The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by the German trade unions, and took five generations to penetrate the Hamburg football team or the Politburo of the German Democratic Republic.

West Berlin was an island within an island, strongly affected by the presence of foreign military, and heavily subsidized. The city was led by a remarkable man, Willy Brandt, who was impatient of the small-town pieties of Bonn. He drank, chased women, and told funny stories. He had also had an exceedingly creditable career — an illegitimate working-class birth in Lubeck, a self-propelled rise through the educational system, an immediate teenage detestation of the Nazis, flight to Norway where, learning the language on the boat, he became a left-wing journalist; work for an anti-Nazi resistance network that included false passports and residence in Berlin; friends all over the place. In other countries, such men and women often turned Communist, especially when Stalin started winning, but Brandt, like other left-wing Germans (and Arthur Koestler), had seen the Communists in destructive action in the last days of the Weimar Republic, when they had co-operated with the Nazis in order to destroy the Social Democrats. Brandt (like Ernst Reuter, his predecessor as mayor of Berlin, who had spent the Nazi years in Ankara as professor of Town Planning) knew his Communists, and as mayor of Berlin he faced them down (and subsequently as chancellor also faced down the extreme Left). He understood that in a democracy the political parties should co-operate to maintain the system if the system were not to collapse. That had failed to happen in the pre-Hitler republic, where, in the restaurant of the Reichstag, the lunchtime tables would have a notice, ‘Only for members of the Catholic (Centre) Party’. Rather than face cantankerous negotiations with the Free Democrats (FDP), the two main parties formed a Grand Coalition. In that way the CDU could control the conservative and Catholic Bavarians, the SPD could contain rebellious left-wing anti-capitalists, and the FDP would subdue its vanities. There was a further element. In the mid-sixties, the American involvement in Vietnam, the possibility that Germany might face a Soviet attack in isolation, brought vital matters to the fore — the future of NATO, the opportunity for a German finger on a nuclear trigger, the possibility of an Anglo-Franco-German Europe: matters that required a strong German government. The querulous Free Democrats were sidelined; so were the right of the Right and the left of the Left. The Grand Coalition emerged in 1966, with a bizarre partnership of the Nazi-resisting Brandt as foreign minister, with an oily Swabian, Kurt Georg Kiesinger (whose Nazi past was at once ‘leaked’ from East Berlin), as chancellor.

Even so, the Grand Coalition pulled in different ways — an element of social and school liberalization, but also a ‘Stability Law’ requiring savings. Whatever: the boom went on with growth again at the fabulous 7 per cent while inflation went back to a trivial level. On the whole, it was Brandt’s side of the coalition that profited: if the Left were anywhere near power, and matters improved as the various elements in the old austerity proved irksome, then the CDU, representing the old virtues, would appear nagging and irrelevant. Welfare spending, 15 per cent of the GDP in 1950, edged up in the later sixties to 18.7 per cent, and did not bring about the end of the world. Brandt’s standing rose. Meanwhile, the coalition came under strain. As the dollar weakened, pressure came from Washington for a serious revaluation of the Mark, and that threatened the profits of the exporters. On the Right, Franz Josef Strauss spoke for them; on the other side, Karl Schiller spoke for international finance (he won: there was a revaluation — 8.5 per cent — in 1969, two others following in 1971 and 1973). As the elections approached (1969) the small Free Democratic Party edged towards the Left, talking of educational reform, ‘participation’ and youth: Ralf Dahrendorf, author of a considerable analysis of Germany’s problems, emerged as a radical, and beady liberal eyes were trained on the foreign ministry. In 1969 a new (‘Little’) coalition emerged, with Brandt as chancellor and Walter Scheel (not Dahrendorf, who was sidelined to Brussels) as foreign minister. Schiller and Helmut Schmidt, both of them remarkable and memorable figures, took over the economic ministries, with functioning corporate institutions and a provision for intelligent public spending. In time, this was to cause strain, because debts built up, but Germany, quite unlike England, had a good seventies. Even a foreign policy began to emerge.

