Bringing Cold War Democracy to West Berlin by Scott H. Krause

Author:Scott H. Krause
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

4 Triple crisis, 1953

In March 1953, Reuter made a second triumphal visit to the United States as West Berlin's mayor. President Eisenhower hailed him as a man of “great qualities” prepared to meet any future crisis, and the reception accorded to Reuter befitted the state leader of a crucial ally.1 Moreover, Reuter secured a further $600,000 in American aid from private sources. The continuing US commitment to West Berlin indicated that broad bipartisan support had carried over to the new administration. It seemed to confirm an assessment by Stone, who, drawing on his wartime experience on the Allied staff, had quipped on the prospects of a President Eisenhower: “the people are okay, but they don't speak so good.”2 Stone's optimism was grounded in the establishment of a Berlin Lobby in Washington, DC. Furthermore, when their tenures in the semi-sovereign Federal Republic ended during the summer of 1952, McCloy and Stone had transferred to prominent positions within the Ford Foundation – the largest philanthropic organization in the world – and would use these posts to direct attention and funds to West Berlin.3

In spite of the network's success in gaining the goodwill of the Republican administration, a crisis struck West Berlin a week after Reuter's return. On April 7, 1953, two staffers of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the US Senate's Government Operations Committee landed at Tempelhof Airport to obtain “a full and fair picture of [US] Government activities here.” Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, two of Senator Joseph McCarthy's most notorious henchmen, immediately targeted American members of the network, such as Stone's former deputy Theodore Kaghan.4 This “investigation” centered on the surprising political alliance between the US Federal Government and a nominally Marxist party at the focal point of the Cold War.

The contrast between international public celebrations of Reuter as an anti-Communist hero and McCarthy's witch-hunts in West Berlin exemplified two possible futures for the network. Whether these reformed socialists could control the political passions their messages had stoked or would be consumed by them became an open question. Yet, McCarthyism also gave the network an opportunity to prove its resilience. Two additional events tested the network later in the year. While McCarthy's staff targeted US officials in Berlin, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and East Berlin in particular, erupted in a popular uprising against the Communist regime on June 17, 1953. Then, the network's most visible remigré member, Ernst Reuter, passed away unexpectedly on September 29, triggering a leadership crisis that precipitated the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)'s brief loss of power in West Berlin.

This chapter charts the network's durability and the political utility of the Outpost of Freedom narrative in reacting to these three overlapping crises. Subsequently, it explores the impact of the uprising for the narrative and outlines the network's recurring exploitation of that narrative to shield itself from McCarthy's attacks. It then assesses the ramifications of Reuter's death, which temporarily stalled the network's political agenda of remaking West Berlin into a model that could guide reconfiguration of the political Left throughout the Federal Republic.

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