The Emergence of Détente in Europe: Brandt, Kennedy and the Formation of Ostpolitik (Cold War History)

THE EMERGENCE OF DÉTENTE IN EUROPE

This book examines the key relationship between Willy Brandt (then Mayor of West Berlin and later West German Chancellor) and the administration of President John F. Kennedy. Arne Hofmann focuses on the administration’s influence on the development of Brandt’s ‘policy of small steps’ and the formation of his later Ostpolitik, the centrepiece of European détente. Brandt’s interaction with the Kennedy administration is traced through the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961, Kennedy’s search for a modus vivendi based on the status quo, the 1962 crisis in German–American relations, the development of his programmatic statements, Brandt’s three meetings with the President including Kennedy’s famous visit to Berlin, the limited nuclear test ban treaty and Brandt’s Berlin pass agreement of Christmas 1963. While the narrative focuses on the gradual change in Brandt’s position, systematic parts concentrate on Brandt’s and Kennedy’s détente concepts, the triangular relationship between West Berlin, Washington and Bonn, with its implications for domestic politics, and on the role of images, campaigning and public opinion. The Emergence of Détente in Europe will appeal to students of Cold War history, foreign policy, international relations and international history in general. Arne Hofmann has taught history and diplomacy at Queen Mary, University of London, King’s College London and the LSE. His current interests lie in the international history of the West since 1945.

COLD WAR HISTORY SERIES Series editors: Odd Arne Westad and Michael Cox ISSN: 1471–3829

In the new history of the Cold War that has been forming since 1989, many of the established truths about the international conflict that shaped the latter half of the twentieth century have come up for revision. The present series is an attempt to make available interpretations and materials that will help further the development of this new history, and it will concentrate in particular on publishing expositions of key historical issues and critical surveys of newly available sources. 1 REVIEWING THE COLD WAR Approaches, interpretations, and theory Edited by Odd Arne Westad 2 RETHINKING THEORY AND HISTORY IN THE COLD WAR Richard Saull 3 BRITISH AND AMERICAN ANTICOMMUNISM BEFORE THE COLD WAR Marrku Ruotsila 4 EUROPE, COLD WAR AND CO-EXISTENCE, 1953–1965 Edited by Wilfred Loth 5 THE LAST DECADE OF THE COLD WAR From conflict escalation to conflict transformation Edited by Olav Njølstad 6 REINTERPRETING THE END OF THE COLD WAR Issues, interpretations, periodizations Edited by Silvio Pons and Federico Romero 7 ACROSS THE BLOCS Cold War cultural and social history Edited by Rana Mitter and Patrick Major

8 US PARAMILITARY ASSISTANCE TO SOUTH VIETNAM Insurgency, subversion and public order William Rosenau 9 THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY AND THE CRISES OF THE 1960S Negotiating the Gaullist challenge N. Piers Ludlow 10 SOVIET–VIETNAM RELATIONS AND THE ROLE OF CHINA 1949–64 Changing alliances Mari Olsen 11 THE THIRD INDOCHINA WAR Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79 Edited by Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge 12 GREECE AND THE COLD WAR Front line state, 1952–1967 Evanthis Hatzivassiliou 13 ECONOMIC STATECRAFT DURING THE COLD WAR European responses to the US trade embargo Frank Cain 14 MACMILLAN, KHRUSHCHEV AND THE BERLIN CRISIS, 1958–1960 Kitty Newman 15 THE EMERGENCE OF DÉTENTE IN EUROPE Brandt, Kennedy and the formation of Ostpolitik Arne Hofmann 16 BRITAIN, GERMANY AND THE COLD WAR The search for a European détente, 1949–1967 R. Gerald Hughes

THE EMERGENCE OF DÉTENTE IN EUROPE Brandt, Kennedy and the formation of Ostpolitik

Arne Hofmann

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Arne Hofmann This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN 0–203–08889–1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–38637–3 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–08889–1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–38637–1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–08889–0 (ebk)

TO MY WIFE, KARIN, AND MY PARENTS, WOLF AND ERIKA

In so many ways you are like my husband – Were not the two of you the only young men of your generation who were leaders in the West? Everywhere else old men who belong to the past. I have been reading about how you negotiated so that the people of West Berlin could visit East Berlin at Christmas. And some people criticized you – saying it was a recognition of the Communist regime. I know my husband would have done just what you did – because he cared about people – and so do you. The other people just care about facts – and they are not human. How strange it is – sometimes I think that the words of my husband that will be remembered most – were words he did not even say in his language ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ – And for once the Germans understood through him – that the United States was committed to them. I am so proud – and grateful that at least he had the chance to do that. Please know, dear Mayor Brandt, that I would so love to come to West Berlin someday – and just see the place he spoke from. I will not leave this country for a year or do anything public – Then I do not know what my plans will be. But I must come someday, and I would like you to take me to that place – which you have named after him. Now he is gone – and it is so awful – I know there will never be anyone like him to lead our country – I hope that you will someday be the voice of your generation, and of the West, and lead your country as he led his. (Jacqueline Kennedy to Willy Brandt, 3 January 1964, WBA, A 3, 198)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

xi xiii

Introduction

1

PART I

Willy Brandt and John F. Kennedy, 1960–1963 1 ‘New Frontier’: from the Kennedy campaign to the first meeting, 1960–March 1961

7

9

2 ‘Almost like brothers’? The first meeting between the Mayor and the President, March 1961

13

3 ‘Essentials’? From the first meeting to the Berlin Wall

20

4 ‘Mending wall’: Brandt, Kennedy, Johnson and the Berlin Wall

27

5 In search of a modus vivendi: Willy Brandt and Kennedy’s quest for a Berlin agreement

43

6 From crisis to détente: the autumn of 1962

61

7 ‘Nineteen sixty-three’: the pinnacle of the Brandt–Kennedy alliance and the first steps towards détente

75

ix

CONTENTS

PART II

Small steps towards new frontiers? Values, ideas, concepts and the emergence of a détente strategy

99

8 From worldview to détente strategy: coexistence, transformation and conceptual concordance

101

9 The intricacies of the status quo: modes of change and conceptual difference

118

10 Towards a new German policy: dealing with the East and conceptual adaptation

125

PART III

Domestic and international politics between Berlin, Bonn and Washington

153

11 Playing the triangle

155

12 Selling candidates and policies: images, campaigning and the promotion of a new policy

165

Conclusion

175

Notes Sources and further reading Index

182 211 220

x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like all studies, this work is the outcome of a sustained project; but while projects lead to scholarship, it is people that lead to projects. This project would not have been possible without the kind support of many people and a few institutions. I owe a great debt of collective gratitude to the LSE’s Department of International History. The department not only provided me with a welcoming and stimulating academic home, but also enabled my research with a generous grant. Alan Sked supported the first half of the original project with an inexhaustible supply of time, encouragement and good spirits, while Odd Arne Westad, who inspired my line of inquiry in the first place, oversaw the second half of the project with great commitment. While the responsibility for any shortcomings is entirely mine, the merits of the final text owe much to his excellent feedback during the initial writing stages. I should also like to thank Piers Ludlow for his intermittent but always perceptive comments, and the rest of the Cold War History circle and the then nascent Cold War Studies Centre for the practical introduction to Cold War scholarship during my time as managing editor as well as for a good time. Beyond LSE, I am obliged to James Ellison for his lastminute comments as well as to Sir Lawrence Freedman and Wolfram Kaiser for their earlier comments as examiners, all of which have helped to improve the text. I also owe thanks to the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, which has kindly supported my studies with a substantial research grant – it was startling to later discover in the Berlin archives that Willy Brandt had collected donations for the Kennedy Foundation to ‘help German students pursue scholarly and political studies in the United States’. I should also like to take this opportunity to thank the Studienstiftung (German National Scholarship Foundation), which, though not involved in this project, had supported my previous studies for six years. While I am obliged to the helpful archivists in both Germany and the United States as well as to the librarians in the British Library, the LSE’s British Library of Political and Economic Science and the Library of Congress, who all patiently dealt with my never-ending requests, I am particularly grateful to the many friends and relatives who have accommodated me during my research in xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

various archives. Barry Robinson and his wife Ann, Tricia Kane and Scott Mclaughlin, Anna Roe and Rick Gibson, and Karen Zwetkow and Ralf Micha have all put me up for weeks and turned strenuous research trips into delightful visits. Karin Gatermann offered me her flat without either knowing or seeing me, while extraordinarily Tim Mennel offered to put up a most distant acquaintance, ended up with a repeatedly returning co-occupant for months at a time, and turned him into a devoted friend in the process. Above all, I am deeply indebted to my parents, Wolf and Erika Hofmann, who unwaveringly supported this project, as all my studies, from the outset, and my wife Karin, who with great patience and forbearance lived through the project with me, supported it at every turn, and last but not least edited numerous versions of the manuscript. The result is dedicated to them.

xii

ABBREVIATIONS

AAPD Abt. Acc. ADA AdsD

Akten zur auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Abteilung Accession Americans for Democratic Action Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (Archive of Social Democracy, Bonn) AFN American Forces Network Europe BC Berlin Crisis [collection of the National Security Archive] BPA Bundespresseamt/Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung (Federal Press and Information Office) BPA-DOK Zentrales Dokumentationssystem des Presse- und Informationsamtes der Bundesregierung (Federal Press Office Central Documentation System) CC Cuban [Missile] Crisis [collection of the National Security Archive] CDU Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe CSU Christlich-Soziale Union (Christian Social Union) CWH Cold War History CWIHP Cold War International History Project DNSA Digital National Security Archive DOS Department of State dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur (German Press Agency) DSB Department of State Bulletin DzD Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik EEC European Economic Community FDP Freie Demokratische Partei fn. footnote FRG Federal Republic of Germany FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States FRUS-suppl. FRUS 1961–1963, vols XIII/XIV/XV microfiche supplement GDR German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) xiii

ABBREVIATIONS

IAA JFKL LAB Memcon MIT MLF NARA NSC NSF OH PA PLB POF PPP Rep. SecState SED SPD SPD-PV UN USBer VfZG WBA

International Access Authority John F. Kennedy Library Landesarchiv Berlin (Berlin State Archive) Memorandum of conversation Massachusetts Institute of Technology Multilateral Force US National Archives and Records Administration National Security Council National Security Files Oral History Interviews Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (Federal Foreign Office Archive, Berlin) Pressedienst des Landes Berlin (Berlin Press Bulletin) Presidential Office Files Public Papers of the President Repertorium Secretary of State Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) SPD-Parteivorstand (SPD executive) United Nations United States Mission Berlin Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte Willy-Brandt-Archiv

xiv

INTRODUCTION

Whoever looked closely, which hardly happened, would have observed that the new direction was at first only felt as a presentiment, tentatively described: devising something ourselves, developing German activity, advocating our own interests; all very well, but to what end? What contents? What concretely? That was still quite thin. (Egon Bahr, Zu Meiner Zeit) In any case, the extraneous circumstances affect the thinking of those involved. (Willy Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten)1

In the broadest sense the story of the origins of West German Ostpolitik – and the role that the relationship between Willy Brandt and John F. Kennedy was to play in that story – began with the problem that Ostpolitik would eventually address: the division of Germany and the division of Berlin. After the Second World War, the defeated Germany was divided in occupation zones, which in the early years of the Cold War quickly solidified into two German states: while the Western zones merged and became the liberal-democratic Federal Republic of Germany, the Soviet occupied Eastern zone became the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Unlike the opposition Social Democrats, which throughout the 1950s remained attracted to the notion of achieving reunification through neutrality, West Germany’s Christian Democratic founding Chancellor Konrad Adenauer prioritized the firm anchoring of his new state in the West over the pursuit of reunification. By 1955 the Federal Republic had become a NATO member, the Eastern side followed suit by turning the GDR into a Warsaw Pact member, and the ‘German question’ of reunification remained unresolved. Adenauer and the West Germans bet on a policy of strength in the hope that, if only the West became strong enough, the Soviet Union would ultimately be induced to loosen its grip on Eastern Europe and release East Germany from its sphere of influence on Western terms. Pointing to the lack of democratic 1

INTRODUCTION

legitimacy and the overbearing role of the Soviet occupation power, the Federal Republic (followed in this by its allies) refused to recognize the GDR, denied its statehood and claimed to be the sole legitimate representative of all Germans: following the ‘Hallstein doctrine’, West Germany threatened to break off diplomatic relations with any state that recognized the GDR (save the Soviet Union). It also refused to recognize East Germany’s Oder-Neisse border with Poland and with it the loss of Germany’s Eastern territories after the War. This position precluded diplomatic relations with all of Eastern Europe and left minimal scope for any West German policy towards the East. The task of safeguarding West Germany’s interests in Eastern Europe and pursuing reunification without compromising West Germany’s intricate legal edifice of non-recognition was largely left to its much less interested Western Allies, and foremost to the United States. Divided into West and East Berlin along the lines of the occupation zones, Cold War Berlin, where Brandt had become Governing Mayor of the Western part in 1957, was the microcosm that mirrored the macrocosm of the German question. But two things made Berlin special. Unlike the border between East and West Germany, the border between East and West Berlin remained open until 1961, keeping the politically and administratively divided city together as one urban organism – and allowing East Germans to flee from Communist rule through the outlet in Berlin. The other peculiarity was West Berlin’s geographical position as a Western exclave deep in East German and Warsaw Pact territory, an endangered outpost of freedom and capitalism whose access routes went through East Germany and fell under Soviet control. During the Berlin blockade of 1948–1949 Stalin had already shut off the overland access to Berlin once, and even since then Allied agreements only guaranteed Western military access. When Khrushchev set off the second Berlin crisis in late 1958 by threatening to conclude a separate peace treaty with the GDR that would nullify Allied agreements and transfer control of the transit routes to the non-recognized East Germans, both the Western access to Berlin and its policy on Germany were once more in danger. Eventually, in the early 1970s, it would be Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik that would temporarily settle these issues: in a series of bilateral nonaggression treaties with Moscow, Warsaw and Prague and a ‘Basic Treaty’ with the GDR, the Federal Republic would formally recognize the political realities in Eastern Europe, including the Oder-Neisse border and the East German state (though not an East German nation), while carefully leaving the door to reunification open for the future. In return the Quadripartite Berlin agreement finally guaranteed the security of, and Western access to, West Berlin. In 1975 the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe wrapped up the basic deal: recognition of the status quo in Eastern Europe, disingenuous Eastern agreement to language about human rights that would prove surprisingly explosive in the long run, and openings for a policy of engagement. 2

INTRODUCTION

Between the old policy and the new, there were the years of political reorientation, the policy-formation of Ostpolitik. Much of this grew out of the precarious conditions in Cold War Berlin, where things came to a boil in 1961–1962, when the Berlin Wall sealed the gap in the German–German border and Western policy on Germany was increasingly redefined by America’s young new President, John F. Kennedy. Brandt’s political biography following his youth in the left-wing labour movement of the Weimar Republic and his Scandinavian exile during the Third Reich had been shaped by his crucial experiences in Berlin. Under the influence of West Berlin’s first Mayor, Ernst Reuter, Brandt focused on the political defence of West Berlin in the Cold War and, uncharacteristically for a Social Democrat, became decidedly pro-American in the process. For much of the 1950s his commitment to West Germany’s integration with the West, NATO and the evolving European Communities set him apart from the mainstream of his party. In turn, however, it contributed substantially to the SPD’s change of course in 1959–1960, when the party dropped the remnants of its Marxist heritage, transformed into a modern peoples’ party, subscribed to West Germany’s ties with the West and chose Brandt as its candidate for Chancellor. As the Mayor of West Berlin in the second Berlin crisis Brandt had represented his city magnificently while thinking about détente, but remained wary of the Western concessions over Berlin that were offered at the 1959 Geneva Foreign Ministers Conference and the abortive Paris summit of 1960 – and unwilling to deal with the GDR. At the beginning of the 1960s, however, things were about to change, and Brandt was about to face new challenges as his relationship with John F. Kennedy unfolded while the Berlin crisis was heading for its climax. The Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation in Berlin is located in the Schöneberg town hall where Willy Brandt resided in his days as Governing Mayor of West Berlin. The address is ‘John F. Kennedy Square’ – the square in front of the town hall where President Kennedy gave his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, subsequently named after Kennedy by Brandt. Inside, in the permanent Willy Brandt exhibition, there is a display case devoted to Willy Brandt and John F. Kennedy. Adjacent to the exhibition is a small gift shop, which sells the Willy-Brandt-andJohn-F.-Kennedy coffee mug. For his part, Brandt’s key aide Egon Bahr has for decades had a Kennedy statuette in his office: ‘Every day the sculpture of his head on my desk serves as the model of a great man who has set a standard.’2 It is clear that John F. Kennedy mattered greatly to Willy Brandt, and in turn the Brandt–Kennedy relationship matters greatly for a number of historical issues. It matters for Brandt’s political biography; and it matters, to a lesser degree, for Kennedy’s biography and, to a greater degree, for his legacy. It matters for German–American relations in the Berlin crisis and the late Adenauer era, and it matters because of the contrast with the different role that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon were later to play in Brandt’s Ostpolitik. It matters above all for the origins of that Ostpolitik and the emergence of détente 3

INTRODUCTION

in Europe, policies that were not only highly conceptualized but, at least in the German case, remarkably preconceived. ‘Nobody could be surprised’, Bahr later wrote about Brandt, ‘when he did as Chancellor what he had developed as Mayor’: ‘. . . a new policy did not have to be developed; it already existed’.3 Thematically and chronologically the prehistory of Ostpolitik, let alone détente, extends far beyond Willy Brandt and John F. Kennedy, important though they were in themselves and for each other. A comprehensive history of its origins and development would have to encompass not just the Brandt– Kennedy relationship but all of Brandt’s early foreign policy, not just Brandt but the entire SPD, not just the SPD but other parties, not just the parties but the public, the political culture and the intellectual history of West German foreign policy thinking, and not just Germany but its place in the international system. This is not that book. But while the present study focuses on Brandt’s relationship with Kennedy, that relationship itself can only be fully understood in the light of all these factors, and they will never be entirely out of sight – and looking at Brandt and Kennedy is more than worthwhile to inform the examination of those other aspects, for it still mattered greatly and mattered at a crucial time. The three years from 1961 to 1963, now generally acknowledged as a turning point for both the Cold War and the history of the Federal Republic, saw Brandt’s first candidacy for the chancellorship, the culmination of the Berlin crisis and the Berlin Wall, three major crises in German–American relations, Brandt’s Harvard lectures, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s visit in Berlin, Egon Bahr’s paradigmatic Tutzing speech, the first international détente treaty in the shape of the limited nuclear test ban treaty, and the first agreement with the GDR in the shape of Brandt’s Berlin pass agreement. At the end of this short but intense period, Kennedy was dead, Khrushchev and Adenauer were out of office, a liberal era was beginning to unfold in West Germany, détente was on the international agenda, and Brandt was leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Though it is the first work solely devoted to the Brandt–Kennedy relationship, this study therefore fits into a rich body of historical writing. Considering the lively debate in the wake of Kennedy revisionism over whether Kennedy was an unreconstructed Cold Warrior or a harbinger of peace and détente, it is somewhat surprising that Kennedy’s influence on Brandt and the question of how his approach to the Cold War in Europe related to the settlement brought about by Brandt’s Ostpolitik has largely gone unnoticed in the Kennedy literature. The most important writings on the topic at hand hence come from recent contributions to the group of studies focusing on Brandt’s early policy in Berlin and the policy formation of Ostpolitik. The classic of the field is Diethelm Prowe’s article on ‘Die Anfänge der Brandtschen Ostpolitik in Berlin 1961–1963’. Prowe’s interpretation followed Brandt’s and Bahr’s contemporary depiction of their policy as an application of Kennedy’s ‘strategy of peace’ and saw Kennedy’s impact on Brandt as the key to ‘a systematic adaptation to the 4

INTRODUCTION

political conceptions of the leading Western superpower’: the ‘framework for a process of rethinking German–German policy in Berlin, which has at both ends been decisively influenced by the Western world power.’ This interpretation has dominated the understanding of the American role in the development of Ostpolitik for a long time. Recently, however, this view has been called into question: though differing vastly in other regards, Wolfgang Schmidt’s Kalter Krieg, Koexistenz und kleine Schritte and Peter Speicher’s unpublished Cambridge thesis on ‘The Berlin Origins of Brandt’s Ostpolitik’ both make the same important, long-forgotten key point by showing conclusively that Brandt developed and expounded many basic ideas that were later associated with Ostpolitik in the 1950s – i.e. before the impact of the Berlin Wall and Kennedy’s German policy.4 Of the two texts, Schmidt’s is both more important and more problematic. It provides an immense wealth of material based on meticulous research and will always stand as an indispensable reference work. The crucial point about the development of Brandt’s thinking in the 1950s is fully documented here, but the discovery also seems to have tempted the author into a methodological pitfall. Keen to show that Brandt had allegedly already developed the conceptual basis of Ostpolitik prior to 1961, Schmidt proceeds to consistently prioritize the tracking of continuity over the investigation of change – rather than examining the intricate ways in which the two were interwoven. One problem with that approach is that in the 1950s Brandt did not yet consider any form of recognition for the GDR, and Ostpolitik’s cornerstone of recognition was arguably much more decisive for the actual operative policy than the parts of the underlying philosophy that did date back to the 1950s. Any concept for an ‘Eastern policy’ that did not allow for recognition was not yet a concept for ‘Ostpolitik’. Instead of relating these issues to the roots of Brandt’s thinking in the 1950s and pursuing the question of how the two became integrated in the eventual strategy for Ostpolitik, Schmidt tends to deny any substantial development in this respect during the early 1960s, falling for Brandt’s rather transparent contemporary rhetoric of continuity – though both contemporaries and historians have long called attention to how Brandt used this to conceal delicate changes. ‘Much can be changed, even in substance, under the political cloak of continuity’, as Brandt himself later commented.5 This overemphasis on continuity not only leads to somewhat questionable interpretations of Bahr’s Tutzing speech and the Berlin pass agreement, it also affects the view of the Brandt–Kennedy relationship on offer (which in part also reflects the lack of American sources). Schmidt’s interpretation remains ultimately paradoxical: on the one hand, it is argued that conceptually Brandt anticipated Kennedy entirely and therefore need not, and did not, learn from him, while on the other it portrays him in allegedly staunch opposition to Kennedy’s radical designs, without acknowledging the obvious similarity between that approach and Brandt’s later Ostpolitik. In the process Schmidt constructs a major crisis in Brandt’s relations with the Kennedy administration in 5

INTRODUCTION

the context of the German–American ‘draft principles’ crisis of spring 1962. In contrast to the evidence for all other disagreements that Brandt had with the Americans in the period, nothing like this is to be found anywhere in the recollections of those involved. As the archival evidence shows, the usually excellently informed Americans were unaware of any such thing and were, on the contrary, grateful for Brandt’s support. Peter Speicher’s diametrically opposed statement, also made in the context of the controversial ‘draft principles’, that ‘While Adenauer’s relationship with America was deteriorating, Brandt’s was steadily improving after the shock of the Wall’ represents not just common wisdom but also an evenhanded reading of the evidence. He rightly concludes that the Berlin Wall was not at the start but at the heart of the development of Brandt’s Ostpolitik. While Speicher’s work is impressive in its multinational source basis, strong on the link between the local conditions in Berlin, German foreign policy and international politics, and tells the larger story beautifully, its overall approach, however, remains somewhat narrative.6 The two main interpretations of the relationship between Willy Brandt and John F. Kennedy therefore remain the old view that Brandt adopted Kennedy’s détente policy and applied it in Germany and the opposed notion that Brandt developed his own détente policy independently, with Kennedy’s role little more than political window-dressing. This study differs from these precedents. Trying to reconcile aspects of change over time with conceptual and structural aspects in a mixture of chronological and thematic parts, it will go on to argue a different, and somewhat more complex, interpretation of mutual influence and anticipation.

6

Part I WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

1 ‘NEW FRONTIER’ From the Kennedy campaign to the first meeting, 1960–March 1961

I am convinced that we are heading for political times in which firmness and imagination will sustain new initiatives of the West. For the people in Berlin and the [East German] Zone surrounding us good news has come to us this week from the friendly country beyond the great water. (Brandt in a radio address after the American Presidential elections)1

An increasingly close campaign to elect a new US President in the midst of the second Berlin crisis could not possibly fail to elicit Willy Brandt’s interest as Mayor of Berlin and Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor. Berlin had to be the first question on his mind, but whereas he was anxious about the possible consequences of the ultimately abortive Paris summit in May 1960, the run-up to a change of administration in Washington was no cause of concern. Neither candidate worried him, but it was the Kennedy, not the Nixon campaign, that increasingly interested Brandt and on which he and the Social Democrats focused their attempts to establish early contacts. The first of these was indirect and originated not from Brandt, but from the SPD’s other foreign policy expert with personal contacts to the United States, Fritz Erler, who provided Kennedy’s campaign team with a memorandum on Germany and Berlin that finally ended up on the desk of John Kenneth Galbraith, then serving as the economic coordinator in Kennedy’s campaign staff.2 Brandt, however, had his own, albeit similarly indirect, contacts. His friend and secondary aide Harold Hurwitz, an American who had lived in Berlin continuously since 1946 and was acquainted with Brandt since 1947, corresponded with James P. O’Donnell, the brother of Kennedy’s assistant Kenneth P. O’Donnell and a Berlin consultant in Kennedy’s campaign team. In September 1960, O’Donnell sent Hurwitz an internal memorandum for Kennedy, in which he saw Kennedy ‘echoing the thinking of . . . Willy Brandt’. He therefore urged ‘a discreet but direct link with the present mayor’ and asked for some input for a speech on Berlin. Hurwitz made sure that Brandt read the memo, and O’Donnell 9

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

was rewarded with a 15-page memorandum from Brandt’s adviser and campaign manager Klaus Schütz, followed by a letter with Hurwitz’s own comments and a copy of Brandt’s latest radio speech. Ultimately, however, O’Donnell wanted something that Brandt could not give: a ‘dossier of frustration’ to use against the legacy of the Eisenhower administration and its Vice President and presidential candidate Nixon. Just as O’Donnell had feared, Brandt did indeed have ‘some ex officio qualms about getting too close to a partisan national debate’ – hardly surprising, considering that Nixon might well have become the 35th rather than the 37th President. The Schütz memorandum, therefore, was as good as it got, but as Hurwitz told O’Donnell frankly: ‘we’re all afraid it won’t help you very much . . . it’s kind of impossible for a candidate here to tell a candidate there what his policy will be on such matters when the chips fall here 10 months later. Too soon.’3 By the time Schütz sent his memorandum to James O’Donnell, he was already able to tell him that he would visit the United States as one of the Social Democrats’ two official observers of the American campaign. As the campaign observer, Schütz was to accompany Alex Möller, the political observer and a member of Brandt’s shadow cabinet (Möller would indeed serve as Brandt’s minister of finance from 1969 to 1971). In the middle of the chaos of a campaigning camp in Philadelphia, the two Social Democrats got to meet the Democratic candidate himself and offered their best wishes for his election. Kennedy had read Brandt’s letter, in which he recommended himself as a guarantor of German–American friendship and cooperation, but the discussion was short and Schütz later judged that Brandt’s letter ‘neither aroused Nixon’s nor Kennedy’s particular attention’. The same, however, could not be said in reverse. Möller was impressed by Kennedy, made his views known, and sensed that the trend in the US was favourable to the German Social Democrats: The climate was good. I got the impression that the attitude of leading politicians and the attitude of the administration had changed conspicuously in favour of the German Social Democrats. Willy Brandt’s various visits (and those of other noted Social Democrats) had been appreciated. One had the feeling that the Americans assumed that they were dealing with a new, undogmatic generation of Social Democrats. As the mayor of Berlin . . . Willy Brandt was accompanied by a strong wave of sympathy. Times were changing and Möller recognized that ‘Nixon would have been a half step towards new ground. Kennedy is a whole step’.4 When Kennedy took that step, the SPD’s reaction proved that Möller’s sentiments were characteristic of the whole party, and the US diplomatic service reported that the SPD, whose spokesmen were ‘among Mr. Kennedy’s most outspoken supporters’, was ‘highly pleased’ with the outcome of the election. In Berlin, Brandt’s most important adviser since the 1960s, his recently appointed press officer Egon 10

‘NEW FRONTIER’

Bahr, won his bet and hence a ‘Kennedy-bottle’ from one of Brandt’s most important advisers of the late 1950s, his Senator for Federal Affairs Günter Klein – ‘united in the hope that with this election the better man may have been found’.5 Bahr’s cautious subjunctive, though, reflected a lingering uncertainty about Washington’s future policy. Sure enough, the progressive agenda of the New Frontier with its modern style and allure appealed to the moderate reformers in the SPD and the new administration’s anticipated foreign policy seemed to suggest a greater closeness to Social Democratic thinking.6 But in late 1960 much of this was still guesswork, and considering both Kennedy’s and Brandt’s later policies, it is worth noting the drift of the early communications: Erler’s memorandum for the Americans postulated that in the long term neither the security of West Berlin nor peace and stability in Europe at large could be maintained without achieving German reunification;7 Hurwitz welcomed James O’Donnell’s ‘idea of competing for firmness in Berlin’ and advocated the retention and, if possible, expansion of the remnants of the Four Power status in Berlin with particular reference to the freedom of movement in the city; while Schütz elaborated on the meaning of reunification. In the meantime Leo Cherne, the Director of the Research Institute of America, informed Brandt that Kennedy was allegedly serious about wanting to roll back Communism – ‘ “peaceful coexistence” is not particularly to Kennedy’s taste’. While Brandt certainly expected Kennedy to be firm on Berlin, this did not, however, mean that he needed to mistake him for a single-minded hardliner. The government in Bonn was in fact already afraid of the opposite, and Cherne’s report was contradicted by another report from New York: ‘Kennedy will make a serious attempt at détente and attempts at a solution in Berlin will be part of this, even if this will only be a temporary solution. In any case: détente!’ Harold Hurwitz later remembered that ‘my feeling was that Brandt had read and comprehended what, between the lines, was Kennedy’s real goal, which was Entspannung [détente], somehow finding a way’.8 In any case Brandt was resolved to place his bets on Kennedy: he praised Kennedy’s election night statement on Berlin; in his nomination speech as candidate for Chancellor he declared his foreign policy programme to be ‘in accordance with the newly elected American President’; and as early as February 1961, the US Mission in Berlin accurately reported that the SPD was relying heavily on the Kennedy victory and the attempt to draw parallels between Kennedy and Brandt. The captivating inaugural address had enthused the Social Democrats – ‘one could only be sad not to have put it like this oneself’, as Bahr recalls. One thing not mentioned in the inaugural, though, was Berlin. This was fastidiously noted in Germany, but Brandt was not perturbed and defended Kennedy in the Berlin House of Representatives against such ‘inappropriate, superfluous, nervous questions’. When asked during his visit to Washington in March, Brandt would reassure both Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk that he entirely agreed with not putting Berlin in the spotlight.9 11

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

It was this visit that the SPD’s relations with the new administration were quickly building up to. The prospect was promising: Erler, Heinrich Deist, Carlo Schmid, Max Brauer (all members of Brandt’s shadow cabinet) and the fast rising Helmut Schmidt travelled to America prior to the crucial Brandt visit and came back with good news. Erler announced that ‘whenever he was to visit America, Willy Brandt would always find an opportunity to meet with Kennedy’, while Deist, too, reported that the administration showed great interest in the German opposition.10 Meanwhile Brandt showed interest in America and gave in to Egon Bahr, who was pressing him to hire Roy Blumenthal’s PR firm in New York to work for Brandt and Berlin. As Bahr later remarked in his memoirs: ‘We did not regret it.’ Blumenthal proved to be highly effective and became a devoted friend and follower, while his aide Theodore Kaghan, a man with connections to the State Department, provided Brandt and Bahr with political reports from Washington that substituted for the ambassadorial reports to which the Berliners had no access. The Berliners, however, were not the only ones interested in information about their transatlantic partners. The Americans, of course, had the US Mission in Berlin, but they also had a disclosed CIA agent in Brandt’s closest vicinity: Ralph Braun (‘Ralphy-Boy’) enjoyed close personal contact with Brandt’s entire inner circle and served as an important, albeit oneway, backchannel to Washington. ‘At any rate, he was excellently informed’, as Bahr recalled: ‘This Berlin Senat was, at least for the CIA, totally transparent. Which was okay.’11 The structures for an intensified contact between Berlin and Washington were in place, and Brandt had good reasons to leave for the United States in a hopeful mood. Although the consequences for US policy on Berlin remained far from clear, Brandt’s favourite had won the American elections, and the SPD’s propaganda had already begun to monopolize Kennedy and link him to Brandt. Brandt’s genuine interest had been awakened, and he was prepared for a new chapter in his relations with the United States. On his departure, he used an interview to articulate the affinity he already felt for the new President: With John F. Kennedy the people of the United States have elected a man to be President who expresses his belief in the superiority of intellectual forces and his will to realize such an all-embracing and concrete programme of peace with particular clarity. For many years, I have been guided by the same considerations in my political work.12

12

2 ‘ALMOST LIKE BROTHERS’? The first meeting between the Mayor and the President, March 1961

Here in the White House in Washington things passed off entirely without ceremonial pathos on Monday. Almost like brothers Kennedy and Brandt posed at the desk for the photographers after their talk. (Hildegard Purwin, ‘Fast wie Brüder’, Telegraf, 15 March 1961)

‘K[ennedy] was good beyond all expectations. After five minutes, the two had a rapport and towards the end things almost got familiar’ – thus Egon Bahr, writing back to Heinrich Albertz, the head of Brandt’s Chancellery in Berlin. The personal encounter went well indeed. Kennedy impressed both Brandt and Bahr thoroughly with his quick, concise and well-informed barrage of questions, while the Americans came to appreciate Brandt in return.1 Kennedy’s questions, which did so much to impress Brandt and Bahr, mostly concerned Berlin, and Berlin, of course, was at the heart of Brandt’s conversations in Washington. Prior to the visit, Brandt’s administration had produced a detailed memorandum on technical improvements in Berlin for the Allies, but it came without any suggestions on how to proceed – in accordance with the line Brandt was to take in Washington, Berlin was not yet ready for a policy initiative.2 Neither was Washington, where Kennedy and Rusk explained to Brandt why not much was to be heard about Berlin in spring 1961. The only exception had been Ambassador at Large Averell Harriman, who had told Brandt and the Berliners on 8 March that the new administration did not consider itself bound by previous negotiations with Moscow: ‘the discussions should start from the beginning’. This seemed to do away with the concessions deliberated at Geneva and Paris, which came as a relief to Brandt, who had opposed them at the time and now eagerly seized the point that they had been withdrawn. However, the Harriman statement was ambiguous: ‘in opening up new areas for discussion it could also presage a softer line’.3 That in turn was, as his briefing materials told Kennedy, not what the Mayor wanted: Brandt still insisted that negotiations on Berlin should only be held in the context of negotiations over reunification. The same brief, however, also pointed out that Brandt might not get what he wanted 13

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

– but Brandt did not know of this and promptly advised Kennedy to ‘broaden the agenda’ if the Soviets were to raise the Berlin question once more.4 The reason why this latent difference, which eventually erupted at the end of the year, did not lead to discord in March lay in the assessment of the situation in spring 1961 and the shared preference for avoiding a new round of Berlin talks altogether. The night before his meeting with the President, Brandt told the American public that ‘I am inclined to believe that we will not have a new Berlin crisis within the next few months, but . . . that new pressure might come sometime later this year’. When asked by Kennedy, he was more specific, but still not particularly worried by access questions, deeming the arrangements ending the latest round of traffic harassments in Berlin satisfactory and the West Berlin stockpiles of food and fuel reassuring in case of emergency. It was originally not his own concern, but the assessment of Foy Kohler, the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, that the Soviets might provoke a crisis over the summer or autumn, for which Brandt now made allowances.5 The scenario in question was the long threatened signing of a separate Soviet peace treaty with East Germany, but this did still not overly worry Brandt – provided that the signing of a separate peace treaty could be split off from the generally feared consequences for Western access to Berlin, as he explained to Rusk one day later: He would simply say to the Soviets: ‘Please do it. We cannot accept the legality of your action but at the same time we cannot stop you from making arrangements within your own area of control. What we cannot accept is any attempt unilaterally to abrogate our rights’. He thought, the Mayor continued, that if the West took this position strongly enough and made it clear to the Soviets how much United States prestige was involved in our position in Berlin, they might be willing to make such a peace treaty but exclude Berlin access from the control of the East German regime. Another possibility was that the East Germans would make a statement guaranteeing non-interference with respect to the access routes of the Western garrisons in Berlin.6 This view was not only practically identical with Rusk’s own thinking, but also with Kennedy’s own unsuccessful approach two and a half months later at his summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna. Brandt’s position was not new, but it was remarkable nonetheless – not least because it failed to anticipate that the suggested de facto acceptance of a separate peace treaty could serve as a half step towards the more radical approach the Kennedy administration was to develop half a year later when the President decided to pursue the idea of parallel peace treaties, which had far-reaching implications for the recognition of the GDR and was not at all what Brandt had in mind.7 Of course Brandt’s scenario required Western firmness on Berlin, but at the time of his visit Brandt did not question the resolve of the Americans and told 14

‘ALMOST LIKE BROTHERS’?

them so. Brandt’s conviction was helped by Kennedy, who replaced a verbose passage in the communiqué with the more lucid statement that the United States would preserve the freedom of the population of West Berlin as stated ‘by treaty and conviction’. Kennedy could not possibly have known how much his impromptu phrase was to impress Brandt, who would refer to it in an incessant line of citations all the way to his first government declaration as Federal Chancellor in 1969.8 What mattered for the agreement with the Kennedy administration in March 1961 were the prescriptions that resulted from all this for how to deal with the Berlin question in the next couple of months. If there was no imminent serious danger, if the kind of crisis that might come up could be coped with and if American firmness could be relied on in case of need, then the best course of action was to lie low and do nothing for the time being. That was precisely what Brandt, who had bad memories of Geneva 1959 and Paris 1960, wanted and turned into the leitmotiv of his visit. In March 1961 this coincided with the position of the new administration, which was still reviewing its policy on Berlin. No wonder, therefore, that Brandt ‘entirely agreed’ when Kennedy told him ‘that it was better on this subject to leave the launching of any challenges to Khrushchev’ and in turn told Rusk ‘that it was better not to take the initiative in raising the Berlin question’.9 The underlying reason why both Brandt and Kennedy were happy to let the issue rest was that in spring 1961 the status quo in Berlin was still working in favour of the West. Both Rusk and Kohler told Brandt in almost identical words that ‘we could live with the status quo in Berlin’, which was more or less what Brandt himself had said on American television. As long as the status quo remained beneficial there was no reason for Brandt to revive the spectres of Geneva and Paris, and he therefore repeated his old line that no agreement was better than a bad agreement.10 Brandt, it seemed, had gotten what he wanted: ‘As far as Berlin itself is concerned, the talks were good’, as he wrote to an old friend. His then wife Rut remembers how he wrote home ‘enthusiastically’ about his talks with Kennedy and his advisers; Brandt himself, when writing to his American friend Shepard Stone, called his visit ‘quite successful’; and Klaus Schütz remembers Brandt more soberly as ‘content, though not more’. The message Brandt brought back from America was: ‘I have returned full of confidence. Our fate, as far as the United States as the leading power of the West are partly responsible for it, is in good hands.’ So all was well – or was it?11 Brandt’s and Schütz’s guarded language may indicate that the visit was more complex than that. In reality the agreement on Berlin was in a precarious balance that depended both on the timing of the visit and the viability of the assumptions it was based on. In the first place, the shared emphasis on letting the Berlin question rest did a lot to defuse the issue of the larger German question, which in Brandt’s mind was inextricably linked to any solution for Berlin. This could have become a thorny issue if the emphasis on not pursuing a new 15

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

Western initiative on Berlin had not largely prevented a discussion of what to do in case of Berlin negotiations – not least because Kennedy had doubts about the role of reunification in negotiating with the Soviets. Brandt, on the other hand called reunification indispensable for long term stability and used his conversation with the President for a spirited pitch: The Mayor confirmed that this [the German desire for reunification] was a basic consideration, then went on to say that he thought it might be possible to have some new discussions with the Russians. Possibly they could be brought to agree to some kind of self-determination for Germany after a period of perhaps 10 years with some interim arrangement during that period.12 This suggestion was remarkably close to the basic framework of the various secret deliberations entertained in Adenauer’s Chancellery at the time, from the idea of a transitional ‘Austria solution’ for East Germany to the various versions of the Globke plan and eventually Adenauer’s later ‘truce’ offer. As far as we know, Brandt was not aware of these secret plans, but in essence he was now suggesting a variation of this to Kennedy – and it got him the same lesson in political realism that Adenauer was to get when he revealed his ‘truce plan’ to Kennedy in 1962/1963: The President questioned whether there would be any Russian interest in such a proposal as the Mayor described it. He said he did not see how it would serve their purposes to agree to any self-determination formula. This was to the point – in fact Brandt himself should have known better, having recently stated privately that ‘I can hardly imagine, though, that under the present conditions “Freedom for the Eastern Zone” should be easier to achieve than “Reunification” ’. Consequently he had to retreat: ‘The Mayor said he had no specific idea as to the acceptability of such a formula to Moscow unless perhaps it could be accomplished as a result of broader agreements between the East and West in such fields as arms control.’ Kennedy had already observed that ‘reunification of Germany was not foreseeable perhaps for a period of many years’, and now dismissed Brandt’s hope for new discussions with the Russians by quipping that ‘it was very hard to find grounds for agreement with the Soviets on anything beyond perhaps removing restrictions on crabmeat’.13 And Brandt had to swallow more on the issue of the Oder-Neisse border, which, unlike unification, Kennedy brought up himself. When asked bluntly ‘what he thought the Federal Government could do about this’, Brandt stuck to the traditional line that the frontier question could only be settled at a peace conference and expressed the hope that ‘some small modifications could be made’. Kennedy was unimpressed and asked whether, since realistically there would be 16

‘ALMOST LIKE BROTHERS’?

neither reunification nor, by implication, any such peace conference, the issue ‘might not increasingly exacerbate relations between Poland and the FRG and all the West’. Back in Germany Brandt dryly told the federal SPD leadership committee that the Americans were judging the question ‘very realistically’ and remarked to the press that ‘I have encountered the question of Germany’s eastern border too often for my liking’.14 Apart from the personal rapport, the success of Brandt’s visit thus depended heavily on the supposed agreement on what had to be closest to the Mayor’s heart: Berlin. With hindsight though, it is easy to see that even this agreement contained the seeds of its own destruction. The idea that the status quo in Berlin was satisfactory enough to fall back on a lie-low policy and that, therefore, ‘we would just have to live with the situation’ as Kennedy told the Mayor, was at least from Brandt’s point of view very much a pre-Wall notion. Later, after he had changed his mind and the Wall had proved him right in doing so, he was to complain that ‘the opinion of those prevailed who said, everything’s too dangerous, everything’s too questionable, best if it remains as it is. But the point was that it could not remain as it was.’ In March he was still of that opinion himself. When asked by Kennedy (whose questions were indeed to the point) Brandt himself told the President that the ‘escape hatch’ in Berlin was ‘a serious problem for the Ulbricht regime’ – but failed to make the mental leap to the crucial question what the East might do about this and whether this was not bound to disrupt the very status quo that Brandt was so keen to preserve. Brandt had actually worried about this at least since 1958, but on the other hand life had kept going on with the status quo largely intact, and in March 1961 Brandt did not make the connection. Instead he argued in his conversation with Rusk that ‘West Berlin was perhaps a necessary safety valve for East Germany, enabling [the] reduction of internal tensions within the GDR to more tolerable levels.’15 This misjudgement was pivotal as it not only determined what Brandt and his hosts talked (and agreed) about, but also what they failed to discuss. If Brandt had already considered a serious crisis likely, then the question of Western contingency planning would have become paramount. That was exactly what Kennedy and Rusk did not want to discuss, and not without reason. As Rusk’s briefing memorandum on Brandt informed the President, Brandt was ‘not completely informed’ about Allied contingency planning: ‘It would thus be well to keep the conversation on such matters as general as possible.’ The Americans did not tell, and Brandt did not ask. Had he asked, another of his themes might quickly have led to dissent: the unity of the whole of the city under the Four Power Status and the significance of the inner-city traffic. Brandt told the President that ‘West Berlin provided a window to the West for the East German population and kept alive their hopes for an eventual change’, went on to call Rusk’s attention one day later to the daily flow of cross-border commuters in the city and told him that ‘More could be said about conditions in East Berlin, stressing that this legally is a Four Power area with respect to which the Soviets are not carrying out their obligations.’ The question was, or should have been, whether 17

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

when it came to the crunch the new administration would subscribe to this – but Brandt missed his chance to find out.16 Ironically it was in the immediate aftermath of the trip to Washington that Brandt adjusted his position. This was prompted by an internal paper from Egon Bahr, which indicated a significant shift in the premises when it acknowledged that ‘Since it seems nevertheless possible that the Soviet Union will enforce an international discussion of the Berlin-topic in autumn and that the status quo can then not be maintained, the necessity to work out a constructive Western proposal arises.’ Consequently Bahr once more revived an old idea of his and produced a proposal for an interim solution that envisaged all of Berlin as one administrative unit with free elections and self-determination extending to the maintenance of the ‘absolutely necessary’ currency union with West Germany and the external representation of Berlin by the Federal Republic. This was of course utterly unacceptable to the East – but if the Allies could have been persuaded, it might have committed them to their claims to East Berlin.17 Brandt had opposed ideas for a Free City of all-Berlin since 1959 because it threatened to sever the vital ties with the Federal Republic. But now that Bahr had attached conditions, however unrealistic, that combined a commitment to all-Berlin with what would have amounted to an extension of much of the ties with West Germany to East Berlin, Brandt finally gave the go-ahead. Bahr’s proposal was integrated in a memorandum which Brandt transmitted to the State Department after his visit as a cross between a summary of points made in the US and a position paper with further elaborations: . . . the starting point should be that Berlin is one whole territory, which the Powers have determined together and for which they continue to be responsible together. The resulting consequence for the West is . . . to speak . . . of the demands which have to be asserted with respect to East Berlin . . . All of Berlin is one administrative unit.18 Then followed Bahr’s concrete suggestions, including self-determination, currency-union and external representation, followed by much of the legal framework provided by Bahr. On 6 April Brandt transmitted his memorandum to Kohler – who neither fed it into the administration of the State Department nor replied to Brandt.19 The American stance still remained to be seen. The ‘good’ talks as ‘far as Berlin itself is concerned’ had laid the personal foundations for Brandt’s relations with Kennedy. However, their agreement had relied on a number of critical conditions. It relied on the early timing, on Brandt’s erroneous assumption that no crisis was imminent, on the related belief that the favourable status quo in Berlin could be maintained, on the resulting preference for avoiding Western action on Berlin, and on the consequent failure to discuss the remnants of all-Berlin unity in the context of contingency planning and American guarantees. Bahr’s and Brandt’s subsequent papers showed 18

‘ALMOST LIKE BROTHERS’?

just how short-lived these conditions were and how quickly the conclusions drawn from them began to disintegrate. Within months, they were to collapse entirely, while the administration’s emerging position vis-à-vis all-Berlin would become increasingly clear. The stage was set for the tumultuous summer of 1961.

19

3 ‘ESSENTIALS’? From the first meeting to the Berlin Wall

. . . we will not agree to any so-called solution of the Berlin question at their [the East Berliners’ and East Germans’] expense in order to save our own apparent freedom, to a solution which may maintain certain rights in West Berlin temporarily but which would deepen the division of Germany, which would take the German question off the agenda and which would have a state border run right through the city. (Willy Brandt at the Berlin SPD convention, 6 May 1961)1

From the middle of April onwards, Kennedy gradually began to look less dazzling. Adenauer followed Brandt to Washington, and through party channels Brandt received a confidential report full of wild disinformation about the visit. According to this piece, Kennedy was supposed to have told Adenauer straight out that he officially wanted to do away with German reunification, that the superpowers should officially renounce any claims to any German territory (i.e. Germany as a whole), which would eventually lead to the recognition of the GDR, while the Berlin problem would have to be solved with a ‘Free City’ West Berlin. In essence, this was the Eastern position, and objectively this had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual course of Adenauer’s conversations in the United States. Even without access to more accurate information, Brandt must have recognized this as bogus, not least because it was perfectly clear that if this had been remotely true, Adenauer would have hit the roof (rather than, as the report ludicrously claimed, telling Kennedy that there would be no domestic problem with giving up on reunification). In fact the Chancellor returned with a transient confidence in Kennedy. But the proverb suggests that there is no smoke without fire, and thus even obvious fabrications can have a habit of sticking in the mind.2 The episode was indicative of the problem with information about Kennedy’s evolving policy. During the summer of 1961, Brandt and his team were largely cut off from the internal development of the administration’s thinking on Berlin. The process of working out the emerging US position, later traced by historians 20

‘ESSENTIALS’?

from Dean Acheson’s reports to the backlash against his hardline position and the work of the Berlin Task Force, occurred beyond Brandt’s view. What Brandt could, and did, follow were the public announcements and diplomatic dealings, as far as information about the latter could be obtained. This, however, provided enough food for thought. In Western and especially West German terminology, it had long been established practice to use the terms ‘Berlin’ and ‘West Berlin’ almost interchangeably, thus leaving both the Eastern side as well as the West Berliners and West Germans unclear about the exact extent of the Western guarantee. After the Berlin Wall, Brandt would later complain bitterly about ‘what a dangerous lie rested in the name of Berlin, mentioned a thousand times in commitments, diplomatic notes and festive speeches, when the name of the whole city was used while only half of the city was meant after all’. Though rather for the opposite reason, Kennedy also deemed that ‘lie’ dangerous, and with the advent of his administration the Americans began to speak increasingly precisely of their guarantees for West Berlin rather than their rights in (all of) Berlin. As Marc Trachtenberg has pointed out, this did not actually indicate a shift in the substance of the US guarantees, which had in fact always been limited to the Western sectors of the city. The novelty was that this was now clearly indicated and signalled to the East.3 At first, this largely escaped detection in Germany. It was only when the new language reoccurred again, in the communiqué of the NATO Council session in Oslo in early May, that the penny began to drop in Berlin. According to Bahr’s and Brandt’s recollection, Bahr acted as if a ‘Hiobsbotschaft’ (biblically bad news) had arrived when the text of the communiqué came out of the teleprinter and rushed to Brandt, shouting, ‘This is almost an invitation to the Soviets to do with the Eastern sector as they please.’4 Once the full implication of Washington’s new-found terminological exactness was realized, there could be little doubt that Brandt’s emphasis on the unity of all-Berlin was not at all where American policy was going. However, Oslo needs to be put into perspective. Brandt’s and Bahr’s memories, all written with the benefit of hindsight after the Wall, kept becoming more dramatic each time the story was told. More to the point, all of these recollections claimed that it was in Oslo that Kennedy’s famous three essentials (US presence in West Berlin, access to West Berlin, and the freedom and viability of West Berlin) had been formulated – which was simply not the case, as Brandt, who was excellently informed about the proceedings in Oslo, should have known. All the Oslo communiqué did was to subtly reinterpret the NATO declaration on Berlin of 16 December 1958 by summarizing it as the determination ‘to maintain the freedom of West Berlin and its people’, whereas the original 1958 declaration consistently spoke of welfare of and the Allied rights in ‘Berlin’. Even that was not new: the new terminology had already crept in at the last Council session in mid-December 1960, but at that point nobody had noticed yet. The significance of the Oslo communiqué was thus magnified in retrospect: at the time Brandt publicly welcomed the Oslo 21

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

Council as a contribution to stabilising the situation and declared Berlin ‘content’, while Bahr privately expressed his hope that Oslo might have helped to prevent the Soviet Union from underestimating the West’s resolve.5 Nevertheless the fact remains that Washington’s focus on West Berlin conflicted substantially with Brandt’s concern for all-Berlin, including the inner-city traffic. Brandt and others have later made much of his statements on East Berlin in summer 1961, but this was nothing new and therefore at best partially in response to American policy. Brandt did not noticeably step up his ongoing campaign for all-Berlin awareness – but he certainly did not tune it down either, and on 12 July an extraordinary session of the Berlin Senat in the presence of Chancellor Adenauer reaffirmed the five points that had first been agreed as the common basis for Berlin policy in January 1960, including point number five: ‘Berlin must continue to remain the meeting place for [all] Germans.’6 The emerging difference between Brandt’s and Kennedy’s priorities mattered because the clash between Kennedy and Khrushchev at their summit in Vienna at the beginning of June left little doubt that a confrontation was in the making. In contrast to the Federal Government, the Americans briefed the grateful Mayor about the summit, who in return told the US Minister in Berlin, Allen Lightner, that he was ‘completely satisfied with President Kennedy’s handling of [the] situation and particularly pleased with [the] strong stand he had taken on [the] German-Berlin problem’. Though Vienna had clearly not been a success and Klaus Schütz remembers the weak impression left by Kennedy’s performance, the Mayor’s trust in Kennedy still remained intact. As Brandt wrote to one of his old American friends on 5 July: ‘The next months will be a challenge to all of us. My confidence has been reinforced by several of the things the President and some of his advisors have said during the last weeks.’7 But the challenge was there, Brandt’s earlier assumption that no immediate crisis was imminent had proved wrong – and Brandt finally sprang into action. In the following week he and his circle of advisers floated two initiatives to confront the pressure on Berlin and the unwelcome focus on West Berlin alone. The first was one last attempt at the idea of an all-Berlin proposal. When Bahr was told by West German diplomats that the West German Foreign Office considered a possible all-Berlin proposal for the Four Power Working Group, he and Albertz saw their chance. The US indeed briefly toyed with the idea, but opinion in the German Foreign Office had turned against it, and by the time Brandt and his aides learnt of the latest development, the German delegation was already opposing it. The all-Berlin idea was stillborn.8 Its chances of survival, not to mention success, were never promising. The idea was not only far from new, it was also patently unacceptable to the Soviet Union and the GDR, and Bahr, who in retrospect called it a Schnapsidee (a crackpot idea), was perfectly aware of this from the beginning, when he acknowledged that it ‘is absolutely unrealistic’, but still thought that it might serve as a ‘relief’.9 The problem with that was that the idea could not be discussed seriously lest it conflict with West Berlin’s vital ties to West Germany or 22

‘ESSENTIALS’?

the maintenance of the Allied legal rights. The first was why the German Foreign Office torpedoed the suggestion, whereas the latter led Brandt himself to vigorously reject the Mansfield plan of 14 June for an international trusteeship authority for all-Berlin after the termination of the Allied rights – showing implicitly that the all-Berlin idea was not for real life.10 Brandt’s second project, both more public and longer-lived, was to take up Khrushchev’s constant calls for a peace treaty by summoning a ‘super-peace conference’ of all of the 52 nations that had technically been at war with Germany. After the Vienna summit Bahr had initially suggested a Four Power peace conference to Brandt; in late June Albertz adopted the idea of a conference with all belligerents (first suggested by the journalists Silex and Haffner); on 7 July Brandt presented the idea to the public; and in the following weeks he kept repeating his suggestion and used his next two discussions with Lightner in Berlin to pitch it to the Americans.11 The American reaction was, of course, crucial. Brandt interpreted Kennedy’s televised speech of 25 July, which publicly spelled out the American response to the Soviet ultimatum, as an affirmation of his approach and claimed that the President had stated ‘that proposals for a peace treaty with Germany should be considered’ and that Khrushchev’s threat of a separate peace treaty might be countered with a Western invitation.12 For years to come, Brandt would keep lamenting this as the missed opportunity of Western policy before the construction of the Berlin Wall. This was extraordinary because it was indeed at least a ‘broad interpretation, probably also wishful thinking’13 and distorted the words of the President, who had specifically not related the ‘invitation’ to a peace conference nor mentioned a peace conference at all – there was only an unrelated reference to ‘any arrangement or treaty’.14 Bahr’s later claim that the United States had actually suggested a 52-nation peace conference at the Paris Foreign Ministers Conference in early August, but had dropped the idea because of resistance from the German government was equally incorrect: no such thing ever occurred in Paris.15 Although Kennedy’s National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy had briefly toyed with the idea of a peace treaty in March, American support for Brandt’s proposal remained in fact limited to Senators Humphrey and Fulbright and Ambassador Gavin in Paris, who failed to interest Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles in the idea.16 This was not uncharacteristic of the disinterest in the higher echelons of power in Washington. When the American press asked Secretary of State Rusk about Brandt’s proposal, he referred to the negative comments of the Federal Government and got a laugh by placing Brandt’s suggestion in the context of the German election campaign, and on 26 July, Dean Acheson, a key adviser on Berlin in the summer of 1961, advised the President ‘against calling a peace conference, since that would bring too many countries into the act’.17 That was the end of the matter as far as the Kennedy administration was concerned – Brandt did not have much of an input. While the American government, like the British but unlike the German and French, did come to 23

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

favour negotiations, this was not conceived of as a peace conference, not to mention a 52-nation peace conference. When Kennedy and his team returned to the peace treaty issue in their internal considerations, it was in the form of parallel peace treaties for East and West Germany. The chances of success for a 52-nation peace conference were always minimal, but then Brandt was ‘not’ pushing this, as he later admitted in September 1962, ‘because I believe that would result in a peace treaty – it won’t result in a peace treaty, at least not for a long time!’18 The goal in summer 1961 was to play for time. Even a failing conference would hopefully prevent a fait accompli while negotiations lasted, the longer the better, and a large 52-nation superconference enjoyed ‘much better prospects – as far as its length is concerned – than a Four-Power conference’. In public, Brandt later added that, as demonstrated by the United Nations, a 52-nation super-conference would confront the Soviet Union with an overwhelming majority in favour of self-determination – altogether a supposedly potent way of countering the dangerous focus on West Berlin alone, broadening the issue and preserving the link with the German question, while exposing Khrushchev by taking him up on his constant demands. After having discussed the idea with a colleague, Bahr wrote to Brandt that they agreed that they ‘could not think of any disadvantage’.19 That assessment remains astonishing, for the proposal was in fact riddled with problems. First, the idea to give 52 nations a say in the German question conflicted with the Four Power responsibility for Germany as a whole, on which the Allied position in Berlin rested. Second, Brandt waved aside the traditional German position that a peace conference had to be preceded by reunification in order to provide an all-German government to negotiate the treaty, which meant either a peace conference without German representation or an open-ended peace conference attended by the GDR – both unacceptable to West Germany. Third, there were issues, unlike self-determination, where West Germany’s idiosyncratic positions would have stood no chance when confronted with world opinion at a super-conference: certainly not with regard to the Oder-Neisse border, and probably not with respect to its refusal to even talk with the GDR. There was clearly a danger that West German positions might suffer irreparable damage in a peace conference that was almost certain not to lead to a peace treaty anyway. Fourth, once at the conference table, the plethora of states might discover their own interests and begin to wonder what was in it for them. Between them, Adenauer, Bundy and the State Department’s legal adviser recognized these dangers immediately.20 Brandt was obviously aware of these objections and tried to forestall and counter them, but as he kept adding modifications, the blueprint for the elusive conference became ever less feasible. At best Brandt’s proposal remained, in his own words, a ‘desperate’ attempt to avert a fait accompli, and after the construction of the Berlin Wall little more than one month later Brandt often mused whether his proposal could have prevented it. However, once the fait accompli had occurred, he still did not let go of his patently unfeasible suggestion, and for over a year Brandt kept repeating 24

‘ESSENTIALS’?

what the US diplomatic service came to call his ‘pet proposal’ to his increasingly uninterested party and the entirely uninterested Americans.21 In the summer of 1961, this was not the American approach. The administration had begun to distinguish between vital and non-vital interests, and Kennedy’s television speeches with their conspicuous emphasis on West Berlin had explicitly specified what the United States were prepared to fight for in Berlin: the US presence in West Berlin, the American access to West Berlin, and the freedom of the people of West Berlin (a point that would later be extended to West Berlin’s ‘viability’, which already figured in the internal planning papers) – soon known as the three ‘essentials’. By implication this also conveyed what America was not going to fight for: East Berlin, the Allied rights pertaining to all of Berlin, the free traffic between East and West Berlin, and even the ties between West Berlin and West Germany were all excluded. This approach was plainly in contrast to the position of Brandt, who on several occasions had produced his own list of essentials, which included West Berlin’s ties to the FRG and the free inter-sector traffic within Berlin. ‘We did not regard these formulations as wholly satisfactory’, as Brandt later commented on the three essentials in the elevated language of his memoirs. While praising the President in public by latching on to one of his few statements not restricted to West Berlin, internally the focus on West Berlin was at least registered. Berlin leaders kept insisting that ‘East–West discussions must not be limited to West Berlin but that [the] West should press for discussion of All-Berlin problem’, and in a report about the largely positive response in Berlin the US Mission reported that the ‘restriction of [the] frame of reference to West Berlin’ was among the only criticisms of the President’s 25 July speech.22 But as if to remove any remaining doubts, Senator William Fulbright used a soon notorious interview on 30 July to spell out the implications and recommended that the GDR close the border in order to stop the torrent of East German refugees leaving East Germany through Berlin. This was bad enough from the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and Kennedy’s initial choice for Secretary of State, but was made even worse when in response to a direct question the President himself passed up the opportunity to disavow these views at a press conference on 10 August. This was three days before East Berlin was sealed off: the message was clear, and Khrushchev got it. Brandt on the other hand rejected Fulbright’s remarks sharply, but did not choose to comment on Kennedy’s response, even though it had been reported in the West Berlin press. Only decades later, he acknowledged that ‘Fulbright said what Kennedy was thinking’.23 Over the course of the summer, Kennedy’s and Brandt’s approaches to the Berlin crisis had diverged. In order to relieve the pressure on West Berlin, Brandt had sought to broaden the issue by shifting it from West Berlin to allBerlin and from Berlin to the German question. Kennedy had gone the other way: worried about war, he narrowed the issue to West Berlin in order to avoid an unnecessary conflict over broader issues. Hence the ‘logical solution to the 25

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

Berlin crisis’, to cut the movement of refugees and ‘reinforce the division of the city to match that of Germany as a whole’, served as the starting point for the Mayor’s attempts to prevent this outcome, while it became the vanishing-point of the President’s endeavour to effect neither an avoidable war nor the loss of West Berlin. Brandt and his team realized this, but keen to be seen as close to Kennedy at the height of the German election campaign, eager to use the Americans for their own ends, and inclined to see American support for Brandt’s approach even where there was little or none, they only grasped it gradually and eventually with hindsight. Klaus Schütz remembers becoming aware of the shift in American policy ‘actually more in retrospect’, and while acknowledging the evolving divergence, Bahr, too, confirms that at the time there was no feeling that their hopes were dashed by US policy, explaining the initiatives of summer 1961 as a reaction to developments in Moscow and East Berlin rather than in Washington. Brandt himself later admitted ‘wishful thinking’: on ‘the German side, especially in Berlin, one didn’t listen carefully’.24 When it came to the broader issue of initiatives and negotiations, Brandt was however both more in tune with the American approach and more aware of its limits. His proposal for a peace conference, he told Lightner, should be taken into account ‘in considering other possibilities for Western initiatives’; it was, as he told the public, ‘always only one possibility’.25 In striking contrast to his agenda during his visit to Washington, Brandt now did want a Western initiative and time-gaining negotiations. In that sense, he was indeed much closer to the American dual approach, which combined firmness with willingness to negotiate, than the government in Bonn, and understood Kennedy’s 25 July speech much more in line with the authors’ original intentions than either its American or its Soviet audience. The Kennedy administration, too, wanted negotiations – but not enough for Brandt’s taste. Lacking the experience of the Vienna summit with Khrushchev, Brandt, unlike Kennedy, did still not believe in a military conflict and warned internally throughout the summer that by concentrating too much on Berlin and military contingencies the West might ‘prepare for a situation which doesn’t come like that and suffer a defeat in the struggle for the broader German issues and Europe in the process’ by neglecting the need for diplomatic initiative.26 But Brandt’s exhortations were in vain, and the American push for negotiations failed to assert itself until after the Wall. By early August Khrushchev and GDR-leader Walter Ulbricht had decided on the Wall, and so had Kennedy. Early that month, the President told his Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow: ‘Khrushchev is losing East Germany. He cannot let it happen. . . . He will have to do something to stop the flow of refugees – perhaps a wall.’ Strolling with Rostow along the colonnade by the Rose Garden, Kennedy continued: ‘And we won’t be able to prevent it. I can hold the Alliance together to defend West Berlin but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open.’ Kennedy had foreseen, encouraged and accepted the Wall in advance. Brandt was yet to find that out.27 26

4 ‘MENDING WALL’ Brandt, Kennedy, Johnson and the Berlin Wall

. . . Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down. (Robert Frost, ‘Mending Wall’, quoted by Robert Kennedy in Berlin on 23 February 1962)1

When the boundary between the Eastern and the Western sectors of Berlin was sealed off on 13 August 1961, Brandt’s relations with the Kennedy administration quickly reached their all-time low. The reaction of the Americans, realistically the only power that might have been able to do something about the Wall as it went up, was the big question in the hours and days after the first barriers had appeared. ‘When are the Americans coming to put an end to this nightmare?’ the Mayor was asked by a bystander in the morning of 13 August, when he inspected the border after having rushed back to Berlin from West Germany.2 Brandt set off to find out. The Mayor, who held the Allied Kommandantura (to which he was technically subordinate) in a certain disdain, had always taken the view that, if the commandants wanted something, they should come to see him – ‘but’, in Bahr’s words, ‘now he wanted something’ and for the first time Brandt set foot in the Kommandantura.3 Brandt himself later admitted that he could not think of effective countermeasures to suggest that morning either, but the least he demanded of the commandants was some form of action to prove the ability to act: a protest issued to all Warsaw Pact states, a protest distributed through the media, military patrols along the boundary. Lacking authorization from their governments, however, the commandants invariably declined or put off Brandt’s requests.4 According to some contemporary reports, an excited Brandt told the commandants rudely ‘Gentlemen, last night you let Ulbricht kick you in the arse’ and upon leaving the Kommandantura remarked publicly that given their reaction ‘the entire East is 27

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

going to laugh from Pankow to Vladivostok!’ The British minister in Berlin (a Brandt sympathizer), on the other hand, later described Brandt as ‘grave but statesmanlike’, while one of the American representatives remembered him as ‘subdued and reflective’. Brandt himself, however, recalled that he was neither feeling cool nor concealing his emotions that morning.5 ‘Hardly ever did I see him that grim again’, Egon Bahr was to write later, remembering how his chief returned from the commandants, calling them ‘shitheads’. ‘Kennedy is making mincemeat out of us’, Brandt allegedly exclaimed, and Bahr agreed: ‘Wir sind verkauft, aber noch nicht geliefert’ (‘We are sold/betrayed, but not yet delivered/done for’ – a pun on the meanings of both words).6 That afternoon, Brandt upped the ante and declared in the Berlin House of Representatives, in the presence of the specially invited Western commandants, that ‘the Western Powers must insist that the illegal measures be reversed (lively applause) and freedom of movement restored’, adding that ‘protests alone should not be the end of the matter’. The next day, CDU Deputy Mayor Franz Amrehn returned to the Kommandantura, and this time there definitely was a confrontation: ‘In [an] insistent manner Amrehn saw fit to impress on [the] Commandants [the] significance of [the] East German measures and reiterated that in [the] Senat’s view protests alone could not suffice.’ At the same time, Brandt himself sent an urgent telegram to Foreign Minister Brentano, reiterating the expectation that the Western powers would insist on a reversal of the sealing-off and not shrink from noticeable countermeasures.7 But the next hours and days made it clear that the Western reaction did not meet the expectations of the Berliners. The Soviets had not only sealed off the sector boundary, but transferred all essential areas of authority over East Berlin to the East German government, and all of this was in clear violation of Berlin’s Four Power status – so the question still was what the Western powers would do. Brandt’s bitter answer was ‘nothing . . . Or almost nothing’: Twenty hours elapsed before the military patrols I had requested appeared on the city’s internal border. Forty hours elapsed before a legal protest was dispatched to the Soviet Commandant. Seventy-two hours elapsed before a protest – couched in terms that were little more than routine – was lodged in Moscow. Three days after the border closure the construction of the permanent concrete wall began and, as Brandt later pointed out, ‘In these three days nothing had happened that could have induced the other side to reconsider its plan.’ And Brandt was right: Khrushchev had indeed given orders to wait and watch the Western reaction. But the US decision was to demonstrate that this was not a casus belli: Kennedy went sailing and did not comment on the Wall for a week, Rusk went to a ball game before issuing a weak statement, the official protests were late and lame, and all suggestions for sanctions were turned down. The notorious East German chief-propagandist Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler had a 28

‘MENDING WALL’

field-day, asking: ‘Have you heard that Brandt has called on the Allies for help?’ Answer: ‘Yes, I’ve heard it, but the Allies haven’t.’8 This did not go down well in West Berlin, where a full-blown crisis of confidence was in the making. In order to provide a controlled outlet for dangerously excited emotions Brandt called a protest rally in front of the city hall on 16 August. That very day the outrage was compounded by the newspaper coverage. The BILD-Zeitung, West Germany’s most influential tabloid, printed the cover headline ‘The West Is Doing Nothing’ in huge letters twined around with barbed wire, and towards noon other newspapers reported that the West had allegedly been informed in advance – a worst case scenario for Egon Bahr as the Senat’s press officer: Never before and never after have I ever yelled at an American like at the poor spokesman Al Hemsing: ‘If I don’t have a real tough denial on the desk within thirty minutes, we are going to move the rally to the front of the American headquarters.’ I got the denial, even a bit faster.9 When Brandt faced the crowd for what may have been the most difficult speech of his political career, he was confronted with a sea of anti-American banners: ‘Betrayed by the West’, ‘Where Are the Protective Powers?’, ‘The West Is Doing a Second Munich’, ‘Doesn’t the West Know What to Do?’, ‘Kennedy Is Selling Us Out!’, ‘Kennedy: You Can’t Stop Tanks With Words’, and shouts of ‘What are the Americans doing?’10 Bahr, who co-authored Brandt’s speech, had recognized the predicament: ‘to scold the West would be dangerous and wrong; to praise the West would be ridiculous’. In a masterpiece of political mass control, Brandt managed to strike the right balance between saying too little and saying too much, but that balance included some rather direct criticism in front of a quarter of a million people and broadcast by all German and 14 foreign television stations. Brandt dismissed paper protests, declared that ‘peace has never been saved by weakness’, and let his audience know that ‘Today I have told the President of the USA, John Kennedy, my and, as I believe, our opinion in all frankness in a personal letter. Berlin expects more than words, Berlin expects political action’. While a reference to the commandants’ meek protest letter had been greeted with a ‘great howl of derision’, he got his only enthusiastic round of applause for breaking the news about his own letter to Kennedy, which was transmitted to Washington that night.11 The letter was remarkable in several regards. First, it had been transmitted directly from Berlin to Washington without even informing the Foreign Office in advance, which Bonn regarded as a violation of the principle of West Berlin’s international representation by the Federal Republic and as an indication that Brandt was effectively making his own foreign policy. This led to a public controversy and a sharp exchange of letters between Brandt and several Federal Ministers.12 Second, the letter’s tone was self-assured at the very least, while at the same time assuming a personal friendship with Kennedy that hardly existed 29

