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Commentary: Berlin Wall erected 50 years ago; wall-like barriers
stillexist
Werner Kreusch/The...
It was a chilly night for high summer in Berlin 50 years ago
Saturday, and it took East German
Communists only about five hours to divide one of Europe's
grandest cities neatly in two.
Starting around 1 a.m., thousands of work teams overseen by
armed guards installed bollards, fencing
and barbed wire, blocking every street and right of way that ran
between the eastern sector of the old
German capital and the three western zones occupied by the U.S.,
the U.K. and France. Rail and
subway links were cut; lines now stopped at the new border that
the Communists had created.
Anyone attempting to cross was to be stopped forcibly and, if
necessary, lethally.
The aim was to halt the disastrous hemorrhaging of East
Germany's discontented population into the
haven of West Berlin. Over the previous 12 years, this exodus
had cost the drab puppet state some
two million of its best and brightest.
Within hours, the capitalist enclave was duly isolated and the
flood of refugees reduced to a trickle. To
that extent, the wall was a triumph. The construction of the
almost 100-mile barrier that became known
as the Berlin Wall was an impressive example of what a
totalitarian command economy could
achieve. However, it was also an admission of defeat. Why was
this necessary, if the communistsystem was superior?
The summer of 1961 seems an odd moment for the Soviet Union and
its European satellites to have
had a crisis of confidence. Four months earlier, the cosmonaut
Yuri Gagarin's epochal space flight had
seemed to prove the superiority of Soviet science. The Bay of
Pigs fiasco in April had shown that the
U.S. couldn't prevent communism even in Cuba, its own backyard.
Nikita Khrushchev had trounced
John F. Kennedy, the inexperienced young American president, at
their summit in Vienna in early
June.
Khrushchev's boast that communism would overtake capitalism
seemed momentarily plausible. In this
atmosphere, why would the government in Moscow sanction such a
retrograde step as the Berlin
Wall?
First, one has to remember that for the Russians, the occupation
of their part of postwar Germanyheld enormous symbolic, as well as
strategic, importance. The Red Army's long advance to Berlin
during the Second World War cost at least 8 million military and
as many as 15 million civilians dead.
The Soviet presence in Berlin and eastern Germany was a sacred
reminder of that dearly bought
victory over Nazism. The existence of a Soviet-controlled state
on German territory was also a
guarantee that Germany would never again menace the Russian
people.
In any case, there was little downside to the provocation.
Neither the Kennedy administration in
Washington nor the governments of the other two main Western
powers occupying West Berlin took
any steps to roll back the wall.
Documents show that officials in both Paris and London almost
welcomed its construction. It
guaranteed the long-term division and therefore weakening of
Germany, which both countries
desired. Francois Mauriac, the Nobel laureate and biographer of
President Charles de Gaulle,summed up French sentiment when he
quipped that he loved Germany so dearly that he wanted two
of them.
On the morning after the wall's construction, the Britain's
ambassador to West Germany, Christopher
Steel, merely cabled London to express his surprise that the
East Germans had waited so long to
take this measure. He and his Foreign Office colleagues spent
the rest of the crisis trying to ensure
that the Americans didn't do anything silly, like trying to tear
the wall down.
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The British needn't have worried. Washington wasn't prepared to
risk war (so long as the Communists
didn't threaten West Berlin) and even hoped that the building of
the wall, brutally immoral as it was,
would usher in an era of increased European stability. The U.S.
had other problems Cuba,
Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Korea, the Congo crowding its
agenda.
The only time the U.S. came close to an armed response was in
October 1961, when the East
German authorities tried to prevent American diplomats from
travelling freely through both East and
West Berlin, as they were permitted to under the Potsdam
agreement of 1945.
Tellingly, the genuinely tense Checkpoint Charlie confrontation
had nothing to do with the existence
of the wall. It was about national prestige. Tanks were called
in, Kennedy and Khrushchev struck a
deal the Soviet tanks would reverse first, and the U.S. would
let the wall stand and any chance
that the Berlin crisis would ignite World War III passed.
For 28 years, the wall gave the communist bloc a kind of sealed
laboratory environment, inside which
its leaders had their chance to fulfil Khrushchev's promises. As
we know, they failed. Spectacularly.
Capitalism may have seemed on the retreat in 1961, but the
Berlin Wall, built to secure the communist
system, planted the seeds of its own destruction.
It is true the Berlin Wall created a certain stability that of
the deep freeze. When the wall fell in
November 1989, it seemed as though Europe and the world had
entered a new era of global
possibility.
Yet the thaw in the Cold War ice revealed other ancient,
precarious fault lines religious, cultural and
nationalist. As the wall recedes into history, we are still
dealing with this uncomfortable fact.
Fifty years on from August 1961, we still have wall-like
barriers in Baghdad, in divided Cyprus and
Northern Ireland, between Mexico and the U.S., and, most
controversially, between Israel and the
West Bank. The difference is, of course, that these exist to
keep people out rather than keep an
unhappy population in.
If we look back to the Great Wall of China or to Hadrian's Wall,
constructed almost two millennia ago
in Roman Britain as protection from barbarian northern
neighbours, as well as at their modern
counterparts, we can see what formidable barriers have in
common: They all stem from insecurity, if
not desperation.
Border walls represent a last resort when a state either can't
or won't deal with a problem that
threatens its existence. As such, history seems to prove, they
are temporary. Like the Berlin Wall, they
are ultimately likely to be unsuccessful. They buy time, but
time is a commodity that, notoriously, runs
out. As it did for East Germany.
McClatchy-Tribune