In the sixties, bright people among the Social Democrats had argued that some opening should be made towards Moscow, towards eastern European countries especially, and that the way towards change in Berlin would be through concession, not denunciation. One reason for the Russians’ behaviour over Berlin was a conviction that, isolated, it would be drained of people, and there was some truth in that: in order to keep the population up, young men who studied there were exempted from conscription, and there was much studying, accordingly, with, accordingly, a great many students, male and female, with nothing to do except make up grievances. Besides, improvements in Berlin, such as family visits, would hardly be gained through head-on collision: for that, the West was simply, locally, too weak. Even in 1963 a Social Democrat warhorse, Egon Bahr, had told a stout Protestant audience at Tutzing that there would have to be Wandel durch Annaherung, meaning that greater closeness would bring transformation (Brandt had been meant to make this speech, but, to his subsequent resentment, missed the cue). This line may have been encouraged by Moscow, with which another warhorse, Herbert Wehner, an old Comintern hand, still had his links; the speech occurred in the late-Khrushchev-period ‘thaw’, when countries bordering Germany and Austria were taking little steps of their own to make travel somewhat easier.

Then there was Soviet energy, which an expanding West Germany could do with: here, the Austrians, in 1967, were the stalking horse, offering credit terms in exchange for access to Soviet oil and natural gas. But the most important element was the change in the German atmosphere, as the post-war generation grew up and read its Spiegel or Zeit: a certain feeling of guilt spread as to what had been done in Germany’s name to the countries to the east, whether Poland or Czechoslovakia. Had the time not come to revise the rigid fifties policy of recognizing neither them nor the eastern borders that had been fixed in 1945? Once Brandt had managed to dispose of his entanglements with the tiresome Kiesinger, policies of openness towards the East became a prime cause of the new SDP-FDP (‘Little’) Coalition. To be in favour of Ostpolitik was to be radical chic, as the Germans understood it: away from the smug stuffiness of the fifties. On one level, this was just common sense: it was absurd not to recognize reality on the ground, and to withhold diplomatic recognition from countries that recognized East Germany. But there was also an idea, not proven wrong in the outcome, that a soft approach would cause a fatal softening on the other side. The problem was a more general one, that so many Germans had suffered, had remade their lives, wanted unification, and detested the in any case very unlovely German Democratic Republic. The older generation, many of them born in old Prussia east of the river Elbe, had difficulty in swallowing the borders of Potsdam, in 1945, on the rivers Oder and Western Neisse.

Brandt’s memoirs, fascinating up to this point, now turn into wooden language and chronology. Feelers went out to Moscow, obviously the heart of the matter, and at least by implication there was a considerable bargain: recognition of East Germany, at least de facto, in return for access to Soviet energy and some easing of conditions for West Berlin. The process took time, not least because the East German leadership, little Ulbricht in particular, knew their Moscow and knew that they could easily go the way of the Greek and Spanish Communists, sacrificed pawns in the greater game of Soviet foreign policy, itself now beset by fears of China. Early in 1970 Egon Bahr went to Moscow; a surreptitious link for communications was opened, with a KGB man, in a villa in Dahlem, in a prosperous part of West Berlin; a non-aggression treaty was drawn up in August. A face-saving letter, drawn up by the Christian Democrat leader, was attached, reserving Germany’s right to unification; subsequently the Constitutional Court and the Christian Democrats were able to assert improvements for the ordinary existence of East Germans that Brandt and Bahr had omitted to insist upon. But the substance was recognition of East Germany, in treaties of 1971-2, preceded by a visit of one Willi Stoph, the SED chairman, to Kassel, in which he made a grotesque claim for ‘reparations’, and a much publicized return journey by Brandt, in March 1970, to Erfurt, by train (there were tiresome formalities against a journey by aircraft via Berlin), during which he was lionized. In December 1970 there was a treaty with Poland, and in the course of a visit to Warsaw Brandt embarrassed his hosts by kneeling at the monument to the Jewish ghetto and the uprising of 1943: by this stage the Polish Communists were making some use of anti-semitism, and Brandt’s spontaneous gesture took them aback. Borders were now recognized, though the treaty with Czechoslovakia, for tiresome formal reasons, took somewhat longer. One counterpart, as with Romania around the same time, was that ‘ethnic Germans’ who had stayed behind in 1945 were allowed to depart: money changed hands for this.

Money also flowed eastwards for more substantial matters. The Germans soon followed the Austrian lead on Soviet energy: at Essen, the very heart of the industrial Ruhr, agreements began in February 1970. Over twenty years the USSR would supply Ruhrgas with 32 billion cubic metres of natural gas, costing (at 1970 prices) DM2.5bn and maybe, starting in 1973, for more than twice as much. The existing pipeline, which stopped in Bratislava, would go on into Bavaria. Mannesmann, the largest European maker of steel piping, was to supply the USSR with 2.4 million tons of it, and the cost would be borne by seventeen banks, headed by Deutsche Bank, repayable, through