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## Contents

<table><tbody><tr><td>I.</td><td><u>The Two Germanies: Estrangement and Rivalry</u></td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>II.</td><td><u>The Role of the Soviet Union</u></td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>The Ambiguities of Soviet Policy: The Stalin Years</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>'Lost Opportunities': Myth or Reality?</td><td>14</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Some Consequences of the Soviet Commitment</td><td>23</td></tr><tr><td>III.</td><td><u>The East German Factor</u></td><td>32</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>An Ideology of the 'Other Germany'</td><td>34</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Stalinism and Beyond: Domestic Policies Since 1961</td><td>38</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>The Political Leadership</td><td>44</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Regime and Society: Toward a Separate East German Consciousness?</td><td>50</td></tr><tr><td>IV.</td><td><u>The Impact on West Germany</u></td><td>56</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Bonn's 'Fundamental Political Thesis' and Its Ramifications</td><td>56</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>The Domestic Political Scene</td><td>68</td></tr><tr><td>V.</td><td><u>Overcoming Germany's Division?</u></td><td>76</td></tr></tbody></table>

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I. The Two Germanies: Estrangement and Rivalry

Few themes in German history are as familiar or as im-
portant as that of internal political dismemberment. Indeed,
domestic fragmentation, or Zerrissenheit, as German scholars
are wont to call it, has been so central a feature of the
German historical experience that many scholarly commentators
consider it to be the crucial determinant of Germany's lack of
a secure sense of national identity. However that may be --
and the matter of national identity is one that will concern
us later on -- nothing would be more misleading than to regard
the emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German
Democratic Republic as successor states within a truncated post-
World War II Germany to be merely the reassertion of a tradi-
tional domestic political pattern. Rather, in a number of
important respects, it represents something entirely unique.

The novelty of Germany's present-day division, it
should be noted at the outset, does not particularly lie in
the international sponsorship accorded to each successor German
state nor in the happenstance that the geographic boundary line
between them coincided with the line of final demarcation be-
tween the Soviet occupation forces in Germany and those of
the Western powers but otherwise is historically unique. As
a matter of fact, foreign influence in the shaping of German
constitutions is by no means unprecedented and Germans them-
selves in both East and West contributed to the establishment

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of their respective postwar political arrangements, although, needless to say, in far greater numbers and under totally different conditions in the case of the Federal Republic than in that of the self-styled Democratic Republic.² And even the boundary line between these two states, despite its unquestionable novelty, can claim some approximation to certain historical antecedents, if only on account of its ability to conjure up recollections of Carolingian lands or else the Confederation of the Rhine on the one side and a rump Prussia-Saxony on the other. Much more to the point than either the factor of foreign influence or that of the precise line of its demarcation is the reality of the major political and socio-economic transformation which each part of Germany has experienced since 1945. What has transpired could scarcely have been more divergent in conception, manner of execution, or character of accomplishment.

The broad outlines of these divergent developments are sufficiently well known to render unnecessary any recapitulation in detail here. Suffice it only to note that in retrospect the break in German historical continuity represented by the collapse of 1945 has increasingly taken on a double dimension. For out of the political vacuum of that "zero point" in Germany's national existence there emerged not only two separate states organized under antithetical forms of government and espousing incompatible ideologies, but also two basically dissimilar economic systems and two highly distinctive social structures.

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It is precisely this socio-economic cleavage, so much more pronounced than the myriad divergences which beset the multiplicity of German states in the centuries before national unification that imparts particular novelty to Germany's present division and, in the view of some observers, to make it more difficult for the double break in Germany's historical continuity. 3

What has taken the place of the social order that was irreparably shattered by the successive shocks of Nazi dictatorship, world war, total defeat, and foreign occupation? In West Germany, merely to mention some of the basic themes which are analyzed at considerable length in other places throughout this volume, social pluralism and economic neo-liberalism dominate. Whatever its other imperfections, the Federal Republic's socio-economic order does provide, it has often been argued, a much more reliable foundation for representative governmental institutions and democratic political practices than has ever existed in Germany before. Moreover, in addition to this highly desirable domestic consequence, the postwar changes in West Germany have borne encouraging international implications as well. For the break with older authoritarian value patterns, so indicative of the predominance within Germany once enjoyed by Prussia, has been parallelled by the rise of new elites based on Germany's city culture, or rather, their reemergence after centuries of submergence, a development which, as Carl J. Friedrich has pointed out, greatly facilitated the reassertion of an older German "vocation for Europe" in the Federal Republic. 4

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In East Germany, on the other hand, the direction of developments was entirely different from the very start. There, a numerically small clique of Communist functionaries, exercising a monopoly of political power at the behest of its Soviet sponsors, forcibly directed a process of social change and economic reconstruction along collectivistic lines. In the course of this transformation, the political leadership also necessarily created its own new elite, different in composition from that which arose in West Germany and in many respects inferior to it, but doubtless imbued with a sense of its own importance and obligation to its political progenitors. To that extent, however great the popular resentment within East Germany as a result of political oppressiveness or economic shortcomings, the Communist regime may well be said to have succeeded in laying the necessary social basis for its own continued survival.

Nor is this all. For in the course of articulation of these two new German societies and their respective political integration into the larger antagonistic alliance systems of the post-war era, the differences between them have been magnified and accentuated to a point where, more so than ever before in the long history of Germany's internal dismemberment, domestic cleavages have run through the realm of ideas and have left their decided imprint not only on literature and the arts but also on social values and popular culture more generally, including even the use and meaning of

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language. For some time Communist officialdom has spoken with
some apparent satisfaction about the emergence of a "socialist
culture" in the German Democratic Republic. Of late, many
West German sociologists, certain publicists who follow East
German affairs, and even some political figures have expressed
their own apprehension lest a continued growing apart of the
two portions of the country eventually render national re-
unification impracticable.⁵ This is obviously a much more
serious matter than the specific impediments on communications
and travel between the two Germanies, although the existence
of all such obstacles -- dramatically, but far from exclusively
exemplified by the Wall in Berlin -- not only serves to symbolize
the threat of a permanent partition of the nation but also con-
tributes to the actual process of its social and cultural
estrangement. Given these symbols of official hostility and
the deeper social realities behind them, it is hardly surprising
that some observers should regard the present situation to be
already one of almost "hygienic insulation" of each successor
society against possible infection from the other,⁶ or that
still other political commentators should have come to doubt
whether the influence which the one part of Germany may ex-
pect to exert on the future internal evolution of the other
can be anything more than marginal.⁷

Although expressions of alarm concerning the deepening
social roots sustaining Germany's division do deserve to be
taken very seriously, observations about the mutual isolation
of the two parts of the country can easily be overdrawn and

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inferences concerning the improbability of future political
influence in either direction are, to say the very least,
premature. This is the case because, whatever may be the
precise degree of their social and cultural estrangement,
there persists between the two Germanies an implacable poli-
tical rivalry, one whose pressures militate strongly against
any permanent political stabilization of the national division
and whose stakes include the external security, internal
stability and even the survival of each. One of the major
purposes of the following pages will be to examine some of
the paradoxical consequences of this aspect of Germany's
national division.

During the many years that have elapsed since the
establishment of the two post-war German states, the rivalry
between them has been markedly lop-sided. Unquestionably, the
Federal Republic as the larger, more populous, more dredibly
legitimate, economically more prosperous and politically far
freer of the two has enjoyed incomparably greater popular
support than its Communist rival to the East. Its superiority
in this respect, together with its far stronger international
position has meant, in turn, that West Germany has constituted
a far more serious potential challenge to the internal con-
solidation and stability of the East German regime than vice
versa.

Yet, to acknowledge this asymmetry of political in-
fluence to date should not be to neglect the possibility of

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its reversal in the future. Some ten years ago, the Swiss political commentator, Fritz Rene Allemann, concluded his perceptive study, *Bonn ist nicht Weimar*, an otherwise optimistic assessment of the viability of the Federal Republic, with a warning that no final judgment could be passed on this matter as long as Germany's division persisted.⁸ Now, especially since the construction of the Berlin Wall and the seeming consolidation of Communist rule which it so forcibly wrought, the challenge implicitly posed by the GDR through its mere continued existence has become much more explicit and formidable. This is not to say that West Germany's political integration with the West is in any immediate danger or that its domestic social order has been put under direct threat. Both at home and in the world at large the Federal Republic remains incomparably stronger than the East German regime. But any attempt to project these factors into the future must recognize the existence of intangible factors. One of the most important of these is the question of national identity. As the writer, Hans Magnus Enssenberger -- in this instance speaking, perhaps, not merely for himself alone -- has expressed it: "The more the identity [of the two German states] is established, the more our own becomes questionable."⁹ And if the problem of identity agitates those who are conscious of the burdens of history, how will it affect the unencumbered younger, post-war generation which is now coming to political consciousness and expression?

Apart from such large underlying imponderables, other, more immediate considerations are worthy of note. Frustrations born of the failure to prevent the entrenchment of the East German regime, much less make progress toward the goal

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of national reunification are already in evidence in West Germany. They may yet come heavily to bear upon the widening public debate in the Federal Republic about the feasibility of new initiatives toward the East, a debate which East German spokesmen have eagerly sought to join with proposals and demands of their own. Developments of this sort, symptomatic of the impulse toward fresh movement on the "German question" merit close watching in view of their possible implications for West Germany's membership in the Atlantic Alliance and for East-West relations more generally. It is almost certainly true, as Karl Kaiser has argued elsewhere in this volume, that many of the fundamental assumptions and some of the official tenets of West German foreign policy have been proved to be badly out of date and are urgently in need of revision. 10

It may also be true, however, that the very search for new initiatives toward East Germany, in an atmosphere laden with possibilities for political irrationality and under conditions of considerable disarray within the Atlantic Alliance, could both jeopardize the Federal Republic's political stability and adversely affect its international position, processes whose mere initiation might well embolden the Soviet Union anew in its own larger confrontation with the West. To such considerations we shall have to return at subsequent points in the discussion.

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## II. The Role of the Soviet Union

### The Ambiquities of Soviet Policy: The Stalin Years

In January 1948, more than a full year before the establishment of the Federal Republic in the Western zones of occupation and the conversion of the Soviet zone into the German Democratic Republic, Stalin reportedly predicted that "the West will make Western Germany their own and we shall turn Eastern Germany into our own state."¹¹ Had the Soviet dictator cared to elaborate upon that terse prediction, he might well have chosen to repeat the remark that he made to confidants even before the end of World War II, when he declared with his accustomed pedantry that "whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own social system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise."¹²

These pronouncements, so expressive of the deeper expansionist impulse of Soviet Communist ideology in the post-World War II period as well as of Stalin's own high regard for the uses of political power and the perquisites of territorial possession, contained all of the necessary elements for a self-fulfilling prophesy. This much deserves careful consideration by all those who otherwise might tend to subscribe uncritically to the view of the GDR, recently given forceful expression by the West German political writer, Ernst Richert, as "a state that ought not to be" -- that is, a state

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whose creation was neither consciously sought by the Soviet Union nor effectively countered by Western policy. ¹³

And yet, despite the corrective uses of pronouncements such as those attributed to Stalin, they cannot by themselves shed sufficient light on the Soviet role in postwar German affairs, either in Stalin's lifetime or subsequently. Rather, such fragmentary evidence, however authoritative in origin, often serves to obscure other important aspects of Soviet behavior. Indeed, to the extent to which these particular pronouncements may appear to herald the transformation of Soviet policy from largely offensive to purely defensive goals, they may be doubly misleading. This is so because one of the central characteristics of the Soviet Union's German policy has been precisely the continued close relationship between expansionist aspirations and consolidationist tendencies. It is the persistent linkage between these two basic elements as much as the many shifts of specific appeal and the frequent apparent hesitations which have imparted to Soviet policy in Germany its ambiguous character. The relationship *is* one which emerged in the Stalin years and, as we shall have occasion to see subsequently, has continued to the present time, albeit under greatly altered circumstances and with significantly changed stakes.

Certainly both defensive and offensive considerations were present in the immediate aftermath of Nazi Germany's collapse, long before the open imposition of the Communist

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dictatorship in the Soviet zone. Stalin, for his part, began by playing for different and potentially much larger stakes; stakes well beyond the immediate "reach" of his armies. In addition to his determination to exact the maximum in reparations from Germany and his concern lest the defeated enemy again threaten Soviet security, Stalin was also intent upon influencing the future political development of the entire country.

To one of Stalin's cast of mind this could only have meant the social and political transformation of Germany as a whole under Soviet aegis. ¹⁴ Just how he proposed to accomplish all of these objectives in a situation rendered more complex on account of the active involvement of the Western powers was yet another matter. At the outset, Soviet policy in Germany seemed to be following that Napoleonic adage which Lenin had invoked at a crucial moment in his own drive for power in Russia: on s'engage et puis on voit. (One commits oneself and then one sees).

Defensive concerns with regard to Germany were, of course, shared by all of the victorious Allies of World War II. At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain accepted as their common purpose in postwar Germany the goals of demilitarization, denazification, and democratization. These general goals were not defined in very great specific detail. Responsibility for formulating concrete policies to attain them devolved upon the separate zonal occupation authorities. (The machinery actually set up by the Potsdam agreement to treat Germany as a single economic and administrative unit proved powerless to prevent this, for

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it actually sanctioned the exercise of "supreme authority" in Germany by individual allied military commanders, each within his own zone of occupation, and, in addition, established the veto principle in the quadripartite Allied Control Council.) For their part, the Soviet occupation authorities proceeded to implement the Potsdam accords in line with what they considered to be elemental requirements of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Almost at once they began to strike at the ostensible socio-economic roots of "German militarism and fascism" through an extensive land reform, expropriation of the holdings of leading Nazis and war criminals, nationalization of heavy industry, and the like. Although these measures may have seemed moderate in comparison with what was to come later, they nonetheless immediately introduced major distinctions between the Soviet zone and the other zones of occupation and represented essential first steps in the direction of its full Sovietization. Moreover, in addition to pushing these reforms, the Soviet authorities early demonstrated a determination to gain a solid political foothold inside postwar Germany. This they did by directly intervening in newly resuscitated German political life to bring about a forcible organization/merger in 1946 between the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD) into the Soviet Zone's Socialist Unity Party (SED), which was from the first under unmistakable Communist control.

