On October 3, 1957, West Berlin's Abgeordnetenhaus (House of Representatives) elected an ambitious, forty-three-year-old Social Democrat as governing mayor. Willy Brandt's election was remarkable for at least three reasons. First, a “remigré” who had returned to Berlin ten years earlier from exile in Norway and Sweden now governed two-thirds of the former German capital.Footnote 1 Second, the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize recipient for his Neue Ostpolitik (New Eastern Policy)—the West German version of détente—had originally emerged as an ardent Cold Warrior in West Berlin and in the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Third, this former press attaché at the Norwegian Military Mission succeeded against a party machine that revered SPD chair Franz Neumann, who had defended the party's independence against Soviet encroachment in the immediate postwar era.
In the context of the Cold War and the U.S. occupation in Berlin, these three factors helped, in fact, to explain Brandt's unlikely political rise. His years in exile and his subsequent anti-communism made him attractive to Berlin voters and to the American occupiers alike. Moreover, Brandt's 1957 election capped a decade-long German-American project of adapting Social Democracy to the exigencies of the Cold War. Before Brandt put the Federal Republic's relations to its Eastern neighbors on new footing, he accrued the political capital to do so by pioneering a Neue Westpolitik in Berlin. Most notably, Brandt and his allies within the Berlin SPD anticipated the federal party's 1959 Bad Godesberger Program that redefined the SPD as a left-of-center, big-tent party by replacing Marxist theory with anti-communist passion and by calling for a close alliance with the United States.
The network responsible for this had formed in war-torn Berlin, but was derived from friendships forged in wartime New York City. Driven by a shared struggle against National Socialism in the past and resistance to Communist policies in the present, Social Democratic remigrés and liberal U.S. occupation officers promoted, for political gain, the narrative of West Berlin as a heroic “outpost of freedom,” in the words of Ernst Reuter, the mayor of West Berlin from 1948 to 1953.Footnote 2 The goals of the network were twofold: to brandish this narrative as a weapon against the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and its Soviet ally in East Berlin, and to use it against political rivals in the SPD in Berlin and in the Federal Republic. Interpreting East Berlin's political agenda as a totalitarian threat, prominent remigrés such as Reuter and Brandt, as well as their public relations director Hans Hirschfeld and Marshall Plan coordinator Paul Hertz, sought to create an anti-communist political left closely allied with U.S. foreign policy. This stood in direct opposition to Franz Neumann and Kurt Schumacher, the chair of the West German SPD, but it was backed by the Public Affairs Division of the U.S. High Commissioner to Germany (HICOG), led by Shepard Stone. HICOG Public Affairs discreetly supported the Berlin SPD remigrés in what became one of postwar Germany's most bitter internal party feuds.
The following discussion examines this German-American campaign for control over the Berlin SPD. It illustrates the network's wartime roots in exile, as well as its supporting media campaigns, clandestine funding, and ongoing efforts to groom Berlin's western sectors as a showcase of liberal democracy. The historiographical aims of this article are threefold: to reassess the role of remigrés in postwar German history as a powerful faction that deserves more systematic scholarly attention; to highlight the resources of U.S. political patronage networks during the opening stages of the Cold War in the nascent Federal Republic; and, finally, to offer a fresh perspective on West Berlin as an alternative laboratory for German democratization.
The Cold War left the Berlin SPD divided over its political priorities. It was in this context that a remigré faction led first by Reuter and later by Brandt confronted Franz Neumann and his political allies, the so-called Keulenriege (“clubs' squad”). For a decade, from the 1948 Berlin airlift until 1958, when newly elected Mayor Brandt succeeded Neumann as SPD chairman, both sides clashed over the relationship of the SPD in Berlin to the United States and its Western alliance. Committed anti-communists in their own right, Neumann's Keulenriege vocally supported the priority Schumacher had given to German unity over a clear commitment to the West during the early Cold War. Having endured the horrors of Nazi concentration camps firsthand (as had Schumacher), Neumann wanted to pick up where Weimar's most progressive social policies had left off.Footnote 3 Remigrés were willing, in contrast, to trade Berlin's postwar single-payer health care system for the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) and the federal subsidies it guaranteed. Moreover, the experience of exile had given remigrés a new appreciation of the civil rights proclaimed in liberal democracies and had made moot many aspirations of the Weimar era, such as the nationalization of industries.Footnote 4 Modification of the SPD's Weimar program thus became a major plank for the remigrés, as Brandt argued tartly in his unsuccessful 1954 bid to succeed Neumann as Berlin SPD chairman: “Where experience leads us to identify dogmatic calcification, we are well-advised to eliminate it without any false sentimentality.”Footnote 5 For these remigrés, the best opportunity to implement their agenda was to embrace West Berlin's self-representation as an “outpost of freedom” in the Cold War, extolling the virtues of Western liberal democracy.
The confrontation between remigrés and the Keulenriege over control of West Berlin's dominant political party was fought in newspaper columns and broadcasts as much as at party meetings. Neumann and his allies pioneered what would become the tactic of choice against Brandt for decades to come: dropping veiled accusations to media outlets accusing Brandt of alleged leftwing radicalism during his years in exile.Footnote 6 But Brandt's journalistic allies countered with media tactics of their own. Leading up to the decisive mayoral election of 1957, for example, U.S.-controlled Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) aired a guest commentary contending that Brandt “had been attacked by Franz Neumann . . . just like Ernst Reuter and Otto Suhr [had been]. Franz Neumann has to search his soul and consider how much he has contributed to the decline of these men.” Stopping just short of implicating Neumann for the sudden deaths of Mayor Reuter and Mayor Suhr while still in office, the commentator described the Keulenriege using Nazi jargon: “It is about time to break through the phalanx of Alte Kämpfer,” the commentator advised, making reference to the earliest members of the Nazi Party (NSDAP): “Berlin needs new men indeed, but no Neumänner.”Footnote 7
As the RIAS commentary suggests, American authorities in Berlin actively supported the remigré faction. Reuter, Brandt, and Hirschfeld in particular had attracted the support of key U.S. personnel such as Shepard Stone, who also controlled RIAS and who served as HICOG's director of Public Affairs from 1949 to 1952.Footnote 8 Neumann had strong anti-communist credentials—first earned when he opposed a 1946 Soviet-sponsored communist attempt to absorb the SPD into the SED in Berlin.Footnote 9 But the remigré experience of exile during the Third Reich vouched as well for their democratic convictions and compatibility with U.S. Cold War interests. Reuter shrewdly offered American authorities an attractive alternative to Neumann: as mayor during the Soviet blockade of 1948–1949, Reuter had memorably depicted the supply of Berlin's western sectors by air as a defense of an “outpost of freedom” against a “force of darkness.”Footnote 10 Such rhetoric drew admiration from Berlin, West Germany, and the United States at the start of the Cold War. The Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) subsequently organized Reuter's triumphal tour across the United States in March and April 1949 to capitalize upon the moment.Footnote 11 For OMGUS and its successor, HICOG, the potential rewards for the success of Reuter's remigré faction had larger ramifications: the advocacy by Social Democrats of a close alliance with the United States at the flash point of the Cold War, i.e., in Berlin, would offer a strong alternative to Schumacher's rejection of German integration with the West.