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

at this time and in this form. Adenauer considered it ‘arrogant’, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung called it ‘didactic’, Schütz, who disapproved of the entire project from the outset, later described it as of ‘heavy calibre’ and Bahr, who did approve, as ‘brutally candid’.13 Third, that problem was not lessened by the fact that the letter was leaked to the press by Adenauer’s Chancellery just after the US administration had decided to keep it secret.14 The letter combined direct criticism of US policy with an entire catalogue of demands. Brandt accused the Allies of acknowledging the ‘Illegal sovereignty of [the] East Berlin government’, and included the warning that ‘This development . . . has tended to arouse doubts as to [the] determination of [the] three powers . . . inactivity and mere defensive posture can bring about [a] crisis of confidence in [the] Western powers.’ He then went on to suggest the proclamation of a Three Power status for West Berlin; demanded a repetition of the Three Powers’ guarantee to continue their presence in West Berlin, backed up by a plebiscite in West Berlin and West Germany; demanded that ‘it be said clearly that [the] German question is in no way settled for [the] Western powers but that they must insist upon [a] peace settlement corresponding to [the] right of selfdetermination of [the] German people’; suggested an initiative at the United Nations; requested, finally, a demonstrative reinforcement of the American garrison in Berlin; and closed with the ominous remark that ‘we will not be spared [the] risks of ultimate decision’.15 These proposals warrant a closer look, not although but because they were neither new nor without problems. An appeal to the United Nations, for example, was not without danger since a serious UN involvement threatened to interfere with the legal basis of the original occupation rights (after all Senator Mike Mansfield and others toyed with the idea of replacing the occupation statute with a UN guarantee), which was not at all what Brandt had in mind. However, Brandt at least wanted to have the Wall and its human rights aspects discussed in the UN – but even that was no safe ride: the non-committed nations did not provide a sympathetic audience, and the Soviet talk of peace treaties and the reality of two German states had some appeal.16 The most controversial of Brandt’s suggestions, however, was his proposal to proclaim a Three Power status for West Berlin. His concern was to prevent a situation where the Four Power status was de facto abrogated for East Berlin, but could still serve as a pretext for Soviet interference in the affairs of West Berlin and conflict with West Berlin’s ties with the Federal Republic. The demand to actually ‘proclaim’ a Three Power status, however, sounded like a possible change in the legal status. Since the original rights of the Western Allies, the legal basis for the protest against the Wall, and the claim to reunification as the framework for the solution of the Berlin problem all depended on the Four-Power status, a legal departure from that status was loaded with implications. Brandt’s suggestive language was the result of his editing of Bahr’s more radical draft, which had indeed suggested to explicitly terminate the Four-Power status17 – and soon led to some hectic backpaddling, when it became the target of 30

‘MENDING WALL’

criticism from the federal government as well as Brandt’s own party. The last remnants of his respect for the ‘hollow shell’ of the Four-Power status, however, had evaporated.18 Finally it is worth noting what the Mayor did not suggest. Military action was out of the question, but Brandt did not even press economic countermeasures with the Americans, but only with the Federal Government in Bonn.19 His proposals for Kennedy were thus not only not innovative, but also not very likely to have a substantial impact as countermeasures to the Wall. Even in the letter itself Brandt confessed that ‘I expect from such steps no significant material change [of the] present situation’, and Brandt, Bahr and Schütz later all conceded that the proposals were ‘conventional’ (Bahr), ‘not that impressive’ (Schütz), ‘clumsy’, and an expression of ‘helplessness’ (Brandt).20 However, as Brandt put it in the letter, ‘it is all the more important at least to demonstrate political initiative’. That was why Brandt had put increasing, and increasingly public, pressure on the Americans. Since Kennedy’s reaction could not be foreseen, this was a gamble, but in the end Brandt won that gamble to great effect. However, at the time that outcome was far from certain – because the American failure to react was deliberate. Kennedy and his associates later often stressed (and Brandt acknowledged) that no one even suggested to tear down the Wall. In fact some American officials at least considered more hardline responses, but this was not the line of the administration, which was succinctly summed up by McGeorge Bundy in a memorandum for the President only one day after the first barriers had gone up: (1) this is something they have always had the power to do; (2) it is something they were bound to do sooner or later, unless they could control the exits from West Berlin to the West; (3) since it was bound to happen, it is as well to have it happen early, as their doing and their responsibility.’21 Even this posture, however, still left the Americans with the problem of how to deal with the developing crisis of confidence in West Berlin. In spite of the accurate reporting of the US diplomatic posts in Germany, the administration badly underestimated this problem. The reason for the administration’s failure to appreciate what was going on in West Berlin was not a lack of intelligence, but, as Lawrence Freedman has aptly put it, ‘the prior existence of a mental wall’. Unlike the Germans, the Americans had long accepted the division of Germany and Berlin mentally, if not diplomatically. Kennedy’s brutal remark, private but leaked, to the effect that the East Germans previously had 15 years to get out in time showed how distant and alien a place Berlin appeared and how perfectly accepted the division was with all its consequences.22 The initial reaction to Brandt’s letter was accordingly testy: ‘Trust?’, Kennedy exclaimed, ‘I don’t trust this man at all! He’s in the middle of a campaign against old Adenauer and wants to drag me in. Where does he get off 31

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

calling me a friend?’ Kennedy was particularly angered to learn that Brandt had referred to the letter in public before it had even been received in Washington and annoyed by Brandt’s call for not words, but action, which, thanks to the leak, put him on the spot. On Kennedy’s instruction, Press Secretary Pierre Salinger told the press that it was not certain when or even whether the letter would be answered, the administration’s public relations machinery began to work, and the US press reaction turned out to be correspondingly negative. For a moment it seemed as if Brandt’s gamble had backfired.23 Brandt, however, proved resourceful and was indirectly connected to the two salient influences that helped to turn the tide in Washington. The first was the urgent report which Edward Murrow, then the head of the United States Information Agency, cabled from Berlin to Washington after his conversations with Brandt and others. The cable warned in drastic words of the ‘risk of an abrupt and serious worsening of our relationship with the people of Berlin and then with the Federal Republic unless we take some immediate steps to reassure them’, and since Murrow was not suspected of ‘Berlinitis’ his cable finally had an impact in Washington.24 The other person to have an impact was the journalist Marguerite Higgins, an influential veteran reporter on Berlin and Germany, who coordinated her efforts with her old friend James O’Donnell – Brandt’s and Hurwitz’s friend in Washington and their collaborator from the time of the Kennedy campaign. Higgins had links to the Kennedys, Kennedy respected Higgins, and she subjected him to a good talking to: If Brandt had not written you this letter, the Berliners would not even elect him dog-catcher, not to mention Mayor. Mr. President, I must tell you frankly: the suspicion is growing in Berlin that you want to sell out the West Berliners. Kennedy grumbled, but the letter was put into perspective. Bahr later reflected on ‘our good luck that we had friends there, who explained this. . . . Without those friends the letter could have gone wrong.’25 At the meeting of the Berlin Steering Group on 17 August, the administration finally decided on a public response: the US garrison in West Berlin was to be symbolically reinforced by one battle group (1,500–1,800 men); Brandt’s suggestion to go to the UN was turned down by the State Department; a reply to Brandt by the President was discussed, decided upon and later drafted, and the decision was made to send Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and General Lucius D. Clay, the ‘hero’ of the Berlin blockade during his time as military governor, to Berlin to deliver the answer.26 The inclusion of Clay in the party was largely the doing of Higgins and James O’Donnell, who had already been working on this gesture for some days. When Higgins died four years later, Hurwitz reminded Bahr that ‘During the first week after the erection of the Wall, you have had a significant clandestine helper.’27 As the passage of the US troop reinforcement on the transit Autobahn 32

‘MENDING WALL’

through East Germany was considered dangerous, Johnson initially did not at all want to go on what his biographers later were to describe as his most successful trip abroad (‘There’ll be a lot of shooting, and I’ll be in the middle of it’).28 But to Berlin he went, accompanied by Clay and Charles Bohlen, the State Department’s Special Assistant for Soviet Affairs. From Brandt’s point of view, too, Johnson’s ad hoc visit had more than one face, and as political action it operated on at least three levels: the emphatic public symbolism, the no less pungent private symbolism, and the political exchange. Publicly, Johnson’s appearance in front of half a million Berliners along the route of the car procession and a quarter million in front of the city hall was an overwhelming success – a ‘triumphant procession’ (Bohlen), a ‘triumph’ (Lightner). When Johnson welcomed the arriving troop reinforcement, the commander observed that the only comparable welcome ‘was when we liberated France.’29 Johnson’s triumph also meant a huge personal success for Brandt: the Mayor could present Johnson and Clay as the direct American response to his undertakings and display himself in the open car next to the prominent American visitors, while the crowd shouted ‘Bravo Johnson! Bravo Clay! Bravo Willy!’30 More importantly the visit was decisive in turning the mood in the shocked city. Only three days after the rally in front of the city hall, the banners now read ‘We Trust Our Protective Powers!’; and when Johnson spoke in front of the city hall himself, the crowd cheered wildly before the German translation was delivered – although they could hardly understand Johnson’s Texan English.31 More than anything else this was a psychological phenomenon achieved by means of symbolic politics. After all, the objective post-Wall situation in Berlin was not altered and was not meant to be altered by Johnson’s publicity stunt. The visit achieved precisely what the Americans had set out to achieve: it changed the mood and stabilized the situation in West Berlin without making any actual impact on the smouldering Berlin crisis – two different categories, which both Brandt and the Americans kept strictly separated. In his critical message to Washington, Murrow had been concerned ‘less with substantive acts than with a psychological climate which I feel can and should be corrected’, and the carefully defined objective of Johnson’s trip was accordingly to raise morale and explicitly ‘not to probe Soviet intentions’. As it turned out, the psychological placebo treatment worked spectacularly, and the Americans were pleased: ‘such “irrational” reactions from largely psychological steps are wholly desirable, necessary and effective’, as a memorandum to Bundy put it, or as William Griffith of MIT wrote to Walt Rostow: ‘a brilliant stroke – Gestalt psychology at its best’.32 And Brandt, playing the master of ceremonies for Johnson’s performance, helped as best he could with sentimental speeches of little substance, celebrating even Johnson’s most trivial remarks. In the end, Brandt and his team needed the psychological boost to the morale of their West Berliners just as much as the Americans. Berlin morale, as a sober telegram from the British embassy put it, was ‘far too addicted to a diet of gestures’.33 While Johnson proved a huge success with the masses, things were less 33

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

pleasant behind the scenes, though hardly less symbolic. Johnson got on Brandt’s nerves – but not without making his point. To the irritation of his hosts, the Vice President cultivated his enjoyment of shopping and got Brandt to open a shoe shop, a shop for electrical razors, and the Berlin City Porcelain Works, all closed over the weekend, reminding the mayor repeatedly of his ‘action, not words’ quotation whenever there appeared to be a problem. Brandt complained about Johnson’s ‘rather unsophisticated humour’, and Bahr felt ‘disillusioned about the stature of a Vice President with whom there were hardly any serious talks’.34 The latter, however, was not quite fair, for talks, and serious ones at that, there were. The frame of reference for these talks was Kennedy’s reply letter to Brandt. The letter was calm and obliging, though carefully avoiding Brandt’s familiarity. This diction, however, like the letter itself, needs to be placed in the context of its delivery: ‘It is easy to send a friendly letter if “LBJ” will follow up with some straight talking’ – and the letter’s actual content was still relentless enough.35 Kennedy’s letter recognized the Wall as a ‘basic Soviet decision which only war could reverse’ and made clear that there were ‘no steps available to us which can force a significant material change’, reminding Brandt bluntly that ‘Neither you nor we, nor any of our Allies, have ever supposed that we should go to war on this point.’ This was reaffirmed in the ensuing discussion, and Bohlen even went as far as telling Brandt that ‘Washington expected something of this kind would happen if the refugee flow continued.’ In turn Brandt mounted an attempt to explain the human, national, legal and moral significance of the Wall to the Americans and maintained his criticism of the delay of the Western protests.36 But Brandt was not the only one displeased by the other’s reaction. Kennedy had instructed the Vice President to talk ‘frankly with Mayor Brandt’ and consequently Brandt was told off for the ‘unfortunate repercussions’ of his letter, when Johnson told him that ‘it did not add luster to our cause to have our own allies writing critical letters to the President of the United States and putting him to the public question’, pointedly emphasising ‘the importance the President attached to keeping our differences to ourselves’. Brandt backed down, claiming, implausibly, that ‘he had not meant to criticize in his letter’, expressed regret for the leak, but insisted ‘that it had helped [to] move American policy off “dead center” ’. Nevertheless, the American reports depicted him as ‘almost apologetic’.37 Brandt did not fare better as far as his proposals for further action were concerned. In his reply letter Kennedy told Brandt that ‘the measures which have been proposed – even . . . most of the suggestions in your own letter’ were ‘mere trifles compared to what has been done. Some of them, moreover, seem unlikely to be fruitful even in their own terms.’ The President went on to explicitly reject Brandt’s suggestion to take the issue to the United Nations as well as his proposal for a three power status for West Berlin, and as to the symbolic reinforcement of the US garrison – Brandt’s only request that ever became a 34

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reality – Kennedy subtly emphasized that he himself had decided to take that measure, thus effectively revoking the original decision of the Berlin Steering Group to credit this to Brandt’s request. Only Brandt’s call for a plebiscite received some encouragement from the President, but the discussion with Bohlen made clear that this was a vague idea in reserve rather than a concrete project. Brandt’s other suggestions, including another go at his peace conference proposal, were also turned down one by one, and the Mayor was ‘advised . . . that all the points in his letter had been carefully considered in Washington, even though it had proved impossible to agree with them’. Brandt later remembered that part of the conversation as ‘somewhat strained’. His concern for East Berlin was hardly shared. On the contrary, Kennedy finished his letter with a cold shower and clear hint: ‘Important as the ties to the East have been, painful as is their violation, the life of the city, as I understand it, runs primarily to the West – its economic life, its moral basis, and its military security.’ The United States had relinquished East Berlin, and Kennedy told Brandt so. Neither all of Berlin, all of Germany, nor reunification were mentioned.38 The Americans were highly content with the Vice President, who, they thought, performed ‘admirably’ (Bohlen) or ‘damn well’ (Clay), and Kennedy himself professed to be ‘most gratified’. One can only imagine what Brandt would have made of Johnson’s patronizing and complacent report, which portrayed him as a ‘chastened’ man, set straight by the Vice President. But Brandt did not need to see this language to be affected. For his understanding of Germany’s position in the international system, the American reaction to the Wall mattered almost as much as the Wall itself, and Kennedy’s letter, as hammered home by Johnson and Bohlen, made a profound impression on Brandt and his advisers. The letter was not a blueprint for Ostpolitik, but it was also far from irrelevant to the development of Brandt’s policy. It was a truly ‘sobering’ reaction, a shock that induced the Mayor and his followers to rethink Western policy, and Brandt later wondered: ‘Was it this letter that raised the curtain to reveal an empty stage?’ In a way it was, as the American response to the Wall revealed to Brandt and his advisers that their expectations had become incompatible with the stance of the Western superpower and proved unrealistic when challenged.39 Since in the long term Brandt and his advisers adapted to this rude awakening to considerable effect, the make-up of this clash of expectations and interpretations warrants a closer look. Brandt was genuinely surprised, shocked and outraged by the Wall as well as deeply disappointed by the American reaction. While prima facie only too human and understandable, from a political perspective this surprise was not a matter of course. After all, Brandt had worried about a state border through Berlin ever since 1958/1959, when he had found out that the East Germans were toying with a ‘Chinese Wall’ project, alarmed the Americans and ordered secret studies and contingency plans from all branches of his administration concerning the ‘Consequences of an Assumed Hermetic SealingOff of the Sector Boundary’.40 Since then Brandt had regularly insisted on the 35

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freedom of inter-sector traffic in Berlin, while the flood of refugees clearly indicated that the East would have to do something about this – and GDR Head of State Ulbricht (in his notorious assurance on 15 June 1961 that ‘nobody has the intention to build a wall’), Senator Fulbright (in his only slightly less notorious interview), and the West German magazine Der Spiegel (in an article less than one week before the barriers went up) had all suggested that this might be a border closure. Over the course of the summer right up to the eve of the Wall’s construction, Brandt himself had warned repeatedly that the escape hatch in Berlin might be closed, and even remarked to the federal SPD press officer Franz Barsig on the evening of 12 August that ‘Perhaps they will build the wall after all’.41 Even Brandt’s often repeated assertion that he had no concrete advance information about the sealing-off was not strictly accurate: on 7 August, Brandt received a confidential informer report of the SPD-Ostbüro (the party’s ‘Eastern Office’ in the GDR) from 4 August, which was distributed in 19 copies to the West German government, the secret service and the Western powers and warned specifically of concrete preparations for imminent sealing-off measures against West Berlin and a closing of the sector boundary – but apparently the Mayor and his aides failed to give credence to this intelligence.42 Later, Brandt admitted that the events of 13 August 1961 ‘were not a bolt from the blue’ and that ‘We were appallingly badly prepared’, conceding that he had allowed himself to have ‘forgotten or dismissed from my mind’ his knowledge of the 1959 ‘Chinese Wall’ project. This psycho-political repression included the likely American response: in two internal memoranda for Brandt eleven months before the Wall, Bahr had perceptively predicted that even in case of a total integration of Berlin’s Eastern sector into the GDR, including (possibly temporary) border closures, ‘It can not be assumed . . . that more than protests could be reckoned with’: ‘It is not probable that [Western] power can be used to influence the developments in East Berlin. . . . The American guarantees for the security of West Berlin and the access to Berlin, that’s what’s definite.’ But when, one year later, the Americans did and said exactly what Bahr had predicted, all of this seemed forgotten, the surprise was genuine and the indignation great.43 For Brandt, the Wall represented a bitter defeat for the West, and he kept saying so, repeating that the West had allowed itself to be pressured out of its Four Power responsibility for all-Berlin. Allen Lightner of the US Mission in Berlin agreed and interpreted the sealing-off as a ‘success’ for the Soviets. But this was the Berlin point of view and diametrically opposed to the view from Washington, where Chester Bowles publicly portrayed the sealing-off as an ‘extraordinary, fantastic defeat’ for the Soviet Union and Communism in East Germany. In one sense, this was a question of propaganda, and propaganda was exactly what the top echelon of the US administration was most concerned with in the first days after the barriers went up: ‘It offers us a very good propaganda stick’, as Kennedy himself wrote on the first day after the cut-off in a memorandum concerned with nothing but propaganda, and both Rusk and Robert 36

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Kennedy, the President’s brother and Attorney General, soon concurred. This was remarkably far removed from the mood in Berlin, and Brandt’s speeches and the publication of his accusatory letter soon began to severely disturb this prospect. In turn this led to yet another clash between Johnson and Brandt in Berlin: ‘it was pointed out that the Mayor’s complaint and the alarm generated thereby among the West Berliners had shifted the propaganda effect so that it now appeared like a show of Western weakness versus Soviet strength’, to which Brandt responded one day later dryly that ‘this view seemed better abroad than in Berlin’.44 But the question whether or not the Wall represented a defeat went far beyond its implications for propaganda purposes: it ultimately depended on the interpretation of its place in the overall context of the Berlin crisis. During the summer of 1961 Brandt had repeatedly warned that the West might be preparing for the ‘wrong wedding’ and now saw himself vindicated and went on to reproach the Kennedy administration for having prepared for the wrong crisis rather than for the one that eventually occurred.45 In a way, Brandt was right: the Americans had focused on the possibility of a military confrontation over Western access to Berlin and did not have any contingency plans in place for dealing with something like the Wall. But this was hardly the reason for the sluggish American response – especially considering that a cut-off of the refugee flow had in fact been foreseen not only by Senator Fulbright, but also by Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson in Moscow in March and Secretary of State Rusk in July.46 The reason for both the lack of contingency planning and the sedate response was that a border closure was simply not regarded as a critical contingency. Brandt still implied that the erection of the Wall was a crisis, but the point was that the Kennedy administration did not really consider it a crisis at all. One day after Brandt had insisted in front of Johnson in the Berlin House of Representatives that ‘We are . . . not at the end of a crisis. We are right in the middle of a serious crisis’, Bohlen candidly told him that ‘in our view this was not the real Berlin crisis’.47 Unlike Brandt, who remained sceptical about an actual military confrontation, Kennedy had sincerely worried about the possibility of a nuclear war over Berlin ever since his stormy Vienna summit with Khrushchev, rating the odds at one in five. Less than a week before the cut-off, Kennedy received confidential news that Khrushchev had told the Italian Prime Minister Fanfani ‘about twelve times’ that war over Berlin would be nuclear from the start, and the day before the cut-off, Kennedy, who had already asked months ago how many Americans would die in a nuclear exchange (an estimated 70 million), was briefed on the procedure for the use of nuclear weapons.48 The human tragedy in Berlin and the legal consequences for the Four Power status and the status of the GDR that constituted a serious crisis for the Mayor paled in comparison to the nuclear inferno pondered by the President. As Kennedy put it squarely: ‘It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.’ Precisely that: not a crisis, but a solution was what Kennedy and his administration saw in the 37

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

Wall – a solution to the refugee problem that had threatened to destabilize the GDR to the point of collapse and thus virtually forced Khrushchev to do something about Berlin. ‘You can’t blame Khrushchev for being sore about that’, Kennedy had told his special assistant Kenneth P. O’Donnell, and Kohler, the Director of the Berlin Task Force, put it with brutal honesty to the Italian ambassador Fenoaltea: While we could not be a party to the Soviet decision to isolate East Berlin from the West[,] the Soviet action, analyzed objectively and impassionately, might very well serve Western interests since it had been our concern that the increasing number of refugees into West Germany might depopulate East Germany.49 The decisive point was that the ‘solution’ provided by the Wall did not violate any of the three essentials. The question was only what it meant for the future course of the Berlin crisis and the American position in West Berlin. As Lightner pointed out from Berlin, there were two possible interpretations: by taking care of the East’s most pressing problem it could either make a settlement easier, or the successful imposition of a fait accompli might embolden the East: ‘Having taken such a big slice of salami and successfully digested it, with no hindrance, they may be expected to snatch further pieces greedily’.50 To Lightner, who believed in the second interpretation, the two views were contradictory – but in line with its dual track approach the administration effectively pursued both. In preparation for the second scenario, Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara aimed to accelerate the military build-up. But at the same time the administration’s entire behaviour strongly signalled to the Soviets that the Wall as such was not a problem, and, unlike Lightner, Kennedy and Rusk did not rule out the first interpretation. As the President explained to Kenneth O’Donnell: ‘Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin? There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he occupied the whole city. This is his way out of the predicament.’ In this case, the Wall was indeed a defeat for Soviet expansionism and a success of Western containment. Furthermore, since the Wall stabilized the GDR, and with it the status quo, it improved the prospects for continuing the status quo and ultimately coming to an arrangement on that basis. As Rusk noted on the first day after the cut-off: ‘while the border closing was a most serious matter, the probability was that in realistic terms it would make a Berlin settlement easier’.51 While the crisp internal expressions of the US position remained hidden, the gist of the American assessment was quite clear, and Brandt soon observed with some bitterness that to some the Wall might have come as a ‘certain relief’.52 But while the Americans could leave it at that, Brandt and the Germans could not: they were compelled to think about the painful lesson they had been taught. The Mayor’s natural gut instinct was encapsulated in the slogan ‘The Wall Must 38

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Go’, the concluding ceterum censeo to his speeches in Berlin in the days after its erection and repeated time and again in the months thereafter.53 This posture culminated in the secret plan of Brandt’s Senator for Interior Affairs Lipschitz to blow a hole in the Wall (Brandt’s – denied – involvement remains unclear), but, as epitomized by the failure of this bizarre project, it did not lend itself to practical policy.54 By early December 1961, Brandt warned that Berlin could not endure the Wall in the long term and that the ‘wall-must-go’ slogan must not be allowed to turn into the same shopworn kind of phrase as the demand for reunification.55 But that, of course, was precisely what was happening, and in the end it was Brandt who embarked on the political journey from the rhetorical demand for the Wall’s removal to the practical project of making it somewhat more transparent, to punch holes in the Wall not with explosives, but with policy. The rapid rise, fall and replacement of the ‘Wall Must Go’ cry and the role this development was to play in the formation of Ostpolitik was embedded in the shock that the Wall and its thinly veiled acceptance by the United States inflicted on the German hopes of reunification and the policy they were based on. To start with, the Wall was decisive in stabilizing the GDR. In spring 1958 Brandt had publicly pointed out that ‘our city will defeat every attempt to stabilize the communist regime in the so-called German Democratic Republic and thus prevent the consolidation of a dual State on German soil’.56 But the effective damming of the refugee flood that threatened to bleed the GDR to death meant that the East German state now could and would be stabilized for the foreseeable future and that the Soviet Union was prepared to take the necessary steps to consolidate its East German satellite. The GDR had gained a long-term future, and the prospect of reunification through Soviet disinterest in a collapsing GDR vanished for decades to come. Second, Brandt and the Germans now woke up to the full implications and limits of the stance taken by the United States. Brandt’s erroneous feeling (‘I’ve rarely had my doubts’) that the Four Power status ‘meant the Russians couldn’t just do with East Berlin as they wanted’ had been proven wrong. And the significance of the American acquiescence in the Wall and the ensuing consolidation of the GDR went beyond Berlin: ‘Kennedy had to confess that he did not want to shake the division’ (Egon Bahr). The widespread West German illusion that the West was pursuing an active reunification policy persisted for some time, but never really recovered from the shock of the Wall. For the third time, after 1953 and 1956, the American de facto respect for the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe had shown that the United States was not prepared to challenge the status quo in Europe. Considering the implications for Germany, whose division was part of that status quo, this was food for thought. As Bahr later put it in his memoirs: ‘If the most powerful country on earth accepts the status quo, should the Berliners revolt against it? If America accepts the status quo as the basis of policy, should the Germans fight against it?’’57 Third, the emerging consolidation of the GDR in combination with the West’s obvious acceptance of that process dealt a momentous blow to the 39

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German hopes of achieving reunification in the foreseeable future. On 18 August, Brandt told the federal SPD members of parliament of the need to make it clear to the Western powers that ‘we will not accept a diktat of division’, but, as he was about to learn, what was accepted and what was to be were two separate categories: ‘for the German people the recent events might mean the end of the unification dream’, as he told Johnson, Bohlen and Clay two days later.58 This mattered on two levels: that of policy making and that of public opinion. Even before the Wall, Brandt had warned for some time that reunification was not around the corner, and even after the Wall he would nevertheless keep talking about reunification as a concrete political objective for years to come. But the truth of the matter was that the Wall and the lesson it taught about American policy suggested that for the foreseeable future reunification was not an attainable goal at all, and in the end it was Brandt who would say so and draw the conclusions for practical policy. But this could not have come about if it had not been for the crucial effect the Wall had on German public opinion and the electorate. Brandt’s hugely controversial Ostpolitik ultimately depended on the readiness of West German society to finally accept and support this policy as well as the small steps leading up to it; and it was the Wall that served as the crucial catalyst for the gradual but far-reaching change of attitude that made Brandt’s future policy sustainable.59 Fourth, the consolidation of the GDR, the American acquiescence and the decline of the prospects for reunification added up to a major defeat for the foreign policy of Konrad Adenauer, for whom the Wall represented a ‘failure of his reunification strategy’ (Hans-Peter Schwarz). Adenauer paid the price on 17 September, when he lost his absolute majority in the federal elections and subsequently had to enter a coalition with the Liberal Democrats that limited his chancellorship to two more years. (The SPD under Brandt gained 4.4 per cent but remained locked into opposition.) When parliament rejoined, Brandt opened his response to Adenauer’s government declaration on 12 December with the observation that ‘The reunification policy up to now has failed.’ The Wall thus marked the beginning of the end for both Adenauer’s long chancellorship and his reunification policy.60 Fifth, however, it was much easier, and natural for an opposition leader, to establish the failure of the old policy than to create a new one. But new policies had to be developed because the Wall presented new challenges which required a policy response. The development of the new policy was a long-drawn, gradual learning process, but from the outset the challenges presented by the Wall determined a set of key tasks. The Wall introduced the humanitarian issue that was to feature so prominently in Ostpolitik: at a stroke the GDR had gained 16 million ‘hostages’ and cut the 2 million West Berliners off from their friends and family members. Since the Wall could not be removed, the task was to make it as transparent as possible. But the humanitarian challenge was linked to a political one: within limits, the GDR had manoeuvred itself into a position to blackmail the West Germans who continued to feel responsible for their East 40

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German countrymen. As the ‘hostage-taker’, the East German regime was in a position to make sure that the humanitarian question could only be dealt with in direct contact with the government of the GDR.61 The GDR’s newly acquired stranglehold on its population and its resulting consolidation made the practice of strict non-recognition much less tenable. But the challenge did not only come from the East. The American conduct also pointed to the ‘futility of trying to ignore the GDR out of existence’ (Frank Costigliola), when the United States respected a decree about the crossing-points for the Western Allies, signed not by the Soviet commandant but by the GDR’s Minister of the Interior: ‘the solemn holders of the original rights in Berlin yielded to that humiliation and followed the orders of the minister of a supposedly not even existent government. . . . And that should not suggest to think about realities?’ (Egon Bahr). Brandt did and, speaking in parliament on 18 August, called this ‘an extremely strong form of recognition of a state organisation’. Ten months later, he told the SPD leadership that: sooner or later a great problem of considerable consequence for domestic policy would arise from the Wall in Berlin. The question whether this Wall should be recognized as a state border would have to be answered.62 Discerning, acknowledging and addressing realities, then, was the last key feature of Ostpolitik prefigured by the Berlin Wall experience – the ‘hour of the great disillusionment’ as Heinrich Krone, at the time the head of the Christian Democrats in the federal parliament, famously put it. The new challenges presented by the Wall were only half the story, the other half were the old realities it revealed: about the GDR, about the Soviet attitude towards the GDR, about the American attitude towards the GDR. In Brandt’s words: ‘we lost certain illusions that had outlived the hopes underlying them – illusions that clung to something which no longer existed in fact’.63 The erection of the Berlin Wall has rightly been called ‘the decisive watershed in postwar West German foreign policy’. Three years later an assessment of Willy Brandt from the US Mission in Berlin observed that ‘Over the past few years Brandt’s views on the management and solution of the German and Berlin problems have undergone considerable change. . . . Of all developments in the Berlin and German situation, the building of the Wall seems to have had the strongest impact on Brandt’s thinking’. Brandt would have agreed: This caesura forced me to reconsider the external factors on which the German and European policy would depend in the next years. . . . My political deliberations in the years that followed were substantially influenced by this day’s experience, and it was against this background that my so-called Ostpolitik – the beginning of détente – took shape. 41

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Bahr and Schütz went even further: in 1981 Schütz stated that ‘German Ostpolitik began on August 13, 1961’, while Bahr later called the erection of the Wall the ‘hour of birth’ for Ostpolitik, dating its lifetime between the construction and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many historians have agreed.64 But two caveats are in order. Recent research has brought out pre-Wall roots of Brandt’s political thinking that later figured prominently in the philosophical underpinning of Ostpolitik.65 The Wall did not create a conceptual tabula rasa, but neither did it leave Brandt’s previous notions unaffected – their context and their scope of reference had irrevocably changed, and eventually they were used as components of a new concept, designed to meet the new challenges raised and the old challenges revealed by the Wall. As a catalyst, the Wall was thus both a decisive turning-point and a link, an ‘integrating element of the very historical continuity’ from the confrontation of the late 1950s through the experiences of the 1960s to the détente policy of the early 1970s.66 Neither stagnant continuity nor abrupt discontinuity are suitable categories for an understanding of the Wall’s place in the policy formation of Ostpolitik: the key to that process is the development that spans the construction of the Wall, while being decisively influenced by it. Even after the Wall, however, that development was not a foregone conclusion. As Egon Bahr later complained: ‘Historians have it easy to find out and prove in retrospect how the concept of Ostpolitik evolved from the Wall. Those who acted did not know that yet.’ The consequences of the Wall took time to make themselves felt, its impact took time to be absorbed and transformed into policy, and the way this eventually happened depended on the constellation and experiences of the following years. For that, the American superpower in general and the Kennedy administration in particular remained crucial. ‘Without the Wall’, Bahr recalled, ‘I would not have become familiar with America in time and intimately enough, and Brandt, too, would have missed a number of things.’67

42

5 IN SEARCH OF A MODUS VIVENDI Willy Brandt and Kennedy’s quest for a Berlin agreement

It is comfortable for the policy practitioner, as which I may perhaps describe myself, that today he’s getting away with a few words of welcome rather than being grilled in a seminar. That way he is spared commenting, for example, on the actual background – or what he considers it to be – of what some call the German– American misunderstandings of spring 1962, and which is perhaps after all a bit more than that. What’s superficial and where the actual causes lie, where facts are to be separated from legends, where terms are juggled about rather than clarified would be worth a thorough and dispassionate examination. I may not tell tales out of school here, but I might indicate a topic. I may also add a conviction, i.e. that a trustful further development of our relations with the United States is not only advisable, but perfectly possible. (Willy Brandt at the Otto-Suhr-Institute, 7 May 1962)1

The crucial question in the months after the Wall went up was about Kennedy’s pursuit of a modus vivendi for Berlin through bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union – and up to spring 1961, Brandt’s position on Berlin negotiations had been sceptical at best. He kept reiterating that the Berlin question could not be solved by a mere Berlin agreement since it was to be solved not in isolation, but only in the context of the German question, i.e. reunification. As reunification would probably not materialize, this effectively meant that no Berlin agreement would materialize either, but that suited Brandt, whose main concern had been the defence of the pre-Wall status quo in West Berlin. He therefore strongly opposed an interim agreement for a limited period since this would create a deadline that in due time could turn into an ultimatum. Instead he welcomed the idea of a modus vivendi that would bring merely technical improvements without changing the legal status or the Allied rights. Consequently Brandt dreaded the concessions on offer in 1959 and considered in 1960 and kept repeating that no agreement was better than a bad one, while admitting internally that no change in the status quo was probably the best to be hoped for. As Bahr put it succinctly in May 1960: 43

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We have never spoken of acceptable interim agreements here, but of additional arrangements at best. . . . To this extent we have taken maximum positions compared to what others already consider, without getting into the impossible position of not wanting to talk at all, which would certainly be the best, but which is just not tenable as things are, since one would be completely isolated with it, and Berlin is not that strong.2 This position had still determined the course of his meeting with Kennedy in March 1961, but began to change under the Soviet pressure during the summer, when Brandt began to press for negotiations rather than trying to avoid them if possible. The negotiations that Brandt wanted so badly to gain time before the Wall now materialized after it. Brandt was understandably bitter about the timing and told both Kennedy and Johnson so.3 But after having experienced the Soviet potential for action and suffering a substantial deterioration of the status quo that he had once tried to protect by avoiding negotiations, Brandt still wanted negotiations and pressured the Americans to take the initiative.4 But this said nothing yet about the form or content of negotiations, and at first his ideas and priorities would turn out to differ significantly from Kennedy’s approach – because Brandt was not the only one to rethink Berlin and the German question. The months after the Wall witnessed a significant shift in the Kennedy administration’s thinking, which became the foundation of the administration’s approach to Germany and Berlin. Elements of and concessions in a possible settlement had been floating around the State Department and the White House since spring 1961, but now that the White House seriously embarked on the project of settling the Berlin crisis through a negotiated agreement, the terms and concessions of such a settlement were spelled out in a series of memoranda from Kennedy, Bundy and Carl Kaysen of the NSC staff (and soon Kennedy’s new Deputy National Security Adviser) in the weeks between 21 August and 12 September. The essence of the new position was that while there was no leeway on the freedom and defence of West Berlin, concessions could be made wherever legal and political positions obstructed a settlement on the basis of the status quo by refusing to recognize it. Kennedy envisioned a peace conference, but with the goal of negotiating two separate peace treaties, and consequently an acceptance and at least de facto recognition of the GDR as well as a final recognition of the Oder-Neisse border were possible concessions, while the two German states would have to negotiate with each other on the reunification issue (an old Eastern demand that presupposed the recognition of the GDR). This could be embedded in mutual security guarantees for the two German states, an East–West non-aggression treaty and a guarantee of the unlimited continuation of West Germany’s non-nuclear status. Even the occupation rights in Berlin were considered replaceable, albeit only if other strong guarantees could be designed to the same effect.5 Two salient characteristics stand out. First, Kennedy’s basic framework 44

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anticipated the outline and essential features of Brandt’s Ostpolitik and the European settlement it achieved in the early 1970s: a settlement on the basis of the status quo, the recognition of the GDR and the Oder-Neisse line, German–German government negotiations, West Germany’s renunciation of an independent nuclear capability, the price of a Berlin agreement, and the tool of the non-aggression pact. Second however, this was far removed from what German politicians and the public were prepared to accept at the beginning of the 1960s, and the Kennedy administration never produced a coherent strategy for breaking this to the Germans. As the basics of the US position were almost immediately leaked to the press, this failure created considerable difficulties once Rusk’s ‘exploratory talks’ with Soviet foreign minister Gromyko got under way. The resulting excitement in the German press was compounded by an unlikely provocateur: General Clay, whom Kennedy had assigned as his personal representative in Berlin to restore confidence and a sense of purpose after the Wall. During a cocktail reception on 22 September, Clay told his guests bluntly and with reference to US policy that the Germans would have to allow for the existence of two German states and accept it for some years, that a recognition of the GDR was not necessarily the same as giving up on German reunification altogether, that the GDR would likely gain certain control rights over the access routes to Berlin, and that for the sake of the German cause the two German states would have to talk to each other. This was meant to be off the record, but was immediately attributed to Clay and created a turmoil in the German press, complete with hysterical BILD-headlines (‘Is Germany Being Sold Out’?) and mock-maps of a divided USA, half-occupied by the Soviets. Clay had to climb down, and in a private conversation with Brandt he denied that the US wanted a de facto recognition of the GDR, but still insisted that for the near future reunification was not an attainable goal and that a ‘multitude of contacts between the people in both parts of Germany’ was desirable to sustain a sense of belonging together. The ‘Americans’, said Clay, ‘could not take this off the Germans’. Two years later, when Brandt had begun to take care of this himself, he would quote the General in defence of the Berlin pass agreement. Even in 1961, the thought was far from new to Brandt, but Clay had hinted at the price that might have to be paid for it: a critical memorandum from Hurwitz to Brandt was aptly called ‘The US Clay-Trial-Balloon and the Question of East/West German Government Contact’.6 The next strike was delivered by the President’s speech at the United Nations on 25 September, three days after Clay’s ill-fated cocktail hour. While deploring it in passing, the President did not call for the removal of the Wall or the reassertion of the Four Power status in East Berlin, and neither did he call for free elections in East Germany or German unification, the unenforceable standard demands of traditional Western policy on Germany. Instead Kennedy explicitly stated that the Americans did ‘recognize that troops and tanks can, for a time, keep a nation divided against its will’, a sentence immediately followed by the 45

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

statement that ‘We believe a peaceful agreement is possible which protects the freedom of West Berlin and allied presence and access, while recognizing the historic and legitimate interests of others in assuring European security.’ As far as Kennedy was concerned, an agreement based on the status quo was acceptable and within reach.7 Brandt publicly welcomed the address, but the praise came with undertones when he hinted that the speech would necessitate a frank exchange between the German and American governments and cooperation in order to find a common basis to work for self-determination. A five point declaration of Brandt’s BerlinSPD pointedly combined an endorsement of the UN speech with the expectation that the West would press for the removal of the Wall and included West Berlin’s ties with the Federal Republic, which Kennedy had once again omitted from his list of positions to be maintained in Berlin, and on 28 September Brandt told the Social Democratic Members of Parliament that the President’s speech contained questionable simplifications.8 Obviously there was plenty to talk about with the Americans, and as chance would have it, opportunity was at hand as Brandt was scheduled to accept the ‘Freedom Award’ of the anti-Communist ‘Freedom House’ in New York in early October – but no invitation to Washington materialized. Though often seen as a deliberate snub for Brandt following his reproachful letter to Kennedy, this had in fact as much to do with the way Brandt, Bahr and Klein mishandled the issue in Berlin as with Washington’s limited desire for seeing the Mayor, when Brandt’s advisers coyly angled for an invitation but failed to get the message across to the US Mission in Berlin.9 Brandt’s main stage was therefore New York, where he delivered his address on the occasion of receiving his award on 6 October. Unlike Kennedy, he devoted ample space to decrying the Wall in strident language, reminded the Americans that from a legal point of view East Germany had annexed and occupied East Berlin, and demanded that the Wall come down. Crucially, in view of the superpower talks on Berlin, he welcomed practical and technical improvements, but insisted once again that this was no solution to the German question: West Germany could not recognize the GDR, West Germany’s refusal to accept the division was just as much of a ‘reality’ as East Germany’s existence, and any isolated Berlin solution that failed to tackle the German question was therefore ‘dangerous’ – ‘Free countries can only neglect Germany’s right to self-determination at their own peril.’ With an assumed innocence bordering on malicious irony Brandt defended the US against rumours that America had lost interest in German reunification, arguing that this ‘would be tantamount to assuming the United States capable of a breach of faith’, and concluded his speech by pointedly reminding his audience of America’s contractual obligations to Germany as a whole – the Western Powers, said Brandt, had acquired rights as well as duties in the German treaties, and if the basis of those treaties had changed this would have to be discussed openly and honestly.10 The next day might have provided an opportunity to do so, when Brandt and Kennedy at least talked on the phone. But the conversation was brief and 46

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indicative of the state of American alliance politics when an evasive Kennedy congratulated Brandt on his speech. While the short exchange remained fairly unproductive, the pattern of the discussion had noticeably changed since the last conversation in March – now it was Brandt who kept asking the penetrating questions: when Kennedy lamely asked about the mood in Berlin, it was Brandt who related this to the pressing issue of a long term settlement; it was Brandt who asked about the talks with Moscow, but learned no more than that there would be further talks; and it was Brandt who said candidly that there were issues that could strain German–American relations and would necessitate frank talks between the governments – but instead of a discussion of those issues he was vaguely told that West Germany should focus more on armament rather than on the crucial but awkward question of negotiations. The meagre material result was Kennedy’s statement that he wanted a Berlin agreement in order not to be confronted with new difficulties every couple of months and an ambiguous assurance that he agreed with Brandt’s statement that this was about more than West Berlin alone. Afterwards Brandt allegedly told newsmen with some irony that it was ‘reassuring that the President was able to identify himself to some degree with the ideas I expressed yesterday’.11 Brandt’s official administration contacts had been limited to the phonecall with the President and a longer conversation with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Richard Davies, and most of the other personalities he met were actually hardliners – and yet the October trip to the United States marked a first watershed in Brandt’s perception of the developing negotiation process and the American position. The challenge had built up gradually: Brandt had been studying the press reports about the shift in the American position, and he had disliked the information he received from the German Foreign Office about the American negotiation proposals and the deliberations of the Western Foreign Ministers in Washington in the middle of September. In the US Brandt tried to convince his listeners that the concessions debated in the American press were dangerous, but was confronted with critical questions about recognition issues and the sustainability of the Hallstein-doctrine – and to cap it all Clay told him upon his return that with regard to relations with East German authorities the question ‘What is recognition?’ needed to be clarified.12 The trip to the United States thus provided the last straw for a systematic reassessment of American policy. In the party executive Brandt reported that the topics discussed in the press were indeed under consideration in political circles, and that he had ‘the impression that the Americans will not pursue an active reunification policy’; and when speaking to the parliamentary party, he hinted that the basis of the treaties between West Germany and the Allies really needed to be compared with today’s reality and that German foreign policy was in need of revision.13 But even these reports were only pale reflections of Brandt’s full assessment, which culminated in a secret memorandum, drafted by Bahr, about his talks in the United States for the Chancellor, the German President and West German party leaders. All three essentials, Brandt said, were in need of 47

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

‘interpretation’: an attempt not only to make them more specific but to cover Brandt’s additional demands by subsuming the three-power responsibility for West Berlin under ‘presence’, the civilian German access under the Allied ‘access’ and the ties with the Federal Republic under ‘viability’. And that was only the beginning, the ‘harmless’ part that Brandt published as early as 1964. What followed was the secret part on the German question: Amongst the subjects which are widely considered negotiable are obviously: a) the recognition of the Oder-Neisse line, b) a kind of de facto recognition of the East German regime, c) a zone of limited and controlled armament in Central Europe. . . . Relatively often one encounters the argument about the ‘reality’ of the German division. . . . It will have to be said with utmost clarity that we cannot recognize the division, even though we have to live with it. ... It would however be unjust to insinuate that the government of the United States was willing to write off the tenet of reunification. They rather seem to assume that the previously made attempts have to be considered failures and that new ways and means should be sought to prevent the two parts of the German people from growing apart. German statements should take up these ideas in a suitable way. ... Frank discussions between the two governments will be needed in order to prevent a possible crisis of confidence. The deliberations of our allies can still be influenced, even though it will hardly be possible to maintain the previous – actual or supposed – German positions one and all. Our allies expect German contributions to the answers to the questions that confront us together.14 By early October three key elements of Brandt’s provisional thinking on the new US policy had thus been established. First, Brandt was fully aware of the new drift of American policy vis-à-vis the German question; and second, he was clearly concerned by this and particularly unwilling to countenance a recognition of East Germany. Third, however, Brandt did not deem it possible to preserve the German position in full: American policy could not be thwarted, but influenced, and consequently German policy had to work with it rather than against it, like it or not. Considering the gap between Brandt’s and Kennedy’s position in autumn 1961 that was no easy task. An internal memorandum by Bahr one month later listed West Berlin’s wishes: negotiations yes, but negotiations about a peace treaty, preferably in the framework of the super-peace conference favoured by Brandt and taking the Four-Power status as the starting point; 48

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emphasize Berlin’s role as the German capital and allow West German Federal authorities in Berlin; assert Berlin as a part of the Federal Republic; guarantee the access to West Berlin; and establish principles of a peace treaty. This wish list was not only unnegotiable, it was also incompatible with the American approach.15 In the meantime General Clay demonstrated what an alternative hardline policy, based on the uncompromising defence of all and every right instead of Kennedy’s distinction between vital and non-vital interests, might look like. When East German police (who technically had no right to do so) refused to let Lightner enter the Eastern sector without inspecting his passport, Clay stunned both Washington and Moscow by employing US armed forces to enforce access. The Soviets backed the East Germans, and within days American and Soviet tanks faced each other head on at ‘Checkpoint Charlie’. Brandt and his administration reacted with mixed feelings. By eliciting the Soviet tanks in East Berlin, Clay had already won the political battle, having forced the Soviets to acknowledge their ultimate responsibility for the Eastern sector. Brandt, who had repeatedly gone on about the East German ‘annexation’ of the Eastern sector, was genuinely satisfied with this. But the danger of the situation was not lost on his administration, which complained about not having been informed, let alone consulted by Clay. Kennedy would have agreed wholeheartedly and used his brother’s backchannels to arrange a mutual withdrawal behind Clay’s back – the moment passed and Clay’s alternative Berlin policy lived on only in his escalating correspondence with the White House and the State Department.16 At this juncture the pressures both from Washington and from the local situation in Berlin had become apparent – the question was how the West Germans, how Adenauer in Bonn and Brandt in Berlin, would react. Brandt’s problem was that though his city was at stake he could do little more than try to influence those who actually could make international policy – in the next instance the Chancellor, who was going to Washington in November. In a letter to Adenauer Brandt outlined his old ideas for talking to the Americans, including the insistence ‘that the Berlin question is not treated in isolation, but remains embedded in the framework of the German question’.17 That should by now have been a matter of course, but as it turned out Adenauer changed tack. The most important result of his trip was a short-lived agreement to limit the forthcoming negotiations to Berlin alone and exclude the broader issues – and this was Adenauer’s doing, not Kennedy’s. What had happened? In theory the point of linking the Berlin issue to the German question had always been to solve it in the context of reunification and, in practice, to simply maintain the status quo in West Berlin while reunification remained elusive – but Kennedy had reversed the direction of that link. Kennedy’s new idea was indeed not at all to solve the Berlin issue in isolation, but to solve it in a larger framework by making significant concessions in the German question in return for a Berlin agreement. This, of course, was the exact opposite of what Adenauer wanted, and consequently the 49

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

Chancellor, who unlike Brandt had repeatedly toyed with isolated approaches to the Berlin problem, reacted by severing the now dangerous link.18 But Brandt was not prepared to go along. In the SPD-executive he expressed ‘very serious reservations’ about limiting the negotiations to Berlin; when Brandt met Adenauer on 5 December, they clashed over the same issue; and in the following weeks Brandt led the Social Democrats in a public assault on Adenauer for giving up the link between reunification and a solution for Berlin and campaigned against narrow negotiations.19 The contrast between Adenauer and Brandt is intriguing – after all Adenauer had his reasons for changing course and Brandt was perfectly aware of them: one month earlier he himself had warned that it was ‘important to prevent buying Berlin’s freedom by concessions in [the] all-German question’, and after Adenauer turned around he accurately explained to the SPD-executive that the government ‘assumed that we could be glad if the German issue was not discussed at present, because raising this topic could have unpleasant consequences for the Federal Republic’.20 And yet, in spite of all this, Brandt continued to insist on negotiating in a larger framework. Over the following months this formal continuity covered a material change of the underlying position. When Brandt reiterated on 27 November that not Berlin but reunification had to be the topic of comprehensive negotiations,21 he still hung on to a position that Adenauer had now recognized as untenable – but by next spring he would happily discuss negotiations in a larger framework with the Americans, perfectly aware this now meant neither reunification nor stalling but imminent concessions. Brandt was caught between the resolution to stay close to the Americans and the American pressure on the West German position, and his position, with less and less of its old certainties proving viable, was in a state of flux. ‘It is quite noticeable’, as the US Mission in Berlin remarked, that Brandt adhered to ‘excessively opaque formulations and has avoided taking positions in, or even making worthwhile contributions to, [the] international debate’.22 In the end Brandt adapted and moved from being slower than Adenauer in fully realizing the implications of the new constellation to overtaking Adenauer in trying to work within the new framework, without having to change his stance against isolated Berlin negotiations. In turn that stance itself helped to change Brandt’s understanding of the larger context. The debate over isolated approaches to the Berlin problem had always reflected on Adenauer’s underlying unwillingness to pay for Berlin with concessions in the German question – Kennedy only did what Adenauer had feared for some time, and the Chancellor acted accordingly. But just as the Chancellor’s priority was the Federal Republic, the Mayor’s priority was Berlin – and narrow Berlin negotiations, while saving West Germany from making concessions vis-à-vis the East, threatened concessions for Berlin. In the given situation of late 1961, Brandt, too, acted in accordance with his old fears: he interpreted the separation of the Berlin issue from the German issue as prefiguring a possible separation of West Berlin from West Germany, and his suspicion 50

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was that Adenauer might have traded concessions in West Germany’s relations with the East against concessions in West Berlin’s relations with West Germany. And that, from Brandt’s point of view, was unacceptable.23 His decision to continue opposing narrow Berlin negotiations thus reflected first and foremost his immediate responsibilities for Berlin rather than the larger question about the meaning of the broader framework. He still preferred avoiding concessions in the German question, but the priority was to avoid concessions in Berlin. In that sense Brandt truly maintained his old position, but given Kennedy’s impact on international affairs it would develop new and far-reaching consequences over the next year – it was because of the continuity in Brandt’s priorities that Kennedy propelled the material change in Brandt’s attitude towards the larger framework of the German question. In light of Brandt’s specific concerns it was little wonder that his meeting with Secretary of State Rusk at the fringe of the quadripartite Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Paris on 12 December opened with a controversial exchange of arguments about West Berlin’s relations with the Federal Republic. With regard to the talks with Gromyko, Rusk told Brandt reassuringly that ‘the Soviets were aware that we would not recognize the GDR’ and that ‘they were aware we would not negotiate with the GDR on access to West Berlin and that the Soviets would have to take care of any arrangements with us with the GDR’ – which was plainly a lie. When Brandt asked whether the US would demand the removal of the Wall, the answer was slightly more honest: the US would propose the restoration of free movement, but there was no hope of success. Back from Paris, Brandt reported to the SPD-executive that he had asked whether reunification was no longer more than an empty phrase and had been assured that this was not so. The question was more significant than the answer.24 But after a gloomy Christmas Brandt’s relations with the Kennedy administration took a turn for the better in February, when Robert Kennedy, accompanied by presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger, included Berlin in his world tour. For reasons of both politics and morale Harold Hurwitz, James O’Donnell and Marguerite Higgins had devised the idea of bringing influential New Frontiersmen to Berlin and focused on Robert Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow (a list that was eventually achieved in less than a year). Using Higgins’ contacts to Clay and Robert Kennedy as well as James O’Donnell’s contacts to John Seigenthaler, a Justice Department aide who accompanied RFK on the journey, they set the ball rolling and, thanks to the administration’s newfound concern about Berlin morale, they were successful.25 Consequently the public relations work was centre-stage: RFK received, in his own words, ‘a helluva reception’, the press echo was enormous – and there was no time scheduled for political discussions.26 It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that the visit had no political significance apart from morale boosting. Brandt later remarked that Bobby’s visit was ‘of importance to us and to himself’, and indeed it mattered on several 51

WILLY BRANDT AND JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1960–1963

levels.27 First, it signalled that after the interlude of the Wall and the Mayor’s solitary trip to New York, Brandt was now no longer shunned by the US administration. Second, there were RFK’s statements in Berlin. In his major speech Robert Kennedy developed the theme of Western systemic superiority, emphasized the quest for social justice and the progressive impulse of the New Frontier, applied this to the patterns of influence and attraction between East and West, and as a result called upon his audience to accept and embrace the challenge of peaceful coexistence. This was extremely close to Brandt’s own thinking, and Brandt reacted enthusiastically.28 And it got even better: for the first time the Attorney General explicitly and repeatedly included the ties between West Berlin and West Germany in the three essentials guaranteed by America, and Brandt pounced on this with zest.29 But when it came to reunification and the Wall RFK also engaged in some straight talking in public, and Schlesinger was impressed: ‘Bobby, I thought, handled himself exceptionally well . . . he made no effort to gratify his audience by saying the things we all knew they so desperately wanted to hear’.30 Third, there were Schlesinger and Robert Kennedy themselves. The presence of Schlesinger, who had drafted RFK’s speeches, mattered since it was Schlesinger who cultivated the liveliest interest in European Social Democracy in the White House – and the prospects for the German Social Democrats in the post-Adenauer era were what Brandt and Schlesinger talked about.31 But while Schlesinger remained comparatively aloof from Germany, Berlin had genuinely impressed Robert Kennedy, and Brandt, who came to admire the brother as much as the President, gained an important contact in the heart of the US administration. All of this served as a critical hinge between the past disturbances in Brandt’s relations with the Kennedy administration and the crunch in German–American relations of spring 1962, which presented Brandt with a defining moment for his relations with Bonn and Washington. When this happened in April, it was because of the convergence of two major issues since the beginning of the year: Kennedy’s pursuit of the idea to solve the Berlin access problem with an International Access Authority (IAA) including the GDR and the predictable failure of the narrow approach to Berlin negotiations. By early March the Kennedy administration was working on the basis of a concept that crystallized the ideas of last autumn in a concrete package. The so-called ‘draft principles’ aspired to safeguard West Berlin in the context of a much broader settlement: the IAA, German–German ‘technical’ commissions, a nuclear non-proliferation agreement and a non-aggression declaration between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, which would explicitly, if not diplomatically, recognize the demarcation lines in Europe – all of that in return for the safety of West Berlin. And the deal was on offer: on 22 March, Rusk handed Gromyko a copy of the ‘draft principles’ in Geneva. Brandt followed these developments considerably more open-mindedly than the government in Bonn, where the temperature was rising fast. Back in 1958 52

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Brandt himself had toyed with the idea of internationalizing the communication lines between West Germany and West Berlin under UN guarantees, and in September 1960 Bahr had already suggested to Brandt ‘an international or exterritorial corridor of whatever technical kind’.32 In principle, that was close to what Kennedy wanted, and, in principle, Brandt had no objections: he welcomed the approach of talking about access first rather than tinkering with the sensitive legal status, he wanted to maintain free air access and secure at least one surface route against arbitrary interference, and if this could be achieved with an international access authority, ‘then it is certainly acceptable to us’ as he told both the public and the SPD Party Council.33 Considering his steadfast opposition to narrow Berlin negotiations, it is unsurprising that Brandt welcomed the reversion to a broader approach. What is important, though, is that once more, as in the previous autumn, Brandt did this fully aware of the new American understanding of the link between Berlin and the broader issues. On 10 April, Schütz, now Berlin’s new Senator for Federal Affairs, forwarded Brandt a report about the talks in Geneva. Schütz was not in possession of the ‘draft principles’, but well briefed by the German Foreign Office, and his report informed the Mayor that the American proposal promoted an intensification of inner-German contacts, precluded nuclear weapons for either German state and suggested a renunciation of force declaration pertaining to the European post-war borders. Brandt learned that Rusk had explicitly stated that legally the US did not consider West Berlin a part of the Federal Republic, and Kohler, as Schütz accurately reported, had told Semenov that the access question had to be solved ‘with respect for the sovereignty of the GDR’. The GDR would participate in access procedures through the IAA, but it would not control them. Finally, within that framework, the Soviet Union was welcome to conclude its separate peace treaty with the GDR. That, and not some vague hope to solve the Berlin question in the context of reunification, was the meaning of broadening the scope of the negotiations, as summed up by Schütz: The exploratory talks so far seem to have shown that the path to a reconciliation of interests is blocked by the thematic restriction to the Berlin question because the Western powers in particular do not have any room for manoeuvre left in Berlin itself. The Americans seem therefore determined to broaden the basis of negotiations by marking congruent interests in questions of European security in a ‘new approach’ in order to obtain ‘barter objects’, which can be brought into the Berlin discussion (non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, nonaggression pact between NATO and Warsaw Pact, declarations of renunciation of force).34 Measured against the traditional West German position, much of this was unpalatable. But Berlin was not Bonn, Brandt was not Adenauer, and Brandt’s position was shifting. Brandt did not want nuclear weapons anyway; Brandt 53

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already knew that the Americans did not consider Berlin a legal part of the Federal Republic; and the idea of letting the Soviets have their separate peace treaty if the consequences for Berlin could be deflected was exactly what he had advocated in Washington a year ago. This left the concern about West Berlin’s ties with the Federal Republic and almost certainly disappointment about the apparent omission of any arrangements for inter-sector traffic. (On 11 April, Brandt told Clay that ‘especially now, I would very much welcome a concrete humanitarian proposal of the Western powers in the question of passenger traffic between the two parts of Berlin’).35 However, it also left the prospect of securing West Berlin as part of a trade-off in the broader context. So Brandt knew – and, in principle if not in detail, he agreed. On 11 April he publicly welcomed the continuation of the negotiations,36 and three days later Paul Nitze, Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, stopped in Berlin and had dinner with Brandt at Lightner’s home. There ‘was general discussion about the merits of confining the Berlin conversation within narrow limits or putting them in a broader focus’: It seemed generally agreed that the Russians were unlikely to acquiesce in the narrower focus and that subjects such as the Oder Neisse line and non-diffusion of nuclear weapons were bound to be brought into the conversation. Brandt indicated that he rather favored the broader framework. On the whole, he said, he would prefer some formal arrangement assuring access to Berlin rather than a mere reaffirmation of the status quo.37 This was significant because by the time he dined with Nitze on the evening of 14 April, Brandt knew precisely what was on the table – and because hell was breaking loose between Washington and Bonn because of what was on the table. After Gerhard Schröder, the new foreign minister forced on Adenauer after the election, okayed the ‘draft principles’ without informing the Chancellor, the Americans revised the document in early April and coupled it with a concrete IAA proposal, which envisioned a board of governors from 11 states plus East and West Berlin, five from the West, five from the East, and three from neutral states. Now Adenauer got to see the documents and told Nitze on 13 April that he was ‘shocked’ by the American proposals, that they included the recognition of the GDR, and that he would ask the President to interrupt the Berlin negotiations (which he did ‘urgently’ the next day, expressing ‘considerable objections’) – and threatened that the American message, if known to the public, ‘would create terrible unrest’.38 Hours later, the public knew. In spite of Kennedy’s personal, explicit and urgent request for strict secrecy, the essence of the American papers had been leaked to the press,39 leading to a major crisis in German–American relations. And while, after the first rush of excitement had subsided, everybody else was engaged in damage limitation, Adenauer poured oil into the fire: at two press conferences in Berlin on the 7th and 8th of May the 54

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Chancellor launched full-scale public attacks on the IAA as well as on the ‘extremely boring’ negotiations in general. According to Adenauer, there would and should be an interruption, and the Chancellor made it plainly clear that he preferred this: ‘I think it would be much better if things remained as they are than to continue this line [of negotiation].’40 That, of course, was exactly the opposite of what Brandt had told Nitze on the evening of 13 April. So what did Brandt make of all this? By the time he received the documents and parts of the draft response by the Federal Government in the early afternoon of 13 April, he had already discovered that journalists were informed and a breach of confidence therefore imminent, which he rightly predicted to be ‘very bad’ and ‘not . . . conducive to the trust between America and the Federal Republic’ when he gave a carefully weighted report to the SPD-executive. The proposals themselves, according to Brandt, contained practically nothing new since most of the points had already been raised and handed over to the Soviets in Geneva on 22 March (which ironically Brandt, unlike Adenauer, knew). His interpretation was that the attempted isolation of the Berlin complex had broken down, while the negative consequences of that attempt, i.e. the potential threat to West Berlin’s ties with the Federal Republic, remained. As far as the larger framework was concerned, he noted with content that the nuclear non-proliferation element matched the SPD’s position and showed that he understood the envisioned non-aggression pact: ‘the present borders in Europe are to be recognized’ – an insight that contradicted his public statements. With regard to reunification, Brandt rather dubiously tried to tell his listeners that the Americans ‘remained strong’, while acknowledging that on the basis of a negotiated understanding the Americans might accept a separate peace treaty and that the envisioned technical commissions had little to do with reunification – ‘They could, however, have something to do with the cohesion between the two territories.’41 This differentiated assessment partly overlapped with, and partly fell behind, the lengthy lists of objections in the government’s draft response, which put much greater emphasis on reunification and the status of the GDR. The next day Brandt sent his comments to Foreign Minister Schröder, striking a careful balance: I do not share the publicly vented doubts in the American Berlin policy. The concern over difficult, but certainly not surprising developments should not change the fact that especially now we have to make an effort towards trusting cooperation with our American friends. With regard to substance, however, Brandt declared himself ‘largely in agreement’ with the draft instructions to Ambassador Wilhelm Grewe in Washington, though he pointed out that an overall judgement would have to be based on the fact that the attempted isolation of the Berlin question had not been achieved. This was where the starting point of Brandt, who welcomed this, differed from 55

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that of Adenauer, who was actively engaged in an attempt to shoot the larger framework down. Brandt’s own priorities and criticism, as spelled out in his response, illustrated this perspective: the ties between West Berlin and the Federal Republic, an assurance that the access arrangement must not lead to a restriction of existing rights and the demand to include the question of the intracity traffic – all of them critically important for Berlin, none of them concerned with the concessions in the larger framework. And this was not done behind the back of the Americans: Brandt made his comments available to Lightner, who cabled them word for word to Washington.42 Significantly it was on the day of Brandt’s comments to Schröder that he agreed with Nitze over dinner that the broader framework was favourable and that a formal access arrangement was preferable to a mere affirmation of the status quo. The American tool for the latter purpose was the now fully developed IAA proposal and Brandt had few immediate objections: Brandt referred to the messages from Washington about the 5-5-3 directorate for the International Access Authority and the consternation it was causing in Bonn. . . . Brandt said that he did not find the U.S. proposal so startlingly new. It had been implicit in a long series of proposals put forward over the past several years in connection with [a] possible Berlin settlement. Neither he nor [FDP chairman Erich] Mende objected to the U.S. position. It was really the CDU which objected.43 This was correct in principle, but a simplification as far as the details were concerned. Like Adenauer, Brandt was more than sceptical about the convoluted make-up of the IAA – a ‘monster of an authority’ as he called it later, which was both far too complicated and too reliant on three relatively weak and exposed tie-breaking neutrals to function reliably under pressure in a highly security sensitive area. Brandt would have much preferred a Four-Power solution – but he also became aware that this held little attraction for the East. Crucially though, for Brandt these were flawed details, albeit important ones, within a valid framework, and not stumbling-blocks leading to the rejection of the entire approach: ‘the composition of the access authority should not be turned into a matter of principle’, as he would tell the Chancellor half a year later. Unlike Adenauer, Brandt did not oppose the IAA fundamentally and would in fact keep raising the idea until 1965 – long after the issue had been dropped by the US.44 In a special session of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee on 19 April Brandt consequently emphasized the need to protect access, warned against putting the Americans off the idea, and concluded that ‘if it can be achieved under halfway reasonable conditions . . . we should do everything to allow such an authority, such an arrangement to come into being’. Brandt, as he put it in early 1964, ‘could not share the excitement of some gentlemen in Bonn about the fact that the [East German] Zone might possibly take part in this’.45 The difference 56

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between acceptance in principle and rejection on principle was then clarified by Adenauer’s press conferences. Brandt was vehemently opposed to Adenauer’s ‘interruption theory’, arguing repeatedly that the last ‘interruption’, i.e. failure to negotiate in time, had produced the Berlin Wall and that a failure to negotiate now was dangerous. After making sure that the SPD was on course, Brandt came out squarely in favour of the uninterrupted continuation of the negotiations and contrasted Adenauer’s stance with demonstrative public confidence in the United States.46 Brandt’s relations with the Americans were clearly taking another turn for the better. Kohler and Lightner pointed out to Schütz and Brandt respectively that the latest versions of the ‘draft principles’ included a provision for an all-Berlin technical commission to deal with traffic and other matters, which went some way towards accommodating Brandt’s constant demand for consideration of intra-city traffic across the Wall – and might potentially provide a fit for his old idea to cover German–German expert negotiations under a Four Power roof. Schütz, travelling to Washington, informed Kohler that Brandt ‘favored the overall approach of the US in its talks with the Soviets on Berlin’, but was more interested in the details. This had its rewards when Kohler told Schütz in response that ‘we regarded Brandt, and the Berliners generally, as key people in the situation and that we had never been quite certain they felt that they were being kept fully informed by the Federal Republic’. Back in Germany, Schütz assured American diplomats that ‘he was not particularly worried that [the] Allies might make concessions in [the] field [of] [the] recognition of [the] Sov[iet] Zone regime or existing boundaries through Germany and Berlin’, while Brandt’s Senator for Economic Affairs, Karl Schiller, met with the President in Washington and used the opportunity to welcome both the IAA and continued negotiations.47 By then this rapprochement was no longer limited to Brandt and his team, but increasingly began to encompass the entire SPD. In the wake of the ‘draft principles’ leak, when not only Brandt but also SPD deputy chairman Herbert Wehner had publicly promoted calm and confidence in the Americans, a new pattern, which had been nascent ever since Kennedy’s election, gained shape and finally surfaced: an SPD championing the cause of German–American relations against a conservative government that had publicly fallen out with the Kennedy administration – not least by gleefully supporting Foreign Minister Schröder against his own Chancellor and much of his own party. This trend culminated, for the time being, in the SPD’s national convention in Cologne at the end of May, where, as noted by the State Department, solidarity with the United States was among the ‘main themes’ of the convention.48 Brandt’s main convention speech provided the occasion for his first coherent, if not consistent, foreign policy statement after the impact of the Wall and the turn in US policy. The speech stands out for three reasons. First, it was noticeable for its transitional nature. Brandt introduced the new leitmotiv of telling unpopular truths, buried Adenauer’s ‘big promise to make the Federal Republic 57

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so strong that one day the Soviets would drop the Zone like a hot potato’ and made it clear that the West’s commitment to Berlin was not matched by its commitment to reunification and certainly not by any diplomatic support for Germany’s legal position on the border questions: reunification was in danger of becoming a catchphrase without obligations. The Federal Republic, Brandt realized, had difficulties adapting to a changed reality. But alongside this went the usual rhetoric about the impossibility of accepting the division of Germany and the coming of reunification. The speech thus combined new accents with old mottos, while obfuscating the tensions between them – a sign of the conceptual fault lines that resulted from the gradual transformation of Brandt’s policy and a feature of his programmatic foreign policy statements for some years to come. Second, Brandt’s speech marked a first high-point of Brandt’s agreement with Kennedy against Adenauer, which was remarkable given his sober assessment of the Western position: Brandt insisted that there was no alternative to maintaining a trust-based relationship with the United States, attacked the government repeatedly for straining German–American relations, supported the search for a modus vivendi and criticized Adenauer once again sharply (though not by name) for the ‘dangerous’ idea of interrupting the negotiations, to which, according to Brandt, there were also no alternatives. ‘In essential fields’, Brandt summed up, ‘the SPD is today more in accord with the Allies than the government.’ Third, however, Brandt also clarified his approach to dealing with the Americans and their proposals. Yes, he supported the negotiations and the search for a modus vivendi, but this support came with a list of qualifications attached: the maintenance of West Berlin’s ties with the Federal Republic; the demand to tackle the Wall and even conditions in East Germany on the international level; the condition that the modus vivendi not obstruct any comprehensive future solutions; and the careful caveat that details mattered. While not fundamentally incompatible with the American approach, there was at least a clear gap between these demands and the American priorities – but precisely that gap was central to Brandt’s emphasis on working with the Americans: ‘We must not confuse steadfastness with rigidity, otherwise we get into isolation. We must not brake, but we must participate actively, positively and with our own suggestions in the shaping of international opinion.’ Brandt was not inclined to engage in a vain attempt to stem the tide, he wanted to safeguard German and Berlin interests by trying to gain some influence on the direction of international developments, or as he put it in Cologne: he did not want to be in the brakeman’s cab, he wanted to be in the locomotive.49 This posture made Brandt interesting to the US administration. David Klein, previously the first secretary of the US embassy in Bonn and now Bundy’s principal staffer for Germany in the White House, noted in a memorandum on the Secretary of State’s forthcoming trip to Germany how ‘We have appreciated the various expressions by Mayor Brandt of his full confidence in the U.S. handling of talks with the Soviet Union.’ Consequently the Secretary’s briefing paper told him that: 58

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Mayor Brandt has taken every opportunity since the Chancellor’s Berlin appearance to express: his full confidence in the U.S. and President Kennedy; his belief that the U.S.–Soviet talks should be continued for an indefinite time if necessary; his hope that the talks would lead to a modus vivendi; his conviction that the U.S. would not come out second-best in discussions with the Soviets; and the determination of the Berlin authorities to do all in their power to help achieve a settlement.50 Little wonder then that Bahr was rather enthusiastic about the course of his preparatory talk with Rusk’s aide Tom Hughes.51 When Brandt met the Secretary of State on 21 June, he was ready to launch his main project: ‘the necessity to take some action to create holes in the wall by political means’ and suggested no less than six ways of going about this, including the German–German technical commissions envisioned in the ‘draft principles’, but mostly focused on Allied action. Rusk’s reaction was ambiguous: he ‘showed interest’ and was ‘open-minded’, but he also made it clear that not only had the US not come forward with any proposals regarding the Wall, but that Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, had told him that ‘this is not a subject for the Soviets but for the GDR’.52 The implicit message was clear: this was a task for the Germans. As Klein pointed out in another memorandum to Bundy five days after Rusk’s visit: The Germans clearly have to carry the ball, but I believe a little prodding on our part might help – and indeed be necessary . . . we might be able to come up with means for facilitating continuous East and West German contacts which could be useful to us politically. And while the Germans clearly were not there yet, Brandt appeared to be the best bet, as Rusk reported back to the President: My . . . discussion . . . with the Berlin Senat indicated that they would go considerably farther than the Federal Republic in proposing practical arrangements to alleviate the situation both in Berlin and on the access routes and that they have fewer illusions about what we can get without paying the price of some practical political concessions.53 A lot had changed since Kennedy’s reaction to the Wall had revealed an ‘empty stage’ to Brandt. The year after the Wall had not afforded Brandt much breathing space. The new American approach had kept him under pressure to adapt rapidly: it had changed the meaning of the link between Berlin and the German question, and it had changed German–American relations and thus the political context in which Brandt operated. Unlike Adenauer, Brandt decided to go along with the 59

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Americans in an attempt to work with rather than against Kennedy’s policy, and in the process Brandt’s policy changed, too. Whereas his old preference for merely technical improvements had effectively precluded a further-reaching interim solution, he now came to truly favour a modus vivendi agreement, and whereas his old insistence on the link between the Berlin and the German question had referred to reunification and effectively meant the stalling of constructive Berlin negotiations, it now increasingly came to imply a readiness to ponder concessions in the German question. He had tentatively begun to readjust the balance between his concerns in Berlin and the West German concerns about the status of the GDR. After the shock of the Wall and under pressure from America, Brandt had started to get moving. But this was still a long road, and Brandt walked it not consistently, but gropingly, hesitantly and sometimes reluctantly. When the next step came with a bang, Brandt was soon to discover that he had not yet walked far enough.

