Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume X, Eastern Europe

288. Telegram From the Mission in West Berlin to the Department of State and the Embassy in the Federal Republic of Germany¹

2555.

West Berlin, August 12, 1986, 1654Z

SUBJECT

• The Berlin Wall Turns Twenty-Five (I): The Concrete Has Many Faces.

1. Summary: No event has so deeply marked German and European history during the past twenty-five years as construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961. The division of Berlin ended one phase of the postwar era and ushered in another. A quarter century later there are signs that the changes wrought by the Wall nave finally been digested. Even as the commemorations begin, new hopes and new approaches are beginning to appear which could have an equally important effect on events during the next twenty five years.

2. This message is the first of three USBer has prepared in an effort to describe the implications of the Berlin Wall. It will deal with the overall political and above all psychological implications for the West. Following telegrams will consider the situation inside West Berlin and will look at Soviet and East German views twenty-five years later. End summary

3. Reaching the quarter century mark, the Berlin Wall has become one of the most enduring aspects of recent German history. It has already outlived Bismarck (19 years as Chancellor), the Weimar Republic (14 years) and the Third Reich. Its construction was one of those shattering events of history which take years to understand. By its very perversity, it demonstrated starkly that the conflicts which had brought about two horrible wars had not disappeared. Europe’s twentieth century nightmare was to continue indefinitely.

“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.”

Robert Frost²

4. Another war seemed a real possibility in those first weeks following August 13. But as the bricks and mortar settled into place, an equally chilling fact became evident. The second phase of Europe’s twentieth century civil war would not be another military holocaust. The Berlin Wall neither threatened war, nor was it designed to prevent it. Its real task was to prevent Europe from healing its wounds. After shedding its blood for twenty years, Europe faced indefinite division and dependence. The price this time would be Europe’s soul and its spirit.

5. The Berlin Wall did not in itself seal this division, but it was the most brutal demonstration of its existence. After August 13, 1961, Europeans slowly and painfully began to understand that 1945 had not been the end of the old or the beginning of the new. Rather it was a catastrophic mid-point in a battle which had decades to run. The Berlin Wall marked the fields upon which this battle would take place. It also revealed the weapons to be used.

6. Anyone who before August 13 had harbored hopes for a quick return to “normality” in Europe, was on that date confronted with catastrophic reality. The Wall was a depiction of “normality.” Europe’s postwar fate was to be divided from within and dominated from without. Above all else, August 13, 1961, demonstrated that the world no longer centered on Europe. To those who hadn’t figured it out already, the real consequence of World War II was finally evident—the old continent was now the object rather than the subject of world affairs.

7. As the dozens of TV teams in Berlin this week have demonstrated, Berlin’s internal border projects a strange fascination to the world’s public. Visitors continue to be shocked by the scar of concrete and wire ripping through intersections, dividing gardens and closing one side of a street from another. Its very existence brings home brutally the horrible costs of war and dictatorship. To Americans especially, it shows why we are in Europe and what we are defending.

8. But in addition to its purely physical effect, the Berlin Wall has become one of the world’s most potent symbols. Resources of powerful nations, including the United States, have been dedicated to dealing with its implications. Sealing off Berlin set off many shock waves, the meaning of which took years to understand. West Germans especially were affected by the closure of the last open door to their Eastern heritage in ways which even today are difficult to describe. In a very real way, the confrontation, suffering, fear and dreams of the postwar world have been compacted into this more than 100 miles of stone, wire and concrete.

“It seems that in Germany, time doesn’t heal wounds, it kills the ability to feel pain.”

Peter Schneider

9. Willy Brandt has written that as he stood at the Brandenburg Gate watching the stones being put into place, he saw clearly for the first time that the West would never force the reunification of Germany against Soviet opposition—Ostpolitik was born. Ten years later the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin concluded the first phase of confrontation over the Wall. From that date onward, Germans of all political persuasions—East and West—stopped planning their lives around the hopes for return to a single nation state. Whatever the distant future might bring, their task was now to make do with the two states which succeeded the Reich.

10. Intervening years have been good to Berlin. Both East and West Berlin have learned to live with division. Both have prospered economically, tensions have been avoided and world crises have shifted to other parts of the world. But underneath the “normality” of material progress and reduced tensions, a gap has begun to form. It is as if an entire society had lost recollections of its origins—of what it is like not to be divided.

11. Existence of the Berlin Wall was the final step in stopping Germany’s effort to forge a national state from a multitude of regional cultures. With the sealing off of Berlin, Germans in both East and West settled back into the cultural and political regionalism which burdened German national development for two hundred years before 1871. West Germans especially were no longer faced with a regular stream of visitors from the East. They saw themselves as the “winners” of the postwar period and felt justified in a certain attitude of superiority towards their Eastern cousins. The Wall justified amputation. Not only physical amputation, but nearly total erasure of memories of the days when the body was whole.

12. Amputation of national tasks meant also gradual eradication of the goals and ideals usually associated with a healthy national culture. Concern for the spiritual health of the German nation was now tainted both by the Nazi past and by the fear of further retaliation from the East. German young people began to grow up in a world where rocking the boat was forbidden. Dreamers or idealists were rejected as dangerous non-conformists. Reformers, such as the first Brandt-Scheel government of 1969, sought to humanize the status quo. And each time the Berlin Wall loomed as proof of the wisdom of this drive for mediocrity. The task was to get along—at home, at work and in the world.

13. In the process, an undefinable but important sense of self began to drip away. In the immediate postwar years, Germans in both East and West had many tasks to keep them occupied. Despite their national division, the open city of Berlin remained a point of contact and an inspiration for the future. The Wall killed this inspiration. Germany became, in the words of SPD party manager Peter Glotz, “an efficient mechanism for the production of goods and services.”

