Harrison - Driving the Soviets up the Wall Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961

Driving the Soviets up the Wall

PRINCETON STUDIES IN
INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS

Series Editors
Jack L. Snyder,
Marc Trachtenberg,
and Fareed Zakaria

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SOVIETEAST GERMAN RELATIONS,
19531961

Hope M. Harrison

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2003 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,
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All Rights Reserved

Third printing, and first paperback printing, 2005
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12428-5
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-691-12428-0

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE CLOTH EDITION OF
THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS

Harrison, Hope Millard.

Driving the Soviets up the wall : SovietEast German relations, 19531961 / Hope M.
Harrison.

p. cm.(Princeton studies in international history and politics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-09678-3 (alk. paper)

1. Germany (East)RelationsSoviet Union. 2. Soviet UnionRelationsGermany (East) I. Title. II. Series.

DD284.5.S65 H368 2003
327.43104709045dc21 2002192693

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper.

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

To My Parents,

and in Memory of Adam B. Ulam

The Dynamics of SovietEast German Relations
in the Early Cold War

1953: SovietEast German Relations and Power Struggles
in Moscow and Berlin

19561958: Soviet and East German Policy Debates
in the Wake of the Twentieth Party Congress

ON THE AFTERNOON of 9 November 1989, I boarded a plane on a long-planned journey to West Berlin. I was going with a group of graduate students from Harvard and Stanford for ten days on a program sponsored by the city of West Berlin. In an effort to maintain the U.S. commitment to West Berlin, the city paid for the program every year to bring up and coming Americans to West Berlin. At the time, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvards Kennedy School of Government. I was working on my dissertation on the building of the Berlin Wall. I wanted to know as much about divided Berlin as possible and was eager for the trip.

Throughout the fall of 1989, East German refugees had been escaping via West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw and across the Hungarian border into Austria. They were all headed to West Germany. Bonn accepted all these refugees as West German citizens entitled to generous social welfare support. In addition, they gave each East German welcome money of 100 deutschmarks (worth roughly $55 at the time). Over 50,000 East Germans had fled to West Germany between May and October 1989, and by early November, this had become a crisis for the West German economic and social welfare system. The refugee numbers increased dramatically in early November. In fact, just before I left for West Berlin, 15,000 East Germans fled to West Germany via Czechoslovakia on 45 November, The question at the top of my list for all of the West Berlin and West German officials we were going to meet was, How can you keep this up? What are you going to do about the refugees pouring into your country?

During the night of Thursday, 9 November, our group flew to Frankfurt. When we boarded the connecting flight to West Berlin on Friday morning, everyone on the plane was reading newspapers with banner headlines declaring, The Wall Is Open! I looked around and thought, Is 10 November the equivalent of April Fools Day in Germany? What is going on? I didnt have to wonder for long. The pilot got on the intercom system and announced, The Wall fell in Berlin last night. We are flying into history.

I could not believe my luck at being in Berlin for this historic occasion, all the more so because of my dissertation topic. My parents, with whom I had spoken many times about the dissertation, were beside themselves with excitement at my timing. Ich war dabei! (I was there! as all the quickly manufactured T-shirts and mugs said.)

Euphoria is the only word to describe the mood on the streets of Berlin. People were selling champagne on street corners. On the afternoon of 10 November, in a jet-lagged, yet ebullient state, several of us went to Kennedy Platz (the site of Kennedys 1963 Ich bin ein Berliner speech), in front of the West Berlin City Hall, Rathaus Schneberg, to hear the West German leaders speak about the momentous opening of the Wall. Chancellor Helmut Kohl had flown back hurriedly from Warsaw that morning along with Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. The West Berlin mayor, Walter Momper, was also on the podium. The most popular speaker of the day, though, was Willy Brandt, who had been the mayor of West Berlin when the Wall went up in 1961 and had gone on to become the West German chancellor. As a historian and as a human being, it was extraordinary to be part of the celebration at Rathaus Schnebergto actually be there and feel the emotion of the day, not just read about it in history books.

Back at the hotel for dinner, I befriended one of the West Berlin English teachers hosting us, Claudia Wilhelm. Claudia volunteered to drive me around in her VW Bug the next day. Claudia was and is a Berliner. She was born in the East and fled with her family to the West in 1958. When the Wall came down, she was reunited with family in the East, including some she had not even known about.