If in making these moves, Stalin had seriously counted on an entirely free hand throughout the whole country, his

calculations were destined to be upset at a relatively early
date. In fact, the political initiative in Germany held at
first by the Soviet Union passed to the United States. In a
rapid-fire sequence of events, whose initiation is usually
although not quite accurately dated from Secretary Byrnes'
Stuttgart speech in September 1946, American policy success-
fully fostered both the economic revival and a political re-
construction of the Western portions of the country. The
Soviet reaction to such Western initiatives as the extension
of the provisions of the Marshall Plan to Germany, announcement
of a reform of German currency, and convocation of a Parliamen-
tary Council to draft a constitution (or Basic Law, as it was
to be designated) for West Germany proved relatively unambiguous.
It entailed dynamic moves both directly to challenge the West
and also openly to consolidate Communist control over the
Soviet zone. The two sets of moves were intimately related
to each other. The better to secure their rear for such of-
fensive actions as the Berlin blockade and the no less sig-
nificant if no less successful attempt to inflame German
nationalism against the West, the Soviets tightened the screws
of totalitarian rule in their own zone. By mid-1948 political
life there had been coordinated under Communist aegis, a shadow
zonal government was in the process of creation, and the SED
itself was made to drop all of its earlier pretenses to being
something other than a Soviet-style Communist party.

Curiously, perhaps, the major ambiguities of the Stalin

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years of the Soviet Union's German policy came only after the end of the Berlin blockade and the formal establishment of the two separate postwar German governments. For Stalin proved hesitant in pushing East Germany's internal socio-economic transformation as rapidly as he did that of other countries in Soviet-dominated East Central Europe at the time. He was even reluctant to confer on the SED regime the status of a full-fledged Soviet satellite. 15 To have done so, the Soviet leader doubtless reasoned, might have needlessly foreclosed any opportunity of exerting influence on developments in West Germany. That the assertion of such influence remained very much Stalin's hope was evidenced, among other things, by his personal telegram of congratulations on the occasion of the GDR's founding to Wilhelm Pieck, the veteran German Communist functionary whom he had installed as GDR President. Rather than stressing any ideological appeals, Stalin's message struck a pronounced nationalist note. 16

While Soviet tactics were clear, Soviet strategy was not. Would the Soviet Union contemplate sacrificing the fledgling Communist regime in East Germany in return for a neutralization of the entire country? That question became immediately topical once the Western powers announced their plans for the rearmament of the Federal Republic.

## 'Lost Opportunities': Myth or Reality?

In recent years, East German spokesmen, echoing their Soviet counterparts, have frequently reiterated that although

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the restoration of German unity through a directly negotiated big-power settlement of the German question is no longer possible, such an opportunity did exist earlier only to have been deliberately forfeited by the West. Basically the same argument has been advanced in one or another form by a number of Western commentators, notably in the Federal Republic. ¹⁷ It is perhaps one sign of West Germany's domestic stability that these arguments have failed to register much if anything of a disruptive impact on its political life to date; in less settled conditions, they "might have proved the *Dolchstosslegende* of the Federal Republic." ¹⁸ Nonetheless, as the West German editorial writer, Countess Dönhoff recently noted, in the absence of definitive evidence as to the seriousness of the relevant Soviet proposals of the early fifties, various illusions are bound to persist in West Germany. ¹⁹ And, it is no less certain that suppositions about "lost opportunities" will continue to be encouraged by the East Germans in the hope that they may yet generate the desired recrimination against the West.

At issue is the period 1952-1955 in the Soviet Union's German policy. During this period the offer of a negotiated settlement in Germany first broached by the Soviet note to the Western powers of March 10, 1952 remained open, only to be shelved upon the Federal Republic's entry into NATO. Rather than considering the period as a whole, however, it is necessary to explore three of its specific junctures: Stalin's initial offer, Soviet conduct in the months immediately following Stalin's

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death in 1953, and the Soviet reaction to the Paris accords
of 1954-55. Only in this way is it ~~at all~~ possible to come
to grips with the knotty question of whether Soviet proposals
were meant ~~as merely~~ a delaying tactic or may have represented
a genuine desire for negotiations.

Certainly, Stalin's 1952 offer still strikes one as
intriguing. Whether the Soviet leader actually preferred a
neutral but united and armed Germany, as stipulated in the
Soviet Union's March 1952 proposals -- a Germany that most
assuredly would have been non-Communist -- to West German re-
armament within the then projected EDC cannot, of course, be
known for sure. Stalin's intentions were never put to the
test of actual negotiations. Yet, as James Richardson suggests,
to pose the question in terms of whether the Soviet Union
genuinely wanted a negotiated settlement with the West in Ger-
many or else merely intended its 1952 offer as a tactical move
to delay West Germany's political and military integration
with the West may itself be misleading. 20 It is at least as
plausible to suggest that the Soviet Union's 1952 overture was
meant both to serve a delaying function and also to constitute
a basis for negotiations. Viewed in those terms, the key ques-
tion becomes one of the extent to which Stalin was prepared
to accommodate the West's interpretation of its own security
requirements and consequently to countenance a drastic reduc-
tion of Soviet political influence in Germany. On these matters,
Soviet diplomacy was conspicuously failed in its failure to profer any

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credible assurances. Indeed, in the context of the prevalent East-West competition for German allegiance, Stalin's 1952 proposals appeared to constitute a bid to regain the political initiative inside Germany by manipulating German opinion against the West. And, in the same context, many of the specific provisions contained in the draft Soviet peace treaty could only be interpreted as indications of Soviet determination to secure major political influence over a united, neutral Germany. 21

Nor was it only a case of negotiations having failed to materialize in 1952 because Western counter-proposals were unreasonably one-sided or Adenauer's insistence on following a "policy of strength" adamant. To be sure, the Western powers did refuse to accept Germany's neutralization as a basis for negotiations as proposed by the Soviet Union and insisted that a freely elected all-German government be allowed the right of joining defensive alliances, which amounted to a demand that a united Germany be free to affiliate itself with the West. And, the Federal Chancellor, for his part, seized upon the Soviet Note of March 10, 1952 as proof of the correctness of the "policy of strength" and represented it as compelling evidence in behalf of the questionable proposition that the Federal Republic's rearmament within the Western framework would automatically force the Soviet Union to make further concessions. 22

The validity of the specific considerations which shaped these positions need not concern us here. Quite apart from the Western reaction and yet contributing to it was Stalin's inability to

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make his 1952 offer politically more effective within Germany
itself. If anything could have served that purpose, it would
have been a relaxation of the harsh totalitarian control which
characterized the Soviet zone. It may well have been that
Stalin was incapable of appreciating the connection between
the quality of rule inside East Germany and the efficacy of
Soviet diplomatic appeals concerning Germany as a whole. Or
he may have feared the possibility of unfavorable diplomatic
consequences resulting from a premature relaxation. It is
equally possible that, entertaining the prospect of expanding
Soviet influence throughout the entire country, he never had
the slightest intention of forfeiting the Soviet hold on its
own zone. Whatever the full explanation, the preservation of
Stalinist rule inside East Germany gave substance to Western
fears about ultimate Soviet intentions and robbed Stalin's
diplomatic initiative of the desired full effect on German
public opinion. What is more, the Soviet Union soon had to
pay the price set by its own diplomatic gamesmanship. To give
credence to the threat that to reject Soviet terms would be to
deepen Germany's partition, Stalin had to be prepared to act
upon it. Thus it was that even as the exchange of diplomatic
notes between East and West proceeded in 1952, Stalinist totali-
tarianism in East Germany intensified. The adoption of a force-
draft program for the "construction of socialism" by the Second
SED Party Conference, meeting in July 1952, may have made the
Soviet threat of deepening the partition seem real enough, but

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it also helped to seal the doom of Stalin's diplomatic initiative of the previous March.

As it happened, it fell to Stalin's heirs to bring internal conditions in East Germany into better line with the expressed Soviet desire to prevent the rearmament of West Germany. Although preparation of East Germany's "new course" of 1953 was doubtless prompted in the first instance by the utterly disastrous consequences of Ulbricht's Stalinist program of "socialist construction," that very disaster may well have suggested East Germany's expendability even more forcefully to the new Kremlin epigoni than to their predecessor.²³ In any case, in early June 1953 the official organ of the Soviet High Commission in Germany saw fit to stress the "great international significance" of the decision to relax political pressure and to modify economic policy in the GDR and even expressed its conviction that "decisive progress in the struggle for a peaceful reunification of Germany" would be made "in the near future."²⁴ A decade later, Khrushchev was to revive speculation about what had been intended by charging that Beria, in association with Malenkov, had in fact advocated "the provocative proposal that the German Democratic Republic be liquidated as a socialist state."²⁵

Whatever the precise divisions of opinion about Germany within the Kremlin at the time, it seems undeniable that on the eve of the June 1953 uprising in East Germany, the interests of Soviet policy and those of the Ulbricht leadership of the SED

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were in serious disalignment. Ulbricht's Stalinist program had been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of his Soviet patrons and his own downfall was evidently being prepared.²⁶ Whether this was the doing of Beria alone or Beria and Malenkov or some other combination of Soviet leaders, the overwhelming weight of all available evidence points to the twin conclusions that in the early summer of 1953, major political changes were under way in East Germany and that these changes were to be followed by some fresh Soviet initiative on the German question as a whole.

That such an initiative was never forthcoming must, paradoxically enough, be attributed in large degree to the popular rising which took place in East Germany on June 16-17, 1953. For its blatant exposure of the total bankruptcy of Communist rule in Germany served to realign Soviet interests with those of the Ulbricht forces in the SED. To have abandoned the East German regime at that point would have amounted to much more than an acknowledgement of the Ulbricht regime's political unpopularity; it might well have jeopardized the entire postwar Soviet position in East Central Europe. These larger stakes could not have been lost upon the Soviet leadership, in view of the simultaneous riots in Czechoslovakia and Moscow's own utterly realistic assessment of the disastrous costs of Stalinism elsewhere in the satellite empire. While it may be regretted that the West did not seek to exploit the Soviet predicament through a more active diplomacy of its own, it seems irresponsible to suggest that this failure amounted to another "lost opportunity"

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to negotiate German reunification.²⁷ If nothing else, Soviet appreciation of the vulnerability of its negotiating position virtually precluded the chance of significant Soviet concessions.

What, then, of Soviet appeals on German reunification in 1954-1955? At this juncture, to be sure, Soviet proposals for free elections did seem much more serious and more nearly in keeping with Western views on the subject than at any previous point. Yet, it is important to note the timing of these offers. What seemed like a Soviet acceptance of the Western requirements for free all-German elections was forthcoming only in the period between December 1954 and February 1955, that is, *after* the instruments which were to govern the Federal Republic's entry into NATO had been initialled and in close conjunction with the formation of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. Given the Soviet commitment to the Ulbricht regime, which was expressed earlier in 1954 by Molotov's intransigence on Germany at the Berlin Foreign Ministers' Conference and the Soviet bestowal of nominal "sovereignty" upon the GDR, and considering the sluggishness of the Soviet response to the collapse of EDC, the new Soviet proposals of this period in fact appear to have involved little more than a tactical bid to delay West Germany's affiliation with NATO. If the Soviet leadership had been seriously prepared to sacrifice the GDR in order to obtain the neutralization of a reunited Germany, appropriate Soviet proposals for free all-German elections almost certainly would have been presented long before they actually were.

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Once the Federal Republic officially entered NATO, the
Soviet Union quickly abandoned its own offer. The tenacity
of its position was fully demonstrated at the Geneva summit
conference in the summer of 1955. Despite suggestions en-
couraged by Soviet propagandists that the Austrian state treaty,
concluded in April of that year, might serve as a "model" for a
German settlement, Bulganin's utterances at Geneva against any
"mechanical formulas" for solving the German problem amounted
to a retraction of the previous expression of Soviet interest
in free all-German elections. As such it anticipated the undis-
guised failure of the Foreign Ministers' Conference of October-
November 1955 to achieve anything more than an exchange of in-
compatible points of view on the German question. That the
overriding Soviet commitment had become one of strengthening
the East German Communist regime is evidenced by what is known
of the meetings between Khrushchev and Bulganin and the SED
leadership just before and once again immediately after the
Geneva summit conference. At these meetings, the Soviet leaders
directed that measures be taken to make East Germany economically
more viable in the interests not only of the consolidation of
Communist power internally but also its assertion internationally.²⁸
The very double character of these directives was indicative
of a full Soviet appreciation of the larger political logic of
Germany's division whereby a stabilization of the "status quo"
on the one side threatened its upset on the other.

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## Some Consequences of the Soviet Commitment

Ever since the mid-nineteen fifties, the Soviet position on German reunification has been unmistakably negative. By disclaiming four-power responsibility in favor of direct negotiations between the "two separate German states" and by endorsing if not actually sponsoring various unacceptable East German schemes for "confederation," the Soviet Union effectively put itself on record against reunification. To be sure, the West, for its part, by failing to raise the German issue at all between 1955 and 1959, when renewed Soviet pressure forced new negotiations, did nothing to challenge the Soviet Union's claim to favoring *eventual* German unity. But the actual Soviet position was not so easily disguised. In 1956, Khrushchev told Guy Mollet: "I prefer having twenty million Germans on my side to having seventy million against us. Even if Germany were militarily neutral, that would not be sufficient for us."²⁹
Although at the time the Soviet side quickly denied that Khrushchev had in fact expressed so disarmingly candid an opinion, subsequent official pronouncements left little doubt that the Soviet Union had lost all interest in a negotiated settlement of the German issue, except perhaps on terms of its own choosing. Indeed, by 1959, Khrushchev was publicly lecturing an all-German workers' conference meeting in Leipzig on the advantages afforded by the division of the country.³⁰ And at about the same time, the Soviet leader was conspicuous in his failure to lend any real encouragement to the West German Social

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Democratic sponsors of their party's *Deutschlandplan*, a scheme whose provisions for the gradual demilitarization of Germany and its step-by-step reunification were thought to respond to the needs of Soviet policy. stated purposes of Italy's 1952 scheme.

