Die Stalin-Note: Historische Kontroverse im Spiegel der Quellen by Gerhard Wettig (review)

On 10 March 1952, the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin took the world by surprise with an offer that seemed too good to resist. A peace treaty was to restore Germany’s unity on the basis of neutrality. Ever since then, politicians, diplomats, and, most notably, historians have been trying to figure out whether Stalin really meant to pursue the goal he had announced in what has become known as the “Stalin Note.”

In the “Battle of Notes” that dragged on well into the autumn of 1952, Western governments refused to take Stalin’s “offer” at face value and demanded concrete assurances from him to give his consent to free elections in all of Germany. After several years in which the USSR had consistently rejected demands for the reunification of Germany on the basis of free elections, the West saw in Stalin’s “offer” above all a propaganda coup and a proposal they considered to be downright dangerous.

The 1952 Stalin Note has few rivals in the attention it has received from German historians. Now, one of the leading protagonists in the debate, Gerhard Wettig, has published another work on the topic, which also marks the beginning of a new series of books on the “History of Totalitarian Regimes in Germany” (Geschichte der Diktaturen in Deutschland).

The last few years have seen the emergence from Russian archives of vast quantities of previously unknown documents on Soviet policy toward Germany. Wettig presents the current state of research and gives a carefully nuanced account of the differences in interpretations of the Stalin Note put forth by different schools of historians. He distinguishes between three such interpretations, the “offer,” “disciplining,” and “propaganda” theses, and explains these in ample detail. An account of the historical context, as reflected in the new sources, makes up the bulk of the monograph. These sources also form the backdrop against which Wettig discusses the controversy centering on the Stalin Note. Having consistently maintained in the decades-old debate that Stalin was not prepared in 1952 to sacrifice the Communist state of East Germany and allow Germany to be reunited on the basis of neutrality, he highlights the newly discovered Moscow files as grist for his mill. This does not, however, prevent him from doing justice to insights that have been made possible by the work of historians pursuing other tracks.

During the Cold War, the debate on the Stalin Note in divided Germany always tended to be fraught with emotion and to degenerate into yet another front in the blame game over the question of who was responsible for the consolidation of Germany’s division. Wettig’s book is a highly welcome injection of objectivity into the debate and helps to historicize it in the context of research on the Cold War. Dealing with a topic that has already spawned an immense body of literature, the book offers a detached and intelligible survey and is recommended reading for all those who are not already experts in the field and are looking for a relatively concise, up-to-date presentation of the current state of research on the history of the division of Germany.