Over the past two decades, scholars have brought to our attention the persistence of NSDAP alumni networks in the bureaucracies of the Federal Republic.Footnote 12 The Berlin SPD's postwar history offers instead an important case study of the political clout enjoyed by those who had resisted absorption by the Nazi regime. Although Willy Brandt has served as the most prominent example of the “particular success” of remigrés in the SPD, the role of such networks and their success have remained desiderata, and their transatlantic dimension has been largely neglected.Footnote 13 In fact, the reliance of the Berlin Social Democratic remigrés on American support illustrates the political clout of Stone's sprawling network of contacts.Footnote 14 Recent literature on West Berlin's fraught political culture is strikingly scant—a consequence, in part, of remigré expertise in advancing their interpretation of West Berlin as a heroic “outpost of freedom” in the Cold War. The fact that a 2009 survey on West Berlin's history reiterated the remigré narrative of German-American bonding as a result of the heroic Berlin airlift illustrates the enduring success of this narrative, which eclipsed the many challenges these remigrés faced.Footnote 15 Despite Brandt's stature as an icon of Social Democracy, attention to his years in postwar Berlin—where he first held an elected office—has been equally sparse. His biographer, Peter Merseburger, sought to reconcile Brandt's years as a Cold Warrior in Berlin with his political reputation for bipartisanship, whereas others, most notably Brandt himself, glossed over them.Footnote 16 Archival sources suggest that, far from being out of character, his behavior maximized the opportunities offered in Berlin, closely linking his political rise with the peculiar Cold War politics of West Berlin.
Formative Experiences in Exile and the Remigrés' Return to Berlin
The nucleus of the German-American network can be traced to wartime New York City. On March 7, 1941, Hans E. Hirschfeld and his family arrived by boat in the city's harbor, ending a harrowing years-long flight from the Nazis.Footnote 17 Hirschfeld had previously coordinated Prussia's state press policy during the Weimar era; as a staunch Social Democrat, he had mounted a vigorous journalistic defense of the Weimar Republic in press and radio broadcasts.Footnote 18 Targeted by the Nazis, he fled to Switzerland via Czechoslovakia in 1933 and was subsequently stripped of his German citizenship. After being denied residency by Swiss authorities, he found refuge in Basel's Alsatian suburb St. Louis/St. Ludwig, across the Rhine from Germany. From French exile, Hirschfeld continued to launch journalistic broadsides against the Nazi regime until hostilities broke out. Amid the chaos following French defeat by the Nazis, he managed to secure an emergency visa for the United States at the American consulate in Marseille in August 1940.Footnote 19 The Hirschfelds followed the American journalist Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee's route to Portuguese ports via Francoist Spain, before disembarking in the United States nearly eight months later.Footnote 20
Hirschfeld's precarious existence during the Nazi era was emblematic of the constraints placed on German Social Democracy more generally. The 1933 victory of National Socialism accelerated the geographic dispersion, as well as the political divisions, of those Social Democrats who had managed to flee. The party reconstituted itself in 1933 as the Sopade organization in Prague, but its members had to flee the Nazis again via Paris to London, losing much of its stature in the process. Moreover, debate over the most appropriate reaction to fascism exacerbated internal tensions. The 1935 offer of the German Communist Party (KPD) to form an antifascist Popular Front could not overcome the ingrained anti-communism of the Sopade. A group called Neu Beginnen (New Beginning) nevertheless emerged in dissent, arguing that the bitter division of the German workers' movement had been a precondition for the Nazis' success, and calling for a clean break “from the past that has been outlived” in order to unite a New Left of all stripes in militant opposition to Hitler.Footnote 21 Personal acrimony further fueled the rift, and, in 1938, the Sopade banished Paul Hertz, the editor of its newspaper Sozialistische Aktion, for participating in Neu Beginnen.Footnote 22 Hans Hirschfeld broke from the Sopade around the same time as Hertz, and, in a letter to his friend, acerbically accused the Sopade executive of “sabotaging” leftist unity.Footnote 23
Hirschfeld and his family found a large but stratified German-speaking refugee community in New York. By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, the city had absorbed an estimated 70,000 German-speaking refugees, who promptly set about reorganizing themselves along sectarian and political divisions imported from Europe.Footnote 24 Those Sopade members who had succeeded in gaining entry to the United States regrouped as the German Labor Delegation. Hirschfeld himself reconnected with Paul Hertz and his Neu Beginnen circle in New York.Footnote 25
Two experiences gradually cooled Neu Beginnen's 1934 enthusiasm for “revolutionary socialism.” The first was the alienation its members felt from Soviet-style communism. Initial accounts of the Stalinist purges reinforced old suspicions of the communists, but the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which marked the Soviet Union's rapprochement with Nazi Germany, finally convinced Neu Beginnen “that Russian politics have nothing in common with International Socialism anymore.”Footnote 26 This renunciation of Soviet communism completed what Hartmut Mehringer has described as the transformation of an initially antifascist consensus into an antitotalitarian consensus.Footnote 27 The second factor that played into the changing worldview of the members of Neu Beginnen was the new appreciation for liberal democracy they had gained from their experiences in the United States. Former communist Karl B. Frank, a leader of Neu Beginnen, reasoned in 1943 that “if the problems in Central Europe would be solved by bourgeois democratic countries under American leadership,” then guaranteed “democratic rights of freedom” would enable “the free development of independent democratic propellants.”Footnote 28 Neu Beginnen's political development mirrored that of Willy Brandt during his Scandinavian exile.Footnote 29 The future mayor of West Berlin had fled as a member of the Socialist Workers' Party (SAP), another left-wing breakaway from the SPD, but the experience of exile precipitated his antitotalitarian turn and staunch defense of liberal democracy. These convictions would serve a network of former revolutionary socialists particularly well in Berlin's Cold War politics.