60

6 FROM CRISIS TO DÉTENTE The autumn of 1962

Brandt and [his] close advisers evidently have taken [a] hard look at what they consider [the] ‘realities’ of [the] Berlin situation. They now seem to be endeavoring to adapt their thinking to these realities and also explain them to [the] public. (US Mission Berlin to the Secretary of State, 25 September 1962)1

On 17 August 1962, almost exactly one year after the construction of the Wall, East German border guards shot Peter Fechter when he attempted to surmount the Wall near Checkpoint Charlie. They let the severely injured, screaming 18-year-old bleed to death for 55 minutes – in full sight of Western citizens, West Berlin police and American military police, who in accordance with their instructions did not interfere on the Eastern side of the Wall. Adding a PR disaster to the human tragedy, an American officer allegedly remarked: ‘That’s not our problem.’2 Even more than a year ago, the public outrage was directed at the Western failure to intervene as much at the Eastern offence: the press was full of criticism, crowds chanted anti-American slogans, a US sector patrol was ‘jeered at and had its vehicle rocked by a crowd which also threw some stones’, and a small demonstration occurred in front of the US Mission – West Berlin witnessed its most serious anti-American outbursts so far, unheard of by the standards of the early 1960s.3 One and a half years later, Brandt wrote that ‘Psychologically this crisis had to be taken even more seriously than the one that had immediately followed the erection of the Wall.’4 His interpretation was that the crisis of confidence quenched by the Johnson visit one year earlier had resurfaced and that only now did the West Berliners begin to grasp the full meaning of the Wall and the limits of the Western commitment.5 Brandt’s son Peter later remembered that ‘I have rarely seen my father as furious and outraged as when he received the news of Peter Fechter’s death’.6 However, Brandt faced not only a human tragedy but also a political challenge. The first task was to get the immediate situation under control, which he managed with a plethora of public statements, warning that ‘Anti-Americanism is poison for this city, and it is the game of the other side’.7 The Mayor was 61

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seriously worried about the possible repercussions abroad: Brandt drafted an unsent letter to the President to reassure him about the West Berliners (‘All reports about anti-American feelings in the Berlin population are wrong’), wrote to General Clay, by then back in America, and anxiously raised the issue in almost all his conversations with Americans that autumn.8 Brandt need not have worried quite so much. Rusk told the President that the Mayor had ‘made a pretty good statement’, Kennedy himself was ‘gravely concerned’ about the Fechter case, McGeorge Bundy, who was due to visit Berlin, intended to tell the US commandant ‘in the gentlest possible way that we hope there will not be another Fechter case’ – and once in Berlin he would reassure Brandt that there was ‘complete understanding’ of the problem and ‘full recognition’ of Brandt’s management.9 The second task was clearly to prevent a repetition, and in principle Brandt achieved this within days by negotiating a solution with the commandants: a military ambulance would cross the border to assist wounded refugees in the Eastern sector if need be. The drawback was that the ambulance would not return to West Berlin but deliver the injured refugee to an East German hospital where he would be cured and then jailed – which was prone to provoke yet another hostile public reaction. This difficulty was indicative of the underlying problem: as long as the expectations of the West Berliners remained fundamentally at odds with the reality of the American commitment in Berlin, a crisis of confidence could be provoked almost anytime – and a reality-based policy would be obstructed almost all the time.10 That then was the third task: Brandt began to work on the public. From autumn 1962 onwards, not only the US diplomatic service, the government in Bonn and Brandt’s Christian Democratic coalition partners in Berlin, but also the newspapers and the public became aware that his policy was shifting, even though Brandt did his best to make the change as elusive as possible. Brandt initiated a deliberate disillusionment campaign to adjust the public to reality: ‘It had to be made clear what was possible in Berlin and what was not.’ But, as Brandt reflected after repeating the same phrase in his final memoirs 30 years later: ‘What was possible, and what was not? That question was my constant companion over the next few years.’11 The Fechter incident had once more made it clear that, in Brandt’s words, ‘in this round of the conflict, the means of the West end precisely at the demarcation line called the Wall and don’t go one millimetre beyond’. This of course was not new, it was, or should have been, the lesson of the Berlin Wall. But to Brandt the Fechter crisis had shown that the people of West Berlin had ‘largely repressed’ that lesson – and, to a lesser extent, the same was true of their leadership as well. Consequently the Mayor now told his Berliners in numerous variations that ‘we have to distinguish between the legal titles, our demands and the reality’.12 In a re-enactment of last year’s course of events, Bahr suggested terminating the Four Power status and turning West Berlin in ‘a city of the West’; Brandt stopped short of demanding termination but launched strongly worded 62

FROM CRISIS TO DÉTENTE

attacks on the Four Power status and emphasized the three-power protection for West Berlin; the public backlash proved sizeable; and from 5 September onwards Brandt once again backpaddled, denied that he wanted to replace the Four Power status and restricted himself to demanding that the Soviets not be allowed to assert a Four Power status for West Berlin alone and not enjoy more rights in the West than the West did in the East.13 But the disillusionment campaign did not stop at that, it extended to the question of how to make the Wall more permeable and, therefore, how to deal with the GDR. A controversy about ill-considered remarks by Albertz concerning political asylum for East Germans partly distracted from a much more potent comment in the same Spiegel interview. When confronted with the thesis that due to the Eastern craving for recognition a limited cross-border traffic could only be successfully negotiated with the government of the GDR (and that this would imply the recognition of the GDR by the West Berlin Senat), Albertz publicly agreed: ‘I, too, don’t consider it likely that the other side is ready for any relaxation in the sense of the transparency of this border before it has achieved, with whatever means, the recognition of its state territory entirely or approximately.’ Albertz’s only reservation was that this was a task for comprehensive negotiations between the world powers – implicitly an endorsement for one of the most far-reaching aspects of Kennedy’s agenda.14 And, unlike the comments on asylum, Brandt did not disown this. On the contrary: in an interview with the Swedish Svenska Dagbladet he described the question of extending recognition to the GDR as a problem for Bonn, in which Berlin should not interfere. This got him press criticism in West Berlin and the not unjustified suspicion that he was concealing a policy change behind equivocal statements – an art which he promptly demonstrated in response on 26 September, when he publicly denied favouring recognition of the GDR, but added in the same breath that there: was nothing to be gained from a peculiar logic which claims that because a thing is not supposed to exist, ergo it does not exist . . . No one could deny, furthermore, that the Soviet Zone authorities in fact had been permitted to assume considerable technical powers in various areas.15 In the SPD-executive he had already criticized the government’s ‘illusion . . . that there was no established, however illegally established, regime beyond the zonal border, but only a nullity’, and one day later he bluntly defended the International Red Cross, which in its attempts to arrange first aid for refugees near the Wall had spelled the GDR without the quotation marks the West Germans were so fond of. While a de jure recognition remained beyond the political horizon, all of this smacked of de facto recognition, and on 25 September the US Mission reported that Brandt’s ‘advisers occasionally raise [the] question whether some modified recognition of [the] GDR is not inevitable’. The question was only who would have to do it.16 63

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As the press was developing a lingering suspicion that Brandt was becoming soft on government-level contacts with the GDR as well as the idea that these were really US government views that were ‘allegedly being filtered through Brandt’, the Americans were watching with interest.17 At first, the US Mission told Brandt that ‘we fully appreciated both [the] significance of what he was attempting to accomplish and [the] difficulties confronting him’ and ‘assured him we stood ready to support him in any way we could’. And the Mission was not alone: just three days earlier Clay had written to Brandt from America and told him that ‘I have liked what you had to say recently.’18 The only initial concern was about Brandt’s repeated assault on the Four Power status, but when the CDU’s reaction to Brandt’s campaign threatened to affect US relations with the Christian Democrats, the Mission finally recommended discontinuing the campaign. On the other hand, Bundy in Washington once more agreed with the Mayor and suggested, with explicit references to Brandt, to trade the Western access rights in East Berlin against the Eastern access rights in West Berlin (i.e. the end of the Four Power status and a three power status for West Berlin) – but once more nothing came of it.19 What really mattered, however, were the expectations of the public, and this was where Brandt proved useful. As the US Mission put it: Brandt’s concern that [the] public [is] unaware of [the] limits of [the] Allied commitment is justified. We too believe [that the] public [is] unprepared for [the] positions called for by [the] Allied plans in response to certain highly likely contingencies.20 This was of concern because the Berlin crisis was heating up again in what Brandt called the ‘secret Berlin crisis’. After the failure of the Berlin negotiations, in which the Soviet Union refused to consider Kennedy’s offer of a comprehensive deal and insisted obdurately on a withdrawal of the Western troops from West Berlin, the Soviets now concentrated troops around Berlin, held manoeuvres on the motorways, set up anti-aircraft units along the air corridors and ‘postponed’ the separate peace treaty and a Berlin ‘solution’ until after the congressional elections in the US, threatening action thereafter. On 7 September the Allies called the Mayor to their operations centre in the Olympic Stadium to warn him of a possible surprise attack. Brandt, who had been a resistance fighter before, was not willing to go gently and was prepared to fight: with the help of the Allied troops in Berlin, riot police, the voluntary police reserve and other volunteers the Mayor hoped to defend a small district around his town hall long enough to turn a military victory for the Soviets into a political defeat by holding out until countermeasures and the UN security council could come into action – Brandt advised his staffers to bring good shoes and told his son Peter that he might not come home for a long time. After clearing the statement with Rusk on 29 September, the Mayor finally, and repeatedly, told the public that in case of an attack he would call on the East German population to revolt.21 64

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But the worsening atmosphere had wider political repercussions beyond these worst case scenarios: it once more highlighted the vulnerability of Western and particularly West German access to Berlin. The East could interfere with Western access in at least four carefully graduated ways: 1 2 3

4

a full blockade; a blockade of West German access only; an attempt to gain control of West German access by ‘sorting’ the transit traffic, i.e. selectively denying access to some (possibly but not necessarily linked to a GDR visa requirement) and, a GDR visa requirement short of ‘sorting’ but incompatible with the West’s non-recognition of the GDR.

The problem was that the Western contingency plans were neither that specific nor that differentiated, and when Schütz was briefed by the German Foreign Office about the state of the Western contingency planning in September 1962, the result was ‘disquietude’. Even Eisenhower had declared that he would not ‘fight a war over the stamping procedure’, and Brandt correctly anticipated that Kennedy certainly was not going to do so either.22 That, however, opened up exactly the kind of gap between West German popular illusions and political reality that concerned Brandt in his disillusionment campaign. Brandt’s response was threefold. First, he pressured both Adenauer and the Americans to clarify the contingency planning. Since he knew, however, that in the end the Americans would not force the Soviets to revoke an East German visa requirement, Brandt secondly did not duck the crucial question of what, therefore, the Western reaction should be – although he approached it almost entirely in diplomatic secrecy.23 When Brandt, Bahr, Albertz and Schütz discussed the issue with the US Mission in Berlin, three options were explored: immediate and full acquiescence, acquiescence after some ineffective countermeasures (considered to reflect the current state of contingency planning), and a plain refusal to accept visas resulting in self-denial of access, effectively a selfblockade requiring an airlift. Faced with those unsavoury choices, Brandt opted for full and immediate acquiescence: Evidently Brandt and [the] other[s] would prefer [to] accept visas from [the] outset rather than after [a] partial self-denial. . . . [The] Berlin officials observed that, if [the] Allies [are] prepared [to] acquiesce [in] East German control [of] Allied land access, [the] Germans under duress have no choice but to accept visas. . . . Officials noted [that] effective interference could occur whenever [the] East [was] prepared to squeeze Berlin, but this [was] not necessarily dependent upon [the] visa issue. . . . Brandt was the most articulate and precise in assessing [the] alternatives and in defining justifiable risks to [the] economy and viability [of] West Berlin of [a] self-denial and blockade.24 65

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This ‘coldly realistic view’, as the US Mission called it, provided a prime example for Brandt’s firsthand experience of how the strict dogma of nonrecognition as pursued by Bonn was becoming unworkable, not least because it no longer had the required Allied support, and for his increasing awareness that it threatened to conflict with Berlin’s interests. As the Mission observed, ‘[Brandt is] also concerned that official Bonn circles might prefer [to] abandon Berlin even to [the] extent [of an] eventual absorption by [the] GDR, rather than [to] pursue [an] action likely to culminate in FRG recognition of [the] GDR’.25 But Brandt’s move was also remarkable for the way he dealt with the Americans: Brandt threatened to thwart what was likely to be Kennedy’s preferred course of action, i.e. a wait and see policy that would leave the Berliners hanging in the air before eventually disappointing popular expectations once more: Brandt maintained that no one can provide [the] leadership and guidance necessary to hold [the] confidence of [the] Berliners if, as in August 1961, [the] Allies leave them in doubt for [a] week or two while deciding upon [a] riposte. In these circumstances [the] Berliners would accept GDR visas, and it would be very difficult or impossible later to persuade them to undertake risks of self-denial and blockade.26 If the Americans would not act, Brandt would. What can be seen here is paramount for an understanding of the development of Brandt’s policy and his relations with the United States: his peculiar emancipation from the Americans did not occur in defence of his old positions, but precisely in the process of adapting his positions to that pressure – the future would hold more of this. The present predicament, however, was exactly why Brandt had wanted an access authority. This, consequently, was the focus of his third reaction to the ‘secret Berlin crisis’: Brandt demanded repeatedly that the IAA issue be reopened in the East–West negotiations where it had passed away in the summer. What was new in comparison was that Brandt now explicitly said what he had mostly left implicit in spring: that the IAA should not fail because of concerns about the status of the GDR. One day after the Allies had warned him of the possible threat to West Berlin, he angrily told the Berlin SPD that it was an ‘idiot’s policy to be opposed to Ulbricht participating with one thirteenth, with the consequence of ultimately leaving him to it with the magnitude of one – divided by nothing!’ Therefore Brandt now kept repeating what he had first said in May: that a GDR participation would not constitute a recognition. It would, as he finally put it plainly in early November, be acceptable to his administration,27 and when he then suggested a Four Power authority (still preferred to the unruly 13-power construction) with East German technical agents acting as administrators on the access routes, the wheel had come full circle: ‘With that, John Foster Dulles’ “agent theory”, so much fought against in 1959, was resurrected and accepted!’ (Wolfgang Schmidt).28 Change, indeed. 66

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Embedded in these developments was a quick succession of meetings between Brandt, Bundy, Rusk and Kennedy. Bundy’s visit to Berlin on 25 September quickly made clear how the White House felt about Brandt after the developments of autumn 1962: Bundy expressed ‘the admiration of the President’ and even ‘supported the Mayor’s action in stressing publicly the importance of the three power status [sic] and rights in West Berlin’. This had its rewards for Brandt, when Bundy told the Mayor that: [the] Berlin authorities should speak up when they think actions are required; and that we must be sure that we have the closest means of communication between Berlin and Washington. He stated that the two most important focal points were Berlin and Washington; that while one naturally had to take into account the views and positions of others (the Federal Republic, Paris and London), they were, in the final analysis, secondary compared to having the clearest understanding between the leaders in Berlin and Washington, who were the most directly involved (should a serious showdown, with all its implications, occur, was implied but not stated).29 These were signs of a political alliance in the making, and Brandt was pleased and had Bundy’s statement leaked to the press, where it was promptly picked up by Adenauer’s worrying associates.30 But, as it so happened, Brandt did think that actions were required and did speak up when he told the National Security Adviser that it was ‘an urgent matter to determine with the Allies at exactly what point GDR harassment of German civilian access would be considered unacceptable and what specific measures would be applied to counteract such actions’ and added his concerns about a policy of self-denial and self-blockade. Bundy, though, ducked the issue and commented, rather discouragingly, that ‘it will not always be easy to develop effective counter-measures’.31 However, Bundy brought news of another, and better, chance to raise these questions. Brandt’s 1962 trip to the United States, where he was scheduled to deliver a series of prestigious and well-prepared lectures at Harvard, was imminent, and in telling contrast to last year Bundy conveyed a warmly worded invitation to meet with the President. Brandt’s first meeting in the US, however, was with Rusk, and when he met the Secretary of State in New York on 29 September, he asked for a clear, written definition of what exactly was covered by the three essentials. But although in striking contrast to Brandt’s first visit both Rusk and Kennedy were now eager to see Brandt fully briefed about the contingency planning, he was to get no such thing. To make matters worse, he misunderstood Rusk’s assurance that though there was no clear legal basis for the civilian access, the US insisted vis-à-vis the Soviets that it went ‘hand in hand with our own rights’ and would in certain circumstances ‘incorporate civilian traffic into ours as [an] exercise of our full rights’: ‘We cannot accept [a] shut-off or close-down of civilian traffic.’ 67

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Brandt misapprehended this informal guarantee as an abstruse further distinction between an unprotected German access and civilian access and promptly complained to his party executive that the Americans were confused about the legal basis.32 When he saw the President six days later Brandt raised the issue again, but Kennedy turned the tables by asking Brandt’s opinion, which had not changed since September: The President asked if Mayor Brandt thought it was wise for us to blockade ourselves if the East Germans asked for visas. Mayor Brandt responded he would, of course, prefer not to accept visas, but if the choice was presented he would prefer to maintain access rather than resort to countermeasures. His way out of the quandary was the hope for either a technical ‘German traffic agency’ or the IAA, and consequently Brandt told the President that ‘he would consider it deplorable if the idea of an international access authority is dead. It is better to deal with Ulbricht as one of thirteen than as one of two’. But, as Brandt indicated with regret back in Germany, the issue was more or less dead.33 Although disconcertingly the Americans agreed with the Mayor about the present danger and the President told him that he was not sure whether a confrontation with the Soviets could be avoided, they proved much less helpful than Brandt might have hoped when it came to finding a remedy. This was not in spite of, but because of the American position actually being quite clear – but in the sense that it was limited: if the Soviets really dared to interfere with military access there would be, in Rusk’s words, a ‘roaring’ crisis, and Kennedy accepted that ‘military access was our problem; that we would move to an airlift and if this were interfered with, it would mean war’. But when the new German ambassador objected that the acceptance of East German visas, which Brandt had just suggested, would give the East Germans the opportunity to practice selective exclusion, the ‘President responded that they have that power now and can always do it. We in turn can counter by using the air route. The really difficult problem was goods, and not people: people can fly; goods must go by rail, truck or canal.’ A mere visa requirement was therefore of no concern to the Americans, and Kennedy restricted himself to unhelpfully pointing out that the alternatives of a self-imposed blockade and a recognition of the GDR were both undesirable, thus pointedly implying that Brandt’s suggested acceptance of GDR visas would indeed come close to a de facto recognition. But what was the alternative? When Brandt asked General Clay what would happen in case of a visa requirement, the General told him: ‘nothing’.34 The bottom line thus came down to two of the three essentials: military access and whatever it took for Berlin’s viability would be defended, while everything else was secondary. This minimum position was of course exactly what Brandt had sought to get elaborated in the first place in order to cover and 68

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clarify the additional contingencies at the lower end of the hierarchy of access casuistics, which gave the Germans their political headaches. Not surprisingly, then, he was unsatisfied: back at home he told the party executive that with respect to the decisive point of civilian access to Berlin the West was unprepared, dismissed the present contingency planning as Flausen (fanciful nonsense), and continued to deplore its condition as ‘pitiful’.35 The problem was not that the Americans were unable to grasp the issue, but that it was not what Kennedy had called ‘our problem’. On the contrary, the President made it almost brutally clear that this was the Germans’ problem. Kennedy was still furious about the German attempt to kill off his proposal package, which had after all been designed to protect the access to Berlin against the kind of crisis that was looming now, and he made no secret of it. Brandt agreed, but was put on the spot in front of the German ambassador. The real problem was the consequence which Kennedy was drawing out of this precedent and which he made abundantly clear when he told Brandt no less than four times that it was now up to the Germans to come up with proposals, that it was the Germans who would have to take the lead, and that the Americans would not do it for them.36 Brandt agreed with Kennedy’s demand for German initiative, which was something he himself had been calling for for a long time, but the idea that the Germans were now left to stew in their own juice was bad news. The administration had drawn consequences which, as Brandt told his party, ‘cannot be welcome to any of us’. First, it forestalled Brandt’s strategy of getting others to do what he did not want to have to do himself: when he suggested that the ambassadors of the Four Powers in Bonn ‘instruct’ German ‘experts’ to work an agreement (thus circumventing government-level contacts and leaving the initiation of German–German talks to the Four Powers), Kennedy not only doubted the Soviet interest, but promptly told Brandt that this kind of thing was up to the Germans now and that the methods were not as important as the content – which very precisely negated the impetus behind Brandt’s construction. Second, Kennedy’s insistence on German initiative also referred Brandt to Adenauer’s government, which was highly unlikely to solve his problems: in response to Brandt’s idea for a German Traffic agency Kennedy promptly told him to discuss this with Bonn, come to an agreement and then have the Germans take the lead – perhaps a desirable, but hardly a likely prospect.37 This did not bode well for the task of making the Wall more permeable. Brandt presented his and Adenauer’s latest hope, a humanitarian deal without government negotiations in return for greater trade in the apolitical framework of the interzonal trade, and the Americans listened politely. The problem, as Brandt, Rusk and Kennedy knew all too well, was that whether on access or on humanitarian relief no deals were to be had without the East Germans, and the East Germans wanted recognition. Talking about access arrangements, Kennedy pointed out to Brandt that ‘of course, East Germany will ask for the greatest degree of recognition in connection with any such arrangement’; and 69

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Rusk, talking about the problem of a GDR visa requirement, advised that the ‘FRG must think more about this question of recognition’: ‘more channels could be opened up and it would be possible to achieve more’. Like Rusk, the President, too, told Brandt that a de jure recognition was a ‘formality’ that was out of the question, ‘but he wants to know what there is below this formality that would be acceptable’, and in their private conversation in the Rose Garden he emphasized that while there was no possibility of reunification in the foreseeable future, Berlin presented a plausible priority problem. Once more the message was clear: tackling Berlin required tackling forms of recognition. In his memoirs, Bahr later acknowledged that ‘Kennedy had grasped the core of our cause’, adding that it took Brandt’s Social-Liberal government to answer this core question. In a sense, that was exactly what Kennedy was up to: not to discourage Brandt, but to spur him on with a mixture of frustration and prodding.38 That this was worthwhile was not only clear from Brandt’s support since spring and his recent campaign, but also from the lectures he had just delivered at Harvard on ‘The Ordeal of Coexistence’. The project was ambitious: as Bahr told Blumenthal when he requested American literature on coexistence, ‘There would be no point in pondering issues here that have already been worked on for a long time abroad’,39 and Harold Hurwitz and Richard Löwenthal (one of West Germany’s most respected foreign policy intellectuals, with whom Brandt had co-written a biography of his political mentor Ernst Reuter in 1957 and who had worked and published on coexistence before) in particular made sure that Brandt was indeed excellently informed about the state of discussion in the US foreign policy scene. And Harvard was just the place for such a project: Brandt had ‘unlimited respect’ for the American elite universities, and this was of course in many ways the Alma Mater of the Kennedy administration. Five years earlier, as Brandt was well aware, the British Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell had lectured on ‘The Challenge of Coexistence’ in Harvard, and two years after the exchange on coexistence between Khrushchev and Kennan in Foreign Affairs, the Mayor of West Berlin took up the thread.40 ‘Since Brandt assessed Kennedy’s long-term intentions correctly’, as Hurwitz later recalled, ‘he believed the time had come to pronounce a long-cherished insight openly, i.e. that peaceful coexistence had to be dared.’41 Brandt’s lectures combined significant strengths with noticeable weaknesses. Far removed from political soapbox oratory, there was real substance here, and the move to promote coexistence in America was bold. ‘The idea to suggest to a country that is out for the win that it should prepare itself for a long period of coexistence with the Soviet Union was an ordeal in itself’, as Bahr later recalled: ‘Coexistence as a term was un-American, and furthermore from the Soviet vocabulary.’42 Compared to Brandt’s own previous statements on the other hand, the Harvard lectures offered little that was new. What was new was the context rather than the content: Brandt now urged the key idea much more systematically and prominently – and with reference to a status quo that now included the 70

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Wall. The old idea was thus applied to a new constellation – with potentially important implications for the concept. But there were problems with that, which fed into the weaknesses of Brandt’s lectures. Like a cyclone the lectures whirled around an empty centre: the unexplored question of how Brandt’s concept of coexistence could be applied to Germany and Berlin under post-Wall conditions, i.e. in view of the Hallsteindoctrine and the GDR’s insistence on recognition combined with its ability to deny everything that Brandt wanted. (A third lecture on Germany and Berlin, added for publication, disappointed in this regard.) Brandt spouted premises, but refused to draw the conclusions, and consequently the lectures mostly remained abstract, with inherent contradictions buried in generalizations. Brandt himself later explained that ‘My phrasing had to remain cautious, tentative and a trifle nebulous.’ As Kaysen observed in a memorandum for the President: ‘They sound as if they were written around here but not quite by the first team.’43 But Kaysen, who passed the lectures on to Kennedy, turned out to be an unusually perceptive reader: Brandt’s Harvard lectures were interesting, more for their views on German policy implicit in them than for their explicit content. As I read him, the interesting elements in Brandt’s views are two. First, we will only make progress on the problem of reunification by indirection and within the context of some kind of détente in our relations with the Soviet bloc. Second, that it is unprofitable to try to deal with Berlin and we must discuss it in the context of larger problems of Germany and European security. This blithely ignored the conceptual core, but it related where Brandt was going with the issues that mattered to Kennedy. ‘What I observed’, Kaysen later remembered, ‘was Brandt’s usefulness in exemplifying German support for the direction in which Kennedy wanted to go.’44 The proximity to the philosophy of the Kennedy administration was palpable and not entirely accidental: Hurwitz had carefully researched its statements on coexistence for Brandt. Kaysen acknowledged this affinity in Harvard, when he commented that Brandt’s ideas sounded ‘familiar’, and Brandt himself assumed that Kaysen told Kennedy ‘how close the lines of our thinking lay’. One year later a proud Brandt received his honorary doctorate from Harvard together with Dean Rusk and George Kennan.45 The Harvard lectures thus served their purpose as a signal to the Kennedy administration and enjoyed an afterlife in the future publications of Brandt, Bahr and Peter Bender, a journalist friend of Bahr’s who had contributed to the Harvard lectures and was soon to become the most intelligent public advocate of Ostpolitik in West Germany. But in spite of Bahr’s considerable public relations effort, the lectures did not create a policy debate in Germany and went largely unnoticed after the first round of the newscycle. After the murder of Peter 71

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Fechter, during the ‘secret Berlin crisis’, and on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, times were not favourable for a discussion of coexistence. But by the time the lectures were published in the post-Cuba climate of 1963, this was no longer the case, and yet they still did not provoke much of a reaction: Brandt had been too cautious after all. The point was driven home when, upon his return to Germany, Brandt promptly did create a controversy, when he stated upon his arrival back in Germany that ‘the treaties of 1955 must be regarded as politically obsolete in one respect at any rate’. The accords of 1954/1955 were held by many West Germans as the grounds for the expectation that it was the Allies’ task to take care of German reunification, and although Brandt immediately clarified that he was not talking about a revision but about a political reinterpretation, his cryptic comment stirred up an argument. What he had elaborated was that West Germany was by now expected to show ‘political maturity . . . in our very own questions’. What was implied, as Adenauer’s confidante Heinrich Krone, now Federal Minister without portfolio, immediately suspected, was the American suggestion not to ignore the fact of the GDR’s existence. What nobody suspected, though, was that there was something else troubling Brandt and that he had just asked Rusk ‘whether we could go back to the 1955 agreements on FRG independence and examine again [the] annexes how FRG relations with West Berlin could be defined’. Brandt was still trying to cover West Berlin’s ties with the Federal Republic and would come back to these relations soon enough.46 For the time being, however, all this was overshadowed by the news of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Brandt was first confronted with the issue when Kennedy briefly alluded to his concerns over Cuba in their conversation on 5 October and told him that ‘If it were not for Berlin we could feel free to take action in Cuba.’47 Brandt had anticipated a crisis in and about Berlin, not Cuba, but the issue soon caught up with him. At noon on 22 October, Adenauer called Brandt to tell him that US Ambassador Walter Dowling was returning to Bonn in order to call on the Chancellor the same evening and asked Brandt whether he knew the reason, ‘remarking half facetiously he thought Brandt might be informed in view [of the] latter’s inside track with [the] Americans’.48 He was not – yet. But the same evening he was informed that Lightner needed to see him that same night. The US Minister was invited to Brandt’s home and told the Mayor what was going on, and at midnight German time, Brandt, Lightner and Bahr listened to the President live on AFN. Bahr perceptively commented that ‘the actions contemplated were better than [an] invasion’, and Brandt fully supported the President.49 In spite of the risk for Berlin, Brandt genuinely believed that Kennedy was doing the right thing and made his support public, but other than that there was nothing to be done: the Berliners were concerned spectators with no choice or influence in this matter. While the Mayor’s grace under pressure was much appreciated by the President and appears to have served as a bonding moment between the two politicians,50 Brandt, Bahr and the rest of his circle watched in suspense and growing 72

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admiration for the Kennedy brothers.51 What was significant about this admiration though was that it was the strength that Brandt, who had just lectured at great length about détente, admired in Kennedy, whom he perceived as a committed détente politician: ‘It was lucky that the President was hard in Cuba’, as Brandt wrote to one of his hosts in Harvard. The Kremlin, Brandt concluded, had recoiled from American power, and power was needed to negotiate securely and with prospects of success from a position of strength. It was the ‘mixture of firmness and prudent restriction in the choice of its means’ that impressed the Berliners – and a reminder that in the early 1960s Brandt’s vision of détente was not soft.52 But Brandt, a man of extraordinary political instincts, was not only quick to praise the President, but also quick to understand the consequences of what had just happened. As soon as the crisis had passed, he pointed out that in view of the Cuban experience the Soviets could no longer be in any doubt whether the United States would defend West Berlin if need be, and as early as spring 1963 Brandt realized and said what historians would confirm much later – that Cuba marked the end of the second Berlin crisis.53 And Brandt realized something else that would become obvious in retrospect: that the Cuban confrontation had prepared the ground for a possible détente. Since it was now clear that ‘West Berlin would become neither a free (i.e.) defenseless city, nor a third German state, nor a city without Western troops’, the question, as Brandt put it in January 1963, was ‘whether these facts could be confirmed on paper; i.e. through [a] formal agreement with [the] Soviets’. Consequently he wrote to Kennedy expressing his hopes that the Soviet Union might now be ready for ‘more realistic Berlin talks’, and publicly called for renewed negotiations and a Western Berlin initiative to use the ‘room for action towards [a] peaceful settlement of other world problems’.54 This was delicate, though, because Brandt was aware that the main lesson of Cuba was the inviolability of the status quo. After claiming, somewhat implausibly, that the American engagement in the Cuban Missile Crisis had only ‘seemingly’ been in the interest of maintaining the status quo, he therefore told the German–American Conference in Berlin on 19 November that: In my opinion it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that it therefore needs to be the essential goal of Western Berlin policy to merely maintain the present condition in Berlin and to change nothing. . . . The mutual respect between the centres of power in East and West should make defusing the Berlin problem not seem out of the question. Today, Berlin is kept under inner tension. The goal should be to develop Berlin in some condition of détente . . . I am therefore inclined to give priority to the aspiration for a modus vivendi over a mere insistence on the status quo.55 Détente was finally on the agenda, but given the non-European origins of the decrease in tension after Cuba there was a risk that rather than buying détente 73

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with a settlement of the German question at the expense of West German positions (as Adenauer feared) or achieving détente through a modus vivendi that would secure and improve conditions in Berlin (as Brandt hoped), a superpower détente focused on nuclear issues and based on an informal mutual acceptance of the status quo might simply leave the Berlin problem aside. The next year would make this increasingly clear, when, welcomed by Brandt, the exploratory Berlin talks would resume but remain inconclusive without stirring up much excitement in either superpower capital. The international constellation had thus been transformed within only a couple of months: the Fechter-crisis rammed home the repressed insight how completely the Americans had written off East Berlin, while showing how unprepared the public was for the political consequences. The ‘secret Berlin crisis’ had not only underlined West Berlin’s vulnerability, but also made it clear that West Germany’s strict non-recognition practice threatened to put West Berlin in an impossible situation if the GDR should play its cards on access well. With cautious public statements and the strictly non-public recommendation to accept GDR-visas, Brandt had moved another step closer to de facto recognition. After a short and dramatic surge in tension, the Cuban Missile Crisis opened the prospect of a détente that might help Berlin, but could also leave its present condition unchanged. Since the pitfalls of that condition as well as Kennedy’s unwillingness to fix them had just been demonstrated, the postcrisis task was becoming clear: German initiative to employ détente for the German cause – to do something about Berlin’s development ‘in some condition of détente’.

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7 ‘NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE’ The pinnacle of the Brandt–Kennedy alliance and the first steps towards détente

In the context of the topic of human rights, too, we should examine how we can get away from the generalities. There is, after all, not much of a point in only telling a UN select committee, or the human rights commission, or whoever that the criminals who do this and that are over there. Where appropriate, this, too, has to be said, and sometimes even more strongly than now. But apart from that, we have to think in terms of changing conditions within the bounds of a balance of power that cannot be changed at first. (Willy Brandt in the SPD executive, 5 September 1962)1

The year from the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis to Kennedy’s assassination saw the development of a trend in which Brandt’s political moves in Berlin became increasingly more proactive and less determined by impulses from Washington. This process began, fittingly enough, with the death of the last project pending between Berlin and Washington: the old idea of a referendum in West Berlin. In order to achieve a sounder footing for West Berlin’s status and to finally enshrine the ties with West Germany, Brandt now wanted referendum questions on the Allied presence in Berlin and relations with the Federal Republic. But while the Americans sometimes toyed with the idea of a new status, they had no intention of getting manoeuvred into a revision of their legal position. Consequently Brandt and the Allies clashed over the referendum questions, and since Brandt had no interest in a plebiscite that failed to cover the ties with the Federal Republic, while the Americans had already lost interest after its propaganda value evaporated together with the threat to Berlin in the wake of the Cuban Missile crisis, the referendum idea finally passed away.2 The attempt to engage the Allies with the referendum project had failed, and Kennedy had made it very clear to Brandt that it was up to the Germans to show some initiative – so Brandt now proceeded to take some initiative, and rather too much for the State Department’s liking. Following the meeting with Kennedy, Brandt had instructed Bahr to draft a letter to Kaysen, which suggested that he 75

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and Adenauer could visit Moscow together and talk to Khrushchev themselves. Bilateral talks between Bonn and Moscow were probably not what Kennedy had had in mind, but it was only the logical consequence of his insistence on German initiative in German matters, a consequence that would later worry the Americans enough when Brandt would draw the same conclusion as Chancellor. The idea that Adenauer might take Brandt along, however, was rather farfetched – but there were other avenues.3 Khrushchev was due to visit East Berlin in mid-January 1963, and Brandt actively angled for an invitation to a meeting. As in 1959, when Brandt had reluctantly turned down a previous invitation, the Allies were opposed, and Lightner, the British and French ambassadors as well as the deputy commandants in Berlin all told him so.4 Lightner rightly called the official line that Brandt could present Khrushchev with a true picture of Berlin instead of disinformation from Ulbricht ‘somewhat bizarre’. But Brandt was not as naive as he sounded: his real agenda was to bypass the GDR, which kept insisting on government level negotiations, and talk directly to Khrushchev about humanitarian alleviation, a modus vivendi and his idea that the Four Powers could instruct German technical experts to talk5 – the ideas he had previously urged the Americans to promote. Consequently Brandt persisted, succeeded in provoking an invitation, and accepted it against the advice of the Allies, who had decided to leave the final decision to Brandt in order to avoid a public confrontation – incidentally demonstrating the increase in his leverage since 1959.6 In the event, the meeting was brought down by Berlin’s CDU chief and deputy mayor Franz Amrehn, who threatened to leave the Senat. Although Brandt enjoyed a comfortable SPD majority and therefore did not have to rely on the votes of his coalition partner, he now turned the baffled Soviet leader down. Brandt and Khrushchev never met, and Brandt soon regretted his decision: ‘He had made a great mistake and he knew it’ (Egon Bahr).7 In the following campaign for West Berlin’s elections on 17 February, Brandt turned the affair into a political weapon against the CDU, which in turn accused him of pursuing a new foreign policy and becoming soft towards the East. Brandt was not defeatible anyway, but the margin of his victory was remarkable: Brandt gained almost 10 per cent, achieving 61.9 per cent for the SPD (as well as 75 per cent in his own constituency), and trounced the CDU, which, losing almost 9 per cent, was reduced to a mere 28.8 per cent. Brandt, Bahr and the US Mission all drew the same conclusion: other factors apart, Brandt’s ‘more flexible approach to relations with [the] East’ during the last year had paid off.8 The experience that such a policy could win elections may have been a crucial spur for what was yet to come. The Free Democrats, too, had been thinking about new approaches to eastern policy, and Brandt now dumped the Christian Democrats and, continuing the tradition of broadbased coalition government in Cold War Berlin despite his comfortable majorities, formed West Germany’s first ever SocialLiberal coalition. West Berlin’s FDP chief William Borm made clear what this was about: ‘Don’t believe that we have gone to all this trouble just because of 76

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Berlin. The point is primarily to get Deutschlandpolitik on the move again.’9 Brandt’s new coalition thus set a momentous precedent: a necessary condition for the Berlin pass agreement nine months later, it prefigured the Social-Liberal coalition that Brandt would form on the federal level in 1969, which was to sustain his Ostpolitik and govern West Germany for 13 years. In a confidential meeting between Bahr, Kaysen and David Klein a few days later in Washington there was ‘General happiness about the election victory and’, as Bahr noted, the ‘expectation that the coalition will be formed without the CDU. Conversation very open and direct.’10 But by then Khrushchev’s invitation and Brandt’s ensuing moves were no longer the primary reason for the American interest in Brandt. The trend towards more independent action in Berlin was supplemented by a complementary tendency: Brandt, already the American favourite in questions of German and Berlin policy, was becoming of additional interest for reasons that were only indirectly related to the German question, i.e. because of European rather than German policy. The question at hand was the ‘Gaullist challenge’ to the United States in Europe, Charles de Gaulle’s vision of Europe as a third force in world politics under informal French leadership. As the Federal Republic increasingly fell between the French and the American stool, the West German political establishment split in ‘Atlanticists’ and ‘Gaullists’. The link with the German question and détente was inconsistent, but existent: many conservatives who were put off by Kennedy’s new German policy were consequently attracted to de Gaulle’s hardline stance on Berlin and his opposition to Berlin negotiations under pressure. From one resistance fighter to another, Brandt paid de Gaulle a certain personal respect, but politically he disagreed with almost everything the General had to say in the early 1960s. Whereas de Gaulle espoused his Europe des patries, Brandt’s vision of Europe, in line with the position traditionally advocated by the US, was integrationist. He consistently called for British EECmembership (later achieved during his chancellorship), which was backed by America but distrusted by de Gaulle as a Trojan horse for the US; he opposed the force de frappe on principle; and he poured ridicule on the idea of replacing the American with a French security guarantee, joking to the US Mission about the ‘choice between the “US nuclear deterrent and French military bands” ’.11 Brandt accepted American leadership, calling on the US and its President to lead as first among equals, and consequently gave German– American relations priority over German–French relations. Later, in the mid1960s, he would somewhat warm to de Gaulle’s pursuit of greater European independence (‘Why only he?’)12 and came to realize that de Gaulle’s Eastern policy was in some ways paving the way for his Ostpolitik – but in the early 1960s Brandt was indeed ‘an Atlanticist of the first order’.13 Kennedy’s response to de Gaulle was the ‘Grand Design’, expounded by the President in his ‘interdependence speech’ in Philadelphia on 4 July 1962: the vision of an integrated Europe as an equal partner in a close Atlantic partnership 77

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with the United States. This grand offer was mostly an anti-Gaullist ploy to keep Europe in check, and the overbearing style of Kennedy’s alliance politics hardly suggested a desire to share leadership and decision-making. Brandt however was enthusiastic, and there is no evidence that he ever saw anything other than a great historical opportunity in Kennedy’s ‘offer’. He had long called for a fleshed-out Atlantic community beyond the military alliance, and now seriously told the SPD-executive that ‘Unless much else goes wrong in the world’ Kennedy’s speech would become more important than the Monroe doctrine.14 But Brandt would not only go on to deplore the lack of a proper European response for years, he also had a go at it himself: the second of his two Harvard lectures was largely designed and delivered as a reply to Kennedy’s ‘Atlantic Community’. This, then, was the background to the events of spring 1963 when the issue came to the boil. On 22 January, one week after de Gaulle’s veto of British EEC-membership, Adenauer and de Gaulle signed the Élysée treaty, a fundamental Franco-German friendship treaty stipulating close and regular high-level consultations on defence and foreign policy. Since the treaty needed parliamentary ratification, with the CDU itself divided between Gaullists and Atlanticists, the stance of Brandt and the Social Democrats suddenly became of great interest. And Brandt knew where he stood: ‘Everything that deepens German–French friendship is good. Everything that deepens German–American relations is better’, as Bahr wrote for Brandt on 11 February.15 By then Brandt was already in full action, criticized the treaty sharply and pursued a double strategy: while working against the treaty at home, he also worked on the Americans abroad. On 8 February, Brandt wrote to the President: As you know, I can not speak for the German Government. However, I do want to let you know, with these personal lines, that in Berlin we never forget the friends who protect us, and who in critical times would have stood by us alone, had that been necessary. The conclusion reached in Brussels was, as I described it last week, a black day for Europe and therefore for Berlin as well. This month I will have occasion to express our feelings of solidarity with the United States in a form that cannot be ignored, and to plead from Berlin for the highest degree of European cooperation and of Atlantic partnership.16 This was not only an attempt to keep the Americans on board but also a rather blatant attempt to get on board, to recommend himself as the German advocate of the American cause. It worked. Kennedy’s reply was more than appreciative, and the President was backed up by Clay, who had badgered Brandt for almost a year about Adenauer’s Gaullist tendencies. In turn Brandt promptly told the public that he had received letters from Kennedy and Clay which had deepened his concern.17 For Brandt this was reason enough to dispatch Bahr to Washington, where he 78

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paid a call on the German specialists in the State Department and met privately with Carl Kaysen and David Klein. While the State Department diplomats conveyed their criticism with professional restraint, Kaysen did not and engaged with Bahr in an openly anti-Gaullist discussion of how to deal with the treaty.18 ‘The USA’, Bahr reported, ‘are open to a relieving thought or a pathbreaking idea. They hope that there will soon be a new Chancellor.’19 He also reported how the Americans had emphasized ‘how good it would be if a “relieving formula” in the ratification law’ could be found, and had even (fruitlessly) asked Hillenbrand and Creel for suggestions20 – and it was indeed in the ratification process that the treaty was effectively defused. This began in the Bundesrat, the Federal Republic’s upper chamber for the representation of its constituting states, where Brandt acted as the rapporteur of the Foreign Affairs Committee and ‘masterminded’ a compromise that introduced the idea of a preamble to the treaty into the legislative process.21 As the complex proceedings unfolded, the eventual solution emerged in collaboration between the Atlanticist faction in the government camp and the SPD: when parliament finally ratified the treaty on 16 May 1963, it added a unilateral preamble that subordinated the treaty to both NATO and the EEC, emphasized the partnership with the USA and practically invalidated the dual alliance envisioned by Adenauer and de Gaulle. In the long term the treaty would yet develop a potent afterlife as the foundation of the German–French axis in the European Community, but in the short term one of the most ambitious Gaullist projects had been turned into a major victory for the Atlanticists in Bonn – and the SPD proudly claimed its due. Bahr wrote to Kaysen that: We are gratified to see the Franco–German Treaty ratified with a preamble such as I suggested in the course of our last discussion in Washington. The Governing Mayor has strongly advocated this in the Bundesrat and, later, in the innermost circles’.22 The Americans were gratified, too, and when Fritz Erler visited Washington in late April, he was delighted to find that ‘the previous prejudice against the SPD . . . in the USA’ had ‘disappeared entirely’. The President and Erler largely agreed on European policy, Bundy took an interest in the SPD’s electoral prospects, and Erler happily obliged when the President ‘inquired as to the reasons for the CDU’s decline’.23 When Kennedy came to Germany two months later, his briefing on Brandt included the preamble and the Mayor’s ‘clear record of support’.24 The interlude of the Élysée Treaty had noticeably increased the SPD’s appeal to the Americans. But the consequences of Brandt’s involvement went beyond American gratitude. Brandt began to think about the links between European and American progressives. Roy Blumenthal and Ted Kaghan of Brandt’s New York PR-firm suggested with Bahr’s support that Brandt lead a European coalition movement of progressive forces in an attempt to recover Europe from Gaullism and provide 79

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an alternative to the conservative Europe of Adenauer and de Gaulle.25 Though Brandt did not know this yet, this was a perfect match for Schlesinger’s efforts to persuade the President of the benefits of strengthening Europe’s moderate left, including the German Social Democrats, to counter the Gaullist influence. When Erler saw Kennedy, the President allegedly talked already of the coming end of the ‘conservative-Christian Democrat’ hegemony in Europe, to be followed by a more prominent role for European Social Democracy.26 This was the context, in which Brandt and his friends in the American trade union movement, the Reuther brothers, became involved in forming the ‘Harpsund Circle’, an informal discussion group to link progressive politicians and labour leaders in Europe and America.27 In the long run, both projects petered out, but in the summer of 1963, they were instrumental in setting the tone for the climax of the Brandt–Kennedy relationship. By June 1963, Brandt was back in the United States to reap the fruits of his coexistence lectures and receive his honorary PhD from Harvard. While in New York, he used the chance to meet with Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s ambassador to the UN, and found the atmosphere favourable. Stevenson expressed the: wish for a certain political connection. In other countries the U.S. government had of course to work with the governments that were after all in office, but he wondered whether the special situation of Berlin did not justify a direct contact, even for questions beyond Berlin. To Brandt’s ‘great surprise’ Stevenson, decidedly not an insider in the Kennedy administration, also wondered whether it might not be possible to talk seriously about solving the German question in the foreseeable future.28 This was a dud shot, but while Brandt was in New York with Stevenson, more important things were happening in Washington, where Kennedy delivered his ‘peace speech’ at American University – ‘a gift from heaven’, as Bahr later called it.29 In a masterpiece of political oratory and a key text for détente, Kennedy prepared the ground for a nuclear test ban treaty and set out basic principles of disarmament, coexistence and a policy of engagement with the Soviet Union. The speech confirmed Brandt’s long-standing reading of Kennedy as a détente politician, and, as he immediately pointed out when he welcomed the speech three days later back in New York, it also provided an excellent conceptual match for his Harvard lectures.30 Brandt had just repeated some of his own beliefs one day earlier at a speech to an international Rotary convention in St. Louis, and soon Kaysen wrote to tell him that ‘I found your speech to the Rotary Club most interesting and have passed it along to the President. What you say fits in very well with the thoughts that lie behind the President’s speech at American University.’31 Brandt knew this only too well, and as soon as he was back in Germany, he began to constantly quote from it. For Brandt, as well as for other Germans thinking about Ostpolitik, Kennedy’s ‘peace speech’ was a landmark on the way to détente. 80

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While Brandt had met with Rusk, who repeated his admonition that West Germany ‘was not self-confident enough’ in German–German affairs,32 he had no opportunity to meet with the President in America – but this was because Kennedy was coming to Germany and Berlin, where Brandt would experience three important Kennedy speeches and two high-level meetings with the Secretary of State and the President within the span of three remarkable days. The initial discussion with Rusk on 24 June in Bad Godesberg was noteworthy as much for the mode of interaction as for its content: at the high-point of the personal and political affinity between Brandt and the Kennedy administration, Brandt and Rusk clashed openly over a new GDR crossing point at the Wall, which provided access to Schönefeld airport in order to connect to a new Austrian flight outside the Allied corridors and therefore under GDR control. The Americans wanted the crossing point closed on principle to keep the air access, as Assistant Secretary of State William Tyler put it, ‘virginal, pure and undiluted’; Brandt wanted it open on principle and refused to shut down any point of contact and traffic transcending the Wall.33 Three points mattered about this: first, Brandt’s ability to confront his American friends openly, while maintaining and improving good relations – this was in stark contrast to the pattern of interaction between Bonn and Washington and key to his understanding and practice of the friendship with the Americans. Second, it was significant that while Rusk kept referring to implications for recognizing the GDR, it was now Brandt who pressed on and discarded this for the benefit of practical arrangements – the pattern in which Brandt followed the American lead in downgrading his concern over recognition was beginning to dissolve and reverse. Third, it was noteworthy that in the end Brandt won: three days later the State Department concluded that it needed Brandt’s concurrence in order to take action, and Brandt’s concurrence never came.34 As the abortive meeting with Khrushchev had indicated, Brandt had leverage and increasingly used it to shape Berlin policy in the image of his own deliberations. Brandt’s last and most intimate meeting with President Kennedy one day later on 25 June, however, was free from any worries about these technical disagreements. The two men met in private over breakfast at 8.15 a.m. (not Brandt’s favourite time of the day), with no American note-taker and not even Bahr present. Brandt jotted down some notes two days later and gave the US Mission a sketchy run-down based on those notes on 3 July, but when Bahr met with a Soviet diplomat on 1 July, he admitted that nobody was fully informed about the content of the conversation – ‘We were alone and could talk with each other openly’, as Brandt later noted.35 The President opened by enquiring about the federal elections of 1965, offered advice on how to maximize the share of votes in conurbations, sought Brandt’s opinion of Ludwig Erhard, Adenauer’s designated successor, and commented on Adenauer’s ‘very pronounced distrust’. Not much could go wrong from there, and when it came to what Brandt later deemed the most important part of the conversation, he and Kennedy were in full harmony: Brandt explained his ideas for a European movement with 81

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‘a certain participation from the progressive-socialist camp’, while Kennedy showed himself informed about the Harpsund circle, attacked de Gaulle and came to the point: . . . there were great opportunities in the next two-to-three years for the co-operation [between] USA–Europe: my friends and I [Brandt] had the chance of decisive influence in Germany. Wilson would succeed in England. Together with the Scandinavians one could achieve good things. The Brandt–Kennedy relationship had finally become what the governing Christian-Democrats in Bonn had been afraid of from the beginning.36 But while the European questions still dominated the scene, the Mayor and the President also talked about Berlin and Germany. Brandt explained the principle of his evolving ‘policy of small steps’ and ‘specifically’ his ‘ideas on alleviation of human misfortune caused by the wall through limited contacts and visits’. Brandt told the US Mission that he was ‘surprised and pleased at [the] depth of [the] President’s information about Berlin’, but none of this was yet particularly far-reaching. Brandt was still thinking of non-political channels in order to avoid negotiations with the East German government. ‘The first important step’, i.e. the Berlin pass agreement of Christmas that year, ‘could not yet be made out at the time’, as Brandt commented in retrospect.37 What could be made out though was the underlying constellation. Kennedy agreed with the philosophy of the policy of small steps, and Rusk reminded Brandt for the third time in a row of ‘the superior attractive force of West Berlin and the FRG’. But the Secretary of State also put Brandt’s dilemma in a nutshell: If Berlin or Bonn worked out proposals or made agreements with the Zone, then there were no objections to that from the American point of view. However, nothing must happen that would get the East-Germans in direct contact with the United States or give the Zone the feeling that tomorrow it could achieve ‘that we formally agree our access with the East-Germans’. Brandt was welcome to go ahead, but it was becoming ever more clear that the Americans would not do the dirty work for him.38 But encourage him they would, and for once the public appearances were more important than the private meetings. Kennedy started on 25 June with his address in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. The President used the opportunity for yet another high-pitched speech on Atlantic Partnership and European integration, which matched Brandt’s second Harvard lecture almost point by point. Neither Adenauer nor de Gaulle were mentioned by name, but when Kennedy had the nerve to quote Goethe at the Germans, reminding them that ‘Faust lost 82

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the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: “Stay, thou art so fair”’, everyone knew who this anti-conservative gibe was aimed at. Publicly commenting on Kennedy’s speeches three days later, Brandt gleefully pointed out the contradictions in the government’s claim to agree with both Kennedy and de Gaulle, while the two disagreed with each other.39 All this, however, quickly paled in comparison to Kennedy’s legendary appearance in Berlin on 26 June. While the Communists covered the Brandenburg Gate with red cloth to prevent the East Berliners from seeing the President, 60 per cent of West Berlin’s adult population turned out to see Kennedy riding in the open car with Brandt – in terms of popular involvement Brandt later called it the greatest day in the history of Berlin prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The report of the US Mission spoke of the ‘problem in [the] proper choice of superlatives’ to describe the ‘tumultuous’, ‘unprecedented’ and ‘overwhelming’ reception accorded to the President; the embassy in Bonn confessed that ‘All attempts to depict the reception in writing are bound to be inadequate from the viewpoint of those who were physically present’; the new ambassador remembered how ‘Individually and collectively, the Germans were having a love affair with young Jack Kennedy’; and Bundy recalled an ‘extraordinary and fantastic, I’ve never-seen-anything-like-this-before kind of day’. When it was over Kennedy told Sorensen: ‘We’ll never have another day like this one as long as we live.’40 It was in this intense atmosphere of excitement and elation that Kennedy delivered his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech in front of Brandt’s town hall: a rousing anti-Communist tirade – and not at all what the President was supposed to say. After four hours of riding through the passionate crowds, Kennedy had decided that the prepared speech was no good. Discarding all but three passages from the carefully edited, but uncompelling draft (but keeping those on the Wall and reunification), Kennedy improvised one of his most famous speeches with minimal preparation time in Brandt’s office, where he continued to practise the pronunciation of the now included ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’41 with the Mayor. The result was rhetorically far more potent than the original draft and considerably more aggressive.42 There was more than rhetoric to Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, though: it did what Henry Kissinger, then briefly a consultant to the White House, had suggested to Kennedy as early as April 1961, it staked the prestige of the President himself to the freedom of West Berlin. Brandt delivered the translation of ‘the strongest US engagement imaginable’ to the Berlin House of Representatives on 3 September: ‘The German capital enjoys the same protection as the cities of the United States.’43 But while the crowd in front of the President loved it, Bundy and presidential counsel and ghostwriter Theodore Sorensen, standing behind him, did not. The whole tone of the speech sat uneasily with the diction of the recent ‘peace speech’, and, worse, Kennedy produced an impromptu criticism of those ‘who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists’. This was not only the opposite of what Brandt was about to do before the year was out, it was also the opposite of the whole 83

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philosophy of the peace speech, and that from a President who was busily trying to negotiate a test ban treaty with those very Communists. Kennedy had been carried away.44 But in spite of its enduring fame, the town hall speech was not Kennedy’s most important address in Berlin. The damage was repaired in the politically more substantial address at the Free University that night, when the President inserted a comment authored by Bundy to give his slip a narrow interpretation: ‘As I said this morning, I am not impressed by the opportunities open to popular fronts throughout the world.’45 In the days to come, Brandt and Bahr, who had a stake in this, were busy spreading this interpretation. But this was only a mere detail compared to the weight of the Free University speech itself. Point by point, the President articulately covered almost all of the key tenets of Brandt’s thoughts and speeches on Germany, Berlin and détente: the Free University speech was no less than an ill-concealed critique of Bonn’s foreign policy, a full-blown endorsement of Brandt’s evolving policy of small steps, and an encouragement to go further with the blessing of the American superpower. ‘Adenauer’s face became stony. Brandt applauded,’ as Bahr observed tersely.46 The close connection between the President’s speech and Brandt’s positions was a genuine expression of the convergence of Kennedy’s and Brandt’s thinking, but it did not simply fall into place by chance. Brandt had served as a point of reference during the genesis of the President’s speeches. Both Rusk and Kennedy himself had asked Brandt for suggestions for the speeches; Sorensen, one of the main ghostwriters, also consulted Brandt; and on 20 June David Klein forwarded Bundy, one of the authors, a memorandum on ‘Thoughts by Willy Brandt which Might be Incorporated in the Berlin Speeches’, focusing on Brandt’s Rotary Club speech, which he had received from Carl Kaysen, who was yet another member of the drafting group: ‘It has some things which are worth using and I think it does offer a formula which could be used if the President is going to talk about reunification. . . . And, in the East–West context, Brandt has a few cogent thoughts, too, which might be picked up’.47 Four months after his triumphant re-election, Brandt basked in the glory of Kennedy’s visit and enjoyed open American support for his policy – Brandt’s relationship with Kennedy had reached its pinnacle and built considerable momentum for a policy of détente in Berlin at a time when the first measures of détente between the superpowers were about to take off. The transition from thinking to doing was in the air. ‘Your visit to Germany has . . . helped many people understand correctly your strategy of peace’, Brandt wrote to Kennedy on 7 July: ‘I hope that through contributions of our own we will be able both to help you and to move forward step by step toward solving our own problems.’48 Before the doing, however, there was one last round of talking: Brandt, Bahr and Albertz cashed in on Kennedy’s endorsement and brought the Kennedy momentum to bear in order to smooth the ground. This began with a full-blown Kennedy campaign: Bahr’s Press and Information Office produced 350,000 copies of a colour pamphlet to be distributed to 84

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every Berlin family with the full text of Kennedy’s speeches, a preface by Brandt and no less than eight pictures of Brandt and Kennedy being youthful and attractive together, while additional copies of Kennedy’s speeches were printed for distribution in schools.49 For the next months and years Brandt and his associates hardly missed a single opportunity to quote Kennedy’s speeches in promotion of Brandt’s policy, and the Free University speech in particular provided them with an entire arsenal of suitable, authoritative maxims and mottoes. Some liked what they heard, while others did not: Brandt’s 4 July statement to the Berlin House of Representatives about Kennedy’s Berlin visit lead to an unexpected exchange with his ex-coalition partner and now leader of the opposition, Franz Amrehn, who resisted the idea that German reunification should only be possible in a changed all-European context, insisted that reunification had to be the starting point, and warned against an interim solution.50 The Americans, on the other hand, were pleased. When Brandt used a speech in Bremerhaven in September to drum home the message once more, David Klein passed an underlined version on to Bundy: ‘I am sending you this in case you and the President have not already seen Brandt’s remarks at Bremerhaven. Brandt, as more often than not, has said things that must be told to a German audience.’51 By then, however, Bahr had already gone further than Brandt in telling the Germans things they did not want to hear. At the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing on 15 July, Bahr’s famous contribution stole the show from Brandt’s comparatively bland speech at the same event. This was because Bahr’s contribution was anything but bland: in one speech he coined the two key-slogans of Ostpolitik, Wandel durch Annäherung (change through rapprochement) and the dialectical ‘overcoming of the status quo by not changing the status quo at first’, the latter offered as a paraphrase of US policy. Bahr now purported to apply Kennedy’s ‘strategy of peace’ to Germany: by working with the East German regime and helping it to improve living conditions, Bahr argued, the West could contribute to a transformation of that regime as a lessening of popular discontent would relieve it of its fear of subversion and thereby allow it to risk change and a relaxation of control, including border control.52 Three characteristics distinguished Bahr’s Tutzing speech from Harvard or Brandt’s own Tutzing speech. The first was pure style: where Brandt remained cautious, hazy and at times elusive, but always warm, Bahr was cold, logical, concrete and precise. In a sense it was due to Bahr’s clarity that it began to dawn on the German public what Brandt had been saying for some time. Second, Bahr applied Brandt’s and Kennedy’s general tenets to the specific question of German–German relations. At first sight, this was only logical, but the peculiarities of the German case led to conceptual complications, and when it came to the consequences, the result suddenly sounded much more explosive than Brandt’s prescriptions for the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, ‘Communist countries’ or ‘the East’. Bahr’s Tutzing speech was what Brandt’s third chapter for the Harvard book should have been but was not. The reason why this sounded so much more explosive was, third, that it 85

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required a reconsideration of the recognition issue – and Bahr did not duck the question. While ruling out a de jure recognition of the GDR ‘as a legitimate state’, he advocated de facto recognition in all but name: he made it perfectly clear that the desired ‘changes and alterations are only feasible based on the detested regime, which presently rules there’; he warned that the constant recognition discussion was dangerous because it threatened to lead into a political culde-sac and obstruct all practical policy; he relentlessly listed all the ‘bashful’ contacts which the Federal Republic did in fact already maintain with the East German regime; he reminded his listeners of how the United States had accepted the orders of the East German Minister of the Interior after 13 August 1961 and suggestively pointed out that the ambassadors of China and the US had negotiated with each other for years without the US recognizing Red China. ‘I come to the conclusion’, Bahr declared, ‘that below the level of legal recognition, below the acknowledged legitimacy of this coercive regime, so much has become common practice that it must, if necessary, also be possible to use these forms in a sense that is favourable to us’. The manuscript of Peter Bender’s forthcoming Offensive Entspannung (‘Détente on the Offensive’), which had inspired Bahr’s position, took the last step and openly called for recognition. In a friendly letter Bahr asked permission to use Bender’s ideas, expressed his admiration but cautioned that an active politician could not endorse the concept fully – ‘I think we can not go that far here’.53 Together this made for an explosive mix and Harold Hurwitz, for one, disagreed with Bahr, disputed that Tutzing could be derived from either Harvard or Kennedy’s ‘strategy of peace’ and told Brandt so: I do not understand how he could say these things after contributing as he did to the coexistence book. His position, while understandable in terms of the issues that existed between us at that time, is certainly a most radical development of the final position you took there.54 And Hurwitz was the least of Brandt’s problems: in an enormous public outcry the press, the CDU, the national SPD and even the Berlin SPD all pounced on Bahr. The lesson was ambiguous. Bahr realized the power of the public taboo and drew the conclusion that it had to be dealt with ‘in tiny steps’, but as Hurwitz later pointed out it showed what could as well as what could not be done: ‘Tutzing was a Belastung [a burden], but also, in the long run, if you ride out that time, then it showed that you could get away with it.’ And part of the reason why Bahr could get away with it was that he could frame his concept as a consequence of President Kennedy’s policy: ‘the CDU cannot fight through to the ultimate conclusion if that forces it to admit that it, or important parts of this party, basically dislikes the entire direction of the American administration’, as he wrote to Herbert Wehner.55 The trick worked, Bahr survived the storm, and only months later did the universally decried Tutzing speech began to emerge as the generally acknowledged point of reference for Brandt’s policy. 86

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With Kennedy behind him, the cautious Brandt was now pushed ahead by his more daring and increasingly less patient advisers. In an unaccommodating speech on the second anniversary of the Wall, Albertz, by now Brandt’s deputy as Mayor, mounted an impatient defence of Bahr without mentioning him by name: he reminded his listeners once more that ‘one world power, two great powers and we Germans, too’ had acquiesced in the GDR’s control over access to East Berlin; spoke of a ‘push into reality’; accused ‘those responsible in Bonn’ of enhancing the GDR’s status by blowing up the recognition issue; and duplicated Bahr’s list of existing de facto contacts – ‘What, then, is all the prattle about?’ Three days later Albertz went even further and plainly told Der Abend that it was necessary ‘to finally take note that a state authority has established itself in the Zone, albeit with prison warders at the top’.56 By now the CDU opposition in Berlin had had enough and filed a vote of no confidence against Albertz. The motion was defeated, but Brandt’s qualified defence of Bahr and Albertz and his conciliatory government statement marked the difference between the plain words of his two key aides and Brandt’s preference for a more non-committal approach to the public. Brandt did his considerable best to obfuscate the meaning of de jure and de facto recognition, but concealed in a plethora of woolly and contradictory statements, there was a slight but potentially significant shift of emphasis, away from the unambiguous assurance in Brandt’s last government declaration on 18 March that there ‘will be no negotiations between Berlin and Soviet Zone authorities’ towards the more elastic message that technical contacts did not constitute recognition.57 In reality, all this was for show only. As a matter of fact Brandt had already treated the new American ambassador to a rundown of the core ideas behind Bahr’s Tutzing speech as early as 4 June, six weeks prior to Tutzing; and once the deed was done he immediately told American diplomats that Bahr’s ideas were interesting and that ‘we think alike’. In spite of Hurwitz’s criticism, the only real differences were about public relations, not about the concept.58 The concept was ready, and in the second half of 1963 both Kennedy and Brandt moved from conceptualizing and speechifying to active détente policy. To Bonn’s unpleasant surprise, the Kennedy administration managed to achieve the nuclear test ban treaty which Kennedy had aimed for in his ‘peace speech’. The treaty, the first of the great détente accords and the precursor of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the SALT agreements, was agreed on 25 July and immediately led to the third major crisis in US–German relations in one and a half years. The signatory powers asked all states – including the GDR – to join the treaty and allowed for possible follow-up conferences with all these states, which conflicted with the West German position, which not only refused to recognize the GDR government, but maintained the illusion that there was no East German state at all. One of the key lessons of the test ban treaty was how untenable that construction was becoming. ‘Now suspicions have been growing’, the US embassy recorded, ‘that the British and the Americans are reaching the point where they will not permit that fact, or the pretense that there 87

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is no fact, to stand in the way of improving East–West relations’. That was indeed precisely what was happening when US Ambassador George McGhee told Foreign Minister Schröder plainly that the ‘small nuance that lay in the fact that the Soviet Occupied Zone gained a little bit more attention was not significant enough to block an agreement about a nuclear test stop’. ‘To many Germans’, the embassy’s analysis therefore concluded, ‘this proves either that they themselves have been wrong, or that their Allies are now on the point of betraying them – both equally hard conclusions to swallow.’ 59 The Chancellor and his followers in Bonn reached the latter conclusion. Adenauer even threatened to resign over the treaty, but in the end was persuaded to be content with a procedural arrangement whereby the GDR would only deposit its accession in Moscow, while Krone noted in his diary that ‘We are the victims of the American détente policy. . . . One day the Americans will relinquish their previous policy on Germany in the interest of détente’. But Krone not only complained about the Americans, he also complained about Brandt: ‘And Brandt? The SPD? I am still surprised how little weight the worries about the Zone carry for them’.60 Brandt was indeed reaching the other conclusion and advocated the treaty in the Bundesrat and the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, repeatedly welcomed it in public, and criticized the government for its handling of the affair.61 But then it did not take him by surprise. Bundy had suggested ‘that we find some way of communicating to Brandt and expressing the nature of the Harriman mission’ to negotiate the treaty, and by 9 July a relevant passage was still included in the draft of the President’s thank you-letter to Brandt after the Berlin visit. This was cut, but by then Kaysen had already been used as the back-channel to Brandt instead, and in a letter of 5 July, five days before the peace speech, Kaysen told Brandt that and why the President considered a test ban treaty ‘of the highest importance’. The letter was an indication of how important and useful Brandt had become, but it also mattered for its content. Kaysen assured Brandt that Khrushchev’s attempt to link the treaty to a nonaggression pact would be tackled with German interests in mind, but did not discard the idea: ‘It may well be possible, however, that, framed in a context which insures the present Western position in Berlin, some form of nonaggression arrangement can be advantageous to us.’ Khrushchev still did not want to compromise on Berlin and the non-aggression pact once more failed to materialize, but the idea had resurfaced once more.62 On 4 August Brandt had a chance to discuss the treaty with McNamara and Nitze in Salzburg: he welcomed the agreement and hoped that more would follow – the exact opposite of Adenauer’s policy.63 From the American point of view, the SPD now offered the full package: it had supported the US in the argument over Berlin in the East–West negotiations; it had supported the US in the argument over European integration, transatlantic partnership and the Gaullist challenge; and it supported the test ban treaty and was content with West Germany’s non-nuclear status (it was only under Brandt that the Federal 88

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Republic later signed the non-proliferation treaty). The Social Democratic stance reflected not only the party’s new pro-American reflexes, but its old anti-nuclear and disarmament traditions as well as its present agreement with US security policy. The SPD, as Brandt kept telling the Americans at every opportunity, did not want nuclear weapons for Germany (which was why Erler’s and Brandt’s scepticism towards the MLF did not matter much from the American point of view). As stated before the last elections, the SPD would approve of any disarmament arrangement agreed by the Great Powers – the idea was to then use the resulting improvement in the international climate for the German cause.64 But how did that linkage work – and did it work? Marc Trachtenberg, Christof Münger, and, to a lesser extent, Andreas Wenger have argued that the limited test ban treaty really represented a hidden Berlin agreement.65 At the heart of this interpretation lies the notion that the Soviet Union and the United States informally traded a guarantee of West Germany’s non-nuclear status and the de facto recognition embodied in the GDR’s participation in the treaty against an implicit understanding that the Soviet Union would respect the status quo in West Berlin. While there is no doubt that 1962/1963 marked a watershed in the Cold War in Europe, this interpretation, at least as far as the test ban treaty is concerned, is problematic and ultimately puts the cart before the horse. West Germany’s accession to the treaty cemented Adenauer’s less binding 1954 reassurance that the Federal Republic would not produce nuclear weapons, but it did not settle the more pertinent question whether it might be supplied with them. While it was credible that the Kennedy administration would never do so, there was no telling what future administrations might decide, and since France did not accede and pressed ahead with the development of the force de frappe, the possibility also remained that one day France might yet strike a nuclear deal with the Federal Republic. Even after the Élysée treaty had effectively been neutralized, this was not all that far-fetched: in summer 1964, de Gaulle, in an apparent attempt to shoot down the MLF, tantalized the West German government with an informal offer of nuclear cooperation.66 Contrary to Münger’s and Trachtenberg’s claims, the letters of the test ban treaty therefore did not serve the same purpose as a non-proliferation agreement, and the Soviet Union had no guarantee that the non-proliferation spirit it breathed in 1963 would not evaporate. If the question of Germany’s non-nuclear status was so important for the Berlin crisis, the Soviets would have done much better to take the formal Berlin settlement on offer from Kennedy, which would have provided the nuclear non-dissemination guarantee that the test ban treaty did not. Even more crucially, the argument hinges on the alleged link between Eastern gains in the test ban treaty and respect for the status quo in West Berlin – but Trachtenberg only shows that the issues were linked ‘in people’s minds’, while Münger and Wenger only provide a few reassuring Khrushchev remarks about Berlin, which as a matter of fact came along with less reassuring rambling about stepping on the West’s ‘corn’ in Berlin.67 Not only does it seem unbelievable that the United States should trade binding concessions in an international 89

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treaty against revocable verbal remarks, but the very reason why no formal settlement came about (and why, despite Soviet and American interest, the test ban treaty was not linked to a non-aggression pact) was precisely Khrushchev’s refusal to guarantee the status quo in West Berlin. There was no deal: the test ban treaty came about not because of a link to Berlin, but because of common interests (and therefore was no American concession, just as East Germany’s participation was a consequence of the treaty’s multilateral design rather than a Western concession), while in spite of strong incentives a Berlin agreement failed to come about because, in the absence of common interests, Khrushchev refused to strike a deal. The real reason why the Berlin crisis ebbed away was much more informal than anything related to the test ban treaty, it was the post-Cuba realization that challenging the status quo in Europe could be suicidal. The point about the little détente of 1963 was precisely that it did not come in the shape of a Berlin settlement. Instead what happened was exactly what Brandt had perceptively feared almost immediately after the Cuban Missile crisis: the superpowers began to leave Berlin aside and got on with détente by focusing on other issues, which threatened to entail West German concessions without trading them for benefits in Berlin. For Brandt as the Mayor of Berlin and already one of West Germany’s foremost proponents of détente this meant that he was left with no safeguard for the vulnerable access to West Berlin, no prospect of an international Berlin settlement that might take care of his pressing humanitarian needs in the divided city, and the growing realization that if détente were to further the German cause, the Germans would have to do it themselves. That was what he now, for the first time, set out to do, and the fact that, half a year after Kennedy, Brandt, too, sprang into action, had a lot to do with the fact that the detour via international politics had not yielded the humanitarian results he needed in Berlin. The humanitarian problem went back to 1961 when, after the Wall went up, the GDR had offered to set up offices in West Berlin that would issue permits for West Berliners wishing to visit East Berlin. This implied that the Wall was there to stay and that the GDR would execute sovereign acts on West Berlin territory – a lot to swallow in the heated atmosphere of August 1961. In line with the public mood, but against the advice of both Bahr and Albertz, Brandt had made a momentous mistake and, instead of playing the issue down, refused the offer. ‘[The] Senat’, the US Mission reported to Washington, ‘realizes that this would mean denying [the] right of West Berliners to go to East Berlin and [the] Sov[iet ]zone, but believed it more important to prohibit [the] existence [of] such travel offices in West Berlin.’ Brandt had declined what could have been the lesser evil and possibly a permanent and unlimited arrangement – something it now took him until 1971 to achieve.68 For the next two years Brandt desperately tried to regain access to East Berlin for his West Berliners without having to shoulder the responsibility for dealing with the GDR. One way to do this was to use either non-state actors or ‘tech90

