THE GDR AND DETENTE

On 26 September 1984, after months of inter-German wrangling over appropriate agendas and timetables, Erich Honecker was supposed to have begun an official visit to the FRG. This would have been the first time ever that an East German Party head had traveled to West Germany, and Honecker would have been received with full diplomatic honors by the Federal President. In addition, his scheduled sidetrip to the land of his birth in the FRG's Saar region would have added to the heavy symbolism of the event, reminding observers in both states anew of a distant but still shared past. Even more remarkable, Honecker's visit was to have come at a time of deeply exacerbated tensions between the superpowers, lending irrefutable testimony to the ability of both Germanies to perpetuate a special detente in spite of their surroundings.

Nevertheless, on 4 September, East German officials announced that this long-awaited visit would again have to be postponed, ostensibly because of opposition to the trip from within the governing circles of the CDU. As in the past, however, the real story behind the failure of the visit was considerably more complex. As such, it serves to bring home, once again, one of the central themes of this book: the inherent historical tension behind the East Germans' attempts to mesh their own country's interests with a complex and ever-changing political environment.

NEW SURROUNDINGS

Erich Honecker, the long-time apparent crown prince in East Germany, succeeded Walter Ulbricht as the head of the SED on 3 May 1971, and the GDR reached a turning point in its history, comparable in significance to that which the state had experienced ten years earlier with the construction of the Berlin Wall. This was not just because of the different leadership styles that the two men represented, the outspoken, assertive, and sometimes arrogantly self-confident style of Ulbricht versus what turned out to be a more stability-minded, bureaucratic, and vocally pro-Soviet slant of Honecker. The GDR's environment itself had changed. One decade after the Wall's construction, the shell of nonrelations surrounding the country had collapsed, and East Germany was exposed abruptly to the world outside its borders.

As we shall see, this new situation meant several things for the GDR's Party leadership: the introduction of regular contacts between East Berlin and Bonn, a less than satisfactory resolution of outstanding differences over the city of Berlin and the nature of inter-German relations, and what amounted to a daily ‘reunification’ of Germany by millions of private citizens on the basis of family ties and friendship. Just by themselves, these factors were undeniably important.

WEIGHING DETENTE'S FUTURE

On 12 December 1979, NATO ministers meeting in Brussels responded to the Soviet Union's stationing of mid-range nuclear missiles in the western part of the USSR with their own far-reaching decision, pending the unsuccessful outcome of negotiations with Moscow, to deploy land-based Pershing II and cruise missiles on West European soil beginning in the fall of 1983. Then, only two weeks later, Soviet divisions rumbled into Afghanistan, for the start of what was to be a long and bloody attempt to impose socialist discipline on that part of the USSR's periphery. Finally, less than a year later, in the summer of 1980, worker unrest swelled to the breaking point in the Polish shipyards of Gdansk and Gdynia, polarizing world opinion.

None of these momentous developments took place within the GDR itself. But their combined impact on East Germany could not have been more profound, since they all threatened to pull the foundations out from under the fragile web of agreements and understandings that had governed East–West relations during the 1970s. Caught in between, the East German leadership found itself in a complex and even paradoxical position. Only a decade earlier, detente's inception had represented a major challenge to East Berlin's ruling authority.

THE WALL

On Sunday, 13 August 1961, residents of the city of Berlin awoke to find that a startling event had decisively changed their lives and transformed the character of their already beleaguered city. Early that morning, armed contingents of East German troops, factory militia, and Volkspolizei had assembled on the boundary line dividing East and West Berlin. A ring of tanks was rolled up to the Brandenburg Gate, the symbolic point of entry into East Berlin. Then, under the supervision of Erich Honecker, the man who would one day preside over the East German Communist Party, shock workers erected barbed-wire fences and rough concrete barriers along the city's line of demarcation, effectively cutting off all means of transport and communication. Within a week, these actions culminated in the erection of a more extensive, permanent structure. This was the Berlin Wall.

This barrier, or die Mauer, as it is known in West Berlin, supplemented and fortified in following years by steel girders, watchtowers, tank traps, death strips, and sophisticated electronic gadgetry, has since become one of the most famous and infamous symbols of East–West confrontation and conflict.

THE EAST GERMANS AND DETENTE

On 11 December 1970, a leading figure in the Politburo of the East German Communist Party (SED), Erich Honecker, prepared his countrymen for an imminent confrontation with their enemies. At this juncture in history, Honecker explained, the Western capitalist powers were banding together to launch a new offensive against the German Democratic Republic (GDR), by defaming the state's Party leadership, heating up their mass media in order to spread the hysteria of anti-communism, and taking advantage of every opportunity to disseminate imperialist ideology. The chief threat among these powers, it seemed, was the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the capitalist half of the old German nation, which was prepared to use every means possible, including sweet-sounding slogans and seductive talk about detente and improved inter-German relations, in order to achieve its long-held goal of subordinating the GDR to its command and then finally liquidating the East German state. ‘Nevertheless,’ Honecker defiantly declared, bracing his population for the assault, ‘nothing has come of this in the past, and likewise, nothing will come of it in the future.’

Only a decade later, however, on 12 December 1981, the East German leader struck quite a different pose. Now General Secretary of the SED, Honecker exuberantly exchanged toasts with the visiting West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, in the GDR.