As a result of the Soviet commitment to the Ulbricht regime and the consequent receding of the horizons of national reunification, direct Soviet appeals to West Germany, for the short term at least, lost their intended charms and Soviet threats their desired sting. To urge that any particular West German move in the field of military policy or toward European integration would jeopardize future prospects for reunification was to utter a threat whose credibility had already been seriously impaired by other Soviet pronouncements of unstinting backing for Ulbricht. Alternatively, to invoke the Eastern orientation of Бусмарckian foreign policy or the "spirit of Rapallo" -- favorite themes of the Soviet Embassy in Bonn during the fifties -- proved no more effective in view of the simultaneous Soviet insistence that the Federal Republic discard political illusions and accept the reality of the GDR's separate existence. By virtue of the Soviet stand on this cardinal issue and especially in light of its renewed pressures against the Western position in Berlin after 1958, the Soviet Union only succeeded in ending the West German domestic debate of the fifties on whether and how the Federal Republic's rearmament might be negotiable in exchange for reunification, a debate whose termination was marked in June 1960 by the SPD's endorsement of the major lines

[x]

-25-

of the Adenauer Government's defense and foreign policies.
That this was a matter of considerably less concern to the
Soviet Union than Communist polemics against the SPD at the
time might have indicated was suggested by the contents of
the memorandum handed to Bonn's Ambassador to Moscow in December
1961 which professed frank indifference to the Federal Republic's
membership in NATO. 31

None of this meant, however, that Soviet policy had
reconciled itself to the loss of all influence over West Ger-
many. To be sure, Khrushchev's own realism may well have ruled
the possibility of anything like a Communist take-over and per-
haps even counseled against its desirability. Nonetheless,
*Realpolitik* alone precluded Soviet indifference to West German
developments and Soviet security needs constantly *dictated* the
goal of weaning the Federal Republic away from its Western
partners. One approach, cultivated especially by Khrushchev
and strikingly documented by the contents of the December 1961
memorandum was to sow West German suspicion of the Western powers
by questioning the sincerity of their avowed commitment to
German reunification. An alternate tack, no less favored by
Khrushchev, involved the attempt to predispose the Western
powers against the Federal Republic and featured slanderous
campaigns against the West German government for its ostensible
revanchism and obstruction of a "realistic settlement" in Ger-
many. Both of these tactics were predicated upon the continued
division of Germany. Both persist to the present day but found

Abše
napretan
apteval
za
nappale
politički
Betržiše
som
nove
štetnije
detajli

-26-

their most forceful expression during the period of what can
be called the attempted Soviet policy of "direct break-through,"
exemplified by the challenge to the West in Berlin between
1958 and 1962.³²

Enough has been written analyzing the character of that
particular direct Soviet challenge so that no thoughtful ob-
server can fail to appreciate that rather than being merely a
defensive move designed only to stabilize the East German regime,
it also involved a major offensive threat against the West as
a whole and especially against West Germany.³³ Had the Soviet
Union succeeded in undermining the Western position in Berlin
or in forcing a recognition of the East German government, which
might have amounted to the same thing, it would almost certainly
have produced political disarray and defeatism in West Germany
and promoted increasing dissension between the Federal Republic
and the Western powers. In view of Soviet efforts to achieve
comparable objectives even in the absence of the Western accept-
ance of its proposed "solution" to the Berlin problem, it can
hardly be supposed that that outcome would have been unwelcome
to the Soviets or that they would not have exploited whatever
further openings to the West it might have provided.

East Germany's function as a bridgehead for Soviet power
to the West represented, however, only one of several important
stakes which the GDR came to embody for the Soviet Union.
Strategically, the division of Germany and the existence of
an East German regime closely oriented to the Soviet Union also
served to secure Soviet power to the East by limiting the

-27-

foreign policy maneuverability of Poland and, to a lesser
degree, Czechoslovakia. With the spread of polycentrism in
the Communist world, the SED assumed a new political role
as a welcome Soviet ally against China and an available
counter against the disintegrative effects of the Sino-Soviet
rift upon Communist East Central Europe. Economically, with
the help of substantial Soviet financial assistance, East
Germany developed both its industrial potential and its
foreign trade capacity to the point where, beginning in 1960,
the GDR became the Soviet Union's leading foreign trade partner.
One of the most highly developed industrial areas in the world,
East Germany emerged as a major supplier to the Soviet Union
of machinery and machine tools, precision instruments, and a
large variety of chemical products, all of which are important
to the Soviet Union's own domestic economic development. At
the same time, because of its deficiency in raw materials,
East Germany became a significant market for Soviet and East
European exports. And given its specialized production pattern
and its great raw material needs, the GDR staunchly supported
Soviet plans for economic integration within COMECON, which
represented an additional political asset for the Soviet
Union. Moreover, East Germany also played a major role in the
Soviet Union's economic offensive in the underdeveloped world.³⁴

Finally, in ideological terms, the Soviet Union found it ad-
vantageous to champion the GDR's "comprehensive construction
of socialism," not only for itself and for what it might still

-28-

promise by way of an "eventual triumph of socialism on the global scale" but even more importantly as evidence of Soviet ideology purity against the rising tide of Chinese accusations of Soviet "revisionism" which came to include quite explicit charges of Soviet willingness to betray East Germany. For all of these reasons, it is hardly surprising that Soviet spokesmen both in the Khrushchev era and since his downfall should have taken so unmistakable a position against German reunification. 35

The more intriguing question, however, is the degree to which the entire complex of elements which constitute the Soviet vested interest in East Germany may generate its own inescapable compulsions toward continued Soviet offensive moves against the West.

Certainly, it should be obvious that despite the relaxation of Soviet pressure on Berlin, the tentative Soviet-American detente, and the many complications for Soviet foreign policy resulting from the Sino-Soviet rift, none of the earlier Soviet objectives with regard to Germany has yet lost its pertinence. Although the 1964 Soviet Treaty of Friendship with the GDR, concluded in place of the previously threatened separate peace treaty, marked a clear retreat from the earlier direct Soviet challenge to the West, by no means did it signify an abandonment of Soviet efforts to alter the "relationship of forces" in Germany. On the contrary, to the extent to which the Soviet Union may presently be pursuing what Zbigniew Brzezinski has suggestively labelled "a policy of fragmentation," that is, an attempt

-29-

"to divide Europe's non-Communist half," 36 its continued offensive engagement in Germany is inevitable. While renewed Soviet pressures on Berlin are far from being ruled out, a less direct approach seems more likely and from the Soviet point of view may appear more promising. One facet of this approach involves East German probes and harrassments against the West in Berlin, moves which the Russians can encourage, restrain, or retract, without necessarily involving their own prestige, according to the tactical imperatives of the moment. And as recent events have amply demonstrated, even without any particular encouragement from the Russians, the East Germans themselves are only too eager to engage in maneuvers of this kind in the interests of asserting their own claim to sovereignty. A larger, longer range, and more important feature, however, is to foster a direct East German challenge to the Federal Republic, one to which the SED leadership is again favorably predisposed on account of its desire for self-assertion. While this aspect of Soviet strategy is scarcely novel, it could hardly hold much promise of success as long as East Germany suffered from an open border and a crippling exodus to the West. Thus it came into prominence only after the escape route in Berlin had been sealed off. Once that happened, however, its new centrality was promptly asserted by Khrushchev, quite explicitly, so in his speech to the Sixth SED Party Congress in January 1963. In effect informing the East German Communists that the erection of the Berlin Wall

-30-

had given them all they could expect to get in the *immediate*
future, the Soviet leader urged them to concentrate their
energies on domestic economic tasks so that they might be in
a stronger position to influence the destiny of the *whole* of
Germany.³⁷ Nor are the Soviets content to allow the full
burden of this onerous task to fall on the limited domestic
capabilities of East Germany alone; on the contrary, they *them*
selves are actively engaged in furthering this design by ex-
tending every effort to assist the GDR in upgrading its inter-
national status. Should concrete evidence of active Soviet
support for East Germany's challenge to West Germany be sought,
it can be readily provided by the Soviet role in engineering
Nasser's invitation to Ulbricht and the evident Soviet satis-
faction at Bonn's subsequent Middle Eastern imbroglio.

The deeper roots sustaining such Soviet support for
the GDR may be found in the decline of the Soviet Union's poli-
tical authority in the Communist world and more particularly
its erosion in East Central Europe. This has had two significant
effects. First, it has created leeway for the East Germans to
attempt their own moves without necessarily turning in every
instance to Moscow for prior approval. (Of this there has al-
ready been evidence in Berlin.) Secondly, given East Germany's
continued close political allegiance to the Soviet Union, it
has enhanced East Germany's *defensive* strategic value to the
Russians. Awareness of this fact by the Ulbricht leadership
has also doubtless emboldened it to press Moscow the more in-

sistently for the utmost Soviet support of the GDR's drive for self-assertion at the expense of the Federal Republic. And a Soviet susceptibility to such pressure is inherent in the very situation that gives rise to it. Viewed in its entirety, then, the irony implicit in the present phase of Soviet policy may well be that while the Russians can curb ~~at will~~ East German aggressive designs against the Western position in Berlin, they can hardly ~~contemplate reducing the larger terms of their support of the GDR's challenge to the Federal Republic~~ without simultaneously confronting the specter of a further serious deterioration of the Soviet Union's own power position in Europe.

These present-day policy perspectives immediately beg a number of basic questions concerning both East Germany and West Germany: What resources and vulnerabilities does each bring to their political rivalry? How assess the degree of posiveness and cohesiveness in each case? What prospects, if any, for German initiatives to transform the present im-placable rivalry into progress toward overcoming Germany's division? It is to an exploration of the ambivalent East German scene to which we shall first turn.

-32-

### III. The East German Factor

Germany's division provides the single most important key to understanding East German policies, both domestic and international. This was unmistakably evident before the erection of the Berlin Wall and it remains true today. Weaker than the Federal Republic in every critical respect, the GDR must unavoidably suffer all the consequences of comparison with it both at home and abroad. As long as an attractive alternative to Communist rule in a divided country continues to exist, Communist rule will continue to be essentially precarious. That precariousness, in turn, explains much of what has been characteristic about the SED dictatorship domestically. Among other things, it explains the rigidities of so many of its policies, the quite distinctive character of its belated de-Stalinization, and Ulbricht's own otherwise improbable political survival. And it also explains such characteristics of the Ulbricht regime's activity in the international sphere as it staunch loyalty to the Soviet Union, quite apart from the continued stationing of some twenty or so Soviet divisions within East Germany; its sneaking sympathies toward Chinese Communist militancy and its efforts to play down the Sino-Soviet dispute, even while publicly supporting the Soviet side to the fullest; its castigation of all manner of polycentrism, whether among its eastern Communist neighbors or within West European "fraternal" parties; and, last but not least, it explains the GDR's inherent compulsion to challenge the Federal

[Y]

-33-

Republic wherever and whenever feasible and Ulbricht's own un-
shakable insistence that the German problem can only be solved
on the basis of the acceptance of the GDR's maximum terms.

It has often been said that East Germany possesses no "nation-
al interest," for it does not comprise a nation but only the
pathetic fragment of one. The only interests at play, therefore,
appear to be those of its rulers, anxious for the preservation
of their power, if not its increase. Moreover, to much of the
Western world, East Germany still appears to be little more than
a prison-house pure and simple, an impression heightened by the
brutality of the Wall in Berlin and the ruthlessness with which
individuals attempting to pass through it without authorization
have been gunned down. Yet, despite the ill-repute which the
East German regime quite deservedly has brought on itself as the
result of such actions, the relationship between the ruling group
and the subject population is obviously much more complex than
that which the image of a penal colony, so readily suggested by the
Wall would imply. Indeed, especially since its erection in 1961,
the SED regime has been at obvious pains to align the East Ger-
man population as a whole behind the interests and goals of the
political leadership. Were this to happen, it is often supposed,
the division of Germany might well be stabilized. And, yet,
if necessary, for it to happen, might well jeopardize the stability of the
Federal Republic and thus unstabilize Germany's division on the
other side. In any case, the very quest to solidify Communist

-34-

[Y]

rule inside East Germany entails -- as necessarily it must -- a deliberate effort to discredit West Germany and to undermine its position internationally if not also internally.

## An Ideology of the "Other Germany"

Like the Federal Republic, the GDR also purports to speak for the entire German nation, or at least the best in it. Much more than is the case with the Federal Republic, the GDR alleges that it has preserved and is carrying forward everything positive in the German historical tradition. More stridently that the Federal Republic, the GDR claims already to embody the future of the entire country. Unlike those of the Federal Republic, the GDR's pretenses are not essentially static and narrowly legalistic but openly political and potentially more dynamic. ³⁹

As is only to be expected, Marxism-Leninism plays a major role in the GDR's self-image. Its existentialist approach to political legitimacy figures crucially in the GDR's self-justification and provides the major doctrinal basis for its presentation of itself as the future of the entire German nation. But prominently along side the essential Marxist-Leninist doctrinal components, there exists a more elaborate ideology of the "other, better, and truer Germany." Its propaganda seeks to depict the GDR as a peaceful, progressive, patriotic, and humane society, all in sharp contrast with what is said to exist in West Germany. For purposes of enlisting foreign Germanophobia against the Federal Republic, the contrast is susceptible of being drawn to a point where the East Germans are made to appear as not really

-35-

Germans at all.³⁹ For domestic consumption, needless to say, the emphasis is on entirely different one, and historical continuity is particularly emphasized. The patreon of heros in this larger domestic version of the GDR's ideology is drawn from various historical repositories. Included are pre-Marxist German social revolutionaries, the great figures of classical German culture, Prussian patriots, especially of the War of Liberation period, earlier leaders of the Marxist movement in Germany, not only Communists but also selected Social Democrats, and anti-fascist "resistance fighters," almost irrespective of class origins or party affiliations. They all are meant to exemplify one or more of the major themes of the "other, better, truer Germany," whose content emphasizes a wide variety of ostensibly patriotic and humanistic virtues. These themes borrow freely from the humanistic heritage of classical German culture, lay heavy stress on the moral superiority of collectivist over individualistic patterns of social organization and, naturally enough, seek to inculcate pride in East Germany's achievements of economic reconstruction and industrial development.

Many of the patriotic symbols and myths of this "other Germany" originated with the propaganda activities of the National Committee of Free Germany, organized under Soviet auspices during the Second World War. They were first introduced in post-war East Germany in a systematic way during the Stalin years and as a result are often still tainted with the same crudity of expression and manipulation which characterized the Stalinist version of

-36-

Soviet Russian nationalism. Nonetheless, the post-Stalin period in East Germany has brought many refinements of appeal. For one thing, the circle of paragons of the particular virtues supposedly embodied by Communist power in the GDR has been widened, especially in recent years, so that it now encompasses, for example, such previously excluded figures as Count Stauffenberg and his comrades of the 20th of July. Secondly, greater stress is currently put on nuturing a pride of accomplishment in GDR's own post-war achievements, achievements wrought by the East German population under all sorts of adverse conditions which, it is now frankly admitted, included major reparations exactions by the Soviet Union. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the indictment of West Germany has become both more extensive and more concrete. In place of an earlier general vituperation against the Federal Republic, greater emphasis has been accorded to attacks against specific unseemly aspects of West German social and political life.

