Cold War Berlin, 1948–61: A People's Crisis?

“Cold War Berlin, 1952-61: A People’s Crisis?” will draw on evocative oral histories, petitions, and “mood reports” to tell the stories of friction and daily interaction on the GDR border in the 1950s.  The open border before 1961 permitted individual East Germans to challenge the local authorities with the implicit threat of defection.  Moreover, over 50,000 East Berliners and East Germans, and over 10,000 West Berliners chose to make the best of both worlds economically, becoming Grenzgänger or ‘border crossers’, Cold War commuters in search of both consumer capitalism and socialist subsidy.  For kicks, young Berliners from both sides romanticized the dangers of the border.  Against the background of these holes in the iron curtain, communist diplomatic brinkmanship sought to stabilize East Germany domestically, but often achieved the opposite: the late-Stalinist ‘building of socialism’ and closure of the inner German border in 1952 caused massive insurrectionary discontent in 1953.  By the same token, the ensuing liberalization, including travel freedoms, created a brain drain which threatened the GDR’s economic foundations. The second Berlin Crisis beginning in 1958 was therefore designed as much to solve internal as international problems, and the ultimate solution – the Berlin Wall – was a tacit admission of this ‘people’s crisis’.  The paper attempts to connect higher-level decision-making, particularly by the East German leadership, with the social realities of building socialism in half a country.  It will also ask whether the very real threat of nuclear war which emerged at the height of the second Berlin crisis created a form of hostage syndrome among East Berliners, keen not to escalate the situation, while activist West Berliners who attacked the new Berlin Wall had to be restrained by police on both sides in the interests of peaceful coexistence.