For the people of Berlin, Saturday, August 12, 1961 was a lovely warm day. In the parks, families played in the sunshine; in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood, the streets were packed with visitors from all over the city for the annual children’s fair. As afternoon gave way to evening, the organisers set off fireworks; then many families moved on to West Berlin’s picture houses, which that weekend were showing Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur and Spencer Tracy in The Old Man and the Sea. And in a hunting lodge just outside the city, East Germany’s communist leader, Walter Ulbricht, put the finishing touches to his plan to slice Berlin in two.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, Ulbricht’s men sprang into action. Nothing had been left to chance; for days, his officials had been quietly buying vast quantities of barbed wire. Even as the city’s people were dancing and drinking, more than 40,000 East German soldiers, 12,000 policemen, 12,000 members of “factory militias” and 4,500 Stasi agents had been making their final preparations. When the order came, just after 1.30am, writes Frederick Kempe, they moved into the streets “so quietly and smoothly that none of the residents…even rose to turn on a light”. By the time that Berlin’s people awoke, the entire allied half of the city — separated from the enveloping East German territory by a border almost 100 miles long — had been hermetically sealed off. All over the city, Ulbricht’s police stood grimly behind rolls of barbed wire. And at East Berlin’s main station, observers saw distraught travellers sitting with their suitcases and bundles, many in tears.
Today we know Ulbricht’s creation as the Berlin Wall, even though at first it was merely a barbed-wire barrier. According to Kempe, a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, its construction was the most perilous moment of the entire cold war, eclipsing even the Cuban missile crisis. With John F Kennedy still finding his feet in the White House, Berlin, Kempe claims, was “the world’s most dangerous place”. He exaggerates, but not by much. Today the Berlin Wall seems like something from ancient history. But at the time, it was the supreme emblem of an ideological conflict that tainted everything it touched — and that seemed likely to last for ever.
Ominously for more discerning readers, Kempe’s book comes with fulsome endorsements from Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as a spectacularly bland introduction by General Brent Scowcroft (national security adviser, 1975-77 and 1989-93). But despite his occasional lapses into journalistic bathos, his book is well researched and lucidly written. What interests him is not really Berlin but Washington and Moscow; we learn little about life in the occupied city, but a great deal about the machinations of the two superpowers. In particular, Kempe is fascinated by the relationship between Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart, the wily, boorish Nikita Khrushchev, who told his colleagues that Berlin was the “testicles of the West”, and that he proposed to start squeezing.
Short, squat and buffoonish, the Soviet leader was seen at the time as the domineering master of the communist world. In fact, as Kempe demonstrates, the real driving force behind the Berlin Wall was Khrushchev’s East German client, the dour Stalinist Ulbricht. A pedantic ice-skating enthusiast who ordered his staff to “smooth the surface” of his private lake before he went out every morning, Ulbricht was desperate to stem the daily flood of refugees to the West. If the drain continued, he told Khrushchev at the beginning of 1961, “we would be faced with serious crisis manifestations.”
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Ulbricht’s demands left Khrushchev in a terrible dilemma. Closing the borders to West Berlin risked antagonising its American, British and French occupiers. But as Kempe shows, Khrushchev was lucky, for his chief adversary, Jack Kennedy, was raw and inexperienced. When the two men met in Vienna for the first time that summer, the youthful Kennedy cut a much more handsome figure. In private, however, the Soviet leader wiped the floor with him, lecturing him at length about the finer points of Marxist-Leninism and the urgent importance of the East Germans getting their way. “Worst thing in my life,” Kennedy told a reporter afterwards. “He just beat the hell out of me.” When he got home, sitting with his brother Robert in the White House, the president wept tears of tiredness and frustration.
All summer Kennedy’s aides argued about what he should do if the East Germans moved against Berlin. When the moment came, he sent his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, in a show of solidarity, as well as thousands of American troop reinforcements — but that was it. The truth was that he was relieved by the appearance of the wall. Far from increasing the tension, it defused it, by confirming the division of the city into two parts. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy remarked to an aide. “There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he planned to occupy the whole city… It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
But of course it was easy to say that in Washington; in Berlin, people felt differently. Perhaps the most haunting moment in Kempe’s book is the story of 19-year-old Hans Conrad Schumann, an East German border guard who, in a famous image captured by a news photographer, hurdled the barbed wire to safety in the west. Carried away by West German police, shaking with adrenaline, Schumann seemed to be one of the lucky ones. He settled in Bavaria and got married, yet decades later he admitted: “Only since November 9, 1989 have I felt truly free.” But even after reunification, he found it hard to see old friends and colleagues, and was even reluctant to visit his family. Nine years after the wall came down, Schumann killed himself. He was the last victim of Walter Ulbricht’s beloved barrier.
Out of his depth
When in June 1961 the recently elected President Kennedy met Nikita Khrushchev to discuss the Berlin crisis, the American’s performance was so poor that the Soviet leader actually felt pity for him. ‘I hadn’t meant to upset him,’ the Russian later recalled, slightly cheekily. ‘I felt bad about his disappointment...[but] politics is a merciless business.’
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Penguin £12.99/ebook £7.99 pp579, ST Bookshop price £10.39