All of this, of course, is meant to serve primarily to facilitate popular acceptance of the SED regime within East Germany. Indeed, it has even been argued that no particular appeal to West Germany is intended or, at least, that it is effectively ruled out by virtue of the blatant incongruities between various elements of the official East German ideology.⁴⁰ To be sure, the SED's calls of former years for a direct revolutionary overthrow of the Federal Republic have been muted. But, and this may be the more important point, merely to give credence to the

-37-

[N]

ideology of the "other Germany" as an *instrumentum regni* within East Germany not only dictates a continuous effort to discredit the Federal Republic by word but also generates a compulsion to intervene in its internal affairs by deed. This, in turn, has animated efforts which have ranged from attempts, often ill-conceived and clumsily executed, to influence the outcome of West German elections⁴¹ to carefully staged and well-timed campaigns to expose the Nazi-tainted past of public figures in the Federal Republic, something which, of course, serves also to discredit the Federal Republic abroad. In any case, as Hermann Matern, one of Ulbricht's long-time cohorts expressed it in a rare moment of candor only a few years ago: "Naturally, we are of the opinion that we are also equally responsible for developments in West Germany and therefore will interfere in its politics as far as our own powers enable us to do so."⁴²

So far, the SED's "powers" have not enabled it to do so very extensively or very successfully but the action-oriented impulse necessarily persists. Moreover, it is strengthened by the more far-reaching ideological claim that 'in conformity with historical laws' the GDR already constitutes 'the fatherland of all German working people and peace-loving democratic forces.' Far-fetched though it may presently seem, this could still readily be pressed into service as a doctrinal basis for massive East German intervention in West German affairs should a favorable opening ever develop. Small wonder that in taking note of West German editorial reaction to the stridently aggressive challenge to the Federal

-38-

Republic thrown down by Ulbricht in his main address on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender, official East German commentary should have agreed with one interpretation which suggested a comparison with the broad "anti-fascist democratic" overtures with which the Communists attempted to appeal to the whole country in the immediate aftermath of World War II.⁴³

## Stalinism and Beyond: Domestic Policies since 1961

In the immediate aftermath of the Berlin Wall, a wave of terror engulfed East Germany and seemed to bespeak the permanent triumph of Stalinism in its most brutal form. The SED declared war against virtually the entire population: industrial workers were made to produce more for the same pay and both trouble makers and simple shirkers in the factory were set upon and beaten. Squads of young toughs were dispatched against households whose television antennas indicated that they were receiving programs from the West. Peasants were bluntly informed to resign themselves to the collectivization of agriculture, which had been completed only the previous year, and to comply with the requirements of their collectivized status on pain of prosecution for sabotage. The administration of justice, always hard on presumptive enemies of the regime, became savage. Ulbricht pronounced that, irrespective of future developments in West Germany, the GDR intended "to complete the construction of socialism and to begin the construction of communism."⁴⁴ If the SED boss and other party spokesmen were to be believed, now that the border

[Y]

to the West had been closed, the previous alterations in domestic policy between a tough course and a milder one, as earlier dictated in larger measure by the susceptibility of the population to flee to the West when abandoned. Henceforth, it seemed, westward, had become a thing of the past. the Stalinist totalitarian revolution was to be pushed forward at all costs.

This phase of domestic policy did not, however, last very long. Starting as early as mid-1962, SED policy made another shift, this time with considerably more far-ranging implications for the future than ever before. For with the security provided by the Wall and doubtless also on Soviet urging, the SED earnestly took up the belated pursuit of freely-given popular acceptance for its regime as a permanent fixture on the German scene and, more importantly yet, the party initiated a series of measures and experiments designed to modernize the economy and to maximize its productive capacity.

In order to make sense of the otherwise ambivalent East German domestic scene as it has unfolded under Ulbricht since then, it is imperative to appreciate the overriding primacy of the drive for economic reform. From the point of view of the Ulbricht leadership, the economic shortcomings and periodic near-chaos which had characterized East Germany's economic performance before 1961 had not merely impaired the chances of ever reconciling the population to the Communist regime but, much more seriously, it must have also seemed to put in question the durability of Soviet backing for Ulbricht personally, and perhaps even nurtured fears

-40-

about the permanence of the Soviet commitment to the existence of
a separate East German state. However this may have been, once
begun, the economic overhaul -- currently known in the GDR under
the preposterously redundant name of "the new economic system of
planning and leadership of the economy" -- rapidly acquired major
proportions. While the technical details need not detain us and
in any case are presently still being worked out, what should be
noted is the degree of innovation involved in economic decentraliza-
tion, enlargement of the areas of autonomous decision-making,
employment of material incentives, and improvement in the climate
of factory work.⁴⁵ Although all of these things may owe their
inspiration to comparable Soviet economic practices associated with
the tenets of Libermanism, they have been carried much further in
East Germany than in the Soviet Union and its innovations have
achieved what seem to be better overall results.⁴⁶ While the
GDR's economic headaches are far from being cured, progress toward
reform and the consequent improved performance of the economy have
given considerable satisfaction to the SED leadership. Among other
things, this has emboldened its spokesmen to assert, for the first
time, East Germany's claim to a special place of prominence among
Communist countries and to imply, much like some West German politi-
cians with reference to the Atlantic Alliance, that the GDR's politi-
cal influence should be enhanced so as to match its economic
strength.⁴⁷

Otherwise, the domestic aspects of the SED's single-minded
concentration on what is officially called the "economic main task"

-41-

have been contradictory. On the one hand, the new economic system, by its very nature, puts a premium on administrative competence and economic expertise to the apparent downgrading of pure ideological zeal. It also favors the development of a reasonably stable legal system to the discount of ideologically inspired vindicativeness against ostensible class enemies, a change which indeed was officially consecrated with the enactment of the April, 1963 reform of the GDR's judicial system. Finally, it encourages the extension of the area of free discussion and exchange of opinion, something which has in fact occurred in East Germany, although official sanction has limited such freedom to economic matters alone. On the other hand, however, from the start of these changes the Ulbricht leadership has been alert to the challenge they might pose to party dominance and has taken every precaution to circumvent the danger. Thus, for example, although the role of ideological cadres in the economic process has been sharply curtailed, party control has not been abandoned and, indeed, efforts at the ideological indoctrination of the entire population have been stepped up.⁴⁸ Moreover, as has been the case throughout his long political career, Ulbricht himself has effectively blocked any public discussion of the past mistakes and errors of the SED regime, discussion of the sort to which so major a change as the new economic reforms might otherwise have been expected to give rise. Not to have done this, doubtless would have imperilled his own hold on power. But the restriction itself is indicative of how narrowly confined the areas of officially sanctioned free discussion and open debate remain in

-42-

East Germany, to date,

The determination to uphold "party-mindedness" in a period characterized by domestic innovation and experimentation and international Communist disintegration have been especially evident in East German intellectual and cultural life. In this ever sensitive realm, party control has persisted without much sign of let-up, despite evident widespread disaffection on the part of writers and artists. Typical of Ulbricht's determination to eradicate here-tical ideas was the treatment accorded Professor Robert Havemann. A physical chemist and a long-time Communist, Havemann lectured on philosophy during the academic year 1963-64. His lectures were immensely popular, not only, one assumes, on account of their brilliant treatment of the philosophy of science from the dialec-tical materialist point of view, but more particularly for the uncompromising indictment of dogmatism and Stalinism in all its forms and their plea for greater freedom of opinion, information, and criticism in East Germany.⁴⁹ After tolerating Havemann's pronouncements for a short while, the party seized upon the first pretext to terminate his teaching, deprive him of his academic posi-tion and expel him from the ranks of the SED. While this treatment was considerably less severe than the punishment meted out to Wolfgang Harich for a comparable offense in 1956, it nonetheless did testify to the Ulbricht regime's unwillingness to countenance a recrudescence of intellectual opposition and its continued readi-ness to combat it by means of arbitrary "administrative measures."

-43-

Even with the regime's determination not to permit anything that might disrupt party control, there are doubtless many ways in which the area of "small freedoms" which have already been granted to the population may be extended in the future. Some of these concessions may recommend themselves as useful for further economic growth while others may seem desirable for purposes of streamlining the dictatorship at home and improving its image abroad. The latter consideration seems very much behind Ulbricht's recent proposal to introduce a choice of candidates at elections in place of the present single list, a reform which may turn out to be more apparent than real. As for other and more genuine concessions, the Ulbricht regime has shown itself particularly adept at trading off measures of domestic amelioration which it has its own reasons for granting in any case against concessions from the West. This was true, for example, of the amnesty of political prisoners in 1964 for which the Federal Republic paid a substantial sum by way of credits to the GDR. The implications of such maneuvers will be discussed at a later point. Apart from this, though, there do exist deeper pressures within East German society for a more far-reaching liberalization of the dictatorship. These are pressures similar in kind to those which the leadership has previously confronted -- and decisively repulsed. For the present, there are few indications that it is prepared to yield much ground against them.

The Political Leadership

For all its many other failings, East Germany's political leadership has always demonstrated exceptional realism in assessing the hazards to its own survival posed by the political environment in which it must function and no small amount of shrewdness in recognizing the tactical imperatives of the moment. To a large extent, whatever credit may be due for the entrenchment of Communist rule in East Germany belongs to Ulbricht personally. To be sure, Ulbricht has had his moments of misplaced rigidity, as was the case in the Spring of 1953, when going unprecedentedly against Moscow's advise, he persisted for the short run in a vain attempt to push through the bankrupt Stalinist program of socialist construction and ventured to do so at the expense of the already defiant industrial workers. It is also true that Ulbricht has been given to misplaced bursts of ideological zeal, as exemplified by the precipitous drive for full agricultural collectivization in 1960, whose successful termination only compounded the difficulties of food supply and contributed to an increased outpouring of refugees to the West. But taken as a whole and viewed from the vantage point of its vested interest in the preservation of power, the record of the Ulbricht leadership has nonetheless been an impressive one. The personal attributes which made Ulbricht himself a virtual paragon Stalinist functionary may well have militated against his winning any warm personal devotion from his closest political inmates, to say nothing of genuine popular affection.

-45-

But the same attributes contributed importantly to Ulbricht's
own political longevity and to the survival of the SED regime as
well.

In his relations with the Russians, Ulbricht has demonstrated
a special talent for correctly evaluating domestic Soviet power
struggles, an uncanny knack for adjusting to shifts in the political
line and a growing capacity to exploit Soviet foreign predicaments
to press the interests of the SED regime.

When Stalinism was the order of the day, Ulbricht proved to
be its effective practitioner. When Khrushchev called for de-
Stalinization, Ulbricht was responsive to that call as well. How-
ever much he may have been out of sympathy with de-Stalinization
at the outset -- and perhaps distrustful then of Khrushchev as well --
Ulbricht was among the very first foreign Communist bosses openly
to denigrate Stalin after the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress.
Similarly, in 1961, following the Twenty-second Soviet Congress,
he swiftly ordered all measures necessary to expunge the memory
of the disgraced Soviet dictator from the East German landscape.
On both occasions, however, Ulbricht took care to remain master
over the East German domestic situation and saw to it that the
successive Soviet campaigns against Stalin did not undermine
Communist rule in the GDR. If at first Khrushchev was not
completely cognizant of East Germany's "specially complicated
circumstances," which constituted Ulbricht's justification for
the continued maintenance of unrelaxed control domestically, the

-46-

Soviet leader soon came to appreciate the importance of these
"circumstances" and to endorse the measures which it necessitated. ⁵⁰
But, much to the surprise to many observers in the West, in his
declining years Ulbricht proved able to grasp the deeper impera-
tives of the post-Stalin era and thus came to preside over the
major economic reforms in East Germany, once again, however, with-
out allowing them to imperil party rule. All told, despite signs
of failing health, he brought to the new policies much the same
energy, drive, attention to detail and concern for political conse-
quence which he had earlier brought to bear upon the execution of
Stalinist programs. Finally, sensing a novel opportunity in the
Soviet Union's faltering control in the Communist world for the
furtherance of the SED regime's international interests, Ulbricht
was apparently not at all reluctant to press his case upon the
Soviet leadership. ⁵¹

Ulbricht's alertness to challenges and opportunities also
contributed to his success in dealing with personal adversaries
within the SED leadership. During the Stalin years, his position
as Soviet viceroy was subject to potential challenge from Franz
Dahlem, another veteran German Communist functionary and known
as personal rival whom Stalin, true to his own fashion in these
matters, kept in the wings as a counter to Ulbricht. This did
not prevent Ulbricht from restricting Dahlem's political influence
and isolating him from his personal followers, maneuvers which
in turn enabled Ulbricht to engineer Dahlem's downfall within

-47-

months after Stalin's death. As for Ulbricht's own larger personal crisis of power in 1953, it has already been suggested how his position was saved largely as a result of the popular uprising in June.⁵² This allowed him to move against the Zaisser-Herrnstadt group which Moscow, or at least elements in the Kremlin, were grooming to take over the East German leadership. Three years later, in the wake of the first Khrushchev campaign against Stalinism, Ulbricht's powers of survival were challenged again. This time the challenge came from diverse forces within the SED leadership known, following their ouster from power, as the Schirdewan - Wollweber-Oelssner group, even though the "group" never really coalesced. Ulbricht saw to that by effectively dividing his opponents against one another. His task was facilitated by the contingency that no member of the oppositionists, nor for that matter, any of the other figures whom Ulbricht rehabilitated in the first flush of anti-Stalinism, dared to move against the SED party boss without first getting the green light from Moscow.

As Ulbricht's rough domestic policies spared the Soviet Union another revolutionary outbreak in East Germany at the time when it had to confront the Polish October and the Hungarian Revolution, Khrushchev was content subsequently to allow Ulbricht to consolidate his personal power. With the route of his erstwhile opponents in the top SED leadership complete by 1958, Ulbricht proceeded to augment his position as Party First Secretary by acquiring for himself additional formal powers and new offices

-48-

in the governmental hierarchy, including that of chief of state.
As a result of these measures of personal aggrandizement, Ulbricht
far overshadowed all of the other SED leaders and came to personify
Communist power in the GDR both to the East German population and
to the outside world.