14. As a result many Germans, especially young people, cannot remember how they got themselves in this strange situation. The feeling of living in an organic nation or a society which would make sacrifices for an ideal or a philosophical belief has become increasingly strange to them. Young people who have been taught to avoid ideals cannot identify with persons or nations who are willing to shed blood for a belief. They begin to mistrust their ability to resist anything. Defense becomes aggression, beliefs become crusades. Rather than understanding the abnormality of their own situation, young Germans have come to see the outside world as the exception. Other nations which do not share Germany’s national numbness come to seem increasingly dangerous.

15. As they began losing a sense of self, Germans of all ages found it difficult to recognize the origins of the society they had built for themselves. They found they had few criteria for judging the tasks of their society. Neither history nor philosophy provided guideposts for navigating difficult terrain. A sole standard for measurement was satisfaction of the need for personal well-being. Both inwardly and outwardly this need was expressed through a desire to avoid challenge and threat.

“Good fences make good neighbors”

Robert Frost

16. It is easy to pin most of this on the young. Indeed, recent years have seen several cases of disorientation and fear among young people. Most dramatic was the deep war scare which nearly paralyzed a good portion of the younger generation during the INF debate, but there are numerous other examples. What is often most disturbing is the missing sense of personal responsibility one finds among German young people today. Results of a recent essay contest sponsored by the International Committee on Human Rights are an interesting example. Of the entrants, 29 percent chose to write about human rights abuses in South Africa. Only four percent chose to write about the situation in the GDR.

17. But not only the young are afflicted. Recall recent events in and around Berlin. When GDR border crossing regulations were changed for diplomats, many German leaders, from all parties, wished to forget the issue. As the flow of asylum seekers increased, the first reaction in Bonn was to call on the allies to do something. In a recent talk with Ambassador Burt, Chancellery State Secretary Schaeuble claimed that the FRG’s hands were tied, because the GDR always had more leverage in inner-German relations than did the West.

18. Above all one senses a severe lack of goals and ambition in post-Wall West German society. It is hard to imagine today’s leaders spitting back at the Western allies as did Konrad Adenauer or Kurt Schumacher. Helmut Schmidt’s new confident style of leadership appears today almost as an anachronism rather than a picture of things to come. Just how lifeless things have become is demonstrated by the periodic outbursts of Franz Josef Strauss. He knows no one takes him seriously, but he doesn’t seem to care. Someone has to scream for help before the entire Federal Republic suffocates in the feather bed of conformity.

“Something there is that doesn’t like a wall”

Robert Frost

19. But twenty five years is not the end of history. Reaction against this painful state of aimlessness is already evident in many parts of German society. And as in the past, Berlin appears to be a harbinger of the atmosphere to come. Politics in this city is boring and often corrupt. Other areas of life are creative and bubbling. Especially impressive are the new young group of businessmen who are straining to move forward. They often express frustration at the provincialism they sense in the Rathaus. Some say they are going to go public with their criticism.

20. Today’s West Berlin reflects a certain whiff of the 1920’s. Arts and literature are flourishing, new political journals are springing up, young people are flocking in from “Wessiland,” as Berliners mockingly describe the territories to the west. Things are changing and with the change will come new ideas and new approaches. The question is what kind and in what direction?

21. An early reaction has been to blame those responsible for the mess. Of course few blame the Nazis or German leaders before 1933 for bringing on the calamity which led to the Wall. Memory has been lost. The world begins with the new system, the new alliances and the Wall.

22. Thus it is the United States or the allies or the super powers who are to blame. A theme running through speeches by Berlin CDU leaders this past week has been that the United States shirked its responsibility to Berlin by allowing the Wall to be built. There is no separate German responsibility for anything. America bears the burden for everything which has happened in and to Germany. Anti-Americanism is the natural result.

23. A further result is to seek accommodation with the painful situation. Today it is the SPD and the Greens who are leading the way. Their efforts are disjointed and often illogical, but they have something in common with a spirit one senses throughout the FRG today. They are aimed at doing something, anything to get things moving in Europe. The need to overcome the frustration which arises from overwhelming dependence and self-rejection overrides even the important philosophical differences with the East.

24. Twenty five years later, one cannot escape the strong impression that time has not healed the wounds in Germany or Europe. For more than two decades, Germans have been trying hard to forget why the Wall was built and to stop from feeling pain. Material well-being and American protection have in fact dulled many of the nerves. But pain-killers are not enough if they are not backed by a clear sense of personal goals and identity. German society in both East and West lacks this foundation. It is based upon partial solutions to fundamental divisions. The Berlin Wall continues to confront Germany with these conflicts.

25. Twice in this century the United States has fought bloody wars in Europe to deal with the fundamental conflicts on the continent. Each time, the conflict focussed on Germany. Whatever may have changed in the past twenty five years, the basic questions of war and peace continue to focus on this country and its difficult history. The Wall is German, but it is also European. The divisions it signifies affect all mankind. As long as it exists, these divisions will remain unresolved. To quote German President Von Weizsaecker: “As long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed, the German question will remain open.”

Kornblum

1. Source: Reagan Library, Stephen Sestanovich Files, [Germany]: Berlin: 08/01/86–08/12/86. Confidential; Priority. Sent for information to East Berlin, NATO Collective, Eastern European posts, Bern, Helsinki, Stockholm, Vienna, Geneva, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Pretoria, USCINCEUR Vaihingen, CINCUSAREUR Heidelberg, CINCUSAFE Ramstein, USNMR SHAPE, JCS, and DOD.
2. Excerpt is from Frost’s “Mending Wall.”