Contacts made in New York during the war would later prove invaluable for extending the network to American occupation authorities in Berlin. Scholars such as Rainer Behring have found no evidence that Social Democratic émigrés could influence American policy during World War II, but participation in the American war effort did ensure that they would hold some sway during the Cold War.Footnote 30 As early as 1940, Hertz had publicly proclaimed: “Freedom and democracy will be only restored when Hitler has been destroyed militarily. German refugees want to contribute to this task.”Footnote 31 Subsequently, some of these expellees entered the American intelligence service. In 1943, Hirschfeld took a job in the biographical records section of the Research and Analysis Division of the Office for Strategic Services (OSS).Footnote 32 His duties included the collection and assessment of material on German Ministerialbeamte (high-ranking civil servants) for this intelligence agency, which was also an academic think tank with a significant number of German émigrés.Footnote 33 At their Rockefeller Center offices, Hirschfeld met another colleague originally from Berlin: Charlotte Stone, née Hasenclever-Jaffé, who had left her native city in 1933 to accompany her American husband, Shepard Stone, to New York after the completion of his dissertation at the University of Berlin.Footnote 34 Hirschfeld and the Stones became personal friends, sharing fond memories of what now served as the capital of an empire they were working to defeat.Footnote 35 Shepard Stone was inducted into the U.S. Army in June 1942; he was assigned to military intelligence and participated in the European campaign from the beaches of Normandy to Thuringia.Footnote 36 Stone became personally attached to the cause of German democratization, as revealed in his comments on V-E Day in a letter to his wife: “To me,” he wrote, “right now I feel a job is unfinished. For there is a tremendous problem over here in which we have a vital interest and I know that some of us should help to do it. If it is done well then there is great hope.”Footnote 37
This letter is remarkable, not least because it essentially laid out Stone's agenda for decades to come. To that end, he remained in Germany, where he worked as a journalist for OMGUS after the end of the war in Europe, implementing American occupation press policy.Footnote 38 It was around this time that their friendship became politically relevant, when Hirschfeld informally gave Stone a list of Social Democrats who “might be interesting to see.” Among those listed was “E. Reuter, now back in Germany” after more than a decade in exile in Turkey; Hirschfeld recommended Reuter as “a very able man.”Footnote 39
The Nazis' defeat in World War II made the question of German postwar reconstruction urgent. There were formidable obstacles to the participation of Social Democratic émigrés in this momentous task, despite their contribution to the Allied war effort. Among the biggest impediments was the Allies' failure to recognize them as acceptable political actors; remaining cut off from contact with German comrades and largely undecided about whether to return to Germany at all only added to their frustrations. Eventually, nearly three thousand Social Democrats, or about half of those who had emigrated, would return to a country that hardly resembled the one they had been forced to leave.Footnote 40
Unfazed, Social Democrats in Germany had already begun the party's reconstruction during the collapse of the Nazi regime. At the same time that the Battle of Berlin was still raging, former social worker Franz Neumann became politically active once again, reestablishing the SPD party organization in his Wittenau flat in Berlin on April 29, 1945. Neumann and fellow Social Democrats initially cooperated with local KPD members to procure necessities from the Soviet occupiers, but resentment of the KPD grew quickly.Footnote 41 As a result, Neumann led the opposition against the proposed Soviet-brokered merger between the KPD and the SPD to create the SED. Proudly displaying his proletarian roots, he organized a referendum on the SPD's independence, which was overwhelmingly affirmed by its members in March 1946. Western Allies who initially viewed independent political activities by Germans as a distraction for democratization had little choice but to endorse an SPD that fought for the essential democratic right of freedom of assembly. In time, however, as the rifts of the opening Cold War deepened, the Allies came to appreciate the party and its members.Footnote 42 Working together with other Social Democrats, Neumann in Berlin and Kurt Schumacher in the West quickly organized the SPD against the communist challenge.Footnote 43
In postwar Berlin's rancorous politics, remigrés were able to assert themselves by exploiting the language of the Cold War. In fact, Berlin SPD remigrés drew their strength not from numbers, but rather from Ernst Reuter's vision and shrewdness.Footnote 44 Upon liberation, Reuter yearned to return to Germany from his exile in Turkey in order to implement a vision that reconciled socialism with civil rights. Strict American and British visa restrictions initially blocked the rapid return of the thundering orator: occupation authorities regarded remigrés as potential liabilities for reorienting Germans politically. Reuter's application for a visa required the personal approval of OMGUS political adviser Robert Murphy, which it received, but the State Department still rejected it. He nevertheless succeeded in obtaining a British visa in July 1946.Footnote 45 Despite the shocking destruction of Berlin, Reuter showed remarkable enthusiasm upon his reinstatement as head of the Berlin City Council for Transportation in November. In the 1920s, Reuter had implemented tremendous improvements to Berlin's public transportation system, but he was anathema to the Soviet occupation authorities as a former communist who had denounced the KPD while extolling the virtues of liberal democracy since 1924.
Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union grew throughout 1947, and Reuter's place in postwar Germany was among the key points of contention between the two sides. The Soviet refusal to certify Reuter's election as mayor of Berlin infuriated OMGUS. It was only after the 1948 Soviet blockade, which administratively divided the city in two, that he was finally able to assume office—and then only in Berlin's western sectors, which he defiantly proclaimed an “outpost of freedom.” Reuter's popularity soared during the airlift, and he later worked hard to convert this popularity into a power base within the Berlin SPD.Footnote 46 As mayor, he faced Berlin SPD chairman Neumann, who viewed himself as the actual center of power within the party.Footnote 47 Among those Reuter inspired was Willy Brandt, who quickly developed into a young protégé.Footnote 48
Reuter bolstered his own position within the party by attracting fellow émigrés to return not only to Germany, but also to the fold of the SPD. His triumphal tour of America in 1949 set the stage for this, and Hans Hirschfeld and Paul Hertz of Neu Beginnen both responded to Reuter's deliberate outreach. Reuter subsequently appointed Hirschfeld as his public relations manager and Hertz as his coordinator for the European Recovery Program (ERP), popularly known as the Marshall Plan.Footnote 49 Upon his return to Berlin in late 1949, Hirschfeld tirelessly portrayed Reuter's policies to Allied authorities, German journalists, and ordinary Berliners alike as a defense of freedom. But Hirschfeld's mission was also personal. Divided Berlin gave remigrés like Hertz and Hirschfeld the opportunity to vindicate their return. After the Third Reich's collapse, the Hertzes and Hirschfelds had to cope with the grim confirmation that numerous close relatives had perished in the Holocaust.Footnote 50 Still, Hirschfeld described his return to the former Nazi capital in the language of divine revelation, enthusiastically noting to skeptical émigré friends in the United States, for example, that after “a few days in Berlin, Saul became Paul. . . . I stayed here because I am convinced that we in Berlin complete a crucial political task—unlike anywhere else on earth.”Footnote 51 West Berlin's resistance to communist ambition had not only given returned Social Democrats like Hirschfeld a new political purpose, but also helped reconcile them with their estranged hometown.