Precisely because the GDR has seemed in recent years to
constitute a personal dictatorship, it is important to guard
against the notion that leadership factionalism has been en-
tirely exorcised and to question the derivative view that Ul-
bricht's departure from the scene may herald a reversal in the
major lines of SED policy. As we have learned from the experience
of other Communist parties, a monolithic facade rarely means the
absence of politics. What is striking about the East German ex-
perience is that (circumstantial evidence of the existence of
conflicts of opinion on specific issues within the top echelons
aside) until their resolution all such conflicts should have
been so well preserved from public view. This has been true
from the earliest days up to the present time, even during
periods such as 1953 and 1956-57 when, as the world learned later,
factionalism had been rife among the top leadership. The simplest
explanation for the divergence between public appearance and
behind-the-scenes reality lies in a shared awareness among all-
top level the hierarchs of the dangers to the regime as a whole of any
premature exposure of differences within its political leader-
ship. This awareness is hardly unique to the East German leader-

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ship, but it bears more heavily upon it, given its exposed situation in an abnormally divided country. Small wonder that after their political downfall Ulbricht should have accused his opponents of both 1953 and 1956-57 of willingness to sacrifice Communist rule in East Germany for national reunification. The historical record may well show that to have been by far the very least of their sins.

These considerations should be taken into account in any speculation about the possibility of a major reversal of policy in the post-Ulbricht period, particularly one which might facilitate national reunification. First of all, it might be noted that although in the exercise of power Ulbricht continued to rely on such members of his old political guard as Honecker, Stoph, Fröhlich, Matern, Neumann, Hager, Norden, and Verner, he also took care to infuse new blood into the highest organs of party and state administration. Especially noteworthy has been the rise to political prominence of a youthful generation of technocrats, best personified, perhaps, by Günter Mittag, who although still only in his thirties already occupies a seat on the SED Politburo. To the extent to which people like Mittag and others of his particular breed -- Erich Apel and Herbert Jarowinski, to mention two -- have already come to share in the exercise of political power, they must have their own strong sense of vested interest in the preservation of the GDR and, indeed, its more forceful assertion on the international scene, goals which have been, of course, Ulbricht's own. Needless to

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say, the same applies also to Erich Honecker, presently presumed
to be in line for the post of Party First Secretary when Ulbricht
goes, and to Willy Stoph, who currently holds the position of
Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Nothing can guarantee
that any of these men will possess to the same degree Ulbricht's
tactical agility and purposive narrow-mindedness. But, unless
all signs are grossly misleading, it would be unwarranted to
expect any of them to succumb to nationalist sentiment to the
point of willingness to countenance a diminution of their power,
to leave aside entirely a liquidation of the GDR.

As is the case in most other modern industrial countries,
East German society is highly complex and manifests a high degree
of internal social differentiation. Any attempt to pass judgment
on the cohesiveness of the GDR's social order which is predicated
upon the simple juxtaposition of "regime" and "society" can,
therefore, prove seriously misleading. While it has been strik-
ing that the SED leadership to date has acted in unison in deal-
ing with popular disaffection, no such singleness of behavior
has yet characterized the reactions of society to the policies
of the regime. To be sure, revulsion against the Wall and the
hardships and restrictions associated with it certainly remains
an important general phenomenon. But it is far from certain
that this outrage which did instantaneously serve to solidify
society against the regime sustained that solidarity very long.
Looking back at the regime's earlier domestic crises, it is

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perhaps noteworthy that even the popular uprising of June 1953, while it did witness in a few instances participation by other social strata, was primarily the doing of the industrial workers.<sup>53</sup> And, in 1956, during the period of intellectual ferment and student unrest, the party ably appealed to the industrial workers against the rebellious students and their dissident teachers. These examples alone suggest that any pronouncement on the attitudes of East German society toward the regime try to differentiate among and sometimes within specific social groups, if for no other reason than that the regime has sought to exploit such differences to its own benefit.

As might only be expected, however, reliable evidence on social attitudes is fragmentary and the inferences drawn from it vary. Consider, to take one specific social group, the case of the industrial workers. Their allegiance is a matter of vital concern to the regime, not so much for the stated ideological reasons but rather because a high level of performance on the part of the skilled East German labor force is indispensable to the attainment of the regime's economic objectives which, in turn, affects in a number of different ways the GDR's quest for international political status. In recent years, labor's record of performance has been eminently respectable and yet there are good grounds for believing that the industrial workers' attitude toward the regime remains, at best, an ambivalent one.<sup>54</sup> Much the same apparent ambiguity applies to the numerically much smaller peasantry whose economic per-

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formance, once it had regrouped after the dislocation of collectivization, improved notably but whose attitude toward the regime probably remains strongly negative. As soon as one turns to the intelligentsia, it is necessary to distinguish between what is officially termed the "technical intelligentsia," that is, doctors, engineers, economic planners, industrial managers and the like, and the "humanistic intelligentsia: the writers, artists, poets, musicians, and scholars. Except when put under excessive ideological pressure, the first category has always rendered dutiful service to the regime. It remains to this day very much in the older German tradition of the apolitical technical expert. By contrast, it is among the intelligentsia of the humanistic callings, that feeling against the regime has consistently run the highest. Once again, however, this tells us nothing about the political relevance of such antipathy. A number of factors, such as professional specialization, differences between age groups, and most important of all, continued tight control by the party have combined so far to perpetuate under the unique conditions of Communist rule, the old cleavages between Geist and Macht.

One is on safer, although still treacherous ground when dealing with age groups. Most reports reaching the West tend to agree that oldsters of almost every social group remain negatively disposed toward the regime. This is especially true of older people of bourgeois background, in so far as individual members of this particular classification have not gained entry

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into the new state service bourgeoisie. It has often been sug-
gested that this dissatisfied element, by volunteering their
complaints to RIAS and otherwise communicating their disgruntle-
ment to the West, have contributed to the perpetuation of an
essentially misleading picture of East German social realities
~~to the outside world.~~⁵⁵ However this may be, the regime itself has
been consciously catering to youth to the virtual neglect of any
attempt to win over the elderly, ~~to its side.~~ Symptomatic of this
is the recent decision granting pensioners the right to leave the
GDR permanently for the West. As for the younger people who are
allowed no such grace, their allegiance is pursued not merely
by stale techniques of ideological indoctrination but even more
~~by the manipulation of prospects of public support for their~~
education and specialized training leading to career placement
and individual advancement on the basis of talent within a
~~society that is in dire need of all their respective skills.~~

~~Can you tell me who~~

~~the above~~

~~specify~~

All of these various ~~and~~ contradictory perspectives on
~~the German~~
East German society beg a question of great ~~topical~~ relevance:
to what extent has there already emerged, or is there now de-
veloping, a separate national consciousness in the GDR? Once
again, evidence is fragmentary and opinions as to its meaning
differ widely. Some observers hold that two decades of Communist
rule, the domestic improvements of recent years, and a sense of
alienation from the West already constitute the essential in-
gredients for widespread popular identification with East Ger-
many as a separate state. Others would vehemently deny the

probability of any such development on grounds of the persistence
of a single German national consciousness alone.

The disagreement, by its nature, is not susceptible of
being settled here. Suffice it only to note that identification
with the ~~goals of the~~ regime need not necessarily amount to a separate East
German national consciousness. In this connection, it is per-
haps suggestive that those who identify most strongly with the
present system often do so not only out of pride of personal
position or of East Germany's social and economic achievements
but also in response to the appeals which are couched in terms
of the GDR being "the better and truer Germany," that is, the
purified part standing temporarily in lieu of the still ailing
whole.⁵⁶ Among such people, there are few, if any, who would
claim to be anything other than simply Germans.

This should hardly be surprising for the regime itself
has yet to begin an effort to inculcate anything like a sense
of distinctive German nationality. On the contrary, even while
striving to foster popular identification with the GDR as a
separate German *state*, official spokesmen have typically cham-
pioned the ideal of a single German fatherland and usually
gone out of their way to profess their solemn conviction that
the German *nation* remains indivisible.⁵⁷ The paradox inherent
in their distinction is only typical of the larger paradox of
a regime which must try to establish itself without benefit of
a national base. What greatly disturbs West German observers,
however, is that fear that to the extent to which the regime

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may succeed in generating popular support for East Germany's
existence as a separate state, it may also succeed in effec-
tively splitting the German nation. Whatever the long-range pro-
spects, calculations such as these have introduced a fresh sense
of urgency into the politics of the German question on the West
German side.

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IV. The Impact on West Germany
Bonn's 'Fundamental Political Thesis' and Its Ramifications

An adequate appreciation of the political impact on West
Germany of the entrenchment of the East German regime requires
a preliminary consideration of three separate but closely con-
nected facets of what might be called Bonn's 'fundamental
political thesis' -- or, to put it more imposingly, the Federal
Republic's raison d'état. Through no fault, save that of his-
torical circumstance, all three aspects: the legal, the poli-
tical, and the psychological, bear in varying degree the colora-
tion of the particular period of East-West conflict during which
the Federal Republic emerged. All three facets have been chal-
lenged, in one way or another, by developments since then.

The *legalistic* tenor of West Germany's official thinking has been one of its most striking characteristics. As such, it has had its critics, both foreign and domestic, who warn that juridical arguments often encourage political miscalculations and may condemn statesmen who rely on them to political quiescence. Contemporary German protagonists of the legalistic -- or, as they would prefer to express it, a legal -- approach insist upon its moral rectitude and its desirability as a counter to the fateful excesses of *Realpolitik* from which Germany has suffered in the past.⁵⁸ Both evaluations have their persuasive points. What concerns us here, however, are not the abstract merits of a general discussion but rather the practical political importance of the concrete points at issue.

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Essentially, the Federal Republic's official state doc-
trine is predicated upon three legal arguments. The first of
these postulates the continuity of the German state, irrespec-
tive of the unconditional surrender of 1945 and the domestic
political vacuum which followed immediately thereafter. Secondly,
pending a final determination at a future peace conference be-
tween the victorious powers of World War II and a freely-elected
all-German government, the boundaries of Germany are held to be
those which existed in 1937. Finally, until the formation of
such a government, it is the Federal Republic, as the one and
only German state based upon popular will and freely given con-
sent, which must be taken to represent the single legitimate
embodiment of German sovereignty and to be the only accredited
successor to the former German Reich.

The last proposition, whose implications are our immediate
concern, finds expression in the Basic Law of the Federal Repub-
lic, notably in its Preamble which declares that those who exer-
cised the constituent power "were inspired by the resolve to
preserve [Germany's] national and political unity"; that they
"acted also on behalf of those Germans to whom participation
was denied'; and concludes with a charge to "the entire German
people, calling upon it to achieve, by free self-determination,
the unity and freedom of Germany." The West German courts, in-
cluding the Federal Constitutional Court, the highest tribunal
in the land, have recognized the Federal Republic as the only
contemporary expression of the uninterrupted continuity of the

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German state and their rulings may be interpreted as upholding
its claim to being the sole legitimate German state. Drawing
upon these judicial opinions, there has emerged an extensive
body of constitutional-legal theorizing which has served further
to buttress the Federal Republic's legal claims for itself.⁵⁹
The basic legal principles involved are accepted by all the
major political parties and, of one leaves momentarily out of
consideration those individual critics who have voiced doubts
or exceptions, they may be said to enjoy the widespread support
of public opinion. Finally, the crucial principle that the
Federal Republic alone is entitled to speak for the entire
German people constitutes one of the doctrinal cornerstones
of West Germany's integration into the Western alliance. The
Federal Republic's claims in this respect have been endorsed
and affirmed by the Western powers, notably in the instruments
executed at London and Paris in 1954 which restored sovereignty
to West Germany and governed her accession into NATO.

Elsewhere in the present volume, in the course of his
examination of the various schools of legal thought which have
developed in West Germany to elaborate and refine the Federal
Republic's legal claims, Ferenc Vali has had occasion to note
the quite practical significance of what otherwise might be
dismissed as merely so many inconsequential exercises in juridical
reasoning.⁶⁰ Given the role which legal training plays in the edu-
cational background of so many of the Federal Republic's civil
servants, including Foreign Office personnel, and in that of

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many of its politicians, as well as the more general legalistic atmosphere which pervades the political culture of post-war Germany, legal first principles readily become a major political factor. What might be added to that important observation, however, is the seeming paradox that even so apparently unambiguous a doctrine as that contained in the Federal Republic's claim to sole representation of the entire German nation is susceptible to widely divergent political uses. On the one hand, it has served to preclude any official West German recognition of the GDR and also to sensitize West German policy makers against moves that might have the undesired effect of upgrading the legal status of the East German regime. But the very same doctrine can also be read in quite different terms. In the opinion of many legal commentators and in the view of an increasing number of political figures as well, the Federal Republic is enjoined by a veritable "Constitutional Commandment" not only to guard against any upgrading of the GDR's status, but also actively to pursue the goal of national reunification. With the attainment of that goal still wanting, the Federal Republic, so the argument runs, is under a legal as well as a moral obligation to act in behalf of the East German population in whose name it also purports to speak. This line of reasoning, in turn, heightens official sensitivity to evidence of impotence and accusations of ineffectiveness on all-German affairs. Especially where the particular concern may not merely be vaguely patriotic in character but more pressingly and concretely humanitarian in content,

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nized the GDR -- the only exception being the rather special case of the Soviet Union as the power held to be responsible for perpetrating and maintaining the division of Germany. This, in essence, is the rationale behind the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, officially promulgated in 1955, not so much as a reprisal against the East Central European states which enjoyed diplomatic relations with the GDR as a warning to neutralist countries, at the time, particularly India, which, it was feared, might otherwise contemplate such relations.

The impediment represented by the Hallstein Doctrine should not, however, be unduly overemphasized. Almost as soon as the Hallstein Doctrine was proclaimed, its limitation on the flexibility of Bonn's foreign policy was recognized and its critics, within the Foreign Office as well as outside the government, began to argue for a more pliable formula for the Communist states of Eastern Europe. Although at first they were decisively rebuffed by the more dogmatic legalists, political support for a revision of the Hallstein Doctrine, so as to circumvent its objectionable consequences, has continued to grow. Under Foreign Minister Schroeder, the cautious beginnings of a reinterpretation have been evident. And, in any case, starting in 1961, West Germany found it possible, even in the absence of formal diplomatic relations, to cultivate trade, commercial, and cultural ties of a politically promising sort with many of the East European states.

