After 1945 by Gumbrecht Hans;

Author:Gumbrecht, Hans;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

DERAILMENT AND CONTAINERS

On june 24, 1948—in retaliation against the introduction of a new currency, four days earlier, in the three zones occupied by Western powers—Josef Stalin blocked all traffic and transport (whether by road or rail) to Berlin. From today’s perspective, the decision appears to have marked the beginning of the country’s partition, which lasted until 1989. However, Stalin did not take the drastic measure for this reason. Probably counter to what he and other decision-making parties had in mind, the action derailed Communist strategy.

If, beginning in the early months of that year, the Allies and other European nations had entertained the possibility of a separate West German state, it seems the Soviet Union held fast to the ideological assumption that proletarian revolution would continue; this would mean that Germany as a whole was to become a socialist nation (a development had been taken for granted from the time of Lenin on). As late as August 15, 1948, the Soviet government offered to suspend the Berlin blockade if a joint currency were launched—and all plans involving a West German state abandoned. Whereas the United States, Great Britain, and France were open to negotiations about a shared economy, they now believed that no alternative to separate states existed. After some initial hesitation on the part of the U.S., three air bridges were struck between West Germany and Berlin, with more than two thousand flights daily. The operation, which was masterminded by General Lucius D. Clay and executed by the American and British air forces, functioned so efficiently that the Soviets lost the power to gamble politically by annexing Berlin’s Western sectors. Instead of preserving the option of a German state united under socialism, the Western allies’ experience of strength led them to eliminate this possibility for good. This outcome was precisely what Stalin had wanted to avoid.

In the former British colonies of Palestine and India, the opposite political strategy underwent a similar derailment. Here, the colonial power in retreat had intended to avoid political tensions that were religiously motivated—and might lead to civil war—by means of partition. Before national independence was granted, they would create an Indian State and a Pakistani State, a Jewish Israeli State and a Muslim Palestine State. However, such prophylactic partitions generated more intolerance of—and aggression toward—minority groups who remained where they did not “belong” than ever before. At the same time, it seems that the Muslim minorities in India and Israel proved more sensitive to new pressures from the majority than previously (that is, before conditions of “diaspora” were enacted). In both cases, an initial strategy meant to promote peace created potential theaters of war that have continued, up to the present day, to be neuralgic zones of world politics.

The Left, in particular, discovered that excessive adherence to specific political goals and plans often entailed this kind of derailment. The experience provides a leitmotif of the narrative in Giovanni Guareschi’s Don Camillo and Peppone, which tells of the struggles (and secret friendship) between the Communist mayor of a village in Northern Italy and the resident Catholic priest, after the war.

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