Der Weg zur Mauer: Stationen der Teilungsgeschichte (review)

Like many contested territories, Cold War Berlin had several names. To the Federal Republic and its allies, the city was divided into East and West Berlin, the sectors that had been occupied and regulated by the victorious powers since the end of Second World War. To the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the city was simply Berlin, sometimes further identified as the Capital of the GDR, a name that proclaimed the city's autonomy as well as its geographical and political connection to the east. Next to this Berlin was a place called Westberlin, an alien and, after 1961, increasingly remote entity that was farther away from its eastern neighbor than Moscow or Sofia. City maps printed in the east left the area of Westberlin blank, reaffirming the fact that nothing was there to interest a law-abiding citizen of the GDR. As it turned out, these empty spaces became a screen on which easterners could project their own hopes, fears, and unfulfilled desires.

Manfred Wilke's Der Weg zur Mauer is the first volume in a series sponsored by the Stiftung Berliner Mauer, one of the many German foundations that encourage scholarly research and public discussions on historical issues. Wilke puts the problem of Berlin into a broadly conceived historical context. He begins with the emergence of the Cold War, traces the subsequent division of Europe into east and west, the creation of the two German states, and the apparent thaw following Stalin's death in 1953, and then focuses on the international crisis over the status of Berlin that began in 1958 and produced the wall that surrounded the western part of the city in 1961. Although Wilke does not provide any startling new information or interpretations, he gives a clearly written and well-balanced account, largely based on the extensive secondary literature and a judicious use of documents, most of them printed and translated into German.

In contrast to Hope Harrison's powerfully argued analysis in Driving the Soviets Up the Wall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), which stressed the primacy of East Germany's policies during the crisis, Wilke places the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of the Soviet leadership. This is also the position recently taken by Jonathan Haslam in Russia's Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), which is based on a careful examination of the Soviet documents. I am not sure that it is necessary or even very useful to calibrate the relative weight of the major participants in the final decision to build a wall. Yoked together in an uncomfortable but indissoluble community of fate, Nikita Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht both played decisive roles. Of course Ulbricht was ultimately dependent on Soviet support, not only to confront the Western allies but also to maintain power at home. Khrushchev, like many stronger members of an unequal alliance, was constrained by his partner's weakness. No matter how difficult and demanding the East Germans were, he could not abandon them because they occupied a key geopolitical and ideological position on the Soviet Union's western perimeter. The difference between Ulbricht and Khrushchev had less to do with the relative influence of their policies than with the different perspectives from which each viewed the question of Berlin. Khrushchev's interest in Berlin was always instrumental: to him, the city was just one piece on a complex international chess board; its isolation and vulnerability seemed to give him an opportunity to divide his enemies, derail West German rearmament, and perhaps even drive the Americans out of Europe—which was and would remain the Soviets' most important aspiration. Ulbricht's goal was simpler, more immediate, and significantly more urgent: unless he could stop the increasingly rapid flow of refugees leaving the GDR by way of West Berlin, his regime would eventually bleed to death. If Ulbricht's responsibility for the wall sometimes seems greater than Khrushchev's, this is because for...