Iron Curtain (41 page)

Grotewohl, like the social democrat
Cyrankiewicz in Poland, might also have realized that if he played along, there was a good chance he would wind up with a top job (as indeed he eventually did: from 1949 until his death in 1964, he was prime minister of the GDR). Whether inspired by fear or opportunism, or both, he agreed to the unification. At a special unification congress
on April 21 and 22, 1946, the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) was born. “Not a one-party system, but the consolidation of a united antifascist democratic front,” wrote
Neues Deutschland
, the communist party newspaper. “Next to this party, which represents millions, there will be, in the long run, no room for any splinter groups.” In her diary, Andreas-Friedrich acidly summarized this statement: “Not a one-party system, but, on the other hand, no room for any other parties.”
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Although Grotewohl caved in under pressure, not all of his party followed. During a tumultuous meeting of the Berlin social democrats, Grotewohl was shouted down with cries of “Lackey!” or “We don’t want a forced unification! We won’t let ourselves be raped” and more:

More than 80 percent of the Berlin social democrats voted against unification with the communist party, a vote that left both parties in an extremely odd position. Although it had ceased to exist in most of eastern
Germany, the Social Democratic Party in the city of Berlin remained a major force. Not only that, the
Berlin SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) had become radically anticommunist, maintaining close ties to the equally anticommunist western SPD.
Kurt Schumacher opened an “Eastern Office” (Ostbüro) to aid eastern social democrats under
Soviet pressure.
Ulbricht railed against Schumacher in lengthy speeches, calling him a “reactionary force” who promoted a “policy of division.”
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Against this background, the first postwar German election campaign, launched in September 1946, proved a curious spectacle. From the beginning, the Soviet military administration and its propaganda division, led by Colonel Tyulpanov, planned the campaign with great precision. “All of the SED’s decisions,” Tyulpanov declared, “must be agreed upon by the leadership of the Soviet Military Administration.” Tyulpanov persuaded higher officials to
suspend temporarily the reparations program, to increase the supply of raw materials to the zone, and even to increase food rations for children, babies, and pregnant women.
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Though initially skeptical of the political talents of their
German allies, the Soviet military administration began to feel more confident of victory by late summer. With unlimited access to paper, the German communists, like the Polish communists, printed hundreds of thousands of posters and more than a million leaflets. Other parties had to fight to get any paper at all. The SED used deliberately anodyne slogans—“Unity, Peace, and Socialism!” or “Unified Germany: Securing our Future!”—and avoided the word “communism,” as well as any references to the USSR. Across the five provinces of the Russian zone, Soviet officials also campaigned openly on the SED’s behalf. In some regions, local commanders reserved the right to promote or veto specific candidates, and to approve or disapprove of electoral rallies.
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Even so, the result was far from reassuring. The SED failed to win majorities at the regional level and would be forced to share power with the “bourgeois” Christian democrats and liberal democrats. In Berlin, where the social democrats campaigned separately from the “unified” SED—and where elections were held simultaneously in both the eastern and western halves of the city—the results were catastrophic. The social democrats won decisively, with 43 percent of the vote in the Soviet sector and 49 percent overall. The SED managed only 19.8 percent overall, even falling behind the Christian democrats, who won 22.2 percent.
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The party tried to put a positive slant on the results. The headline of
Neues Deutschland
declared the “Great Election Victory of SED in the Zone.” But behind the scenes the leadership was disappointed and the Russians were furious. In Moscow, the Soviet leadership debated a policy change and considered removing Tyulpanov. In the Red Army’s Karlshorst headquarters, some even expressed doubts that democracy could be “created only through the bayonet” and advocated a more liberal policy.
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Instead of liberalizing, the Soviet military administration cracked down. One of the people who felt that pressure was
Ernst Benda. In 1946, Benda was a law student at Humboldt University in
East Berlin and the chairman of the students’ association of the Christian Democratic Party (Christlich Demokratische Union, or CDU). Christian democracy seemed to him an obvious choice at the time: “After the experience we had with the Nazi regime it was necessary to become active in politics and to bring your religious
personal convictions into politics, to try to form politics according to what you believe in.”
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The party gave Benda a small office at its headquarters on Jägerstraße, close to the university, where he was able to listen to the party leaders’ internal debates. At the time, the CDU was divided between a strongly “pro-Western” and anti-Soviet faction, led by
Konrad Adenauer in the West, and another group, led by
Jakob Kaiser in the East, whose members believed that it was still possible to find a compromise between East and West and thereby avoid the permanent division of Germany. There was nothing “conservative” about the party in the contemporary sense: “If you looked at the party platform [of the
East Berlin CDU] today,” Benda explained in 2008, “it would be to the left of the left.”

Yet even Benda’s left-wing Christian democracy—at the time he advocated the creation of a welfare state and some centralization of the economy, along with private business and enterprise—led him into conflict with the communists at the university. He objected when, on the occasion of a communist party meeting in 1947, the university was draped in red flags, and, in conjunction with other activists, produced leaflets demanding to know where they were meant to be studying, “Humboldt University, or Higher Party School?” The majority of the student council—which split along party lines roughly similar to those in greater Berlin—cooperated with Benda and his CDU friends. “It is not important which party you vote for, it is more important which party you don’t vote for,” Benda told a university election rally at that time. “And everybody understood what I meant by this … You were either for or against the communists. If you were against them, it was not important whether you were a social democrat, a Christian democrat, or anything else.”

