The Berlin Wall (16 page)

In September 1938, Brandt was one of many exiles to lose his German nationality by Gestapo decree. He married Anna Carlota Thorkildsen, a
Norwegian citizen, and applied for citizenship himself. Norway had become ‘home’.

It was a home, sadly, that he would have to give up before long. When the Germans invaded Norway in April 1940, Brandt could have been tracked down and arrested as a traitor, had not a friend lent him a Norwegian army uniform. Brandt was treated briefly as a prisoner of war by his unwitting fellow countrymen and then released. But he could not be sure of his personal safety in occupied Norway. Within weeks, he escaped across the border into neutral Sweden.

Brandt was granted Norwegian citizenship by the country’s government in exile and then a licence to practise as a journalist. He opened a Swedish-Norwegian news agency with two local colleagues, reporting on the situation in Sweden and in occupied Norway, and acting as stringers for agencies in America and the United Kingdom. Brandt was undoubtedly also involved with Allied intelligence.

The end of the war brought a brief moment of euphoria, followed by some difficult decisions. Brandt returned to Oslo with his wife and family. But now, of course, with Hitler’s Germany defeated, there was another decision looming. Which country should he live in?

Many exiled German politicians-some technically stateless-had to wait years for permission to return to their own country. But Brandt was now a Norwegian citizen. In November 1945, a Norwegian Labour Party newspaper sent him to report on the Nuremberg war-crimes trials.

After observing the war-crimes trials, Brandt wrote a book entitled
Criminals and Other Germans
. He pleaded against the idea of collective national guilt. Brandt acknowledged the trials as legitimate and necessary, but felt passionately that the judges should have included a German-to speak and condemn on behalf of those who had opposed the Nazi regime, but had none the less also suffered for its crimes.

Brandt’s views were not shared in Allied countries, including Norway, where some said he was an apologist for Germany. He found his thoughts becoming bound up with the future of his native land. The collapse of his marriage was also a factor.

Brandt returned to Germany in 1947 as a press officer working for the Norwegian Military Mission in Berlin. He wore a Norwegian army uniform and drew the pay of a major (necessary under the rules attached
to the presence of the military mission). In years to come, opponents would accuse him of exploiting his privileges as a ‘Norwegian officer’ while his compatriots starved. His Norwegian companion in Berlin and future wife, Rut, would write:

We lived in requisitioned houses with requisitioned furniture and slept in requisitioned beds. The provisions were imported from outside: we ate in allied restaurants, shopped in allied stores, paid with allied military money-British BASF pounds or American SCRIPT-dollars-and went to allied cinemas and clubs. It was an unnatural colonial life and in fact from a human point of view just as degrading for those who lived in relative plenty as for those forced to stand outside and suffer…
⁵

The smell of death that still hung over Berlin, its legacy from the wartime bombing and fighting, affected Brandt deeply. As did the fact of German suffering. Finally, after almost a year, he decided that he must choose, and accepted a job as Berlin representative of the SPD. It meant giving up his Norwegian nationality and becoming German again—citizen of a country that did not, at this point, technically even exist. He had burned his boats.

It was a new beginning that would take the one-time young revolutionary from Communist sympathiser to determined enemy of the SED, from firebrand journalist to international statesman. Willy Brandt’s journey was an adventure of the mind and the heart. His experiences had changed him profoundly. Unlike those of Erich Honecker.

Honecker had shown courage and commitment in fighting National Socialism, but nothing about his views, or his feelings, changed as a result of his experiences. Despite his harsh experiences at the hands of the Gestapo, the SED’s post-war persecution of its opponents did not seem to cause him any concern. The end justified the means.

Honecker assisted loyally and uncritically in the creation of the SED, helped build its minute control over society in the Soviet Zone/GDR. He climbed that society’s ladder through hard work, organisational skill, and, above all, conformity.

Brandt did not always find conformity easy. By 1949, he had joined the group of young Social Democratic high-flyers surrounding the newly
appointed West Berlin mayor, Ernst Reuter. They were the generation-in-waiting.