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nical contacts’ like the Red Cross, lawyers, churches, the Interzonal Trade Office or the municipal administration of East Berlin, and Brandt tried over and over again. Brandt’s other hope had been that the Allies might either solve the problem for him or provide him with an officially approved negotiation channel. He had tried hard to make an improvement in inter-sector traffic an objective, if not a condition, of an internationally negotiated modus vivendi agreement for Berlin. Short of such a solution on a silver platter, Brandt would also have been happy for the Occupation Powers to commission the Germans to innocently negotiate on an ‘expert level’ on their behalf, an old idea, which he pitched to the Kennedy administration four times, culminating in his August 1963 Salzburg meeting with McNamara and Nitze, where he straight out asked to be ordered.69 Though much less helpful than Brandt would have liked, the Americans had not been unsympathetic. In autumn 1961 the Allies had gone along with Brandt’s suggestion that the three Western commandants should propose check points on the border line to the Soviet commandant, while the Allied Kommandantura had given Brandt’s Senat the desired authorization to discuss arrangements with the Soviet Sector city administration.70 Their ‘draft principles’ had provided for an all-Berlin technical commission to deal with traffic and other municipal matters, which was exactly the kind of German–German expert talk under Allied aegis that Brandt kept asking for; and in June 1962 the Americans had even been prepared to propose the commission independent of the ‘draft principles’ package.71 But both Brandt and the Americans ran into the same problem, when East Berlin and Moscow kept signalling time and again that this was a matter for negotiations with the East German government, and since in the meantime the Federal Republic did its best to shoot down the ‘draft principles’ and stopped the proposal for an independently established technical commission, the US had begun to lose interest. After all, as the American officer at the site of Peter Fechter’s death had allegedly pointed out so harshly, this was not their problem: the principal American concern with Berlin was security, not humanitarian alleviation. As Kennedy, who had not much sympathy for the West German refusal to talk to the East Germans anyway, told Brandt so plainly in October 1962, it was now up to the Germans themselves to show some initiative. Brandt, slowly, got the message. As he told the Berlin House of Representatives on 9 January, it was foolish ‘to sit around and wait for what the Four [Powers] might one day do about Germany. That way we’ll go down the drain!’ After two years of bitter experiences, the conclusion was clear: ‘You cannot get permits from Bonn, Washington, Moscow, not even the Chinese, but only from East Berlin. Ergo, one must talk with them, probably not with the municipal administration in the Red town hall, but with the government. . . .’72 And in December 1963, less than four weeks after Kennedy’s death, Brandt finally did. On 5 December he received a half-provoked offer of negotiations from the Deputy Chairman of the GDR Council of Ministers, Alexander Abusch: the GDR offered a temporary permit arrangement that would allow West Berliners 91

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to visit relatives in East Berlin over Christmas. Brandt seized his chance, and after a flurry of complicated negotiations, the first Berlin pass agreement was signed on 17 December 1963. The significance of the Berlin pass agreement for the development of Ostpolitik and German–German relations can hardly be overrated. To start with, it introduced the humanitarian element into practical détente policy: for the first time humanitarian concerns took centre stage and began the way that would eventually lead via innumerable German–German arrangements to the humanitarian ‘basket 3’ of the CSCE Helsinki accords in 1975. The intense negotiations, however, did not revolve as much around the humanitarian goods, as around the political price. ‘The Sov[iet ]Zone rulers’, as Brandt had complained in August, ‘were only interested in exploiting human suffering in order [to] advance their political objectives’ – that is to say, in return for humanitarian favours the GDR wanted some recognition. Brandt had repeatedly rejected this ‘political blackmail’, but in the end the GDR, enjoying the stranglehold it had established with the Wall and the patience of a dictatorship that could now afford to ignore the humanitarian needs of its citizens, had the greater staying power. Ultimately the dilemma boiled down to the question whether strict nonrecognition was worth the humanitarian price, or whether humanitarian relief was worth the political price, and Brandt eventually opted for the latter. ‘For Bahr and Brandt’, the US Embassy reported, ‘[the] Christmas Pass success appears to have opened [a] gate to [a] road which they wish to travel and for which they are prepared to pay the tolls.’73 But that still depended on how high exactly the price was. Brandt himself later marvelled at the ‘contortions’ that resulted from the haggling between West and East Berlin and admitted that ‘the acrobatic formulas devised to protect each side’s interests must appear not only incomprehensible but positively absurd to the outsider’.74 Brandt’s negotiator Senatsrat Horst Korber (backed up by the invisible Bahr) was a mere civil servant, his negotiation partner Erich Wendt a GDR state secretary. Negotiations in West Berlin took place in the Office for Urban Traffic outside Brandt’s town hall, but in East Berlin they were held not in a municipal building, but in the House of the GDR Council of Ministers. Since the GDR would not accept visitors from ‘Berlin’ (redolent of unity), while the Senat refused to use ‘West Berlin’ (evoking independence) ‘Berlin (East)’ and ‘Berlin (West)’ were invented for their geographical innocence. Bahr, under the circumstances unable to speak of either the ‘GDR’ or the ‘Zone’ resorted to the term ‘the other side’. The negotiators signed a ‘protocol’ instead of an agreement, which Korber signed ‘on the instruction of the Chief of the Senat Chancellory, given on behalf of the Governing Mayor of Berlin’, distancing Brandt as far as possible from the signature, while Wendt signed ‘on the instruction of the Deputy of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the German Democratic Republic’ – ‘a recognition feast in genitives’, as Bahr called it decades later. In the event, East Berlin postal employees collected the permit application forms in West Berlin, brought them to East Berlin where the ‘sovereign act’ of issuing 92

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the permits took place, before they were brought back to be handed out in West Berlin, so that the West Berliners could take them back to East Berlin.75 In short, the West Berliners did all they could to avoid the character of an international treaty, to avert the danger of a self-recognition as an independent entity apart from the Federal Republic and to prevent a legal recognition of the GDR by implication, while the East Germans were busily trying to achieve the opposite. The difference was papered over with Heinrich Albertz’s ‘salvatory clause’: ‘Both sides established that it was impossible to reach agreement on joint definitions of localities, authorities, and official posts.’ This agree to disagree formula, which made it possible to conclude a practical agreement in spite of fundamental and irreconcilable legal differences, had potential: it prefigured the identical approach in the Quadripartite Berlin Agreement of 1971, then suggested by Bahr to Kissinger.76 The hard-fought compromise thus struck the balance that made agreement possible, but the iron fact remained that Brandt had negotiated and concluded an agreement with the East German government. He had dealt with, though not spoken of, the GDR as a state: in essence this was Brandt’s de facto recognition of the GDR. The East German state was there and had to be dealt with – Bahr had insinuated no less in Tutzing and now told the US Mission that the pass agreement, ‘including [the] methods and means of achieving it, is regarded as a first step in [the] implementation of [the] “Bahr thesis” as set forth in his July 1963 speech at Tutzing’.77 But Tutzing was about more than just recognition, and so was the pass agreement. Basically Tutzing was about using de facto recognition to achieve contacts that would have an impact in East Germany – and by conceding the first bit of de facto recognition, the pass agreement provided the first round of these contacts. So Brandt was not the only one paying a price. As the US Mission diagnosed one year later, there was a wager at the heart of the pass agreements: ‘In a sense it appears that Brandt and those of like persuasion on the Western side, and the GDR regime in the East, are each betting that movement in this direction will advance their own policy more than that of the other side.’ As Bahr later confirmed, that was precisely what he was betting: Both could count on having come closer to their different aims: we, to turn the temporary opening into a permanent institution; they, to have advanced recognition. . . . Part of this policy was exactly that both stakeholders remained interested because they could hope that their calculation would work out. One will see who has the better hand in the end. . . . With the permits the whole philosophy of Ostpolitik has been tested in a nutshell.78 And the success seemed to bear Brandt and Bahr out: the GDR expected 30,000 visitors and got 790,000, paying a total of 1.2 million visits in 18 days, resulting in an estimated four million people seeing each other again – ‘an enormous little 93

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success’ (Bahr) and a ‘great achievement’ (Brandt) for the Mayor and his team. Brandt later called 18 December 1963, when the first permits coincided with his birthday, one of the happiest days of his life. That happiness mattered politically: Brandt learned that dealing with the GDR government could achieve not only the kind of progress that otherwise remained gridlocked, but also domestic success – while controversial among West German politicians, the pass agreement was hugely popular with the Berliners. Movement was possible, and for the second time after his election victory one year ago, Brandt had the experience that a more flexible policy towards the East could enjoy popular support and thus be politically sustainable.79 What all this added up to was a breakthrough in German–German relations and the policy formation of Ostpolitik – but under fire from West Germany Brandt innocently assured the public that the pass agreement was ‘no new policy’ and that it ‘was not and is not intended to launch a “new policy” here’. By now this was palpable nonsense, and no one in the political scene believed him, not the US embassy in Bonn, not the US Mission in Berlin, and not the suspicious guardians of traditional Deutschlandpolitik in Bonn and Berlin. Amrehn, who enumerated in detail how Brandt’s Senat had departed from its previous line, was able to quote both Brandt’s new coalition partner, the Free Democrats, and the more candid Albertz against Brandt in the Berlin House of Representatives; Bahr frankly explained in a letter to ex-FDP chairman Thomas Dehler why more progress could be made if the pass agreement was not declared a ‘new policy’; and later Brandt himself admitted that it is ‘a mistake to think we were unaware of the precedent we were setting, but there was no point in talking about it. Let sleeping dogs lie, we thought.’80 The Americans, for one, were not sleeping. The ‘decision to treat with GDR state rep[resentatives]s . . . involves [a] fairly significant new departure’, as Ambassador George McGhee cabled to Washington from Bonn: It is in fact a potential ‘quantum jump’, from which extensive consequences could flow aside from those connected with [the] mere pass issue alone. . . . [The] Germans seem to maintain the rationale for the pass talks that only ‘technical contacts’ are still involved. Although this may satisfy [the] public, it does not alter [the] transaction.81 Kennedy had effectively encouraged the Germans to do this for three years, but now Kennedy was dead, and so the crucial question was what the American position was going to be. Brandt hastened to stress the full agreement with the Allies, but while this was not exactly untrue, there was certainly an element of exaggeration: ‘Bahr, in Berlin’, the US Embassy noted, ‘has presented such [a] patently false version of [the] extent to which [the] Allies were consulted in [the] pass negotiations as to arouse [the] suspicions of press reporters’.82 In fact, Brandt hardly consulted the Allies at all. They had, as they told the German Foreign Office, been ‘informed, but not consulted’, and the US Mission 94

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repeatedly complained about Brandt’s haste and with angry irony placed his ‘consultation’ in quotation marks.83 ‘Well, should we also have to ask them?’ Bahr later wondered: ‘now that has a little bit to do with the fact that this Brandt slowly began to feel grown-up. And, as a grown-up, I act. I inform, as is fit and proper, but I do not ask each time like a minor’.84 This harked back to Brandt’s treatment of the Americans in the run-up to the abortive meeting with Khrushchev one year earlier, but it also foreshadowed the heyday of Ostpolitik, when Henry Kissinger would once more note with irritation that Brandt did not consult, but only inform. But while the Americans disliked the consultation procedure, they did not disagree in principle. The recommendations of the US Embassy and Mission remained cautious, but on balance mildly favourable, while the ambassador himself ‘was pleased with this result’: ‘I believed that we should support Brandt and told him so.’ Accordingly, he told the State Department on 11 December that ‘there seems to be no call for us to define German interest in dealings with [the] GDR. Indeed in [the] past we have seen conceivable advantages in some such dealings, although [the] Germans have always balked at [the] idea’. Consequently the Department approved both the initial negotiations and the following attempt to negotiate permanent arrangements, while David Klein made the case for the pass agreement in the White House.85 The Americans did, however, have two recurring concerns: to safeguard the authority of the Allies in Berlin and to avoid ‘becoming enmeshed in conflicts of views between [the] Senat and [the] FRG, between political parties in Germany or between contesting political figures on this highly political subject’.86 The first could easily be accommodated, but the second one was not what Brandt was hoping for. The pass agreement was not only incompatible with West Germany’s traditional Eastern policy, it was also a spanner in the works for Foreign Minister Schröder’s new policy of movement, which was designed to combine a guarded opening towards Eastern Europe with a pronounced exclusion of East Germany in an attempt to isolate the GDR. Brandt had taken the federal government by surprise, used the time pressure to coax and cajole it into going along, and now faced accusations of pursuing his own foreign policy and resistance against further agreements – some overt American support would have been more than welcome. In March, May and June 1964, Erler, Brandt and Albertz all promoted the pass agreement in Washington, but they all came up against the same position. ‘The point that Brandt should take away with him’, Bundy advised President Johnson, ‘is that although we feel every effort should be made to “humanize” the Wall, the means of accomplishing this should be worked out jointly by Bonn and Berlin, in consultation with the Western Allies . . .’ – and the very first thing Brandt got to hear from Rusk was how important it was not to allow the Berlin and German questions to become a partisan issue. Brandt was not pleased and repeatedly told his American hosts that he ‘would like the Allies to take more than a neutral position in these questions. He felt that what the West Berlin 95

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government was attempting to do was in line with President Kennedy’s thinking of a step by step process. If this was so, there needed to be discussions between the two sides.’87 But although the Americans refused to give Brandt the public support he wanted, they did still support him: not only did they protect Brandt against an attempt by the German Foreign Office to effectively cut him out of the consultation loop,88 they also backed his new policy internally. When the German government delegation came to meet their American counterparts in Texas at the end of December 1963, the President told the new Chancellor that ‘he was pleased with the project, for it showed flexibility and imagination’, Erhard immediately disagreed, and the tone was set for a series of confrontations, which culminated in a thinly veiled onslaught on Bonn’s ‘rigid’ German policy by Bundy, who insistently challenged the Chancellor with a summary of the rationale behind an alternative policy based inter alia on ‘a more flexible position on the question of relations with East Germany’. While Brandt complained about the ‘neutral’ Americans, the head of the Federal Chancellery’s foreign policy department noted in his diary that ‘certain circles in America and West Berlin are scheming together in this question in order to boost the SPD’.89 Brandt had more support than he knew. But even so he knew that he was still in accord and that the US did in fact welcome the agreement – not least because the Berlin Task Force told him and Rusk told Albertz so in Washington.90 So Brandt made do, pursued his policy, referred to the Allies nonetheless, and in the end it was enough: Brandt had set out on his path and would successfully negotiate three further pass agreements by 1966. He would have preferred to travel that path with Kennedy, but the ‘murder of our mentor’, as Harold Hurwitz called it in a letter on Christmas Eve 1963, prevented this. Three decades later Brandt still considered Kennedy’s assassination ‘a misfortune for the whole world’.91 Brandt flew to Washington and attended John F. Kennedy’s funeral, a mayor and opposition leader among the heads of state and government: during the memorial ceremony in St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Brandt was placed among the friends of the family. The German delegation tried to cut the unwelcome addition to their party, but instead of the German Chancellor, President or Foreign Minister, it was the Mayor whom the Kennedys invited to the White House. An awed Brandt walked the halls of the temporarily deserted White House, before he met with the family, then with Bobby and Jacqueline, finally with the widow alone.92 For the next two years, Brandt would continue to arrange for private meetings with Jacqueline Kennedy during his US trips and lay wreaths at Kennedy’s grave. But Brandt was not only perhaps the most meaningful German guest at Kennedy’s funeral in Washington, he also led the mourning in Berlin and Germany. At 1 a.m. on the very night the news had reached him, he already spoke in front of 70,000 Berliners; the next day he went on television for the second time to commemorate Kennedy on West Germany’s main televisionnews programme, before speaking to the Berliners at a first official mourning 96

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rally on the evening of the 23rd.93 From there on Brandt saw to it that for the next years Kennedy was incessantly commemorated in and by Berlin, while he himself put out a constant stream of obituaries and commemorative essays. While his veneration was genuine, the constant commemoration was not without political incentives: Brandt was trying for charisma by association. Nowhere did this become more apparent than in his book Encounters With Kennedy, a rush job after Kennedy’s death, which treated the reader to an abundance of suitable Kennedy quotes and made use of every opportunity to portray the two politicians together. In an unfriendly review, the Zeit mocked it as ‘Encounters With Brandt’, and the US Mission, too, came to the conclusion that this was an electioneering piece about Brandt, not Kennedy. From Brandt’s point of view, this blending of Brandt and Kennedy was precisely the point. The book concluded with the appeal that the flame of hope that slipped from Kennedy’s hands must be carried on – and there was little question who was destined to pick it up. By celebrating the Kennedy cult Brandt cast himself as Kennedy’s political executor in Germany and Europe, and Kennedy’s widow, for one, gave her blessing when she compared Brandt to her late husband and wrote him of her hope ‘that you will someday . . . lead your country as he led his’.94 Considering how closely Brandt had become identified with Kennedy, it is worth remembering that this was the President who tolerated and arguably invited the Berlin Wall and put unprecedented pressure on West Germany’s Deutschlandpolitik. As Peter Bender later pointed out, ‘Hardly any American President has treated the Germans so ruthlessly, and none became as popular with them’95 – a paradox that included Brandt. Kennedy’s Berlin policy in the summer of 1961 never became what Brandt hoped for and was ultimately incompatible with his own suggestions; the American acceptance of the Wall shocked him; the turn of US policy on Germany in autumn 1961 took him half a year to adjust to; the American nonchalance vis-à-vis the access dangers that resulted from West Germany’s non-recognition practice disturbed him; and his hope that the Americans might lead the Allies in fixing his humanitarian problems in Berlin was disappointed. And yet, in spite of this notable series of differences and disappointments, Brandt had strongly supported the President – and had come a long way in the process. Unlike in 1960, Brandt now genuinely sought a Berlin agreement, and he accepted that such an agreement could only be negotiated in a larger framework, knowing full well that this now meant imminent concessions instead of indefinite talk of reunification. He had gone far in prioritizing Berlin’s interests over concerns regarding the status of the GDR: in stark contrast to his earlier opposition to Dulles’ agent theory, he was now prepared to accept GDR visas if necessary, and he finally abandoned his previously staunch refusal to deal with the GDR when he negotiated the Berlin pass agreement with its government. The pass agreement thus not only marked a milestone on Brandt’s way to Ostpolitik, it also was the appropriate conclusion to his intense three-year relationship with John F. Kennedy. At its core a German response to a German problem, 97

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it was partly in reaction to what Kennedy did (and did not do): it was encouraged by Kennedy’s own policy96 as well as by his pressure on German policy, and in its essence a German match for the President’s approach. As Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Brandt: ‘I know my husband would have done just what you did’.97 Tracing Brandt’s and Kennedy’s interaction shows how, together with some active encouragement, their very differences pushed Brandt towards adjusting his policy. In itself, however, it does not account for either Brandt’s readiness to adapt or the closeness of the relationship. After all, the Federal Government in Bonn was exposed to much the same pressures, but proved far less willing to go along with Kennedy. What, then, propelled the special relationship between Willy Brandt and John F. Kennedy? One key answer to explore is the intellectual affinity between Kennedy and what Clay called ‘the thinking Germans in Berlin’.98

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Part II SMALL STEPS TOWARDS NEW FRONTIERS? Values, ideas, concepts and the emergence of a détente strategy

8 FROM WORLDVIEW TO DÉTENTE STRATEGY Coexistence, transformation and conceptual concordance In all our talks in the last two and one-half years, I have been impressed by the degree to which we see these great issues alike ... (John F. Kennedy to Willy Brandt, 23 July 1963)1 Over lunch we talked about German–American relations and also about the concept of small steps. We noticed, not for the first time, a complete agreement . . . (Willy Brandt, ‘Noch einmal ging Kennedy ans Fenster . . .’, Bild am Sonntag, 22 January 1964)

Brandt, Kennedy and their relationship were embedded in the Western Cold War discourse on East–West relations – an increasingly ‘transnational system of ideas’,2 in which the German and American strands remained distinct but interdependent. On its most fundamental level, this went back to the West German turn towards the West after 1945 and the concomitant socio-cultural orientation toward Western values and practices that has been described as the ‘Westernization’ or ‘Americanization’ of West German society and political culture. It is tempting but somewhat misleading to portray Brandt as a product of ‘Americanization’. The crucial impact on his political socialization occurred during his time in exile in Scandinavia where he absorbed Norwegian and Swedish Social Democracy, before the contact with the West in Berlin continued what had begun in the North.3 But, as the US diplomatic service observed in 1965, the result remained the same: . . . Brandt’s origin and life have made him an ‘Atlantic man’ and an internationalist . . . Brandt came to feel completely at home in the Atlantic community of nations, learning their languages and absorbing their philosophies and traditions. He is, in short, a completely Westernoriented man for whom it is axiomatic that free Germany is and must remain basically a Western nation, whatever her future role vis-à-vis Eastern Europe.4 101

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Among other things this meant that for Brandt, to a much higher degree than for Bahr, America was always more than just a dominant power-political factor. Though not uncritical, Brandt not only liked Americans and America, where he felt at ease, it also represented the ‘epitome of freedom and democracy’ to him.5 Unusually for a Socialist, Brandt admired the American liberal tradition and was later well aware of the fundamental implications of West Germany’s turn to the West: Many citizens of the Federal Republic also understood this process as a moral, spiritual decision for the Western way and ideals of life. Democratisation can be grasped as the adaptation of the Western spirit. If that is so, then Adenauer’s foreign policy has helped to give a chance to the process of westernisation, which in my conviction has to be served for the development of the inner, individual and social forms of existence in our country. I put ‘Western’ here for that civic spirit which sustains the idea of a free and simultaneously social democracy.6 In his influence on German Social Democracy and eventually on the political culture of the country at large, Brandt became a pivotal catalyst of Westernization. Brandt was also highly integrated in the personal network that served as a social transmission belt for Westernization in the early Federal Republic: via his mentor Ernst Reuter and his friend Harold Hurwitz, he was connected to the Neu Beginnen group, to Melvin Lasky, the ‘dynamic centre’ of the evolving network in and beyond Berlin, to the CIA-funded ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’, and to the Reuther brothers and the American labour movement.7 These were not just American contacts in general or official contacts of the kind that Brandt maintained with many Americans, but a network of private connections that integrated Brandt specifically with American East Coast Liberalism. Nothing could have been more symbolic of Brandt’s position than his appearance at the Americans for Democratic Action during his first visit to Washington under the Kennedy administration, where he gave a pointedly titled dinner speech on ‘New Frontiers for German Democracy’ to celebrate the annual Roosevelt day, informed by notes on Roosevelt compiled by Harold Hurwitz, based in turn on the work of Arthur Schlesinger, and read into the Congressional Record by Hubert Humphrey.8 Against this background, it becomes understandable why Brandt, who felt a ‘certain intellectual distance, which was hard to bridge’ towards Eisenhower, already felt an ‘intellectual affinity’ with Kennedy even before he met with the new president, and that, when they met, Brandt immediately felt Kennedy to be sympathetic to his social and domestic agenda.9 With John F. Kennedy came a President who was apt to represent Brandt’s understanding of Western values, who was supported by and partly integrated into Brandt’s informal American network, and someone with whom he could connect personally. On the surface the two politicians were a perfect match: 102

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both of the same generation, young, attractive, restless, reformist, and able to laugh at the same jokes.10 This bridged the difference between the illegitimate working class child and the millionaire’s son. There were many personal differences, to be sure, but there was also a binding character trait: both were introverts at heart, womanizing yet recoiling from intimate contact, but with an exceptional ability to reach people. They shared the gift to make people fall in love with them, to inspire utter loyalty, and ‘to give other people the feeling, even the conviction that they all together served great ideals’.11 Both Kennedy’s and Brandt’s charisma were sustained by oratorical performances which at their best could be spellbinding and which helped to convey the perceived combination of an idealist vision and the ability to implement it as pragmatic realists in practice – Brandt was well aware of the magic of this combination and saw it clearly in Kennedy. Brandt and Kennedy could recognize themselves in each other. Brandt and his aides admired Kennedy genuinely and personally, but Kennedy, as Schlesinger later recounted, also ‘greatly liked Willy Brandt’. Theodore Sorensen, too, remembered how Kennedy ‘was particularly fond of . . . West Germany’s Willy Brandt’, and when asked whether the President had any German friends who had access to him ‘just because he knew them and liked them’, Martin Hillenbrand later replied that ‘the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt came as close to it as anyone else’: ‘He had the kind of personality, and represented the kind of viewpoint, which the President found particularly congenial.’ The viewpoint, of course, was what really mattered in the end: ‘Certainly JFK was favorably influenced by Brandt’s personality, but it was his views that were important’ (Carl Kaysen).12 And Kennedy and Brandt did tend to see things similarly, not least because their basic outlook on political life was similar. They shared an understanding of history as a dynamic process of incessantly progressing change: ‘everything is always in flux and nothing ever remains as it was’, as Brandt later summarized his long-held belief. In May 1962, he told his party that the ‘ten years before us will bring greater changes than the ten years behind us. Whoever wants to prevent this future is going to lose it. Whoever is not capable of sensing the world of tomorrow, will not be able to take part in shaping it. Neither in foreign nor in domestic policy will things stay as they are’ – and a little over one year later Kennedy told the Germans the very same thing: . . . and our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. This notion of history was profoundly un-conservative: the challenge was to adapt and progress, not to preserve and stand still. From this Brandt and 103

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Kennedy drew the same conclusion: not just to ride the wave of change, but to try to channel and direct it, ‘to engage in purposeful, coordinated interventions in the process of history’, as Brandt put it boldly in Harvard. And Kennedy sounded hardly less bold: ‘We need not accept that view [that we are gripped by forces we cannot control]. Our problems are man-made – therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.’13 This led to a political approach characterized by dynamic flexibility, always seeking initiative to keep up with the hazards and opportunities of historical change. Brandt constantly asked for more activism, ‘flexibility’, ‘initiative’ and ‘permanent offensive’ and warned indefatigably of becoming passive, reactive and defensive. He repeatedly took aim at Adenauer’s famous ‘No Experiments!’ slogan, and pointedly chose the proverb wer rastet, der rostet (‘he who rests rusts’, the German equivalent to ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’) for the title of his 1962 convention speech.14 Little wonder then that ever since his first visit in March 1961, Brandt was taken with the Kennedy administration’s agile can-do attitude, which he kept holding up as an example for Germany. As their second meeting confirmed, Kennedy and Brandt were of one mind when it came to proactive policy: . . . the President repeated the importance of using our heads now and not waiting until the crisis. He then expressed his confidence in Mayor Brandt. Mayor Brandt responded by remarking that he, too, thought we were in a weak position when we feared to try new ideas. Our attempt to stand on the status quo always leads to the status quo minus. We had to act. The President agreed . . .15 This attitude had potentially significant consequences for the development of a détente strategy, in so far as it suggested a departure from the entrenched Cold War posture in general and particularly from the West German hope that the East German state could simply be sat out if only it was ignored with enough perseverance. But Kennedy applied this dynamic approach not only to the Cold War, but also to peace. In his ‘peace speech’ the President outlined a dynamic conception of peace: I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and goodwill of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. . . . Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace – based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions – on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. . . . It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process – a way of solving problems.16 104

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This definition – dynamic, pragmatic and visionary – had great appeal for Brandt, for whom peace was a cornerstone value (‘peace is not everything, but everything comes to nothing without peace’).17 Within a few years of each other, both Kennedy and Brandt helped to ensure that peace no longer remained a ‘propagandistic monopoly of the East’18 and contributed to a change of discourse and political language in the West, but particularly in West Germany, that replaced the vocabulary of war and power politics with one of peace and détente.19 For Brandt and Kennedy, however, this was about more than words and propaganda. The point of Kennedy’s definition was precisely that peace was a concrete political task that had to be actively tackled. The basic framework for a dynamic approach to détente was marked out. It is important to keep this in mind to understand the dialectical approach of the emerging détente concepts, since, in an apparent paradox, the starting point of détente was not the love of peace, but the fear of annihilation, not movement, but stalemate. In 1977 Egon Bahr stated categorically in a contribution to a political dictionary that ‘Détente as a concept has developed since the early 1960s as the result of the nuclear stalemate between the superpowers’ – and that was no more than what he had already told Brandt in August 1963, when he advised that ‘in contrast to previous periods, this time “détente” has been forced by the nuclear stalemate. And that is not likely to change for the foreseeable future.’20 With the Sputnik start in 1957 the USSR had demonstrated that it now had an intercontinental delivery system and could threaten the United States directly with its nuclear capability. The certainty that ultimately the US could afford to wage nuclear war in Europe while the USSR could not was disintegrating and with it the military foundation for a whole series of assertive US Cold War policies since 1948.21 By the early 1960s nuclear parity was on the agenda and with it a comprehensive rethinking of nuclear strategy and the precepts of Cold War foreign policy. Kennedy, who campaigned on the basis of an alleged ‘missile gap’ favouring the Soviets, had been aware of the problem even before his presidency,22 and opened his administration to a number of strategists who had been pondering the dilemma for some time: while the beginnings fell into the Eisenhower era, it was the Kennedy administration that was coined by the nuclear change of paradigm and confronted it squarely. The President was haunted by the nuclear spectre and consistently concerned about nuclear war by miscalculation. The possibility of nuclear annihilation ran as a leitmotif through his great speeches, from the inauguration with its caution that ‘man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish . . . all forms of human life’ to the UN speech of September 1961 with its warning of the ‘nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads’, to the peace speech, for which it became the starting point: ‘I speak of peace because of the new face of war.’23 Brandt could not have agreed more. Like Kennedy, he had been well aware of the basic problem before 1961: the philosopher Bertrand Russell, a fellow member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, had made it clear to him as early as 1955 that nuclear weapon 105

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technology effectively ruled out war as a means of conflict-resolution between nuclear powers.24 As the Berlin crisis heated up, he came to share Kennedy’s fear of miscalculation, and in his Harvard lectures of 1962 Brandt evoked the ‘peril of total self-annihilation’ no less than five times.25 The nuclear revolution entailed a whole series of consequences. On the strategic level, the Kennedy administration recognized that, confronted with a Soviet second strike capability, the deterrence doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’ was becoming less credible, and consequently adopted the ‘flexible response’ strategy, allowing for graduated responses in an attempt to control escalation and provide exit stops on the road to nuclear war. Brandt was not (and Bahr not yet) a security expert, but Fritz Erler and Helmut Schmidt, the SPD’s preeminent security specialists, not only agreed but had partly anticipated the new strategy, and Brandt was on board.26 The other military consequence, the renewed urgency of arms control, fit in with the SPD’s disarmament tradition anyway, and Brandt, a long-term advocate of controlled disarmament, was a natural supporter. But the nuclear revolution had political as well as military and strategic consequences: if killing each other was no longer an option, living with each other became imperative. First confronted with the problem of a nuclear armed opponent, the Soviets were first to draw and proclaim the consequence. In the mid1950s Lenin’s concept of ‘peaceful coexistence’ was revived, updated under the influence of the nuclear dilemma and turned into official doctrine at the twentieth Party Congress in 1956, when Khrushchev repudiated the Stalinist interpretation of the doctrine of the inevitability of war between rival social systems. However, the concept retained its Leninist barb. While ‘peaceful coexistence’ ruled out head-on war with the nuclear armed capitalist states, it was also designed to create the space to pursue class-struggle and the expansion of Communism under the conditions of the nuclear age: i.e. with all means short of a major war combined with an ostentatious challenge to the West to engage in social and economic competition. The West was slow to respond to that challenge. While the US still enjoyed nuclear invulnerability, the idea was not compelling, sounded soft on Communism, and was incompatible with Eisenhower’s and Dulles’ ‘roll back’ rhetoric. Consequently the Eisenhower administration consistently rejected the notion in public, and much of the Western writing on coexistence remained limited to either crypto-Communist advocacy of the Soviet concept or attempts to unmask its aggressive thrust and denounce it as propaganda. And the picture in West Germany was not much different: the comments of West German politicians on coexistence were almost exclusively limited to warnings of danger.27 Brandt was the great exception. Ever since 1955 he had advocated peaceful coexistence in a series of continuously more high-profile speeches and publications, culminating in the Harvard lectures of 1962.28 While the elaboration became more refined, the message remained essentially the same: due to the danger of atomic war, coexistence had become ‘a question of mankind’s very 106

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existence. In the real sense of the word, coexistence is not a mere alternative, but our only chance for survival.’ Consequently, as Brandt concluded in Harvard, it ‘is our business to recapture the concept from Khrushchev and his propagandists’, which was not only necessary but natural: ‘coexistence is really suited to be one of democracy’s own ideas; it belongs logically to the democratic principles of human dignity, tolerance, the right of self-determination and national independence’. This was plausible, but bold: Hurwitz had warned Brandt that as ‘a subject “coexistence” plays a secondary role [in the United States] – for it is too “unrealistic” and distrusted a word’.29 And yet it was no accident that Brandt’s advocacy of coexistence culminated in America and under the Kennedy administration. While Kennedy was reluctant to use the tainted word, it described the elusive goal of his approach to East–West relations – ‘to conduct this disagreement in areas where we have interests without direct confrontation of the two countries’ and without affecting their ‘vital security interests’ or prestige, as he told Khrushchev in Vienna. Kennedy, too, had drawn the logical conclusion from the nuclear danger that frightened him: the necessity to coexist underlay his September 1961 address to the UN (‘Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames’); during his Berlin visit in February 1962, Bobby Kennedy delighted Brandt by calling for engagement in the peaceful competition that the Soviets talked of; and the President’s peace speech of June 1963 was a call and concept for coexistence in all but name.30 ‘His large project was to consolidate what Khrushchev called peaceful coexistence in such a way that it would be acceptable to the American people and his allies.’ Brandt, who in a 1964 speech equated the American term ‘strategy of peace’ with the Soviet ‘peaceful coexistence’, understood and had found a partner.31 But neither Kennedy nor Brandt had any intention of letting coexistence work according to the Soviet script. In April 1961, Kennedy characterized the Communist threat as relying ‘on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day’, while Brandt discussed the Soviet concept at Harvard and concluded that: With a charm that is uniquely his own and without any equivocation, Khrushchev has stated that he will bury us. And he appears to feel provoked when we seem reluctant to march along his own road of coexistence to the cemetery which he has prepared for us. The Soviet formula for coexistence cannot be reconciled with our own concept of true coexistence.32 That they embraced the concept nevertheless was due to their perception of their opponent, their self-perception, and their resulting vision of the interaction between the two sides. The starting point for this was anti-Communism and a fairly traditional scenario of Soviet threats and intentions. Brandt, Bahr and the 107

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Kennedy administration agreed that the Soviet Union was expansionist and kept the Berlin crisis deliberately simmering in an attempt to absorb West Berlin into the Communist sphere, to detach the Federal Republic from NATO, and thus to divide the West and weaken the US in ultimate pursuit of world supremacy.33 This was standard fare, but Brandt, and eventually Kennedy, also urged a new attitude toward the old opponent. Not in spite, but because of his own unrelenting assessment of Communism, Brandt was concerned about the irrational fear that characterized the anti-Communism of the 1950s and early 1960s and constantly warned against demonizing the enemy: Communism, he kept repeating, was not a ‘superhuman system for which there is no remedy’. This was echoed in Kennedy’s peace speech when the President asked to ‘reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union’ and warned ‘the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side’. Against the background of the Communism scare of the turn of the decade these were remarkable things to say. But if coexistence was unavoidable, they were also necessary things to say, as Brandt made clear in Harvard: ‘Our political strategy must proceed from the realization that coexistence cannot work unless we free ourselves from the lurking suspicion of Communist superiority.’ What was needed for coexistence to work were ‘sound and reliable judgments of our opponent when developing a strategy of our own’.34 Brandt’s, and increasingly Kennedy’s, judgment relied on three basic axioms: change, differentiation and systemic inferiority. In accordance with his view of history, Communist societies and the Eastern bloc were not exempt from the forces of history. Change was possible from within and, as Brandt pointed out since 1955/1956, change was taking place.35 After his first round of talks with the Kennedy administration in March 1961, Brandt wrote to an old friend that ‘among the most interesting are considerations by Bohlen and others about changes in Eastern Europe that are to be expected and possibly promoted’; and the President’s speech at the Free University in Berlin once more demonstrated the agreement with Brandt, when Kennedy declared that ‘the winds of change are blowing across the curtain as well as the rest of the world. . . . The people of Eastern Europe, even after 18 years of oppression, are not immune to change. . . . The people of the Soviet Union, even after 45 years of party dictatorship, feel the forces of historical evolution.’36 One of the changes that both Brandt and the Kennedy administration observed with interest was the process of ideological and political fragmentation, which had interested Brandt throughout the 1950s. ‘It is the Communist Camp itself’, as Brandt put in Harvard, ‘where signs of a differentiating process have become apparent – indeed so much so that we can no longer speak of a monolithic Eastern bloc’. This coincided with the assessment of the Kennedy administration, which built the concept of its Eastern European policy on the observation and encouragement of nationalist polycentric tendencies. Brandt had already reported after his visit to Washington in spring 1961 that the new administration did not view the East as a monolithic bloc, and in 1962 both Robert 108

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Kennedy and Walt Rostow touched on the fragmentation of Communism during their visits to Germany.37 The most important of these divisions was the Sino–Soviet split, which the Kennedy administration followed with considerable interest. In 1963 Brandt learned from Adlai Stevenson, Dean Rusk and Carl Kaysen about the role that the Sino–Soviet split played in the context for both the peace speech and the test ban treaty, and came to the conclusion, as he told the SPD-executive in August 1963, that this was ‘a [major] event in world history’.38 Its exposure to change and differentiation made Communism a much less terrifying enemy to coexist with. Coping with change and diversity, Brandt believed, was a crucial precondition to historical success, but a precondition that Communism lacked: ‘. . . Communism has enshrined itself in an outmoded dogma which will continue to inhibit the development of new ideas. The system has become too narrow. The structure is brittle; any serious crack in it brings the danger of a collapse.’ Brandt was deeply convinced that the West not only stood for the better cause, but also for the better system (and therefore need not fear Communism): ‘Whatever its weaknesses, our system is stronger and more attractive. Our great political trump is that large areas of our society are free of political control or influence. Freedom is strength.’ While this appears evident in retrospect, it was far from obvious in the late 1950s when Communism was considered to be on the rise economically, technologically, militarily and possibly politically – but, remarkably, Brandt held this belief steadily since 1955.39 It took Kennedy considerably longer to come round to this view, and the change in perception between the Sputnik shock and the Cuban Missile Crisis was significant. Kennedy had thought and worried about the ability of democracies to compete in direct confrontation with a totalitarian enemy ever since his Harvard thesis on British appeasement policy. In 1960 he campaigned against the legacy of the Eisenhower administration as a period during which the Soviet Union had allegedly caught up with and even surpassed the United States, while the US had ‘gone soft – physically, mentally, spiritually soft’.40 He made much of a (non-existent) ‘missile-gap’ and came to office with a belief in Soviet strength. However, two developments contributed to a reversal of these worries. One was the intellectual trend in the social sciences where modernization theory, with Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth in the front, elevated the American model to the teleological goal of historical development, a confidence that was mirrored in the emphasis that the anti-Communist Liberalism of the kind represented by Schlesinger and the ADA put on the social strength of democracies in the competition with Communism.41 The other was intelligence: by August 1961, the President began to revise his assessment of Soviet strength and started a process of re-evaluation that was not completed before 1963.42 This, together with the propaganda opportunities, were enough to get in line with Brandt. Robert Kennedy’s speech in Berlin in February 1962, drafted by Schlesinger, dwelled on Western systemic superiority and linked freedom to social progress. Brandt saw himself confirmed, played the ball back in Harvard, 109

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and saw himself confirmed again when in his speech at the Free University in Berlin the President picked up right where his brother had left off: Indeed, the very nature of the modern technological society requires human initiative and the diversity of free minds. So history, itself, runs against the Marxist dogma, not towards it. Nor are such systems equipped to deal with the organization of modern agriculture, and the diverse energy of the modern consumer in a developed society. In short, these dogmatic police states are an anachronism.43 What better, then, than to accept and embrace Khrushchev’s misguided challenge of economic, social and cultural competition? Peaceful competition of rival systems was after all exactly what had developed in Berlin until 1961 – a competition that the East lost so crushingly that it had to build a wall to save its system and prevent its citizens from running over to the competing system, as Brandt, Chester Bowles and Robert Kennedy were quick to point out.44 Ulbricht secretly agreed, writing to Khrushchev on 16 September 1961 that the: experiences of the last years have proven that it is not possible for a Socialist country like the GDR to carry out a peaceful competition with an imperialist country like West Germany with an open border. Such possibilities will only be given, once the Socialist world system has surpassed the capitalist countries in per-capita production. That was exactly what both Khrushchev and Ulbricht, who had already announced their ambition to catch up with and surpass the United States and West Germany respectively, were after. Brandt sensed a political chance. What this meant, he kept reiterating, was that the standards were set by the West, that, at least economically, the West was the ‘yardstick by which Communists measure their own success’, and that they had done so in the field of competition where the West was strongest.45 This mattered not just because of the advantages of Western superiority but also because of its presumed effect on the definition of the East’s interest. The category of ‘interest’ touched on a central element of Brandt’s and certainly Bahr’s political thinking. Like the Cold War liberals in America but in contrast to much of his party in the 1950s, Brandt had learned to think in powerpolitical categories of national interest, while Bahr, later mocked together with Kissinger as one of the ‘Metternichs of détente’, based most of his understanding of international policy on these terms.46 This provided a key to their assessment of the Communist East, in which three closely related assumptions were blended: 1

Brandt and Bahr, the former not unaffected by the American end of ideology debate, preferred interest to ideology because it was closer to their own 110

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2

3

thinking and because ideological enemies were more dangerous and harder to deal with.47 While they acknowledged that the Communist East was obviously an ideological enemy and the Cold War an ideological conflict, Brandt and Bahr nevertheless tended to believe that ultimately the Soviet Union’s national interest took precedence over ideological considerations.48 As modernization theory and convergence theory spread from the American social sciences to the international policy discourse, Brandt, as well as parts of the Kennedy administration, also believed that the East was undergoing a ‘trend from dogma to production’: a slow structural process of deideologization linked to new interests resulting from industrial modernisation and consumption, i.e. precisely the field where Khrushchev wanted to compete with the West and beat it by Western standards.49

These propositions were not always distinguished carefully enough: they tended to cross-fertilize in theoretically questionable ways, and the question to which extent the national interest could be conceived of independent from the ideology that shaped it in the first place was never sufficiently addressed – some of the later conceptual problems of Ostpolitik like Bahr’s underestimation of ideology and overestimation of security policy had their origins here. The reflection on the Eastern interest and ideology led to two main conclusions, which provided the hinge that linked the broad conceptual considerations to operative policy. The first was that, as Brandt pointed out in Harvard, for all the Cold War strife, on ‘one point his [Khrushchev’s] interests coincide with our interests: we both want to prevent a military collision of the nuclear powers’. Kennedy had already identified no less than five common interests in 1959, and the thought reverberated strongly in his peace speech, where it occupied a central place: ‘In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race.’ And it was crucial that this was an interest: Brandt himself had warned earlier that agreements with the Soviet Union only had any value as long as the Soviet interest in them could be maintained. But this was precisely the case, as Kennedy pointed out: ‘Agreements to this end are in the interest of the Soviet Union as well as ours – and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.’50 Compared to the hardline position that saw the Cold War as a zero-sum game in which any gain for one side was bound to be a loss for the other and compared to the related assertion that agreements with Communists were pointless as they would only break them, this was a significant departure.51 And the greater the shared interest, the better – there was potential here not just for the avoidance of nuclear war, but, as Brandt pointed out, also for the conduct of the Cold War: ‘If we can manage to link the interests of the Eastern bloc, or those of single Communist countries, with our own interests, we will have created an instrument of political action far more effective than any paper 111

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protests.’ In his Washington meeting with Brandt in March 1961, Rusk had put it more graphically when he commented that ‘by spinning spider webs across from West to East it might be possible to create a rope’.52 This led into the second conclusion: that the West had an interest in fostering the perceived process of de-ideologization in the East and, by doing so, had an opportunity to influence the Eastern interest – with incalculable potential longterm benefits for the West. When Bahr joined the SPD in 1957, his first speech already included the advice that ‘We simply must behave in such a way that the Soviet interest changes’; and when Brandt wrapped up his discussion of interest and ideology in Soviet policy in Harvard he concluded with the thesis that ‘What we can and should seek to do is to create a state of affairs in which ideology will cease playing the dominant role.’ This was an ambitious project: in the long-term the task, according to Brandt, was no less than ‘to create a situation in which it would be to the advantage of the Soviet Union to grant the German people the right of self-determination’, a goal to which Brandt and Bahr adhered throughout the early 1960s.53 In 1963 the underlying idea featured in Kennedy’s peace speech: We must therefore persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace.54 Two weeks later, the President repeated this notion in his speech at the Free University in Berlin, and the two passages quickly became key quotations for Brandt, Bahr, Erler and Wehner.55 But how to do this? If the East could not be crushed in a direct military confrontation, but was considered inferior in peaceful competition, subject to change and open to influence via its own interests, some of which it shared with the West, then clearly a policy of engagement was called for. In practice this meant dealing with the opponent, and dealing with the opponent meant negotiations. As far as Berlin and Germany were concerned this was no matter of fact: Acheson was opposed on principle, Rusk mostly saw them as a political form of occupational therapy, de Gaulle was consistently opposed to what he regarded as negotiations under pressure, and Adenauer erratically opposed negotiations for most of 1961, then favoured them for a few months under the impression of the Berlin Wall, until from early 1962 onwards he opposed them once more under the impression of Kennedy’s German policy.56 But Kennedy defended negotiations on principle, and his approach had from the outset been to negotiate: he talked of negotiations in his campaign;57 before and even after the Vienna summit his administration worked on a negotiating position; the aftermath of the Berlin Wall saw a renewed American attempt to arrive at a negotiable position; the first half of 1962 saw a major negotiation effort; and even after the 112

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disappointment and disillusionment of summer 1962 the administration kept on negotiating. Brandt had viewed Berlin negotiations with mistrust until the crisis summer of 1961, but since then he had consistently called for them and supported Kennedy’s effort: negotiations were necessary, Brandt reminded the public, because ‘without negotiations with the Soviet Union there will be no progress whatsoever’.58 For both Kennedy and Brandt the pursuit of negotiations rested on two principles. The first was strength: the President was ‘presiding over one of the great military build-ups of all time’, and on the very day of the peace speech Congress passed the largest-ever defence budget.59 Kennedy, who believed that Britain was driven into appeasing Hitler by a lack of military preparedness, loved to quote Churchill’s ‘arm to parley’ and held that military strength was the necessary precondition for meaningful negotiations. While historians continue to argue whether he ‘oscillated between hardline and conciliatory approaches with little apparent rationale’ (James Giglio) or whether he purposefully pursued a coherent dual track approach,60 Brandt was firmly convinced that the latter was the case. ‘Many misunderstandings of the last months are the consequence of the fact that the concept of our real friends beyond the great water has often not been understood here’, he told the SPD convention in May 1962: It means: to be strong and to negotiate. There is no longer an alternative here. Strength is no end in itself. It is not a means of forcing the opponent to the knees. It is the basis for seeking reconciliation, for surviving and for improving one’s own position in peaceful struggle.61 It was important to get the balance right: both the belief in imminent victory and the fear of defeat could push an ideologically driven opponent to extremes, as Brandt explained in Harvard – a warning that matched Kennedy’s admonishments from the peace speech one year later that nuclear powers must avoid bringing ‘an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war’, but that ‘we can seek a relaxation of tensions without relaxing our guard’. And Brandt believed that Kennedy did get the balance right and interpreted both the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the first breakthrough of détente in the summer of 1963 as the consequences of this approach. His notion of détente in the early 1960s was thus considerably more hard-nosed than his image in the later years of his life: ‘When it comes to detente, blind faith and wishful thinking are no great help. And weakness only increases the hazards.’62 After strength, the second principle of Brandt and Kennedy’s negotiation strategy was to exclude areas of irreconcilable interests in order to focus on shared interests and areas of possible agreement. ‘Look Mr. Chairman’, Kennedy had told Khrushchev in Vienna, ‘you aren’t going to make a Communist out of me and I don’t expect to make a capitalist out of you, so let’s get down to business.’63 According to the State Department’s instructions for the 113

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embassy in Germany, the ‘draft principles’ were little else than an attempt to put this approach on paper, in order to: deal with [the] existence of [the] underlying disagreement on elements of [a] permanent solution and even on formulations of existing facts in such a way as to avoid [a] dangerous crisis. Our paper attempted to set forth certain principles which might be agreed by both sides, omitting those points on which no verbal agreement could be reached, in an effort to create [a] basis for a possible modus vivendi. Brandt was aware of this. The American strategy, as Schütz had informed him, was to establish aspects of agreement now, while burying the controversial aspects in unlimited talks.64 This was compatible with the approach that Brandt had been advocating throughout the previous month: his old idea of starting with technical-practical problems rather than getting gridlocked in the great political questions. It was, as Kohler told Erler in Washington on 21 April 1962, an agree to disagree approach, i.e. exactly the formula which, in the form of Albertz’s ‘salvatory clause’, made Brandt’s pass agreements and much of his later Ostpolitik possible.65 For Brandt and Kennedy these principles made negotiating feasible, and negotiating had benefits. In the first place, negotiations were not only a tool for reaching agreements, but the mere conduct of negotiations was also an end in itself, a tool to check on the enemy: ‘If vital interests under duress can be preserved by peaceful means’, Kennedy explained in November 1961, ‘negotiations will find that out. If our adversary will accept nothing less than a concession of our rights, negotiations will find that out.’ ‘A way for each to test the other and to keep the other under a certain control’, as Brandt put it in Harvard. He had already argued half a year earlier that it was ‘better to talk for a longer time than to shoot for a shorter time’, and in later years the habit to keep the other side talking in a cocoon of constant negotiations designed to make a sudden outburst of undesirable action less likely was to become an integral part of Ostpolitik and German–German relations.66 In this sense negotiations themselves already represented a form of ‘contact’, and contacts in turn were what Brandt wanted out of negotiations. The promotion of contacts was among Brandt’s oldest projects. Ever since 1949 he had consistently called for a maximum of grassroots contact between the people in East and West Berlin, East and West Germany and ultimately Eastern and Western Europe. The call in Harvard for ‘as many real points of contact and as much meaningful communication . . . as possible’ was only a provisional high point of this long-standing trend. Kennedy, too, had developed the same idea early and advocated it in a US Senate debate on Poland in 1957,67 before he broadened this approach and applied it to Germany as President. The ‘draft principles’ provided for mixed technical commissions ‘to increase cultural and technical contacts’, the peace speech asked for ‘increased contact and 114

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communication’ and Kennedy’s speech at the Free University in Berlin delivered the quote Brandt needed: ‘It is important that the people on the quiet streets in the East be kept in touch with Western society. Through all the contacts and communication that can be established, through all the trade that Western security permits’. Rusk encouraged more contacts between East and West Germany in each of his five meetings with Brandt up to 1963, but whereas this was the issue of incessant clashes between Rusk and Bundy on the one and the West German government on the other side, Brandt hardly needed reminding and was only too happy to be able to quote the President. The policy of ‘weaving’ that later characterized Ostpolitik had its origins here.68 Contacts mattered for three reasons. First, contacts between the divided people were one of the key means of providing humanitarian alleviation. For Brandt this goal was as old as his pursuit of contacts. It was an end in itself, a natural task of policy in general and détente in particular, and the driving force of his policy in Berlin after the Wall. In the White House David Klein was lobbying for Brandt’s humanitarian quest, and at the Free University in Berlin Kennedy, too, called ‘to improve the lot and maintain the hopes of those on the other side’, an appeal soon echoed by the US ambassador. This gave Brandt another quotation to work with, and the German Foreign Office, already annoyed by Brandt’s constant talk of alleviation, now found itself pressured by the Americans as well.69 Second, contacts were considered instrumental in maintaining a sense of community between the Germans in East and West. ‘. . . what’s good for the people in the divided country is also good for the nation’, as Brandt put it famously in 1964.70 Although they explicitly subordinated it to peace, freedom and humanity, the nation was a pivotal category for both Bahr, essentially a leftwing nationalist, and to a slightly lesser extent Brandt.71 The further reunification seemed to slip away, the more important became the cohesion of the nation – all the way up to Brandt’s later emphasis on the cultural nation and his concept of two states in one nation: the ambition to use contacts to keep the nation together while the states remained divided became a cornerstone of Brandt’s policy, later seamlessly adopted and continued by both Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl. To understand the role of this element in the concept and genesis of Ostpolitik, however, it is critical to realize that it preceded the acceptance of two states in Germany by many years: Brandt had consistently argued this point ever since the foundation of the two German states in 1949.72 The idea of using contacts to preserve the nation was not a consequence of, but eventually a reason for recognizing the East German state, and one with American support. Clay had advised Brandt that ‘a multitude of contacts between the people in both parts of Germany’ was desirable to ‘keep the feeling of belonging together alive’, and in May 1964 Rusk told Brandt the same. One month later, he added to Albertz that if enough contacts could be established, a kind of ‘de facto reunification’ might be achieved on the ground.73 Finally, and most ambitiously, contacts in all forms and shapes – political, 115

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economic, cultural, personal – were the way to accept and engage with Khrushchev’s challenge of peaceful competition: to expose the East to that competition, to bring the West’s systemic superiority to bear in that competition, to exert influence on the people as well as the elites, to place emphasis on living standards and consumer satisfaction, thereby to foster the perceived process of evolutionary change, social modernization and de-ideologization, thus to influence the East’s perception of its own interest and, ultimately, to change it – ‘a program and a posture that can encourage transformation on the other side’, as Brandt summarized it in 1962. Transformation was no longer a prerequisite, but a possible consequence of détente.74 Brandt had gradually developed this programme in line with his thinking about coexistence in the 1950s, and some glimpses of antecedents could be observed under the Eisenhower administration, notably in Vice President Nixon’s famous ‘kitchen debate’ over living standards with Khrushchev in July 1959. When Brandt and Nixon met in February 1958, they already agreed that the East could be infected wherever the West sought human contact and cultural exchange, but it was only in Harvard that Brandt’s strategy of transformation was systematically developed and conceptually integrated.75 Philosophically at least, the Kennedy administration was thinking along similar lines. During his visit in Berlin Robert Kennedy had already observed that ‘The flow of influence is now always from West to East, not from East to West; from democracy to Communism, not from Communism to democracy.’ Lobbying for contacts with East Germany, Rusk kept telling Brandt as well as the Federal Government over and over again not to underestimate, but to employ the ‘great gravitational force . . . to the West’, and the President’s peace speech finally provided a conceptual match for Brandt: Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament – and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.76 At least in theory much of the Eastern European policy of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations was based on this concept of transformation through engagement.77 Brandt and Kennedy had accepted Khrushchev’s challenge of coexistence and, with much the same intention as Khrushchev, turned it around: ‘We’ve been afraid we’d be poisoned by them. The fact is we have much more chance of poisoning them, so to speak’, Brandt told a press conference in America as early as 1958, and at the 1960 national SPD convention in Hanover he bluntly pronounced the vanishing-point of this perspective: I am convinced that we can accept the challenge of Communism. We must safeguard peace and find rules which will enable us to be economically, politically, and spiritually free for the struggle with the 116

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other world that is now called peaceful coexistence. We shall win this struggle!78 Two main observations emerge from this survey of Brandt’s and Kennedy’s approach towards coexistence. First, the extent of the general conceptual agreement between Brandt and Kennedy was extraordinary, sometimes stretching to the point where their utterances became virtually interchangeable. This goes a long way towards answering the question of what propelled the Brandt– Kennedy relationship. Second, this concordance was all the more remarkable as, so far, it was scarcely the result of mutual influence. The Kennedy administration followed Brandt’s thinking with interest and approval, the President himself read the Harvard lectures, and Brandt had a limited influence on Kennedy’s speeches in Berlin, but no more. The President’s peace speech proved a comprehensive conceptual match for Brandt’s ideas, but it was the result of American thinking about American problems (the background after all was the pursuit of a test ban, not Berlin or Germany), hardly the product of a German Mayor’s influence on the American President. The same, however, was also true in reverse. Brandt and Bahr jumped at the opportunity to sell much of this as applications of Kennedy’s approach and succeeded in fooling a number of contemporaries as well as historians into following their lead, but in fact most of Brandt’s basic key tenets preceded the Kennedy administration, as did a number of programmatic key texts – from his conception of coexistence in the mid-1950s to the 1958 Philadelphia speech and the 1960 convention speech to his Foreign Affairs articles on ‘The Means Short of War’ of the same year. In many regards the Harvard lectures only cumulated the results of this long and gradual development, and even then they preceded both the peace speech and the Free University speech by a year.79 As far as the administration’s conceptual thinking was concerned Brandt, like everybody else, had to rely on the speeches: there were neither briefings nor instructions of any kind. ‘Along with our negotiations – which were not really conceptual in nature, but characterized by getting in tune with each other in terms of the general atmosphere – a parallelism of thinking in the same direction developed’, as Bahr recalls: ‘And in Washington as in Berlin one came, independent of each other and at totally different levels . . . to identical or similar results.’80

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9 THE INTRICACIES OF THE STATUS QUO Modes of change and conceptual difference

It is worth making the conception of détente precise so that it does not degenerate into a meaningless or misused magical formula. (Willy Brandt, ‘ “Détente” Is No Catchword’, in Brandt, A Peace Policy for Europe, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969, pp. 166–173)

The picture so far would seem to suggest an extraordinary extent of conceptual concordance coupled with, at best, very limited conceptual influence. But the story does not end here, for neither was the conceptual agreement as seamless, nor was Kennedy’s influence as limited as it would appear. To start with, a caveat about the status of stringent foreign policy concepts is in order, not least because they often suit memoir writers and historians better than foreign policy practitioners.1 There were significant gradations between Bahr, Brandt and Kennedy in this regard. While Bahr developed into a highly conceptually driven politician, Brandt’s approach remained characterized by a certain vagueness allowing a high degree of flexibility. A 1964 review by the US diplomatic service in Berlin concluded that ‘Brandt’s approach to most problems is essentially tactical and pragmatic’: To be sure, in major policy issues he is guided by broad, long-range conceptions. However, these conceptions tend to be rather vague, flexible and imprecise – anything but dogmatic and rigid. His style is that of a careful, clever tactician who usually proceeds cautiously, making sure of cover and allies before he makes a move.2 Taken on its own, parts of this description could equally well serve as a characterization of John F. Kennedy, whose penchant for visionary policy statements contrasted with a strong focus on tactics and the operational. But there were significant differences in degree. Thanks to Bahr, Brandt’s dependence on preconceptualized policy may have been somewhat exaggerated over the years, while, thanks to historiographical Kennedy-revisionism, Kennedy’s strategic 118

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coherence has probably been somewhat underrated – but on balance Brandt clearly still attached greater value to long-term concepts than Kennedy. More importantly, though, Brandt and Kennedy not only tended to differ in the importance assigned to their coexistence concept as a whole, they also gave different priorities to its elements. In part these differing priorities were a natural consequence of the different vantage-points in Berlin and Washington – local, national, and European in the former, but global in the latter case: the humanitarian consequences of the Wall, to give but one example, were obviously more pressing in Berlin than in Washington. But there was more to this than varying perspectives on the same concepts, there were real conceptual fault-lines, and almost all of these followed from different perceptions of the status quo. The ‘status quo’ was a surprisingly complex and occasionally paradoxical notion. Defined as the existing state of affairs, the status quo in Europe comprised the Soviet control of Eastern Europe, the American presence in Western Europe, the Oder-Neisse border, the GDR, as well as the Allied presence in West Berlin with its close ties to the Federal Republic. However, there was a meta-level, i.e. the fact that the West did not accept the territorial status quo in Eastern Europe, while the East did not accept it for West Berlin – in a dialectical antithesis these refusals to recognize the territorial status quo, the notion that the territorial status quo was an ‘open status quo’,3 also formed a part of the overall status quo. This complicated the meaning of ‘changing the status quo’, which was what, on the territorial level, the East wanted in West Berlin and what the West wanted in Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe, while inversely both also sought a partial change of the ‘open status quo’ by trying to dissuade the other side from their challenge to the territorial status quo in order to achieve recognition and security for their own gains. Changing the status quo was the key conceptual challenge because it was an ambition that clashed directly with the starting point of détente: the nuclear stalemate and eventually the experiences of the Berlin and Cuban crises strongly suggested that under nuclear protection the territorial status quo was in fact inviolable. This presented a problem in so far as all involved were still committed to change, be it world communism or reunification. When Brandt first began to espouse coexistence in 1955, his starting position was therefore ‘yes to coexistence, but no to the status quo!’, and seven years later he still insisted that ‘coexistence cannot be a synonym for maintenance of the status quo’. This threatened to be a contradiction in terms. The Soviet conception of coexistence, Brandt’s concept of transformation by coexistence and Kennedy’s ‘strategy of peace’ were all designed to solve this problem by replacing a hopeless direct challenge to the status quo with an indirect one. ‘Based on the status quo, the preconditions must be created to overcome the immobilism’, as Brandt had already put it in 1961.4 But here the similarities ended. What did ‘based on the status quo’ mean – other than the inveterate unwillingness to relinquish the Western hold on West Berlin? Brandt and Bahr promoted Kennedy’s ‘strategy of peace’ as a peaceful attempt to overcome the status quo gradually, exactly in line with Brandt’s 119

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Harvard lectures. Conceptually this was not wrong, but the fact of the matter was that Kennedy set considerably less store by this than Brandt. The long-term trend in America went away from, not towards, transformation, and it was no accident that by the time Brandt had to coordinate his Ostpolitik with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, transformation was hardly part of the American détente concept any more at all.5 Unlike Brandt and the Germans, Kennedy and the US could live well with the status quo. In this sense Kennedy’s and Brandt’s repeated assurances that Kennedy’s approach was based on common West German and American interests were wrong. In truth the Federal Republic had a ‘special conflict’ with the Soviet Union, as Richard Löwenthal called it in 1974 – and the resulting special interests were not naturally shared by its Western Allies, as Hurwitz pointed out to Brandt in August 1963: Kennedy’s strategy-for-peace has made it very obvious that among the Atlantic partners only the Federal Republic has a national vested interest in changing the status-quo in Europe . . . the fact does remain that for the first time a fundamental accord with the Soviets is being reached on certain common interests in the field of defense and foreign policies. That is what tends to make the Federal Republic presently seem so glaringly alone with its natural interest in changing the European status-quo in a fundamental way.6 By late 1965 the message appeared to have sunk in when Brandt told the SPD leadership that ‘both world powers are . . . interested in the maintenance of the status quo in Europe. Both world powers!’7 This difference in interest between West Germany and the rest of the world resulted in different attitudes towards changing the status quo. The traditional West German position was to constantly demand a change of the territorial status quo, while tenaciously refusing any change where the ‘open status quo’ was concerned. This is why Bonn’s policy has correctly been characterized as both a constant challenge to and an uncompromising defence of the status quo8 – and why Foreign Minister Schröder was able to tell Rusk and Bundy that a ‘freezing’ of the status quo had to be prevented and that it was ‘better . . . to persist in the present situation’. This was based on the assumption that a change in the open status quo, i.e. recognition, would solidify the territorial status quo. Instead it should be kept ‘in motion’ – implying that it was, in fact, in a state of flux.9 Both the Kennedy administration and Brandt increasingly doubted that assumption. During their meeting in October 1962, Brandt pointed out that by merely persisting in the status quo the West had gotten a status quo minus (i.e. the Wall) and ‘the President replied that this was precisely his opinion’.10 Mere persistence in the status quo was considered bad – but the question was which status quo. When Kennedy admonished the Germans in Berlin that it was ‘not enough to mark time, to adhere to a status quo, while awaiting a change for the better’, he emphatically did not mean this as an endorsement of West Germany’s 120

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insistence on challenging the territorial status quo, but as a criticism of its rigid objection to any change in the ‘open status quo’.11 But what did Brandt mean? In a first step, Brandt told the Germans that it was wrong to persist in tense relations between East and West. (In contrast Adenauer wrote to Kennedy as late as October 1961 that ‘So far my impression has been that it is not the confrontation, but precisely the lessening of the confrontation that is dangerous.’12) Since 1955 the West, following West Germany’s lead, had made progress in the German question a precondition of détente in general and disarmament in particular. Only removal of the cause of tensions, i.e. the division of Germany, could lead to a true relaxation of tensions, the West Germans argued. Under the conditions of the emerging nuclear stalemate, this link quickly became untenable and soon began to break down. While this did not prevent the government in Bonn from clinging tenaciously to the idea that the West should not pursue any arrangements with the East that bypassed the German question, the SPD had already acknowledged in the 1950s that détente and disarmament had an intrinsic value independent of the German cause. Unlike the SPD, however, Brandt had never really believed in the idea of détente through reunification in the first place and warned not to overestimate Germany’s weight.13 By 1959 he realized that the linkage was breaking down, and in the early 1960s he became keenly aware of the decline in Germany’s importance: ‘Germany’, Brandt told the 1962 SPD convention: is not as much at the centre of world events as we like to assume today. Today there is another question at the centre of world events: how to turn the tacit agreement that there shall be no great war into a formulated agreement which . . . guarantees the avoidance of the great war. In Kennedy’s words, at the United Nations in September 1961: ‘Men no longer maintain that disarmament must await the settlement of all disputes.’14 Instead, since 1959 the Americans increasingly suggested to the Germans that the order should be reversed. Far from keeping it in flux, Rusk told Schröder in September 1963, the tensions since 1945 had actually consolidated the status quo, and when he told Brandt eight months later that 17 years of tension had not advanced unification by one millimetre, both Schütz and Bahr murmured agreement. There was no way of knowing what détente would bring, Rusk explained, ‘but it offered the only prospect’.15 This was not new to Brandt, who had always argued that arms control and a general détente might help to prepare (rather than result from) a solution to the German question. ‘In reality’, he told the SPD convention in 1962: a lessening of tensions . . . is the most important precondition for realising our right to self-determination. . . . Reunification can only be considered realistic in connection with a changed relationship between East and West. For the sake of peace and our national future we must 121

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contribute to such a change. Whoever believes in being able to profit from an unaltered relationship between East and West cements the status quo.16 This, then, was an intermediary step towards change: promoting détente to change the East–West relationship without either changing the territorial or the open status quo first. (‘A détente in the East–West conflict, which we desire . . ., cannot make the regime in the [East German] Zone any more acceptable to us’, Brandt still claimed as late as August 1963.17) But although this meant that Brandt was ahead of the German debate, this half step – like Foreign Minister Schröder’s narrower attempt to insist on linking détente measures to progress in the German question – fell behind the pace of the Kennedy administration and ultimately proved insufficient. Over the course of the 1960s the neat formula of reunification through détente instead of détente through reunification served to cover a learning process, conceptual inconsistencies, and a continuous reassessment of the relationship and growing distance between reunification and détente. By 1960 Bahr still demanded that the German question be given a ‘significant role’ in all security negotiations and wished that it could take precedence over the disarmament problem; in 1961 Brandt noted with concern that the Americans seemed determined to simply pursue security talks independent of the German question; it was not until 1964 that he conceded to Rusk ‘that the German question cannot be inserted at every point’, and then only after telling him that ‘it was important to link the question of German unification to decisions on other long-run problems’.18 Through most of the 1960s, Brandt clung to the notion that in the end détente did mean the elimination of the cause of tensions after all: . . . we must make it clear beyond all doubt that Germany is interested in détente and not in the maintenance of tension. However, a détente that deserves that name includes the kind of measures that help to overcome the political causes of the tension. And in that context there’s no getting around the German question.19 This position created problems. Conceptually a definition of détente as overcoming the cause of tensions fudged the difference between détente through reunification and reunification through détente by essentially equating the two and actually made more sense for the former than for the latter formula. Furthermore, a conception of détente based on removing the cause of conflict was difficult to reconcile, if not essentially incompatible, with Brandt’s own conception of coexistence as a of way of fighting the conflict. ‘The notion of the transformation of the conflict implies: the conflict is changed, but not resolved’, as he himself explained to the German Society for Foreign Policy in June 1964.20 The fundamental problem, however, was that the magic trick of using détente to generate change without being able to change the territorial status quo or 122

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having to modify the open status quo proved unsustainable. As the test ban and later the non-proliferation treaty showed, disarmament agreements tended to require multilateral participation, which inevitably raised the problem of how to deal with the GDR as a state – which was exactly why Bonn was opposed. Brandt was willing to compromise for the sake of peace and détente, but by doing so he allowed for first modifications of the ‘open status quo’. But Kennedy was not just compromising, Kennedy actively wanted to change the ‘open status quo’. The West German position was succinctly, if with dubious logic, stated by Ambassador Wilhelm Grewe: ‘The status quo cannot, of course, be changed, but it is important to keep the status quo as a nonrecognized status quo . . .’. Kennedy’s logic was the exact opposite: because the territorial status quo could not be changed anyway, the mutual refusals to accept it could be traded. ‘This would have the effect of offering the Soviets assurances about the status quo in Germany in return for assurances about the status quo in Berlin’, as an early memorandum on non-aggression arrangements put it.21 Conditions on the ground would remain the same, but security, stability and safety from crises escalating into nuclear war could be dramatically improved without giving something away that was not unattainable anyway – that was the rationale behind the administration’s German policy since August/September 1961. Instead of détente through reunification or reunification through détente Kennedy was not only pursuing détente without reunification but even détente through recognition. This was not a concept that Brandt had anticipated. The Eastern recognition of the status quo in West Berlin was of course what Brandt had always wanted from a modus vivendi agreement, but the prospect of actually recognizing the status quo in the East had initially appalled him when he explained to the party executive after Kennedy’s summit with Khrushchev in Vienna that: Khrushchev has made it clear . . . that for his government the point is to fix the results of the Second World War, i.e. to declare the border of the Zone as the Western border of the Eastern bloc and to also get it somehow indirectly recognized, to ground it in international law, and thereby to immortalize it. This would not be a peace treaty, this would be a diktat of division, and such a diktat of division would certainly not stand with our people and with the general development.22 And yet, although he became well aware of the new American approach and did not initially agree with it in all its consequences, Brandt, unlike the government in Bonn, did not rise in revolt against it, but gradually adapted, continued to support the President, and eventually adopted much the same approach in his Ostpolitik. The reason why that adaptation was possible was Brandt’s conceptual closeness to Kennedy at the outset. Following a 1960 draft by Bahr, Brandt had already written in 1961 that: 123

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For the time being, the world will . . . have to come to terms with balancing in a state that means neither war nor peace in the conventional sense. At first this presupposes the safeguarding of the present assets of both sides. The attempt to find new rules of the game is largely based on a policy of the status quo. Yet it is known that the fixing of a condition does not suspend the forces and the dynamism which work for permanent change. . . . In other words: based on the status quo, the preconditions must be created to overcome the immobilism. This was the basis of Brandt’s programme of transformation through coexistence instead of a direct challenge to the territorial status quo. But what exactly were the ‘assets’ (Besitzstand), and what did their ‘safeguarding’ (Sicherung) mean? When Brandt had first used variations of this passage for his 1960 Foreign Affairs article and his nomination speech at the Hanover SPD convention in late 1960, Brandt had defused Bahr’s draft by making it more precise: ‘The problem is to maintain the military status quo in order to gain the necessary freedom of movement for overcoming the political status quo’ – and that version, too, was published alongside with Bahr’s original in Brandt’s 1961 essay collection. This reflected his hope to employ détente and disarmament as a motor for change, but it also suggested that Brandt hoped to buy political change with the safeguarding of military, rather than political, assets in an effort to circumvent a political recognition of the status quo. At the SPD convention in Hanover, Brandt added that in ‘I know that I am in agreement here with the newly-elected American President, John F. Kennedy’, but the next three years showed that Kennedy went further than that.23 The point, however, was that while this was miles away from Bonn’s philosophy, it took Brandt and Bahr only a comparatively minor conceptual step – albeit one with far-reaching political consequences – to catch up and adapt. The basic dialectic formula, to fix in order to overcome, was already in place. It only had to be fully applied in order to arrive at Ostpolitik’s key concept of ‘recognizing the status quo in order to change it’. When, introducing his elaboration of the rationale for a de facto recognition of the GDR in Tutzing, Egon Bahr paraphrased Kennedy’s ‘strategy of peace’ approvingly as ‘overcoming . . . the status quo by not changing the status quo at first’, he came within a hair’s breadth of making the connection. Over three decades later, he would remind his listeners at the Willy Brandt Foundation that ‘President John F. Kennedy had already expressed the dialectic that whoever wanted to change the status quo had to recognize it’.24 All that remained to be done was to call a spade a spade and accept the consequences. That, however, proved no easy task.

