The controversy surrounding it, however, had not diminished. Robert Murphy, Clay’s political adviser, complained that if Stalin really had been serious, he would have used confidential communications, not a newspaper, to explore a settlement. Where Kennan stressed the need to avoid a division of Europe, Murphy retorted that the line had already been drawn “through no fault of the Western Powers.” If the West Germans lost confidence in the Americans, the Truman administration would soon be worrying about a new line that would leave all of Germany on the wrong side. Murphy’s views had support elsewhere in the State Department, the Defense Department, and of course within Clay’s command, where doubts about Program A were as strong as ever.11
Kennan’s committee was being whipsawed, he complained to Acheson early in February, but the choices it was considering would shape the future for decades to come. So in an effort to break the stalemate—and no doubt with his Japan trip in mind—Kennan offered to go to Germany to see the situation for himself. He was, Franks reported to London, a powerful influence in Acheson’s State Department. “I regard his mission to Germany as likely to be of particular importance.” Nonetheless, Kennan admitted on the day before he was to leave, it was probably too late to change the American position on the establishment of a West German government.
What followed surprised and gratified Kennan, for, in the words of the meeting minutes, taken by Murphy himself,
The Secretary said that he was sorry to hear Mr. Kennan say this because he had been almost persuaded by the cogency of Mr. Kennan’s argument.... [H]e did not understand . . . how we ever arrived at the decision to see established a Western German government or State. He wondered whether this had not been the brainchild of General Clay and not a governmental decision.
Acheson deferred any decision on Germany until after Kennan’s return. He then asked Kennan to follow him home that evening to continue the discussion, and there expanded his assignment to include talks with American and allied diplomats elsewhere in Europe. This gave Kennan a broader mandate than he had ever received from Marshall to pursue Program A. Murphy, deeply worried, sent word ahead to Clay that “Kennan is as luke warm as ever toward the establishment of a Western German government.... I am most eager for him to obtain a better understanding of the actual German conditions.”12
Still stuck in Bermuda on the night of March 10, Kennan made his way to the officers’ club, where a bingo game was in progress. It seemed to exempt the players “from the necessity to think and speak.” Outside a breeze was blowing, “unceasing and slightly sinister,” while in the distance a B-29 was revving its engines for takeoff. Most Americans on the island were coming from, or going to, Germany: how had it been in the old days? one of them wanted to know. “It was awful now,” he continued, without waiting for an answer. After another stop in the Azores—well known to Kennan as a place and as a problem in World War II—he flew into blockaded Berlin on March 12 and was able to see it for himself: “The city seemed dead—a ghost of its former self.” For the ever- impressionable Kennan, who had always regarded Germany, along with Russia, as an expatriate home, it was as if he were seeing his own ghost as well.13
II.
Which is probably why he went back to keeping a diary, his first sustained effort to do so since returning to Washington in the spring of 1946. That city rarely inspired, or left time for, the kind of writing he had done in the past. Nor had his 1948 trip to Japan produced such an account, perhaps because the setting was too alien. But when Hessman finished typing what Kennan had written during the eleven days he spent in Germany in 1949, she had thirty-four pages. Kennan had permitted himself again—as if with relief—to filter a diplomat’s observations through an artist’s eye, a historian’s ear, and a poet’s emotions. He wrote of
Once fashionable Berlin suburbs, where people camped out in the surviving dark cold houses “like barbarians in the palaces of Italy.”
Tall bare poplars, “which had waited and watched through the final years of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era and the war and the bombings and the arrival of the Russian army,” now standing “alone again through another night, until the battered cars of the first early subway train came clattering past.”
Ruins, which still stood “in awful and imposing desolation: the piles of rubble flowing down to the sidewalk, twisted iron beams and the remnants of walls standing out above them, portions of rooms hanging giddily in the air like stage settings.”
Chauffeurs, outside a brightly lit American club, “stamping up and down and muttering in the cold night air, . . . like an evil caricature of the bundled Russian coachmen of olden times, waiting for their masters outside the night- clubs of St. Petersburg and Moscow.”
Occupiers, who in the midst of devastation were unable to stop “handing each other drinks and discussing through the long evenings the price of antiques, the inadequacies of servants, and the availability of cosmetics in the PX.”
But also kids, with no memory of a different Berlin, who treated the devastated city as an immense playground: “What other children had infinite supplies of bricks and other building materials for building dams in the flowing gutters [or] such magnificent settings for hide-and-seek? Where else could you, if the policeman wasn’t looking, detach one of the little steel dump cars on the rubble-removal tracks and roll it down whole city blocks to a make- believe railway station far away? Who else had such natural embattlements and redoubts for conducting snowball fights?”
The planes landing every three minutes were keeping the city supplied, but that was an improvisation: “We had no answer, yet, to the great political insecurity that hung over this area.” Whatever vision did exist was clouded by “our habits, our comforts, our false and corrupting position as conquerors and occupiers.”
Why was it, for example, that in their meetings with Germans, Clay’s staff was still seating them at the far ends of tables, as if to replay surrender negotiations? Why couldn’t the Americans understand that their “childish” reliance on ice cream and Coca-Cola revived the Germans’ old sense of superiority? Why relieve them of responsibility by managing—often mismanaging—their daily affairs, while at the same time “bloating their morbid delusions” by assuring them that the future of Europe depended on them?
Too many Germans regarded defeat as a kind of automobile accident, allowing them to forget what they had done to bring it about. And yet denazification was doing more harm than good. How could one ever acknowledge enough guilt to compensate for the crimes? a half-Jewish editor asked Kennan. Balancing that scale was a task for another world, not this one. Some Germans, however, welcomed having their occupiers cram down their throats things they would never voluntarily have swallowed. They might not like living under the Americans, but they didn’t want them to leave. They were, on the whole, better than the British, who ran their zone with a condescension imported from their empire, and certainly the predatory French, who seemed bent on stripping their zone bare. All were preferable to the nearby Russians.
And yet it was Andre Francois-Poncet, the chief French diplomat in Germany and a spokesman for the new foreign minister, Robert Schuman, who proposed to Kennan a plan to end military government, place the three western zones under civilian commissioners, and give those Germans as much control over their own affairs as possible. The Soviet zone was gone, a German friend warned Kennan. The Russians had imposed a social revolution