Many post-war democratic leaders were former Weimar-era politicians, in their fifties, sixties or even seventies. Some had been imprisoned by the Nazis. To young men like Brandt, the former Weimar politicians-‘the beards and bellies’ as he once irreverently described them-were to be respected for their courage, but ever so slightly despised for their failure to stop Hitler.

Brandt was, of course, unusual in other ways. Most of his contemporaries had either been convinced Nazis or had been swept up in the mass mobilisation of war. In 1947/8, many were still prisoners. All who had lived through the Third Reich between adolescence and adulthood remained a generation in recovery, getting by from day to day. Brandt, the successful returned exile, belonged to a small group of young people untainted by involvement with the Nazis and undamaged by the experience of fighting on Hitler’s behalf.

As early as the SPD/KPD ‘marriage’ that created the SED, Brandt had observed that this was a shot-gun wedding. Nevertheless, he had hoped that a peace treaty might create a democratic German central government based in Berlin. Final disillusionment came with the Soviet blockade of West Berlin in the summer of 1948.

Though Brandt still supported the then SPD policy of state ownership and control, he gained a reputation as a determined anti-Communist. He learned much from Ernst Reuter, the former Bolshevik, who believed that a democratic Germany and a democratic Berlin needed to be supported by a strong Western anchor. Reuter was the last in a series of men, a generation older than Brandt, who could have been the father he never knew and were crucial mentors at various times in his life.

In 1949, Brandt was offered Reuter’s old job running the city’s transport system. He turned it down. Instead, he went to Bonn as a part of the Berlin delegation of deputies, who because of the city’s special status were not directly elected but nominated by the city assembly. He commuted between Berlin and the Rhineland, until 1957, when he was elected as governing mayor.

This was in future. Though some regarded him as Reuter’s heir
apparent, when the hugely respected High Burgomaster died suddenly in September 1953, aged sixty-four, Brandt, who had just celebrated his fortieth birthday, did not succeed him. In the 1950 Berlin elections, the CDU and its allies had won an equal number of seats to the SPD. The CDU’s candidate withdrew in favour of the popular Reuter, but when the latter died, the CDU declared its intent to govern. Berlin had its first non-SPD mayor since the war, and Brandt was in opposition.

In December 1954, the SPD won back some seats and was returned to power. Brandt, however, was passed over in favour of the veteran Otto Suhr, a hero of the blockade. As president of the Berlin house of assembly, Suhr had bravely resisted the Communist crowds that tried to intimidate the city’s elected representatives. Brandt was awarded Suhr’s old post, the second-most important job in the city.

Only when Suhr died, in August 1957, did Brandt attain the heights of power in the divided city. The handsome young governing mayor and his attractive, fashionably dressed Norwegian wife, Rut, became popular favourites, a Berlin pre-echo of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Opponents sneered at his ‘American’ style and the superficiality of the press coverage, but with television sets now appearing in Berliners’ homes, with rock ‘n’roll and the headlong worship of youth starting to take over every branch of the media, the sceptics made little headway.

Erich Honecker, by contrast, had officially given up youth in 1955, just when it was coming into fashion. That was when, aged forty-three, he stopped being chair of the SED’s junior section, the Free German Youth, which he had built up into a millions-strong apparatus for controlling the post-war generation in the GDR. Honecker was sent to attend the Soviet Central Committee’s training college in Moscow. Successful graduates of this school were headed for the very top of their party organisations. For an ambitious young Communist, this was heady stuff.

Sure enough, shortly after his return from Moscow, Honecker became secretary to the Central Committee for security questions and a permanent member of the Politburo. Since the fiasco of 17 June 1953, Ulbricht had insisted on exercising this vital role himself. His willingness to hand these functions over to Honecker was a special expression of trust.

At the same time as Brandt became mayor-by free election-so Honecker reached a key position in the GDR, though not by any election
process considered valid in the West. In 1953, when Ulbricht was threatened with overthrow, Honecker had been one of the few East German leaders who supported him. ‘Pointy beard’ Walter did not forgive a traitor, but neither did he forget a favour.