Joint Media Campaigns for “Freedom” in Berlin
Hans Hirschfeld's new office enabled the remigrés to gain a foothold in the American government's media empire in Berlin, which could be used to attack the SED, as well as to promote remigré candidates. Reuter broadly construed Hirschfeld's portfolio as West Berlin's public relations director, allowing him to act as a conduit for close cooperation between American authorities and the West Berlin administration. Hirschfeld drew on his émigré experience and his network of OSS contacts for this task. He regularly informed Karl F. Mautner, the Viennese-born American liaison officer in West Berlin's City Hall, about the Reuter administration's public relations activities, for instance. Mautner's summaries of these conversations also appeared on the desk of Shepard Stone, who controlled American media efforts in Germany as head of HICOG's Public Affairs division.Footnote 52 Stone and Hirschfeld also communicated directly, conducting personal meetings in Berlin at HICOG's Frankfurt headquarters, and at Stone's private home in Taunus.Footnote 53 In light of the sensitive political nature of this back-channel communication, written records are intentionally sparse, but official memoranda summarizing these meetings have survived in Hirschfeld's personal papers.Footnote 54 These rich but underutilized sources indicate that Mayor Ernst Reuter, HICOG commissioner John McCloy, and then-journalist Willy Brandt were present at some of these meetings. Hirschfeld's memoranda are also crucial for unearthing the story of clandestine U.S. support for the remigré campaign to take control of the West Berlin SPD. The nature of American support—which included favorable coverage on RIAS and financial contributions to the remigré party press—underscored the significance the network placed on media outreach for its political success. Hirschfeld's duties combining public relations and sensitive back-channel communication highlight the importance of his post in an era increasingly defined by broadcast media.
RIAS served as the primary media source for disseminating narratives that benefited the remigré network. Although its function as a Cold War attack station has been well documented, its role as a vehicle for popularizing the “outpost of freedom” narrative has attracted less attention.Footnote 55 Because RIAS held a commanding position in Berlin's radio market during the 1950s, its coverage and positive portrayal of remigré Social Democrats helped advance the party's political message. Founded in 1946 by OMGUS, RIAS rose to prominence during the Berlin airlift, attaining market shares of up to 80 percent.Footnote 56 In fact, American authorities in Berlin ranked RIAS as its most important media outlet.Footnote 57 The station achieved success by tailoring its programs to the tastes of Berliners. Under American management, young German journalists such as Gerhard Löwenthal, later one of West Germany's most popular television journalists, and Egon Bahr, Brandt's future foreign policy confidant, created a slate of programs that combined news, culture, and entertainment. All of this heralded a new and fresh type of journalism for listeners conditioned by thirteen years of Nazi propaganda; moreover, RIAS's programming offered a clear alternative to its East German competitor, the Berliner Rundfunk, which merely repeated the party line.Footnote 58
With its slogan “a free voice of the free world,” RIAS balanced its commitment to upholding the ideals of independent journalism while furthering a Cold War political agenda. American management addressed this tension on an ad hoc basis, with RIAS journalists pushing to expand journalistic freedom at the same time that HICOG and the SPD were seeking political loyalty. Unlike public broadcasting stations in the Federal Republic proper, RIAS did not have to answer to any Rundfunkbeirat (broadcasting council) that might have opened the door for party lobbying. Social Democrats in Berlin resorted instead to informal networking.
Hans Hirschfeld's contacts again proved decisive in furthering Social Democratic goals. In his capacity as Berlin SPD press policy representative, he gained the trust of U.S. authorities, SPD remigrés, and RIAS personnel. Upon his return to Berlin, Hirschfeld brought together Reuter and incoming RIAS director Fred G. Taylor to discuss the “shared work” ahead of them. Taylor later elucidated the nature of this work when he pledged to Reuter that “RIAS will always strive to support your work in every regard.”Footnote 59 To that end, RIAS consistently portrayed Berlin's western sectors as a heroic “outpost of freedom”—an outpost led by an untainted mayor and enjoying the full support of the United States. Hirschfeld suggested joint-ownership of this narrative when he approvingly referred to “our Berlin” to his “dear friend” Taylor.Footnote 60 The “Outpost narrative” could conveniently be employed politically against communist enemies and intraparty rivals alike.
The triangle of SPD remigrés, RIAS, and U.S. authorities infuriated other political actors in the city. The East Berlin SED branded RIAS journalists as American mercenaries who had sold their souls “for blood money like Judas.”Footnote 61 But behind closed doors, the SED party bureaucracy begrudgingly admitted that “the hate and slandering campaign of the western press and RIAS succeeds in confusing many West Berlin[ers,] who still disapprove of the Workers' and Peasants' Power,” i.e., the German Democratic Republic (GDR).Footnote 62 Apart from the political vitriol, Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Mayor Walther Schreiber seemed to agree with the communist assessment of RIAS's closeness to the SPD, when, during his brief tenure between 1953 and 1954, he pushed behind the scenes for the creation of a second West Berlin station “in which we [conservatives] can speak our own language.”Footnote 63
RIAS's coverage of the SPD remigrés revealed that its pledge of unconditional support extended beyond the Cold War proper into domestic political wrangling. Analysis of RIAS programming between 1948 and 1958 confirms that Reuter and other prominent remigrés received the most airtime. Notably, RIAS introduced the show “Wo uns der Schuh drückt” (Where the Shoe Pinches) on November 18, 1951, which it would carry until 1978: the show gave Reuter the opportunity every second Sunday to field questions from Berliners for fifteen to twenty minutes.Footnote 64 Billed as an example of RIAS's innovative programming and civic engagement, the radio program enabled Reuter to speak on a regular basis to thousands of Berliners.
The case of Willy Brandt similarly exemplified RIAS's generous assignment of airtime to remigrés. Immediately upon being elected president of the Berliner Abgeordnetenhaus in 1954, Brandt's presence on RIAS increased even further, with one program modification giving Brandt the chance to address listeners “on the eve of every session of the Berliner Abgeordnetenhaus.”Footnote 65 In turn, Brandt offered U.S. authorities his suggestions for possible programming improvements.Footnote 66 Exclusive access to his constituents through West Berlin's most popular radio station prior to any parliamentary debate gave Brandt enormous power to frame political discussion in Berlin.
The close cooperation between HICOG's Public Affairs and SPD remigrés in the West Berlin media market also included direct American financial contributions on behalf of the remigrés. This helped explain Brandt's tenure from 1949 to 1951 as editor of the short-lived tabloid Berliner Stadtblatt. His most prominent journalistic endeavor puzzles his biographers because it appears somehow disconnected from Brandt's life in politics. Peter Merseburger has attributed it to the necessity of feeding his young family.Footnote 67 But in the context of the remigré-Keulenriege clash, Brandt's stint as editor of the Berliner Stadtblatt appears as a crucial stepping-stone in his political career: in that post, he first captured the attention of U.S. occupation officials and continued to exploit that attention as Reuter's heir apparent following the mayor's sudden death in September 1953.
