Helsinki accords.

29. On Guadeloupe (1979), see Schmidt, , Men and Powers, 189Google Scholar, and photo caption following 108; for Strauss's views on West German self-confidence and nuclear issues, see Strauss, 209, 263–66, 294–95, 346–67, 392–404, 412–19, 460–68, 478–88. Of course, the nuclear issues reflected not just the condition of the national psyche but a genuine strategic quandary over West German military vulnerability. Adenauer also wanted a Franco-German or Euro-German nuclear deterrent but was less comfortable with a nuclear-dependent overall posture for the alliance than Strauss was. See Schwarz II; also Cioc, Mark, Pax Atomica: The Nuclear Defense Debate in West Germany during the Adenauer Era (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

30. As Clemens (p. 119) notes, “Strauss, like many Union fundamentalists, considered the actual attainment of state unity under any foreseeable circumstances unfeasible. But downplaying, let alone forswearing, that goal … would permit consolidation of the GDR, and allow Moscow to move toward what he considered its next aim: neutralization of the Federal Republic itself.” See also Hacker, 232–36.

31. How inadequately this was understood, even in 1975, is shown by the Union's decision (regretted by reformists) to vote against a resolution supporting the Helsinki Final Act, whose human rights provisions offered an opening for those who wanted “to exploit the ‘positive opportunities’ of détente and not merely guard against the risks” (Clemens quoting and paraphrasing Olaf von Wrangel (CDU), 165; see also Lemke, 184–85, and Clemens, 159). For the parallel American debate, see Kissinger III: 635é63.