As 1947 turned into 1948, these kinds of protests took place with ever greater frequency. They were also met with greater repression.
Manfred Klein, the CDU leader who had tried to cooperate with the
Free German Youth leaders, had already been arrested by the spring of 1947, and protests at the universities of
Rostock, Jena, and
Leipzig led to more arrests. Another student leader,
Arno Esch, was ultimately sentenced to death by a Soviet military tribunal.
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The crackdown took a little bit longer to get under way in Berlin—the eastern half of the city was still being watched carefully by its western counterpart—but it finally came.
Paul Wandel, the rector of Humboldt University and a long-standing communist, expelled three leading
student activists. The student council, which was still led by a noncommunist majority, voted to go on strike.

The end, for both Benda and the eastern Christian democrats, came soon afterward:

Benda hung up the phone, left the office, and went immediately to the subway station—not to Friedrichstraße, where his colleague had just been arrested, but to Kochstraße, another border crossing. After a few minutes he had entered into the American zone. He did not return to East Berlin for forty years.
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By the end of 1947, Mikołajczyk had escaped from Poland and was living in Britain. Nagy was in exile, on his way to the United States.
Jakob Kaiser had resigned as the leader of the Christian Democratic Party in the Soviet zone of Germany and would soon leave, along with Benda and many other colleagues, for West Berlin. Less than three years had elapsed since the end of the war, but almost all organized, legal opposition to the communist regimes had now been eliminated. Often 1948—the year of the Berlin blockade—is said to mark the
beginning of the Cold War as well as the onset of “Stalinism” in Central Europe. But the Stalinization—or Sovietization, or totalitarianization—of
Eastern Europe was already far advanced well before 1948 began.

By the autumn of 1947, Stalin had also stopped pretending to the outside
world that he would adhere to the language of the Yalta treaty. During the war, he had shut
down the Comintern as a gesture of goodwill to the Western Allies. Now he created a new organization—the
Communist Information Bureau, or
Cominform—in part as a gesture of aggression toward those same Allies.

Although there had been some loose talk of re-creating an international body of “revolutionary” communist parties, the immediate impetus for the creation of the Cominform was the news that President Truman and his secretary of state,
General George C. Marshall, were launching a plan to help rebuild Europe’s economies with large investments and big credits. In his 1947 Truman Doctrine speech, Truman had declared that “the seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want.” The end result of that thought was the Marshall Plan, a generous fund for European recovery. Proposed in June 1947, the Marshall Plan was intended to rebuild European economies and—depending on your point of view—either help fend off the threat of communist revolution or help entrench Western capitalism. Writing at the time, one American advocate declared that “The Plan will create an economic environment in Europe favorable for the growth and development of democratic processes and economic prosperity.” More to the point, the plan can “prevent a breakdown of the political and economic structure of Europe,” and thus lower the chances of communist revolutions in Western Europe, which at the time were believed to be a real threat.
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At first, the Soviet Union was utterly flummoxed by the Marshall Plan. When the program was announced, the Polish government, desperate to join, immediately requested guidance from Moscow. Molotov replied that as yet he had no information on the matter.
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The Yugoslav government’s instinct was to refuse, but it wrote to Moscow for advice as well.
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Meanwhile, the Czechoslovak government—under the impression that it had a choice—voted to accept the offer and to attend a Marshall Aid conference in Paris. Stalin summoned
Klement Gottwald, the
Czechoslovak communist party boss, and
Jan Masaryk, the noncommunist Czech foreign minister, to Moscow. He told them that the Americans were “trying to form a Western bloc and to isolate the Soviet Union” and they were to have no part of it. Bluntly, he ordered them to withdraw from the meeting: “It is necessary for you to cancel your participation in the Paris conference
today
—that is, June 10, 1947.” They did.
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The Cominform was Stalin’s response to Truman’s challenge. Symbolically,
the institution would solidify “his” bloc, enabling its members to better respond to “propaganda” from the West in the future. With its creation, the notion of a uniquely “Polish”—or German, or Czech, or Hungarian—path to communism was to be eliminated. All of the world’s important communist parties were to adopt a single line, in Eastern Europe and in the West. Ten communist parties were invited to join, from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland,
Romania, the USSR, and Yugoslavia; Western parties from France,
Italy, and the
“Free Territory of Trieste” (at the time a disputed territory, eventually divided between Italy and Yugoslavia) joined as well.

Not all of those present at the organization’s first meeting in September 1947, in the Polish mountain resort of Szklarska Poręba, seemed aware of its purpose. Gomułka, the forum’s Polish host, emphasized the “informal nature of the meeting” in his first speech and spoke naïvely of “the need for exchange of experiences between the Communist Parties.” But there were no exchanges of experience. Instead, the
Soviet delegation took over and imposed its agenda.
Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s culture boss, made a thundering speech in which he spoke of the “new alignment of forces,” the “formation of two camps,” and the “American plan for the enslavement of Europe.” Finally, he provided the group with its draft resolution, which starkly described a Europe divided between “the policy of the USSR” and its allies on the one hand, which was “aimed at undermining imperialism and strengthening democracy,” and “the policy of the USA and Britain, aimed at strengthening imperialism and strangling democracy” on the other.
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