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10 TOWARDS A NEW GERMAN POLICY Dealing with the East and conceptual adaptation

The insight that the indispensable German contribution to a beneficial development in our part of the world could also be made on the basis of two states [in Germany] did not come easily to me. (Willy Brandt, Erinnerungen, p. 153)

The reason why it was so hard for Brandt and Bahr to take a step that suggested itself so clearly as a corollary of their own logic was that the idea of recognizing the territorial status quo in Europe was shrouded in a powerful taboo in West Germany. In a fundamental break with German nationalism Konrad Adenauer had prioritized the integration with the West over reunification – but the other side of that coin was the development of a collective state of denial over the consequences. The fatal logic of ‘es kann nicht sein, was nicht sein darf ’ (what must not be, can not be) was applied to the emerging status quo in the East: the non-recognition of the GDR and the Oder-Neisse border became not only cornerstones of policy but sacred cows of political culture. This obsession quickly gained a considerable momentum of its own. Legal constructions replaced actual realities as constant talking replaced political action, while the increasing gap between claim and reality was bridged only by faith and taboo. The Germans ‘seemed caught up in a theology of their own making’ (Marc Trachtenberg) – this was what Brandt much later called the Lebenslüge, the lived lie, of the early Federal Republic.1 This belief system entailed two fundamental problems. The first was that an inbuilt denial of reality made for a poor and ultimately unsustainable basis for practical policy. Supposedly explosive but effectively hopeless reunification schemes like the Globke plans and the Austria solution as well as the SPD’s Deutschlandplan all suffered from a ‘lively romanticization of the Federal Government’s options’,2 while the obdurately defended fiction that the GDR was not even a state was constantly in danger of embarrassing Bonn whenever it became too obvious that the reality did not conform to the creed. Bismarck’s definition of policy as the art of the possible, Brandt pointedly hinted in an article drafted by Bahr in 1965, meant that: 125

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it is exactly no longer policy to pursue the obviously impossible, that it is no art to confine oneself to the representation of demands, however justified, and that it is neither art nor policy to remain entangled in wishful thinking.3 The second problem was that by its nature the taboo was limited to the political culture that sustained it. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told Kennedy that ‘East Germany exists’ and that it was ‘nonsense for the West Germans to talk as though it doesn’t exist’, while even Adenauer’s old friend Dulles had told the German ambassador that ‘To pretend the enemy does not exist is not a very realistic or practical policy.’4 The entire American discussion, as exemplified by the debates in Congress or Walter Lippmann’s influential newspaper columns, was not only diverse but free from the taboos that determined the limits of the German discussion. Through his own travels and conversations, the briefings of Harold Hurwitz and Richard Löwenthal, the reporting of Roy Blumenthal and Egon Bahr’s reading, Brandt was exposed to this taboo-free discourse and noted as early as 1958 that in America all views were heard without prejudice – in contrast to Germany where ‘in an atmosphere of mutual nervousness’ some views were denounced from the outset. This mattered because it had the potential to be intellectually liberating: ‘Once a taboo is broken in the mind it no longer appears as a taboo after some time, but acquires almost the character of the banal’, as Bahr later remarked about Tutzing.5 During the Kennedy administration this difference in thinking erupted and became a matter of public awareness in the Federal Republic, as the administration launched a coherent, if not always consistent, attack on West German illusions. Truth required ‘to face facts as they are, not to involve ourselves in self-deception; to refuse to think merely in slogans’, the President warned the Germans in Berlin: ‘let us deal with the realities as they actually are, not as they might have been, and not as we wish they were’. By then this was music to the ears of Brandt, who had campaigned for a heightened sense of reality since the Fechter crisis of autumn 1962 and now relished the opportunity to quote Kennedy. Reality became a provocative term for German conservatives and the trademark of Brandt’s Ostpolitik in an attempt to regain the ability to act: ‘Progress’, Peter Bender wrote later, ‘did not consist in getting closer to the objectives, but in getting closer to an insight in the balance of power.’ In his Nobel Peace Price speech Brandt concluded that if ‘the balance sheet of my political effectiveness were to say that I have helped to open up the way for a new sense of reality in Germany, then one of the greatest hopes of my life would have been fulfilled’.6 But in the early 1960s it was much easier for Kennedy than for Brandt to accept reality. Brandt’s first meeting with the President had included a lesson in realism when Brandt could not answer Kennedy’s question why the Soviets should agree to grant Germany self-determination after a ten year interim 126

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arrangement, and each of Brandt’s thrusts towards realism after the erection of the Wall and the murder of Peter Fechter was in response to the palpable American acceptance of the underlying realities. It was also much easier for Brandt to talk about reality than to accept it: after the shock of the Wall he started by hiding behind the unhelpful argument that while the division of Germany was a reality, West Germany’s refusal to accept it was a reality, too; Bahr’s Berlin memorandum of November 1961 happily developed an unnegotiable position for negotiations; and in 1962 the Harvard lectures delivered a prime example of Brandt’s transitional inconsistency when he admonished his audience within one passage to ‘recognize realities for what they are’ and ‘to put forward demands that may appear unrealistic right now’.7 The problem was that it was precisely the hopelessness of the most unrealistic demand, i.e. reunification, that was the most unsavoury reality to accept. The demand for and belief in reunification was a basic article of faith in post-war West Germany. Unable to do anything, the West Germans talked about it all the time, and Brandt, though more aware of the real prospects and later sharply critical of this practice, talked just as much about reunification as any other West German politician until the late 1960s. Reunification, according to Brandt, could never be renounced and had to be kept on the international agenda (falsely assuming, in the characteristic West German confusion of talk and fact, that it was on the agenda). ‘The national movement for German reunification’, he wrote in the New Leader in July 1961, ‘must remain wedded to insistence by the Western Allies on their rights and obligations to bring about such a reunification.’8 This stance came under pressure when Kennedy and his administration conspicuously stopped the ritual references to reunification. (‘We are not going to be able to alter that [fact of life] by the President getting up every week making a speech against it’, Robert Kennedy told the Germans in February 1962.)9 The Federal Government in Bonn reacted with ceaseless pleas for more talk of reunification, but the alternative was to reflect on the difficulties of reunification. Brandt compromised and kept talking about reunification while reflecting on its difficulties. The chief difficulty, as both Brandt and Kennedy pointed out, was that reunification was clearly not obtainable against or even without the Soviet Union. Foreign Minister Schröder preferred to evade that problem altogether when he advised Rusk to avoid this ‘Ausdrucksweise’ (way of expression),10 whereas Brandt struggled with the consequences in his Bundestag speech of 6 December 1961: In his interview with ‘Izvestia’ the American President has correctly explained that reunification can obviously not be achieved against the will of the Soviet Union. The consequence would be that, in order to achieve it, we would have to try for an improvement of the relations with the Soviet Union. In today’s situation this appears almost hopeless.11 127

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The West Germans were caught in a double bind: reunification required an understanding with the Soviet Union, but in addition to the Cold War at large it was precisely the special conflict between West German revisionism and the Soviet grip on Eastern Germany that fundamentally marred German–Soviet relations in the first place. As Brandt admitted in the ‘German’ chapter added to the Harvard lectures, this made for a bleak prospect: Under these conditions, it is indeed one of the most difficult tasks imaginable to normalize relations between Germany and the Soviet Union . . . the Federal Republic cannot refrain from insisting that the Soviet Union must release her grip on that area which today is called East Germany. Up to the present, the government of the Soviet Union has found no reason to give up this military glacis with its centers of industrial production. One well might ask what could have ever induced the Soviet Union to withdraw from this position. Here I am not concerned with renewing that fruitless discussion about the price that might be paid. For at present, I feel that there is no price that either we or our Western allies could possibly pay that would induce the Soviets to relinquish their grip on the zone.12 This only went to prove what Brandt had already said long before Kennedy: that reunification was not around the corner, but ‘could occasion a long and arduous process, full of contradictions, demanding sacrifice and the utmost patience’.13 At the time, this was a remarkable position in contrast to both West German expectations and Adenauer’s reassurances. Most of those West Germans polled in the late 1950s who were willing to choose a time frame in response to the question how long it would take until reunification answered ‘up to five years’, the shortest period on offer, while constant majorities of over 60 per cent believed that it made sense to constantly demand reunification rather than leave it to time. When Adenauer specified time periods in the 1950s, they fluctuated between two, five and ten years (until, from 1958 onwards, the Chancellor became more pessimistic), while Foreign Minister Schröder disputed the idea of reunification as a historical process rather than a concrete demand as late as 1965. This was what Brandt was up against.14 In contrast, the admonishments of both Robert and Jack Kennedy that there were ‘no indications at present that the Soviets would change their negative attitude . . . in the foreseeable future’, that it was ‘unrealistic, therefore, to entertain hopes that German reunification would soon become a reality’ (RFK), and that reunification would ‘therefore, not be either quick or easy’ (JFK) seemed to provide a perfect match for Brandt’s warnings.15 But the almost identical language concealed a significant difference in the underlying positions. For Kennedy, who distinguished sharply between the need to give the West Germans a minimum of nominal support for the idea of reunification and its almost total irrelevance as a political objective,16 this was as far as he could go in 128

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telling the Germans that he thought reunification a mere chimera. ‘Germany will probably never be reunified’, he told Kenneth O’Donnell, who thought that the President was ‘realistic enough to see the hope of a reunited East and West Germany as an impossible dream’.17 The difference between an assessment of reunification as a distant long-term objective or a near impossibility might have been somewhat academic, but the consequences for short and medium-term policy were not. Reunification, as Kennedy impressed on Brandt in October 1962, was simply not a task for their generation18 – and Kennedy was much more interested in what their generation could do than in what the future might hold. His question, with which Rusk tormented his German counterparts, was what could be done, and his answer was delivered to the German public with candour by his brother in Berlin: ‘There is nothing more that we can do right at this time.’19 In this perspective, reunification was of no import for policy. Kennedy did not have a reunification policy of any sort. This was not, at least not yet, Brandt’s understanding of the truism that reunification was a long way off – which was still an ambiguous position. It could, as in Brandt’s case, eventually lead to the realization that a qualified acceptance of the status quo was required as a basis for constructive policy under the conditions of Germany’s continuing division, but it could also, as in the case of Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder, serve as a call for patience and a warning against fatigue in the pursuit of the policy of non-recognition and reunification. Both Brandt and Kennedy referred reunification to history, but while the Americans meant this as discouragement and implied that the project had to be shelved, Brandt drew encouragement from his view of history as unstoppable change, which might one day create the conditions for reunification. But in 1965 Rostow told Brandt bluntly that Germany could not base its policy on the idea that ‘history comes to rescue the German maiden’20 – and Brandt agreed. What the Americans meant to intimate was that because reunification was at best a historical question it could not be allowed to stand in the way of present policy, but Brandt and Bahr thought about present day policies as possible catalysts of historical change. As Bahr remembered later: At that time all of us who were interested in this were still thinking in terms of a policy . . . in our own interest, with the objective to get a process going that would end with the German right of self-determination. This was, so to speak, the working hypothesis of our thinking until the late 60s. According to Bahr ‘change through rapprochement’ was originally only designed for ‘a timewise limited transition until reunification’,21 and in the mid1960s Brandt kept talking about a peace conference and a Deutschlandinitiative ‘with substance’, demanded German plans for a peace treaty and portrayed détente as a road to reunification. The origins of Ostpolitik did not lie in a renunciation of reunification. 129

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This led to some half-deliberate misunderstandings. On the one hand Brandt was perfectly aware ‘that the Americans will not pursue an active reunification policy’ and that for many in the West reunification was ‘not a question of practical policy’ at all, while on the other he defended the Kennedy administration against the charge of having written reunification off.22 Nowhere did this inherent tension become more evident than in the treatment of the President’s comments in Germany and Berlin. The American planning papers anticipated: the problem, throughout the visit, and particularly in Berlin, of how to deal with the problem of German reunification in a way which will meet the political and emotional requirements of the Germans themselves on this issue without holding forth false hopes or sounding overly provocative.23 Consequently, the President combined support for reunification in principle with warnings about its remoteness, and by doing so apparently erred on the side of caution. The German Foreign Office gladly ignored the latter part and celebrated the resumption of American talk of reunification,24 while Brandt got exactly the combination he wanted and claimed that Kennedy’s ‘strategy of peace’ bridged the gap: During his visit the American President has spoken about reunification in a manner that was sober and realistic and that yet showed a way ahead. The solution of the German questions has its place in his concept for a phased overcoming of the present situation. Speaking about the ‘great expectations of the strategy of peace’, right after Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner-speech, he had gone even further and told the Berliners in the presence of the President that ‘This will be the path to selfdetermination. In this way we will also arrive at the reunification of our people.’25 At best this was a considerable stretch of Kennedy’s approach: contrary to Bahr’s public claim in July 1963, the German right to self-determination was decidedly not ‘an indispensable part of the American ideas to relax and change the relationship between East and West’. This difference in expectations (or at least their public presentation) had conceptual consequences and affected the perspective of the ‘small steps’ that were at the heart of Brandt’s strategy in the 1960s. Brandt had realized that the uncompromising all or nothing approach with its exclusive focus on reunification was untenable and resulted, quite logically, in nothing. Small steps in between had to be allowed for and achieved: ‘I would prefer bigger ones’, as he put it at the 1964 SPD convention in Karlsruhe, ‘but small steps are better than no steps.’26 The question, however, was whether these were measures in their own right or still seen as steps, albeit small ones, towards the, albeit distant, goal of re130

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unification. When discussing ways of achieving humanitarian contacts between East and West Berlin in September 1962, Rusk had told Brandt that ‘if . . . easements of this sort could be worked out, it should be tried even though it will not solve [the] main problem’, and in later years the Johnson administration encouraged the Germans to pursue a gradual approach to reunification, not because they believed it worked, but in order to ‘acclimatize them to the status quo’.27 In 1963 – the year of Tutzing – this was not Brandt’s take on gradual measures. Humanitarian measures could be a ‘first step’, as he repeated throughout the late summer, ‘But the path must lead towards self-determination for the fellow-countrymen who are separated from us and to the restoration of our unity in one state in peace and liberty.’ This began to change in 1964/1965, when, after the first pass agreement, Brandt started to emphasize the distinction between the intrinsic value of humanitarian steps and any possible benefit for reunification. Finally he came to criticize the ‘erroneous belief that small steps or medium steps automatically would lead to a peace settlement for Germany’ and ‘did not regard the small steps as an automatic path to reunification, but as a value in themselves in so far as one helped the people in the Zone’.28 While reunification thus drifted further and further away, it became clear that more than a policy of humanitarian improvements in Germany was required. Brandt and Bahr drew four interrelated conclusions that ultimately all pointed in the same direction. The first was that, since the USSR guaranteed and maintained the GDR, the key to progress in the German question was in Moscow, not in East Berlin. Bahr had said so since the 1950s, and there was a continuous line from this basic insight to the ‘Moscow first’ strategy and the pivotal role of the Moscow treaty in Brandt’s Ostpolitik of the early 1970s.29 Second, it followed that the Gordian knot of needing better relations with the Soviet Union in order to solve the problem that marred these relations in the first place had to be cut, and the only way to cut it was détente both between the superpowers and in German–Soviet relations.30 Third, this meant that legitimate Soviet security concerns (acknowledged by Kennedy, but still a contradiction in terms for many Western contemporaries) would have to be taken into account and ultimately satisfied, if it should ever be possible to detach East Germany from the Soviet Union. ‘Only the plenary of European states whose collective sovereignty and source of authority is acknowledged by the Soviets and endorsed by an Atlantic partnership can offer an acceptable guarantee of security to the victims of Nazi aggression’, Brandt explained in October 1963: And only when all our neighbours and all their neighbours accept that guarantee and are convinced that they need no longer fear for their safety – only then can the German people expect to share fully the privileges as well as the responsibilities of the era that lies ahead.31 Bahr’s later (over)emphasis on security would be heavily influenced by that thought. 131

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In the same speech, Brandt also drew the fourth conclusion when he introduced his security argument with the admission that the ‘hope for our own reunification is in large measure dependent on our hope for the reunification of Europe’. Both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson explicitly encouraged this idea, and in 1964 Brandt credited the ‘Americans in particular’ with having ‘made clear the connection between European developments and the German question’.32 The belief that German reunification presupposed all-European unification was notable not only for ultimately proving wrong, but for its profound consequences: this was where Deutschlandpolitik became Ostpolitik, a European policy to address the German question, a German policy to reconcile all of Europe. Both Brandt’s and Bahr’s view of Europe had long been all-European and the admonition that Europe did not stop at the iron curtain was rooted in Brandt’s statements of the late 1950s and reoccurred throughout the early 1960s as well as in the later language of Ostpolitik. When President Kennedy advised the Germans in Berlin ‘to think once again in terms of all of Europe’, this was not only welcome to Brandt, but possibly even due to his influence since David Klein had recommended, via Bundy, to adopt Brandt’s relevant passage from the Rotary speech in St. Louis for the President’s speech.33 By 1964, Brandt was working on translating this attitude into policy and created a stir in West Germany by bypassing the Federal Government with a memorandum on relations with Eastern Europe for Dean Rusk.34 But the ‘restoration of Europe’35 was easier said than done – especially for Germans. Two decades and less than a generation after the Second World War, Eastern Europe remained deeply scarred by the Nazi onslaught and afraid of Germany, and both Khrushchev and Gomulka knew how to work the German spectre to curb their domains. This was not only a propaganda problem, but an obstacle for any Eastern European policy, not to mention reunification, and from 1963 onwards the Americans pressured both Schröder and Brandt to realize that the Eastern fear was real and had to be allayed. Brandt was already aware of the problem: Germany, he pointed out in the third chapter added to his Harvard lectures, had an ‘interest in helping to form . . . the picture of Germany that the people of those countries have’.36 Eventually this would be one of the great achievements of Ostpolitik, but in the early 1960s Brandt struggled with the consequences. Two great and obvious stumbling blocks stood in the way of these ambitions. The first was that it was difficult for West Germany to engage with Eastern Europe as long as it did not even have diplomatic relations with these countries – but the Hallstein doctrine categorically forbade diplomatic relations with any country recognizing the GDR except the Soviet Union itself. For Eastern Europe in particular this never made much sense as the countries in the Soviet bloc had hardly any choice (a fact that was later allowed for in the ingeniously named ‘congenital defect theory’). The doctrine willingly left German representation in Eastern Europe to the GDR, and as time passed it created a series of further problems: as Ulbricht’s 1965 reception in Cairo and the ensuing débâcle for 132

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Bonn’s Middle Eastern policy demonstrated, it provided third world countries with a handy means of blackmailing Bonn’s foreign and development aid policy, and over the course of the 1960s – from the GDR’s participation in the nuclear test ban treaty to the first round of recognitions in 1969 (prior to Brandt’s chancellorship) – it slowly became clear that the Hallstein doctrine increasingly failed to halt the East German advances. This threatened to result in a directly proportional loss of West German influence, since the rigid mechanism of the doctrine committed the Federal Republic to breaking off diplomatic relations with countries that recognized the GDR. There was a danger, as Brandt pointed out in 1966, that the GDR could ‘indirectly determine where the Federal Republic of Germany has to lower its flag’.37 In November 1962 Secretary of State Rusk instructed all American diplomatic posts that it ‘has long been the position of the U.S. government that it would be desirable and advantageous for the FRG to establish diplomatic relations with certain Eastern European Governments’; Adenauer privately put it to Brandt in June 1962 that the Hallstein doctrine might have to be traded as long as one could still get something in return; and in 1964 President Johnson hinted publicly that ‘it is also our belief that wise and skillful development of relationships with the nations of Eastern Europe can speed the day when Germany will be reunited’38 – but Brandt wobbled. He had in fact long been sympathetic to relations with Eastern Europe, but throughout the first half of the 1960s he left it at questions and allusions, held on to the idea that ‘In respect to the nature of these relations, content is much more important than the outer form’, showed himself satisfied with Schröder’s trade missions and told the Americans as late as 1965 that he did ‘not r[e]p[ea]t not consider it wise or desirable for [the] FRG to establish full diplomatic relations at this time with Eastern European gov[ernmen]ts’.39 The second key problem for the pursuit of all-European reconciliation and the dispelling of East European fears was that West Germany’s contesting of the Oder-Neisse border and the talk of the legally continuing existence of the borders of 1937 were openly revisionist – 20 years after the last world war and in the midst of the Cold War, the commitment to peaceful means was simply not good enough to reassure the Poles. In this question the Western pressure on the Federal Republic as well as Kennedy’s pressure on Brandt was far greater than on the Hallstein doctrine. Kennedy had stated as early as 1957 that it was ‘not possible or proper to freeze the legal status of these territories until there has been a final peace conference’,40 the recognition of the Oder-Neisse border reoccurred in all of the administration’s designs for a European settlement built around Berlin, and throughout 1961 the administration kept considering a declaration that, while technically maintaining that the question could only be formally resolved in a peace settlement, would commit the US as well as West Germany in advance to accepting the border when that time had come.41 In November 1961 Kennedy and Rusk challenged Adenauer and Schröder on the issue, and by early 1965 the West German position had come within a hair’s breadth of being openly disavowed by the United States.42 133

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Brandt himself had already come under considerable pressure from President Kennedy in their March 1961 meeting, and he was fully aware of West Germany’s increasing isolation as well as the substance of the American position – but nevertheless not willing to move. In fact he was little better than the rest of the West German political establishment. In striking contrast to the expectations of the electorate and the expellees in particular, almost the entire political elite, including Chancellor Adenauer, Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano and the SPD leadership, were perfectly aware that the territories East of the Oder-Neisse border were lost and said so, internally, in no uncertain terms – without ever confronting the public.43 From the early 1950s onwards, Brandt at least emphasized the ‘reunification of the German people where they live today’ over territorial claims beyond the Oder-Neisse, but this still went along with talk of border modifications, a hope on which he would insist not only publicly but also privately to Kennedy in 1961 and de Gaulle in 1965.44 Often resorting to the sophistic argument that the Federal Republic could not recognize a border that it did not actually share as long as it remained separated from Poland by the GDR,45 he kept defending the official West German position; and in 1965 Brandt, who purported to stand out against the government by allegedly favouring an initiative on Germany ‘with substance’, told the Americans that there was nevertheless ‘no sense in raising the border question at this time’.46 In the confines of the SPD-executive he made no secret of the reason for this behaviour: Adenauer should not be given the chance to tell the expellees to blame the Social Democrats for the loss of the Eastern territories – ‘with certain bitter things that lie ahead of us it matters very much who is made to tell it like it is’. Rusk’s 1965 comment to his ambassador to Bonn that ‘For electoral purposes, the Germans would like to talk about reunification; but for the same reason they do not wish to talk about frontiers’ was just as true for Brandt as for anyone else.47 The problem was that Brandt also wanted reconciliation with Eastern Europe and Poland in particular. In keeping with the line that Brandt took all the way from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, Bahr maintained in 1962 that the refusal to recognize the Oder-Neisse border ‘need not prevent us from an improvement of the relations between the Federal Republic and Poland . . . Good and close relations need not depend on diplomatic relations and the exchange of ambassadors’.48 This was sheer wishful thinking. In fact the two goals were plainly contradictory, but it took Brandt and the SPD until 1966 to come off the fence and demand the establishment of diplomatic relations with Eastern Europe. In the same year Bahr had publicly excluded the ‘Eastern territories’ from any reunification and argued for a recognition of the Oder-Neisse border in his unpublished book manuscript of 1965/1966. But it was only in 1968 that Brandt, by then Foreign Minister but speaking as leader of the Social Democrats, caused a stir by declaring publicly that a reconciliation with Poland required the ‘recognition or respect for the Oder-Neisse line until the settlement in a peace treaty’.49 Even by West German standards this was not particularly impressive. In 134

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March 1965 Erich Mende, the chairman of the liberal FDP, demanded full diplomatic relations with Eastern Europe at his party’s national convention, and a few weeks later Foreign Minister Schröder, too, dared to raise the issue in public (without swaying his party or his government) – one year before the SPD finally came round to ask for them as well. Brandt’s party colleague Carlo Schmid had already publicly attacked the Hallstein doctrine in 1963, and it was Fritz Erler, not Brandt, who in 1965 under the influence of Dean Rusk first put it to the public that the Oder-Neisse border would have to be settled, i.e. recognized, prior to a final peace treaty. In both cases, the SPD, whose chairman now was Willy Brandt, distanced itself from these views.50 As Governing Mayor, Brandt was willing to run risks in Berlin if they brought benefits in Berlin, but as West German opposition leader he was not inclined to pay the price for breaking taboos without being in a position to reap the rewards. All this was therefore almost a decade behind the Western position. West Germany was losing time. In 1963 David Bruce, a former ambassador to Bonn and now the US ambassador to Britain, warned Rusk that ‘an Oder-Neisse line offer would have been much more impressive if it had been made some years ago. Our bargaining power deriving from this point is now less’. In 1966 Brandt warned that ‘the prices are constantly increasing’ in the field of Deutschlandpolitik; and later Bahr would complain that time had been lost on the Oder-Neisse issue.51 In 1967 the ‘Ulbricht doctrine’ would prove them right, when it stipulated the recognition of the Oder-Neisse border and the GDR as the Warsaw Pact preconditions for the diplomatic relations with Eastern Europe that the Federal Republic now wanted. Progress in the German question was not to be had without Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but Eastern European policy could not circumvent the recognition problem. Nor could it circumvent the GDR – and that Brandt knew. Throughout the mid-1960s he and his entourage were openly critical of Foreign Minister Schröder’s doomed attempts to use an active Eastern European policy to isolate East Germany and undermined them by negotiating the pass agreements with the East German government. Brandt had begun the long journey towards his eventual recognition of the GDR, and arguably it was in this regard, where Kennedy was furthest ahead of Brandt, that the Kennedy administration made its greatest impact on the development of Brandt’s policy. While developing the foundations of his coexistence theory in the 1950s, Brandt had remained a hard-core opponent of any contact with, let alone recognition of the GDR government, at a time when both Carlo Schmid and Herbert Wehner were willing to go further. In November 1961, he rejected the suggestion that German–German relations might be negotiable and told the SPDexecutive that: I think we should, as far as the relation to the Zone is concerned, rather rely – in full awareness of all the difficulties we have to deal with – on what has been previously said and developed on this, [i.e. on] technical, practical contacts . . . it also does not seem right to me to go beyond 135

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that framework because . . . in the international debate the topic of finding an arrangement with the Zone-state is presently understood not as a step towards the solution of the German question, but as an element of removing the German question from the agenda of international politics.52 Throughout the early 1960s Brandt would maintain as a matter of principle that the GDR could not be recognized. This view was partly rooted in his image of the GDR, which he genuinely tended to see as little more than a Soviet occupied zone, ‘a construct not at all comparable with countries like Poland, Hungary etc., although these, too, are under Communist rule’. Brandt underestimated the impact of the GDR government on international affairs, and it was not until 1965 that he came to believe: that Sov[iet]-GDR relations have undergone a major change, with the present Soviet administration treating the GDR like other Eastern European countries and no longer like a special Sov[iet] preserve. The East German regime had become more independent and self-assured. . . . The regime no longer parrots Moscow. ‘This’, he admitted with regards to economic modernization, ‘was surprising’ because he ‘had believed that the Ulbricht regime could not do certain things’.53 However, this did not mean that Brandt’s stance on recognition did not change until the mid-1960s. In a process typical for Brandt, he did not abandon the concept, but gradually changed its meaning. This became necessary because his original interpretation of non-recognition became untenable for two main reasons. The first problem was that while Brandt uncompromisingly opposed government level contact with the GDR throughout the 1950s, he also wanted a maximum of technical contacts and practical arrangements to ensure a maximum of encounters between ordinary East and West Germans. This was neat in theory, but contradictory in practice, since it was up to the GDR with its insistence on government negotiations to grant or withhold those contacts. In reality refusing government level contacts effectively meant renouncing technical and human contacts – and Secretary Rusk, hoping for exactly the kind of ‘gravitational force’ that was so central to Brandt’s transformation concept, admonished the Mayor in September 1962 that it was ‘Important that barriers do not come from our side’.54 As long as Berlin still served as a permeable meeting point this contradiction had been bearable, but after the Wall plugged that leak it was not, and Brandt was compelled to negotiate with the GDR within less than three years. The second problem was that under Kennedy his old understanding of nonrecognition no longer enjoyed the necessary support of the Western superpower, which was moving the other way: ‘We might encourage the FRG to move toward closer relations with the GDR. There should be at least de facto, possibly 136

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eventually de jure recognition of the GDR by the West for an indefinite period, but not to the prejudice of ultimate German reunification.’ This recommendation, strongly reminiscent of Brandt’s later solution to the recognition problem, was given by George McGhee in April 1961 – one year before Kennedy appointed him ambassador to West Germany. The President himself made it repeatedly clear to his administration that ‘since we shall have to talk with representatives of that regime at some stage, we should not now take so strong a line that these later talks will look like a defeat’ and that ‘If the issue is talking to the East Germans or having a war, we are obviously going to talk to the East Germans’, adding that ‘We have recognized many worse governments.’55 In autumn 1961 Kennedy consequently entertained the idea of parallel peace treaties; some ‘degree of recognition’ (Bundy) or ‘form of recognition’ (Kaysen) was included in all of the administration’s plans for a settlement; and East German participation was not only a necessity for the test ban treaty but a key element of the proposed International Access Authority or any realistic access arrangement for Berlin. There was only one problem with that: ‘You could end this crisis tomorrow by recognizing Ulbricht, and you could probably get some fairly juicy guarantees in return’, as Bundy told the President in August 1961, ‘But the West Germans would feel deeply betrayed.’ Kennedy therefore put considerable pressure on the West Germans and looked for ‘sentiment in Germany supporting more recognition of the DDR’56 – and both involved Brandt, who not only knew of the American position, but also had his nose rubbed in the recognition problem by Kennedy and Rusk. The two factors combined when, very much contrary to Brandt’s hopes, Kennedy neither solved the dilemma of contact versus recognition for him nor cared to resolve those specific threats to the West German access to Berlin that resulted from West Germany’s refusal to deal with the GDR. Under these pressures Brandt adapted his stance in an initial two-year process from the winter of 1961/1962 to the winter of 1963/1964, which took him from the orthodox position that non-recognition forbade any political contact with the GDR government to the de facto recognition embodied in his pass agreements. The stepping-stones in this transformation were the realization that Kennedy’s acceptance of the Wall and East German authority in East Berlin implied a massive de facto recognition, his qualified support for the ‘draft principles’ and the access authority in spite of their built-in elements of de facto recognition, his readiness to accept GDR access visas and the once so bitterly disputed ‘agent theory’, and his support for the test ban treaty in spite of the GDR’s participation. Brandt metamorphosed, and eventually he would go further than Kennedy was able to. But in the early 1960s it was Kennedy who set the pace. When the President told Brandt in October 1962 that a de jure recognition was a ‘formality’ that was out of the question, but wondered ‘what there is below this formality that would be acceptable’, he described and asked for a de facto recognition – and this was precisely the way out of the recognition dilemma that Brandt walked from 1962 onwards. The key question, as Clay had 137

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put it to Brandt in October 1961, was: ‘What is recognition?’57 The beauty, and the paradox, of de facto recognition, i.e. of factually dealing with the GDR as a state and its government without bestowing any legal (de jure) recognition, was that while a full recognition was not yet in the cards it nevertheless enabled the inevitable business without defining it as recognition. In September 1962 Rusk told Brandt succinctly that ‘we would not extend de jure recognition to East Germany. But we do not wish [to] attempt [to] define de facto recognition which means nothing in law. Furthermore there are certain advantages in not trying to define this point.’ Since the whole point of de facto recognition was to engage in relations while maintaining the pretense of non-recognition, a discussion of these relations in terms of recognition was by definition contrary to the purpose.58 Consequently, both Rusk and Brandt obscured the terms in public: Rusk happily engaged in terminological nonsense when he denied ‘any formal de facto type of recognition’ on German television, while Brandt got into the habit of portraying the difference between legal and de facto recognition as an allegedly arcane legal matter (‘I as a non-jurist have never been able to fully comprehend these finesses’). By adding unclearly distinguished categories Brandt fogged the discussion in order to steer the unwelcome recognition debate away from what was, de facto, about to happen. In the party executive Brandt disclosed the rationale behind this war of words when he clarified that ‘one must not strain the point of non-recognition of the [Soviet occupied] Zone to the extent that any technical arrangement, which might for instance correspond to the pattern of the inter-zonal trade or an international access authority, would then, as I believe, be misinterpreted as recognition’. If, as in the case of the proposed access authority, the relations between the territories in question were in fact relations between government appointed representatives of states, then all this beating about the bush came of course back to de facto recognition – but, as Brandt had just intimated, this was not about getting the terms right but about adjusting them to suit the political agenda.59 By doing so Kennedy and Brandt reversed and undermined the approach of the Federal Government. Bonn’s starting point was that no recognition was permissible, from which it deduced, rigidly but logically, that no government or state level relations with the GDR ought to be possible. Kennedy’s starting point was, and Brandt’s became, that de facto relations with the GDR were necessary, from which they deduced, less rigidly and less logically, that, if this had to be reconciled with the principle that no recognition was permissible, then the obvious solution was to claim that these relations implied no recognition. In stark contrast to the candour of the internal proceedings, Kennedy and his administration kept publicly denying that any de facto recognition was either intended or implied in their proposals. Brandt quickly caught on and from 1962 onwards repeated the message that the IAA, German–German expert talks, ‘technical contacts’, and eventually even negotiations and agreements with the GDR government did not constitute any form of recognition. 138

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The key to this position was the American argument that recognition was purely a matter of intent, which Brandt happily adopted to justify the Berlin pass agreement with reference to the Moscow testban treaty. As the US embassy pointed out: In view of our traditional emphasis on [the] element of intent as far as recognition is concerned, we were able with logic to argue against [the] claim that [the] role accorded to [the] GDR in [the] Test Ban Treaty constituted recognition. [The] Fed[eral] Rep[ublic] is now in the position of having to stress [the] element of intent in claiming that pass arrangements do not constitute recognition in any way.60 By shifting the focus from the deed to the intent, this formula permitted the combination of almost any practical action with the theory of non-recognition – a perfect recipe for de facto recognition. This was more than just a charade, this was about the power to define: the question was after all not only ‘what is recognition’, but also who got to decide. Brandt’s and Kennedy’s problem was that, while they were trying to play the recognition question down, the Federal Government was playing it up at every turn. This was intended to deter a de facto recognition, but backfired when Kennedy and Brandt persisted nevertheless. In its hypersensitivity Bonn effectively shared East Berlin’s eager view of what constituted recognition, which played to the GDR’s advantage whenever actual steps were taken – this was what Brandt, Nitze and Albertz meant when they pointed out that by helping to make a big affair of the GDR’s participation in the test ban treaty, the West German government was involuntarily helping to enhance the status of the GDR.61 The crossfire from Bonn angered Brandt because he already had to take into account that the GDR would celebrate and inflate every bit of recognition that it could get. For de facto recognition to work without descending into de jure recognition it was crucial to stay in control and retain the power to call the terms vis-à-vis an opponent who had little interest in arranging de facto relations tacitly – which was what Brandt was trying to do when he claimed that the pass agreement did not alter the principle of non-recognition: ‘Nothing changes that even if the Communist authorities say or desire the opposite.’62 Since in this case the Communists clearly had the evidence on their side, this was a slippery slope, but far from being an undesirable side-effect, it was an integral, if implicit, part of the deal: it was the price Brandt paid to obtain the pass agreement and without it there would have been no agreement. Methodologically, and by implication conceptually, the willingness to pay a political price in return for political goods represented a major, hard-won step not in line with either Bonn’s traditional policy or Brandt’s original conception of détente. West Germany’s Eastern policy suffered from the basic problem that, while aspiring to change, it combined an exclusion of force with a fundamental failure to find a basis for negotiations that was of any interest to the East. The 139

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West German contributions to Western planning consistently made the Western position less negotiable and less acceptable to the Soviet Union. As both the West Germans and the resulting plans acknowledged, the point was not to engage in constructive negotiations but to blame the Soviets for refusing. This approach was fundamentally at odds with Kennedy’s efforts to develop a real negotiating position and resolve the Berlin crisis through successful negotiations. Negotiating successfully, the administration realized, required paying a price as well as reaping a reward: ‘The general approach’, as Llewellyn Thompson saw it in November 1962, ‘would be that of a scale balance in which the weights on both sides could be changed without upsetting the overall balance.’ This was incompatible with the West German habit of developing proposals that ‘would give us all we want without giving the Soviets much of anything’, as Kennedy put it to Adenauer the same month in response to Adenauer’s truce plan.63 Instead both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations believed that it was necessary to put oneself into the Soviets’ shoes (an idea that still upset the West Germans when President Johnson suggested it publicly in May 1964), to allow for their interests and, as Bundy told Chancellor Erhard in December 1963, to provide ‘a clear quid pro quo for the Soviets’.64 This was anathema to Bonn, and in March 1961 Brandt, too, had presented a version of the truce plan to Kennedy and failed to explain ‘why there would be any Russian interest in such a proposal’. In June 1961 he told the Americans that ‘we ought to be reiterating our position more often even though we knew it would be unacceptable to [the] Soviets’; in November 1961 Bahr still believed that a mere list of ‘Berlin’s wishes’ could represent a ‘valuable German contribution’; and in April 1962, Brandt still argued for countering Soviet maximum positions with equally unrealistic Western maximum positions.65 But to insist on unnegotiable positions was only consistent as long as one did not also want constructive negotiations. Bonn did not, but once Brandt changed his stance, pinned some hopes on negotiations and supported the American effort, he faced a problem. He knew that the Americans were looking for ‘barter objects’ and were asking about the ‘price’ of an agreement,66 but still preferred not to pay one. His way out was his, and Kennedy’s, notion that détente was to be built on common rather than diverging interests. When challenged with the assertion that negotiations implied a give and take, Brandt therefore maintained that ‘instead of asking where can the one or where can the other side give way, I would prefer to ask: where could there be common interests’.67 However, it turned out that this worked much better for Kennedy, notably in the field of nuclear arms control, than it did for Brandt in Berlin. The problem was that the Soviet Union and the GDR simply did not share the Western interest in easing travel restrictions or making Berlin’s access safe for the West. Brandt did not let go of the common interest approach easily, but he gradually adjusted. Bahr had already realized since 1960 that if de facto recognition was a price, its value was continuously decreasing over time; in June 1962 Rusk reported after his visit that Berlin had ‘fewer illusions about what we can get 140

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without paying the price of some practical political concessions’ than Bonn; in September 1962 Brandt remarked with respect to the ‘draft principles’ that ‘after Bonn’s objections there is nothing left of this plan anymore that could still have tempted the Soviets to trade’; and by November 1962 the US Mission in Berlin believed that ‘Brandt and [his] associates may be willing [to] pay [a] price in [the] direction [of] accepting [the] de facto existence [of] two German states’ if the Allies could obtain a suitable deal. In the Berlin pass agreement Brandt finally paid that price when he negotiated and agreed on the basis of the principle of give and take and the mutual wager that in the long-run the take would outweigh the give and thus make the price worthwhile. The common interest approach had been reduced to using the agree-to-disagree formula of the salvatory clause to exclude areas of conflicting views and interests that were not part of the political trade-off. Détente was not for free. Brandt was on his way to Kennedy’s détente through recognition – and would later muse in retrospect that the ‘Recognition that the GDR represented a second state on German soil went hand in hand with the readiness to negotiate on the settlement of practical questions. I had learnt that when I was Mayor of Berlin.’68 But the inspiration offered by Kennedy was not limited to backing and promoting Brandt’s own beliefs, teaching anew the ancient lesson of do ut des, and pushing Brandt towards de facto recognition. Kennedy wanted more than what Brandt did from 1963 to 1966, he essentially wanted what Brandt did from 1970 to 1973: a package deal on the basis of the status quo that secured Berlin, where the West had no give, in the context of a European interim settlement, where a trade could be made. ‘. . . if we can either find some modus vivendi in regard to Berlin or a more solid long-range agreement, this will open up the possibility of agreements on many other questions . . . including the question of German frontiers, respect for the sovereignty of the GDR, prohibition of nuclear weapons for both parts of Germany, and the conclusion of a pact of non-aggression between NATO and the Warsaw powers’, as Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev on 15 February 1962.69 The framework envisioned and pursued by the Kennedy administration thus already tied together the essential features of Brandt’s Ostpolitik one decade later and anticipated not only its outline but even its tool, the nonaggression pact. The idea to use non-aggression pacts as a means of recognizing the status quo had been a Soviet invention, but it was the Kennedy administration that first took it up in the West: a non-aggression pact was a standard part and sometimes the framework of the administration’s ideas for a European settlement. McGhee suggested encouraging the Federal Republic to negotiate non-aggression pacts with the Eastern European countries; Kennedy himself instructed the State Department to consider a non-aggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact; the State Department kept various far-reaching drafts; the ‘draft principles’ included an entire section on renunciation of force and the prospect of a future non-aggression pact; Kennedy’s briefing book for the European trip of summer 1963 recommended to re-examine the idea; and in early August 1963, Harriman 141

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argued the case for pursuing a non-aggression pact by pointing out to Kennedy that the resulting détente might also ‘make more possible an improvement in the East German situation along the lines that Brandt had asked for’. When Khrushchev failed to link the test ban treaty to a non-aggression pact, the reason was not that the US was opposed on principle, but that Khrushchev, who also needed to learn that détente was not for free, was not willing to pay the price in Berlin.70 While, predictably, Bonn was opposed, Brandt wavered and misled the public when he claimed that a renunciation of force had nothing to do with a recognition of borders. This was logically true but politically wrong since the point in question was the political implications of a formal pact, and internally Brandt admitted that ‘There was more to the suggestion to negotiate a non-aggression pact between the two existing blocs in Europe, i.e. the present borders in Europe are to be recognized.’71 Brandt himself was not quite there yet, but he was getting there: in spite of his understanding, he did not oppose Kennedy’s negotiations effort in 1962/1963; in May 1964 he cautiously suggested to Rusk that the Federal Republic might mollify the Polish with a ‘qualified nonaggression arrangement’ without a border guarantee;72 as Foreign Minister from 1966 to 1969 he oversaw the Federal Republic’s exchange of notes on a non-aggression arrangement with Moscow, while Bahr developed the non-aggression framework of the later Ostpolitik in the Foreign Office policy planning council; and finally – once he had cleared the hurdles of accepting both the Oder-Neisse border and the ‘two states in Germany’ – Brandt would use that framework as Chancellor to engineer the kind of settlement that had eluded Kennedy one decade earlier. This is not to say that there was a straight line from one to the other. Ostpolitik was not predetermined at the end of 1963, and as much as the pass agreement broke with West Germany’s traditional Deutschlandpolitik, it was only the beginning of a new policy, and many important dimensions – including business, economics and security – still awaited development. The distance from the de facto recognition contained in the pass agreement for Berlin to the qualified recognitions granted by an Ostpolitik with European scope remained great, and it took Brandt six years and the experience of the SPD’s abortive speaker exchange with the SED, the end of the pass agreements, the Ulbricht doctrine, and the Cambodian Crisis before he was ready, and the ascent to the chancellorship before he was able, to do what Kennedy could not. But there was also a conceptual reason why the line was not straight: Brandt did more than just catch up. He and Bahr did not adopt as much as adapt Kennedy’s approach. When they finally came round to accept that recognition was an indispensable precondition to the kind of détente that might allow their transformation concept to take effect – that they had to truly recognize the status quo in order to overcome it – there was still much more emphasis on the overcoming than in Kennedy’s design. And since it turned out that they could not get around the GDR and its government, Bahr eventually applied Brandt’s 142

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transformation strategy to East Germany itself. This not only implied a major departure from conventional wisdom, which prescribed the outright removal of the East German regime, it ultimately also engendered conceptual consequences that went beyond anything envisaged by Kennedy. In 1957 Brandt had declared that it was in the all-German interest ‘if every halfway legal lever is used to not only keep the resistance against the regime in the [East German] Zone alive, but to increase it’. In 1958 he had praised West Berlin’s function of preventing a stabilization of the GDR, and in November 1961 Brandt’s old collaborator Richard Löwenthal, who less than a year later helped to prepare the Harvard lectures, claimed that ‘forms of weakness in the stability of regimes in the camp of the enemy are an asset to the Western cause’. This had offered a distinctly limited perspective, not only because the Wall consolidated the GDR and put an end to West Berlin’s destabilizing effect, but because both Brandt and Löwenthal, mindful of 1953 and 1956, had to simultaneously counsel against any open revolts.73 Instability was presumed to be good because it presented the Soviet Union with a problem – but what good did that do if each time the problem became acute this only resulted in an undesirable crackdown? The experience that the Soviet client regimes, including the GDR, could not be toppled from below as long as the Soviet Union guaranteed them by sheer military force eventually led Brandt and Bahr to the conclusion that ‘any policy aimed at the direct overthrow of the regime over there is hopeless’, as Bahr put it in Tutzing.74 Since West German policy could therefore no longer be geared towards ‘removing Communism in the other Germany, it must contribute to changing it’, ‘not revolution, but evolution’, as Bender wrote in the book whose manuscript had inspired Bahr’s Tutzing speech. The starting point was to help improve the living standards in East Germany, something that was in line with Brandt’s general transformation concept and that he had long wanted for humanitarian reasons anyway. Brandt had indicated in Harvard that: I am inclined to agree with the view that the discontent caused by material problems in Communist countries increases the danger of tensions that cannot be controlled, whereas the betterment of material living conditions can enhance the prospects of evolutionary change. One year later, President Kennedy stated in Berlin that the ‘difference in living standards will have to be reduced by levelling up, not down’,75 and two weeks later in Tutzing Bahr applied this to the GDR and admitted the implied reversal in the stance towards the East German regime: A material improvement should have a tension-relaxing effect in the Zone. A stronger supply of consumer goods is in our interest. . . . One could be concerned that the discontent of our fellow-countrymen would then somewhat decrease. But precisely that is desirable, for it is a 143

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further prerequisite for eliminating an element from the process towards reunification, which could lead toward uncontrollable developments and would therefore be bound to lead to inevitable setbacks. One could say that this would prop up the regime, but I have just tried to show that there is no practicable way via the overthrow of the regime.76 But why should this lead to a transformation of the regime? According to Bahr, internal liberalization would become possible because a fall in popular discontent enabled a reduction in suppression – less would be needed to prevent an insurgency and maintain the regime, and eventually so little that the Wall might become permeable: We have said that the Wall is a sign of weakness. One could also say that it was a sign of fear and of the survival instinct of the Communist regime. The question is whether there are not possibilities to relieve the regime of these quite justified concerns so far that even the loosening of the borders and the Wall become practicable, because the risk is bearable.77 This notion of ‘relaxation through reassurance’ or ‘liberalisation through stabilisation’, as Timothy Garton Ash has paraphrased it succinctly,78 was arguably compatible with but hardly deducible from Kennedy’s policy. It was attractive, not least since, as Brandt craftily told the unconvinced American ambassador, ‘efforts to improve conditions in East Germany might be regarded as an area of joint interest between the Soviet Union and the West’79 – but it was not without complications. At the core there was a latent tension between elements of underhand subversion and elements of calculated stabilization that was never quite resolved. On the one hand Brandt had defined coexistence as ‘a period of war with peaceful means’ and had made it clear that his approach was designed to win that war and use détente to get at the otherwise unassailable East German regime: ‘Ulbricht and company cling . . . both politically and ideologically, to the thin threads of an international constellation that has arisen out of East–West tensions. This tension is the staff of their life. Any real détente would be a mortal peril for them.’80 Later Brandt, Bahr and their followers loved to quote the East German quip, alternatively attributed to Ulbricht or GDR Foreign Minister Otto Winzer, that Bahr’s Tutzing concept really represented an ‘aggression in felt slippers’.81 On the other hand, however, Bahr’s concept called quite openly for a stabilization of that regime as a prerequisite for change. At Harvard Brandt had already intimated that ‘subversive influences from the outside are really not ever the right means for making domestic opposition more effective’ and cautioned that when dealing with opposition in the East ‘we must simply be guided by our own best interest, and in so doing we have to weigh carefully what bearing our 144

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actions will have on the internal conditions in the various Communist countries’. In the following years Bahr developed a fixation on control and would turn the sentence ‘transformation requires stability’ into his mantra.82 This crucial link had implications that went far beyond the plainly reasonable, though momentous, insight that the impossibility of removing the East German regime required dealing with it. Since the ultimate goal of transformation now appeared to require stability and reassurance, internal opposition and resistance came to be seen as undesirable factors apt to increase the regime’s anxiety and perceived need for suppression. As Josef Joffe has compellingly shown, it ‘follows that confrontation is the deadly bane of this benign vision’ and that therefore ‘conciliation must take precedence over confrontation, and hence that incentives are more important than penalties’. This directly affected the options of Western policy and with it the whole vision of détente. At least conceptually, this was where Bahr and Brandt began to depart from Kennedy’s hard-nosed dual track approach of strength and negotiation, confrontation and détente, which Brandt had shared and admired in the early 1960s – in contrast, transformation through stabilization implied, in Joffe’s word’s, ‘many carrots, few sticks’. And over time the implication was realized: Brandt’s increasingly softer vision of détente, his disagreement with Helmut Schmidt over how to respond to Soviet policy in the late 1970s, and the SPD’s later difficulties with Solidarno´sc´ and the East German civil-rights movement as well as its inability to match Helmut Kohl’s balance of German–German détente and US policy in the 1980s were all rooted in the imperative of stabilization.83 Bahr would later admit to having neglected the civil-rights movement and apologize to Solidarno´sc´ ,84 but while this was done with the benefit of hindsight, there was trenchant contemporary criticism from a close and sympathetic corner, when Harold Hurwitz wrote to Brandt after Tutzing that ‘There is also a moral side to this that must be mentioned. It is in the liberal and socialist traditions a somewhat disgusting example of “Hochmut” [arrogance] to imagine that, knowing best, one has the right to usurp from an enslaved people its right to insurrection.’85 Three years later, Hurwitz would renew this criticism in response to Bahr’s unpublished book manuscript: I am speaking of the involvement of the people in the events . . . I know that you have thought a lot about the problem of controlling an avalanche of popular mood which could lead to catastrophe. . . . Perhaps I see it differently than you. Bismarck has buried the tradition of German democracy of 48 in order to make Germany into one state. This was regrettable, and I believe that the mixture of hubris and obedience that has caused and prolonged two world wars can be put down to this. I do not hope that the Germans will be given their reunification as a gift by their leadership, whoever the leaders may be . . . I am afraid that Germany will not be reunified without the people acting, and if reunification was accomplished without the involvement of the people, 145

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I would consider this regrettable and disturbing. The reunification should be about the final creation of a democratic nation.86 The idea of liberalization through stabilization was thus both inherently problematic and potentially in conflict with the subversive elements of the concept. Half a year after Tutzing the pass agreement demonstrated this latent inconsistency in practice. The agreement, which Bahr explicitly presented to the Americans as an implementation of Tutzing, created some of the contacts required by Brandt’s strategy and arguably helped to ease the humanitarian pressure in East Berlin, thus theoretically reducing the need to contain that pressure and allowing for a gradual easing of repression. But at the same time Brandt pointed out to an American audience in May 1964 that the: Hundreds of thousands of West Berliners brought some of their commitment to freedom – and thus returned it – to a region they had not been allowed to enter for two and a half years. . . . We know that during these days the people who got together talked to each other as we talk in the West among ourselves, that is as if they were not in a communist-controlled area. Bahr later recounted how a ‘bit of mischievous delight developed about the fact that many West Berlin cars were riding on East Berlin streets. Did the other side consider what their citizens would think, feel and desire at this first example of change through rapprochement?’87 This was arguably in line with Brandt’s original concept of winning the struggle of coexistence by using contacts to ‘poison’ the East, but how was this supposed to reduce the anxieties of the East German Communists in order to allow them to liberalize? Clearly the dissemination of a commitment to freedom, the practice of a free discourse, a firsthand demonstration of the difference in prosperity and the resulting discontent did not decrease but increase the pressure on the East German regime. This contradiction right at the crucial link between stabilization and liberalization pointed to a set of even more fundamental problems. A lessening of pressure might have made liberalization possible, but it required a certain leap of faith to jump to the conclusion that it would therefore occur, considering that the SED’s understanding of Communism tended to conflict with any liberalization not just on practical but on ideological grounds. Brandt’s and Bahr’s reckoning was that it was the quest for higher living standards and economic competition with the West that would bring this about. Guided by the belief that interests were superordinated to rather than defined by ideology, the general idea behind their transformation concept was that the more Eastern citizens and Eastern policy cared about the standard of living, the more it would come to determine Eastern interests and thereby de-ideologize the regimes. The promotion of higher living standards thus fulfilled the dual function of lessening discontent in order to enable liberalization and of propelling that 146

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liberalization once it was possible. The question was whether the two functions were compatible. There were problems with that. The precise logical relationship between the three key elements of higher living standards, stabilization and liberalization was never entirely clear. What was cause and what was effect? In 1960 Brandt had stated that the Communist world ‘will not be able to avoid a certain deideologization . . ., unless it . . . wants to quit the race’.88 This suggested that the logical chain ran from the need for better economic performance to the need for de-ideologization in order to achieve this to the actual achievement of prosperity through liberalization. In that case, however, liberalization preceded the actual improvement in living standards which according to Bahr was now also needed as a prerequisite for the stabilization that supposedly enabled liberalization in the first place. This flawed logic had political consequences: if liberalization depended on the East’s realization that this was necessary for improving economic performance and living standards, then clearly the one thing the West had to avoid was reducing this need by supplying outside aid that could tempt the East to substitute it for the unwanted liberalization that it might otherwise have come to regard as inevitable – and arguably this was exactly the effect that Ostpolitik later had on East Germany.89 Bahr, on the other hand, suggested that prosperity was a cause and liberalization a consequence, i.e. that the logical chain ran from increased prosperity not only to stabilization (the necessary but not sufficient condition for liberalization), but also to de-ideologization as a result of increased consumer demands. In that case, however, the concept not only faced the question why higher living standards should make the Communists care more than embarrassingly low standards, but also the dilemma that the very ideology which it sought to overcome stood in the way of greater prosperity in the first place. Nothing the West could do on its own could ever close the gaping disparity in prosperity, especially not in the East German case, where the standard was not determined by absolute improvements but by the hopeless comparison with the Federal Republic – and Bahr’s idea that a sufficient lessening of discontent would make the loosening of border controls practicable required little less than closing that gap (‘They should live as well as us; then . . .’).90 At the very best the West could have assisted the East German regime in bringing this about, but in order to achieve this economic miracle, the regime would have had to pursue economic policies which would have required the abandonment of some of its Communist core beliefs in the first place, i.e. as a cause rather than a consequence of prosperity. Logically, this led back to square one, while politically this was something that the regime, defining its interests through ideology, was never willing to do.91 In fact it was less likely to do so than any other Eastern European state, since, lacking the legitimacy of a nation state, Communism was the GDR’s only raison d’être. This was why the application of Brandt’s general transformation theory to the specific German case was not straightforward: the question was whether, 147

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as long as national legitimacy mattered and the desire for reunification remained alive, the regime could ever significantly liberalize its rule without endangering its whole state. For the concept to work and truly allow liberalization, conditions would have had to improve so much and nationalism would have had to became so weak that the GDR and with it the division of Germany would actually have gained popular legitimacy – an unpalatable conclusion for a concept that was explicitly designed as part of a reunification strategy. Henry Kissinger already pointed to this flaw in 1965, and Brandt and Bahr themselves were aware of the problem.92 In his 1964 lecture at Hamburg University Bahr argued that ‘we should not be so fainthearted as to believe that a full stomach, however full, can suffocate the will to freedom’ (allowing reunification, but not liberalization since the GDR could then still not afford it), but in the following discussion with the CDU politician Erik Blumenfeld and the journalist Sebastian Haffner he ‘quite openly agreed that improvement of conditions in the Zone might well lead to the permanent split rather than to the reunification of Germany, but he believes that the chance is worth taking’ (now allowing liberalization, though no longer reunification) – but he could not have it both ways. In reality, Bahr always believed that freedom would lead to reunification,93 but so did the East German rulers, who decided that this was a not a chance worth taking. Even if, in spite of all this, they had decided otherwise and allowed a significant liberalization, there was still the problem of Soviet control, and as the Prague Spring would prove, the Soviet Union was not any more likely to permit revolutions from above than from below. There was a conceptual tension between the ambition of promoting the prospects of reunification by arduously transforming the GDR and the insight that the key to reunification remained in Moscow. Bahr accounted for that when he explained in Tutzing that the ‘Zone must be transformed with the consent of the Soviets. If we had gotten that far, we would have taken a big step towards reunification’.94 However, he did not explain how the Soviet Union would be brought to give that consent. The transformation of the GDR really presupposed the transformation of the Soviet Union, a task even more daunting and beyond West German control. If, however, this could be achieved, and Bahr later controversially claimed that it had,95 then why the focus on transforming the East German regime? As Brandt told Kennedy in October 1962, and as both Brandt and Bahr were so acutely aware in the early 1960s, ‘the state in the [East German] Zone could not at all be held without the presence of the Soviet army’ and was likely to collapse the moment it was released from the Soviet grip.96 Over the adoption of Bahr’s concept and decades of getting used to the GDR this knowledge gradually got lost to the extent that it came as a surprise when precisely that happened in the late 1980s. Contrary to Bahr’s key tenets, the GDR was not transformed; the Soviet Union (which arguably was transformed) changed, de-ideologized and redefined its interests because of economic collapse rather than improved living standards before it, too, broke down; reunification came not through evolution but through revolution; from below, not from above; not in the context of an all-European 148

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unification and without an all-European security system. This indicates that there were problems with the concept beyond the ‘irony of history’ (Bahr). But it does not necessarily follow that the policy was wrong. ‘Ideas are not policy’, as Dean Rusk once remarked.97 Ostpolitik was always over-conceptualized, but it was still as much a response to the pressures of the international system as the result of a preconceived concept. The relationship was often bi-directional: just as the policy was shaped by the concept, the concept also served to justify the policy. The two went hand in hand, but while the policy was distinguished by its realism, the concept suffered from the intellectual constellation at its birth: Kennedy could base his strategy on the realization that in the 1960s reunification was beyond operative policy, but the West German discourse still compelled the Germans to make reunification the start and end point of their thinking, which was precisely what Bahr did from the early 1950s to the late 1960s.98 The policy itself, however, could be pursued for many reasons, right and wrong, and in spite of their differing premises and expectations, Kennedy and Brandt eventually arrived at very similar policy designs – indicating that Ostpolitik might just as well be measured against Kennedy’s more modest expectations: security for Berlin, stability, peace and a freeze, if not an end, to the Cold War in Europe, better East–West relations and limited humanitarian gains in the East. The evolving difference in the underlying concept for essentially similar policy designs, however, indicated that although the precedent had been set, the path from Brandt’s support for Kennedy to his own Ostpolitik was a process of emancipation as much as of adaptation. This German emancipation in dealing with the German question was not a matter of course: relying on the notion that reunification was a Four Power responsibility and loath to get their hands dirty in dealing with a situation that did not allow for pure solutions, the government in Bonn had tended to leave the German cause to the Western Allies and content itself with the defence of its entrenched positions. ‘One had to make reunification possible for Germany for it to be able to be constructive’, as Foreign Minister Schröder told the American ambassador. The US diplomatic posts in Germany deplored ‘a certain escapist flight-from-responsibility in the German attitude, which is not accompanied by a renunciation of the right to criticize’ and the ‘almost pathetic reliance upon [the] Western powers, particularly [the] US, to find [a] solution which will satisfy German aspirations without war or significant concessions’, and concluded that it was ‘somewhat futile to expect much in [the] way of new initiatives from [the] Germans. As in the past new proposals [are] unlikely to be made unless they originate from [the] American side.’99 This attitude had already disturbed Eisenhower, Dulles and Herter, it annoyed the Kennedy administration in autumn 1962, and infuriated the President after the draft principles crisis of 1962. And like Eisenhower before and Johnson after him, he once more leaned on the Germans, not least through Brandt, to come up with suggestions of their own. Brandt, who had been briefed by both the Germans and the Americans along these lines long before, did not need telling. He had long been vexed by this and 149

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repeated throughout the early 1960s that one could not expect the Americans to ‘be more German than the Germans’ and ‘rack the brain of the Germans’. Since the Federal Republic was sovereign it needed to ‘grow up’ and show ‘political maturity’, take responsibility, offer ideas, contributions, proposals and German initiatives, take ‘a leading German role’ and become an ‘independent partner in the Western community’. When, in October 1962, Adenauer sniped in the Bundestag at ‘those who for the sake of bustle constantly expect new initiatives of the Federal Government’, he implied not only the Americans but also Brandt.100 At the heart of this controversy was a fundamentally different interpretation of the same problem: Adenauer’s cauchemar des coalitions at the root of his opposition to any emerging détente was the fear that the two superpowers might settle their differences over Germany’s head. Brandt agreed with the premise and told the SPD executive in May 1962 that ‘In the long run there is a danger that the Russians and Americans agree at Germany’s expense’. Brandt’s conclusion, however, was diametrically opposed to Adenauer’s: wanting détente, he believed that Germany neither should nor could halt the superpowers – it was precisely the attempt to use Germany’s insufficient weight to stand in the way of détente that threatened to isolate Germany and produce the very results that Adenauer and he both feared. To pursue a policy of all or nothing in the face of détente and to accuse the Americans of disregarding German interests while simultaneously ignoring their request for German suggestions, Bahr and Brandt argued, was ‘the safest way to lose one’s influence on the further development’. It was precisely through an active participation in détente that the Federal Republic could play a role, gain influence and pursue its interest101 – and not just because détente was inescapable, but because it was conducive to that pursuit: We cannot rattle with the weapons of others. We have no military muscle and no strength. We are forced to act out of a situation of weakness – and that only leaves détente. Namely under the perfectly simple logic: it is in détente that we have the greatest influence. If things get confrontational, we lose influence. And if it comes to war, there’s only obeying and dying.102 However, it was easier to call for initiative than to show initiative and easier to follow a welcome lead than to lead ahead. While Bonn specialized in what not to do, there were certainly more suggestions coming out of Berlin, but more often than not these were suggestions for what the Americans might do, while in terms of feasibility their merit varied. When a critical journalist asked Brandt in October 1962 point-blank how he actually envisaged the constantly demanded German initiative his answer remained characteristically vague. Back in 1960 Brandt had declared that ‘German activity in foreign affairs must not become a mere acclamation of policies that others make, or are supposed to make, for us.’103 But when Kennedy arrived on the scene it became convenient for Brandt to try to get the US to solve his humanitarian problem in Berlin for him, to 150

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acclaim the President’s policy, and to pass off his own advances as a mere application of the American approach. But as Brandt edged closer to Kennedy, paradoxically his independence grew: the long year from winter 1962 to winter 1963 saw a row about West Berlin’s ties with the Federal Republic, Brandt’s attempt to meet with Khrushchev against American advice, his self-assertion in the quarrel about the new crossing-point, and the emergence of an idiosyncratic extension to Brandt’s and Kennedy’s understanding of coexistence and transformation. Over the same period Brandt’s relations with the Allied Kommandantura in Berlin steadily deteriorated as a direct result of Brandt’s longstanding discontent with the restrictions imposed by the Four-Power status and his and Albertz’s ensuing attempts to increase the Senat’s administrative latitude at the Kommandantura’s expense. In summer 1963, while Brandt’s relationship with the White House reached its pinnacle, the resulting friction with the US Mission in Berlin boiled over and produced a flurry of telegrams to Washington about the need to control the working relationship with the Mayor – but both Brandt and Albertz proved obstinate and the tensions simmered on through 1964, 1965 and 1966. When, in order to obtain what Kennedy would not obtain for him, Brandt concluded the Berlin pass agreement in December 1963 with no consultation and less information than the Americans would have liked, the US Mission in Berlin rightly concluded that ‘Brandt’s increasingly independent course of initiatives in the field of contacts with the East German authorities’ owed as much to frustration as to inspiration: He no longer looks seriously to the Four Powers to generate the necessary movement toward solutions for the overall Berlin and German problem. Tacit Allied acceptance of the Wall and its consequences seems to have persuaded Brandt and his closest advisers that for the foreseeable future the Western Allies would act chiefly as protectors of the status quo in West Berlin and that the impulse for movement with respect to East Berlin and the Soviet Zone must come from the German side.104 Ten years later Brandt’s fully fledged Ostpolitik would resemble Kennedy’s blueprint more closely than ever – but by then it was the German Chancellor and not the American President who temporarily settled the German question, outpaced the United States in the quest for European détente, and worried Kissinger and other Americans with a Rapallo complex with the independent and proactive pursuit of his Ostpolitik, even though it remained compatible with American policy. Kennedy’s impact on Brandt was full of paradoxes. Brandt anticipated Kennedy: their basic understanding of peace, the nuclear stalemate, coexistence, Communism, Western systemic superiority, contacts, transformation and the possibility of affecting the other side’s interests coincided in resonant harmony – but Brandt’s development of these tenets largely preceded the President’s 151

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relevant speeches, and in some cases it took Kennedy until the last year of his presidency to catch up. But Kennedy went further than Brandt: while the status quo served as the starting point for both their détente concepts, in the early 1960s Kennedy’s willingness to accept the territorial status quo in Europe was more unqualified and further-reaching than Brandt’s. Since Kennedy was keener to pursue détente for the sake of security rather than in the hope of finding an indirect way to change the status quo, it was easier for him to base détente on a recognition of the status quo – not just transformation through détente, but détente through recognition. Finding it easier than Brandt to see and accept realities in practice rather than just talking about them in the abstract, Kennedy was much less concerned about reunification, which he considered beyond the political horizon and therefore largely irrelevant as a policy objective. On that basis the Kennedy administration anticipated Brandt: it favoured West German diplomatic relations with Eastern Europe in spite of the Hallstein doctrine, it was prepared to recognize the Oder-Neisse border, it was willing to extend at least de facto recognition to East Germany, and it combined these elements with a modus vivendi for Berlin and a non-aggression framework in its plans for a package deal that would have achieved a European interim settlement closely resembling the result of Brandt’s Ostpolitik ten years later. But Brandt caught up: under the influence of Kennedy and the Wall, he learned that common interests were not enough to deal with the East in the German question, that deals would require give and take, that give and take would require concessions, and that concessions meant recognition: the element of de facto recognition in the Berlin pass agreement less than a month after Kennedy’s death, the willingness to suspend the Hallstein doctrine for Eastern Europe in 1966, the willingness to recognize the Oder-Neisse border in 1968, ‘two states in Germany’ in his government declaration as Chancellor one year later, and finally the give and take of Ostpolitik’s interrelated European treaty system based on recognition and non-aggression. But Brandt and Bahr did not just catch up, conceptually they went further than Kennedy: not just détente through recognition, but transformation through recognition, change through rapprochement. And while Brandt caught up with Kennedy, Brandt also became independent: independence through adaptation. Both the agreements and the differences with Kennedy thus combined to propel the development of Brandt’s conceptual thinking. It was precisely because Brandt had anticipated Kennedy in the first place, that, when Kennedy in turn anticipated Brandt, he was able to pull him along in spite of violating West German taboos – because the gap was narrow, if deep, because Kennedy’s conclusions could be derived from Brandt’s premises, and because they were prerequisite for Brandt’s approach to work in an international environment that Kennedy helped to shape in the first place.

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Part III DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS BETWEEN BERLIN, BONN AND WASHINGTON Politically and conceptually, President Kennedy both pushed and pulled Willy Brandt on his way to Ostpolitik. Together with the pressure of the local situation in Berlin, these influences might, or might not, have been sufficient on their own to close the initial gap that appeared between them when Kennedy pressed ahead, accepted the Wall and pursued a German policy that overtook Brandt’s starting position of early 1961. However, they only go partway in explaining the unfolding momentum of the Brandt–Kennedy relationship while that gap lasted. Even while and when Brandt and Kennedy diverged, there was a third force at work that still pulled them together and in the process helped the other two to take effect. Brandt and Kennedy’s relationship was never bilateral: it was always trilateral in that it was always only one side of the tense political triangle between the Social Democratic Mayor in Berlin, the CDU-led government in Bonn and the powerful President in Washington. This was not a matter of course. Far from being eternal, this triangle represented a new constellation: in the 1950s this had not been a structure to reckon with. As the architect and guarantor of West Germany’s integration with the West, Konrad Adenauer, famously dubbed ‘Chancellor of the Allies’ by his Social Democratic opponent Kurt Schumacher, had enjoyed excellent relations with the Americans, who regarded him as a ‘dream partner’ ‘almost too good to be true’.1 In the meantime the SPD’s penchant for neutralism and opposition to West Germany’s integration with the West ensured that Adenauer need not worry about the Social Democrats’ miserable relations with the US government. Brandt himself enjoyed good relations with the Americans in Berlin and for most of the 1950s was arguably closer in foreign policy to Adenauer than his own party, but characteristically a German expert in the State Department commented on his election as Mayor of Berlin in 1957 that there ‘is no question that he is western-oriented and anti-Communist . . ., but he remains a Social 153

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Democrat with much of the intellectual confusion which his party comrades have shown with respect to foreign policy and rearmament issues’. When the Mayor met the President in February 1958, Eisenhower ‘reflected that most of his friends in Germany today were in the Government’ and ‘hoped that Mayor Brandt would convey to them his greetings . . .’. Back home Brandt reported how he had tried to use a lecture in Boston to make clear ‘that Social Democrats are not necessarily cannibals’. In the 1950s there was no political triangle, only the axis between Bonn and Washington – the SPD did not come into the equation.2 From 1959 onwards, however, several developments combined to change this pattern. The first was the SPD’s change of course in 1959/1960. While the 1959 Bad Godesberg convention transformed the party’s programme, freed it of its Marxist heritage, and turned the SPD into a pragmatic people’s party with appeal to the middle class, Herbert Wehner’s famous Bundestag speech of June 1960 committed the SPD to national defence, NATO and West Germany’s integration with the West and marked the beginning of the SPD’s pursuit of a course of ‘togetherness’ with the Federal Government in foreign affairs. Both represented great progress for Brandt and his brand of Social Democracy in the mould of his predecessor as Mayor of Berlin, Ernst Reuter, rather than in that of West German SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher. It was only fitting that as one of the key motors of this change Brandt became the new candidate for Chancellor. From the American point of view the SPD was rapidly losing its odium, while at the same time Adenauer’s relations with Washington gradually but perceptibly deteriorated from 1959 onwards – and slowly the possibility of a new formation emerged. How this would play out depended just as much on the winner of the American Presidential elections of 1960 as on the German contest one year later. In 1951 Kennedy had declared SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher rather than Konrad Adenauer ‘the strongest of Germany’s political figures’, in 1957 he had written in Foreign Affairs that ‘the age of Adenauer was over’, and during the 1960 campaign he had criticized Adenauer’s policies as ‘too rigid and unyielding’.3 The German candidates read the signs: Brandt favoured Kennedy and courted the Democrats internally, while Adenauer favoured Nixon, but made the mistake of making his preference known. The fronts were clear, and when Kennedy narrowly won, the triangle between Berlin, Bonn and Washington began to open up.

