The Berlin Wall (15 page)

Not so. Ulbricht used the time to gather his forces. Faced with renewed criticism, he announced that Zaisser’s and Herrnstadt’s behaviour amounted to an ‘anti-party’ attitude. They must be investigated by the party’s control commission, which happened to be headed by his ally, Matern. Using his still-extant powers, Ulbricht announced that the monthly plenum meeting of the SED Central Committee would take place on 24-6 July. He prorogued the Politburo session until then.

It soon became obvious that it was not Ulbricht but his opponents who were finished. Semenov had performed a 180-degree turn and now supported him, on instructions from his superiors in Moscow. The
plenum later that month was graced with the presence not just of Semenov but of I. Kabin, the shadowy but powerful figure responsible to the Soviet Central Committee for relations with Germany.

When Ulbricht took to the podium to address the SED plenum, it was already plain he had the Kremlin’s approval. He launched a blistering attack on his enemies, asserting that Zaisser had conspired with the disgraced Beria to betray the GDR, and that Herrnstadt had been part of the plot. The plenum voted to dismiss Zaisser and Herrnstadt as a ‘party-hostile faction with a defeatist line’ from their jobs and from all party posts.
²⁶

Ulbricht had triumphed. They might dislike him, but the Soviets had decided that to let him fall would be a sign of weakness. And weakness, it was clear from the turmoil in the satellite countries that had followed Stalin’s death, was one thing they could not afford.

So the workers, by rebelling against Ulbricht’s regime, paradoxically saved their tormentor’s political life. Ulbricht would allow the ‘new course’ to continue for a time while he re-established his grip on power, purging reformists and weak links. Thousands of those who had participated in or expressed approval of the 17 June uprising were tracked down, arrested and imprisoned. Two hundred and sixty-seven East Germans had been killed during the disturbances. A further 200 were executed, 1,400 imprisoned for life.

From now on, no one could pretend that the SED government was based on popular approval. It was, as anyone could see, a regime imposed by Soviet tanks.

Berthold Brecht, the world-famous radical poet, playwright and darling of the international Left, had returned from America to East Berlin after the war, supplying vital cultural credibility to the SED. On 17 June, he supported Soviet intervention against the strikers, but before his death three years later, he was sufficiently conscience-stricken-or cunning—to show that he too understood what had happened on that day. The SED state, while ever more loudly protesting its democratic credentials, had shamelessly abandoned the last remnants of them.

In his poem, ‘The Solution’, Brecht satirised 17 June 1953 with supreme irony:

After the uprising of 17 June

The Secretary of the Writers Union

Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee

Stating that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

6

THE CROWN PRINCES

DURING THE
1950s
IN
Berlin, two Germans of roughly the same age, both humbly born, both men of the Left and resisters of the Nazis in their youth, faced each other across the Cold War political divide.

Neither of these rivals were Berliners. In fact, both came from the outermost edges of Germany. Erich Honecker, SED official and later East German leader, was born on 25 August 1912 in Wiebelskirchen, a mining town in the Saarland, in the far west of Germany. Willy Brandt, future mayor of West Berlin, came into the world sixteen months later, in December 1913, in the country’s far north. He was a son of the ancient Baltic sea port of Lübeck, from where the next landfall is Denmark.

The first would be the creator of the Berlin Wall, the second would ensure the survival of the isolated island city that the Wall created. They would both spend a long time as leaders-in-waiting, only to gain power within a year of each other. And one would destroy the other; although it would be, in the end, a hollow victory.

Communism was in Erich Honecker’s blood. Honecker senior, a coal-miner, had been a member of the KPD since 1919. His son was politically active from the age of ten.

At eighteen, pursuing an apprenticeship as a roofer, young Erich also graduated to membership of the paramilitary ‘Red Front Fighter League’. He was picked to join the elite youth intake at the International Lenin School in Moscow. On his return to the Saarland (which by the Treaty of Versailles lay under League of Nations administration and French economic control) he became an official of the Communist youth movement, abandoning his apprenticeship. In 1933, he was elected to its central committee.

