20th Century and Germany

Change Through Rapprochement

Egon Bahr's concept of "change through rapprochement" never really had prospects for success as the subsequent years showed and as hindsight, which always sees 20/20, indicates. The Communist case for "demarcation" for instance, reiterated in 1971, and the petition for an exit visa, written by the actor Manfred Krug in 1977, both showed that East and West Germany were moving in two diametrically opposed directions. Neither was willing to yield an inch and both proscribed certain thoughts and actions -- thought crimes, so to speak, for which Krug paid a price in 1977 (having lost a number of jobs because of a letter signed to protest the banishment of a friend). East and West Germany were also symbolic of the greater forces at work in the world -- the forces pulling and pushing and vying for power in the latter half of the 20th century -- Soviets on one side, and the U.S. on the other. The Cold War was raging red hot and whatever optimistic "change through rapprochement" existed in July of 1963 died in November of that same year when U.S. President Kennedy was assassinated in the cold light of day before a crowd of Texans. Kennedy had signaled rapprochement directly with Khrushchev and averted a crisis building in Cuba. Kennedy's death signaled that the deeper levers of the State would not allow such rapprochement to go forward. Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush -- never was rapprochement anywhere near their policies (even when they tried to get it there -- as Carter did, for example, when he sought peace in the Middle East). Change would only really come when the Soviet Union would fall under the weight of its own corruption and the machinations of Western powers.

When Egon Bahr noted that "the American strategy for peace can also be defined by the formula that Communist rule should be changed, not eliminated" he was essentially revealing the wordplay that the West has come to be known for: doublespeak to use a term invented by one of the 20th century's most politically spot-on novelists. The "change" that the U.S. wanted was subversion -- and the CIA was readily engaged in exactly that type of operation thanks to the Marshall Plan's bottomless purse, opened for the Intelligence agency's covert operations and fronts, like Radio Free Europe. In truth, there was no hope for rapprochement. The East knew it as well as the West, and Bahr's call for cooperation, while idealistic and even logical in many ways, was not part of the zero-sum game that the West had been playing for the whole of the 20th century and still plays today. As the East discovered the West's aims (particularly noting the escalation of conflicts as in Vietnam and elsewhere), it saw that a line (or wall) between the two had to be maintained as there could be no real political, social or economic cooperation so long as they were pursuing separate goals.