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If we meet a representative of Berlin in the free world, then we see that he behaves like the emissary of a sovereign prince. I’m thinking for example of being in Washington or New York and meeting Mr Albertz or Mr Bahr or Mr Schütz there. I think that the Governing Mayor himself actually gives cause for making that three-state-theory visible in the world through his behaviour. (Defence Minister Kai-Uwe von Hassel in the CDU executive, 17 January 1964) We believe it important to analyze Berlin-Bonn and SPD-CDU differences on Berlin policy at this time . . . If modifications [of the] US negotiating position [are] to be developed, this of course should be done with full understanding of [the] probable BonnBerlin attitudes. (Mission Berlin to the Secretary of State, 14 November 1962) And we thought: well, it can’t do any harm at all if they realize in Washington what grouches there are in Bonn. (Egon Bahr)1

The crisis-prone relations between Adenauer and Kennedy are well known. What is of interest here is not how Bonn dealt with Kennedy and vice versa, but how Adenauer and the CDU reacted to the emerging affiliation between Kennedy and Brandt. While this was an ongoing process, the high-profile visits of Vice President Johnson and President Kennedy in August 1961 and June 1963 are aptly suited to serve as case studies to show the underlying development. When the Wall went up in August 1961, Adenauer had been slow to grasp the situation and lost points when he notoriously defamed the Mayor as ‘Brandt alias Frahm’ and failed to go to Berlin, while Brandt was seen to struggle with the crisis. Brandt’s angry letter to the President and Kennedy’s annoyance seemed to offer an opportunity to regain ground, get Brandt down off his high 155

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horse and drive a wedge between Brandt and Kennedy. According to Brandt and Albertz, who claimed to have this from Johnson, the Federal Government had approached the US administration and recommended not to respond to Brandt’s letter.2 The Chancellor gleefully told journalists over tea that the Americans had publicly indicated that Brandt’s letter would not be answered and acknowledged that the ‘letter is not to be published’ (‘But as you know – after all many things are going out which must not be published’), before the Federal Chancellery promptly leaked it to the press.3 The whole plot backfired when Washington changed course and decided to send Johnson with a reply letter from the President and the public credited Brandt with having gotten the Vice President to Berlin – which induced the government to enter into an argument with the SPD about whose doing the Johnson visit was, in turn causing Kennedy’s press secretary to point out that this was an American idea. ‘It does not get any more narrow-minded’, as Wolfgang Schollwer, a Liberal forerunner of Ostpolitik, noted in his diary.4 When Johnson stopped in Bonn on his way to Berlin, Adenauer still ‘expressed his disapproval’ of Brandt’s letter (‘The Chancellor thought that Mayor Brandt’s reaction had been stupid’).5 But by now Adenauer could no longer count on American complicity. Kennedy’s advisers had convinced the President that Adenauer should not accompany Johnson on his way to Berlin, and last minute efforts by Adenauer and his foreign policy adviser Osterheld to overturn that decision failed. Johnson flew alone, and it was Brandt who hosted the Vice President’s triumph in Berlin, aired live on German television at the height of the election campaign. Osterheld later commented bitterly that the Americans refused: on the grounds that they . . . did not want to favour Adenauer by taking him along. By doing so they of course favoured Brandt; but that was precisely what influential circles in America wanted. They thought that Brandt was easier meat than the unwieldy old man; they hoped for a more pleasant wavelength.6 The backlash in the CDU/CSU was huge. When the CDU executive convened less than two weeks after the erection of the Wall, the Berlin politicians present found that the ‘discussion in the executive is in essence about the continuation of the election campaign. The main topic is not a discussion of the situation in order to draw political conclusions.’ The topic was not the Wall, but Johnson and Brandt – and the opinion of some executive members from Berlin that the visit had been helpful was a distinct minority view.7 The majority view, shared by Adenauer, Krone and virtually all others, was exemplified by the tirades of CSU Defence Minister Franz Josef Strauß from the CDU’s Bavarian sister party: I have the unpleasant feeling that some thread runs between the entourage of Mr Brandt and the entourage of Mr Kennedy, (Shout: 156

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Very right!) that there is a connection – one can roughly think of the names – and that this whole Johnson-story including the 1,500 men as electoral help for Mr Brandt was arranged in some form . . . I believe, Mr Chancellor, that the American imposition on you was outrageous. (Shout: Very right!) An American Vice President must not say this . . . For ten years the Social Democrats have not only antagonized but in some ways publicly insulted the Americans. And now the Chancellor who in the sense of a historical turn has brought German politics side by side with American politics should not be allowed to appear with the American Vice President. I don’t believe this. Something is wrong, something is happening.8 The Federal Government in all seriousness pursued Strauß’ resulting idea that the US should now offer political ‘compensation’.9 Predictably nothing came of it, but in the meantime the SPD almost succeeded where the government failed, when an SPD group placed an advertisement in local newspapers that celebrated Brandt’s role in bringing Johnson to Berlin under the slogan ‘America is Behind the SPD’. This infuriated not only the CDU and the Foreign Office, which promptly alarmed the Americans, but also the Vice President, who threatened to dissociate himself publicly.10 A few weeks after Johnson went back to America, all those involved took stock. Heinrich Krone confided to his diary that ‘There are forces in Washington who want Brandt for Chancellor.’ The American embassy warned that ‘Regardless of [the] outcome of [the] German elections, it seems increasingly clear that [the] U.S. will have certain problems in [the] future with regard to its relations with [the] CDU/CSU.’ Brandt, however, wrote merrily, and with some chutzpah, to Foreign Minister Brentano that since Johnson’s appearance had improved the mood in Berlin ‘the interest of the Federal Republic should agree with the interest of Berlin. In my view there is no reason to regret the course of these events, neither for the Federal Government, nor for you, dear Mr Foreign Minister.’ The triangle had sprung into action for the first time, and all three sides had tasted its power.11 Two years and two major crises in German–American relations later, everybody knew what was on the cards when the President was due to visit Germany. Whereas Brandt and his aides met with the American advance party ‘in an informal, cordial atmosphere marked by much good humor’,12 Heinrich Krone ‘gave [a US] mission officer [an] exceedingly frank appraisal [of] how [the] CDU leadership in Bonn regards [the] President’s Berlin visit’: Krone revealed considerable anxiety over what [the] President will say in [his] Berlin speeches and in private conversations with Brandt. He and [the] Chancellor obviously fear [that] Brandt will be able to exploit [the] visit to present [the] public at large with [the] image of having received [the] President’s endorsement for his more flexible position 157

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. . . Krone said frankly that [the] CDU leadership had to do all in its power [to] prevent Brandt from exploiting [the] President’s Berlin visit for his own personal prestige as a national SPD leader.13 Three days later Adenauer’s designated successor, Ludwig Erhard, tried another tack when he impressed on Ambassador McGhee that ‘The difference between the two main political parties in Germany was considerably wider than in the US’ and worried openly about an American preference for the SPD.14 Once Kennedy had arrived in Germany, Adenauer himself continued in this vein by warning the President that if Brandt were to govern he would do a ‘trade’ with the Russians. But none of this worked any more. Kennedy promptly whispered Adenauer’s little intrigue to Brandt over lunch with Adenauer sitting on his other side.15 In Frankfurt he snubbed Erhard’s approach by remarking publicly that: All along the way the Minister-President [of Hesse] pointed out those people along the street who belong to the SPD, while Minister Erhard pointed out all those who belonged to the CDU. Even though I have been here for almost 3 days, I am yet unable to make the distinction or see the difference. In any case, I see friends.16 In Berlin the President finally gave Brandt precisely the endorsement that Krone had feared, and to make matters worse from the CDU’s point of view Kennedy would – despite Adenauer, Krone and Erhard’s best efforts – not let himself be stopped from visiting a trade union congress coincidentally in session in Berlin. His appearance proved, in the words of the American diplomats, a ‘smash hit’ with the unions generating an ‘enormous favorable reaction in labor circles’, and of course Brandt and the Social Democrats made the most of it.17 The outgoing Chancellor was not willing to leave it at that and made an appointment with the American ambassador for the sole purpose of denigrating the domestic opposition with explicit reference to the President’s avowed inability to tell Christian Democrats from Social Democrats. One month later Adenauer treated Secretary of Defense McNamara to the same lecture, but this worked no better than the similar plots before and during the Kennedy visit. The American memorandum of conversation did not even record his remarks and instead mocked the anti-Communist leitmotiv in the old man’s ‘opening remarks, which lasted 57 minutes’.18 The key to Adenauer’s approach was to link the SPD to basic anti-Communist fears, but his crude 1950s style antiCommunism with its references to the Mongol invasions no longer had the desired effect. The Chancellor was at the losing end of the new political triangle, and his attempts to play the Social Democrats off against the Americans failed precisely because they were moulded in the image of the 1950s and therefore went against the grain of the new constellation. Adenauer, used to having 158

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reliably scary Socialists and a monopoly on the Americans, could not play a triangle whose very existence worked to his detriment. Instead the Conservatives were locked into a structure that helped to exacerbate their foreign policy disagreements with the Kennedy administration by pitching them against the Americans domestically. ‘. . . if the SPD had not made itself the loudspeaker for President Kennedy’s policies’, the new CSU Secretary General Anton Jaumann told American diplomats in October 1963, ‘then the CDU/CSU probably would not have felt compelled to call attention, in such loud tones, to the differences in opinion between the Allies’. In a fundamental reversal of both domestic and international significance, the SPD and the CDU/CSU had switched places with regard to US foreign policy.19 This created an interesting situation for Washington, which found that unlike Bonn it could turn the triangle to its advantage. For obvious reasons the proWestern turn of the SPD and the elimination of a neutralist option in West German politics were welcome anyway, but they also, for the first time, created an acceptable alternative to Adenauer. Just as Adenauer was about to head for confrontations with the United States, his view no longer carried the weight of the only available pro-Western option in West Germany. ‘. . . it will of course be very difficult’, his foreign policy adviser noted at the height of the draft principles crisis, ‘to stop the steamroller which is about to start rolling, and this all the more so since Washington knows that there are influential politicians in Germany who think differently from the Chancellor’. This indeed suited the Americans. Henry Kissinger had already told the President as early as April 1961 that ‘I like Brandt personally . . . a gain in Socialist strength would be favorable for us in the long run . . . we cannot cooperate in staking our whole position on the man [Adenauer,] even less on a man of his age’. Consequently the administration remained impervious to the worried entreaties of the CDU and instead enjoyed its new leeway. ‘I wouldn’t for one minute suggest that we modify our handling of the SPD’, David Klein advised McGeorge Bundy in April 1963: ‘For too long, our contacts with them have been too flimsy. But as far as the CDU is concerned, there is no reason we cannot reassure them of our intentions to work with them, as we have in the past, although we are clearly beyond the point where they have to be pampered.’20 As it became apparent that Brandt not only agreed with Adenauer where the US needed them to agree, but also disagreed with Adenauer where the US, too, disagreed with the Chancellor, Brandt and the SPD advanced from an acceptable to the preferred West German alternative for Washington. ‘SPD relations with the U.S. could not be much better’, as the American Embassy concluded in December 1963, and by 1965 an Embassy report on the ‘Implications for German–American Relations of a Possible SPD Election Victory’ concluded that an SPD government ‘would probably be more accommodating to US views on many points’. President Kennedy had arrived at the same conclusion two years earlier when he practically told Brandt that he wished him electoral success. ‘He liked Willy Brandt’, as Arthur Schlesinger recalled, ‘and expected 159

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that if Brandt became chancellor, he would be a far more sympathetic partner.’21 But although Brandt was increasingly perceived in his role as candidate alongside his role as Mayor, the Americans were well aware that Brandt would not win in 1961 and was not yet likely to win in 1965 – politically Washington had to deal with the incumbent government, not with a hypothetical partner. But this made Brandt more, not less important. The key advantage that the triangle between Berlin, Bonn and Washington offered to the American end, was that to a limited but worthwhile extent it allowed Washington to circumvent Bonn. When Adenauer balked, Kennedy could still use Brandt to exert some influence in West Germany: ‘The President has the feeling that if Brandt is kept informed and cheerful he can be a health[y] counter-agent in the German political culture’, as Bundy told Kaysen in summer 1963. Half a year later the US Embassy agreed, when it pointed out that ‘In political terms, the United States has at present a friend in the Social Democratic [Party] of Germany, and the SPD can effectively further U.S. views on a number of vital issues’. And the Americans learned how to play that game actively: in May 1964 Bundy advised President Johnson in his briefing on the American position for Brandt’s next visit that ‘This will probably be used by Brandt to show that we are for realism on these matters – but so we are, and it doesn’t hurt to have it known.’22 The beauty of this approach, from the American point of view, was that it not only provided a German sounding-board, it also allowed for the combination of diplomatic with domestic pressure in influencing the Federal Government. ‘I realize the delicacy of floating ideas with the leader of the Opposition’, Bundy noted in March 1961, ‘but it might provide useful pressure on Adenauer.’ How this combination of public and private diplomacy worked in practice was demonstrated when the President used his October 1962 meeting with Brandt to vent his anger about West German opposition to the ‘draft principles’. One day later the State Department instructed Ambassador Dowling that ‘Since [the] discussion was lively [it] will probably have repercussions in Bonn. Suggest you check their views of it and report.’ This worked in exemplary fashion: Brandt returned to Germany, told the public that America expected German contributions, passed his memoranda of conversation on to the Chancellor, met with him and conveyed Kennedy’s anger personally, then met for one hour with Ambassador Dowling to discuss his meeting with Adenauer, which Dowling reported straight back to Secretary of State Rusk.23 Within the confines of nolens volens having to deal with Adenauer in Bonn, the new side of the triangle with Berlin not only increased the American leeway, but provided a welcome sideways lever to deal with Bonn. At its best, the triangle could do the same for Brandt: his, albeit limited, influence on Kennedy’s speeches in Germany and Berlin was a major example, and when forwarding a Brandt speech to Bundy in September 1963, David Klein suggested that ‘it might be useful to press some of the same points with Schroeder when he gets here, although the SPD label will clearly have to be 160

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obliterated’.24 These were highlights, but in the meantime Brandt still got personal leeway out of the triangular constellation and enjoyed the advantages afforded by West Berlin’s intermediary status. As Governing Mayor of West Berlin he argued and campaigned for West Berlin as a full state of the Federal Republic, repeatedly attacked the Four Power status, and snapped at the authority of the Allied Kommandantura. On the other hand, however, Brandt was only to happy to refer to the Four Power status and the Allied prerogatives when he needed them to guard his independence from the government in Bonn, which was after all supposed to represent West Berlin in foreign affairs. This was not lost on the others. The US Mission described Brandt’s technique lucidly and accused Brandt and the Senat of wanting ‘to have their cake and eat it too’, while Adenauer sarcastically told Ambassador McGhee that: the legal status of Berlin, as he saw it, is somewhat as follows: [the] Fed[eral]Rep[ublic] believes [that] Berlin belongs to Germany. [The] United States and other countries do not. Mayor Willy Brandt appears to believe sometimes it does, i.e. when he needs money, while at other times he does not.25 Little wonder then that throughout the whole period a running battle kept flaring up between Brandt’s administration in Berlin, which tended to circumvent the Foreign Office and the Embassy in Washington and frequently accused them of withholding information, and the Foreign Office, which accused Brandt of pursuing his own foreign policy and tried in vain to control West Berlin’s relations with the Allies. These were crucial because they provided Brandt with the kind of official relations with Washington that the opposition typically lacks – thus turning the political triangle into a diplomatic ménage à trois. Groups of three tend to be unstable because any division pitches two against one, and Brandt and Kennedy shared a problem: ‘Both still had to deal with an old man in Bonn, who was in different ways troublesome and disagreeable to both of them. Such a constellation joins together, even tacitly’, as Bahr recalled in his memoirs.26 Brandt’s relations with the Kennedy administration therefore profited directly from the deterioration of Adenauer’s relations with Washington: each of the three major crises in German–American relations between 1961 and 1963 engendered a distinct push in the American interest in Brandt. His support of the Berlin negotiation effort, his opposition to the Élysée treaty, and his support for the test ban treaty were welcome, but they only really mattered because Adenauer balked – thereby encouraging Brandt to diverge and support Kennedy as far as possible. Inadvertently Adenauer allowed Brandt to follow Kennedy into the uncharted territory beyond traditional Deutschlandpolitik by covering his back: Brandt did not agree with everything that came out of Washington either, but by and large the business of opposing (and the American wrath it incurred) could safely be left to Bonn. Brandt did not yet bear the responsibility for reconciling US 161

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foreign policy, and Kennedy’s understanding of consultation, with West German foreign policy in practice – and might have found it harder to deal with Kennedy if he had already been installed in Bonn himself. This mechanism presented Brandt with the question of how to handle the juxtaposition with Adenauer in his own dealings with the Americans. During his travels in the United States, Brandt had built up a reputation for conducting himself with loyalty to the Federal Government – to the point that in 1961 Baron zu Guttenberg of the CSU commented that in the USA Brandt created the impression of agreeing ‘with Kennedy and Adenauer’, but in the Federal Republic of agreeing ‘with Kennedy against Adenauer’. While modifying this approach somewhat when the successive crises of the early 1960s found him closer to Washington than Bonn, he never abandoned it entirely. There was nothing like the all-out conspiracies that Adenauer and Strauß suspected, and there was no direct equivalent to Krone’s and Adenauer’s frontal attacks on the SPD – because there was no need or use for it. Brandt’s support for Kennedy and the occasional reminder that ‘It was really the CDU which objected’ was quite enough. The constellation, as Bahr later acknowledged, ‘took effect through itself, as long as one didn’t try to exploit it’.27 But this did not mean that Brandt and his team did not play the game – they only played it slightly more subtly and much more successfully. When Adenauer was due to visit the United States in spring 1961, Hurwitz wrote frankly to Brandt that: If he makes a poor showing in the States, all to the good. But one must not count or even need we hope for that. The main thing is to prepare for the right kind of admiration of him in the States, the kind that is full of uncanny doubts about its possibly lasting. The miracle must be taken for what it is in the States – and that should shock Germany – that he is seen doing a splendidly well-prepared performance but also as a kind of freak-show, a stunt. One should collect the right kind of information to help here. . . . The question is how to get certain U.S. editors and columnists to be thinking along these lines when he arrives? I’d like to discuss that with you or Egon.28 Hurwitz, though close to Brandt, was not a member of the inner political circle around the Mayor and showed a tendency to develop eager initiatives that were not necessarily appreciated by the camarilla in the Senat Chancellery. There is no evidence that Brandt pursued Hurwitz’s suggestion – but then Brandt found less obvious ways that were both more indirect and more effective in taking advantage of the contrast with Adenauer. ‘Adenauer was difficult and Brandt was attractive, both personally and intellectually’, as Carl Kaysen put it later;29 and highlighting this contrast, Brandt discovered, could be very effective where Brandt’s strengths played on Adenauer’s weaknesses. One of these weaknesses was the need for regular 162

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repetitions of American statements on US guarantees and reunification. The requirement of constant reassurance was arguably as much the product of American insincerity as of West German neuroticism, but either way it greatly annoyed the Kennedy administration: ‘It was, the President said once, like a wife who asks her husband every night, “Do you love me?” and, when he keeps repeating he does, nevertheless asks again, “But do you really love me?” – and then puts detectives on his trail.’30 Contrary to his later claims, Brandt had originally not been much different when it came to collecting reassurances, but now he scented which way the wind was blowing. ‘In response to the Secretary’s inquiry as to whether the Mayor had any doubts as to the US commitment on Berlin’, Brandt had already told Rusk in December 1961 that ‘he had none but that there were many people in the Federal Republic who had such doubts’; and when he came to America in autumn 1962, he made a point of declaring that he had not come to seek new reassurances, adding later on television that the West Berliners ‘do not belong to those who mistrust the words of friends’.31 The enthusiastic reactions to these fairly trivial remarks can only be understood against the background of exasperation with Bonn: both Kennedy and Rusk explicitly thanked Brandt for his statements, Rusk added that ‘This was [the] best thing Brandt could have said’, and nine months later in Berlin the President would publicly applaud Brandt for repeating his remarks.32 Adenauer not only made Brandt look good, but Brandt knew how to help. Vice versa, Kennedy could also be used to make the CDU look bad. Two months after Kennedy’s triumphant visit, Bahr advised Brandt that ‘we . . . must urge the CDU to implement their pro-American statements in practice or to repeat them. This is tantamount to setting a Spaltpilz [a divisive bacterium] on to the CDU, whose Occidental circles are suspicious of the Kennedy-policy’. Only a few weeks later Adenauer, now ex-Chancellor but still CDU-chairman, handed the SPD the opportunity on a silver platter in the shape of an interview with Marguerite Higgins, in which he attacked US government policy and blamed the Wall on the Americans (whose reaction, in stark contrast to his own actual position two years earlier, he now sharply condemned). As the US Embassy recognized, the SPD had ‘seldom been offered a better handle for parliamentary mischief’, and within two days the Social Democrats produced a parliamentary interpellation, asking the government whether or not it shared the exChancellor’s views. The government found itself thrust into an embarrassing political double-bind, and the SPD once more enjoyed the mechanics of a triangle that it had learned to play well.1 The political triangle between Berlin, Bonn and Washington thus effected all three relationships and helped to reinforce Brandt’s affinity to Kennedy even where their political positions were not, or not yet, congruent. While Brandt’s attraction, like Bonn’s opposition, to Kennedy did not originate from tactical considerations, domestic tactics helped to close the strategic gap: adapting promised political benefits, whereas falling behind threatened to destroy a rewarding political structure. 163

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This constellation persevered throughout the 1960s, but while it did not dissolve, it was never again quite as sharply in focus as in the last years of the Adenauer era. Though good and beneficial, Brandt’s relations with President Johnson had nothing like the personal chemistry and the mutual respect that had distinguished Brandt’s relations with Kennedy. As it became clearer that the Berlin crisis was over while the Cold War in Asia heated up, the Berlin Mayor became less important (and aware of it). Vietnam in turn eventually soured the SPD’s relations with the US from the grassroots, while Brandt, who later admitted to having repressed the problem, kept trying to cultivate the American connection. In the meantime Bonn was becoming less repellent to Washington as Ludwig Erhard, an avowed Atlanticist who was popular with US diplomats, became Chancellor, while Foreign Minister Schröder pursued his policy of opening trade missions in Eastern Europe with support from both the United States and the SPD. The Frankfurter Rundschau commented that Brandt was losing his bogey, and the SPD began to worry about its competitive advantage.2 This was premature: the arguments about Brandt’s pass agreements, German–American disagreement about the desirability of a largely propagandistic Deutschlandinitiative, the re-run of the crisis over the test ban treaty in the controversy over the non-proliferation treaty, and mounting American impatience about the West German attitude towards the Oder-Neisse border showed that Bonn remained much more inflexible in questions of Eastern policy than Washington would have liked, while Foreign Minister Schröder remained under attack from the Gaullists in his own party: in April 1964, half a year into Erhard’s government, David Klein described Schröder to McGeorge Bundy as ‘losing foreign policy initiatives to Willy Brandt . . .’. When Brandt left Berlin in 1966 to become Foreign Minister in Bonn, the SPD was still the ‘preferential German option of the USA’.3

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12 SELLING CANDIDATES AND POLICIES Images, campaigning and the promotion of a new policy Policy must have not only substance, but style. (James P. O’Donnell to Sorensen for Kennedy, re: Campaign and Foreign Policy, 1 September 1960) That’s what I was writing about always, you have to use symbolic things here to give the Berliners a sense of security. (Harold Hurwitz)1

Brandt could be content with the way in which the triangle between Berlin, Bonn and Washington intertwined international and domestic politics – he was clearly at the winning end. Ultimately, however, playing off Kennedy against Adenauer could not be an end in itself: what eventually mattered for Brandt as a party politician was winning elections and for Brandt as a statesman a popular mandate for the policies he deemed necessary. In this respect, Brandt’s advantage in the United States was only useful to the extent that it could be translated into a domestic advantage. Trying to transfer Brandt’s American advantage was more than worthwhile, for Brandt enjoyed a sparkling image in the United States. His fluent English, good looks and easy-going manner – ‘bright, easy, and affable’ as Bundy described him to President Johnson – made Brandt an instant favourite with the Americans.2 At least until 1962 Brandt’s image in the United States was almost apolitical and strongly determined by the twin epithets of ‘liberty’ and ‘courage’. This played directly to two central American values, and Brandt took care to drum them home in his American speeches and hardly let any American get away without a replica of Berlin’s Freedom Bell.3 The key to this was to identify his image closely with that of Berlin, and Brandt did this consciously, perseveringly and successfully: the ‘image of Willy Brandt has become the image of Free Berlin all around the globe’, as Robert Kennedy wrote after visiting Berlin, a ‘city whose Mayor has been so unusual in his exposition of the identity of Berlin with the whole cause of freedom’, as the President put it one year later. This was good for Brandt, but it was also good for Berlin. Since West 165

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Berlin was a geographically nonsensical exclave, militarily indefensible in a localized conflict, economically a burden, and politically at least as much of a problem for the West as for the East, it was vital for the Mayor to uphold Berlin’s symbolic value and tie it directly to the prestige of the United States. Brandt, as Harold Hurwitz put it later, knew: at that time that the American interests and the Berlin survival can be wedded in a marriage that can break up if you let them go. There’s a danger here. But survival requires this bond, and it’s a bond that the Berliners and he has to secure. Brandt did secure that bond, Berlin’s potency as a symbol proved surprisingly powerful, and Brandt’s own international image sky-rocketed until it began to gradually change in the wake of the Harvard lectures. Whereas previously Brandt, and practically all his US allies, had been known as Berlin hardliners, he now became identified with a détente concept and the Berlin pass agreements. At the same time Bahr and Albertz became noticed but not trusted in America, and when Hurwitz talked to the ‘Cold Warrior people’ from 1962 onwards ‘there was always the suspicion of Egon and a feeling that Willy was nice but soft’.4 This eventually complicated and politicized Brandt’s image in America, but for most of the 1960s his image in Germany did not yet match his popularity in America. The point, however, was that America helped to improve Brandt’s image at home. Not least due to the conscious efforts of Brandt’s professional PR work, his success in embodying and selling Berlin in America reflected directly back home where it was credited as a political accomplishment and in turn became part of his domestic image. But there were also broader, less direct but more fundamental ways in which Brandt’s image benefited from John F. Kennedy as the ultimate political trendsetter. Kennedy’s entry into the White House was widely perceived as the hallmark of a new post-1950s era for which the seemingly vibrant and uniquely image-conscious President himself set the tone. Right from the enthusing inauguration, this new mood was picked up in West Germany where it fermented and slowly changed the parameters of public politics5 – and this suited Brandt and his image, which suddenly appeared in context. Whatever the reality was, the role of the family in Kennedy’s imagery and the part played by Jacqueline not only mirrored what Brandt and his attractive Norwegian wife Rut had been doing in Berlin, but provided the Brandts with something they could not produce on their own: a fashion and a celebrity role model. ‘. . . there was Mme. Brandt in another hat’, as the New York Post noted in 1963: ‘young and bright and smiling, ready for the role of another Jackie Kennedy.’6 Much more important, though, was what Kennedy did for the perception of youth in politics. Youth and a sense of a change of generations were central to the Kennedy image: Kennedy had campaigned for Congress in 1946 under the slogan ‘The New Generation Offers a Leader’, went on to become the 166

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youngest Senator and the youngest President (replacing the oldest President), assembled a cabinet with an average age a full ten years younger than Eisenhower’s, and proudly declared in his inaugural speech that ‘the torch has been passed to a new generation’.7 The President’s youth stood out in a world run by comparatively old men, and Kennedy’s personal relations with Adenauer in particular were marred by the vast age difference: the octogenarian Chancellor was sensitive about his age and distrusted inexperienced youth, whereas Kennedy had the feeling of ‘talking not only to a different generation, but to a different era, a different world’. Inversely their generation created a natural bond between Kennedy and Brandt: ‘Were not the two of you the only young men of your generation who were leaders in the West?’, as Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Brandt after Kennedy’s death: ‘Everywhere else old men who belong to the past’.8 What mattered more than this effect on personal relations was that Kennedy contributed to a revaluation of youth and old age in the political sphere. Youth per se was nothing but a biological fact. Its political value depended on its cultural meaning, and in the 1950s, when one of the main expectations of youth was proper respect for age, being young had not necessarily been a political advantage: one week before the first campaign debate with Nixon in 1960, Walter Cronkite, one of America’s best-known TV news anchormen, had asked Kennedy on American television if he wished that he looked older. In February 1961 the US Mission in Berlin reported that ‘Although his close advisers hate to admit it, they fear that Brandt’s youth, while contributing to his general popularity, is as yet a political liability, since in German political life youth is often equated with inexperience.’9 But times were changing, and Kennedy did a lot to change the value of youth in political culture: ‘the Kennedyite conception of youth was rich with connotative associations: activism, optimism, originality, vigor (“vig-ah”), and the pursuit of excellence. But above all, it implied idealism.’10 This perception quickly crossed the Atlantic and began to spread in West German society,11 where it provided a cultural windfall for Brandt and the SPD. As the US Mission reported as early as February 1961: ‘In trying to make a virtue of Brandt’s youth and to avoid the label of political immaturity, the SPD team is relying heavily on the Kennedy victory’.12 Over the following three years, Kennedy’s panache kept affecting the German image of youth in politics, and when the young President finally came himself, the American Embassy partly interpreted his triumphant visit as a celebration of youth.13 The benefit for Brandt and his party was obvious and not without electoral consequences. Of course not all of this was directly due to Kennedy, whose role in redefining youth, and exporting the image abroad, was only part of the much larger process of the far-reaching cultural change in the Western world between the 1950s and 1960s – but processes are made from parts, and when it came to youth Kennedy was one of the harbingers and pioneers of change in his sphere. Another aspect of the changing political culture of the 1960s that mattered 167

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greatly for Brandt was the status of the Nazi past – and although this was much more of a German peculiarity, Brandt still found the American perspective helpful. The context was complex: while in the 1960s the confrontation with the past became one of the dominant topics of the political–cultural debate, fuelled a clash of generations, and gained a determining long-term place in West German political culture, there was precious little effort to come to terms with the Nazi legacy in the 1950s with their eagerness to shake off the past and focus on reconstruction. As far as the government was concerned, Adenauer was content to let the dust settle in silence and stood by several associates with dubious personal histories. The focus on Communism as the current totalitarian threat had helped to make this internationally acceptable, but between 1959 and 1961 reports about an alleged revival of anti-Semitism in Germany, some apparently Stasi inspired swastika smearings, the Eichmann trial, the controversies over the tainted pasts of Globke and Oberländer, and the publication of William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich combined to raise the issue in the West at a time when Kennedy brought a number of advisers into the American government who shared an anti-German reputation dating back to the Nazi period. Both the German Foreign Office and Brandt worried about Germany’s standing abroad. Brandt, however, whose later Ostpolitik was coined by the insight and admission that ultimately the German division was the result of the German onslaught on Europe, confronted the matter directly: he raised the issue himself, talked about the Nazi past while defending the present, actively sought out representatives of Jewish organizations, and publicly advocated confronting rather than suppressing history. In retrospect Brandt’s statements, too, appear sometimes flawed where he used exculpatory phrases such as ‘in the name of Germany – a name that was much abused by those who had seized power’ or ‘horrors perpetrated by the criminals who controlled the Third Reich’ to dissociate a country and a people from the regime they produced. By the standards of the time, however, Brandt was the positive exception for addressing the issue at all: ‘It is quite extraordinary how seldom one meets a German who will even admit to remembering Hitler, let alone following him, but Brandt is not like this. He is one of the few Germans capable of acknowledging his country’s past misdeeds, while working all the time for a happier future in Europe’, as the British exMinister in Berlin, Geoffrey McDermott, observed in 1963.14 The reason why America mattered in this context was not just Brandt’s concern about Germany’s image abroad and the role it played in keeping the indispensable Americans on board in Berlin. As an exile and resistance fighter Brandt himself was deeply involved with his public persona – and this played out very differently in Germany and America. In the United States Brandt’s antiFascist record during the Nazi years was a personal asset: usually cited in the same breath as his anti-Communist record in Berlin, it contributed to his association with liberty and courage in an image of well-rounded anti-totalitarianism, fighting, broadly, on the American side. Up to, and including, the elections of 168

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1965 this was not the case in West Germany, where Brandt was defamed for having left the country and worn a foreign uniform. Both the election campaigns of 1961 and 1965 saw smear campaigns with active participation from the CDU/CSU and in 1961 from Chancellor Adenauer himself. The stark contrast between the German and the American view meant that Brandt’s defamation, which was reported in detail by both the US diplomatic service and the world press and which looked particularly bad in the context of the other news stories about the Nazi legacy, became simultaneously a further burden for Germany’s and a further boost for Brandt’s image abroad. The latter was a balm for the beleaguered Brandt – and his team helped things along. Brandt agreed to send Harold Hurwitz as his electoral agent to the United States in late April 1961, and one of Hurwitz key tasks was ‘to arouse the interest of the press in the defamation campaign against the Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor’. On his arrival in the US Hurwitz found that the German embassy was circulating the story that the defamation campaign had died down, and set about to prove the opposite: Hurwitz approached 16 major newspapers and persuaded Brandt’s friend Melvin Lasky to talk to Joe Alsop and Walter Lippman, the most influential columnists of the time – and this was on top of discussing the issue with various representatives of American Liberalism and the attempt to organize American involvement in a German Fair Campaign Practices Committee based on the American model.15 The crucial question was to which extent this reflected the defamation issue back home via the American mirror: as Hurwitz himself pointed out to Brandt, ‘The US press response to defamation is useful here only if we get it back.’ The aim was ‘to restore the taboos, which have almost been revoked by the CDU/CSU in the election campaign, through the reaction abroad’, and the means was to convey ‘a “big brother is watching you” effect’: The trip was undertaken with the assumption that German voters’ sense of security rests warily on what their more powerful Allies think of them, and hence that American responses to the 1961 Federal German election campaign could again exercise some influence on its outcome.16 Ultimately this strategy did not work out – certainly not to the extent of rendering the defamation campaign unprofitable and deterring its re-run in 1965. But although it was not as effective or as easy to manipulate as Hurwitz hoped, there still was a feedback loop. After a visit to the United States Axel Springer, one of West Germany’s most influential press magnates, showed himself impressed and told Bahr ‘repeatedly that a defamation campaign in this style would have disastrous consequences abroad, particularly in America’. When Brandt travelled to the US in March 1961, German newspapers did write about the American perspective, while dpa reported that the President himself had inquired into the matter.17 In the meantime the German diplomatic posts told 169

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Bonn that a continuation of the campaign ‘would not influence the mood towards the Federal Government and the governing party favourably’. In America, Ambassador Grewe warned, the campaign hurt Adenauer and Strauß and benefited Brandt.18 The failure, then, was one of degree, not of principle. The principle – that the way in which images were dealt with in Germany and America mattered for Brandt’s prospects as a candidate in the German elections – was sound, and the defamation problem was only one example of the American influence on Brandt’s campaigning. Learning from America, it seemed, meant learning to win, and Brandt learned: after reading Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960 in 1963, he sent Bahr a five-page memorandum with 21 points on how to learn from the American experience.19 Thanks to Klaus Schütz, who acted as Brandt’s personal campaign manager, Brandt was already a seasoned disciple of Kennedy’s campaigning by then. Schütz was a trained political scientist who had studied in Harvard for a year and already had a track record for applying American electioneering methods after he had systematically professionalized Brandt’s campaign for the Berlin elections in 1958. In 1960, Schütz had accompanied Alex Möller to the United States to observe the American campaign, analysed the campaigning methods, was impressed by Kennedy, and soon told Brandt that ‘we must do something like that here, too’.20 The consequences showed in the federal campaign of 1961, which marked a milestone in the history of campaigning in the Federal Republic. Brandt’s Berliner team did their utmost to turn Brandt into a ‘Hero Made to Measure’ (Der Spiegel) and personalize the campaign with what the US diplomatic service recognized as ‘highly-individualized, American style campaign tactics’,21 while Schütz revolutionized German canvassing by adopting the American whistlestop tour and sending Brandt on a massive Deutschlandreise through Germany, modelled specifically after Kennedy’s rather than Nixon’s scheme.22 After Kennedy’s success in the soon famous television debates with Nixon, Brandt immediately suggested a German television discussion between him and Adenauer and repeated his challenge several times in 1961. But Adenauer was not inclined to play Nixon’s role and declined persistently – a vignette of Kennedy’s, Brandt’s and Adenauer’s different relationships with television as a political medium. In the meantime Brandt, who admired Kennedy’s ‘integration of the intellectuals’23 in Washington, mirrored Kennedy’s campaign once more by involving writers and intellectuals in his own canvassing, thus creating a precedent for his future campaigns as well as a contrast with Adenauer’s and Erhard’s hostile relationships with intellectuals. Taken all together, these innovations amounted to an extensive Americanization, or in Schütz’s word ‘Kennedyization’, of the Social Democratic campaign, and the SPD made no secret of it either. ‘Brandt’s departure from time-honored German campaign methods and his adaptation of distinctly American electioneering techniques’, as the US diplomatic service called it, was so palpable that it became a news story in its own right.24 170

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This was not a problem: on the contrary, the association with America was a distinct electoral advantage. ‘For more than two decades a part of electoral success in Germany came from America’, as Bahr recalled in his memoirs, and no one knew this better than Konrad Adenauer, who posed with an Indian headdress in the 1957 and a Texan hat in the 1961 campaign.25 Now that the party had created the programmatic prerequisites and chosen a distinctly pro-American candidate, the SPD was keen to do likewise. The precondition for that, however, was that the American administration would let them – not a matter of course, given that the Eisenhower administration had intervened in favour of Adenauer in the election campaigns of both 1953 and 1957. The Social Democratic hope that this would stop with the new administration was therefore immediately and repeatedly conveyed to the American Embassy, and when Brandt travelled to Washington in March 1961 he noted with content that ‘neutrality is exercised toward the two main wings of German politics, from someone or other even a quite benevolent neutrality toward the German Social Democrats, which after all makes for a difference compared with former times’ – and it could not hurt that the press reported the same back home.26 This allowed the SPD to play the American card, cash in on Kennedy’s victory and link him to Brandt. Brandt’s official appointment as candidate for Chancellor was not only accompanied by his ‘Appeal of Hanover’, written in pure New Frontier-style, but ended with an acclamation and an acceptance speech (in themselves borrowings from America), which concluded with Brandt’s recitation of the Federal Chancellor’s oath of office – a trick directly copied from Kennedy after Schütz had observed it in the United States.27 And this was only the beginning. SPD newspapers vied with one another in comparing Brandt to Kennedy, Schütz produced a later discarded draft campaign poster that showed Brandt and Kennedy above the SPD slogan ‘We Are One Family’, and the SPD published 4.9 million copies of a pamphlet called ‘Trust’, which combined pictures of Brandt in America with a compilation of press quotations comparing him to Kennedy or elaborating on his rapport with the President. Brandt was systematically styled into a ‘German Kennedy’. ‘It suggested itself’, as Schütz later recalled: ‘There was not that much to construct.’28 The 1965 campaign saw a modified re-run of the new approach (and yet another slick pamphlet on the theme of Brandt and America, this time called ‘Journey to Good Friends’), but the affair left a bitter aftertaste: shortly before and after the 1965 elections Harold Hurwitz and Klaus Harpprecht, later one of Brandt’s closest advisers in the later years of his chancellorship, both criticized the image-oriented approach, while Herbert Wehner stated, and Brandt tended to agree, that the American model could not be transferred to German conditions. By 1969 Brandt spoke of inappropriate Americanisms, and Klaus Schütz of all people later wrote an article arguing out that the ‘German Kennedy’ was a pure media construction. In retrospect the caricature struck some of Brandt’s associates as ‘embarrassing’ and ‘distasteful’ (Gisela Spangenberg) or simply as ‘terrible, terrible’: ‘a merry-go-round that illuminates itself as American, turns, 171

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rings, and does not make headway’ (Bahr).29 This was justified as far as Brandt’s authenticity was concerned: as his stature grew, Brandt had to be Brandt. As far as the overhaul of the SPD’s campaigning was concerned, however, it was also somewhat unfair: realistically most of the disappointment about the election results was due to the SPD’s inflated expectations: it is worth remembering that in 1961 Brandt scored the best result for the SPD since 1919 and the highest gains in the history of the Federal Republic, a result on which he improved by a further 3.1 per cent in 1965. That this was not enough to govern was neither Brandt’s nor the campaign’s fault, but almost a structural certainty as long as the FDP remained committed to the CDU. There were limits to what campaigning could do. Campaigning, however, was not all that the prestige of Kennedy and the United States could do for Brandt in Germany – it could not only be used to sell candidates, but policies, too. This mattered because as Brandt set out to gradually change his policy towards the East he came up against the deeply ingrained taboo surrounding the GDR and the dogma of reunification. In 1963 Bahr wrote to Peter Bender that a full adoption of Bender’s concept ‘would require readiness for political suicide’ – and that was from the man who, together with Heinrich Albertz, considered Brandt overcautious and tried to urge him on. The result was a situation in which, all the way from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, West German politicians in all parties thought more, and better, than they dared to say in public – ‘it was difficult to express the full truth’, as Brandt admitted to the SPD leadership council in October 1962.30 Brandt and Bahr later made much of this, but it is worth recalling that Brandt suffered from a taboo that he continued to fuel for electoral reasons years after he had begun to depart from it politically. In 1964, Brandt’s first year as federal SPD chairman, the SPD convention in Karlsruhe inexcusably took place in front of a map of Germany in the borders of 1937 with the text ‘Heritage and Mission’ beneath it, and in the election campaign of 1965 Brandt would still go on about reunification initiatives and a peace conference.31 Wanting to have his cake and eat it too, Brandt tried to overcome and exploit the crucial taboos at the same time. Instead of tackling them directly, he combined homoeopathic doses of publicly shared insights with talk of continuity and agreement with the Federal Government, even where there was little or none – and the trump card in this game was Kennedy, because Kennedy allowed Brandt to counter one sacred cow of West German political culture with another: the primacy of agreement with America and the authority of the President. Kennedy’s and America’s image were useful in boosting Brandt’s image, but they were politically invaluable where they could be directly linked to Brandt’s policy – that was why Brandt, Bahr and Albertz began to quote Kennedy at every possible occasion and blended Kennedy’s statements with their own. For the same reason, the barrage of quotations was selective and heavily dependent on a relatively small number of key speeches. ‘Well, of course we picked out what fit. Of course we did. Not without understanding that he also had to say 172

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other things’, as Bahr conceded later. And Brandt did not stop at being selective either: on several occasions he publicly alluded to Allied support that either did not exist or was not given to the desired extent, and on a number of occasions he positively twisted the Americans’ words. The reason for that, the reason for all of that, was that the Americans’ words were still worth more than Brandt’s own. As Bahr put it mischievously in retrospect, ‘it was perfectly clear, if the Americans say something, it can’t be wrong, can it?’32 This attitude was rooted in the immense popularity of the United States and President Kennedy in the early Federal Republic. America was by far the most popular foreign country in West Germany, and the numbers kept climbing up. In September 1963, 90 per cent of polled West Germans stated that the Federal Republic should cooperate with the United States (followed by France with 71 per cent), and in April 1965, 49 per cent chose America as ‘Germany’s best friend’ (followed by France with only 9 per cent in a survey with mutually exclusive answers), while Kennedy’s Berlin visit increased the number of people with a good opinion of the President from 76 per cent to 83 per cent.33 Brandt was acutely aware of this basic factor of German politics – not just because any Berlin politician would have been, but because it was Harold Hurwitz’s job to research this kind of data with systematic polling in Berlin. ‘It became his life work,’ as Richard Löwenthal later wrote about Hurwitz, ‘to unravel the paradox of a city whose population, “the Berliners”, personified resistance to Communism and yet gladly became conductors of détente between East and West.’34 And Hurwitz found more than just Kennedy’s rising popularity in Berlin, which increased the belief that US policy was good for Berlin from 60 per cent to 80 per cent after the Kennedy visit. He unearthed two underlying trends of considerable significance for Brandt’s Berlin policy. First, there was an increasing belief that US policy had changed under Kennedy; and, second, among those who did consider US policy to have changed there was an increasing belief that the change was for the better. Right after the Wall the question whether US policy had changed had made no difference for the question whether it was good for Berlin: ‘in the view of the Berliners, “Status quo” and “flexibility” were an equal cause for concern’. But while the decreasing number of Berliners who deemed US policy unchanged remained just as unconfident in July 1963 as they had been in autumn 1961, the number of those among the increasing believers in change who considered the change to be advantageous rose drastically from 60 per cent in autumn 1961, to 74 per cent in spring 1963, to 84 per cent on the eve of the Kennedy visit, to over 90 per cent in the week afterward. By early July 1963 Brandt, Bahr and the White House were already informed of these data, and in January 1964, just after the pass agreement, Hurwitz drew the conclusion ‘that with increasing confidence in the protective powers, the West Berliners’ interest in a flexible Deutschlandpolitik has also steadily grown, and with it also their readiness for negotiations’: ‘John F. Kennedy has made a substantial contribution to convincing the Berliners that a flexible Deutschlandpolitik is advan173

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tageous.’ Kennedy, who had been advised that by ‘reassuring, and building up your credit with, the Germans and the Berliners you will actually increase the latitude you have for achieving an East–West detente, or even an acceptable Berlin arrangement’, would have been pleased.35 The partnership with America, once dubbed the Federal Republic’s ‘second constitution’, once again proved a fundamental and powerful political factor in early West Germany. American approval had the potential to make or break, as Bahr recalled in his memoirs: Whoever was held in regard in America, rose in the esteem of the Germans. Whoever was noticed in America, had to be taken seriously in Germany. Inversely: whoever wanted to win in Germany, had to be winning in America. . . . If there had been a vote on the affinity to a country, the Federal Republic would have elected the USA. To adapt to them corresponded to inclination, not to calculation. To contradict them, not only appeared stupid, but improper.36 That was why the competitive triangle between Berlin, Bonn and Washington was so politically charged and really mattered for the German domestic scene; that was why Brandt’s shining reputation for liberty and courage in America benefited him in Germany, why, as in the cases of his youth, American imagery affected the outlook on Brandt’s domestic image and why American judgements, as in the case of Brandt’s personal history, could be used in an attempt to reorient the discourse in which that image was traded. That was why it was promising to import American campaigning techniques, valuable to campaign with support for and by the United States, and tempting to reach for the President’s popularity in Germany by posing as the German Kennedy. That, finally, was why Brandt could use Kennedy to sell his own policy and pave the way ahead. As Bahr put it in the memoirs – ‘There was no doubt: the small steps from Berlin to Bonn went via America.’37 Brandt walked that path.

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Brandt has identified himself strongly with U.S. policy concepts developed under President Kennedy. No foreign leader has impressed and influenced him more than the late President. Brandt saw in him a model and kindred spirit, whose realism and pragmatism strongly appealed to him. Brandt has tried to copy Kennedy’s style in foreign policy and domestic politics. Brandt supports the U.S. position on Atlantic relations and European integration. In management of East–West relations, he admires the U.S. approach of combining strength with flexibility and endorses the Strategy of Peace, the patient search for areas of mutual interest where agreements may be possible. He believes the Federal Republic should also conduct a policy characterized by initiative and flexibility toward her Eastern neighbors. (Mission Berlin to the Department of State, A Political and Personal Assessment of Willy Brandt, 6 May 1964)1

A quarter of a century after he advised McGeorge Bundy on Berlin and, for that matter, on Brandt in the early 1960s, David Klein co-authored a book on Berlin: From Symbol of Confrontation to Keystone of Stability, which concluded that the ‘testing of the Khrushchev years had identified firm ground on which a definitive European settlement would be constructed, including the German Ostpolitik and the first formal, written quadripartite agreement on Berlin’.2 This was written months before that settlement would, quite in accordance with the hopes of its West German creators, prove to have been indefinite rather than definitive. But the historical judgement was accurate. Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik was fuelled by the political constellation and experiences of the early 1960s: the superpower’s evolving respect for the status quo in Europe; the consolidation of East Germany; the humanitarian post-Wall agenda; the need to deal with the GDR and approach the thorny issue of recognition; the need and search for a Berlin agreement; the link between that agreement and a comprehensive European settlement this side of reunification hopes; the agree-to-disagree formula of the ‘salvatory clause’; Brandt’s self-confident policy of informing, but not 175

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consulting his Allies; the application of the transformation strategy to East Germany and its extension in Bahr’s stratagem of relaxation through reassurance – all these features and more were to loom large in Brandt’s later Ostpolitik. In historical perspective, the making of the European détente of the early 1970s cannot be understood without the origins of détente in the early 1960s. One might, quite rightly, object that of course the evolution of Brandt’s Ostpolitik neither began nor ended in the early 1960s. In fact, it first began in Brandt’s thinking about coexistence in the 1950s, and it was by no means complete or predetermined by 1963. The speaker’s exchange, the end of the pass agreements, Brandt’s experience as Foreign Minister, the Ulbricht doctrine and the Cambodian crisis, Bahr’s work in the Foreign Office planning council, the notion of the ‘European peace order’, the blueprint for the treaty system and the security dimension of Ostpolitik were all yet to come, as were the declared readiness to enter into full diplomatic relations with Eastern Europe, to recognize the Oder-Neisse border, to drop the Hallstein doctrine and to move from forms of de facto recognition to a qualified political recognition of the GDR. The early 1960s were not a self-contained period that created Ostpolitik ex nihilo whole and entire, and then, after a delay of six years, led to its implementation. They were a phase in an overarching process of policy formation. And yet the Kennedy years were pivotal for the emergence of détente. Heinrich Albertz later called the years from 1961 to 1963 the Vollzug des Nachdenkens (the doing of the thinking), and his ambiguous phrase captures the key combination that made this period crucial.3 The thinking that occurred in response to the new constellation brought about by John F. Kennedy and the Berlin Wall was vital, but the reason why the thinking now became critical was that it marked the transition from just doing the thinking itself, to making it applicable, to actually doing what had been thought in operative policy. If détente was to become a reality, neither thinking, nor talking about it, nor wanting it was a sufficient condition. Only when these necessary conditions were matched with feasibility did détente become a real possibility – and feasibility meant the readiness to recognize the status quo. This was essentially what happened in the Kennedy years, when under the influence of Kennedy and the Wall Brandt began to reconcile his détente concept with the fact that détente required the recognition of the status quo. By the end of 1963, détente was still no foregone conclusion, but now, as both Kennedy and Brandt demonstrated, it was a possibility, not just for foreign policy thinking but for successful operative policy. How, then, did the interaction between Willy Brandt and John F. Kennedy unfold in those crucial years, how did it help to make those years crucial, and how did it gain its extraordinary momentum? In a sense their political love affair was a foregone conclusion. By the time Jack Kennedy set about to conquer the White House, Brandt was already steeped in a personal network that connected him with American Liberalism, and the SPD was already in the process of adopting his pro-Western course. Eisenhower was Adenauer’s steadfast ally, 176

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Nixon was Eisenhower’s Vice President, Kennedy was a sympathetic Liberal, and Brandt needed a partner. No wonder then that Brandt favoured Kennedy over Nixon and that the Social Democrats celebrated Kennedy’s victory. The outward attempts to link Brandt to Kennedy began in Kennedy’s first month in office – Brandt’s and Kennedy’s relationship was off to a good start long before the Mayor of Cold War Berlin and the new President of the United States met for the first time. When they did, the meeting went well and established the personal rapport that would lay the foundation for an intense political affinity. Politically, however, the initial understanding was based on omissions in the political discussion that resulted from a misjudgement of the state of the Berlin Crisis. When the crisis heated up and put to the test what Brandt and Kennedy had failed to talk about, it emerged that Kennedy and Brandt were not of one mind – though Brandt was slow to realize this. The first pattern of Brandt and Kennedy’s relationship was taking shape: frustration. Kennedy did not pursue Brandt’s allBerlin approach; instead he signalled to the Soviets that his interest was, and ended, in West Berlin. Kennedy, like Brandt, sought negotiations to deflate the crisis, but neither then nor later did he ever pursue Brandt’s proposal for a 52power peace conference. Instead he stopped talking about reunification. While Brandt placed more and more emphasis on the endangered freedom of movement in Berlin and desperately tried to avert the Wall, Kennedy came close to inviting it. By provoking and accepting the Berlin Wall President Kennedy was instrumental in setting up a new constellation which exerted great structural pressure on West German foreign policy in general and the Mayor of Berlin in particular. At a stroke, the Wall consolidated the GDR and thereby invalidated a policy oriented towards its disappearance in the foreseeable future. On the contrary the GDR was now in a position to make increasing degrees of de facto recognition the condition for any and all arrangements with East Germany, local or international – and Kennedy had no qualms about this when he accepted the GDR’s de facto annexation of East Berlin and included the GDR in the test ban treaty. Ignoring the GDR was becoming unsustainable, and nowhere was the pressure greater than in West Berlin, whose people needed an arrangement most. Brandt hoped that Kennedy might solve the resulting problems by helping the West Berliners to regain access to East Berlin and planning for the problems that could ensue for West German access to West Berlin because of West Germany’s refusal to deal with the state that contained the transit routes. Kennedy did neither, and instead the death of Peter Fechter confirmed gruesomely that American ambitions did not extend beyond the Wall. And they certainly did not extend beyond East Germany: Kennedy made it quite clear to both Adenauer and Brandt that there was no American support for a revision of the OderNeisse border and increasingly less patience with the West German refusal to recognize it. 177

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The sum total of these frustrations added up to two consequences: 1

2

West Germany’s, and Brandt’s, old Eastern policy was becoming palpably less tenable, both because of the lack of American support and because it was no longer suited to the new constellation whose creation Kennedy had abetted. If the West Germans rejected the American approach for the love of old tenets, then it was up to them to develop their own solutions to their problems, and Kennedy told Brandt so in no uncertain terms.

A new policy was required. But Kennedy had not only frustrated Brandt and the Germans, he also offered a new policy far beyond what Brandt had yet, and Adenauer ever, considered. Kennedy reversed the meaning of the mantra that the Berlin question could only be solved in the context of the German question: instead of hoping for a solution to the Berlin question as a by-product of a miraculous agreement on reunification (and the continuation of the status quo in its likely absence), he was willing to trade Soviet concessions in Berlin against Western concessions in the German question, especially where these concessions were notional rather than material. Kennedy was prepared to recognize the status quo in Europe in return for a Soviet recognition of the status quo in West Berlin and link a favourable Berlin agreement to a recognition of the Oder-Neisse line, at least a de facto recognition of the GDR, a guarantee of West Germany’s non-nuclear status, with a nonaggression pact or even two separate peace treaties for the two German states serving as the framework. Given Brandt’s deep disappointment with the American reaction to the Wall, the letdown of his subsequent hopes for American remedies, the affront to his political position, which precluded dealing with the GDR or recognizing the Oder-Neisse border, and the resulting distance to Kennedy’s policy, this might have been the end of Brandt’s flirtation with the new American president – but it was not. Instead Brandt gave up on the Wall-must-go slogan and, encouraged by Kennedy but acting on his own, he adapted. Although he had once put up with rather than put hope in Berlin negotiations and had tended to prefer the pre-Wall status quo to the imponderables of an interim agreement, Brandt came to favour Kennedy’s pursuit of a settlement. Although he knew what Kennedy had in mind when he talked about dealing with Berlin in a larger context, Brandt stuck with the old but now inverted formula that Berlin could and should not be dealt with in isolation. Although Brandt knew and worried about the declining status of reunification in US policy and although he had a number of reservations against various details of the package deal that Kennedy was tying up, Brandt, unlike Adenauer, did not rise in revolt against Kennedy, but supported the President. In the process he began to gradually change his priorities and downgrade his objections to dealing with the GDR. In his response to Kennedy’s ‘draft 178

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principles’ package he focused on technical issues relevant to Berlin rather than on the status of East Germany. In autumn 1962 he gave up on his entrenched opposition to the agent theory and told the Americans that, if it came to the crunch, he was prepared to accept GDR visas, while at the same time launching a disillusionment campaign in which he and his closest advisers began to publicly feel their way towards ‘realities’. He began to talk the meaning of nonrecognition down rather than up, and finally he subscribed to Egon Bahr’s Tutzing concept, which provided a rationale for the recognition of the GDR and advocated de facto recognition in all but name. At the end of this line stood Brandt’s own form of de facto recognition in the Berlin pass agreement, when he dealt and negotiated with the GDR as a state and traded a degree of de facto recognition against a degree of humanitarian alleviation in Berlin. Six years later Brandt would begin to launch his Ostpolitik as Chancellor on the basis of the status quo in Europe and in West Berlin, commit the Federal Republic to Germany’s non-nuclear status, link a favourable Berlin agreement to a recognition of the Oder-Neisse line and a qualified recognition of the GDR in a series of non-aggression treaties – and thereby achieve the kind of European Cold War settlement that had eluded President Kennedy one decade earlier. Following Kennedy politically was possible for Brandt because in many respects he already had anticipated Kennedy conceptually. The two shared an independently developed understanding of offensive coexistence based on a policy of engagement in the nuclear age – but it was usually Brandt who espoused these concepts first. The fact that in his professed philosophy Kennedy was closer to Brandt than any other statesman made it much easier and much more attractive for Brandt to follow Kennedy politically: the conspicuous conceptual concordance between Brandt and Kennedy was not an effect of their close relationship, it was a driving cause. But Kennedy’s political approach was not without conceptual implications, and these went further than what Brandt had anticipated. Kennedy thought in terms of give and take and realized that the détente that both he and Brandt aspired to required a recognition of the territorial status quo in Europe. Where Brandt hoped for change through détente, Kennedy acknowledged the need for détente through recognition – so Brandt had to adapt conceptually as well as politically. And the closeness of their conceptual starting points meant that he could: Brandt and Bahr only had to draw the full conclusion from their own insight that the status quo might have to be somehow fixed before it could be changed and combine Kennedy’s détente formula with their own in order to arrive at Ostpolitik’s slogan of ‘recognizing the status quo in order to overcome it’. They did and in doing so went further when Bahr introduced the critical key concept of liberalization through stabilization. This went beyond Kennedy and came with a number of inherent conceptual problems and contradictions that would later burden Ostpolitik and lead to some of its more problematic consequences. Brandt’s Ostpolitik was not Kennedy’s ‘strategy of peace’ after all. 179

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So Brandt could and did catch up and eventually overtake Kennedy, but why did he? The main answer was that Kennedy, uninhibited by German taboos, did no more than show Brandt the logical conclusion of his own thinking, and that for all its impositions the lesson taught by Kennedy, i.e. that Brandt’s wish list for détente came at a price, held the promise of being suitable for the real world. Being willing to deal with the GDR meant being able to engage in politics and negotiate deals, as Kennedy did in the test ban treaty and Brandt in the pass agreement – and later his Ostpolitik. But a third factor helped. The pronounced affinity between Kennedy and Brandt and the pro-Western turn of the SPD combined with the tensions between Adenauer and Kennedy to shift the proAmerican role in West German party politics from the Christian Democrats to the Social Democrats and set up a tense political triangle between Berlin, Bonn and Washington. While the CDU-led government in Bonn felt threatened by the new axis between Washington and Berlin, the President appreciated Brandt’s support for his key policies. Kennedy had found a welcome alternative voice in Germany that offered him a sounding board to convey his position to both the German public and Bonn. Profiting from Adenauer’s poor relations with Kennedy, Brandt gained political room for manoeuvre and found himself in a situation in which he did not even have to do very much to cause his domestic opponents distress – for any political player this was a situation worth maintaining: breaking with Kennedy had domestic costs attached to it. Following Kennedy on the other hand offered domestic benefits: from his role as the defender of Berlin to his relative youth and the framing of his personal history as a resistance fighter, Brandt’s domestic image profited from the American connection and allowed election campaigns that not only used American, and more specifically JFK’s campaigning techniques, but capitalized on the prestige of President Kennedy and the United States by linking Brandt to both. And the weight of Kennedy and America could not only be used to sell Brandt, it could also be used to sell his policies. American support was crucial for asserting policies in Cold War West Germany. It could be used to counteract conflicting taboos, and it contributed to the development of a climate in Berlin that allowed Brandt to gradually deviate from old taboos without risking his political career. Kennedy therefore not only limited the sustainability of West Germany’s old Eastern policy, while offering a new American Eastern policy, he also helped to make a new German Eastern policy possible. As Harold Hurwitz later recalled: ‘I think it meant [Brandt] could take off. And the bounds in which one could operate were no longer so restricted. And therefore it was feasible for them to be a little bit adventurous . . . he knew all along that until the Americans were salient, he could not function, he could not move . . . if you’re in Berlin you know this’.4 Brandt did know. As Mayor of Berlin he was acutely aware that the friendship with the United States had ‘become a corner-stone of German foreign policy’ and later recapitulated in his memoirs that, ‘For me, close links with the United States . . . were a basic requirement of German policy.’5 If that was so – 180

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if the American limits to the credibility of West Germany’s traditional policy, the pressure and example of America’s own policy and America’s weight in enabling a new German foreign policy were that significant – then was the development of Brandt’s foreign policy and ultimately the reorientation of West Germany’s Eastern policy under Brandt no more than a function of US policy, not a conscious copy, but a systemic necessity? Following Wolfram Hanrieder’s early but influential characterization of West German foreign policy as a ‘penetrated system’, many historians have thought so: ‘In the medium and long term the Federal Republic was without doubt not strong enough to assert itself against the trend of the system. Its adaptation was therefore only a question of time, which however still took three or six years respectively’ (Ernst-Otto Czempiel) – ‘For a half-nation that is both the product and prime victim of the Cold War, the system, to paraphrase Freud, is destiny’ (Josef Joffe).6 This was certainly true in the sense of Egon Bahr’s 1971 statement that ‘German foreign policy, no matter in which direction it is oriented, will be the more effective the more it corresponds to the basic conception of the determining alliance partner, the USA’7 – and Bahr himself would soon enough come up against the power of that force with his unrealized plan for a second stage of Ostpolitik, which could no longer count on American support. In other regards, however, this perspective needs to be qualified. First, it tended to overlook the extent to which Brandt already developed some of the philosophical underpinnings of his later Ostpolitik (though not the crucial readiness to approach the thorny issue of dealing with the GDR and recognizing the status quo) in the 1950s – i.e. at a time when Bonn mostly still enjoyed Western support for its policy. Second, it tends to overlook the extent to which the policy formation of Ostpolitik was not only a process of adaptation, but also of emancipation: the further Brandt adapted, the more independent he became, until he finally overtook the Americans with an Ostpolitik confidently conducted by Germans in an attempt to take charge of the German cause themselves. Third, and finally, the abstract idea of systemic necessity tends to work on the assumption that in the end policies conforming to the system would prevail more or less automatically. But there was no guarantee of that. At different points and times both the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats chose to brace themselves against the international trend. In Cold War West Germany this was bound to lead to political difficulties and likely to benefit the proponents of alternative policies, but it was neither guaranteed to lead to a change of government nor to a change of policy. This was a political force, not a law of nature, and the way it played out depended on the human players it involved. To say that Brandt’s Ostpolitik evolved in a context coined by external and systemic influences is not to say that it was pre-ordained or inevitable. As Willy Brandt told his American audience on 13 March 1961: ‘. . . it calls our attention to the important point that there is almost always more than one way in the life of nations and that the study of history is worth nothing if it is only supposed to teach us that everything happened because it had to happen that way’.8 181

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1 Egon Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, Berlin: Siedler, 1999, p. 53; Willy Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten: Die Jahre 1960–1975, Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1976, p. 7. 2 Bahr, Zeit, p. 169. 3 Bahr, Zeit, pp. 155 and 278. 4 Diethelm Prowe, ‘Die Anfänge der Brandtschen Ostpolitik in Berlin 1961–1963: Eine Untersuchung zur Endphase des Kalten Krieges’, in Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Graml (eds), Aspekte deutscher Außenpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart: DVA, 1976, pp. 249–286 (p. 254); Wolfgang Schmidt, Kalter Krieg, Koexistenz und kleine Schritte: Willy Brandt und die Deutschlandpolitik 1948–1963, Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001; Peter Speicher, ‘The Berlin Origins of Brandt’s Ostpolitik, 1957–1966’, Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge 2001. 5 Willy Brandt, My Life in Politics, London: Hamilton, 1992, p. 402. 6 Speicher, ‘Origins’, pp. 235 and 193.

1 ‘NEW FRONTIER’: FROM THE KENNEDY CAMPAIGN TO THE FIRST MEETING, 1960–MARCH 1961 1 PLB 256, 11-Nov-1960, p. 2, WBA, A3, 107. 2 Hartmut Soell, Fritz Erler: Eine politische Biographie, Berlin and Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Dietz, 1976, vol. 1, pp. 409–413. 3 O’Donnell to Sorensen, no date, O’Donnell to Hurwitz, 8-Sep-1960, Hurwitz, Brief, 12-Sep-1960, Hurwitz to O’Donnell, 20-Sep-1960, LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 89, no. 321; Schütz to O’Donnell, 13-Sep-1960, AdsD, Bahr papers, 46B. 4 Klaus Schütz, ‘Die Legende von einem deutschen Kennedy: Willy Brandts Bundestagswahlkampf 1961’, in Bernd Polster (ed.), Westwind: Die Amerikanisierung Europas, Cologne: DuMont, 1995, pp. 28–34 (p. 33); Alex Möller, Genosse Generaldirektor, Munich and Zurich: Droemer Knaur, 1978, p. 175; Alex Möller, ‘Amerika und die Präsidentenwahl 1960’, in Alex Möller, Unruhige Zeiten: Reden und Aufsätze, Karlsruhe: Müller, 1963, pp. 51–67 (p. 61). 5 NARA, 762A.00/11–3060; Consulate Munich, between 6-Dec-1960 and 12-Dec1960, p. 5, NARA, 762A.00/12–660–12–1260; Bahr to Klein, 17-Nov-1960, AdsD, Bahr papers, 46A and 348. 6 Cf. Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die Ära Adenauer 1957–1963: Epochenwechsel, Stuttgart: DVA, 1983, pp. 127ff.

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7 As Schmidt, Brandt, p. 335, points out, this was not exactly the position of Brandt, who believed in the necessity of securing Berlin short of reunification. 8 Research Institute, 12-Nov-1960, WBA, A6, 33; Sänger to Ollenhauer, 17-Nov-1960, WBA, A6, 34; Hurwitz-interview, Berlin, 14-Jul-2000. 9 PLB 256, 13-Nov-1960, WBA, A3, 107; Willy Brandt, . . . auf der Zinne der Partei. . .: Parteitagsreden 1960 bis 1983, ed. by Werner Krause and Wolfgang Gröf, Berlin and Bonn: Dietz, 1984, p. 31; USBer, 3-Feb-1961, pp. 1 and 9, JFKL, NSF, 91; Bahr-interview, Bonn, 29-Jan-2001; Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin, Stenographischer Bericht, III. Wahlperiode, vol. 3, 2-Feb-1961, p. 40; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 29; FRUS-suppl. 57, p. 4. 10 AdsD, SPD-PV, Präsidium, 6, 27-Feb-1961 and 6-Mar-1961. 11 Bahr, Zeit, p. 144; Bahr-interview (cf. Bahr, Zeit, pp. 254–256). 12 Revue 11, 12-Mar-1961, WBA, A3, 114.

2 ‘ALMOST LIKE BROTHERS’? THE FIRST MEETING BETWEEN THE MAYOR AND THE PRESIDENT, MARCH 1961 1 Bahr to Albertz, 14-Mar-1961, AdsD, Albertz papers, 170; Bahr-interview: ‘the man had an immense charisma, which was underlined by the manner in which he asked questions, the manner in which he reacted: immediately to the core, immediately the essence out of a difficult complex. The man could think, he was well prepared, he could react – that was tremendous!’ 2 NARA, 762.00/2–1461. 3 DSB 44, January–June 1961, p. 432; Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 61. 4 Attachment to Rusk to Kennedy, 10-Mar-1961, JFKL, POF, 117; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 29. 5 Meet the Press, 12-Mar-1961, PA, Abt. 7/Referat 160; Brandt–Kohler memcon, 13-Mar-1961, NARA, 762.0221/3–1361. 6 FRUS-suppl. 57, p. 3. 7 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 17; Rolf Steininger, Der Mauerbau: Die Westmächte und Adenauer in der Berlinkrise 1958–1963, Munich: Olzog, 2001, p. 170; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 90 and 94; DNSA, BC01580; NARA, 762A.00/3–2260; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 360 and 402f.; DzD IV/6, p. 974. 8 Brandt, Einsichten, pp. 17ff.; Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages. 6. Wahlperiode. Stenographische Berichte, vol. 71, Bonn, 1969/1970, p. 31. 9 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 29; FRUS-suppl. 57. 10 FRUS-suppl. 57; NARA, 762.0221/3–1361; Meet the Press, 12-Mar-1961, PA, Abt. 7/Referat 160; DzD IV/6, p. 457; Columbia University speech, 17-Mar-1961, p. 11, WBA, A3, 114. 11 Brandt to Szende, 5-Apr-1961, WBA, A3, 198; Rut Brandt, Freundesland: Erinnerungen, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1992, p. 138; Brandt to Stone, 29-Mar1961, WBA, A6, 93; Schütz, ‘Legende’, p. 33; Brandt in Telegraf, 21-Mar-1961, WBA, A3, 114. 12 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 27. 13 Ibid.; Willy Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, ed. by Helga Grebing, Gregor Schöllgen and Heinrich August Winkler, vol. III: Berlin bleibt frei: Politik in und für Berlin 1947 – 1966, ed. by Siegfried Heimann, Bonn: Dietz, 2004, p. 306. 14 Ibid.; AdsD, SPD-PV, Präsidium, 6, 20-Mar-1961; Die Welt, 21-Mar-1961, LAB B Rep. 002, Acc. 1949, no. 2623.

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15 Ibid., pp. 26f.; AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 24, 19-Oct-1962; FRUS-suppl., no. 57, p. 2. 16 Attachment to Rusk to Kennedy, 10-Mar-1961, JFKL, POF, 117; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 28; FRUS-suppl. 57, p. 4. 17 Berlin paper, 27-Mar-1961, AdsD, Bahr papers, 47B. 18 Vermerk über Besprechungen in Washington und New York, late March 1961, pp. 3ff., WBA, A6, 93. The transmitted memorandum was not the New York speech, as suggested by Schmidt, Brandt, p. 366. A comparison between the references in Material zum 13. August 1961, p. 5, WBA, A6, 76; Heinrich Albertz [Bahr], ‘War die Mauer zu verhindern?’, Der Spiegel 20, no. 44, 24-Oct-1966, pp. 72–85 (pp. 72ff.) and Willy Brandt, Begegnungen mit Kennedy, Munich: Kindler, 1964, p. 47 identifies the document. 19 Brandt to Kohler, 6-Apr-1961, WBA, A6, 93.

3 ‘ESSENTIALS’? FROM THE FIRST MEETING TO THE BERLIN WALL 1 Material zum 13.8.1961, pp. 4ff., WBA, A6, 76. 2 Memorandum, 18-Apr-1961, WBA, A6, 37; cf. FRUS 1961–1963, XIII, pp. 6–9 and 272–282, XIV, p. 45–55. Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 370–372 lends too much credence to this disinformation. 3 DzD IV/7, p. 1026; Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 324ff., fn. 137 and p. 326. 4 Brandt, Kennedy, p. 59; Albertz, ‘Mauer’, p. 75; Bahr, Zeit, p. 130. 5 DSB 40, January–June 1959, p. 4; DSB 44, January–June 1961, pp. 39f. and 801f.; PLB, 15-May-1961, WBA, A3, 116; Bahr to Leichter, 20-May-1961, AdsD, Bahr, 47B. 6 DzD IV/6, p. 1231. 7 Embassy Bonn, 6-Jun-1961, and USBer, 9-Jun-1961, quotation pp. 1ff., JFKL, NSF, 91; Schütz-interview, Berlin, 13-Nov-2000; Brandt to Walter Reuther, 5-Jul-1961, WBA, A6, 37. 8 Bahr, note, 16-Jun-1961, AdsD, Bahr papers, 47A; LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 7993b, sheets 431–436 (sheet 434/p. 4) and 437–440. Cf. Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 374–385. 9 Bahr-interview; note, 6-Sep-1960, AdsD, Bahr papers, 46B. 10 Klein to Brandt, 22-Jun-1961, LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 7993b; DzD IV/6, p. 1142; USBer, 16-Jun-1961, JFKL, NSF, 91; AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 21, 1/2-Jul-1961. 11 Notes, 7-Jun-1961 and 29-Jun-1961, AdsD, Bahr papers, 47A; Albertz to Brandt, 24Jun-1961, WBA, A6, 71; DNSA, BC02248, p. 4; manuscript for press conference, 6Jul-1961, WBA, A3, 120; DzD IV/6, p. 1199; USBer, 11 and 23-Jul-1961, JFKL, NSF, 91. 12 PLB 159, 26-Jul-1961, WBA, A3, 121. 13 Schmidt, Brandt, p. 387. 14 PPP 1961, p. 538. 15 Albertz [Bahr], ‘Mauer’, p. 75. Cf. FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 267–323 and Steininger, Mauerbau, pp. 249–257. The Americans suggested to invite the Soviets to a Four Power, not a 52-nation, conference, cf. Adrian W. Schertz, Die Deutschlandpolitik Kennedys und Johnsons: Unterschiedliche Ansätze innerhalb der amerikanischen Regierung, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 1992, pp. 122 and 128. 16 Bundy, Thoughts on Brandt, 13-Mar-1961, JFKL, NSF, 74; USBer, 11-Jul-1961, JFKL, NSF, 91; PA, Referat 305/II A6, 129, sheet 80; NARA, 762.00/7–1061. 17 DSB 45, July–December 1961, p. 180; DNSA, BC02241. 18 Quoted in Schmidt, Brandt, p. 451, cf. Brandt, Kennedy, pp. 59ff.