After Hitler came to power, Honecker ducked in and out of the underground, before turning up in Berlin under a false identity. In December 1935, after three months of clandestine activity, he was arrested by the Gestapo.

In June 1937, 24-year-old Erich Honecker was convicted by the Nazi People’s Court for ‘conspiracy to commit high treason’. He was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour, served in the notorious prison at Brandenburg-Görden, west of Berlin.

During the Second World War, Görden became a transit camp for the concentration-camp system and also the site of a judicial death house, where between 1939 and 1945 almost 2,000 inmates, including gypsies, Jews and political prisoners, were executed. Honecker spent the time between 1940 and 1943 working in a toy-soldier factory. After that, because of his training as a roofer, he was assigned to external construction squads, repairing bombed buildings in Berlin.

On 27 April 1945, the Red Army arrived at Brandenburg-Görden. Quickly released because of his political credentials, Honecker reported to the Soviet city commandant’s headquarters at Berlin-Friedrichsfelde. He acquainted the Russians with his curriculum vitae and was referred to the Ulbricht group as a possible recruit.
¹

Honecker was assigned the task of recruiting young people to the resurgent Communist party. Within a year, he was made national chairman of the SED’s youth organisation, the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend = FDJ). An obedient and tireless worker and conspirator, he would retain this key post for nine years. He joined the central committee of the SED and the GDR parliament. Still in his mid-thirties, Honecker advanced into the party’s leadership alongside men and women fifteen, twenty, or (in Pieck’s case) thirty-five years older than himself.

In 1958, now a full member of the SED’s innermost circle, the Politburo, Honecker was appointed Secretary for Security Questions. This was a big job—overseer of the police and army—and brought Honecker closer to the position of leader-in-waiting to Ulbricht. Honecker was efficient and absolutely committed. The party was his life. One of the underestimated attractions of Communist states lay in the steep career paths they offered to the energetic and ruthless offspring of simple workers. Honecker was a fine example of this principle.

So, a long way from the Saarland? Geographically, certainly. By now Honecker was only in the most notional fashion still living in the country where he was born. But one of the strange things about the man, who appeared so much the perfect, almost robotic
apparatchik
, who subordinated everything to ideology, was his fondness for the remote industrial district where he had spent his early years.

A cellmate of Honecker’s at Brandenburg-Görden would claim, many years later, that he could furnish the listener with a plausible tour of Wiebelskirchen, based simply on what Honecker had repeatedly recounted to him during those long days of imprisonment at the hands of the Gestapo. Honecker, by all accounts, was often homesick.
²
This remained true even after he reached the heights of Communist power, but by then his perspective was confined to the area between the Elbe and the Oder, hundreds of kilometers from where he had been born.

Willy Brandt also grew up with a distinctive accent, that of Lübeck. The ancient Baltic port’s most famous son was the writer Thomas Mann. Unlike Mann, who came from wealthy patrician stock, Brandt—born neither Willy nor Brandt but Herbert Karl Frahm—grew up ‘across the tracks’ in the humble suburb of St Lorenz. His mother, Martha Frahm, was a single parent who worked in a grocery store.

The most important single figure of the boy’s childhood was his grandfather, Ludwig Frahm, a former labourer-turned-truck-driver, originally from poverty-stricken rural Mecklenburg, whom he called ‘Papa’. The boy often did not see his working mother for days on end, and was never quite sure where he should call home.

Later, Brandt and his biographers would speculate on the effects of such a childhood on his character: a certain distance that endured beneath the mask of friendship; a tendency towards self-reliance and independence; and paradoxically, a constant reaching-out for company, especially of the female kind, which expressed itself in numerous love affairs.
³

Only in his teens did Herbert move into a broader world beyond Lübeck’s working-class subculture. He was very bright, and at fourteen was awarded a city scholarship that enabled him to go to the Johanneum, a fee-paying
Gymnasium
or high school. There Herbert studied the
classics, history, languages and high-level science with the sons of Lübeck’s prosperous middle class.