Just as important, the Berliner Stadtblatt served as a vehicle for direct but covert American intervention in the internal Berlin SPD feud. After the successful conclusion of the airlift, tensions between remigrés and the Keulenriege rose in 1950 over the question of West Berlin's relationship with the Federal Republic. The Neumann wing proposed selective adoption of federal German law, seeking to retain a single-payer health insurance system in Berlin. The Reuter wing, in contrast, called for full integration into the Federal Republic, pointing to the carrot of West German subsidies. Tensions came to a head at a board meeting of the SPD on May 15, 1950, when Neumann and Brandt clashed over the SPD's relationship with the Western Allies.Footnote 68 Two weeks later, Hirschfeld confidentially contacted Stone, citing an “urgent need” for assistance.Footnote 69
Hirschfeld followed up with a written request for American subsidies following a telephone conversation with Stone: noting the “severe financial distress” of the Berliner Stadtblatt, Hirschfeld argued that “intraparty differences” necessitated American financial support. He reminded Stone of his own assessment that “the Berliner Stadtblatt is the organ of the Reuter SPD. The Telegraf”—an SPD paper edited by Arno Scholz—“follows Schumacher unconditionally.” Hirschfeld pleaded that “we need a newspaper in Berlin that follows, maintains, and explains our political agenda...”Footnote 70 In addition, American support for the Berliner Stadtblatt would enable it to assert its financial independence from Scholz's Telegraf.Footnote 71
Hirschfeld's correspondence with Stone reveals lesser-known details of the remigrés' overall ambitions and cooperation with the United States. He mentions in his letters the many undercover flights that he and Reuter had taken to HICOG headquarters in Frankfurt for “political talks.” This was significant given Reuter's vocal embrace of German integration into the Western Alliance, which represented a direct challenge to SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher. Reuter's stature in both the party and the press had grown immensely: recognized as the heroic organizer of the Berlin airlift, he flaunted his defiance of Soviet demands. Hirschfeld had bound Stone to conspiratorial silence, asking him “to view and act on this strictly in private. Except Reuter and Willi [sic] Brandt nobody knows that I write you. Hanover [i.e., Schumacher] and Scholz would resist if they—let alone others—learned of this matter.” All three Social Democrats involved in this correspondence had been in exile during the Third Reich, and Brandt's inclusion in this select circle further signified his rapid rise within the party as a Reuter loyalist. Hirschfeld also introduced Brandt to Shepard Stone on this occasion, in effect, writing a letter of recommendation for the young remigré:Footnote 72
The Stadtblatt will always be Social Democratic with its current journalists, but without being too close to the party. Willi Brandt, its current editor, is a guarantee for that. . . . Brandt is not yet 37 and is Berlin's representative in the Bundestag. He fled in 1933 from Lübeck to Norway, where he studied history and worked as a journalist. . . . He returned to Germany after the 1945 collapse as a correspondent for Scandinavian newspapers. Later, he became press attaché at the Norwegian Military Mission in Berlin. He relinquished this post and his Norwegian citizenship in 1948 to participate actively in the political life of Germany. He is an excellent man and in no way a party-dogmatist or narrow-minded. His entire background guarantees, in my opinion, sensible political views.Footnote 73
Political opponents such as Franz Neumann, Konrad Adenauer, and Franz Josef Strauß would later use Brandt's time in exile to question his integrity.Footnote 74 Hirschfeld instead highlighted it as a badge of honor, reasoning that SPD Cold Warriors in Berlin were connected by the shared experience of exile. Moreover, in the eyes of American authorities in 1950, an émigré background vouched for democratic and anti-communist convictions.
American funds started flowing swiftly in July 1950, after Hirschfeld had reminded Shepard Stone once again of the tenuous finances of the SPD remigré wing.Footnote 75 On July 19, 1950, Hirschfeld met Walter Ridder, the HICOG official managing the ERP. Stone had pulled strings to finance the remigré wing, infusing the Stadtblatt with Marshall Plan money. It was also Stone who suggested that the Stadtblatt publish two supplements extolling the benefits of the ERP for West Berlin—at a cost of 100,000 DM each.Footnote 76 The remigré network quickly sprang into action, with Brandt and his staff commencing work the next afternoon on the first supplement, entitled “Berlin and ERP.”Footnote 77 In the meantime, Ridder called Hirschfeld, informing him that a contractual agreement had been drafted and only needed the signatures of the remigrés.Footnote 78 On July 27, 1950, Hirschfeld and Brandt travelled to HICOG headquarters in Frankfurt. According to Hirschfeld, Brandt signed a contract in which HICOG ordered from the Berliner Stadtblatt “two supplements […] on ‘Berlin and the Marshall Help.’ […] HICOG, section cultural affairs, and ERP publications pay the Berliner Stadtblatt 100,000 DM each after publication of the supplement concerned.”Footnote 79 Knowledge of open American financial donations to Berlin remigrés would have enraged SED communists, political competitors in West Berlin, as well as the chairmen of the Berlin and West German SPD; both sides were thus sworn to secrecy. As Hirschfeld wryly wrote, “representatives [of John McCloy] pointed out again that the High Commissioner placed great value on strict confidentiality concerning this contract, its implementation, etc.” Hirschfeld assured Americans that “our side also had great interest in only informing the truly necessary circle.”Footnote 80
Three pieces of archival evidence corroborate the veracity of Hirschfeld's account concerning these clandestine American contributions to the SPD. In the first place, U.S. State Department files confirm his role in West Berlin in the 1950s as a conduit for transferring funds from HICOG to the West Berlin administration on different occasions. From mid-1952 to late 1953, Hirschfeld acknowledged receipt of an additional 106,500 DM in cash for unspecified “services to be rendered”—presumably to fund other public relations work for Reuter's policies.Footnote 81 A second piece of evidence is a record of clandestine financial transactions between Stone and Hirschfeld. Volker Berghahn has documented how the Bürgermeister Reuter Foundation acted as a front allowing Stone to transfer $150,000 in May 1954 from the Ford Foundation to the financially troubled Der Monat, a journal run at the time by liberal anti-communist Melvin Lasky.Footnote 82 But the Bürgermeister Reuter Foundation listed just 23,517.97 DM in foreign donations in its annual report that year, implying that board member Hans Hirschfeld had conducted some business off the books.Footnote 83 A third piece in the puzzle involves Brandt's correspondence with Ridder about the aforementioned supplements to the Berliner Stadtblatt: on August 19, 1950, Brandt sent Ridder two copies of a completed six-page supplement, “Berlin im ERP,” and asked him “to arrange the agreed upon transfer in the most expedited fashion.”Footnote 84 The Stadtblatt ran the supplement the next day, which, in keeping with the stipulations of the Frankfurt contract, was followed by another one in late October.