After the 1953 uprising, and the trauma of the Polish and Hungarian revolts in 1956, security went from being one key aspect of government policy in East Germany to becoming arguably the most important. The economy had to be improved, it was true, but the main priority was to keep the SED in power until a rise in the masses’ standard of living could be secured and the regime made more popular. Meanwhile, subversion and dissent must be suppressed. For the good of the people, of course.

The record year for population loss was, for obvious reasons, 1953, year of revolt and repression. During those traumatic twelve months, almost 400,000 left for the West. The figure dropped in 1954 to less than 200,000 before starting to climb again, staying at around a quarter of a million annually for the next three years. Since the foundation of the GDR in 1949 and the end of Honecker’s first full year as Secretary for Security in 1958, 2.1 million East Germans had fled the country that Ulbricht built. Almost a million would leave during the next three years. In the first twelve years of its existence East Germany lost around a sixth of its population.

The ‘new course’ of 1953-4 had been intended to make life more tolerable for all those tempted to leave, especially small-business men, scientists, doctors and dentists, and skilled craftsmen, who made up a disproportionate percentage of those who were classified in tellingly military terms as ‘deserters from the Republic’ (
Republikflüchtige
). Even though Ulbricht had managed to hold on to power, it seemed that reform of the system was inevitable, a hope further fuelled by CPSU Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in February 1956.

Ulbricht faced challenges from liberals within the Politburo, including
Stasi
Minister Ernst Wollweber and Karl Schirdewan, Secretary to the Central Committee with responsibility for Cadre Questions (party membership). Unsure of Moscow’s support, Ulbricht could not deal with these challenges as summarily as he might have wished. None the less, these two Politburo members formed a latent threat to his power that he could not ignore. And, being Walter Ulbricht, did not.
⁶

In June 1956, widespread rioting in Poland led Khrushchev to appoint the relatively liberal Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been imprisoned under Stalin, as leader of the Polish Communist Party. Gomulka was permitted to carry out market and economic reforms (including a stop to agricultural collectivisation) so long as he continued to toe the Soviet line internationally. This looked like good news for reformers everywhere.

Unknown to the liberals in the GDR, however, the high tide of reform was already about to turn. At the end of 1956, the Soviets were forced to use the Red Army to suppress a revolt in Hungary-led, moreover, by a reformist Communist prime minister, Imre Nagy. This bloody business shocked the world. In Moscow it presaged a turning-away from the post-Stalinist liberalising process and a revival of belief in brute strength.

Ulbricht did not rush things. Using Honecker, who had now slotted his old FDJ trusties into key parts of the security and party apparatus, and marshalling his old Stalinist cronies, the First Secretary gradually isolated the liberalisers. In December 1956, the new Security Secretary, Honecker, accused Wollweber of neglecting the pursuit of the state’s enemies. He demanded regular reports on this problem, keeping the
Stasi
chief on the defensive for the next months and aiding the construction of a portfolio of alleged failures that could be used against him. At the end of 1957, the reformist economic planner and close Schirdewan ally, Gerhart Ziller, who had been brutally criticised by Ulbricht at a Politburo meeting, gave way under the pressure and took his own life.

Ziller’s suicide was the signal for the hardliners to go in for the kill. In February 1958, Wollweber, Schirdewan and Fred Oelssner, deputy chair of the Council of Ministers and a moderate, were accused of ‘factionalism’ and sacked from the Central Committee.

From now on, Honecker exercised a key overseer role. He stood in charge of security, the army, and the party organisation. In short, every process that was key to the regime’s hold on power passed through his office. The slogan Honecker adopted and issued to the comrades whose political life he now controlled gave a clear message: ‘He who attacks Walter Ulbricht, attacks the party!’ This would remain Honecker’s motto until the day, more than a decade later, when he decided to overthrow Ulbricht himself.

At the Fifth Party Congress of the SED in July 1958, Ulbricht reigned supreme. The economic and political policies he announced to the cowed comrades represented a virtual return to the old ‘building socialism’ programme he had so disastrously pursued until the summer of 1953: more restrictions on the dwindling numbers of private businesses and craft workshops, a resumption of enforced collectivisation of agriculture. Ulbricht made a further astonishing declaration: soon the GDR would overtake West Germany in the production of foodstuffs and consumer goods.