Berlin полностью

In the area of foreign policy, Honecker’s regime began with a major change in Berlin’s legal status: the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin, negotiated by the four occupation powers in September 1971 and signed into law in June 1972. While not ending four-power control over the city, the agreement allowed Bonn to represent West Berlin in its external relations. At the same time, the Western powers tacitly recognized East Berlin as the capital of the GDR. (When Washington accorded diplomatic recognition to the GDR in 1974, it carefully described its embassy there as in and not to East Germany, and it characterized East Berlin as merely “the seat of the GDR government.”) Ancillary agreements guaranteed travel and communications between West Germany and West Berlin and stipulated that all future changes in Berlin’s status must be achieved through arbitration. Also in 1972, talks between the two Germanys yielded the Basic Treaty, which facilitated inter-German cooperation in such areas as telecommunications, waste disposal, pollution control, and postal services. The FRG and the GDR now formally acknowledged each other’s existence, though at the insistence of Bonn, which heretofore had refused to recognize any nation that recognized East Berlin, the mutual acceptance was qualified by the exchange of “permanent missions” rather than full-fledged embassies. Bonn was careful to stipulate that the GDR was a state within the German nation rather than a sovereign foreign nation. With respect to Berlin, the Basic Treaty established more liberal visiting privileges for West Berliners and West Germans wanting to pay visits to the other side of the Wall. Now they could spend up to thirty days a year in East Berlin, provided that they exchanged a certain sum of D-marks—five for West Berliners, ten for West Germans—each day they stayed. (On November 5, 1973, the required exchange went up to ten marks for West Berliners and twenty marks for West Germans.) Some telephone links between the two halves of the city were also restored. The Berlin Wall remained a formidable barrier, but it had developed a few cracks.

It soon transpired, however, that the “openness” touted by Honecker at the beginning of his rule hardly extended beyond such tentative liberalization measures. Indeed, even the modest opening to the West in the early 1970s represented a source of danger for Honecker, since his hopes for promoting the GDR as a fully sovereign state depended in part on the cultivation of a unique East German identity. Bonn’s leaders might speak of common German values, but Honecker adopted a policy of ideological apartheid he called Abgrenzung. In addition to cracking down on free discussion and artistic expression (about which more below), his regime sought to generate a sense of East German patriotism that might be strong enough to withstand the pressures of increased exposure to Western influences.

Manipulation of history played an important role in this endeavor. Previously the SED regime had eschewed building many bridges to the German past, insisting that the new socialist state represented an abrupt and necessary departure from tainted traditions. In the main, only working-class heroes and martyred Communists had been acceptable as historical models. Under Honecker, however, the state asserted its claim to a host of figures, institutions, and political legacies that heretofore had earned nothing but socialist scorn. Martin Luther, for example, suddenly went from being a lackey of princes to a social rebel and precursor of Marx. Luther’s rehabilitation facilitated overtures to the Evangelical (Protestant) Church, which had been rigorously suppressed under Ulbricht. By mending fences with the Evangelical Church, the regime sought to harness its considerable influence and to use it as an agent of social control. The great Protestant composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, was rehabilitated as a musician of the people, while Goethe was found to have championed positive social change. (The GDR regime became so enamored of Goethe that in 1970 it ordered a team of scientists to exhume and inspect his body, in the hope that it might be displayed in a glass case as a poet-saint of the people. The remains proved to be in such bad shape, however, that the scientists simply cleaned up the bones, coated them with chemicals, and returned them to their crypt in Weimar. Needless to say, this creepy operation was conducted in the greatest secrecy.)