The Berlin Wall

In the late 1950s the Soviet-American relationship began to sour once again. In Europe, the focus of the confrontation was Berlin, where Americans, British and French forces retained their post-war control over the western part of the city.

Khrushchev’s ultimatum had several objectives. First, it was a response to growing GDR demands to cut the brain drain of talented young East Germans via the open access route from East to West Berlin. Pushed by the lack of opportunity in East Germany and pulled by the prosperity in West Germany, thousands of young East Germans were by this stage taking advantage of the one remaining hole in the Iron Curtain. Indeed, not only was the GDR deprived of many of its most promising and best-educated citizens, but the constant movement from East to West was also providing welcome propaganda to Konrad Adenauer’s West German government and its American supporters. Accordingly, the secondary aim of the Berlin ultimatum was to cause some rifts in the close (from the Soviet perspective disturbingly so) American-West German rela­tionship. Finally, the Soviets hoped to create doubts within NATO at a time when the Alliance was considering whether to deploy medium-range missiles in Western Europe.

Ironically, the end result of the prolonged Berlin crisis was a propaganda defeat for the Soviets and East Germans, and a reaffirmation of the status quo in Europe, for the United States and the West European Powers simply rejected Khrushchev’s ultimatum. Moreover, he could not make any progress on the issue when he met with President Eisenhower at the Camp David summit in September 1959. The first Soviet leader to visit the United States, Khrushchev instead seemed to abandon the controversial issue for the time being in favour of friendly banter. The following year, however, Khrushchev’s tone changed again. In May I960 he stormed out of the Four-Power Paris Summit meeting that had been convened in order to deal with such unresolved issues as the Berlin question. The Soviet premier cited as his reason a series of American U-2 spy flights, one of which had been shot down (and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, captured and tried) shortly prior to the summit, and demanded that Eisenhower publicly apologize for such violations of Soviet airspace. The American president, who had probably hoped to end his presidency on a hopeful note, left office early the following year with the Cold War in full flow.

In 1961, as Khrushchev came under increasing pressure both at home and abroad to live up to his tough rhetoric, the new US president, John F. Kennedy, was left to deal with the climax of the Berlin crisis. With more than 100,000 East Germans fleeing via Berlin in the first half of 1961, it was clear that the issue had to be settled. However, with both sides under pressure to remain tough, the Soviet-American summit in Vienna in June 1961 accomplished little. Hence, the war of words intensified: Khrushchev set the end of 1961 as the deadline for a solution; Kennedy shot back by reaffirming America’s commitment to West Berlin and asking Congress to increase defence expenditure.

The building of the Berlin Wall had mixed effects. In the short term, it diffused the crisis by removing its source, for East Germans now found it virtually impossible to move to the West via Berlin. The Western Powers, including the United States, protested but they did not attempt to remove the wall, realizing that this would risk war. As a result, the Berlin question, while by no means solved, soon occupied a far less central position as a source of Cold War tension. In a sense, the Berlin Wall thus symbolized the acceptance of the status quo in Europe by both sides. To the West, Berlin was clearly not an adequate cause for going to war. To the Soviets, West Berlin’s existence was acceptable as long as it no longer drained the best and the brightest from the GDR. However, Khrushchev’s decision to build the wall was also indicative of the tightrope act that the Soviet premier was performing. On the one hand, he had been pressed by his East German allies to take action, but on the other hand, he was no more eager than Kennedy was to risk a nuclear exchange. In Berlin, at least, a stability of sorts — however bizarre a concrete wall dividing the former capital of the Third Reich was in the nuclear age — had set in.

In the long run, however, the more significant symbolic value of the wall was not the stability it seemed to provide, but the way in which it clarified for all to see the differences between the two political systems it separated. As Cold War propaganda wars continued, the West never stopped using to its advantage the fact that the East had had to build a wall to keep its people in. Over subsequent decades the Berlin Wall became the symbol of the Cold War’s endurance, and the ultimate unanswerable indictment of communism.