In Review:
The Fall of the Berlin Wall, by William F. Buckley,
Jr.
(John Wiley & Sons, 212 pages, $19.95)
Right around the corner as you make your way through the front
door of the Spectator’s Arlington offices is a brown
particleboard bookcase. Its function is to display the last year or
so’s worth of magazines so that staff can quickly get at back
issues. A few times a week, I find myself in front of this
bookcase, thumbing through issues of this unwonted publication. I
sometimes pause, mid-pageturn, to eyeball a curious artifact on the
fourth shelf from the top. Inside a Plexiglas container rests a
chunk of mortar mixed with brick about the size of a mandarin
orange. A length of rusted over barbed wire runs from one end of
the plastic case to the other — for effect, I think. A small typed
notice advertises this as a piece of what used to be the Berlin
Wall.
William F. Buckley’s new book is intended as a history of that
wall, from its conception as a way for the Soviet Union to staunch
the flow of East German refugees and East Europeans generally, who
preferred freedom over purges and famines, to its audacious
construction in the late summer of 1961 to its collapse, at the
hands of thousands of ordinary Germans on both sides of the divide,
in 1989. It was the last Great Moment in European history.
But of course some truly dark moments preceded its dismantling.
On the evening of August 12, 1961, officers of the East German army
sealed off what had been lenient, almost Canadian-like check
points, and began stringing the barbed wire. Over the next several
days, they finished the outline of what would be built into a wall
13 feet high with dogs, guard towers, and a “dead zone,” the space
in which many a person was shot and left to bleed to death while
making a break for it.
We know now that the East German forces were under strict orders
from the Kremlin: (a) by all means, lay down the wire; but (b) if
the Western forces advance, cease construction and fall back —
under no circumstances were they to fire the first shot. But the
three other Western nations in charge of Berlin after the Second
World War (the U.S., England, and France) didn’t know of these
orders, were caught entirely off guard by the closure, and, in the
confusion, didn’t wish to risk a hot war with the cold-blooded,
shoe-pounding Nikita Khrushchev.
As a consequence, the wall was bluffed into existence by madmen
holding a pair of two’s. Buckley relates the story of the
nightclubbers in West Berlin who filed out onto the streets to see
“militiamen with jackhammers and crowbars [tearing] up the paving
stones on major streets, making them impassable by ordinary
vehicles,” while others unrolled the wires, guarded by officers
with tommy guns. Wait till the Americans get here! taunted
some of the braver bar hoppers, who were soon to be
disappointed.
The U.S. did indeed dispatch Gen. Lucius Clay, the man who had
engineered the Berlin airlift in 1948 and saved the city from being
swallowed whole by the Soviet Union, and he began to live up to his
reputation. Clay walked into East Germany himself and, on a few
occasions, marched troops and civilians in and out of the border
stations, in effect taunting the Soviets and the East German
satellite government. This defiant spirit was not, alas, the
decisive one. For reasons of expedience and geopolitics, the U.S.
government soon accepted the wall as an unbreachable barrier, the
Iron Curtain set in stone.
John F. Kennedy comes off particularly bad in this tale of woe.
The youthful president might have cut a dashing figure and wowed
the Europeans with his style and rhetoric, but he proved to be
weak, distracted, and ultimately a poor decision maker. In foreign
policy, his administration seems almost an inversion of what should
have been. The hawks won the fights that they should’ve lost (send
armed insurgents into Cuba, start feeling out Vietnam) and the
doves had a habit of yanking defeat out of an easy victory’s jaws
(don’t provide air support, accept a Soviet presence in Cuba so
long as they don’t have nukes, don’t risk a confrontation over the
partition of Berlin).
In the first few days of construction, tanks could have rolled
over the barbed wire and reasserted international law, codified
under the Four Powers Agreements, that England, France, and the
U.S. were to have a say in all of Berlin, not just the West. But
the U.S. government under JFK’s leadership made crystal clear that
it “was not going to choose this time and place to pay any price,
bear any burden.”
FOR A BOOK titled The Fall of the Berlin Wall, I expected
more about, well, the actual physical fall of the Berlin Wall. The
penultimate chapter “The Wall Came Tumbling Down” does give a rough
sketch of how it happened. Riots and protests all over the Soviet
satellite nations forced changes in the respective regimes, include
a shuffling of the leadership deck, and the new leaders proved more
liberal than their predecessors.
At a press conference on the night of November 9, 1989, East
German party chief Günter Schabowski announced that freedom of
movement had been reinstated. The Volk took to the streets in
celebration. By midnight, hundreds of Germans were dancing atop the
Brandenburg Gate. The next day “hundreds of Berliners, West and
East, were there with real chisels and claw hammers and
screwdrivers and sledgehammers to pry loose their own piece of the
wall.” These being Germans, they made quick work of it.
The physical destruction of the wall is related in rapid fire
fashion — less than three pages, all told — because it was almost
anticlimactic, and because Buckley has bigger fish to harpoon. The
inflexible ideology that built the wall and kept it in place began
to tumble long before it did. Granted, the West gave Karl Marx’s
legacy the decisive push, but it was already teetering and frail,
straining under the weight of its own inhumanity.