The legal principle establishing the boundaries of "Germany"

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within the borders of the country as they existed in 1937 proved
much less tractable. The primary issue here is that of the trans-
Oder-Neisse territories, but the politics of the West German
stand on this one issue which concerns German-Polish relations,
have colored the Federal Republic's relations with others of
the East Central European states, Czechoslovakia in particular.
This is not the place to speculate on whether an official West
German recognition of the Oder-Neisse line might have resulted
in an early and genuine political rapprochement with Poland. In
view of the many psychological and political impediments on the
Polish side -- including not only the legacy of World War II and
its immediate aftermath but also the considerable interest of
the Polish Government in manipulating the "German threat" in
order to stabilize the regime at home and consolidate its rela-
tions with the Soviet Union -- there are good grounds for doubt-
ing such a favorable outcome. Be that as it may, what is striking
is the linkage between the Federal Republic's refusal to contem-
plate acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line and its legal doctrine
on German unity. Moreover, the assertion of the continuity of German
sovereignty within the borders of 1937 has been strengthened by
the fact that the GDR, which in the official view is no real
German state at all, has recognized the Oder-Neisse line as final.
The GDR's recognition is, of course, dismissed as totally devoid
of significance. Yet it has had the significance of reenforcing
the Federal Republic's insistence that the entire issue must
await an eventual peace conference at which a freely elected

Perhaps you should also mention E. Ausens [N] amnivalence; want recognition of the Nise and acceptance of German laws.

63-

all-German government would resolve its territorial differences with Poland but that short of that eventuality even a preliminary discussion of Germany's final eastern boundary is inadmissable. 62

Official West German spokesmen have often emphasized that this position is far from constituting a demand that a reunified Germany automatically return to the 1937 boundaries. It is also clear that few West Germans would any longer be prepared to press for the maximal claim. Furthermore, other official pronouncements have committed the Federal Republic never to resort to force in revising its borders, an obligation that has been cited with explicit reference to the Oder-Neisse line. Nevertheless, many West German politicians have found it opportune to invoke the formal legal position in appeals to the former inhabitants of these territories and have done so in terms which stress support for their ostensible right to resettle in the place of their origin (**Heimatrecht**). On occasion, one and the same political figure will declare his willingness to seek an accommodation with, for example, Poland on one-day only to insist strenuously upon the inviolability of **Heimatrecht** on the next. 63 Altogether, the fact that such issues have been kept open on legalistic pretexts has only served to compromise the credibility of West Germany's professions of peaceful intentions toward her Eastern neighbors and disposed them against Germany's reunification.

Nor is this all. In addition, the consequences for the character of domestic political discussion within West Germany

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have been distinctly unfortunate. Paradoxically perhaps, the Federal Republic's successful political and social absorption of the millions of German expellees from Eastern Europe has been accompanied by an increase of militancy on the part of the professional functionaries of the refugee associations. In order to stimulate flagging expellee elan and, no less, one supposes, to demonstrate their own indispensibility as its organizational leaders, they have pressed their attack against so-called "politicians of renunciation" -- a phrase entirely indicative of the vindictiveness of their manner and, incidentally, only too reminiscent of the scurrilous attacks of an earlier decade against "fulfillment politicians." It goes without saying that all this has served to facilitate an identification of interests on the German question between the regimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia and their populations and has also to some extent enabled the Eastern bloc countries to project to the West a discrediting image of German "revanchism."

Such problematics, however, constitute only one part of the larger political aspect of the Federal Republic's raison d'être. For from Bonn's doctrinal first principles there runs a direct and again logically credible connecting line to the policy-laden view that Germany's division represents the major cause of the Cold War. From this it follows that German reunification, or at least progress toward it is an essential prerequisite for a genuine detente, not to mention a durable political settlement in Europe. These propositions, in turn,

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have concealed additional policy corollaries. On the one hand, the Federal Republic's understandable rejection of any responsibility for the initiation of the East-West conflict of which it is only a product has created a reluctance to initiate measures designed to ameliorate the conflict's tensions. Even more, a growing consciousness that the Federal Republic's Western allies need not share its national objectives with anything like the same degree of intensity has tended to heighten fears of steps of international relaxation that imply acceptance of Germany's division as final. This, in turn, has animated efforts to generate "salutary unrest" in order to keep the West from neglecting the existence of Germany's "open wound," efforts which willy-nilly cast the Federal Republic even more forcefully in the role of a revisionist power and an obstacle to a relaxation of tensions. As a result, recent West German policy has paradoxically been characterized both by continued dependence on the Western powers for the attainment of national reunification and recurrent suspicion of being betrayed by its allies in the course of a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. 64

But the psychological complications may be still more profound. The Federal Republic's claim to speak for the entire German nation has been psychologically appealing, among other reasons on account of Bonn's own foreign policy success in rehabilitating Germany from the status of a political outcast to that of a valued and respected member of a larger international community. For membership in the Atlantic alliance and parti-

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cipation in various projects of European integration afforded an opportunity of turning away from the perplexing uncertainties bequeathed by German history and the post-war division of the country. In this sense these international vistas pointed the "way out" from the apparent dead-end prefigured by Germany's national collapse in 1945. They offered not merely military security and economic advantage but even more importantly a sense of identity and purpose transcending that of self. Such, at least, was the case before rivalries within the alliance and the consequent juxtaposition between Europe and the Atlantic community spurred a revival of self-concern.

Nor is this the only conundrum. For from the outset the road away from political collapse and psychological confusion led in ambivalent directions. Affirmative tones and international objectives toward the West were accompanied by negative accents and purely national objectives with regard to the East. As Golo Mann critically summarized it a few years ago: "In [Bonn's] relations with the West it has moved forward from agreement to agreement. In its relations with the East it has offered nothing but a single, rigid no. No to the GDR; no to the Oder-Neisse frontier; no to the satellite states; no to communism generally." This was not only a matter of policy. Sustaining the negativism of specific policies was a set of deeper unconscious reflexes. In so far as this gained expression at all, it did so as a kind of "surrogate ideology" of anti-Communism which the Federal Republic's *raison d'être* itself encouraged, or at least did nothing to prevent.

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To be sure, the diffuse anti-Communism of the first decade
or so of the Federal Republic's existence has been subject to
recurrent intellectual challenge domestically. And, despite
its notable persistence within those political circles which
have professed their disbelief in such developments as the Sino-
Soviet dispute, it has proved amenable to refinement in the-
making of policy to take more adequate account of the emergence
of national differences among the Communist states of East Central
Europe. But no such psychological adjustment is possible, offi-
cially at least, with regard to the East German regime. It is,
in fact, virtually ruled out by the very nature of Bonn's funda-
mental political thesis. As a result, the absence of adequate
psychological preparation to deal with possible long term changes
in East Germany has been striking. Among other things, this has
been evidenced in the repeated official West German insistence
that nothing essential can ever change due to the Wall, or for
that matter, the brutal suppression of the June 1968 uprising.
66

It has also been manifested in the details of various plans
which the West German government has sponsored for a future
merger between West Germany and East Germany, plans which have
been unfailingly based upon an unquestioned assumption that the
East German population will continue to prefer the socio-economic
system that obtains in the Federal Republic. 67 All of this is
understandable and may well be fully justified. But it also
suggests the potentially deeper challenge to the stability and,
perhaps, even the survival of the Federal Republic should East

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Germany through its own efforts ever succeed in overcoming its ill-repute in the minds of anything-like a significant segment of West German public opinion.

## The Domestic Political Scene

In historical retrospect, the erection of the Berlin Wall may well turn out to have initiated a new era in West German politics. Since 1961, the problem of Germany's division and the host of related questions of foreign and military policy have become the overriding issues of domestic politics -- and much more urgently so than perhaps ever before. But if the great domestic debates of the fifties on these issues were characterized by a relative clarity of alternative conceptions and a fixity of partisan lines, the more recent discussions have been marked by vagueness on crucial matters of substance and ambiguity of party position. Each of the major political parties, in varying degree, has found itself internally divided. All of them have nominally come to agree on the desirability of "German initiatives" to overcome national division; so far none of them has proved able or willing to produce a concrete program for German reunification.

To understand the causes of the evident disorientation of political opinion within the Federal Republic is also in part to appreciate the multiple challenge posed by the entrenchment of the East German regime. The Wall and the consequent deepening of the national division not only dealt an immediately crippling blow to all earlier partisan tenets on the German

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problem; it also put in jeopardy for the longer term the entire elaborate set of defenses, legal, political, and psychological, that had been built up in support of the Federal Republic's *raison d'etat*. To work out a precise policy for German reunification under the altered post-1961 circumstances seemed to require, at the political level alone, some form of acceptance of Germany's post-World War II eastern frontiers, to leave aside limitations on German arms, concessions that could be interpreted in the domestic political arena as unilateral and which, in any case, could not be guaranteed to lead directly to the restoration of national unity. And if these imponderables were not serious enough, the basic issue was rendered even more difficult by disension within the Western alliance, and Franco-American rivalry for German allegiance, in particular. Under these complex conditions, the understandable reaction was not to venture too far from previously established positions; the irony was, and still remains, that these departures which were undertaken threatened to undermine those very positions.

In view of Chancellor Adenauer's prior (and subsequent) political inflexibility, it is somewhat curious to note that in the period of shock and disillusionment which followed the Wall's erection, it was he who initiated the effort to redefine the immediate problem from national and humanitarian terms.⁶⁸ By so doing, Adenauer in effect anticipated the efforts of others to formulate a policy of "small steps," designed in the first instance to alleviate the personal hardships resulting from

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national division. From such modest beginnings, whose origins lay in essentially humanitarian considerations alone, the Social Democratic Party soon evoked larger political vistas of perforating the Wall so as to reverse the estrangement between East and West Germany. Both the desire for initiative and its ultimate objective were incorporated in the SPD slogan "Change Through Approach" (Wandlung durch Annäherung). And, not to be outdone by the political opposition, the CDU, or at least the Chairman of its Parliamentary Group. Barzel, pronounced evident agreement in the form of the comparable slogan "Change Through Influence" (Änderung durch Einwirkung). For its part, the FDP concurred with the expression of similar thoughts on its own.

When it came to the precise definition of policy, however, all of the parties seemed to be handicapped either by internal divisions, anxiety about public opinion, fear of sacrificing the Federal Republic's legal position, or elements of each. All of them concurred, to be sure, in such "small steps" as the pass agreements, but on the question of the desirability of other official contacts and the larger issues of political strategy toward the GDR, opinion has been fragmented in numerous directions.

Internal party factionalism has been especially rampant in the case of the Christian Democrats. After the retirement of so domineering a leader as Chancellor Adenauer, the CDU/CSU may in any case have been ripe for fragmentation. In the event, Franco-American dissension provided the major impetus and re-

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unification policy, no less than foreign policy more generally,
proved the main object of cleavage. A group of so-called
"Gaullists," including Strauss and his Bavarian CSU but also
claiming the allegiance of a number of powerful figures in
the CDU proper, not the least of whom was Adenauer, professed
to see in any policy of initiatives hidden but basic dangers
to the Federal Republic's position. Their expressed concern
not to sacrifice West Germany's legal claims both against the
GDR and in regard to the eastern frontiers drove them back to
the vigorous defense of previously established doctrinal posi-
tions.⁶⁹ Despite the persistence of other leaders like Foreign
Minister Schroeder in a "policy of movement" consonant with
their understanding of the American "strategy of peace," the
political influence of the "Gaullists" within their party's
councils has been considerable. Testimony to that was offered,
among other things, by the content which so aspiring a political
figure as Barzel felt obliged to give to his own earlier slogan
so as, in effect, to rob it of its original meaning.⁷⁰

So far the Social Democratic Party has been less openly
plagued by differences within its own ranks. To be sure, the
SPD leadership in Berlin has always been somewhat at odds with
the national party headquarters in Bonn. Whereas in previous
years the Berlin SPD tended to take a harder line toward the
East German regime than that of the national organization, more
recently the positions have been reversed. Nevertheless, under
Brandt's leadership the SPD as a whole came to champion both

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"small steps" to assuage personal hardships and larger political initiatives as well. But no less than other West German politicians, the Social Democrats proved to be chary of seeming to advocate concessions that might prejudice the Federal Republic's previous position. As a result, while the SPD has continued to foster expectations of further steps to proliferate contacts across Germany's dividing line and to encourage a longer range vision of influencing developments within East Germany toward the end of ultimately eliminating Germany's partition, it has yet to embody its own views of an active policy to achieve German unity in anything like a concrete, precise program.⁷¹ Rather, in addition to nurturing these expectations, its spokesmen have devoted themselves to an attempt to demonstrate what cannot be conclusively proved beforehand, namely, that none of the "small" or "middle" steps which the SPD backs need necessarily serve to upgrade the status of the GDR.

Much the same concern with the procedural side of official contacts between the Federal Republic and the GDR has been true of the FDP, even though its Party Chairman, Mende, has gone further, perhaps, than any other political leader so far in attempting to differentiate among "small," "middle," and "large" steps on the German question.⁷² What seems especially noteworthy about his proposals, however, and those which have recently emanated from other FDP leaders over the years, is the priority they accord to the pursuit of Germany's national aspirations over other considerations of foreign policy.⁷³

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All these particular positions and their larger under-
lying assumptions momentarily aside, the quality of political
life during the recent and current period of renewed discussion
of the problematics of Germany's division merits some comment.
For a variety of reasons, none of which need necessarily be
directly related to the inherent complexity of the issues at
hand, the fabric of domestic politics in the Federal Republic
has shown unmistakable signs of increasing strain. No doubt
the hazards of Germany's international position call for states-
manship of the highest order. No doubt also that the existence
of a number of difficult choices demands political leadership
of equal magnitude. Among its other requirements is the need
for public clarification of meaningful alternatives and their
possible consequences.

