Berlin полностью

When Johnson flew back to Washington, General Clay stayed behind as Kennedy’s personal representative in the city. His presence was meant to demonstrate America’s resolve to protect West Berlin. Actually, his presence turned out to be almost too demonstrative. Clay was determined to show that the U.S. could still exercise its rights in Berlin despite the new wall. In late October 1961, when the East Germans demanded that American officials show their passports in order to enter East Berlin, Clay sent armed jeeps through Checkpoint Charlie with orders to display nothing but their firepower. On the evening of October 24, U.S. mission chief Allan Lightner was denied entry into East Berlin for not showing his passport. Clay dispatched troops to escort Lightner across the border. “If the Vopos had started shooting,” Lightner later wrote, “we would have had to kill all of them. . . . All hell would have broken loose.”

The next day all hell almost did break loose. When another group of Americans was stopped at Checkpoint Charlie, Clay came to the rescue with a phalanx of ten M-48 tanks. As might have been predicted, the Soviets responded in kind. Soon the M-48s stood muzzle to muzzle with Russian tanks, the first time in history that American and Soviet armor had ever confronted each other in anger. The tanks on both sides were fully loaded, ready to fire. The American commander on the spot worried that “a nervous soldier might accidentally discharge his weapon,” or some tanker might “step accidentally on his accelerator leading to a runaway tank.” After seventeen hours, while rumors circulated the globe that Berlin was about to become the flash point for World War III, word came from the Russian command to pull back. It seems that Kennedy, without telling Clay, had called on the Russians to remove their tanks in exchange for future “flexibility” on Berlin. Knowing that with Clay on the scene it would have been hard for the Americans to withdraw first, Khrushchev gave them a graceful way out.

Dean Rusk later dismissed this contretemps as “the silly confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie brought on by the macho inclinations of General Clay.” The gesture was certainly macho, but hardly without danger. Had one of those tanks opened fire, the other side would undoubtedly have fired back, and the wartime partners of yesteryear, who sixteen years before had embraced at the Elbe, would have found themselves in a slug-out on the Spree. The next step might well have been all-out war.

The Quarantined City

Instead of bringing war, the Berlin Wall helped to keep the Gold War cold. After it went up, the level of political tension in Europe went down. Berlin, which had been the chief site of contention between East and West since the end of World War II, became something of a backwater in the continuing standoff. The two halves of the divided city went their separate ways with considerably less world attention focused on them.

Although East Berlin did not have a wall around it, it too was isolated in important respects, for it was the capital of a country that (at least early on) the Western nations did not recognize, and its masters were determined to keep it as ideologically distinct from the West as possible. During the first two years after the Wall went up, West Berliners were barred from entering East Berlin altogether. Then, just before Christmas 1963, a complicated arrangement was instituted whereby West Berliners could secure passes for brief visits to East Berlin during the holiday season. As of September 1964 West Berliners could visit their relatives five times during the year. In the immediate post-Wall years East Berliners were allowed to go to the West only on official business. Eventually, pensioners were permitted to move West whenever they wished, since this conveniently shifted the burden of supporting them from the GDR to the Federal Republic.

Because the Berlin Wall removed the possibility of disgruntled GDR citizens fleeing en masse to the West, the Ulbricht government could more resolutely impose its vision of socialist progress on the remaining population. In 1963 the government introduced a “New Economic System of Planning and Leadership.” In addition to tightening economic centralization across the board, the plan foresaw extensive development in the field of robotics, which Ulbricht believed was the wave of the future. The SED government promised that the GDR would soon surpass the West in this domain, and in a futile effort to do so it cut spending on housing and consumer-goods production, which had been low to begin with. The money saved on basic consumer necessities, however, turned out to be insufficient to fund the drive for technological supremacy. Ulbricht was forced to go cap in hand to the Soviets for loans. This was not what the Russians had had in mind when they established their East German satellite.