‘Present at Disintegration’: The United States and German Unification

Abstract

To this day historians continue to debate the origins of Germany’s division after World War II, and whether or not it was the inevitable and logical consequence of the war itself, the product of communist intransigence or, as has recently been argued, the result of an ‘American decision’ to secure the more important Western part of the country against Soviet influence (Eisenberg, 1996). What they do not seem to question however is that once the country had been divided, there seemed to be little inclination thereafter to undo what had been done in the critical years between 1945 and 1949. Indeed, each time it looked as if the new status quo was under threat — as it certainly appeared to be in 1953 when workers rose up in the East, and then later in 1961 when East Germany began to haemorrhage badly — the Western powers appeared to be far more concerned to shore up the situation than to challenge it. Of course, as John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, there were a number of reasons why the main powers were unwilling or unable to reunite Germany, one being the logic of the superpower conflict itself (Gaddis, 1997: 113–51). However, there were also historical considerations. While Germany’s division could easily be explained and justified in terms of Cold War realities, policy-makers privately agreed that underlying their attachment to the new arrangement was a concern to prevent Germany rising up again and threatening the peace. Some policy-makers did not even bother to hide their true feelings, and at times influential Americans such as Dean Acheson, George Ball and Henry Kissinger openly conceded that Germany’s division and West Germany’s integration into NATO was the only basis upon which to build a new European order; and those like George Kennan who challenged this essential truth were simply utopian schemers with little understanding of the real world.