On none of the counts, however, has the Federal Republic's
domestic political life in the post-Kanzerdemokratie era (to
forego any judgment on that earlier and still controversial
period) yet to give very solid grounds for optimism. On the
contrary, all indications to date point toward the opposite
conclusion. Both between and within the political parties,
genuine differences of opinion on specific policies have com-
snapped by
These laws
bined with personal likes and animosities, and been further ex-
acerbated by petty considerations of individual avarice and
personal political advantage to convey an overall atmosphere
of multipartisan political disorientation. While the prevalence
of political intrigue has especially plagued the Christian
documentation

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Democrats, the major governing party's junior coalition partner, the FDP, long beset by its own internal divisions, has also partaken of the larger disarray within government ranks, and the SPD, for its part, also experienced the general phenomenon of its parliamentary representatives being cut off from the deliberations of the party leadership.⁷⁴ Needless to say, none of this has contributed to the edification of public opinion or even the clarification of basic issues. Those who may have expected the 1965 election campaign to have sharpened the focus of public discussion were doomed to disappointment. The dominant role played by professional campaign technicians in close conjunction with public opinion experts served rather to obfuscate the basic issues.⁷⁵

In view of the inherent difficulties of the policy choices yet to be made, their withdrawal from the exaggerated partisan controversy of an election campaign need not necessarily have been inopportune. More disquieting, however, have been other signs of a potentiality for irrationality, in future policy deliberation. Its major source need not be party conflict nor personal political rivalries but rather the atmosphere of revived nationalism in which both are increasingly being set. The mere persistence of Germany's division gives impetus to precisely such a development. In part, the exacerbation of nationalist frustrations is inherent in the very situation that generates them in the first place. Even the most dispassionate West German politicians have succumbed to nationalistic expres-

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signs of impatience. 76 Others have recommended a greater cultivation of national consciousness and a "purified patriotism" as a prerequisite to overcoming Germany's division. 77 Such revived nationalism, whose dynamics may not be easily controlled, gains further sustenance in the degree to which vital cleavages in the Western alliance serve to set the Federal Republic adrift. All told, frustration caused by the absence of progress in realizing Germany's national aspirations represents a highly volatile factor, but one which paradoxically must also be included in any calculation of the prospects for overcoming Germany's division through increased contacts between the Federal Republic and the GDR.

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V. Overcoming Germany's Division ?

In the absence of a coordinated Western policy on German
which would be something other than merely
reunification, one that would be something other than merely
declamatory in character, the pressures on the Federal Republic to
pursue its own initiatives seem certain to increase. In part,
these pressures have their origins in other countries of the
Western alliance. American and British policy makers have tended
to encourage a more active West German policy toward the East,
without drawing any clear distinction between East Germany and
the other Communist states. They have done this in apparent
compensation for their own inactivity on the German question.
But that very inactivity itself generates further domestic pres-
sures within the Federal Republic toward exclusively German initia-
tives. ⁷⁸ And even if that were not the case, humanistic impulses
to ameliorate conditions inside East Germany and to reestablish
severed personal ties would generate powerful domestic pressures
of their own on any West German government. All three sets of
pressures point to the likelihood of more official contacts be-
tween the Federal Republic and the GDR. They also suggest the
possibility of their increased involvement in each other's af-
fairs. It is far from certain, however, that the terminus of
these developments need necessarily be national reunification.

Those who purport to see in the proliferation of contacts
between the two Germanies a round-about road to reunification
usually put the case somewhat as follows: Official contacts,
desirable in any event to improve the lot of the East German

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population, can be utilized to introduce Western political in-
fluence into the GDR. Thus, even if the short run effect may
be to help the East German regime to consolidate itself, the
long term prospects promise its liberalization. And it is
precisely through such liberalization, and through it alone,
that Germany's partition can be overcome.

This line of reasoning is based upon two assumptions
that require closer scrutiny. The first explicitly holds that
internal liberalization within the GDR will necessarily prove
conducive to its rapprochement with the Federal Republic. The
second implicitly postulates that the superior position of the
Federal Republic and that of the West more generally will be
maintained intact during the period from the present stalemated
division to its termination in national unification.

The first of these suppositions raises a host of imponder-
ables that tend to be too easily overlooked due to the special
~~but~~ *attrition*
*and deceptive charms of the word 'liberalization' itself.* Yet
much, if not everything, would seem to depend upon who carries
out the liberalization that is assumed to follow in the wake of
greater security for the regime and its exposure to Western
influences and under what conditions.

A sudden relaxation of the SED dictatorship in an atmosphere
of general political disorientation could still, as in 1953, lead
to a popular uprising which, in turn, would almost certainly
prompt Soviet intervention and result in a serious setback to
the entire cause of reunification. Such an outburst, however,

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does not seem likely, if only because the SED regime is already
much more solidly entrenched than it was in 1953.

What, then, about a controlled relaxation of the East
German regime brought about by elements in the Communist leader-
ship more secure in their position of power and therefore more
readily responsive to popular pressure? This is indeed the
eventuality which is usually uppermost in mind in the reasoning
about Western influence creating the preconditions for East
German liberalization. The chain of argument which leads from
such liberalization to reunification contains a number of po-
tentially faulty links. First of all, it presupposes a funda-
mental cleavage between the old guard in the SED leadership,
exemplified by Ulbricht and his ilk, and a different, presum-
ably more flexible set of leaders. Unfortunately, our knowledge
of political preferences within the top echelons of the East
German regime does not suffice to pass judgment on whether such
a cleavage exists. Two things deserve to be borne in mind, how-
ever. First, whatever the outcome of the inevitable personal
struggle to succeed Ulbricht, it is highly improbable that power
will ever devolve upon the Ulbricht regime's most outspoken
critics who have been intellectuals far removed from the centers
of actual power. It is true, as we have had occasion to see,
that among the present leadership there is a rising group which
might with justification be labelled "technocratic." It does
not follow, however, that its members need be receptive to pres-
sures toward rapprochement with West Germany or even toward
domestic relaxation. It would be a mistake to underestimate
the vested interest all members of this rising group have in

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the preservation of their own power. And it is also a mistake

Naur

To view the conundrum from the point of view of personalities.
Ubricht himself has already introduced significant changes
in the GDR, changes which few competent observers in the West
would have ventured to ascribe to him beforehand. With the
further consolidation of the regime postulated by proponents
of the formula "reunification through liberalization" either
Ubricht or his successors might well grant more and more con-
cessions to the population without necessarily sacrificing their
own control or proving more pliable on the "national issue."
On the contrary, such a sequence of events, by enhancing the
popularity of the regime at home, might only serve to render
it more truculent toward the Federal Republic.

In all such calculations, it is important to bear in
mind that the East German leadership, no matter of whom it may
consist, will have one crucial asset, its Paradoxical though it
is rooted in its very vulnerability.
As long as the leadership's consciousness of its own
may seem
weakness relative to West Germany persists, it is unlikely to
be an asset to court its own downfall on any road to reunification.
An acute
awareness of the risks to its own power seems certain to be a
significant feature of the East German regime's position in
all its dealings with the Federal Republic; indeed, it has al-
ready been very much in evidence.⁷⁹ No amount of West German
assurance or economic aid is really sufficient on this score.
Rather, to the extent to which West German concessions may tend
to increase the self-confidence of the East German leadership
through providing it with a greater degree of domestic consoli-

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dation, its propensity to challenge the Federal Republic far
from being diminished, will probably increase.

Upon closer inspection the vision of a liberalized East
Germany may well turn out to be a specter. If liberalization does
not lead to rapid reunification, which no West German advocate of
measures to facilitate it has yet suggested, then a more liberal,
domestically secure but internationally assertive East Germany
would be in a better position than ever before to damage the
Western position. Ultimately, the implicit assumption of the ad-
vocates of "reunification through liberalization" that the West's
initially far superior position would remain intact might be
proved to have been illusory.

Even before the stage of credible liberalization is
reached in East Germany, the proliferation of official contacts
along the lines envisaged by proponents of broadening "small
steps," such as the seasonal Berlin pass agreements into "middle
steps," including Western economic credits, offers a number of
opportunities for the GDR to attempt successfully to enhance its status.
From the West German point of view the crucial issue is usually
defined as that of official recognition of East Germany as a
separate state. Except in the extreme case of one proponent of
official contacts who is willing to grant the GDR formal recog-
nition,⁸⁰ almost all the others urge that the issue be simply
side-stepped.⁸¹ Unfortunately, however, this is not always
easy. Short of formal recognition, there are still many con-
cessions which the East German regime could obtain which would
effectively upgrade its status. The very initiation of various

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contacts and "steps" generates its own forward dynamic of public
expectations which the East German regime can more easily manip-
pulate for its purposes than the West German government may be
able to control for its. Nor is it always clear in advance how
the specific method of handling intra-German contacts will af-
fect the status of the GDR. The very disputes which have raged
within the Federal Republic about whether to coordinate these
contacts in a single government office and, if so, where to
locate this office in the official hierarchy so as to preclude
an enhancement of the GDR's status are susceptible of being
manipulated by the East German regime to press its own case,
if not with the Federal Republic than with the outside world.

Much more serious are the implications of the prolifera-
tion of contacts between the two German governments for the
Western position in Berlin. On the one hand, Western rights
of access to Berlin could be threatened anew first in indirect
and then in more open ways as the GDR succeeded in making good
its claims to sovereignty as a separate state. On the other,
the determination of the Western powers to maintain their posi-
tion and rights in Berlin might well be weakened as the GDR
succeeded in overcoming its status as a political pariah. That
domestic liberalization, facilitated by the Federal Republic,
would aid the GDR in precisely this ambition, follows from the
increased likelihood that other nations would be more ready to
extend diplomatic recognition to a liberalized East Germany
than before. So transformed, the GDR might well succeed in
blocking the employment of the Hallstein doctrine or other re-

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taliatory measures against its new diplomatic partners by appeals to a more sympathetic public opinion in West Germany. At bare minimum, it would succeed in complicating the Federal Republic's foreign relations in ways which might make Bonn's 1965 Middle Eastern imbroglio seem only a mild foretaste.

Finally, the larger and longer-range impact of a more stable, more liberal, more internationally accepted GDR upon the domestic political life of the Federal Republic ought not to be overlooked. The process of ideological erosion in each of the two Germanies is quite likely to be assymetrical with earlier doctrinal positions collapsing more rapidly in the Federal Republic than in the GDR. The resultant political atmosphere in West Germany would be much more problematic and more susceptible to East German manipulation than vice versa. East German strategy could easily follow two different courses simultaneously: On the one hand, nationalist frustrations over the failure to have achieved progress toward reunification could be encouraged along with neutralist reactions of recrimination against the West. On the other hand, the same excrescences could be decried in the outside world, to which the GDR might well begin to seem to constitute "the other and better Germany."

In view of all the many possible pitfalls on the road to a liberalized East Germany, alternative conceptions deserve examination. It is indicative of the one-sided character of public discussion of the problem in the Federal Republic to date and perhaps symptomatic of something more also that it has

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yet to produce an alternative conception by a West German, To
be sure, those who profess to see fundamental dangers in new
departures have spoken out, but mainly to reiterate older and
no longer persuasive doctrines on reunification. (The only
notable innovation to come from this school has involved the
rather far-fetched supposition that Chinese pressure on the
Soviet Union will force its retirement from East Germany and
thus permit reunification. 82) Rather, the main protagonists
of an alternative approach have been American exponents of a
policy of sharply differentiating between the GDR and the other
East Central European Communist states. 83 As they see it, the
purpose should be, first, to isolate the East German regime and,
ultimately, in conjunction with other coordinated Western policies
of appeal to the Soviet Union and East Europe, to render it poli-
tically anachronistic. Although this strategy has great logical
merit, its political feasibility is far from certain. First,
its appeal within the Federal Republic is impaired, not only
because it threatens for the short run to perpetuate the East
German regime's most reprehensible features and to drive it more
tightly into the embrace of the Soviets, but also because on
both counts it seems altogether discriminatory against the
Germans. 84 Secondly, to be seriously sustained, it requires
greater coordination within the Atlantic alliance than seems
presently likely. Finally, to promise a chance of success, it
presupposes both rigidity on the part of the Federal Republic
against the GDR and also flexibility of West German policy

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elsewhere in East Europe. Yet, the very political forces in the Federal Republic most inclined to follow the first line are least favorably disposed to the second.

In order to be rendered both acceptable and practicable, any policy of containing the GDR would seem to require both refinement of tactic and relation to an overall Western strategy on Germany. Assuming the latter may yet be developed in all its requisite aspects, the former might attempt to differentiate among cultural, economic, and political elements in contacts between the Federal Republic and the GDR. While cultural ties are highly desirable and economic relations probably unavoidable, anything that facilitates the GDR's assertion of sovereignty is fraught with numerous political dangers.

Merely to observe such a tripartite distinction will itself require an extraordinary measure of West German perseverance inasmuch as the East German regime, as it has recently demonstrated on the matter of cultural exchanges, cannot be expected to overlook a single opportunity to press for the maximum political advantage.⁸⁵ In the larger analysis, to suggest that the Federal Republic pursue a policy toward the GDR both flexible in some respects and unyielding in others and relate this policy in a consciously meaningful way to a grand international strategy is also to impose upon West Germany a burden which it is ill-equipped to meet alone. More than ever before the aim of overcoming Germany's division ought not to be an exclusively German concern.

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Footnotes

1. See, for example, Koppel S. Pinson, *Modern Germany, Its History and Civilizations* (New York, 1954); of. Ferenc Vali's contribution to this volume. For an earlier but still suggestive appraisal of regional differences within Germany, see Eugen Diesel, *Germany and the Germans*

2. Cf. Peter H. Merkl, *The Origin of the West German Republic* (New York, 1963), especially, pp. 29-89 and C.J. Friedrich's Introduction.

3. The socio-economic aspects of Germany's post-war division have thoughtfully been examined by the West German sociologist, Ralf Dahrendorf. See his "Wandlungen der deutschen Gesellschaft in der Nachkriegszeit: Herausforderungen und Antworten," in Ralf Dahrendorf, *Gesellschaft und Freiheit* (Munich, 1962), pp. 300-320, in which Dahrendorf concludes with a warning that if the division persists, a reunification of Germany from within could become impossible. (p. 320.) In another version of the same essay, "Die neuen Gesellschaft: Soziale Strukturwandlungen der Nachkriegszeit," in Hans Werner Richter, ed., *Bestandsaufnahme* (Munich, 1962), pp. 203-220, Dahrendorf concludes on a slightly different note in which he suggests the divergent development of the GDR and the Federal Republic points equally to the possibility of a breakdown of the regime in the East

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and a collapse of representative democracy in the West. (An
English translation of the essay with the latter conclusions
appeared in *Encounter*, April, 1964, under the title, "The New
Germanies.")

