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Holding on in Berlin: March 1948 and SED Efforts to Control the Soviet Zone
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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March 18, 1948 dawned cold and rainy in Berlin. Although the city government had proclaimed the hundredth anniversary of the 1848 revolution an official holiday, Berliners awoke to a day that seemed ill-made for personal or political celebrations. One century earlier, some nine hundred persons had died on Berlin's barricades, dramatically challenging the Prussian ancien regime but falling short of their aspirations for a free and unified Germany. After one hundred years that had seen only a brief interlude of tumultuous democracy between the world wars, competing forces in postwar Berlin both claimed the democratic legacy of those barricade battles in a new contest for the city. But that legacy proved difficult to control. For the Soviet-supported Socialist Unity Party (SED), Berlin represented at once the core of the party's expanding power and the greatest threat to its realization. Like the 1848 revolutionaries, the SED leadership in Berlin found the lines between victory and defeat decidedly blurred.
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References
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83 This fact served as one of the principal arguments of Volkskongress opponents as well. They argued that Germans' support of national unity was self-evident and did not require any artificial movement to express it. Paul Löbe (SPD) made this point in his speech on March 18, 1948. See Berlin (West Berlin) Landesarchiv, , Berlin. Behauptung von Freiheit und Selbstverwaltung, 434.Google Scholar
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94 Copy of British Statement on the “Volksbegehren” in Berlin, May 21, 1948, LAB, STA Rep. 101, Nr. 170.Bl. 2b.
95 Stenographisches Bericht der 11. (25.) Parteivorstandssitzung d. ZK der SED, June 29–30, 1948, SAPMO, DY 30/IV 2/1/48, Bl. 238. Some western officials challenged the validity of the count, claiming that they were able to sign signature lists multiple times without hindrance or asserting that signatures were gained under false pretenses (e.g., on a list of persons claiming their homes to be vermin free). For some of these critiques, see the discussion in the Stenographisches Bericht der 69. Sitzung der Stadtverordnetenversammlung, May 25, 1948, 24 ff.
96 See the City Assembly debate from April 29, 1948, Stenographisches Bericht der 66. Sitzung der Stadtverordnetenversammlung. Also, LAB, Rep. 280 (LAZ-Sammlung), Sta.-Ort. Nr. 8503/25.
97 Friedensburg letter to the Allied Kommandatura on the Volksbegehren decision, May 28, 1948, LAB, STA Rep. 101, Nr. 170, Bl. 2j–2k.
98 Andreas-Friedrich, Ruth, Battleground Berlin: Diaries 1945–194S, trans. Boerresen, Anna (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1990), 213.Google Scholar
99 “Heraus zur März-Demonstration,” LAB, Rep. 280 Sta.-Ort. Nr. 1230.
100 Weber, Hermann, Geschichte der DDR, rev. ed. (Munich: DTV, 1999), 41.Google Scholar
101 On the ways that the GDR's economic weakness undermined its claims to political legitimacy and expanded the leverage of East German workers, see Kopstein, Jeffrey, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945–1989 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar. On the ambiguous operation of control mechanisms in the GDR, see also the collection of essays in Jarausch, Konrad H., ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999)Google Scholar. On the GDR's stability, see, for example, Epstein, , The Last Revolutionaries, 7.Google Scholar
102 Thanks to my colleague Seth Koven for first suggesting this formulation.