“Berlin im ERP” opened with the lead article “Focal Point of World Politics,” which Hirschfeld wrote for Reuter. The piece again advanced the successful airlift narrative of heroic Berliners defending “freedom”—side by side with Americans—“against the obstructionist policies of the Soviet Union.”Footnote 85 All of Reuter's prominent loyalists continued to emphasize this point in their articles. Brandt, for example, attempted to shore up support for the Marshall Plan among Berlin workers while anticipating SED talking points: “Sure, Americans want their business to thrive. But many of them have understood brilliantly that they need solid partners for that.”Footnote 86 These supplements differed from other contemporary West German newspapers in their open praise of the virtues of American foreign policy; moreover, Franz Neumann and his Keulenriege comrades remained conspicuously absent from the list of contributors.
Hirschfeld's personal papers also illuminate the American rationale for providing covert funding to the Berlin SPD remigrés. Stone and Hirschfeld met again in August 1950 to discuss West Berlin's fiscal situation—specifically, its need for increased West German subsidies. At this meeting, Stone asked Hirschfeld whether Reuter might “increase his influence on [German] federal government policies.” Hirschfeld's answer to this blunt question was noncommittal; he told Stone that although Reuter's first priority was Berlin, “future opportunities were left to future developments.”Footnote 87 The conversation anticipated a meeting between High Commissioner McCloy and Reuter the following day; it was there that the Americans openly prodded Reuter to consider his ambitions at the federal level. Stone could make the surprising support for parts of a nominally still Marxist party plausible as beneficial to American Cold War foreign policy. Given his behavior up to this point, Reuter would have, in Bonn, made a close alliance with the United States a party plank, bringing the SPD into alignment with the foreign policy stance of the CDU. As a possible successor to Chancellor Adenauer, Reuter would have been at least as close to American policymakers as the incumbent was.
Whatever Reuter's answer to the American proposition might have been, HICOG's interest in him continued. Using him as a shining example of successful American Cold War foreign policy, Stone enlisted Reuter to record a voice-over for international Voice of America radio broadcasts.Footnote 88 He also coordinated the itinerary of Reuter's tour across the United States in March 1953, which was intended to drum up American popular support for West Berlin while increasing Reuter's visibility in Germany.Footnote 89 The collaboration between Reuter and HICOG was apparently so close that Hirschfeld could ask Stone once again whether he could “count on” further electoral campaign funding.Footnote 90
American support for the Berliner Stadtblatt was far more robust than it was for HICOG‘s broader, simultaneous campaign for a democratic press.Footnote 91 In fact, Stone secured a way for Hirschfeld and Brandt to bypass a competitive, bureaucratic, two-stage application procedure for a loan from ERP funds that would have included an examination of the paper's creditworthiness.Footnote 92 The Stadtblatt’s prospects of passing such an examination were doubtful, having suffered hefty monthly losses of over 50,000 DM in both March and April 1950.Footnote 93 American support for the Stadtblatt stood out even further with respect to the type of financial assistance being proffered. Instead of receiving a loan that carried an interest rate of about 5.5 percent, the Berliner Stadtblatt was permitted to charge HICOG 200,000 DM directly—a generous amount for a total of only twelve newspaper pages. With a vastly increased circulation of 100,000 copies, as stipulated by the contract with HICOG, the sales price for an entire edition of supplements would have been 15,000 DM (at 15 Pfennige per issue).Footnote 94 This amounted to a net cash injection of 85,000 DM for each of the two supplements. Whether Brandt invested the money into the ailing Stadtblatt—or whether the remigrés used it to finance a slush fund—remains unclear.
The Reconstruction of West Berlin as “Athens on the Spree”
The Berliner Stadtblatt supplements also gave Brandt the opportunity to explain the German-American network's vision of West Berlin in a way that would attract further infusions of American resources, while undergirding the political success of the remigrés. In the second supplement, Brandt drew on the turn-of-the-century trope of the city as an idealized “Athens on the Spree.”Footnote 95 Describing West Berlin in this way fostered Brandt's belief that the western half of the city was leading in both the physical and moral reconstruction of Germany: “In the meantime, the former Reichshauptstadt and vestige of [reactionary] Prussia has become a German state—not any state, but one that wants to be a constituent state of the Federal Republic and become the capital of a Germany reunified in freedom.”Footnote 96 Brandt used the popular notion of ancient Athens to describe his vision of West Berlin as a proud city-state that embodied democracy, but that was admired equally for its prowess and culture. This lofty vision was less an accurate description of the field of rubble stretching from the Wannsee to the Reichstag than it was an agenda used to steer the network's policies and motivate it in the struggle for control of the Berlin SPD.