4. C.J. Friedrich, "Germany and Europe," in this volume, pp.

5. For journalistic reportage of a high order on these themes, see, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, Rudolf Walter Leonhardt, Theo Sommer, *Reise in ein fernes Land* (Hamburg, 1964). A competent survey from the professional sociological point of view is offered in Peter Christian Ludz, ed., *Studien und Materialien zur Soziologie der DDR* (Cologne and Opladen, 1964).

6. Cf. the comments of Dieter Hildebrandt, "Grenzfälle für Anfänger," *Der Monat*, May, 1965, p. 39.

7. This point of view has been recurrently expressed by some American and British political commentators. For one recent example, see Oscar Gass, "German Unification: Prospects and Merits," *Commentary*, July, 1965.

8. Fritz René Allemann, *Bonn ist nicht Weimar* (Cologne and Berlin, 1956), p. 412.

9. Enzenberger's particular remark was made in a speech at Darmstadt in October, 1963, as quoted in Kurt Sontheimer, "Die unbequemen Mahner," *Die Zeit*, June 26, 1964.

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[Y]

10. See pp.

11. Milovan Djilas, *Conversations with Stalin* (New York, 1962), p. 153.

12. *Ibid.*, p. 114.

13. Ernst Richert, *Das Zweite Deutschland: Ein Staat der nicht sein darf* (Gütersloh, 1964). For a critique in greater detail, see the present author's "The German Problem Once Again," *Survey*, April, 1965.

14. Djilas reports that immediately after World War II Soviet leaders, including Stalin, were adamant in their insistence that "all of Germany must be ours." *Op. cit.*, p. 153.

15. Whereas during 1948-49 SED spokesmen tended to employ the terms "anti-fascist democratic order" and "people's democracy" interchangeably, thereby identifying developments in East Germany with more general trends elsewhere in the satellite world, they were compelled a year later to observe a terminological distinction and to insist that East Germany's political and social order remained only "anti-fascist democratic" in character. Even after the commencement of a concerted campaign to "build socialism" in July, 1952, the designation "dictatorship of the proletariat" was scrupulously avoided in favor of the euphemism "workers-and-peasants power."

16. Heralding the event as a "turning point in the history of Europe,"

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[Y]

Stalin went on to express his high personal hopes for Germany's
future and to suggest the possibility of a Soviet-German
alliance in Europe. For the text, see *Dokumente zur Aussen-
politik der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik*, Vol. I (Berlin,
1954), p. 232. Other manifestations of this tactic included
the establishment of a National Front of Democratic Germany to
rally such supposedly patriotic elements as former Nazis and
military officers.

17. For one egregious example, see Paul Sethe,

18. John Mander, "Taking Stock," *Survey*, October, 1962, p. 176.

19. *Die Zeit*, June 11, 1965.

20. James L. Richardson, *Germany and the Atlantic Alliance: The Interaction of Strategy and Politics* (publication forthcoming), Ch. 2 "The Western Alliance versus Neutrality."

21. *Ibid.* for specific examples.

22. This was especially true of Adenauer's first public reaction
to the Soviet Note in his speech at Siegen, March 16, 1952.

23. According to one insider's report, otherwise uncorroborated
however, the SED was ordered in the Spring of 1953 to prepare
a plan for its participation in free all-German elections,
See, "Ein Generalplan der SED," *SBZ-Archiv*, 25 May 1955, pp.
147-149.

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24. Tägliche Rundschau, June 13, 1953.

25. Pravda, March 10, 1963.

26. For some of the relevant details, see Carola Stern, *Ulbricht: Eine politische Biographie* (Cologne, 1964), pp. 170-174.

27. For the opposite point of view by one who judges the failings of Western diplomacy to have been more costly, see Richard Lowenthal's introduction to Arnulf Baring, *Der 17. Juni 1953* (Cologne, 1965).

28. Cf. Carola Stern, *Porträt einer Bolschewistischen Partei* (Cologne, 1957), pp. 87-89.

29. Quoted from *Bulletin der Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung* (Hereafter cited as Bulletin), July 20, 1956 in Ernst Deuerlein, *Deutschland wie Chruschtschow es will* (Bonn, 1961), p. 25.

30. *Foreign Radio Broadcasts: Daily Report*, No. 62, 1959, BB2ff.

31. For the full text of the memorandum, see *Bulletin*, January 10, 1962.

32. The designation is Zbigniew Brzezinski's. See his *Alternative to Partition* (New York, 1965), pp. 77ff.

33. For a particularly trenchant analysis, written during the Berlin crisis, see Henry A. Kissinger, *The Necessity for Choice* (New York, 1960), pp. 132-153.

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34. For a recent Soviet appreciation of the GDR's role in this respect, see the review in *International Affairs* (Moscow), January 1965 of S. Doernberg's official *Kurze Geschichte der DDR* which although otherwise highly favorable, reproaches Doernberg for not giving enough attention to East German ties to the underdeveloped countries. According to the reviewer, these ties are "making a sizeable contribution to the help given them by the socialist world." (pp. 102-103)

35. The most recent Soviet pronouncement on reunification, by Foreign Minister Gromyko, was the most strongly negative to date. According to Gromyko the restoration of German national unity was entirely out of the question. *Die Welt*, March 18/19, 1965.

36. Brzezinski, *op. cit.*, 79, and p. 82.

37. Speech of N.S. Khrushchev in *Protokoll des VI. Parteitages der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei* (Berlin, 1964), Vol. I, p. 289ff.

38. To be sure, much like the Federal Republic's Basic Law, the GDR's 1949 Constitution did affirm Germany's indivisibility and purported to be an instrument for the entire German people. Little was ever made of this affirmation however, since for fairly obvious reasons official spokesmen chose rather to stress the case for recognizing the separate existence of two sovereign German states. On this point, cf. Theodor Eschenburg,

[Y]

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Staat und Gesellschaft in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1956), p. 350.

39. See the report of John Mander, "Behind the Wall," *Encounter*, September, 1964.

40. Richert, *op. cit.*, p. 183.

41. For a suggestive analysis of East German and Soviet attempts to influence the outcome of the 1957 West German election campaign, see Uwe Kitzinger, *German Electoral Politics* (Oxford, 1960), pp. 251-259.

42. *Neues Deutschland*, March 18, 1962, as quoted in Alois Riklin and Klaus Westen, eds., *Selbsterzeugnisse des SED Regimes* (Cologne, 1963), p. 37.

43. *Neues Deutschland*, editorial, April 29, 1965.

44. Ulbricht's report to the 14th SED Central Committee Plenum, *Neues Deutschland*, November 26, 1961.

45. For a critical evaluation of these reforms, see Carl Thalheim, *Die Wirtschaft der Sowjetzone in Krise und Umbau* (Berlin, 1964).

A more current comprehensive and more favorable assessment is provided by Harry Trend and Dorothy Miller, "East Germans Ahead in Economic Reforms," Radio Free Europe Internal Research Paper, publication as a monograph forthcoming.

46. Trend and Miller, loc. cit.

47. See Peter Florin, "An der Jahreswende," *Einheit*, January, 1965

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and "Technische Revolution und Sozialismus," *ibid*.

48. Notably through an attempt to introduce agitation into residential districts.

49. Havemann's lectures were published in West Germany under the title *Dialektik ohne Dogma? Naturwissenschaft und Weltanschauung* (Hamburg, 1964). For a critical evaluation of Havemann's position, see Peter C. Ludz, "Freiheitsphilosophie oder aufgeklärte Dogmatismus?" *SBZ-Archiv*, 12 June 1964, pp. 183-189 and 13 July 1964, pp. 195-201.

50. See especially Khrushchev's speech to the Sixth SED Party Congress in January, 1963, *op. cit*.

51. Nor to protest vigorously to the Soviet leadership when he felt that the GDR's interests were being slighted. See *East Europe*, March, 1962, p. 56. For a report of another incident of a different sort on the occasion of Ulbricht's visit to the Soviet Union in 1964, see *Der Spiegel*, June 10, 1964, pp. 22-23.

52. See above, pp.

53. See Steefan Brant, *Der Aufstand* (Stuttgart, 1964) and Arnulf Baring, *Der 17. Juni* (Cologne, 1965).

54. In this connection, the high degree of political consciousness of the part of the workers and the persistence of older Social Democratic traditions play a role.

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55. See Richert, *op. cit.*, *passim*.

56. See Map Frankel, "East Germany: Hitler Era? Someone Else's Past," *New York Times*, December 11, 1964.

57. Thus, Ulbricht himself denounced Karl Jaspers suggestion that West Germany and East Germany might develop into separate nations. *Neues Deutschland*, December 18, 1960. More recently, it is true, some East German commentators began to develop the argument that certain Western policies, such as the projected MLF, might drive Germany's division to a point where the eventual emergence of a separate East German nation might become inevitable. See *Neues Deutschland*, October 28, 1964. This line, however, was soon soft-pedalled and replaced by more strident assertions that the GDR embodied the future of Germany as a whole. See Ulbricht's speech to the 7th SED Central Committee Plenum, *Neues Deutschland*, 28 April 1965.

58. See, for a forceful expression of this point of view, Wilhelm Grewe, *Deutsche Aussenpolitik der Nachkriegzeit* (Stuttgart, 1960), p. 138 ff.

59. For a comprehensive review of the various schools of constitutional-legal thought, see Rudolf Schuster, *Deutschlands Staatliche Existenz im Widerstreit Politischer und Rechtlicher Gesichtspunkte 1945-1963* (Munich, 1963) and Ferenc Vali's contribution to this volume.

60. Pp.

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61. For one recent interpretation along these lines by a leading political figure, see Erich Mende, "Weitsicht Enscheidet Unsere Zukunft," Speech to 1965 FDP Congress, mimeographed.

62. In January 1965 Fritz Erler did suggest such preliminary explorations, only to create a furor and immediately to withdraw, in effect, his own proposal.

63. This occurred in the case of no less central a personage than Chancellor Erhard, in April 1964. Many other examples and instances could be cited.

64. For a more detailed exposition of these points, see Karl Kaiser's contribution to this volume, pp.

65. Golo Mann, "Rapallo: The Vanishing Dream," *Survey*, October, 1962, p. 87. See also his "Der verlorene Krieg und seine Folgen," in *Bestandsaufnahme*, op.cit.

66. For one assertion that "the regime is stigmatized once and for all" see the *Bulletin* (English language edition), June 8, 1965.

67. This is true, for example, of the most recent study which otherwise created something of a sensation by virtue of its findings concerning the stabilization of the GDR. See, *Vierter Tätigkeitsbericht des Forschungsbeirat für Fragen der Wiedervereinigung* (Bonn, 1965).

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68. For one statement of this redefinition by Adenauer, see "The German Problem - A World Problem," *Foreign Affairs*, October 1962. A brief discussion of the Chancellor's private initiatives as well as his public appeals is contained in Theo Sommer, "Kleine Schritte - wie gross?" *Die Zeit*, July 20, 1965.

69. A forceful summary of this position is contained in Ernst Majonica, *Deutsche Aussenpolitik* (Stuttgart, 1965). Majonica serves as chairman of the CDU's parliamentary foreign policy group.

70. See "Barzel für Politik des Einwirkens," *Die Welt*, April 1, 1965.

71. The closest approximation remains Egon Bahr's 1963 Tutzing speech which dealt, however, in the main with prospects for encouraging internal liberalization within East Germany and the question of regulating official contacts between the two German governments. Excerpts from his address, touching upon the latter point, may be found in Heinrich Siegler, *ed.*, *Wiedervereinigung und Sicherheit Deutschlands*, 5th ed., (Bonn, 1964), pp. 311-312.

72. Cf. Mende's speech to the 1965 FDP Party Congress, *loc.cit*.

73. For a good account of the nationalist strain within the FDP, see "Die Koalitionspartei," *Die Zeit*, May 14, 1965.

74. A trenchant critical assessment of the structural problems of what F. R. Allemann terms "a democracy without discussion" is offered in his "Bonn ist nicht Weimar: Zehn Jahre Danach,"

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Der Monat, May 1965.

75. See Allemann, loc.cit., and Rolf Zundel, "Unter dem Diktat der Demoskopie," Die Zeit

76. For a brief discussion of this phenomenon in relation to the problem of formulating specific policies, see Theo Sommer, "Initiativen für Deutschland," Die Zeit, July 13, 1965.

77. The recommendation was apparently first forthcoming from Mende. See Die Welt, November 4, 1963; cf. Mende's renewed call for national consciousness at the 1965 FDP Congress, loc.cit. Similar calls have been issued in recent years, among others by Gerstenmeier, Hassel, and in much more strident tones by Strauss.

78. Thus, for example, in his proposals for greater German initiatives, Erich Mende has explicitly made the point that Western "abstinence" necessitates more German activity. See Mende, loc.cit.

79. Among other things, this probably lies at the root of the East German regime's unexpected propaganda shift in the Spring of 1965 from a tentatively favorable to a markedly negative line toward the West German discussion of prospects for liberalizing the GDR. For a related assertion of maximal East German demands, see Ulbricht's speech to the 7th SED Central Committee Plenum, loc.cit.

80. For one example, see Peter Bender, *Offensive Entspannung* (Cologne, 1964).

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81. Cf. Bahr's 1963 Tutzing speech and Mende's address to the 1965 FDP Congress.

82. The tendency to look to Chinese pressure on the Soviet Union as a key to German reunification has been especially pronounced among the "Gaullists." For one recent example, see "Strauss weist auf Rolle Chinas hin," *Die Welt*, Oct. 26, 1964.

83. Especially Henry A. Kissinger, *The Troubled Partnership* (New York, 1965), and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, *Alternative to Partition*, both of whose proposals on the German problem have figured prominently in West German public discussion.

84. For some of the reasons, see Theo Sommer, "Jammerd mit viel schönen Reden," *Die Zeit*, May 21, 1965, and Peter Bender, "Die Illusion der Isolierung," *Der Monat*, June, 1965.

85. In late 1964, the East German regime began to permit the travel of substantial numbers of performing artists to West Germany only to press for a formal cultural exchange agreement between the two German governments shortly thereafter. For a statement of the West German position, see *Bulletin*, June 9, 1965.