German Questions, American Answers

More than thirty years after German unification, both the Germans and their neighbors continue to wrestle with the history of Cold War national division. Although the terms of the debate have shifted over the years, there is still much to learn about both the process of division and its longer-term impacts. Recent works such as Astrid Eckert’s 2019 book West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Economy, Culture & Environment in the Borderlands have broadened our understanding of German division by considering the environmental consequences of drawing a new border in the middle of a country. We are also moving (finally, one hopes) beyond Cold War-related efforts to blame one side or the other in search of a more complete understanding of what happened and why.

German division was both overdetermined and contingent. One can see how difficult, if not impossible, it would have been for the United States and Soviet Union to agree on a common approach to Germany when both superpowers considered a stable and reliable German partner crucial to their deeply contrasting visions for the future of Europe. At the same time, however, the reluctance of either side to want to appear responsible for the final division created opportunities for political entrepreneurs on both sides to take steps that gave division its concrete shape. The goal of recent scholarship has been to understand those forces without feeling the need to re-litigate Cold War disputes.

Christian Ostermann’s exemplary new book, winner of the 2022 Richard W. Leopold Prize from the Organization of American Historians, benefits from this improved perspective, placing his analysis in a post-Cold War framework to understand the decisions and decision makers who shaped the postwar world. His narrative takes detailed stock of the years between the linkup of Soviet and U.S. troops in April 1945 and the aftermath of the uprising against Soviet authority in the German Democratic Republic in 1953. Of special significance, as Ostermann puts it in the book’s preface, is his effort at “writing East Germany into Cold War History” (ix). Drawing on a wide range of sources—as one would expect from someone who has done so much to encourage multiarchival research, especially from the “other side” in his position at the Cold War International History Project—Ostermann demonstrates that previous attempts to analyze the early days of the Cold War in Germany, even those that have challenged U.S. narratives, have been incomplete without the chance to appreciate the active roles played by Soviet and East German leaders.

One of Ostermann’s key insights concerns the contradiction at the heart of U.S. strategy on Germany and Europe. On the one hand, Ostermann seconds Carolyn Eisenberg and others who note the powerful economic and geopolitical impulses in Washington toward accepting German division. Only such a division could secure the integration of Germany’s key western areas, especially the coal and industrial regions of Rhine and Ruhr, into the postwar European economy. Thus, Washington resisted and ultimately rejected Soviet proposals for four-power control of that region (proposals offered precisely because they would hinder such western integration) and encouraged the development of different economies in East and West. On the other hand, however, Ostermann notes that many in Washington had initially hoped to use the successful democratic development of the West to encourage the rollback of communist influence in the East.

Some of this argument may be familiar to those who wish to “blame” the West for German division, but Ostermann avoids such simplistic analysis, and has an eye for surprising paradoxes in policy and personalities. For example, he is able to show that initially it was George F. Kennan who resisted all-German cooperation, advocating a policy of “walling off” (his term) the western zones from the East to make them part of the new Europe, while Military Governor General Lucius Clay, usually portrayed as a hard line “bogeyman,” initially advocated all-German cooperation (44, 33). Indeed, Ostermann calls Clay’s initial position “rollback by cooperation,” based on the hope that pursuing all-German economic development “would extend American influence into the Soviet zone, eventually undercutting Soviet-backed Communist rule” (276). As paradoxical as it may have sounded, U.S. leaders wanted to believe that division may have been an unavoidable first step, though they also considered it to be a transitory development once Western recovery took hold. How to get from that first step to the second, however, remained unclear. Rollback was “severely circumscribed by the overall American strategy … centered on the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into Western European economic, political, and military structures.” How to pursue such integration, which ought to “prevent the resurgence of German nationalism” while also satisfying German desire for national unity, remained problematic for the next four decades (279).

Using both East German government documents and records of local communities, Ostermann also demonstrates how the Soviets and the East German government, who recognized early on that their project of building a socialist state made division more likely, also sought to stabilize their regime in the face of Western challenges (234). Although he does an excellent job detailing East German calls for reunification, he also shows how such calls were instrumentalized to undermine Western plans for rearmament and economic integration without any clear sense of how they would be realized as policy. Anyone seeking support for claims of a “lost opportunity” for German reunification will be disappointed.

What readers will find is much to be learned about U.S. policy and how the United States dealt with its allies and partners. Students and scholars who have focused mainly on the development of the Federal Republic of Germany will find especially interesting how Ostermann reveals the emerging tensions between the Americans, who viewed Germany largely from the perspective of their global struggle with communism, and their West German partners, who could not lose sight of their ties to the Germans on the other side of the zonal border. Ostermann shows, for example, that U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s administration pushed for harsher economic warfare against the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the early 1950s but ran into surprising resistance from the conservative government of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. For both practical political and ideological reasons, Adenauer’s government had to respond to economic and political impulses within Germany that wanted to make sure connections across the inner-German border were not completely destroyed. In phrases which would no doubt shock those who considered (and still consider) Adenauer an unregenerate Cold Warrior, U.S. officials accused him of preferring “concession and accommodation” with the East over confrontation in his negotiations for continued East-West trade (229).

The most fascinating parts of the book include Ostermann’s analysis of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration’s efforts at psychological warfare and its response to the 1953 uprising. For all its desire to appeal directly to the East German people through charitable work and other information operations, the Eisenhower administration was caught off guard by the 1953 crisis because they had assumed that Walter Ulbricht’s regime in East Germany was strongly in charge of the situation. The habits of anticommunism blinded Washington to the very real conflicts within the GDR in early 1953. Pressure from the post-Stalin Soviet leadership on the Ulbricht government to adopt a “new course,” Ostermann reports, drawing on East German documents, led some “panicky” officials to fear the collapse of the East German Communist Party (SED) regime. “In the small town of Seehausen, according to a local SED account, ‘the entire village is in the bar, drinking to the health of Adenauer’” (241).

Once the upheaval burst into the open on the night of 16–17 June, which Ostermann shows was clearly more than just a strike by workers in East Berlin, however, the crisis was in some ways already resolved. Although communist officials wanted to blame the uprising on Western agitation, there was no coordinated Western response. Neither High Commissioner James Conant nor his public affairs chief Alfred Boerner were even in the country when it began. The powerful Berlin broadcaster Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) encouraged the strikers, but other official responses remained cautious. It did not take long to become clear that there would be no overt Western actions in support of the strike. Although food drives and support for refugees remained part of policy, by the end of the year the GDR had stabilized, and the National Security Council concluded in NSC-174 that “the detachment of any major European satellite from the Soviet bloc does not now appear feasible except by Soviet acquiescence or by war” (172).

Although his main narrative concludes with the sobering aftermath of the 1953 uprising, Ostermann ends his book on a hopeful note, pointing toward the ultimate liberation of Berlin and East Germany through public uprising and Soviet acquiescence in 1989–1990. He also recognizes that a lot had to happen before then, including nearly three decades of literal “walling off” between East and West. Nevertheless, his book shows how that first postwar decade shaped much of what came later. His well-researched and insightful analysis of that decade will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how and why Germany was divided, and who paid the price for that division.

Author Biography

Ronald J. Granieri is professor of History at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA, United States. A historian of Germany and transatlantic relations, he is the author of The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966 (New York, 2003) and is currently completing a study of German politics and foreign policy between détente and reunification. Any opinions expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army or Department of Defense.