The Cold War: The Real German Question

Berlin was still taut. Refugees from East Germany continued their desperate attempts to scale the Wall and sprint to freedom. Shots were fired from both sides of the border. At the highest levels of diplomacy, talks toward negotiations had come to a standstill. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was back inMoscow after sessions with President Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. At his press conference, the President reported somberly: “The talks which we had with Mr. Gromyko did not give us immediate hope that this matter would be easily settled…On the substance, we are not in sight of land.”

What was land? An agreement that would lessen tension over Berlin? A treaty defining the future of Germany? A “general European settlement”? Last week, with a hiatus in East-West talks, it was becoming clear to some diplomats and journalists that the real question is not Berlin but Germany, the heart of Europe, and they stepped back to take a cold, hard look at suggested settlements—and their possible consequences.

The Basic Three. For the U.S. on Berlin, there are at least three principles that must be sustained even at the cost of war:

> First and foremost, the continued existence of West Berlin as a free and economically viable city, which means that it must remain part of a free and economically prosperous West Germany.

> Continued ground and air access to West Berlin from West Germany.

>The continued presence of Western forces in West Berlin.

After those three absolute requirements, what are the possibilities for diplomatic give and take? Many have been considered, but none is perfect and most are perilously imperfect. Among them:

∙ PEACE TREATY. The U.S. Government considers it inevitable that Russia will sign a peace treaty with East Germany. It is equally clear that the U.S. will not fight to prevent such a treaty—unless it interferes with basic rights in West Berlin. But the signing of such a treaty, this year or next, will contribute to the permanent division of Germany, which is Khrushchev’s real aim—and the real danger for Berlin (which, Nikita Khrushchev hoped, became permanently divided with the building of the Red wall on Aug. 13).

∙ RECOGNITION. At present, the U.S. has no intention of granting official diplomatic recognition to East Germany. Beyond breaking Western promises, such a move could only lead to the undercutting of West Berlin, of West Germany, and of the entire Western position in Europe. But there is considerably more give in the U.S. attitude about a de facto recognition. Thus, in return for a restatement of the West’s three basic rights in West Berlin, the U.S. would not balk if East Germans were to stamp papers and examine lading bills on traffic along the access routes to Berlin.

∙ DEMILITARIZATION. As recently as May 1959, the West offered an overall peace plan, which included provisions for progressive reductions in military forces in Europe and overall ceilings for U.S. and Soviet military personnel. The thinning-out was keyed to German reunification and contained measures for guarding against surprise attack. The Soviet Union flatly rejected the plan and offered its own, calling for withdrawal of NATO forces from Europe and the dismantlement of NATO’s military bases, in return for Soviet troop withdrawals from East Germany, Poland and Hungary. The U.S.S.R.’s plan was intolerable to the U.S.: it would have meant that U.S. forces would pull back for thousands of miles while Russian troops would remain within easy attacking range. The present U.S. position offers room for negotiations along the lines of force reduction in return for hard agreements on German unification.

∙ FREE CITY. Of all the notions that have been raised, that of establishing West Berlin as a demilitarized “free city” is perhaps the silliest. It was first advanced in the Soviet’s 1959 proposals. It would force the departure of Western troops and shatter the most vital of the West’s three requirements for West Berlin—that the city remain politically and economically a part of West Germany.

∙ ODER-NEISSE RECOGNITION. It has been argued that the West should give official recognition to what is presently a fact of geographical life: the Oder-Neisse line, which divides East Germany from Germany’s old Polish territories. This would perpetuate what West Germans now call the “Three Germanys”—West, East and Polish. But in any such threeway dismemberment of Germany lie the seeds of future war, and the West cannot recognize the Oder-Neisse line without at least a guarantee of eventual unification of West and East Germany.

The danger in all such ideas is that in their essentials they require that the U.S. offer a quid without realistic hope for a Russian quo. Surely, one Western demand in any negotiations should be that the Communists tear down the wall between East and West Berlin; in fact, the West should have prevented the wall’s construction in the first place—a point increasingly recognized in Washington.

The Vital Part. Berlin and West Germany are inextricably tied together. The more that Khrushchev succeeds in implanting the idea of a permanently divided Germany, the more tenuous will become the position of West Berlin—as a “showcase” of democracy, as a bastion of freedom, as a city that can live. And the more desperate and uncertain the future of West Berlin, the more ominous the outlook for West Germany.

Given this situation, there is very little room for negotiation with the Russians. The question is not Berlin; it is Germany, a land and people that cannot remain forever divided. And however distant reunification may be, whatever dashes that prospect will have serious consequences.