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19 Albertz to Brandt, 24-Jun-1961, WBA, A6, 71; note, 29-Jun-1961, AdsD, Bahr papers, 47A. 20 NARA, 762.00/7–2561; Hanns Jürgen Küsters, ‘Konrad Adenauer und Willy Brandt in der Berlin-Krise 1958–1963’, VfZG 40, 1992, 483–542 (p. 537); Bundy, Thoughts on Brandt, 13-Mar-1961, JFKL, NSF, 74; Schmidt, Brandt, p. 420. 21 DzD IV/7, p. 1026; NARA, 762.00/4–962. 22 Willy Brandt, People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975, London: Collins, 1978, p. 21; PLB 159, 26-Jul-1961, WBA, A3, 121; USBer, 7-Aug-1961, JFKL, NSF, 91. 23 PPP 1961, p. 557; Brandt, Life, quotation p. 49; NARA, 762.00/8–1161; reports of early August, JFKL, NSF, 91. 24 Freedman, Wars, p. 60; Schütz-interview; Bahr-interview; Brandt in Gerald S. Strober and Deborah H. Strober (eds), ‘Let Us Begin Anew’: An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency, New York: HarperCollins, 1993, p. 361. 25 USBer, 23-Jul-1961, JFKL, NSF, 91; press conference, 28-Jul-1961, WBA, A3, 121. 26 AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 21, 1/2-Jul-1961, p. 3. 27 W.W. Rostow, The Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History, New York: Macmillan, 1972, p. 231.

4 ‘MENDING WALL’: BRANDT, KENNEDY, JOHNSON AND THE BERLIN WALL 1 Robert F. Kennedy, Just Friends and Brave Enemies, New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 154. 2 Hermann Zolling and Uwe Bahnsen, Kalter Winter im August: Die Berlin-Krise 1961/63. Ihre Hintergründe und Folgen, Oldenburg and Hamburg: Stalling, 1967, pp. 14ff. 3 Bahr, Zeit, p. 132. 4 Brandt, Life, pp. 2ff., People, pp. 14–16, Kennedy, pp. 67f.; Material zum 13.8.1961, p. 18, WBA, A6, 76; Albertz [Bahr], ‘Mauer’, p. 78; Brandt in: Die Mauer, documentation by Harald Schott, 19-Jun-1986, p. 61, AdsD, Bahr papers, 335. 5 Peter Koch, Willy Brandt: Eine politische Biographie, Berlin and Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1988, p. 234; Zolling and Bahnsen, Winter, p. 17; Jürgen Petschull, Die Mauer: August 1961: Zwölf Tage zwischen Krieg und Frieden, Hamburg: Gruner+Jahr, 1981, p. 57; Curtis Cate, The Ides of August: The Berlin Wall Crisis, 1961, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978, p. 304; Geoffrey McDermott, Berlin: Success of a Mission?, London: André Deutsch, 1963, p. 32; Howard Trivers, Three Crises in American Foreign Affairs and a Continuing Revolution, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972, p. 33; Ann Tusa, The Last Division: Berlin and the Wall, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, p. 281; Brandt, Life, pp. 2ff. 6 Bahr, Zeit, p. 131; Zolling and Bahnsen, Winter, p. 131; David Binder, The Other German: Willy Brandt’s Life and Times, Washington: New Republic, 1975, pp. 183ff. 7 DzD IV/7, p. 16; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 332; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 334ff. 8 Brandt, Life, p. 2, People, p. 16, Kennedy, p. 67; Zolling and Bahnsen, Winter, p. 145. 9 Bahr, Zeit, p. 134. 10 Brandt, People, p. 30; Peter Wyden, Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989, p. 225; Richard L. Merritt, ‘A Transformed Crisis: The Berlin Wall’, in Richard L. Merritt and Anna J. Merritt (eds), Living with the Wall: West Berlin, 1961–1985, Durham: Duke University Press, 1985, pp. 3–36 (pp. 26ff.); Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, London and Basingstoke: Papermac, 1993, p. 204; John W. Keller, Germany, the Wall and Berlin: Internal Politics During An International Crisis, New York: Vantage, 1964, p. 120.

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11 Bahr, Zeit, p. 134; DzD IV/7, pp. 52f. and 56f.; DNSA, BC02341; Wyden, Wall, p. 225. 12 Brandt to Lemmer, 21-Aug-1961, AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 22-Aug-1961; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 346–349. 13 Barbara Marshall, Willy Brandt: Eine politische Biographie, Bonn: Bouvier, 1993, p. 50; Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20-Aug-1961, LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc. 2685, no. 5147; Klaus Schütz, ‘Es ging um Deutschland und Europa: Willy Brandt und seine Politik für Berlin 1957 bis 1966’, in Politik für Berlin: Willy Brandt 1957–1966, Berlin: Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung, 1998, pp. 23–37 (p. 27); Schütz-interview; Bahr-interview. 14 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 348; Der Spiegel, 30-Aug-1961, pp. 12ff.; Schwarz, Ära, p. 151. 15 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 345ff. 16 Cf. Peter Pawelka, Die UNO und das Deutschlandproblem: Das Deutschlandproblem im Spannungsfeld zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und den Vereinten Nationen – unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Außenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland – 1949 bis 1967, Tübingen: Mohr, 1971, pp. 74–105, 94f. and 97–105. 17 Schmidt, Brandt, p. 395. 18 DzD IV/9, p. 204. 19 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 335; Der Auswärtige Ausschuß des Deutschen Bundestages: Sitzungsprotokolle, vol. 3: 1957–1961, ed. by Joachim Wintzer and Josef Boyer, Düsseldorf: Droste, 2003, p. 1294. 20 Bahr, Zeit, p. 135; Schütz, ‘Deutschland und Europa’, p. 33; Brandt in Strober and Strober (eds), Oral History, p. 364; Brandt in: Die Mauer, documentation by Harald Schott, 19-Jun-1986, p. 82, AdsD, Bahr papers, p. 335. 21 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 331. 22 Freedman, Wars, p. 75; Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963, New York: Burlingame, 1991, p. 278 and JFKL, OH, Grewe, p. 9. 23 Zolling and Bahnsen, Winter, pp. 145f.; Binder, Other German, p. 186; Merritt, ‘Crisis’, p. 32; Jean Edward Smith, The Defense of Berlin, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press and London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 283; Cate, August, pp. 391f. and 423; Norman Gelb, The Berlin Wall, London: Joseph, 1986, p. 207. 24 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 339–341, Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life, New York: Henry Holt, 1990, p. 638. 25 Zolling and Bahnsen, Winter, pp. 131–133 and 146f.; Bahr-interview. 26 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 347–349. 27 O’Donnell to Boenisch, [August 1961], LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc 2632, no. 7059; O’Donnell to Biel, 26-Aug-1961 and Hurwitz to Bahr, 5-Jan-1966 (quotation), LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 89, no. 321 and 322/II; Zolling and Bahnsen, Winter, pp. 131–133; Cate, August, pp. 349–352; Smith, Clay, p. 641; Antoinette May, Witness to War: A Biography of Marguerite Higgins, New York and Toronto: Beaufort, 1983, pp. 226ff. 28 Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, ‘Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye’: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1970, p. 343. 29 FRUS-suppl. 132; USBer, 20-Aug-1961, JFKL, NSF, 92; Reeves, Profile, p. 217. 30 Koch, Brandt, p. 243; Petschull, Mauer, p. 167; Wyden, Wall, pp. 229 and 232. 31 Petschull, Mauer, pp. 164 and 168; Cate, August, p. 411. 32 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 340; FRUS-suppl. 131; Gildner to Bundy, 21-Aug-1961, JFKL, NSF, 74; Griffith to Rostow, 25-Aug-1961, JFKL, NSF, 82. 33 Quoted in Tusa, Division, p. 314. 34 Brandt, People, p. 34; Bahr, Zeit, p. 136.

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35 Speicher, ‘Origins’, p. 218, fn. 97. 36 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 352f.; DNSA, BC02369 and BC02370; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 433ff. 37 DNSA, BC 02351; Visitation to Germany, pp. 2ff., JFKL, NSF, 82; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 355ff.; DNSA, BC02369; report meeting, 5-Sep-1961, JFKL, NSF, 82. 38 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 348 and 352f.; Visitation to Germany, p. 3, JFKL, NSF, 82; Brandt, People, p. 33. 39 Charles Bohlen, Witness to History 1929–1969, New York: Norton, 1973, p. 485; Smith, Clay, p. 645; PPP 1961, p. 566; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 357; Brandt, Life, p. 4. 40 LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 10978, sheets 427–464; FRUS 1958–1960, VIII, p. 144; DNSA, BC00615. Cf. Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 141f. and 212–214. 41 Documents on Germany 1944–1985, Washington, DC: Department of State, 1985, p. 737; Der Spiegel 15, no. 33, 9-Aug-1961, pp. 13ff.; Franz Barsig, ‘Der Bau der Berliner Mauer und der Wahlkampf der SPD 1961’, in Hans-Peter Schwarz (ed.), Berlinkrise und Mauerbau, Bonn: Bouvier, 1985, pp. 105–116 (p. 112). 42 Vor Maßnahmen gegen Westberlin, 4-Aug-1961, stamped 7-Aug-1961, WBA, A6, 75; Schwarz, Ära, p. 427. Cf. Speicher, ‘Origins’, p. 203; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 388f. and Peter Merseburger, Willy Brandt 1913–1992: Visionär und Realist, Stuttgart and Munich: DVA, 2002, pp. 393ff. According to a recent report, West German, American and French intelligence services had all received information and warnings since July/early August, cf. Klaus Wiegrefe, ‘Die Schandmauer’, Der Spiegel, no. 32, 6-Aug-2001, pp. 64–77 (pp. 72ff.). 43 Brandt, People, p. 17; Brandt, Life, pp. 46–48; note for Mayor, 6-Sep-1960, p. 2 and ‘On the German question’, pp. 12ff., AdsD, Bahr papers, 46B. 44 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 342; DSB 45, July–December 1961, p. 486; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 332; Visitation to Germany, p. 2, JFKL, NSF, 82; DNSA, BC02369. 45 AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 21, 1/2-Jul-1961. 46 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 32; Honoré M. Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis: A Case Study in U.S. Decision Making, Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 1980, pp. 305ff. 47 DzD IV/7, p. 158; DNSA, BC02369/02370, p. 2. 48 JFKL, OH, Robert Kennedy, p. 100; Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy, Garden City: Doubleday, 1966, p. 190; William E. Leuchtenburg, ‘President Kennedy and the End of the Postwar World’, in Aïda DiPace Donald (ed.), John F. Kennedy and the New Frontier, New York: Hill and Wang, 1966, pp. 124–137 (p. 133); Beschloss, Crisis Years, pp. 268ff. and 271; Catudal, Crisis, pp. 226ff. 49 O’Donnell and Powers, Johnny, pp. 343 and 339; DNSA, BC02298. 50 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 342. 51 O’Donnell and Powers, Johnny, p. 343; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 334. 52 DzD IV/7, p. 1026. 53 Cf. Koch, Brandt, p. 239. 54 Tusa, Division, pp. 340ff.; Speicher, ‘Origins’, pp. 229ff.; John P. S. Gearson, Harold Macmillan and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 1958–62: The Limits of Interests and Force, Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 193ff. 55 DzD IV/7, p. 1032; USBer, 5-Dec-1961, JFKL, NSF, 94. 56 Willy Brandt, ‘The East–West Problem as Seen From Berlin’, International Affairs 34, 1958, 297–304 (pp. 298ff.). 57 Brandt in Strober and Strober (eds), Oral History, p. 360; Bahr, Zeit, pp. 125 and 136. Cf. SPD-PV, executive, 25, 28-Aug-1963, p. 24.

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58 Die SPD-Fraktion im deutschen Bundestag: Sitzungsprotokolle 1957–1961, ed. by Wolfgang Hölscher, Düsseldorf: Droste 1993, p. 583; DNSA, BC02369, p. 6. 59 Manuela Glaab, Deutschlandpolitik in der öffentlichen Meinung: Einstellungen und Regierungspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949 bis 1990, Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 1999, pp. 381ff.; Glaab, ‘Die Deutschland- und Ostpolitik Willy Brandts in der öffentlichen Meinung’, in Carsten Tessmer (ed.), Das Willy-BrandtBild in Deutschland und Polen, Berlin: Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung, 2000, pp. 41–51 (pp. 43f.). 60 Schwarz, Ära, p. 147; DzD IV/7, pp. 1066ff. 61 Cf. Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, New York: Random House, 1993, pp. 67, 137–149 and 213. 62 Frank Costigliola, ‘The Pursuit of Atlantic Community: Nuclear Arms, Dollars, and Berlin’, in Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 24–56 (p. 42); Bahr, Zeit, p. 133; DzD IV/7, p. 83; SPD-PV, Präsidium, 10, 18Jun-1962, p. 2. 63 Heinrich Krone, ‘Aufzeichnungen zur Deutschland- und Ostpolitik 1954–1969’, in Rudolf Morsey and Konrad Repgen (eds), Adenauer-Studien III: Untersuchungen und Dokumente zur Ostpolitik und Biographie, Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1974, pp. 134–201 (pp. 162); Brandt, People, p. 20. 64 William E. Griffith, The Ostpolitik of the Federal Republic of Germany, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1978, p. 102; USBer, 6-May-1964, p. 9, NARA, POL 6 GER W; Brandt, Einsichten, p. 9, and People, p. 20; James S. Sutterlin and David Klein, Berlin: From Symbol of Confrontation to Keystone of Stability, New York, Westport and London: Praeger, 1989, p. 61; Andreas Vogtmeier, Egon Bahr und die deutsche Frage: Zur Entwicklung der sozialdemokratischen Ost- und Deutschlandpolitik vom Kriegsende bis zur Vereinigung, Bonn: Dietz, 1996, p. 55; Bahr, Zeit, p. 11. 65 Schmidt, Brandt; Speicher, ‘Origins’. 66 Prowe, ‘Anfänge’, p. 260. 67 Bahr, Zeit, pp. 153 and 144. 5 IN SEARCH OF A MODUS VIVENDI: WILLY BRANDT AND KENNEDY’S QUEST FOR A BERLIN AGREEMENT 1 WBA, A3, 136. 2 Bahr to Klein, 13-May-1960, AdsD, Bahr papers, 48A. Cf. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 292f. and 303; Küsters, ‘Berlin-Krise’, pp. 498–501; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 248f., 268, 288f. and 306f. 3 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 346; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 345. 4 USBer, 7-Sep-1961, JFKL, NSF, 92; Material zum 13.8.1961, p. 27, WBA, A6, 76. Cf. DzD IV/7, p. 484. 5 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 359f. and 402f.; Kaysen, Thoughts on Berlin, 22-Aug1961, JFKL, Schlesinger papers, White House files, WH-3; FRUS-suppl. 128 and 145; NARA, 762.00/9–561. Cf. Trachtenberg, Peace, pp. 325–328; Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 226–229; Andreas Wenger, Living With Peril: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nuclear Weapons, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997, pp. 227–230; Christof Münger, Ich bin ein West-Berliner: Der Wandel der amerikanischen Berlinpolitik während der Präsidentschaft John F. Kennedys, Zurich: ETH, 1999, pp. 112–128; Christof Münger, Kennedy, die Berliner Mauer und die Kubakrise: Die westliche Allianz in der

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6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

Zerreißprobe 1961–1963, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003, pp. 112–117; Schertz, Deutschlandpolitik, pp. 136f. and 140–143; Harald Biermann, John F. Kennedy und der Kalte Krieg: Die Außenpolitik der USA und die Grenzen der Glaubwürdigkeit, Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997, pp. 138–141. DzD IV/7, pp. 491–493; NARA, 762.00/9–2561; USBer, 25-Sep-1961, JFKL, NSF 86; David Binder, The Other German: Willy Brandt’s Life and Times, Washington: New Republic, 1975, p. 194; Brandt–Clay memcon, 2-Oct-1961, WBA, A6, 71; Stenographischer Bericht, IV. Wahlperiode, vol. 2, 9-Jan-1964, p. 36; memorandum, 24-Sep-1961, LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 89, no. 321. PPP 1961, p. 625. PLB, 26-Sep-1961, WBA, A3, 126; Aktennotiz, [September 1961], AdsD, Bahr papers, 47A; NARA, 762.00/10–561; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 406ff. USBer, 20-Sep-1961, JFKL, NSF, 92; telex 159, 25-Sep-1961, PA, Abt. 7/Referat 159; DOS to USBer, 27-Sep-1961 and USBer to SecState, 28-Sep-1961, JFKL, NSF, 93; PA, Referat 305/II A6, 134, sheet 195. Speech, 6-Oct-1961, WBA, A3, 127 and cf. DzD IV/7, p. 661. Brandt–Kennedy phone call, 9-Oct-1961, WBA, A6, 71; Jean Edward Smith, The Defense of Berlin, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press and London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 318. Consulate New York to German Foreign Office, 11-Oct-1961, PA, Referat 305/II A6, 134; Press review, 26-Sep-1961, LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc. 2632, no. 7059; Der Spiegel nos. 41 and 42, 1961, AdsD, Bahr papers, 372; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 403ff.; Catalogue of questions, LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc. 2632, no. 7059; Brandt–Clay memcon, 9Oct-1961, WBA, A6, 71. AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 16-Oct-1961; Die SPD-Fraktion im Deutschen Bundestag: Sitzungsprotokolle 1961–1966, 2 vols, ed. by Heinrich Potthoff, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1993, vol. 1, p. 16. Memorandum, 11-Oct-1961, WBA, A6, 71; cf. Bahr’s draft, AdsD, Bahr papers, 47A. Bahr, Zur Berlin-Situation, 11-Nov-1961, LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc. 2632, no. 7059. NARA, 762.00/10–2461; note, 27-Oct-1961, WBA, A6, 75; Brandt–Clay memcon, 29-Oct-1961, WBA, A6, 71; FRUS-suppl. 228; USBer, 30-Oct-1961, JFKL, NSF, 93; Hurwitz to James O’Donnell, 31-Oct-1961, LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 89, no. 321. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 351; cf. Küsters, ‘Berlin-Krise’, pp. 534ff. FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 590–632; NARA, 762A.00/1–2462. AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 26-Nov-1961; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 355ff. Cf. Küsters, ‘Berlin-Krise’, pp. 535–537; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 414–420 passim. NARA, 762.00/10–2661; AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 26-Nov-1961, p. 27. DzD IV/7, p. 1009. USBer, 17-Jan-1961, pp. 5ff., JFKL, NSF, 84. AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 26-Nov-1961, pp. 1 (minutes) and 28 (transcript); USBer, 1-Dec-1961, JFKL, NSF, 94; NARA, 762A.00/1–2462; Schmidt, Brandt, p. 426. After the erection of the Berlin Wall, soon to be Foreign Minister Schröder was in fact privately willing to sacrifice West Berlin in order to maintain the West German positions on reunification, non-recognition and the Oder-Neisse line rather than see them become concessions in Berlin negotiations, cf. Torsten Oppelland, Gerhard Schröder (1910–1989): Politik zwischen Staat, Partei und Konfession, Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002, pp. 422–424. FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 668–672; AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 15-Dec-1961, pp. 1–6.

189

NOTES

25 Hurwitz to Brandt and Bahr, 24-Sep-1961, Hurwitz to O’Donnell, 31-Oct-1961, Hurwitz to Higgins, 31-Oct-1961, LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 89, no. 321; USBer, 12-Jan-1962, JFKL, NSF, 86; JFKL, OH, Robert Kennedy, p. 174; notes of 27-Nov-1961 and 21-Feb-1962, AdsD, Bahr papers, 44B. 26 JFKL, OH, Robert Kennedy, p. 175, cf. JFKL, Robert F. Kenney papers, Attorney General’s trips, 2 and 4; JFKL, NSF, 251; NARA, 033.1100-KE; WBA, A6, 78. 27 Brandt, Life, p. 62. 28 Address, 22-Feb-1962, JFKL, Robert F. Kennedy papers, Attorney General’s trips, 4; PLB 30, 23-Feb-1961, LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc. 1949, no. 2625; radio address, PLB 46, 5-Mar-1962, WBA, A3, 134. 29 In the speech and twice in Meet the Press, 23-Feb-1962, JFKL, Robert F. Kennedy papers, Attorney General’s trips, 4. Brandt: NARA, 033.1100-KE/3–162; USBer, 6Mar-1962, JFKL, NSF, 95; Brandt to Kennedy, 23-Feb-1961, JFKL, POF, 116b. 30 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times, London: André Deutsch, 1978, p. 575. Transcripts in JFKL, Robert F. Kenney papers, Attorney General’s trips, 4 and 14. 31 AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 16-Mar-1962. 32 FRUS 1958–1960, VIII, pp. 189ff.; memorandum, 6-Sep-1960, AdsD, Bahr, 46B. 33 USBer, 9-Mar-1961, JFKL, NSF, 95 (quotation); AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 17-Mar1962; to foreign press, 11-Apr-1962, WBA, A3, 135. 34 LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 7993b, sheets 526–546 (pp. 8, 9 and 20). Cf. Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 427–430. 35 Brandt–Clay memcon, 11-Apr-1962, WBA, A6, 72. 36 Brandt to foreign press, 11-Apr-1962, WBA, A3, 135. 37 FRUS-suppl. 327. 38 FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 102 and 112. 39 The usual suspects for the leak are Krone and ex-Foreign Minister von Brentano, though Adenauer’s decision to meet with leaders of the parliamentary parties in the Bundestag rather than discretely in the Chancellery was already designed to attract attention rather than maintain confidentiality (Henning Köhler, Adenauer: Eine politische Biographie, Frankfurt a.M. and Berlin: Propyläen, 1994, pp. 1151ff.; HansPeter Schwarz, Konrad Adenauer: A German Politician and Statesman in a Period of War, Revolution and Reconstruction, vol. 2: The Statesman: 1952–1967, Providence and Oxford: Berghahn, 1997, p. 609). In ambiguous language a contemporary report implied that the participants were either yelling so loudly that they could be understood by journalists in the corridor or deliberately informed those journalists (Der Spiegel 16, no. 17, 25-Apr-1962, pp. 16f.). Wolfgang Schmidt, however, speculates that Brandt leaked the information (Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 430–433). This appears unlikely for several reasons: 1

2

3

Brandt (unlike Adenauer, von Brentano and Krone) had not yet seen the new American documents when he had his opportunity to leak and consequently would have had to leak on the basis of Schütz’s report of 10 April, i.e. after learning about the controversial new documents, but only hours before he could judge them himself – an unlikely timing for a destructive leak. Schmidt points out that, like Brandt, Sydney Gruson in the New York Times (14Apr-1962) appeared to be unaware of the proposed make-up of the IAA – but the formula was publicly known shortly thereafter (DzD IV/8, pp. 486ff.), requiring either a parallel leak or a second Brandt leak, which considering his statements to the SPD-executive and Paul Nitze seems improbable. Gruson did however convey an alleged Adenauer statement, of which Brandt could not be aware – unlike those present at the meeting, including Krone and von Brentano.

190

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4 5

6

7

40 41 42 43 44

45 46

Gruson also emphasized concerns regarding reunification and the GDR – precisely those of Adenauer’s worries that did not overly concern Brandt. The political objective of the leak was to ‘somehow bring the matter down with a big row’ (Schmidt, Brandt, p. 430) – which is incompatible with Brandt’s past, present and future support for an IAA, which he maintained for another three years after everyone else had lost interest, and with his adamant conviction that the negotiations should continue. It was, however, entirely compatible with Adenauer’s demand for an interruption of the negotiations. The leak is incongruent with Brandt’s overall approach to the Americans, which was aimed at cooperation but could include frank and honest internal criticism – in contrast to his dealings with the Americans after the leak. Reconciling a deliberate leak with Brandt’s subsequent communications with the Americans requires a conspiracy theory. The underlying issue is Brandt’s assessment of the American proposals, which Schmidt largely deduces from his own assumptions, i.e. from what it should have been, assuming that Brandt’s position would not change. There is no evidence for the claim that ‘alarm bells’ were ringing in Berlin in reaction to Schütz’s report (p. 430) or that Brandt would have shared the assessment of the notoriously alarmist Krone that an agreement based on the draft principles would have a devastating psychological effect on Berlin (p. 431, incidentally also a concern reported in the Gruson article). In fact Brandt’s language and criticism was distinctly stronger in winter 1961 than in spring 1962. Schmidt interprets the demand of the Berlin-SPD on 7 April (i.e. before the Schütz report) for at least one free and uncontrolled surface access route besides the air access as ‘a blunt rejection of an international access authority as the Americans . . . had offered it’ (p. 426), but in fact Brandt had already welcomed an IAA as a tool to meet precisely these criteria on 8 March (USBer, 9-Mar-1962, JFKL, NSF, 95).

While Roger Morgan claims to have private information naming Brentano and/or Krone, the State Department’s intelligence service identified Adenauer as the source of the leak (Roger Morgan, ‘Kennedy and Adenauer’, in Douglas Brinkley and Richard T. Griffiths (eds), John F. Kennedy and Europe, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999, pp. 16–31 (pp. 20ff.); Roger Morgan, The United States and West Germany 1945–1973: A Study in Alliance Politics, London: Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 113; Schertz, Deutschlandpolitik, p. 148; Biermann, Glaubwürdigkeit, p. 154, fn. 250). DzD IV/8, pp. 486–489; American Foreign Policy 1962, pp. 699f. AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 13/14-Apr-1962. Schröder to Grewe, 13-Apr-1962, Brandt to Schröder, 14-Apr-1962, WBA, A6, 72; FRUS-suppl. 329. FRUS-suppl. 327. Brandt, Einsichten, p. 38; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 393 (and cf. p. 382). Cf. Brandt, Kennedy, pp. 140f.; Thema: Verhandlungen, 18-May-1962, WBA, A3, 137; Brandt–Adenauer memcon, 19-Jun-1962, WBA, A6, 72; ‘Germany’s Role in the Atlantic Alliance’, 20-Apr-1965, p. 11, WBA, A3, 207; Brandt to Sommer, 27-Apr1965, WBA, A3, 207; USBer, 17-Nov-1962, JFKL, NSF, 98; USBer, 6-May-1964, p. 13, NARA, POL 6 GER W; Embassy Bonn, 30-Apr-1965, NARA, POL 12 GER W. Der Auswärtige Ausschuß des Deutschen Bundestages: Sitzungsprotokolle, vol. 4: 1961–1965, ed. by Wolfgang Hölscher, Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004, p. 183; Brandt, Kennedy, p. 140. AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 12-May-1962, minutes, p. 12, commnuniqué, pp. 1ff., cf. SPD-Fraktion Sitzungsprotokolle 1961–1966, ed. Potthoff, vol. 1, pp. 104ff., fn. 5;

191

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53

PLB 94, 14-May-1962, WBA, A3, 136; Thema: Verhandlungen, 18-May-1962, pp. 2ff., WBA, A3, 137; USBer, 11-May-1962 and 16-May-1962, JFKL, NSF, 96; NARA, 611.61/5–1762; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, pp. 64ff. DOS to USBer, 19-Apr-1962, JFKL, NSF, 96; USBer, 12-Jun-1962, JFKL, NSF, 96; NARA, 762.00/4–2562; NARA, 762.00/5–962; Schiller–Kennedy memcon, 17-May1962, JFKL, NSF, 75. FRUS-suppl. 352. Brandt, Parteitagsreden, pp. 45–47, 54 and 61–68. Klein to Bundy, 13-Jun-1962, JFKL, NSF, 246; FRUS-suppl. 352. Talk with Hughes and Bahr to Pechel, 13-Jun-1962, AdsD, Bahr papers, 44B. Note, 22-Jun-1962, p. 3, WBA, A6, 72; memorandum for federal government, 21Jun-1962, p. 4, WBA, A6, 72; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 192. Cf. Schmidt, Brandt, p. 440. Klein to Bundy, 26-Jun-1962, JFKL, NSF, 84; Rome (Rusk), 23-Jun-1962, JFKL, POF, 117 (security). 6 FROM CRISIS TO DÉTENTE: THE AUTUMN OF 1962

1 FRUS-suppl. 374. 2 Brandt, Kennedy, p. 152; Embassy Bonn, 21-Aug-1962, JFKL, NFS, 97; Speicher, ‘Origins’, pp. 237–239. 3 USBer, 20-Aug-1962, JFKL, NSF, 97. 4 Brandt, Kennedy, p. 153. 5 Brandt to Berlin SPD, 28-Aug-1962, p. 13, WBA, A3, 141; AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 24, 5-Sep-1962. 6 Peter Brandt, ‘Zum Geleit’, in Dieter Dowe (ed.), Brand(t)meister: Willy Brandt als Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin im Spiegel der Karikatur in West und Ost, Munich: Olzog, 1996, pp. 9–21 (p. 15). 7 Report to Berlin SPD parliamentary party, 22-Aug-1962, p. 3, WBA, A3, 141. 8 Draft, Brandt to Kennedy, 30-Aug-1962, AdsD, Bahr papers, 324; Brandt to Clay, 4Sep-1962, LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 12467. 9 Philip Zelikow and Ernest May (eds), The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: The Great Crises, 3 vols, vol. 1: July 30–August 1962, ed. by Timothy Naftali, New York and London: Norton, 2001, p. 535; Legere to Kaysen, 1-Sep-1962, JFKL, NSF, 85; Bundy to Kennedy, 20-Sep-1962, JFKL, NSF, 251; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 332f. 10 DOS to USBer, 20-Aug-1962, USBer to SecState, 20-Aug-1962 and 21-Aug-1962, JFKL, NSF, 97; Legere to Kaysen, 1-Sep-1962, JFKL, NSF, 85; FRUS-suppl. 374 and 394; NARA, 762.00/8–2162; Brandt to Berlin SPD, 28-Aug-1962, p. 13, WBA, A3, 141, WBA, A3, 141; AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 24, 19-Oct-1962, pp. 7ff. 11 Brandt, Kennedy, p. 153; Brandt, Life, p. 4. Cf. Speicher, ‘Origins’, pp. 240ff.; Kurt L. Shell, Bedrohung und Bewährung: Führung und Bevölkerung in der Berlin-Krise, Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1965, pp. 290–296 and 364; Prowe, ‘Anfänge’, pp. 264–267. 12 AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 24, 19-Oct-1962, p. 8, and 5-Sep-1962, p. 6; DzD IV/8, p. 992. 13 Brandt to Berlin SPD, 28-Aug-1962, WBA, A3, 141; Bahr to Brandt, 29-Aug-1962, AdsD, Bahr papers, 44A; Brandt to Clay, 4-Sep-1962, LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 12467; AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 24, 5-Sep-1962, communiqué p. 2; DzD IV/8, pp. 1023 and 1033; Der Tagesspiegel, 9-Oct-1962, LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc. 1949, no. 2625; SPD-executive press release, 19-Oct-1962, p. 4, AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24. 14 DzD IV/8, pp. 1002ff.

192

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

USBer, 6-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 97. AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24, 5-Sep-1962, p. 13; DzD IV/8, p. 1020; FRUS-suppl. 380. Embassy Bonn, 11-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 76. USBer, 8-Sep-1962, p. 2, JFKL, NSF, 97; Clay to Brandt, 5-Sep-1962, LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 12467. FRUS-suppl. 380; USBer, 3-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 76; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 292 and 294f. FRUS-suppl. 380. Richard Löwenthal, Vom kalten Krieg zur Ostpolitik, Stuttgart: Seewald, 1974, p. 61; Brandt, Einsichten, p. 36, People, p. 38, Kennedy, pp. 154ff.; Trachtenberg, Peace, p. 350; Peter Brandt, ‘Geleit’, pp. 9ff.; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 342. USBer, 28-Sep-1962, JFKL, NSF, 97; William Burr, ‘Avoiding the Slippery Slope: The Eisenhower Administration and the Berlin Crisis, November 1958 – January 1959’, Diplomatic History 18, 1994, 177–205 (p. 203). On 13-Sep-1962, however, Schiller told a group of businessmen that the Senat had accepted the possibility of visas, FRUS-suppl. 380. USBer, 28-Sep-1962, JFKL, NSF, 97. Cf. NARA, 762.00/11–962. Ibid. Ibid. Brandt to Berlin SPD, 8-Sep-1962, WBA, A3, 142. Cf. Thema: Verhandlungen, 18May-1962, p. 11, WBA, A3, 137; AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24, 5-Sep-1962, 19-Oct1962 and 16-Nov-1962; NARA, 033.62A41/11–662. Schmidt, Brandt, p. 471. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 329 and 333f. USBer, 3-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 76. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 331ff. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 341f.; cf. Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 464ff. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 344ff.; on television, 8-Oct-1962, pp. 9ff., WBA, A3, 143. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 385; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 341 and 345f.; Brandt–Kennedy memcon, 1st draft, 5-Oct-1962, p. 3, JFKL, NSF, 97; AdsD, SPDPV, Präsidium, 10, 8-Oct-1962. AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24, 19-Oct-1962, p. 8; AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 24, 16Nov-1962, p. 6. Brandt–Kennedy memcon, 1st draft, 5-Oct-1962, pp. 3f., JFKL, NSF, 97. AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24, 19-Oct-1962, pp. 6ff.; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 345ff.; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 382; Brandt–Kennedy memcon, 1st draft, 5-Oct-1962, pp. 3ff., JFKL, NSF, 97. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 345, 348 and 343; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 382ff. (quotation) and 385; Bahr, Zeit, p. 154. Bahr to Blumenthal, 7-May-1962, AdsD, Bahr papers, 44B. Hugh Gaitskell, The Challenge of Co-existence, London: Methuen, 1957; Nikita S. Khrushchev, ‘On Peaceful Coexistence’, Foreign Affairs 38, October 1959, 1–18; George Kennan, ‘Peaceful Coexistence: A Western View’, Foreign Affairs, January 1960, 171–190. Harold Hurwitz, ‘Mein Leben in Berlin’, Leviathan: Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 27, 1999, 264–279 (p. 272). Cf. Willy Brandt, The Ordeal of Coexistence, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. Bahr, Zeit, p. 149. Brandt, People, p. 99; Kaysen’s PS to Bundy’s memorandum, 4-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 76. For a discussion of coexistence and many of the ideas contained in the Harvard lectures see chapters 8 and 9.

193

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44 Ibid.; Kaysen, letter to the autor, 19-Mar-2001. The German conservatives and Krone in particular suspected much the same, cf. Speicher, ‘Origins’, p. 249. 45 Hurwitz, ‘The Concept of “Peaceful Coexistence between Rival Social Systems”’, pp. 19ff., 31f. and 36, WBA, A3, 145; Brandt, Life, pp. 58ff., Kennedy, p. 179. 46 DzD IV/8, p. 1197; USBer, 8-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 97; Tagesspiegel, 9-Oct-1962, LAB, B Rep. 002 Acc. 1949, no. 2625; Krone, ‘Aufzeichnungen’, p. 171; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 341. 47 FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 347. 48 DNSA, CC00950. 49 Brandt, People, p. 89; DNSA, CC00950. 50 Cf. DNSA, CC00915; USBer, 24-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF 86. 51 Bahr-interview, Bonn, 29-Jan-2001; Bahr-interview, in Andrea Stuppe, ‘Aspekte des Amerikabildes Willy Brandts, 1933–1963: Eine Studie unter Berücksichtigung des Materials im Willy-Brandt-Archiv’, Masters thesis, Cologne 1997 [available at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Library, Bonn], pp. XIf.; Brandt, Kennedy, p. 174. 52 Brandt to Friedrich, 29-Oct-1962, and Bahr, draft for Albertz’s statement to the SPDexecutive on 1-Dec-1962, AdsD, Bahr papers, 44A. 53 PLB 215, 29-Oct-1962, WBA, A3, 146; to Foreign Press Association, 2-Nov-1962, WBA, A3, 147; PLB, 26-Nov-1962, WBA, A3, 148; Willy Brandt, Tackle the Tasks of Tomorrow: Statement of the Governing Mayor, Willy Brandt, before the Berlin House of Representatives on March 18, 1963, Berlin: Press and Information Office, 1963, pp. 44ff. 54 NARA, 762.00/1–1063; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 390; to Foreign Press Association, 2-Nov- 1962, WBA, A3, 147. 55 DzD IV/8, p. 1424. 7 ‘NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE’: THE PINNACLE OF THE BRANDT–KENNEDY ALLIANCE AND THE FIRST STEPS TOWARDS DÉTENTE 1 AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 24, p. 19. 2 Cf., e.g., DOS to Embassy Bonn, work copy, 30-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 98; LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 10978, sheet 282; NARA, 762.00/11–162; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 392; Embassy Bonn, 9-Nov-1962, JFKL, NSF, 98; Rusk to Kennedy, 12-Nov1962, JFKL, NSF, 76. 3 Brandt to Kaysen, draft, 17-Oct-1962, AdsD, Bahr papers, 44A. 4 USBer, 6-Jan-1963, 14-Jan-1963 and 16-Jan-1962, JFKL, NSF, 98. 5 USBer, 6-Jan-1963, JFKL, NSF, 98; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 476 and 479. 6 USBer, 16-Jan-1963, and DOS to USBer, 16-Jan-1962, JFKL, NFS, 98; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 477. 7 Bahr, Zeit, p. 166. 8 USBer, 19-Feb-1963, JFKL, NSF, 98. Cf. Vogtmeier, Bahr, p. 69; Arnulf Baring, Machtwechsel: Die Ära Brandt–Scheel, Berlin: Ullstein, 1998 [c.1983], p. 245; Merseburger, Brandt, p. 450. 9 Prowe, ‘Anfänge’, p. 271. 10 Bahr to Mayor (‘Pechel’), 25-Feb-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49B. 11 USBer, 6-Feb-1963, NARA, POL 7 WGER. 12 Speech to Foreign Policy Association, New York, 15-May-1964, WBA, A3, 180, cf. Brandt, Wille zum Frieden, p. 114. The statement caused considerable excitement. 13 Schmidt, Brandt, p. 537. Cf. also Klaus Hildebrand, ‘Willy Brandt, Charles de Gaulle und “la grande Europe” ’, Historische Zeitschrift 279, 2004, pp. 387–408; Horst Möller and Maurice Vaïsse (eds), Willy Brandt und Frankreich, Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005.

194

NOTES

14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24, 5-Sep-1962, p. 2. Bahr to Brandt, 11-Feb-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49B. Brandt to Kennedy, 8-Feb-1963, JFKL, NSF, 86. Kennedy to Brandt, 18-Feb-1963 (and cf. the even stronger first draft: work copy, 15Feb-1963), JFKL, NSF, 86; Clay to Brandt, 19-Feb-1963, and Brandt to Clay, 27Feb-1963, WBA, A6, 42; Brandt to Clay, 21-Mar-1963, LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 12467; USBer, 27-Feb-1963, JFKL, NSF, 98. Report, 25-Feb-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49B; Bahr to Mayor (‘Pechel’), 25-Feb1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49B; DOS to USBer/Embassy Bonn, 25-Feb-1963, JFKL, NSF, 98. Bahr to Brandt, 25-Feb-1963 (‘Shep’), p. 3, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49B. The last sentence was ambiguous: it could refer to the fact that Adenauer was due to be replaced in autumn (Erhard and Schröder, the likely successors, were both Atlanticists), but also to Brandt’s next candidacy. Memorandum to Mayor (‘Pechel’), 25-Feb-1963, quotation p. 4, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49B; DOS to USBer/Embassy Bonn, 25-Feb-1963, JFKL, NSF, 98. Oliver Bange, ‘English, American, and German interests behind the Preamble to the Franco-German Treaty, 1963’, in Gustav Schmidt (ed.), Zwischen Bündnissicherung und privilegierter Partnerschaft: Die deutsch-britischen Beziehungen und die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, 1955–1963, Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1995, pp. 225–280 (p. 251). Bahr to Kaysen, 17-May-1963, JFKL, NSF, 77. Erler quoted in Reiner Marcowitz, Option für Paris? Unionsparteien, SPD und Charles de Gaulle 1958 bis 1969, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996, p. 107; Erler–Kennedy memcon, 25-Apr-1963, JFKL, NSF, 77. Talking paper, 10-Jun-1963, JFKL, NSF, 240. Bahr to Brandt, 26-Feb-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 353. Brandt, Kennedy, p. 179. Cf. Victor Reuther to Brandt, 3-Apr-1963, Wayne State University, Victor Reuther papers, box 27, folder 26. Brandt–Stevenson memcon, 10-Jun-1963, p. 2, WBA, A6, 74; cf. AAPD 1963, p. 681. Garton Ash, Name, p. 65. Zur ‘Strategie des Friedens’, 13-Jun-1963, WBA, A3, 157. Kaysen to Brandt, 22-Jun-1963, JFKL, NSF 86. Brandt–Rusk memcon, 12-Jun-1963, WBA, A6, 74. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 532; Brandt–Rusk memcon, 24-Jun-1963, WBA, A6, 74. DOS to Embassy London (Rusk), 27-Jun-1963, NARA, POL 28 BERLIN. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 538; Gerhard Kunze, Grenzerfahrungen: Kontakte und Verhandlungen zwischen dem Land Berlin und der DDR 1949–1989, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999, p. 67; Brandt, Kennedy, p. 185 (quotation). Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 417–419. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 538; Brandt, Kennedy, pp. 185ff. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 531; Brandt–Rusk memcon, 24-Jun-1963, WBA, A6, 74. PPP 1963, p. 517; BPA, Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR), 28-Jun-1963, appendix I, p. 3, BPA-DOK. Hurwitz, Berlin Briefing, 6-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF 241; Brandt, Kennedy, pp. 26f., 194, 196, 198, 203f., 230f.; Brandt, People, pp. 72ff.; Brandt in Strober and Strober (eds), Oral History, p. 370; USBer, 27-Jun-1963, JFKL, NSF, 241; Embassy Bonn, 28-Jun-1963, NARA, POL 2–1 WGER; George McGhee, At the Creation of a New Germany: From Adenauer to Brandt: An Ambassador’s Account, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 60ff.; Kai Bird, The Color of Truth:

195

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41

42

43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms: A Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998, p. 247; Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965, pp. 600ff. It is one of the stranger American myths that Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ was either gramatically incorrect German or could be misunderstood for ‘I am a doughnut’ – both are nonsense. For a brief discussion, a lesson on the intricacies of the use of articles in German grammar and some pertinent linguistic literature cf. Andreas W. Daum, Kennedy in Berlin: Politik, Kultur und Emotionen im Kalten Krieg, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003, pp. 131ff. JFKL, POF, speech files, 45; Reeves, Profile, pp. 535ff.; Prowe, ‘Berliner’, pp. 144–149 and 164; Brandt, Kennedy, p. 195; Brandt in Strober and Strober (eds), Oral History, p. 371; O’Donnell and Powers, Johnny, pp. 409ff.; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, New York: Random House, 1988, p. 390; Bird, Color of Truth, p. 247. Kissinger to Kennedy, 5-Apr-1961, JFKL, NSF, 117; DzD IV/9, pp. 656ff. Cf. Freedman, Wars, pp. 268ff. Reeves, Profile, p. 536; James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991, p. 219; Freedman, Wars, p. 269. PPP 1963, p. 529; Beschloss, Crisis, p. 608. This interpretation may even have been technically correct: Kennedy had told Brandt before the speech that he was concerned about the popular front ideas of the French socialists, Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 419. Bahr, Zeit, p. 150. Brandt–Rusk memcon, 12-Jun-1963, WBA, A6, 74; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 417; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 538; Klein to Bundy, 20-Jun-1963, JFKL, NSF, 241. Brandt to Kennedy, 3-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF, 86. Ein großer Tag in der Geschichte unserer Stadt, AdsD, Bahr papers, 338; ‘KennedyBroschüre: Abgekürztes Verfahren’, Telegraf, 18-Aug-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 123; USBer, 6-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF, 241. Abgeordnetenhaus, Stenographischer Bericht, IV. Wahlperiode, vol. 1, pp. 193–195. Klein to Bundy, 17-Sep-1963, JFKL, NSF, 99. DzD IV/9, pp. 572–575. For a conceptual discussion see chapter 10 below. Bahr to Bender, 29-Jun-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49B. Cf. Peter Bender, Offensive Entspannung: Möglichkeit für Deutschland, Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1964. Hurwitz to Brandt, 20–22-Aug-1963, pp. 6ff., WBA, A6. Schütz, too, felt that Bahr had announced a new policy without consultation, Schütz-interview. Bahr, Zeit, pp. 155ff.; Hurwitz-interview; Bahr to Wehner, 6-Sep-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49A. DzD IV/9, pp. 627–630; quotation in Abgeordnetenhaus, Stenographischer Bericht, IV. Wahlperiode, vol. 1, p. 255. Cf. the debate on 3-Sep-1963 in Abgeordnetenhaus, Stenographischer Bericht, IV. Wahlperiode, vol. 1, no. 13 and DzD IV/9, pp. 656–665 and 679–693; DzD IV/9, p. 207. Cf. Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 507f. and 512. Amrehn patiently called attention to the ever so gradual shifts in Brandt’s terminology and tried in vain to get Brandt to nail down what exactly they implied (DzD IV/9, pp. 674ff.). Peter Bender later acknowledged that ‘The more Brandt and his friends considered something new, the more they protested that everything remained the same. This made intelligent opponents livid’, Peter Bender, Die ‘Neue Ostpolitik’ und ihre Folgen: Vom Mauerbau bis zur Vereinigung, 4th edn, Munich: dtv, 1996, p. 132. McGhee, Creation, pp. 53f.; Speicher, ‘Origins’, pp. 296ff., fn. 42; Consulate Munich, 17-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF, 77 (quotation).

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59 Embassy Bonn, 2-Sep-1963, NARA, DEF 18–4 XR POL W GER-US (1st and 3rd quotations); AAPD 1963, 2nd quotation p. 907. 60 Krone, ‘Aufzeichnungen’, pp. 178ff. 61 Brandt’s notes for the Bundesrat, 16-Aug-1963, WBA, A3, 161; Der Auswärtige Ausschuß, vol. 4, pp. 741–743. Brandt acknowledged that it had to be clarified that no recognition was intended, but criticized that this could habe been done swifter and smoother. 62 Kaysen to Clifton, undated; draft telegram, 9-Jul-1963; Kaysen to Brandt, 5-Jul-1963, all in JFKL, NSF, 86. Cf. Bundy to Kaysen, 4-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF, 370. 63 Brandt–McNamara–Nitze memcon, 4-Aug-1963, WBA, A6, 74; FRUS-suppl. 424. 64 DzD IV/7, p. 374. 65 Trachtenberg, Peace, pp. 379–402; Münger, Kennedy, Berliner Mauer, Kubakrise, pp. 309–315 and 374; Münger, West-Berliner, pp. 194–199 and 207; Andreas Wenger, ‘Der lange Weg zur Stabilität: Kennedy, Chruschtschow und das gemeinsame Interesse der Supermächte am Status quo in Europa’, VfZG 46, 1998, 69–99. 66 Franz Eibl, ‘Die deutsch-französischen Konsultationen vom 3./4. Juli 1964 und de Gaulles “Angebot” einer nuklearen Zusammenarbeit’, in Karl G. Kick, Stephan Weingarz and Ulrich Bartosch (eds), Wandel durch Beständigkeit: Studien zur deutschen und internationalen Politik, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998, pp. 389–408; Franz Eibl, Politik der Bewegung: Gerhard Schröder als Außenminister 1961–1966, Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001, pp. 345–353. 67 Trachtenberg, Peace, p. 390 (cf. also p. 389: ‘general sense of connectedness’); Münger, West-Berliner, pp. 197ff.; Wenger, ‘Stabilität’, p. 95.; Khrushchev: FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 543 and pp. 568ff. 68 USBer, 23-Aug-1963, JFKL, NSF, 92. Cf. DzD IV/7, pp. 201–203; Schwarz, Ära, pp. 149ff.; Jacques Schuster, Albertz – der Mann, der mehrere Leben lebte: Eine Biographie, Berlin: Fest, 1997, pp. 74ff.; Schmidt, Brandt, p. 402; Prowe, ‘Anfänge’, p. 259. 69 Salzburg, 5-Aug-1963, JFKL, NSF 80. 70 FRUS-suppl. 228; commandants meeting, 30-Oct-1961, LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc. 3455, no. 6965; DOS to USBer, 2-Nov-1961, JFKL, NSF, 86; NARA, 762.00/11–1561; USBer, 16-Nov-1961 and 15-Dec-1961, JFKL, NSF, 94. Cf. Speicher, ‘Origins’, pp. 226–228. 71 LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 7993b, sheets 625f. Cf. Schmidt, Brandt, p. 441. 72 Abgeordnetenhaus, Stenographischer Bericht, IV. Wahlperiode, vol. 2, p. 44; Bahr, Zeit, p. 161. 73 USBer, 19-Aug-1963, JFKL, NSF, 99; Embassy Bonn, 27-Dec-1963, NARA, POL 23–10 BERLIN. 74 Brandt, Erinnerungen, p. 81; Brandt, People, pp. 96f. 75 Bender, Ostpolitik, pp. 130ff.; Prowe, ‘Anfänge’, pp. 279–281; Bahr, Zeit, pp. 162ff.; Schuster, Albertz, p. 107; DzD IV/9, p. 1023. 76 Cf. Bahr, Zeit, p. 162; Brandt, Einsichten, p. 107, People, p. 98. 77 USBer, 24-Dec-1963, NARA, POL 36 GER. 78 USBer, 1-Dec-1964, NARA, POL 23–10 GER; Bahr, Zeit, p. 164. This process had built-in momentum: once granted, Brandt could not revoke the conceded extent of de facto recognition, while the GDR could revoke access to East Berlin and therefore try to increase the price – which was precisely why the pass agreements were no longer renewed in 1966. But the momentum worked both ways: in the framework of the Quadripartite Berlin Agreement and the Basic Treaty of 1971 and 1972 not only Brandt, but also the GDR had to give much more (and to accept, once more, the agree-to-disagree clause over which the last pass negotiations failed in 1966) – and by then it was Brandt who set the pace.

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79 Brandt, Life, pp. 67 and 70; Bahr, Zeit, p. 164; Merseburger, Brandt, p. 457. 80 DzD IV/10, pp. 88 and 96–102; Bahr to Dehler, 22-Jan-1964, quoted in Vogtmeier, Bahr, pp. 69ff.; Brandt, Life, p. 70. Cf. Speicher, ‘Origins’, pp. 330–333. 81 FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 640ff. 82 Embassy Bonn, 4-Jan-1964, NARA, POL 23–10 GER. 83 AAPD 1963, p. 1670; USBer, 31-Dec-1963 and 1-Jan-1964, NARA, POL 23–10 GER. 84 Bahr-interview. 85 McGhee, Creation, p. 119; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 641. 86 FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 1. 87 FRUS 1964–1968, XV, pp. 88–90; meeting with Berlin Task Force, 18-May-1964, NARA, POL 28 GER B. 88 FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 665, 667f. and pp. 678ff. and AAPD 1963, p. 1686; Embassy Bonn, 31-Dec-1963, NARA, POL 36 GER; Embassy Bonn, 16-Jan-1964, DOS to Embassy Bonn, 23-Jan-1964, and USBer to SecState, 25-Jan-1964, NARA, POL 23–10 GER B. 89 FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 660 and 675ff.; Horst Osterheld, Außenpolitik unter Bundeskanzler Ludwig Erhard 1963–1966: Ein dokumentarischer Bericht aus dem Kanzleramt, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1992, p. 46. 90 Meeting with Berlin Task Force, 18-May-1964, NARA, POL 28 GER B; Albertz–Rusk memcon, 5-Jun-1964, LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 10851. 91 Hurwitz to Stone, 24-Dec-1963, LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 90, no. 327; Brandt, Life, p. 62. 92 Brandt, Kennedy, p. 230; AdsD, SPD-PV, Präsidium, 12, 2-Dec-1963; Brandt, People, p. 92, Kennedy, pp. 230–232; Willy Brandt, ‘Anruf aus dem Weißen Haus’, Der Spiegel, 4-Dec-1963, p. 21; Greta Hurwitz during Hurwitz-interview. 93 PLB 231, 23-Nov-1963, and PLB appendix, 25-Nov-1963, WBA, A3, 167. Cf. Daum, Kennedy in Berlin, pp. 167–174. 94 Die Zeit, 5-Feb-1965, WBA, A3, 198; USBer, 3-Apr-1964, NARA, POL 18 GER B; Brandt, Kennedy, p. 242; Jaqueline Kennedy to Brandt, 3-Jan-1964, WBA, A3, 198. 95 Bender, Ostpolitik, p. 119. 96 ‘I at any rate had the feeling that what we were doing is certainly quite a lot with respect to the “so-called ‘GDR’ ”, but ultimately in the truest sense of the word peanuts compared to what Kennedy’s doing with the Russians, or with the Soviets’, Bahr-interview. 97 Jacqueline Kennedy to Brandt, 3-Jan-1964, WBA, A3, 198. 98 USBer, 28-Sep-1961, JFKL, NSF, 86. 8 FROM WORLDVIEW TO DÉTENTE STRATEGY: COEXISTENCE, TRANSFORMATION AND CONCEPTUAL CONCORDANCE 1 JFKL, NSF, 86. 2 Hans-Peter Schwarz, ‘Supermacht und Juniorpartner: Ansätze amerikanischer und westdeutscher Ostpolitik’, in Hans-Peter Schwarz and Boris Meissner (eds), Entspannungspolitik in Ost und West, Cologne: Heymanns, 1979, pp. 147–191 (p. 172). 3 For this and the following cf. Stuppe, ‘Amerikabild’, pp. 98ff. and pp. 13–15, 22–26, 45–48, 52 and 57. 4 USBer, 16-Sep-1965, p. 6, NARA, POL 12 GER B. 5 Brandt, Erinnerungen, p. 393. 6 Brandt, Einsichten, pp. 68ff. and cf. p. 80. 7 Cf. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999, pp. 80ff. Programme, 13-Mar-1961, WBA, A3, 93; ‘New Frontiers for German Democracy’, WBA, A3, 114; Hurwitz to Brandt, 28-Feb-1961, LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 89, no. 321; Brandt to Humphrey, 7-Apr-1961, AdsD, Bahr papers, 47B. Brandt, Einsichten, p. 83; Brandt, Kennedy, p. 44, Life, pp. 58ff. Brandt, People, p. 70. Baring, Machtwechsel, p. 721. Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, London: André Deutsch, 1965, p. 363; Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 576; JFKL, OH, Hillenbrandt, p. 33; Kaysen, letter to the author, 19-Mar-2001. Brandt, Life, p. 65; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 43; PPP 1963, p. 517; Brandt, Coexistence, p. 35; PPP 1963, pp. 460ff. Brandt, Parteitagsreden, pp. 45 and 60. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 348. PPP 1963, p. 461. Egon Bahr, Willy Brandts europäische Außenpolitik, Berlin: Bundeskanzler-WillyBrandt-Stiftung, 1999, p. 42. Peter Bender, Offensive Entspannung: Möglichkeit für Deutschland, Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1964, p. 41. Cf. Peter Siebenmorgen, Gezeitenwechsel: Aufbruch zur Entspannungspolitik, Bonn: Bouvier, 1990, p. 55; Garton Ash, Name, p. 374; Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 745. Egon Bahr, ‘Entspannung’, in Ralf Zoll (ed.), Bundeswehr und Gesellschaft: Ein Wörterbuch, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1977, p. 86; Bahr, note, 23-Aug-1963, WBA, A6, 74. Cf. Melvyn P. Leffler, ‘Bringing it Together: The Parts and the Whole’, in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2000, pp. 43–63 (pp. 55ff.). John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, ed. by Allan Nevins, London: Hamilton, 1960, pp. 4ff.; The Issue Beyond Berlin: Survival, JFKL, Pre-Presidential Papers, 1030. PPP 1961, pp. 1 and 620; PPP 1963, p. 460. Cf. Freedman, Wars, pp. 18–26, 33ff., 71, 261 and 418. Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 172 and 218; cf. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 188ff. Brandt, Coexistence, p. 3, cf. pp. 2, 19, 23 and 35. Helmut Schmidt, Verteidigung oder Vergeltung: Ein deutscher Beitrag zum strategischen Problem der NATO, Stuttgart: Seewald, 1961; SPD-Fraktion Sitzungsprotokolle 1961–1966, ed. Potthoff, vol. 1, pp. 211–225; DzD IV/8, p. 1263; DzD IV/6, p. 700; Stephen J. Artner, A Change of Course: The West German Social Democrats and NATO, 1957–1961, Westport and London: Greenwood, 1985, pp. 188–195; Lothar Wilker, Die Sicherheitspolitik der SPD 1956–1966: Zwischen Wiedervereinigungs- und Bündnisorientierung, Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Neue Gesellschaft, 1977, pp. 158–167. Cf. Bender, Entspannung, p. 172, note 48, and p. 162; Siebenmorgen, Gezeitenwechsel, pp. 115f. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 188–190; Willy Brandt, ‘Voraussetzungen des Ringens um die deutsche Einheit’, Außenpolitik 8, 1957, pp. 357–366 (p. 359); Brandt, ‘East–West Problem’, p. 299; Willy Brandt, ‘Außenpolitische Kontinuität mit neuen Akzenten’, Außenpolitik 11, 1960, pp. 717–723 (pp. 720ff.); Brandt, Parteitagsreden, pp. 31–32; Willy Brandt, ‘The Means Short of War’, Foreign Affairs 39, 1960/1961, 196–207; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 170–173, 196, 218–220 and 324; Speicher, ‘Origins’, p. 151.

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29 Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 2f. and 35; Hurwitz, ‘The Concept of “Peaceful Coexistence between Rival Social Systems”’, p. 19, WBA, A3, 145. 30 FRUS 1961–1963, V, pp. 175ff.; PPP 1961, pp. 618–626 (p. 626); RFK’s address, 22-Feb-1962, pp. 6ff., JFKL, Robert F. Kennedy papers, Attorney General’s trips, 4; PPP 1963, pp. 459–464. 31 Freedman, Wars, p. 340, cf. p. 419 (cf. Michael B. Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente: Coming to Terms, New York: St. Martin’s, 1991, pp. 28ff.); PLB, 3Dec-1964, p. 7, WBA, A3, 194. 32 PPP 1961, p. 336; Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 12ff. 33 Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 9, 11–19, 25f., 53–57 and 87f.; Brandt, ‘Means Short of War’, p. 198; R. Kennedy, Friends, p. 155; NARA, 762.0221/1–761 [sic]; Schlesinger, Days, pp. 343f. Cf. Freedman, Wars, p. 34; Warren I. Cohen, Dean Rusk, Totowa: Cooper Square, 1980, pp. 296f., Vogtmeier, Bahr, pp. 74ff. 34 PLB, 21-Jul-1961, p. 4, WBA, A3, 121; PPP 1963, p. 461; Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 26 and 18. 35 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 212, 234f. and 305; Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 57 and 81. 36 Brandt to Szende, 5-Apr-1961, WBA, A3, 198; PPP 1963, p. 528. 37 Brandt, Coexistence, p. 20; Bennett Kovrig, Of Walls and Bridges: The United States and Eastern Europe, New York and London: New York University Press, 1991, pp. 107ff.; Bennett Kovrig, The Myth of Liberation: East-Central Europe in U.S. Diplomacy and Politics since 1941, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP, 1973, pp. 250f.; cf. also Cohen, Rusk, pp. 295f; Die Welt, 21-Mar-1961, pp. 1ff. (p. 3); Telegraf 68, 21-Mar-1961; R. Kennedy, Friends, p. 181; Rostow, lecture, 18-Oct1962, p. 10, AdsD, Bahr papers, 449. 38 Noam Kochavi, ‘Washington’s View of the Sino–Soviet Split, 1961–63: From Puzzled Prudence to Bold Experimentation’, Intelligence and National Security 15:1, 2000, 50–79; Brandt–Stevenson memcon, 10-Jun-1963, and Brandt–Rusk memcon, 12-Jun-1963, WBA, A6, 74; Kaysen to Brandt, 5-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF, 86; AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 25, 28-Aug-1963, p. 27. 39 Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 38 and 80. On 1955 cf. Schmidt, Brandt, p. 170. 40 John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept, London and Melbourne: Hutchinson, [1940], pp. 223–234; The Issue Beyond Berlin: Survival, p. 1, JFKL, Pre-Presidential Papers, 1030; Kennedy quoted in Froman, Détente, p. 21. 41 Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000; Freedman, Wars, p. 14. 42 Reeves, Profile, p. 231; Freedman, Wars, p. 419, cf. also p. 249. 43 PPP 1963, p. 529; cf. RFK’s address in Berlin, 22-Feb-1962, JFKL, Robert F. Kennedy papers, Attorney General’s trips, 4. 44 PLB 168, 7-Aug-1961, WBA, A3, 122; Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 3–6 and 11; DSB 45, July–December 1961, p. 480; RFK’s address in Berlin, 22-Feb-1962, p. 6, JFKL, Robert F. Kennedy papers, Attorney General’s trips, 4. 45 Ulbricht quoted in Karl-Heinz Schmidt, Dialog über Deutschland: Studien zur Deutschlandpolitik von KPdSU und SED (1960–1979), Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998, p. 87; Brandt, Coexistence, p. 79. 46 Abraham Ashkenasi, Reformpartei und Außenpolitik: Die Außenpolitik der SPD, Berlin: Westdeutscher Verl., 1968, pp. 101 and 132f.; Prowe, ‘Anfänge’, p. 285; Vogtmeier, Bahr, pp. 339 and 364f.; Bahr, Zeit, p. 107; Freedman, Wars, pp. 14ff. 47 Brandt, Coexistence, p. 27; Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich?, pp. 131ff. 48 Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 18 and 79; Bahr, Zeit, p. 91; Vogtmeier, Bahr, p. 346. 49 Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 79ff. Cf. Gabriele Metzler, Konzeptionen politischen

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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Handelns von Adenauer bis Brandt: Politische Planung in der pluralistischen Gesellschaft, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2005, pp. 225–231. Brandt, Coexistence, p. 19; Kennedy, Strategy of Peace, p. 12; PPP 1963, pp. 462. Cf. Freedman, Wars, pp. 16 and 275. Brandt, Coexistence, p. 34; FRUS-suppl. 57. Bahr quoted in Vogtmeier, Bahr, p. 360; Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 25 and 110f. PPP 1963, p. 462. PPP 1963, p. 527; cf. Bender, Ostpolitik, pp. 119f. Freedman, Wars, p. 16; Köhler, Adenauer, pp. 1144–1150; Daniel Kosthorst, Brentano und die deutsche Einheit: Die Deutschland- und Ostpolitik des Außenministers im Kabinett Adenauer 1955–1961, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1993, p. 387. PPP 1961, pp. 726ff.; Cohen, Rusk, p. 136. DzD IV/8, p. 1420. Reeves, Profile, quotation p. 230; Freedman, Wars, p. 268. Kennedy, England, p. 196; Giglio, Kennedy, pp. 25, 216 and 285 (quotation); Freedman, Wars, p. 33 and 112. Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 61. Brandt, Coexistence, p. 27; PPP 1963, p. 462; speech at the ADA, 16-May-1964, pp. 3ff., WBA, A3, 181. Reeves, Profile, p. 167. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 119ff.; LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 7993b, sheets 540ff. NARA, 762.00/4–2162, p. 3. PPP 1961, p. 727; Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 27f.; Brandt to international press, 11Apr-1962, WBA, A3, 135. Cf. Garton Ash, Name, pp. 149–152. Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 106–109, 168–172, 175–177 and 186f.; Speicher, ‘Origins’, pp. 109, 118f. and 158–160; Brandt, ‘Voraussetzungen’, p. 365; Brandt, Coexistence, quotation pp. 77f.; Kennedy, Peace, pp. 93–95. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 97; PPP 1963, pp. 463 and 527f.; Garton Ash, Name, pp. 139ff., 148f., 258–279 and 367. Klein to Bundy, 13-Jun-1962, JFKL, NSF, 246; Klein to Bundy, 10-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF, 77; PPP 1963, p. 527; DSB 49, July–December 1963, p. 823. Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 104. Brandt, Coexistence, p. 92; DzD IV/9, pp. 566 and 570; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, pp. 116f.; Vogtmeier, Bahr, pp. 48, 82f., 127, 196 and 333–342; Baring, Machtwechsel, pp. 316f.; Bahr, Zeit, pp. 89–92. Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 107ff., 142, 169–171 and 175; Speicher, ‘Origins’, p. 109. Brandt–Clay memcon, 1-Oct-1961, p. 2, WBA, A6, 71; FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 91; Johnson-Rusk–Albertz memcon, 5-Jun-1964, p. 2, NARA, POL 28 GER B. Brandt, Coexistence, p. 78. Cf. Froman, Détente, pp. 4, 6, 11f., 23, 25, 28f. and 35f. Lecture, 24-Feb-1958, pp. 6ff., WBA, A3, 84; Merseburger, Brandt, p. 349; Schmidt, Brandt, p. 219 (cf. pp. 132 and 195f.). RFK address in Berlin, 22-Feb-1962, p. 2, JFKL, Robert F. Kennedy papers, Attorney General’s trips, 4; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 343; PPP 1963, p. 460. Cf. also DSB 49, July–December 1963, pp. 821–824. Kovrig, Walls and Bridges, pp. 103–111; Kovrig, Liberation, pp. 238f., 242–244, 249–268; A. Paul Kubricht, ‘Politics and Foreign Policy: A Brief Look at the Kennedy Administration’s Eastern European Diplomacy’, Diplomatic History 11, 1987, 55–65 (p. 55); Frank Costigliola, ‘Lyndon B. Johnson, Germany and the ‘End of the Cold War’, in Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker (eds), Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy, 1963–1968, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 173–210 (pp. 192–210); Cohen, Rusk, pp. 295f.

201

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78 New York World-Telegram and Sun, 11-Feb-1958, PA, Abt. 7/Referat 160; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 32. 79 Cf. Bahr, note, 5-Feb-1964, AdsD, Bahr papers, 45B; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 364, 485 and 545. 80 Bahr-interview. Cf. Bahr, Zeit, p. 150. 9 THE INTRICACIES OF THE STATUS QUO: MODES OF CHANGE AND CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCE 1 Cf. Siebenmorgen, Gezeitenwechsel, p. 407. 2 USBer, 6-May-1964, NARA, POL 6 GER W. 3 Helga Haftendorn, Security and Détente: Conflicting Priorities in German Foreign Policy, New York: Praeger, 1985, pp. 5 and 80; Josef Joffe, ‘The View from Bonn: The Tacit Alliance’, in Lincoln Gordon et al., Eroding Empire: Western Relations with Eastern Europe, Washington: Brookings, 1987, pp. 129–187 (pp. 139, 141 and 150). 4 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 190 and cf. p. 224; Brandt, Coexistence, p. 8.; Willy Brandt, ‘Berlin und die Einheit der Nation’, in Brandt, Plädoyer für die Zukunft: Zwölf Beiträge zu deutschen Fragen, Frankfurt a.M.: EVA, 1961, pp. 52–63 (p. 53). 5 Cf. Froman, Détente, pp. 23, 25, 28f., 35f., 60f. and 63; Helga Haftendorn, ‘Towards a Theory of Detente’, in Ruediger Juette (ed.), Détente and Peace in Europe, Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus, 1977, 102–118 (pp. 103ff.). Brzezinski was rather an exception in the Nixon administration in this regard, cf. Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American–Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. edn, Washington: Brookings, 1994, p. 38. 6 Hurwitz to Brandt, 20–22-Aug-1963, WBA, A6, 43. Cf. Richard Löwenthal, Vom kalten Krieg zur Ostpolitik, Stuttgart: Seewald, 1974, pp. 2ff. 7 AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24, 11-Dec-1965, p. 13. 8 E.g. Bender, Ostpolitik, p. 107, versus Kosthorst, Brentano, p. 364. 9 Rusk–Bundy–Schröder memcon, 24-Jun-1963, p. 2, NARA, POL 7 US (Kennedy); AAPD 1963, pp. 1218 and 1153. 10 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 384. 11 PPP 1963, p. 527. 12 Adenauer to Kennedy, 21-Oct-1961, quoted in Münger, Kennedy, Berliner Mauer, Kubakrise, p. 123. 13 Brandt, ‘Voraussetzungen’, pp. 358f.; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 113, 151f. and 191. 14 Brandt in ‘Heraus aus den Schützengräben des Kalten Krieges’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22/23-Aug-1959, WBA, A3, 95; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 62; PPP 1961, p. 620. 15 AAPD 1963, p. 1161 and FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 582; Washington talks, 18-May1964, quotation p. 3, WBA, A6, 99; FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 91. Cf. Trachtenberg, Peace, pp. 277 and 378. 16 Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 63. 17 SPD-Pressemitteilungen und Informationen 257/63, 28-Aug-1963, AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 25. 18 Bahr to Klein, 13-May-1960, and Zur deutschen Frage, September 1960, p. 8, AdsD, Bahr papers, 48A and 46B; AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 22, 26-Nov-1961, pp. 26ff. and 37; FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 90. 19 Nuremberg lecture, 25-Sep-1963, p. 4, WBA, A3, 163. 20 Willy Brandt, ‘Gemeinschaftsideale und nationale Interessen in der deutschen Außenpolitik’, Europa-Archiv 19, 1964, 419–426 (p. 420). 21 FRUS-suppl. 193; Possible NATO-Warsaw Pact Nonaggression Arrangement, 21Jun-1961, p. 2, NARA, 762.00/3–22–62.