None the less, young Herbert Frahm did not lose his loyalty to the people he had grown up with. Nor did pride in his new school, and his eagerness to learn, stop him from becoming absorbed in politics. At fifteen he was elected chair of his local socialist youth group and was soon writing pieces for the local SPD newspaper.

The problem was that, as democracy came under ever greater threat, Frahm became more of a firebrand leftist. The SPD establishment tolerated the semi-authoritarian rule of the Catholic conservative chancellor, Brüning, who governed through presidential decree after the slump hit Germany in 1930. The far Left of the SPD, especially its youth, preached revolution and militancy as answers to the economic crisis and the rise of the Nazis. They drifted closer to the KPD than to their own party.

Herbert acted on his disillusionment in 1931 by deserting to an idealistic splinter group, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP). The SAP’s founders hoped to attract support from both SPD and KPD and form a common front against the Nazis. For young Herbert, there was considerable personal sacrifice involved in his desertion to the SAP. As a promising young SPD organiser, he could have expected the party to support his university studies. Now that was out of the question. When he left school in February 1932, he became a trainee clerk with a shipping brokerage company. Meanwhile, he devoted almost every hour of his free time to politics.

Needless to say, however, the SAP had no mass support. The membership reached no more than 12,000. There were two elections to the Reichstag in the crisis year of 1932, in which the party gained 0.2 per cent and 0.1 per cent of the national vote. Despite the tireless agitation of young Frahm, who was proving a fine public speaker, it did little better in Lübeck. When the Nazi tide washed over Germany, the not yet twenty-year-old was becoming well known. This did not bode well for his future safety.

After Hitler came to power, several members of the SAP’s central committee were immediately picked up by the Gestapo. One was detained while travelling to Oslo, in Norway, to set up an SAP base
in exile. The leadership asked Frahm to take his place—either presciently confident of his abilities or simply desperate. In April 1933, he was smuggled across the Baltic in a fishing boat and made his way to Oslo.

So Herbert Frahm left Germany. At the same time, he ceased being Herbert Frahm. After Hitler came to power, the SAP central committee formally dissolved the party, but many of its members refused to accept defeat. A secret meeting was called at a location near Dresden. Representative of the diehard comrades from Lübeck was Frahm. In the process, he used for the first time the
nom de guerre
that would make him famous: Willy Brandt.

From the moment he set foot in Norway, and for the rest of his life, Herbert Frahm became Willy Brandt. Charming, intelligent and articulate, he had a gift for languages, learning Norwegian so quickly that within a year he could give lectures in his adopted tongue.

In 1936, Willy Brandt visited Berlin on an intelligence mission for the SAP. He used a borrowed Norwegian passport under the name Gunnar Gaasland—profession, student—and, helped by the fact that the Olympic Games had filled the city with foreign tourists, survived to tell the tale. In Berlin (codenamed ‘Metro’ among SAP exiles), he experienced a shocking realisation. Nazism was not, as Marxist-Leninists insisted, a shaky, temporary phenomenon foisted on the country by an élite. The fact was, Hitler had Germany—and most of its people’s allegiance—firmly in his grip.
⁴

During these years, Brandt’s gifts as a writer blossomed. He published articles in Norwegian, Dutch, Swiss and Swedish publications, as well as a successful book,
Why Did Hitler Win in Germany
?

The young revolutionary Brandt, meanwhile, moved slowly but steadily away from extremism. The murderous chaos of the Spanish Civil War, which he experienced during a visit in 1937, the bloody purges in the Soviet Union, and finally the Hitler-Stalin pact, convinced him that collaboration with the Communists was fraught with problems. Though still a Marxist, he set out on the road to the moderate, democratic socialist stance of which he became a leading post-war exponent.