In the summer of 1952, the network suffered Reuter's failure to install Brandt as Berlin SPD chairman, as well as the end of the tenure of both John McCloy and Shepard Stone. After a last meeting with Reuter in Berlin—which the official press release billed as “Mr. McCloy wanting to renew old friendships”—McCloy and Stone took up prominent positions at the Ford Foundation.Footnote 97 Stone assured Hirschfeld that “in the course of our work [for the Ford Foundation], we [McCloy and I] often think of Berlin and what can be done to help Berlin. As [McCloy] said in the days before he left Germany, he will continue to do everything possible.”Footnote 98
Shortly after McCloy and Stone moved to the Ford Foundation, the cooperation between HICOG and the Berlin SPD remigrés suffered two severe setbacks: the onset of McCarthyism in the United States, and Ernst Reuter's death in 1953. On September 22, 1953, Hirschfeld vented his frustration to Stone:
What currently takes place in the [U.S. embassy in Bonn-]Mehlem is anything but pretty. . . . In the last months, all that you and your colleagues have built up over years has been brought to naught. I do not understand this policy at all . . . because if one stops in the thick of it, it means that all of the expended strength, effort, and resources were futile.Footnote 99
Hirschfeld did not expand on the nature of the policy that infuriated him, but his letter coincided with his last receipt of American funds, substantial congressional cuts to cultural expenditures in Europe, and Senator Joseph McCarthy's targeting of American operations in Germany.Footnote 100 In April 1953, Roy Cohn and G. David Shine, McCarthy's most notorious aides, descended upon Bonn and West Berlin, claiming that American operations had spent “millions of dollars on waste and mismanagement” and kept communists on its payroll.Footnote 101 As their first target, Cohn and Shine singled out Theodore Kaghan, deputy director of HICOG's Public Affairs Division.Footnote 102 Kaghan pointed out his anti-communist credentials to McCarthy at a Senate hearing, and the American-remigré network rushed to Kaghan's defense behind the scenes: Hirschfeld drafted a letter of support that was signed by Ernst Reuter just months before his death.Footnote 103 Shepard Stone also wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times defending his former deputy, as well as American intervention in German politics. He warned that “it would be dangerous to the security of the American people to permit the destruction of a program in Germany that has done so much good.”Footnote 104 Kaghan confided to Hirschfeld his disappointment about the “wimps at the State Department” for failing to back him up against accusations of harboring communist sympathies.Footnote 105 In light of its timid response—which was limited to delaying proceedings and hoping for McCarthy's political demise—it seems likely that the State Department cut off all direct funding to the SPD.Footnote 106
Reuter's lethal heart attack on September 29, 1953, was a serious blow to the remigrés' fight for control of the Berlin SPD, as well as to American hopes for a “westernized” SPD. Hirschfeld wrote gloomily to Stone that Reuter's death had “provoked a feeling of abandonment among Berliners.”Footnote 107 On the occasion of McCloy's and Stone's visit to offer their condolences, the latter tried to encourage Hirschfeld: “We sensed the same courageous Berlin spirit, and it was a deep experience to be with all of you again.”Footnote 108 Among the most palpable short-term effects of Reuter's death was the loss of the SPD's hold on power. West Berlin's all-party coalition frayed, prompting the conservative CDU and liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) to form a governing coalition against the SPD, the largest faction. This sudden development was of great concern to Stone, who tried to console Hirschfeld: “[It] is not a healthy situation, and everybody who knows something about Berlin deplores what has happened.”Footnote 109
Now out of power, the remigrés needed a new leader. Although Willy Brandt gave the main eulogy at the deceased mayor's funeral, where he called for a continuation of Reuter's policies, he seemed hesitant to confront Berlin party chairman Neumann openly.Footnote 110 Former Berlin senator and Reuter loyalist Günter Klein implored Americans to intervene, suggesting to American liaison officer Karl Mautner that “a bit of pushing, possibly even carefully and tactfully by the American side, could help” to convince Brandt to run against Neumann. To add urgency to his request, Klein asserted that “without W[illy] Brandt, no struggle could hope for much success at this juncture.”Footnote 111 Brandt eventually challenged Neumann at the party convention on June 12, 1954, only to fall two votes short of unseating him as chairman of the Berlin SPD.Footnote 112 Brandt's support for West German inclusion in NATO also doomed his bid at the national convention in Berlin a month later for a spot on the SPD national executive board.Footnote 113 Frustrated but still determined, Brandt wrote a letter to Reuter's widow from his summer retreat on a Norwegian island: “The triumph of mediocrity and lack of leadership that we experienced at the convention naturally crosses my mind over and over. We have no choice but to tighten our belts further (Helm enger schnallen)” and brace for battle.Footnote 114
The remigrés' near victory at the June 1954 convention alarmed their communist opponents on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate. GDR intelligence informed the Central Committee of the SED in a confidential document that “Berlin offers a bad example of the Yankee faction's influence. Here the Yankee faction has been able to pick up almost half of the delegates' votes for their candidate, Willi [sic] Brandt.”Footnote 115 Upon his return to West Berlin, Brandt began once again to doubt his chances for success. In October, Mautner wired his superiors at HICOG and the State Department about Brandt's apparent lack of confidence. He noted that Brandt “required more than the usual amount of prodding, badgering, pushing and at least one martini to get started. What finally emerged was totally gloomy.”Footnote 116
Even though Mautner's reports on the situation of the Berlin remigrés was troubling, some signs of hope did emerge before the close of 1954. City elections on December 5, 1954, gave the SPD an absolute majority of seats in the Abgeordnetenhaus. The party was thus assured a role in the government, and Brandt prevailed comfortably against a Neumann protégé to clinch the SPD nomination for president of the Abgeordnetenhaus.Footnote 117 A pleased Hans Hirschfeld immediately informed Mautner, who cabled his superiors with the news that Willy Brandt was a shoo-in for the House presidency.Footnote 118 The year 1954 also coincided with the Ford Foundation stepping up its activities in Germany as semiofficial financier of several West Berlin prestige projects: led by Shepard Stone, it donated and inaugurated the Henry-Ford-Bau as the centerpiece of West Berlin's new Free University.Footnote 119
With the new Abgeordnetenhaus election results confirming Willy Brandt as House president, Franz Neumann as SPD whip, and Otto Suhr as mayor, the confrontation between remigrés and the Keulenriege intensified, with Suhr left to mediate the squabble. Brandt, facing a press campaign that claimed he had fought in a communist International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, sued the conservative Montags-Echo for libel in 1957. Under oath, its editors implicated Franz Neumann as the source of their information.Footnote 120 In the meantime, American authorities were closely tracking the feud, with Mautner regularly cabling updates on SPD personnel developments.Footnote 121
By 1956, both Otto Suhr's cancer and Willy Brandt's ambition were open secrets in West Berlin's City Hall in Schöneberg, and Brandt's informal American network now did its best to groom him as Suhr's potential successor. To that end, Hirschfeld and Stone started planning a 1957 U.S. tour for Brandt.Footnote 122 At the same time, Karl Mautner felt compelled to write his superiors a long dossier on Brandt's character and supposedly bright future in politics:
W.B. is a somewhat ponderous and slow but hearty man from the Baltic Sea. He carries himself with dignity and inspires confidence. In the last years, he has grown to the stature of a young statesman to be watched, a coming man. He is an excellent, sober speaker, compelling in his careful formulation and dignified presentation, which does not exclude a warm sense of humor.Footnote 123
As this suggests, Mautner and Brandt enjoyed an easy rapport. For instance, Brandt had confided to Mautner—contrary to his public position—that although “the Oder-Neisse line may have to be accepted eventually,” the issue remained useful as a diplomatic bargaining chip.Footnote 124 Brandt also stayed in close contact with Shepard Stone, relaying through Hirschfeld his hope for a repetition “of our last gemütlich get-together in Bonn.”Footnote 125
