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Review of:

Der Mauerbau: Die Westmächte und Adenauer in der Berlinkrise 1958-1963 [The Building of the Wall: The Western Powers and Adenauer in the Berlin Crisis, 1958-1963] by Rolf Steininger
Olzog Verlag, Munich, 2001
Pages: 411. Euro 18.50

Reviewed By: John A. Moses
Reviewed in: Australian Journal of Politics and History
Date accepted online: 21/04/2004
Published in print: Volume 50, Issue 1, Pages 123-154
See all reviews for this journal

Book Reviews

Rolf Steininger is one of the leading German authorities on Germany and the Cold War. The present work focuses on the background and development of the Cold War crisis that led to the building of the Berlin Wall, an episode that characterised even more than the Berlin Blockade of 1948 the explosive potential of Soviet foreign policy. Until now, no scholar has been able to evaluate the records housed in the relevant archives in London, Washington and Bonn. Steininger has accomplished this in exemplary fashion using as well the full range of memoirs of the key protagonists now available. As head of the department of contemporary history at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Steininger has carved out a reputation for prodigious productivity.

Consequently, one learns in considerable detail what the essential concerns of the Cold War protagonists were concerning the "German Question", as it was crystallised in the unique problem posed by Berlin. The dynamics were infinitely complicated by the fact that the three Western powers themselves were by no means of one mind on the issue of German unification, while the Soviets would only consider such a development if the new unified Germany were guaranteed to be strictly neutral. In the prevailing circumstances such a situation was illusory. Adenauer's Germany was always committed to the West, certainly if Charles de Gaulle could be relied upon to cancel out the influence of the "Anglo-Saxons".

Above all, though, the Russians needed to stabilize the GDR as the lynch pin of their cordon sanitaire against the West, and that became especially acute when West Germany was permitted to re-arm at the time of the Korean War. The Soviets became acutely concerned at the prospect of West Germany also gaining a nuclear capability, something that filled the Kremlin with intense anxiety: former Nazi officers with their finger on a nuclear trigger! The British, too, under Harold Macmillan, never really wanted German re-unification at any price. In this regard there existed a permanent informal nexus between Moscow and London on the German Question. The French played an equally deceptive role. On the one hand de Gaulle played upon the Franco-West-German new found fraternity while on the other France was terrified of the puissance économique d'Allemagne. US priorities were always determined by George Kennan's concept of containment, obstructing Soviet expansionism wherever it raised its ugly head. And what of Adenauer? He would never accede to a reunification if it meant permanent German neutrality, read: isolation from the West. The Roman Catholic Chancellor cultivated a profound distrust and horror of the brutalities of atheistic communism.

Steininger has meticulously unravelled and interpreted the dynamics of the Cold War in so far as its key prize was concerned. In retrospect it seems abundantly clear why the Soviets erected the wall and why the Western allies did effectively nothing to prevent it. Clearly, with the horrors of the Second World War still alive in the mind of all the statesmen involved, no one in the West was going to sacrifice the bones of one private soldier in the cause of German re-unification. Significantly, it had to wait until both the Soviet Union and its German client state the GDR, alongside all the other Soviet bloc states, finally and inexorably imploded. Our understanding of that phase of the Cold War during which time Soviet policy held the West in thrall has been greatly enhanced by Rolf Steininger. It took a lot of time and several summit conferences for the Powers involved to come to grips with the "new realities" in and around Germany and Europe. The erection of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 merely documented those realities. As indicated, the pre-condition for the solution of the Berlin problem and German re-unification was the implosion of the Soviet imperium which was dramatised on international television by the tearing down of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989.