202

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22 AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 21, 1/2-Jul-1961. 23 Brandt, ‘Berlin und die Einheit der Nation’, p. 53; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 31; Brandt, ‘Means Short of War’, pp. 196ff.; Brandt, ‘Stellung’, p. 34. For Bahr’s draft cf. Schmidt, Brandt, p. 355. 24 DzD IV/9, p. 572; Bahr, Brandts europäische Außenpolitik, p. 35. 10 TOWARDS A NEW GERMAN POLICY: DEALING WITH THE EAST AND CONCEPTUAL ADAPTATION 1 Trachtenberg, Peace, p. 277; Brandt, Life, pp. 139–146, People, p. 36. 2 A. James McAdams, Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 46. 3 Quoted in Ernst Kuper, Frieden durch Konfrontation und Kooperation: Die Einstellung von Gerhard Schröder und Willy Brandt zur Entspannungspolitik, Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1974, p. 216, cf. Bahr’s manuscript, AdsD, Bahr papers, 9B. 4 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 699; FRUS 1958–1960, VIII, p. 79. 5 Brandt quoted in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14-Feb-1958, WBA, A6, 87; Bahr, Zeit, p. 155. 6 PPP 1963, p. 527; Bender, Ostpolitik, p. 54; Willy Brandt, Peace: Writings and Speeches of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, 1971, Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1971, p. 142. 7 Brandt, Coexistence, p. 31. 8 Willy Brandt, ‘Warning for East & West’, The New Leader, 17–24-Jul-1961, pp. 3f. 9 RFK in Fernseh-Pressekonferenz, 23-Feb-1962, p. 4, in USBer, 27-Feb-1962, JFKL, Robert F. Kennedy papers, Attorney General’s trips, 4. 10 AAPD 1963, p. 672. 11 DzD IV/7, p. 1067. It should be noted that Brandt had seen the basic problem before Kennedy pointed it out, cf., e.g., Brandt, Zur Denkschrift von Professur Buchner, 14-Feb-1960, LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc. 2685, no. 5191. 12 Brandt, Coexistence, p. 110. 13 Brandt, Tasks, p. 48. Cf. Brandt, ‘Voraussetzungen’, p. 365; Speicher, ‘Origins’, p. 170; Schmidt, Brandt, pp. 198, 333 and 538; Ashkenasi, Reformpartei, pp. 99f. and 126; Edwin Czerwick, Oppositionstheorien und Außenpolitik: Eine Analyse sozialdemokratischer Deutschlandpolitik 1955 bis 1966, Königstein: Hain, 1981, p. 126. 14 Elisabeth Noelle and Erich Peter Neumann (eds), Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung 1958–1964, Allensbach/Bonn: Verlag für Demoskopie, 1965, pp. 482f.; Rudolf Morsey, Die Deutschlandpolitik Adenauers: Alte Thesen und neue Fakten, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verl., 1991, pp. 21f.; Gerhard Schröder, ‘Germany Looks at Eastern Europe’, Foreign Affairs 44, 1965/1966, pp. 15–25 (p. 19). 15 NARA, 033.1100-KE/3–162; PPP 1963, p. 527. 16 Cf. FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 360. 17 O’Donnell and Powers, Johnny, pp. 330 and 339. 18 USBer, 11-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 98; Krone, ‘Aufzeichnungen’, p. 171. 19 RFK in Fernseh-Pressekonferenz, 23-Feb-1962, p. 4, in USBer, 27-Feb-1962, JFKL, Robert F. Kennedy papers, Attorney General’s trips, 4. 20 Brandt–Rostow memcon, 13-Apr-1965, WBA, A6, 103. 21 Dettmar Cramer, gefragt: Egon Bahr, Bornheim: Zirngibl, 1975, pp. 35 and 43. Cf. Bahr, Zeit, p. 159; Karsten Schröder, Egon Bahr, Rastatt: Arthur Moewig, 1988, p. 116; Vogtmeier, Bahr, p. 66; Siebenmorgen, Gezeitenwechsel, p. 2. 22 AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 16-Oct-1961, p. 3; DzD IV/9, pp. 418ff.

203

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23 FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 527. 24 Äußerungen zur Deutschland- und Berlinfrage, 28-Jun-1963, pp. 1–3, PA, Referat II A 1, 126; PA, B 150, 7, sheets 2370 and 2372. 25 PLB 130, 8-Jul-1963; DzD IV/9, p. 462. 26 Bahr on Sender Freies Berlin (SFB), 6-Jul-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49B; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 105. 27 FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 340; Brzezinski in July 1966, quoted in Costigliola, ‘Johnson, Germany’, p. 198. 28 To the party council, 28-Aug-1963, manuscript p. 3, WBA, A3, 161, communiqué p. 2, AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 25; Consulate Hamburg, 6-Dec-1965, NARA, POL 12–3 GER W; PA, Referat 305/II A 6, 220, sheet 345 (15-Apr-1965). Cf. also Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 495. 29 Cf. Vogtmeier, Bahr, pp. 121, 139 and 191. 30 Cf. DzD IV/9, p. 570; Nuremberg lecture, 25-Sep-1963, p. 5, WBA, A3, 163; Willy Brandt, ‘Friedensstrategie’, Westfälische Rundschau, 28-Sep-1963, BPA-DOK. 31 PLB 208, 22-Oct-1963, pp. 7ff. and English draft pp. 19ff., WBA, A, 165. 32 Ibid.; FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 159. 33 PPP 1963, p. 528; Klein to Bundy, 20-Jun-1963, JFKL, NSF, 241. 34 FRUS 1964–1968, XV, pp. 152–159. 35 Ibid., p. 159. 36 Brandt, Coexistence, p. 106. 37 Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 127. 38 DOS instruction, 14-Nov-1961, p. 4, JFKL, NSF, 94; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 366ff.; PPP 1963–64, p. 710. 39 Brandt, Coexistence, pp. 106ff.; USBer, 8-Apr-1965, NARA, POL 7 GER W. 40 Kennedy, Strategy, p. 97. 41 McGhee to Rostow, 10-Apr-1961, p. 3, JFKL, NSF, 74; Kaysen, Thoughts on Berlin, 22-Aug-1961, p. 12, JFKL, Arthur M. Schlesinger papers, White House files, WH-3; Bundy to Kennedy, 23-Oct-1961, p. 1, JFKL, NSF, 405; Rusk to Kennedy, 15-Nov-1961, JFKL, NSF, 83. 42 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, pp. 609–611 and 623f.; FRUS 1964–1968, XV, pp. 206 and 211. Cf. Debra J. Allen, The Oder-Neisse Line: The United States, Poland, and Germany in the Cold War, Westport and London: Praeger, 2003, pp. 239–275. 43 Küsters, ‘Berlin-Krise’, p. 507; Axel Frohn, ‘Adenauer und die deutschen Ostgebiete in den fünfziger Jahren’, VfZG 44:4, 1996, pp. 485–525; AAPD 1963, pp. 666ff.; Bender, Ostpolitik, p. 54; Siebenmorgen, Gezeitenwechsel, p. 226; Kurt Klotzbach, Der Weg zur Staatspartei: Programmatik, praktische Politik und Organisation der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1945 bis 1965, Berlin and Bonn: Dietz, 1982, pp. 569ff.; Hartmut Soell, ‘Die Ostpolitik der SPD von der Mitte der fünfziger Jahre bis zum Beginn der Großen Koalition’, Politik und Kultur 3:1, 1976, pp. 35–53 (p. 48); Czerwick, Oppositionstheorien, pp. 117ff., Noelle and Neumann (eds), Jahrbuch 1958–1964, pp. 504ff. 44 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 190f. (quotation) and 483f., cf. also p. 306; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 27. 45 While certainly an awkward point from the Eastern perspective, the argument always remained flawed as the FRG at the same time made a big point of denying the existence of the state that actually did border on the Oder-Neisse line. 46 Brandt–Bahr–Puhan–Creel memcon, 13-Apr-1965, pp. 2ff., NARA, POL 28 GER B. 47 AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 26-Nov-1961, p. 37; FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 206. 48 Manuscript, 29-Oct-1962, AdsD, Bahr papers, 44A. 49 DzD IV/12, p. 851; Griffith, Ostpolitik, pp. 125f.; Czerwick, Oppositionstheorien,

204

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50

51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

p. 123; Bahr on the radio, 1-Mar-1966, p. 30, AdsD, Bahr papers, 338; Bahr, Zeit, p. 183; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 165. The SPD had already demanded the establishment of diplomatic relations with Eastern Europe a decade earlier, but that was before the party’s change of course in foreign policy, and the demand had since been dropped. DzD IV/11, pp. 311f.; Eibl, Schröder, pp. 327–331; Oppelland, Schröder, pp. 326–333; Petra Weber, Carlo Schmid 1896–1979. Eine Biographie, Munich: Beck, 1996, pp. 670ff.; Embassy Bonn, 9-May-1963, and Embassy Bonn, 14-May1963, NARA, POL 12 WGER; Soell, Erler, vol. 1, pp. 497–502; Klaus Hildebrand, Von Erhard zur Großen Koalition 1963–1969, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt and Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1984, p. 95; Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, Unionsparteien, Sozialdemokratie und Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika 1945–1966, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1983, p. 572. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 651; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 126; Bahr, Zeit, p. 173. AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 26-Nov-1961, p. 38. AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 24, 19-Oct-1962, p. 27; USBer, 21-May-1965, NARA, POL 18 GER W; Rostow–Brandt–Bahr–Schütz memcon, 19-May-1965, pp. 1ff, NARA, POL GER W-US. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 343. McGhee to Rostow, 10-Apr-1961, JFKL, NSF, 74; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 210; Frank A. Mayer, Adenauer and Kennedy: A Study in German–American Relations, 1961–1963, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, p. 38; Frank Costigliola, ‘The Failed Design: Kennedy, de Gaulle, and the Struggle for Europe’, Diplomatic History 8, 1984, pp. 227–251 (p. 232). FRUS-suppl. 145; FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 767. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 382f.; Brandt–Clay memcon, 9-Oct-1961, WBA, A6, 71. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 343. Dean Rusk, The Winds of Freedom: Selections from the Speeches and Statements of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, January 1961–August 1962, ed. by Ernest K. Lindley, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, p. 172; DzD IV/9, pp. 689f.; to Berlin SPD, 8-Sep1962, p. 7, WBA, A3, 142; AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24, 19-Oct-1962, p. 9. Embassy Bonn, 31-Dec-1963, NARA, POL 36 GER. Cf. DzD IV/10, p. 90. DzD IV/9, p. 629; Brandt–McNamara–Nitze memcon, 4-Aug-1963, pp. 3ff., WBA, A6, 74; FRUS-suppl. 424. PLB 8, 13-Jan-1964, WBA, A3, 172. FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 423 and 438. Cf. the editorial note in FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 73; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 675. FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 27; USBer, 9-Jun-1961, JFKL, NSF, 91; Bahr, Zur Berlin-Situation, 11-Nov-1961, pp. 4 and 6, LAB, B Rep. 002, Acc. 2632, no. 7059; Der Auswärtige Ausschuß, vol. 4, p. 181. LAB, B Rep. 002, no. 7993b, sheet 546; Brandt–Lightner memcon, 6-May-1962, WBA, A6, 72. Erich Böhme and Klaus Wirtgen (eds), Willy Brandt: Die SPIEGEL-Gespräche 1959–1992, Stuttgart: DVA, 1993, p. 71 (10-Jan-1962). Bahr to Brandt, 7-Oct-1960, AdsD, Bahr papers, 46B; Rome (Rusk), 23-Jun-1962, JFKL, POF, 117; AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24, 5-Sep-1962, pp. 13ff.; USBer, 14Nov-1962, JFKL, NSF, 98; Brandt, Life, p. 210. FRUS 1961–1963, VI, p. 95. Helga Haftendorn, Security and Détente: Conflicting Priorities in German Foreign Policy, New York: Praeger, 1985, pp. 159–164; McGhee to Rostow, 10-Apr-1961,

205

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71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99

p. 4, JFKL, NSF, 74; NARA, 762.00/9–561; draft non-aggression treaty, 7-Aug1961, NARA, Executive Secretariat, Conference Files, Records Relating to the Berlin Crisis 1961–1962, box 2 (Entry # 3052, LOT 66 D 124); NARA, 762.00/3–22–62; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 70ff. and pp. 97ff.; Nonaggression Arrangement, JFKL, NSF, 240 (President’s Trip, Europe 6/63–7/63, Briefing Book); FRUS 1961–1963, V, p. 726. Cf. also Kaysen to Kennedy, 1-Aug-1963, JFKL, NSF, 265. AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 13/14-Apr-1962. Cf. PLB 76, 16-Apr-1962, WBA, A3, 135; Thema: Verhandlungen, 18-May-1962, p. 22, WBA, A3, 137. FRUS 1964–1968, XV, pp. 91ff. and cf. p. 94; Gespräche in Washington, 22-May1964, p. 3, WBA, A6, 99. Brandt, ‘Voraussetzungen’, p. 364; Brandt, ‘East–West Problem’, pp. 297ff.; Lowenthal lecture, p. 8, encl. to Consulate Munich, 9-Nov-1961, JFKL, NSF, 83. DzD IV/9, p. 573. Cf. Vogtmeier, Bahr, pp. 38–44. Bender, Entspannung, pp. 111 and 94; Brandt, Coexistence, p. 71; PPP 1963, p. 529. DzD IV/9, p. 575. On the following cf. Garton Ash, Name, pp. 176–196 and Joffe, ‘View’, pp. 150f. and 178–180 DzD IV/9, p. 575. Garton Ash, Name, pp. 176f. and 367. McGhee, Creation, p. 53. Brandt at Columbia University, 17-Mar-1961, p. 1, WBA, A3, 114; Brandt, Coexistence, p. 100. Brandt, Erinnerungen, p. 80; Bahr, Zeit, pp. 157 and 550. Brandt, Coexistence, p. 33; Vogtmeier, Bahr, pp. 88f. and 309; Bahr, Zeit, pp. 183. Joffe, ‘View’, pp. 151 and 153, cf. also pp. 159–163 and 182–187 and Garton Ash, Name, pp. 126–410 passim. Bahr, Zeit, pp. 343f. and 575. Hurwitz to Brandt, 20–22-Aug-1963, WBA, A6, 43. Hurwitz to Bahr, 18-Jul-1966, AdsD, Bahr papers, 466. Brandt to the ADA, 16-May-1964, p. 7, WBA, A3, 181; Bahr, Zeit, p. 164. Quoted in Schmidt, Brandt, p. 333. Cf. Garton Ash, Europe’s Name, pp. 185–205 and 368f. including the chapter on ‘stabilisation without liberalisation’. Bahr, Zeit, p. 553. Cf. Garton Ash, Europe’s Name, p. 367; Joffe, ‘View from Bonn’, p. 180. Henry Kissinger‚ ‘Wege zur deutschen Einheit’, Die Zeit 19, 7-May-1965, pp. 9 and 11, and no. 20, 14-May-1965, p. 9, and Kissinger on German television, 12-Oct1965, p. 8, AdsD, Bahr papers, 338; PA, Referat 305/II A 6, 169, sheet 193. Vogtmeier, Bahr, p. 76 and 92f.; Consulate Hamburg, 4-Jun-1964, p. 4, NARA, POL 32–4 GER. DzD IV/9, p. 573. E.g., Bahr, Zeit, pp. 247, 267, 297, 543 and 574. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 383. Bahr, Zeit, p. 543; Thomas W. Zeiler, Dean Rusk: Defending the American Mission Abroad, Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2000, p. 35. Cf. Vogtmeier, Bahr, pp. 47 and cf. pp. 105 and 107. When Bahr initiated the work of his Foreign Office planning council in 1966, he characteristically asked his staff to ‘spare no taboo’ and reinvent policy from scratch ‘with the only task: how does unity become possible’, Bahr, Zeit, p. 226. AAPD 1963, p. 908; NARA, 762A.00/10–2660; Embassy Bonn, 9-Aug-1961, JFKL, NSF, 91; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, p. 410.

206

NOTES

100 DzD IV/8, p. 145; Brandt, ‘Kontinuität’, p. 722; DzD IV/9, p. 208; Vermerk, 12Apr-1965, WBA, A6, 103; DzD IV/8, p. 1197; AdsD, SPD-PV, minutes, 24, 19-Oct1962, p. 6; Roosevelt day speech, 13-Mar-1961, p. 5, PA, Abt. 7/Referat 160; Klaus Gotto, ‘Adenauers Deutschland- und Ostpolitik 1954–1963’, in Rudolf Morsey and Konrad Repgen (eds), Adenauer-Studien III: Untersuchungen und Dokumente zur Ostpolitik und Biographie, Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1974, pp. 3–91 (p. 75). 101 AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 12-May-1962, p. 13; Nuremberg lecture, 25-Sep-1963, p. 16, WBA, A3, 163. 102 Bahr-interview. 103 On television, 8-Oct-1962, p. 4, WBA, A3, 143; Brandt, ‘Stellung’, p. 42. 104 USBer, 6-May-1964, p. 3, NARA, POL 6 GER W. PART III DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS BETWEEN BERLIN, BONN AND WASHINGTON 1 Trachtenberg, History, p. 177. 2 DNSA, BC00032, p. 3; FRUS 1958–1960, VIII, p. 20; America House, 24-Feb-1958, p. 12, WBA, A3, 84. 3 John F. Kennedy, A Compilation of Statements and Speeches Made During his Service in the United States Senate and House of Representatives, Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1964, p. 980; John F. Kennedy, ‘A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs 36, 1957/1958, p. 49; Kennedy, Peace, p. 96. 11 PLAYING THE TRIANGLE 1 Günter Buchstab (ed.), Adenauer: ‘Stetigkeit in der Politik’: Die Protokolle des CDU-Bundesvorstands 1961–1965, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998, pp. 579ff.; USBer, 14Nov-1962, JFKL, NSF, 98; Bahr-interview. 2 Albertz in AdsD, SPD-PV, executive, 22, 22-Aug-1961; Brandt to Lemmer, 21-Aug1961, encl. to ibid. 3 Konrad Adenauer, Teegespräche 1959–1961, Berlin: Siedler, 1988, p. 543; Der Spiegel, 30-Aug-1961, pp. 12ff.; Schwarz, Ära, p. 151. 4 Wolfgang Schollwer, Liberale Opposition gegen Adenauer: Aufzeichnungen 1957–1961, ed. by Monika Faßbender, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990, pp. 159ff. 5 Johnson, report, 19/20-Aug-1961, p. 1, JFKL, NSF, 82; oral report, 5-Sep-1961, p. 1, JFKL, NSF, 82 (Berlin, general). 6 Horst Osterheld, ‘Ich gehe nicht leichten Herzens . . .’: Adenauers letzte Kanzlerjahre – ein dokumentarischer Bericht, Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1986, p. 62. 7 Buchstab (ed.), CDU-Bundesvorstandsprotokolle 1957–1961, p. 1030. 8 Ibid, pp. 1017ff. 9 Ibid., p. 1038; NARA, 762A.00/9–661. 10 Embassy Bonn, 13-Sep-1961, JFKL, NSF, 74; DOS to Embassy Bonn, 13-Sep-1961, and USBer to DOS, 14-Sep-1961, JFKL, NSF, 92; NARA, 033.1100-JO/9–1461; NARA, 033.1100-JO/9–1661 (misfiled). 11 Heinrich Krone, Tagebücher, vol. 1: 1945–1961, ed. by. Hans-Otto Kleinmann, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1995, p. 529; Embassy Bonn, 13-Sep-1961, JFKL, NSF, 74; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 347. 12 USBer, 16-May-1963, JFKL, NSF, 241. 13 USBer, 17-Jun-1963, JFKL, NSF, 98. 14 Embassy Bonn, 20-Jun-1963, NARA, POL 7 US (Kennedy).

207

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15 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, p. 419; Brandt, People, p. 75, Life, pp. 30ff. 16 PPP 1963, p. 515. 17 Embassy Bonn, 2-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF, 241; USBer, 28-Jun-1963, NARA, POL 7 US (Kennedy). 18 AAPD 1963, pp. 737–745 and 922; FRUS 1961–1963, XV, quotation p. 547. 19 US Consulate Munich, 15-Oct-1963, NARA, POL 2 WGER. 20 Osterheld, Kanzlerjahre, p. 109; Kissinger to Kennedy, 6-Apr-1961, quoted in Mayer, Adenauer & Kennedy, p. 10; Klein to Bundy, April 1963, JFKL, NSF, 77. 21 Embassy Bonn, 18-Dec-1963, NARA, POL 12-6 WGER; Embassy Bonn, 22-Mar-1965, NARA, POL 12 GER W; Schlesinger, letter to the author, 13-May-2001. 22 Bundy to Kaysen, 4-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF, 370 (I am obliged to David Geyer for this reference); Embassy Bonn, 6-Dec-1963, NARA, POL 12 WGER; FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 88. 23 Bundy, Thoughts on Brandt, 13-Mar-1961, JFKL, NSF, 74; DOS to Embassy Bonn, 6-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 76; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, III, pp. 386ff.; USBer (Dowling), 11-Oct-1962, JFKL, NSF, 98. 24 Klein to Bundy, 17-Sep-1963, JFKL, NSF, 99. 25 USBer, 6-May-1964, p. 15, NARA, POL 6 GER W; Embassy Bonn, 21-May-1963, JFKL, NSF, 241. 26 Bahr, Zeit, p. 148. 27 Guttenberg quoted in Grabbe, Parteien, p. 361; FRUS-suppl. 327; Bahr-interview. 28 Hurwitz to Brandt, 27-Mar-1961, WBA, A6, 36. 29 Carl Kaysen, letter to the author, 19-Mar-2001. 30 Schlesinger, Days, p. 362. 31 FRUS 1961–1963, XIV, p. 670; Issues and Answers, 7-Oct-1962, p. 6, PA, Referat 305/II A6, 170. 32 FRUS 1961–1963, XV, pp. 342 and 347; PPP 1963, p. 522. 33 Bahr to Brandt, 1-Oct-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 362; Embassy Bonn, 7-Nov-1963, JFKL, NSF, 78. 34 Beatrix W. Bouvier, Zwischen Godesberg und Großer Koalition: Der Weg der SPD in die Regierungsverantwortung: Außen-, sicherheits- und deutschlandpolitische Umorientierung und gesellschaftliche Öffnung der SPD 1960–1966, Bonn: Dietz, 1990, p. 185; Marcowitz, Option, p. 224 and Soell, Erler, pp. 457f.; Brandt, People, pp. 83 and 318–322, unabridged: Einsichten, pp. 422–426. 35 FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 68; Grabbe, Parteien, pp. 21ff.

12 SELLING CANDIDATES AND POLICIES: IMAGES, CAMPAIGNING AND THE PROMOTION OF A NEW POLICY 1 LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 89, no. 321; Hurwitz-interview. 2 FRUS 1964–1968, XV, p. 88. 3 Cf. Andreas Daum, ‘America’s Berlin 1945–2000: Between Myths and Visions’, in Frank Trommler (ed.), Berlin: The New Capital in the East: A Transatlantic Appraisal, Washington: AICGS, 2000, pp. 49–73. 4 R. Kennedy, Friends, p. 146; PPP 1963, pp. 524ff.; Hurwitz-interview. 5 Cf. Schwarz, Statesman, p. 513. 6 ‘Willy Brandt’, New York Post, 1-May-1963, WBA, A6, 95. Cf. Koch, Brandt, p. 187; Daniela Münkel, ‘Zwischen Diffamierung und Verehrung: Das Bild Willy Brandts in der bundesdeutschen Öffentlichkeit (bis 1974)’, in Carsten Tessmer (ed.), Das Willy-Brandt-Bild in Deutschland und Polen (Berlin: Bundeskanzler-WillyBrandt-Stiftung, 2000, pp. 23–40 (pp. 25ff.).

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7 PPP 1961, pp. 1–3; Reeves, Profile, pp. 14f., 20, 38 and 145; Giglio, Kennedy, p. 22. 8 Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 559; Jacqueline Kennedy to Brandt, 3-Jan-1964, WBA, A3, 198. 9 USBer, 3-Feb-1961, p. 9, JFKL, NSF, 91; Cronkite: Mary Ann Watson, The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 11. 10 Thomas Brown, JFK: History of an Image, London: Tauris, 1988, p. 18. 11 Cf. Schwarz, Statesman, p. 514. 12 USBer, 3-Feb-1961, p. 9, JFKL, NSF, 91. 13 Embassy Bonn, 28-Jun-1963, p. 5, NARA, POL 2–1 WGER; Embassy Bonn (McGhee), 3-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF 241; McGhee, Creation, p. 61. 14 Speech at New School for Social Research, 19-Apr-1965, p. 2, WBA, A3 206; statement to be issued thru Held, [March 1961], PA, Abt. 7/Referat 160; McDermott, Berlin, p. 73. 15 Hurwitz to Brandt, 21-Jun-1961 (quotation) and further correspondence, LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 90, no. 332; Hurwitz to Brandt, 17-Apr-1961, WBA, A6, 36. 16 Draft report, 14-Jun-1961, pp. 7 and 1, and Hurwitz to Brandt, 21-Jun-1961, p. 3, LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 90, no. 332. 17 Note on Springer-meeting, 25-Feb-1961, AdsD, Bahr papers, 47B; press clippings in WBA, A6, 93 and BPA-DOK; PA, Referat 305/II A 6, 134, sheets 142ff. 18 New York telex, 23-Mar-1961, p. 4, PA, Abt. 7/Referat 160; PA, Referat 305/II A 6, 127, sheets 191–193. 19 Brandt to Bahr, 28-Jul-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 348. 20 Schütz-interview; cf. Münkel, ‘Diffamierung und Verehrung’, p. 27, fn. 15. 21 ‘Held nach Maß’, Der Spiegel 37, 1961, 28–44; NARA, 762A.00/5–2961. For this and the following cf. also Daniela Münkel, Willy Brandt und die ‘Vierte Gewalt’: Politik und Massenmedien in den 50er bis 70er Jahren, Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2005, pp. 216–255. 22 Schütz, ‘Legende’, pp. 30–32; Peter H. Merkl, ‘Comparative Study and Campaign Management: The Brandt Campaign in Western Germany’, The Western Political Quarterly 15, 1962, 681–704 (pp. 688ff.) 23 Roosevelt day speech, 13-Mar-1961, p. 7, PA, Abt. 7/Referat 160. 24 Schütz in Kerstin Gardill, Vom Regierenden Bürgermeister zum Kanzlerkandidaten: Willy Brandt in der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung von 1957 bis 1961, Berlin: WVB, 2004, p. 126; NARA, 762A.00/5–2961, p. 3. 25 Bahr, Zeit, p. 148; Schwarz, Statesman, p. 520. 26 Brandt to Szende, 5-Apr-1961, WBA, A3, 198. Cf. NARA, 762A.00/12–1960 and /4–661; NARA, 762.00/3–2061. 27 DzD IV/5, pp. 515–517; Brandt, Parteitagsreden, p. 40; Schütz, ‘Legende’, p. 28; Bouvier, Weg, p. 74; Grabbe, Parteien, pp. 358ff. 28 Klaus Schütz, Logenplatz und Schleudersitz: Erinnerungen, Berlin and Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1992, picture after p. 128; NARA, 762A.00/5–861; Grabbe, Parteien, pp. 363f.; Schütz-interview. 29 Jens Feddersen and Jesco von Puttkammer (eds), Reise zu guten Freunden, Bonn: Neuer Vorwärtsverlag, [1965]; Hurwitz to Bahr, 24-Jun-1965, LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 90, no. 325; Harpprecht to Brandt, 29-Sep-1965, WBA, A6, 50; Carola Stern, Willy Brandt, rev. edn, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996, p. 73 and fn. 103; Bundeskanzler Brandt: Reden und Interviews, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1971, pp. 59ff.; Schütz, ‘Legende’, p. 34; G. Spangenberg-interview, Berlin, 15-Nov-2000; Bahr-interview. Gisela Spangenberg, married to the head of Brandt’s Berlin Chancellery, worked as the Berlin representative of Roy Blumenthal, the New York PR firm working for Brandt.

209

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30 Bahr to Bender, 29-Jun-1963, AdsD, Bahr papers, 49B; AdsD, SPD-PV, Präsidium, 10, 8-Oct-1962. 31 Klotzbach, Staatspartei, p. 569; Merseburger, Brandt, pp. 465ff. 32 Bahr-interview. 33 Elisabeth Noelle and Erich Peter Neumann (eds), The Germans: Public Opinion Polls 1947–1966, Allensbach and Bonn: Verlag für Demoskopie, 1967, pp. 301ff. and 543–552; Noelle and Neumann (eds), Jahrbuch 1958–1964, pp. 331ff., 533 and 545–555; Elisabeth Noelle and Erich Peter Neumann (eds), Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung 1965–1967, Allensbach and Bonn: Verlag für Demoskopie, 1967, p. 430; Consulate Stuttgart, 29-Jul-1965, NARA, POL GER W-US. 34 Quoted in Hurwitz, ‘Leben’, p. 265. 35 Harold Hurwitz, ‘Die Meinung der Berliner’, Der Monat 16, no. 185, February 1964, pp. 13–15, cf. the differing (and stronger) draft of January 1964 in LAB, E Rep. 300–33, Hurwitz papers, box 90, no. 325; Berlin Briefing, 6-Jul-1963, JFKL, NSF, 241; Vreeland to Kennedy, 12-Jun-1963, JFKL, NSF, 241. 36 Bahr, Zeit, pp. 146ff.; cf. Walther Leisler Kiep, Good-bye Amerika – was dann? Der deutsche Standpunkt im Wandel der Weltpolitik, Stuttgart: Seewald, 1972, p. 106. 37 Bahr, Zeit, p. 148. CONCLUSION 1 NARA, POL 6 GER W, p. 2. 2 Sutterlin and Klein, Berlin, p. 62. 3 Heinrich Albertz, Dagegen gelebt – von den Schwierigkeiten, ein politischer Christ zu sein: Gespräche mit Gerhard Rein, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976, p. 40. 4 Hurwitz-interview. 5 Brandt to Daley, 29-Mar-1961, WBA, A6, 93; Brandt, People, p. 77. 6 Wolfram F. Hanrieder, West German Foreign Policy 1949–1963: International Pressure and Domestic Response, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967 (cf. Hanrieder, Germany, America, Europe: Forty Years of German Foreign Policy, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 333f.); Ernst-Otto Czempiel, ‘Auf der Suche nach neuen Wegen: Die deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen 1961–1969’, in Wolfgang-Uwe Friedrich (ed.), Die USA und die deutsche Frage 1945–1990, Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1991, pp. 167–193 (p. 174, cf. also pp. 169ff. and 189); Joffe, ‘View’, p. 138. Cf. Manfred Knapp, ‘Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ostpolitik der BRD und den deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen’, in Egbert Jahn and Volker Rittberger (eds), Die Ostpolitik der Bundesrepublik: Triebkräfte, Widerstände, Konsequenzen, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1974, pp. 157–179 (pp. 165 and 171f.); Werner Link, ‘Détente auf deutsch und Anpassung an Amerika: Die Bonner Ostpolitik’, in Detlef Junker (ed.), Die USA und Deutschland im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges 1945–1990, Ein Handbuch, 2 vols, Stuttgart and Munich: DVA, 2001, vol. 2, pp. 56–65; Heinrich Potthoff, Im Schatten der Mauer: Deutschlandpolitik 1961 bis 1990, Berlin: Propyläen, 1999, pp. 52ff.; Grabbe, Parteien, pp. 13ff.; Prowe, ‘Anfänge’, pp. 254 and 269; Czerwick, Oppositionstheorien, p. 99; Ashkenasi, Reformpartei, p. 186. 7 Quoted in Vogtmeier, Bahr, p. 352. 8 Roosevelt day speech, 13-Mar-1961, p. 3, PA, Abt. 7/Referat 160. Cf. the argument in Thomas Banchoff, The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 1945–1995, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 13, 21ff., 68, 70–73 and 168 that the international system only forced the Germans to adjust their policy, but did not dictate the form or the extent of that change, thus leaving multiple options (which, however, underrates the extent of US pressure on p. 72).

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Primary sources Archival sources Archive of Social Democracy of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Bonn Willy Brandt Archiv in the Archive of Social Democracy (The assignment of abbreviations to the file groups in the Willy Brandt Archive follows the usage in the Willy Brandt edition, Berliner Ausgabe). A 1. Persönliche Unterlagen / biographische Materialien A 3. Publizistische Äußerungen Willy Brandts 1933–1992 A 6. Beruflicher Werdegang und politisches Wirken in Berlin 1947–1966 (At the time of research, the folder allocation of the record group ‘Beruflicher Werdegang und politisches Wirken in Berlin’ was under revision and no longer in accordance with the finding aids. The future allocation of files and documents may therefore differ from the one referenced here, which reflects the actual allocation at the time of research). Egon Bahr Papers Heinrich Albertz Papers SPD-Parteivorstand SPD-Landesverband Berlin Berlin State Archive B Rep. 002: Bestand Senatskanzlei E Rep. 300–33: Harold Hurwitz Papers

211

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Political Archives of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin Press and Information Office of the Federal Government, Berlin Central Documentation System (BPA-DOK) John F. Kennedy Library, Boston Papers of President Kennedy National Security Files (NSF) Presidential Office Files (POF) Pre-Presidential Papers (PPP) Robert F. Kennedy Papers Theodore C. Sorensen Papers Papers of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Oral History Interviews US National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of State National Security Archive, Washington, DC See Digital National Security Archive Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit Victor Reuther Papers, box 27, folder 26 National Defense University, Washington, DC Taylor papers, box 36, 16A Germany

Personal communications Egon Bahr, interview, Bonn, 29 January 2001 Klaus Schütz, interview, Berlin, 13 November 2000 Harold Hurwitz, interview, Berlin, 14 July 2000 Gisela Spangenberg, interview, Berlin, 15 November 2000 Peter Bender, interview, Berlin, 13 November 2000 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., letter, 13 May 2001 Carl Kaysen, letter, 19 March 2001 212

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Walt Whitman Rostow, email, 8 March 2001 Robert S. McNamara, note, 18 March 2001

Selected printed primary sources Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, Stenographischer Bericht, III. Wahlperiode, vol. 3, IV. Wahlperiode, vols 1 and 2, Berlin, continuous. Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1963–1966, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994–1997. Albertz, Heinrich [Egon Bahr], ‘War die Mauer zu verhindern?’, Der Spiegel, vol. 20, no. 44, 24 October 1966, pp. 72–85. American Foreign Policy: Current Documents 1960–1963, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964–1967. Der Auswärtige Ausschuß des Deutschen Bundestages: Sitzungsprotokolle, vol. 3: 1957–1961, ed. by Joachim Wintzer and Josef Boyer, 2 parts, Düsseldorf: Droste, 2003. Der Auswärtige Ausschuß des Deutschen Bundestages: Sitzungsprotokolle, vol. 4: 1961–1965, ed. by Wolfgang Hölscher, 2 parts, Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004. Böhme, Erich and Klaus Wirtgen (eds), Willy Brandt: Die SPIEGEL-Gespräche 1959–1992, Stuttgart: DVA, 1993. Brandt, Willy, ‘Voraussetzungen des Ringens um die deutsche Einheit’, Außenpolitik 8, 1957, 357–366. —— ‘The East–West Problem as Seen From Berlin’, International Affairs 34, 1958, 297–304. —— ‘Amerikanische und deutsche Einheit’, Außenpolitik 10, 1959, 209–213. —— ‘Außenpolitische Kontinuität mit neuen Akzenten’, Außenpolitik 11, 1960, 717–723. —— ‘The Means Short of War’, Foreign Affairs 39, 1960/1961, 196–207. —— A Programme for Government, Bonn: Social Democratic Party of Germany [1961]. —— ‘Berlin und die Einheit der Nation’, in Willy Brandt, Plädoyer für die Zukunft: Zwölf Beiträge zu deutschen Fragen, Frankfurt a.M.: EVA, 1961, pp. 52–63. —— ‘Warning for East & West’, The New Leader, 17–24 July 1961, 3–4. —— Mit Herz und Hand: Ein Mann in der Bewährung, Hanover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1962. —— ‘Für eine Welt des Friedens: Kennedys Politik wird seinen Tod überdauern’, Vorwärts, 27 November 1963, 1 and 3. —— Tackle the Tasks of Tomorrow: Statement of the Governing Mayor, Willy Brandt, before the Berlin House of Representatives on March 18, 1963, Berlin: Press and Information Office, 1963. —— The Ordeal of Coexistence, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963 (Koexistenz – Zwang zum Wagnis, Stuttgart: DVA, 1963). —— ‘Anruf aus dem Weißen Haus’, Der Spiegel vol 17, no. 49, 4 December 1963, p. 21. —— ‘Noch einmal ging Kennedy ans Fenster. . .’, Bild am Sonntag, 22 January 1964. —— ‘Gemeinschaftsideale und nationale Interessen in der deutschen Außenpolitik’, Europa-Archiv 19, 1964, 419–426. —— ‘An morgen denken’, Neue Gesellschaft 11, 1964, 3–9. —— ‘Deutscher Beitrag zur Strategie des Friedens’, Politik 1:2, 1965, 12–19. —— ‘Der Wille zur Einheit’, Politik 2:2, 1966, 15–22.

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—— ‘Entspannungspolitik mit langem Atem’, Außenpolitik 18, 1967, 449–454. —— ‘German Policy Toward the East’, Foreign Affairs 46, 1967/1968, 476–486. —— A Peace Policy for Europe, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969/Friedenspolitik in Europa, Frankfurt/a.M.: Fischer, 1968. —— Peace: Writings and Speeches of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner 1971, Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Neue Gesellschaft, 1971. —— Der Wille zum Frieden: Perspektiven der Politik, 2nd edn, Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1972. —— . . . auf der Zinne der Partei . . .: Parteitagsreden 1960 bis 1983, ed. by Werner Krause and Wolfgang Gröf, Berlin and Bonn: Dietz, 1984. —— Berliner Ausgabe, ed. by Helga Grebing/Gregor Schöllgen/Heinrich August Winkler, vol. III: Berlin bleibt frei: Politik in und für Berlin 1947 – 1966, ed. by Siegfried Heimann, Bonn: Dietz, 2004. Brandt, Willy and Richard Lowenthal, Ernst Reuter: Ein Leben für die Freiheit, Munich: Kindler, 1957. Buchstab, Günter (ed.), Adenauer: ‘. . . um den Frieden zu gewinnen’: Die Protokolle des CDU-Bundesvorstands 1957–1961, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994. —— (ed.), Adenauer: “Stetigkeit in der Politik”: Die Protokolle des CDU-Bundesvorstands 1961–1965, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998. Die CDU/CSU-Fraktion im Deutschen Bundestag: Sitzungsprotokolle, vol. 3: 1957–1961, ed. by Reinhard Schiffers, 2 parts, Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004. Die CDU/CSU-Fraktion im Deutschen Bundestag: Sitzungsprotokolle, vol. 4: 1961–1966, ed. by Corinna Franz, 4 parts, Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004. Department of State Bulletin, Washington, DC: Office of Public Communication, Bureau of Public Affairs, monthly Digital National Security Archive, http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/ Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik, series III and IV, Frankfurt a.M. and Berlin: Metzner, 1961–1981. Foreign Relations of the United States, multiple vols, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Kennedy, John F., Why England Slept, London and Melbourne: Hutchinson, 1940. —— ‘A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs 36, 1957/1958, 44–59. —— The Strategy of Peace, ed. by Allan Nevins, London: Hamilton, 1960. —— A Compilation of Statements and Speeches Made During his Service in the United States Senate and House of Representatives, Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1964. Kennedy, Robert F., Just Friends and Brave Enemies, New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962. Krone, Heinrich, ‘Aufzeichnungen zur Deutschland- und Ostpolitik 1954–1969’, in Rudolf Morsey and Konrad Repgen (eds), Adenauer-Studien III: Untersuchungen und Dokumente zur Ostpolitik und Biographie, Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1974, pp. 134–201. Krone, Heinrich: Tagebücher, vol. 1: 1945–1961, ed. by Hans-Otto Kleinmann, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1995. Möller, Alex, ‘Amerika und die Präsidentenwahl 1960’, in idem, Unruhige Zeiten: Reden und Aufsätze, Karlsruhe: Müller, 1963, pp. 51–67. Noelle, Elisabeth and Erich Peter Neumann (eds), Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung 1958–1964, Allensbach and Bonn: Verlag für Demoskopie, 1965.

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—— (eds), Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung 1965–1967, Allensbach and Bonn: Verlag für Demoskopie, 1967. —— (eds), The Germans: Public Opinion Polls 1947–1966, Allensbach and Bonn: Verlag für Demoskopie, 1967. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1961–1966, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1962–1967. Rusk, Dean, The Winds of Freedom: Selections from the Speeches and Statements of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, January 1961 – August 1962, ed. by Ernest K. Lindley, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Die SPD-Fraktion im deutschen Bundestag: Sitzungsprotokolle 1957–1961, ed. by Wolfgang Hölscher, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1993. Die SPD-Fraktion im Deutschen Bundestag: Sitzungsprotokolle 1961–1966, 2 vols, ed. by Heinrich Potthoff, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1993. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages: Stenographische Berichte (Bonn, continuous). Zelikow, Philip and Ernest May (eds), The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: The Great Crises, 3 vols, New York and London: Norton, 2001.

Selected memoirs and recollections Bahr, Egon, Was wird aus den Deutschen? Fragen und Antworten, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982. —— Sicherheit für und vor Deutschland: Vom Wandel durch Annäherung zur Europäischen Sicherheitsgemeinschaft, Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 1991. —— Zu meiner Zeit, Berlin: Siedler, 1999. Brandt, Rut, Freundesland: Erinnerungen, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1992. Brandt, Willy, My Road to Berlin, as told to Leo Lania, London: Peter Davies, 1960 (Mein Weg nach Berlin, as told to Leo Lania, Munich: Kindler, 1960). —— Begegnungen mit Kennedy, Munich: Kindler, 1964. —— People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975, London: Collins, 1978 [abridged] (Begegnungen und Einsichten: Die Jahre 1960–1975, Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1976). —— Links und frei: Mein Weg 1930–1950, Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1982. —— ‘Ein Rückblick auf 1961’, in Gerd Langguth (ed.), Berlin: Vom Brennpunkt der Teilung zur Brücke der Einheit, Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1990, pp. 296–299. —— My Life in Politics, London: Hamilton, 1992 [abridged] (Erinnerungen: Mit den ‘Notizen zum Fall G’, ext. edn, Berlin: Ullstein, 1994). Bundy, McGeorge, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, New York: Random House, 1988. Cramer, Dettmar, Gefragt: Egon Bahr, Bornheim: Zirngibl, 1975. Grewe, Wilhelm G., Rückblenden 1976–1951, Frankfurt a.M., Berlin and Vienna: Propyläen, 1979. Hurwitz, Harold, ‘Mein Leben in Berlin’, Leviathan: Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 27, 1999, 264–279. McGhee, George, At the Creation of a New Germany: From Adenauer to Brandt: An Ambassador’s Account, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989. Möller, Alex, Genosse Generaldirektor, Munich and Zurich: Knaur, 1978. O’Donnell, Kenneth P. and David F. Powers with Joe McCarthy, “Johnny, We Hardly

215

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

Knew Ye”: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1970. Osterheld, Horst, ‘Ich gehe nicht leichten Herzens . . .’: Adenauers letzte Kanzlerjahre – ein dokumentarischer Bericht, Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1986. Rostow, W.W., The Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History, New York: Macmillan, 1972. Rusk, Dean, As I Saw It: A Secretary of State’s Memoirs, London and New York: Tauris, 1990. Salinger, Pierre, With Kennedy, Garden City: Doubleday, 1966. Schlesinger, Arthur M., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, London: André Deutsch, 1965. Schütz, Klaus, Logenplatz und Schleudersitz: Erinnerungen, Berlin and Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1992. —— ‘Die Legende von einem deutschen Kennedy: Willy Brandts Bundestagswahlkampf 1961’, in Bernd Polster (ed.), Westwind: Die Amerikanisierung Europas, Cologne: DuMont, 1995, pp. 28–34. —— ‘Es ging um Deutschland und Europa: Willy Brandt und seine Politik für Berlin 1957 bis 1966’, in Politik für Berlin: Willy Brandt 1957–1966, Berlin: BundeskanzlerWilly-Brandt-Stiftung, 1998, pp. 23–37. —— ‘Willy Brandt: Der 27. November 1958 und seine Folgen’, Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2002, pp. 187–196. Sorensen, Theodore C., Kennedy, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965. Strober, Gerald S. and Deborah H. Strober (eds), “Let Us Begin Anew”: An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency, New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Further reading: a small selection (Additional literature can be found in the notes.) Arenth, Joachim, Der Westen tut nichts! Transatlantische Kooperation während der zweiten Berlin-Krise (1958–1962) im Spiegel neuer amerikanischer Quellen, Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1993. Ashkenasi, Abraham, Reformpartei und Außenpolitik: Die Außenpolitik der SPD, Berlin: Westdeutscher Verl., 1968. Baring, Arnulf, Machtwechsel: Die Ära Brandt–Scheel, Berlin: Ullstein, 1998 [c. 1983]. Bender, Peter, Die ‘Neue Ostpolitik’ und ihre Folgen: Vom Mauerbau bis zur Vereinigung, 4th edn, Munich: dtv, 1996. Beschloss, Michael R., The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963, New York: Burlingame, 1991. Bouvier, Beatrix W., Zwischen Godesberg und Großer Koalition: Der Weg der SPD in die Regierungsverantwortung: Außen-, sicherheits- und deutschlandpolitische Umorientierung und gesellschaftliche Öffnung der SPD 1960–1966, Bonn: Dietz, 1990. Catudal, Honoré M., Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis: A Case Study in U.S. Decision Making, Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 1980. Dallek, Robert, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917–1963, Boston and New York/London: Little, Brown, 2003. Daum, Andreas W., Kennedy in Berlin: Politik, Kultur und Emotionen im Kalten Krieg, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003.

216

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Eibl, Franz, Politik der Bewegung: Gerhard Schröder als Außenminister 1961–1966, Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001. Freedman, Lawrence, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Froman, Michael B., The Development of the Idea of Détente: Coming to Terms, New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Gardill, Kerstin, Vom Regierenden Bürgermeister zum Kanzlerkandidaten: Willy Brandt in der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung von 1957 bis 1961, Berlin: WVB, 2004. Garton Ash, Timothy, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, New York: Random House, 1993. Geyer, David C. and Bernd Schaefer (eds), American Détente and German Ostpolitik, 1969–1972, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, supplement 1, Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2004. Giglio, James N., The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991. Grabbe, Hans-Jürgen, Unionsparteien, Sozialdemokratie und Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika 1945–1966, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1983. Granieri, Ronald J., The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2003. Heimann, Siegfried, ‘Willy Brandt und Berlin’, in Thomas Sirges and Birgit Mühlhaus (eds), Willy Brandt: Ein deutsch-norwegisches Politikerleben im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/a.M.: Lang, 2002, pp. 85–97. —— ‘Einleitung: “Berlin bleibt frei”: Politik in und für Berlin 1947–1966’, in Willy Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, ed. by Helga Grebing, Gregor Schöllgen and Heinrich August Winkler, vol. III: Berlin bleibt frei: Politik in und für Berlin 1947–1966, ed. by Siegfried Heimann, Bonn: Dietz, 2004, pp. 15–83. Hofmann, Arne, ‘Small Steps Towards New Frontiers? Ideas, Concepts and the Emergence of a Détente Strategy in the Thinking of Willy Brandt and John F. Kennedy’, Historical Research 79:205, August 2006, 429–449. Joffe, Josef, ‘The View from Bonn: The Tacit Alliance’, in Lincoln Gordon et al., Eroding Empire: Western Relations with Eastern Europe, Washington, DC: Brookings, 1987, pp. 129–187. Köhler, Henning, Adenauer: Eine politische Biographie, Frankfurt a.M./Berlin: Propyläen, 1994. Kosthorst, Daniel, Brentano und die deutsche Einheit: Die Deutschland- und Ostpolitik des Außenministers im Kabinett Adenauer 1955–1961, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1993. Küsters, Hanns Jürgen, ‘Konrad Adenauer und Willy Brandt in der Berlin-Krise 1958–1963’, VfZG 40, 1992, 483–542. Mayer, Frank A., Adenauer and Kennedy: A Study in German–American Relations, 1961–1963, New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Merseburger, Peter, Willy Brandt 1913–1992: Visionär und Realist, Stuttgart and Munich: DVA, 2002. Münger, Christof, Ich bin ein West-Berliner: Der Wandel der amerikanischen Berlinpolitik während der Präsidentschaft John F. Kennedys, Zurich: Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, 1999. —— Kennedy, die Berliner Mauer und die Kubakrise: Die westliche Allianz in der Zerreißprobe 1961–1963, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003. Münkel, Daniela, ‘Politiker-Image und Wahlkampf. Das Beispiel Willy Brandt: Vom

217

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deutschen Kennedy zum deutschen Helden’, in Bernd Weisbrod (ed.), Die Politik der Öffentlichkeit – Die Öffentlichkeit der Politik, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003, pp. 55–76. —— ‘Als “deutscher Kennedy” zum Sieg? Willy Brandt, die USA und die Medien’, Zeithistorische Forschungen 1:2, 2004, 172–194. Niedhart, Gottfried, ‘Revisionistische Elemente und die Initiierung friedlichen Wandels in der neuen Ostpolitik 1967–1974’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, 2002, 233–266. —— ‘The East–West Problem as Seen from Berlin: Willy Brandt’s Early Ostpolitik’, in Wilfried Loth (ed.), Europe, Cold War and Coexistence, 1953–1965, London and Portland: Cass, 2003, pp. 285–296. Niedhart, Gottfried and Oliver Bange, ‘Die “Relikte der Nachkriegszeit” beseitigen: Ostpolitik in der zweiten außenpolitischen Formationsphase der Bundesrepublik Deutschland im Übergang von den Sechziger- zu den Siebzigerjahren’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 44, 2004, 415–448. O’Brien, Michael, John F. Kennedy: A Biography, New York: Tomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press, 2005. Oppelland, Torsten, Gerhard Schröder (1910–1989): Politik zwischen Staat, Partei und Konfession, Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Prowe, Diethelm, ‘Die Anfänge der Brandtschen Ostpolitik in Berlin 1961–1963: Eine Untersuchung zur Endphase des Kalten Krieges’, in Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Graml (eds), Aspekte deutscher Außenpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1976, pp. 249–286. —— ‘Der Brief Kennedys an Brandt vom 18. August 1961: Eine zentrale Quelle zur Berliner Mauer und der Entstehung der Brandtschen Ostpolitik’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 33, 1985, pp. 373–383. —— ‘“Ich bin ein Berliner”: Kennedy, die Mauer und die “verteidigte Insel” WestBerlin im ausgehenden Kalten Krieg im Spiegel amerikanischer Akten’, Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 1989, pp. 143–167. Reeves, Richard, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, London and Basingstoke: Papermac, 1993. Schertz, Adrian W., Die Deutschlandpolitik Kennedys und Johnsons: Unterschiedliche Ansätze innerhalb der amerikanischen Regierung, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 1992. Schmidt, Wolfgang, Kalter Krieg, Koexistenz und kleine Schritte: Willy Brandt und die Deutschlandpolitik 1948–1963, Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001. —— ‘Die Wurzeln der Entspannung: Der konzeptionelle Ursprung der Ost- und Deutschlandpolitik Willy Brandts in den fünfziger Jahren’, VfZG 4, 2003, 521–563. Schöllgen, Gregor, Willy Brandt: Die Biographie, Berlin and Munich: Propyläen, 2001. Schuster, Jacques, Albertz – der Mann, der mehrere Leben lebte: Eine Biographie, Berlin: Fest, 1997. Schwarz, Hans-Peter, Die Ära Adenauer 1957–1963: Epochenwechsel, Stuttgart: DVA, 1983. —— Konrad Adenauer: A German Politician and Statesman in a Period of War, Revolution and Reconstruction, 2 vols, vol. 2: The Statesman: 1952–1967, Providence and Oxford: Berghahn, 1997. Siebenmorgen, Peter, Gezeitenwechsel: Aufbruch zur Entspannungspolitik, Bonn: Bouvier, 1990. Soell, Hartmut, Fritz Erler: Eine politische Biographie, Berlin and Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Dietz, 1976.

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219

INDEX

Abend, Der 87 Abusch, Alexander 91 access (to West Berlin) 2, 14, 21, 25, 36–7, 45–6, 48–9, 51–4, 56, 59, 64–70, 74, 81–2, 90, 97, 137, 140, 177 Acheson, Dean 21, 23, 112 activism 104, 150 Adenauer, Konrad 1, 4, 6, 16, 20, 22, 24, 30–1, 40, 47, 49–60, 65, 67, 69, 72, 74, 76, 78–82, 84, 88–9, 102, 104, 112, 121, 125–6, 128, 133–4, 140, 150, 153–65, 167–71, 176–8, 180 agent theory 66, 97, 137, 179 Albertz, Heinrich 13, 22–3, 63, 65, 84, 87, 90, 93–6, 114–15, 139, 151, 155–6, 166, 172, 176 all-Berlin, emphasis on 17, 21–2, 25 all-Berlin solution 18–19, 22–3, 177 Alsop, Joe 169 America in West German political culture 172–4 Americanization 101–2 Americans for Democractic Action (ADA) 102, 109 Amrehn, Franz 28, 76, 85, 94 anti-Americanism 29, 61–2 anti-Communism 46, 107–8, 153, 158, 168 anti-Semitism 168 assassination and funeral, John F. Kennedy’s 96–7 Atlanticism 77–9, 101, 164 Bahr, Egon 1, 3–5, 10–13, 18, 21–4, 26–32, 34, 36, 39, 41–4, 46–8, 53, 59, 62, 65, 70–2, 75–81, 84–7, 90, 92–5, 102, 105–7, 110–12, 115, 117–19, 121–7, 129–32, 134–5, 140, 142–50, 152, 155, 161–3, 166, 169–74, 176, 179, 181

Barsig, Franz 36 Bender, Peter 71, 86, 97, 126, 143, 172 Berlin Steering Group 32, 35 Berlin Talks see negotiations Berlin Task Force 21, 38, 96 Berlin Wall 3–6, 17, 21, 23–46, 51–2, 57–63, 69, 71, 81–3, 87–8, 90, 92, 95, 97, 110, 112, 115, 119–20, 127, 136–7, 143–4, 151–3, 155–6, 163, 173, 175–8 Bild 29, 45, 101 Bismarck, Otto von 125, 145 Blumenfeld, Erik 148 Blumenthal, Roy 12, 70, 79, 126 Bohlen, Charles 33–5, 37, 40, 108 Borm, William 76–7 Bowles, Chester 23, 36, 110 Brandt, Peter 61, 64 Brandt, Rut 15, 166 Brandt’s image in America 165–6 Brauer, Max 12 Braun, Ralph 12 Brentano, Heinrich von 28, 134, 157 Bruce, David 135 Bundy, McGeorge 23–4, 31, 33, 44, 51, 58–9, 62, 64, 67, 79, 83–5, 88, 95–6, 115, 120, 132, 137, 140, 159–60, 164–5, 175 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 12, 102 ‘change through rapprochement’ 85–6, 129, 143–9, 152 Checkpoint Charlie 49, 61 Cherne, Leo 11 ‘Chinese Wall’ project 35–6 Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 1, 28, 41, 56, 62, 64, 76–80, 82, 86–7, 148, 153, 155–9, 162–3, 169, 172, 180–1 Christian Social Union (CSU) 156–7, 159, 162, 169

220

INDEX

Churchill, Winston 113 civil rights movement (in East Germany) 145 Clay, Lucius D. 32–5, 40, 45, 47, 49, 51, 54, 62, 64, 68, 78, 98, 115, 137–8 coexistence, concept of 11, 52, 70–2, 80, 106–8, 116–17, 119, 122, 124, 144, 146, 151, 176, 179 commandants, Allied (in Berlin) see Kommandantura Communism, perception of 107–11 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) 2, 92 congenital defect theory 132 Congress for Cultural Freedom 102, 105 contact, German–German see German– German government contact contacts, promotion of 45, 53, 59, 81–2, 93, 114–16, 131, 136–7, 146, 151 contingency planning 17–18, 35, 37, 65, 67, 69 control (vs mass movements) 143–6 convergence theory 111; see also modernization theory Costigliola, Frank 41 Creel, Robert C. 79 Cronkite, Walter 167 Cuban Missile Crisis 4, 72–5, 90, 109, 113, 119 Czempiel, Ernst-Otto 181 Davies, Richard 47 Dehler, Thomas 94 defamation campaign against Brandt 168–70 Deist, Heinrich 12 détente 139–45, 150–2, 179–80; active policy of 87, 90, 92, 176; beginnings of 3–4, 41–2, 73–4, 80, 84, 87, 105, 119, 142, 175–6; and Berlin 73–4, 90, 173; conceptions of 122, 139–41, 143–9, 152, 179–80; consequences of 116, 121, 131; and Cuban Missile Crisis 73–4, 119; and disarmament 124; dynamic approach to 104–5; and Gaullism 77; Kennedy and 6, 11, 73, 80, 84, 143–5, 174, 179; and language 105; and nuclear stalemate 105, 119; opposition to 88, 150; preconditions for 121; and recognition 122–3, 141, 176; and reunification/German Question 71, 121–3, 129, 131; and strength 73, 113,

145, 166; and transformation 116, 120 see also status quo differentiation (in the East) 108–9 disarmament 80, 89, 106, 116, 121–4 disillusionment campaign 62–5, 179 division of Germany 1, 20, 31, 40, 48, 58, 115, 121, 127, 129, 148 Dobrynin, Anatoly F. 59 Dowling, Walter 72, 160 ‘draft principles’ 6, 52–7, 59, 91, 114, 137, 141, 149, 159–60, 190–1 Dulles, John Foster 66, 97, 106, 126, 149 economic competition 110–11, 147; see also living standards Eichmann, Adolf 168 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 10, 65, 102, 105–6, 109, 116, 149, 154, 167, 171, 176–7 electioneering methods 170–2, 180 elections and candidates: USA (1960) 9–12, 154, 170; USA congressional (1962) 64; West Berlin (1958) 170; West Berlin (1963) 76–7, 84, 94; West Germany (1953 and 1957) 171; West Germany (1961) 3, 9–11, 23, 26, 40, 54, 89, 154, 156–7, 160, 169–72; West Germany (1965) 81, 159–60, 168–9, 171–2 Élysée Treaty (1963) 78–9, 89, 161 emancipation, Brandt’s 66, 149, 151–2, 181 Erhard, Ludwig 81, 96, 140, 158, 164, 170 Erler, Fritz 9, 11–12, 79–80, 89, 95, 106, 112, 114, 135 ‘essentials’ of policy for Berlin 21, 25, 38, 47, 52, 67–8 European Community and European Economic Community (EEC) 3, 77–9, 88 European dimension of Ostpolitik 85, 132–3, 148–9 Fechter, Peter 61–2, 71–2, 74, 91, 126–7, 177 ‘flexible response’ vs ‘massive retaliation’ 106 Four Power status 11, 17, 28, 30–1, 37, 39, 45, 48, 62–4, 151, 161; proposed Three Power status 30–1, 34, 62–4, 67, 161 fragmentation see differentiation Frankfurter Rundschau 164 Free Democratic Party (FDP) 40, 56, 70, 76–7, 94, 135, 156, 172

221

INDEX

Free University Speech, given by Kennedy 84–5, 108, 110, 112, 115, 117 Freedman, Lawrence 31 Freedom House 46 Freud, Sigmund 181 Frost, Robert 27 Fulbright, William 23, 25, 36–7 Gaitskell, Hugh 70 Galbraith, John Kenneth 9 Garton Ash, Timothy 144 de Gaulle, Charles 77–83, 88–9, 112, 134 Gavin, James M. 23 Geneva Foreign Ministers Conference (1959) 3, 13, 15 German Democratic Republic (GDR), existence of 2, 45–6, 63, 72, 87, 125–6, 141 German–German government contact, ‘technical contacts’ and ‘expert talks’ 41, 45, 57, 64, 69, 76, 86–7, 90–1, 94, 114, 135–8, 151 Giglio, James 113 give and take 45, 53, 59, 92–3, 128, 135, 139–42, 152, 179–80 Globke, Hans 16, 125 168 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 82–3 Gomulka, Wladislaw 132 ‘Grand Design’ 77–8 Grewe, Wilhelm 55, 123, 170 Griffith, William 33 Gromyko, Andrei 45, 51–2 Guttenberg, Karl Theodor zu 162 Haffner, Sebastian 23, 148 Hallstein doctrine 2, 47, 71, 132–3, 135, 152, 176 Hanrieder, Wolfram 181 Harpprecht, Klaus 171 Harpsund circle 80, 82 Harriman, Averell 13, 88, 141–2 Harvard lectures, given by Brandt 4, 67, 70–2, 78, 80, 82, 85–6, 104, 106–9, 111–14, 116–17, 119, 127–8, 132, 143–4, 166 Hassel, Kai-Uwe von 155 Helsinki Accords 2, 92 Hemsing, Al 29 Herter, Christian 149 Higgins, Marguerite 32, 51, 163 Hillenbrand, Martin 79, 103

historiography 4–6, 89–90, 113, 117–18, 181, 184, 190–1 history, notion of 103–4, 108, 110, 129, 168, 181 Hitler, Adolf 113, 168 Hughes, Tom 59 humanitarian measures 40–1, 54, 69, 76, 90–2, 97, 115, 119, 131, 143, 146, 149–50, 175, 179 Humphrey, Hubert 23, 102 Hurwitz, Harold 9–11, 32, 45, 51, 70–1, 86–7, 96, 102, 107, 120, 126, 145–6, 162, 165–6, 169, 171, 173, 180 ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech 3, 83–4, 130 intellectuals, political involvement of 70, 170 intelligence 31, 36, 109 interests see national interests interim solution see modus vivendi International Access Authority (IAA) proposed for Berlin 52–7, 66, 68, 137–8 international system 4, 35, 149, 181 Jaumann, Anton 159 Joffe, Josef 145, 181 Johnson, Lyndon B. 32–5, 37, 40, 44, 61, 95–6, 116, 131–3, 140, 149, 155–7, 160, 164–5 Kaghan, Theodore 12, 79 Kaysen, Carl 44, 71, 75, 77, 79–80, 84, 88, 103, 109, 137, 160, 162 Kennan, George 70–1 Kennedy, Jacqueline 96, 98, 166–7 Kennedy, Robert F. 27, 36–7, 51–2, 73, 96, 107–10, 116, 127–8, 165 Khrushchev, Nikita 2, 4, 14–15, 22–6, 28, 37–8, 70, 76–7, 81, 88–90, 95, 106–7, 110–11, 113, 116, 123, 132, 141–2, 151, 175 Kissinger, Henry 3, 83, 93, 95, 110, 120, 148, 151, 159 Klein, David 58–9, 77, 79, 84–5, 95, 115, 132, 159–61, 164, 175 Klein, Günter 11, 46 Kohl, Helmut 115, 145 Kohler, Foy 14–15, 18, 38, 53, 57, 114 Kommandantura, Allied (in Berlin) 27–9, 41, 62, 76, 91, 151, 161 Korber, Horst 92 Krone, Heinrich 41, 72, 88, 156–8, 162

222

INDEX

Lasky, Melvin 102, 169 Lebenslüge 125 Lenin, V.I. 106 Liberal Democrats (German) see Free Democratic Party (FDP) liberalization 144, 146–8, 179 Lightner, Allen 22–3, 26, 33, 36, 38, 49, 54, 56–7, 72, 76 Lippmann, Walter 126, 169 Lipschitz, Joachim 39 living standards 116, 143–4, 146–8; see also economic competition Löwenthal, Richard 70, 120, 126, 143, 173 McDermott, Geoffrey 28, 168 McGhee, George 88, 94–5, 137, 141, 158, 161 Macmillan, Harold 126 McNamara, Robert 38, 88, 91, 158 Mansfield, Mike 23, 30 Mansfield plan (1961) 23 Mende, Erich 56, 135 modernization theory 109, 111, 116 modus vivendi/interim solution 16, 18, 43–4, 58–60, 73–4, 76, 85, 91, 114, 123, 126–7, 141, 152, 178 Möller, Alex 10, 170 morale in West Berlin 29, 30–1, 33, 45, 48, 51, 61–2, 66 Multilateral Force (MLF) 89 Münger, Christof 89 Murrow, Edward 32–3 nation and nationalism 2, 108, 115, 125, 146–8, 181 national interests 1–2, 16, 24–5, 38, 46, 49, 53, 58, 66, 69, 88, 90, 92–3, 95, 97, 104, 107, 110–14, 116, 120, 122, 129, 132, 139–40, 141, 143–4, 146–8, 150–1, 157, 166, 177; common interests 90, 111, 120, 140–1, 144, 152, 175 Nazi legacy 131–2, 168–9 negotiations 13–14, 16, 24, 26, 43–55, 57–60, 63–4, 66, 69, 73–4, 76–7, 82, 84, 86–7, 88, 91–7, 112–14, 122, 127, 135–42, 145, 161, 173, 177–80; isolated Berlin talks vs wider framework 43, 46, 49–56, 60, 97, 178 network, Brandt’s 9–10, 32, 51, 102, 176 Neu Beginnen group 102 Neue Zürcher Zeitung 30 New York Post 166

Nitze, Paul 54–6, 88, 91, 139 Nixon, Richard 3, 9, 10, 116, 120, 154, 167, 170, 177 non-aggression pact 44–5, 52, 55, 88, 90, 123, 141–2, 152, 178–9 non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and Germany’s non-nuclear status 44–5, 52–4, 55, 88–9, 141, 178–9 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 1, 3, 21, 52–3, 79, 108, 141, 154 nuclear arms control 74, 140; see also nuclear non-proliferation treaty (1968); nuclear test ban treaty (1963) nuclear non-proliferation treaty (1968) 87, 89, 123, 164, 179 nuclear test ban treaty (1963) 4, 80, 84, 87–90, 109, 117, 123, 133, 137, 139, 142, 161, 164, 177, 180 nuclear weapons, nuclear stalemate and nuclear war 37, 105–7, 111, 113, 119, 121, 123, 151, 179 Oberländer, Theodor 168 Oder-Neisse border 2, 16–17, 24, 44–5, 48, 54, 119, 125, 133–5, 142, 152, 164, 176–9 O’Donnell, James P. 9–11, 32, 51, 165 O’Donnell, Kenneth P. 9, 38, 129 Oslo communiqué (1961) 21–2 Osterheld, Horst 96, 156 Ostpolitik 1–6, 35, 39–42, 45, 71, 77, 80, 85, 92–5, 97, 111, 114–15, 120, 123–4, 126, 129, 131–2, 141–2, 147, 149, 151–3, 156, 168, 175–6, 179–81 Paris Accords (1954/1955) 1, 72 Paris Foreign Ministers Conference (August 1961) 23 Paris Quadripartite Foreign Ministers Meeting (December 1961) 51 Paris summit (1960) 3, 9, 13, 15 pass agreements for Berlin 4–5, 45, 77, 82, 91–7, 114, 131, 135, 137, 139, 141–2, 146, 151–2, 164, 166, 173, 176, 179–80 peace, notion of 104–5 peace conference, peace treaty 16–17, 23–4, 26, 35, 44, 48–9, 123, 129, 133–5, 172, 177; separate peace treaties 2, 14, 23–4, 30, 44, 53–5, 64, 137, 178 ‘peace speech’, given by Kennedy 80, 83–4, 87–8, 104–5, 107–9, 111–17

223

INDEX

peaceful competition 106–7, 109–10, 112, 116, 146 plebiscite see referendum ‘policy of movement’, Schröder’s 95, 133 Prowe, Diethelm 4–5 Purwin, Hildegard 13 Quadripartite Berlin Agreement (1971) 2, 93, 175 reality 30, 46, 58, 62, 62–3, 65, 87, 125–8 reassurance, West German need for 130, 163; see also morale in West Berlin recognition 2, 5, 14, 20, 41, 44–5, 47–8, 54, 57, 63, 65–6, 68–71, 74, 81, 86–7, 92–3, 97, 119–20, 123–5, 129, 133–42, 152, 175–6, 178–9; de facto and de jure 44–5, 48, 63, 70, 74, 86–7, 89, 93, 124, 136–42, 152, 176–9 Red Cross 63, 91 referendum 30, 35, 75 reunification of Germany 1–2, 11, 13, 16–17, 20, 24, 30, 35, 39–40, 43–53, 55, 58, 60, 70–2, 83–5, 97, 115, 119, 121–3, 125, 127–32, 134, 137, 144–6, 148–9, 152, 163, 172, 175, 177–8 Reuter, Ernst 3, 70, 102, 154 Reuther brothers (Walter and Victor) 80, 102 role models 166 Rostow, Walt 26, 33, 51, 109, 129 Rusk, Dean 11, 13–15, 17, 23, 28, 36–8, 45, 51–3, 58–9, 61–2, 64, 67–72, 81–2, 84, 95–6, 109, 112, 115–16, 120–2, 127, 129, 131–8, 140–2, 149, 155, 160, 163 Russell, Bertrand 105–6 Salinger, Pierre 32, 156 Schiller, Karl 57 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr 51–2, 80, 102–3, 109, 159–60 Schmid, Carlo 12, 135 Schmidt, Helmut 12, 106, 115, 145 Schmidt, Wolfgang 5, 66 Schnitzler, Karl-Eduard von 28–9 Schollwer, Wolfgang 156 Schröder, Gerhard 54–7, 88, 95, 120–2, 127–9, 132–3, 135, 149, 160, 164 Schumacher, Kurt 153–4 Schütz, Klaus 10–11, 15, 22, 26, 30–1, 42, 53, 57, 65, 114, 121, 155, 170–1 Schwarz, Hans-Peter 40

Seigenthaler, John 51 Semenov, Vladimir S. 53 Shirer, William L. 168 Silex, Karl 23 Sino-Soviet split 109 small steps, Brandt’s policy of 40, 82, 84, 101, 130–1, 174 Social Democratic Party (SPD) 1, 3–4, 9–12, 17, 20, 25, 31, 36, 40–1, 46–7, 50–3, 55, 57–8, 63, 66, 68, 68–9, 75–80, 86, 88–9, 96, 102, 106, 109, 112–13, 116, 103, 110, 120–1, 123–5, 130, 134–5, 138, 142, 145, 150, 153–64, 167, 169–72, 176–7, 180–1; SPD Ostbüro 36 Solidarno´sc´ 145 Sorensen, Theodore 83–4, 103, 165 Spangenberg, Gisela 171 Speicher, Peter 5–6 Spiegel, Der 36, 63, 170 Springer, Axel 169 status quo 2, 15, 17–18, 38–9, 43–6, 49, 54, 56, 70–1, 73–4, 85, 89–90, 104, 119–25, 129, 131, 141–2, 151–2, 173, 175–6, 178–9, 181; ‘open’ vs ‘territorial’ status quo 119–25, 152, 179 Stevenson, Adlai 80, 109 Stone, Shepard 15 ‘strategy of peace’, Kennedy’s 4, 84–6, 107, 119, 124, 130, 175, 179 Strauß, Franz Josef 156–7, 162, 170 superiority of the Western system 52, 108–10, 116, 151 taboo 86, 125–6, 172 Thompson, Llewellyn 37, 140 ties, West Berlin’s with West Germany 18, 22, 25, 30, 46, 48, 52, 54–6, 58, 72, 75, 119, 151 Trachtenberg, Marc 21, 89, 125 trade unions and labour movement 3, 80, 102, 158 transformation (of the East) 85, 112, 116, 119–20, 124, 136–7, 142–8, 151–2, 176 truce plans, Globke plans, Austria solution 16, 125, 140 Tutzing speech given by Bahr 4–5, 85–7, 93, 124, 126, 131, 143–9, 179 Tyler, William 81 Ulbricht, Walter 17, 26–7, 36, 66, 68, 76, 110, 132–3, 136–7, 144; Ulbricht doctrine 135, 142, 176

224

INDEX

United Nations (UN) 24, 30, 32, 34, 45–6, 53, 64, 75, 80, 105, 107, 121 viability of West Berlin 21, 25, 48, 65, 68 Vienna summit (1961) 14, 22–3, 26, 37, 107, 112–13, 123 Vietnam War 164 visas 65–6, 68, 70, 74, 97, 137, 179 visits: Erler, Deist, Schmid, Brauer and Schmidt to US (February 1961) 12; Brandt to US (March 1961) 13–19, 112, 140; Adenauer to US (April 1961) 20; Johnson and Bohlen to West Germany and West Berlin 32–5, 37, 44, 61, 155–7; Adenauer and Schröder to US (November 1961) 49, 133; Brandt and Rusk in Paris (December 1961) 51, 163; Robert F. Kennedy and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr to West Berlin (1962) 51–2; Schütz to US (April 1962) 57; Schiller to US (May 1962) 57; Rusk to West Germany and West Berlin (June 1962) 59, 140–1; Bundy to West Berlin (September 1962) 51, 67; Brandt to US (September/October 1962) 67–72, 120, 131, 136, 138, 160, 163; Rostow to West Berlin (October 1962) 51, 109; Khrushchev to Berlin (January 1963)

76, 151; Bahr to US (February 1963) 78–9; Erler to US (April 1963) 79; Brandt to US (June 1963) 80–1; John F. Kennedy, Rusk and Bundy to West Germany and West Berlin (June 1963) 81–4, 120, 127, 157–8; Brandt to US (November 1963) 96; Erhard and Schröder to US (December 1963) 96; Brandt to US (May 1964) 95, 115, 122, 142; Albertz to US (June 1964) 95–6 Wall see Berlin Wall Warsaw Pact 1–2, 27, 52–3, 135, 141 Wehner, Herbert 57, 86, 112, 135, 154, 171 Wendt, Erich 92 Wenger, Andreas 89 ‘West Berlin’ vs ‘Berlin’ 21, 25 Westernization 101–2 White, Theodore 170 Wilson, Harold 82 Winzer, Otto 144 youth, image of 83, 85, 103, 166–7, 174, 180 Zeit, Die 97

225