Otto Suhr's death in office on August 30, 1957, sparked a heated internal party battle for his succession. Searching for a suitable candidate among the ranks of the SPD faction in the Bundestag, Franz Neumann frantically tried to prevent Brandt from assuming office. By this time, however, Brandt's power base had expanded to such a degree that no Bundestag member was willing to run against him.Footnote 126 Hans Hirschfeld was thus able to invite Shepard Stone to West Berlin four days later: “I want Shep to meet a few people this time, and also Willy Brandt in particular, who will probably be governing mayor by the time of your arrival. So no stranger to Shep.”Footnote 127 At the same time, Neumann faced intense criticism from the executive board of the Berlin SPD for publicly undermining Brandt as the SPD candidate.Footnote 128 On October 3, 1957, Brandt was sworn in as governing mayor of Berlin. His forces then moved quickly, with Mautner noting a few weeks later that “the palace revolt against Franz Neumann is picking up force.”Footnote 129 In a hastily scheduled party convention on January 12, 1958, Brandt succeeded Neumann as Berlin SPD chairman by a margin of 163 to 124 votes.Footnote 130
Shepard Stone once again served as a major supporter of Brandt and his ambitious program for reestablishing West Berlin as a cosmopolitan metropolis. In February 1958, he organized Brandt's twelve-day tour across the United States—a tour funded by the Ford Foundation. Stone was able to secure many high-profile speaking engagements and private meetings for Brandt by billing him in this way: “Persecuted and exiled by the Nazis, he is now one of the leading political personalities of his native land and its restored democratic institutions.” During his time in the United States, Brandt spoke at Harvard University, appeared on television on CBS's “Face the Nation,” and dined with the editorial staff of the New York Times, Senators Jacob Javits of New York and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, as well as CIA director Allan Dulles; he also took the time to meet with old friends, former RIAS director Gordon Ewing and Shepard Stone among them—the latter on three separate occasions.Footnote 131 Throughout this hectic tour, Brandt and his press staff kept constituents in Berlin informed of his exploits through RIAS broadcasts as well as a diary published in the Bild-Zeitung.Footnote 132
In June 1958, the Ford Foundation brought its commitment to Mayor Brandt's vision of an “Athens on the Spree” to a new level, when it gave West Berlin's Free University a million-dollar grant: “I look forward to thanking you in person for your efforts,” Brandt wrote in a cable to Stone.Footnote 133 Later that month, Stone traveled to West Berlin to award the grant. Hans Hirschfeld's toasted Stone at a banquet held in his honor: “In Berlin, [Stone] is no stranger. Only a few people know what Berlin owes to this man who hates public visibility.”Footnote 134
Conclusion
The rivalry between the Reuter-Brandt and Neumann wings of the Berlin SPD stemmed not only from clashing personal ambitions, but also from fundamental disagreements over the meaning of postwar Social Democracy. Considerable controversy arose over whether full integration into the Western Alliance was needed to counter the communist challenge posed by East Berlin's SED. At the same time, American occupation officials were convinced of the importance of the West Berlin internal party feud. The political mindset and the history of its formerly exiled leaders made the Reuter-Brandt wing sympathetic to the Americans—and vice versa. Placing their chips on Reuter and Brandt, officials like John McCloy and Shepard Stone hoped to achieve success at a federal level. U.S. hopes that Reuter might convince the West German SPD to support unconditionally the Western Alliance were dashed, however, by his untimely death.
Just as former Reuter loyalists were rallying around Willy Brandt as their new standard-bearer, Brandt was increasingly captivating American officials in Germany. He was experienced, trustworthy, and politically savvy, having demonstrated his credentials as a remigré and shown his political reliability in 1950 by facilitating clandestine American donations to Reuter; he also projected a polished image during his campaign, one that came across well on broadcast media. In West Berlin, remigrés like Brandt could profit from photo opportunities at ribbon-cutting ceremonies and at unveilings of U.S.-funded projects, from State Department-sponsored tours across the United States, and from positive coverage on RIAS, West Berlin's most popular radio station. The party machine initially dominated by Neumann crumbled as Brandt's visibility and popularity in the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus allowed him to succeed Otto Suhr as governing mayor. The study of the Berlin SPD from 1948 to 1958 offers us fresh perspectives, then, in three critical areas: the contribution of remigrés to postwar German history, the influence at the time of informal German-American political networks, and the role West Berlin played as an alternative laboratory of German democratization.
The importance of the remigré background of prominent postwar Berlin Social Democrats cannot be overstated: remigrés challenged the SPD to do more than merely pick up where Weimar's most progressive social policies had left off. In fact, remigrés had broadened their anti-fascist principles with anti-totalitarian convictions in defense of civil rights against communist threats as well. Politicians who had experienced exile were particularly well positioned to succeed in Cold War Berlin's SPD. Advocacy for German integration into the Western Alliance, along with an informal network of contacts dating back to the period in exile, were, in fact, instrumental in their success. The point is not to cast either Willy Brandt or Ernst Reuter as puppets of the United States, as contemporary SED parlance of an “American faction within the SPD” suggested.Footnote 135 The American intervention in the intraparty feud originated in Berlin, not in Washington, DC. By claiming to represent an “Athens on the Spree,” Reuter and Brandt shrewdly seized on a narrative–the myth of West Berlin as an “outpost of freedom”– that combined three major benefits: it could reconcile the former exiles with the country they had fled, serve as a compelling story line for voters, and provide political capital to elicit American support in a manner that replaced the occupier/occupied power dynamic.
The concept of West Berlin as an “outpost of freedom” helped forge—and was a product of—an informal German-American network. Portraying the plight of the West Berliners as a struggle for freedom fit so well into the U.S. Cold War discourse of the 1940s and 1950s that key American policymakers seized on the narrative as a common political project worthy of considerable resources. Thanks to compatible political outlooks, Berlin SPD remigrés were able to secure advice, favorable media coverage, as well as financial contributions totaling at least 306,500 DM (the present-day equivalent of at least $700,000), from American Cold War liberals such as Stone and Kaghan. Both Reuter and Brandt could rely on their relationship with Hans Hirschfeld and his contacts, which dated back to their wartime exile in the United States. Hirschfeld's crucial friendship with Shepard Stone had begun during his time at the OSS, but there is little evidence that the political clout of their postwar friendship was part of any high-level grand design. They had met long before they controlled hundreds of thousands of Deutschmarks, at a time when Hirschfeld was a low-level profiler at the OSS and Stone a captain in the U.S. Army. They nevertheless succeeded years later in capitalizing on their friendship for maximum political gain.
This story of a robust and ambitious cast of remigrés, coupled with the subtle but unswerving intervention of American authorities in West Berlin's political process, opens up a fresh perspective on West Berlin's history. The half city offers a unique but highly relevant case study of German postwar democratization—one that involved a differing dynamic from that of the Federal Republic. Despite its economic dependency on the Federal Republic proper, West Berlin pioneered seminal political decisions of the postwar era, with the local SPD anticipating the 1959 Bad Godesberger Program that later scrapped Marxist theory and endorsed West German NATO membership. Brandt's biography points to an important path from the margins of exile to the most prominent posts of the Federal Republic—one that ran through West Berlin. This city seared by the Cold War offered an alternative laboratory of German democratization in which global and local politics were intensely intertwined—and it offered often ostracized remigrés important opportunities as cultural translators.
