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Hidden Behind the Wall: West German State Building and the Emergence of the Iron Curtain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2011

Sagi Schaefer
Sagi Schaefer
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Columbia University
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Extract

It is widely accepted that the inter-German border was constructed by East German authorities to halt the emigration to the west, which had damaged the East German economy and undermined the East German state agencies' power. This article argues that this is an inaccurate understanding, which mistakenly treats perceptions and insights gained from studying the Berlin Wall as representative of the mostly rural border between East and West Germany. It emphasizes crucial transformations of frontier society during the 1950s, highlighting the important role of western as well as eastern policy in shaping them.

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Articles
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Central European History , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 506 - 535
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Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2011

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References

1 For example, see Fulbrook, Mary, The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 7Google Scholar; Ross, Corey, Constructing Socialism at the Grass-Roots: The Transformation of East Germany, 1945–65 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ritter, Jürgen and Lapp, Peter Joachim, Die Grenze. Ein deutsches Bauwerk (Berlin: Links, 2006), 19Google Scholar; Schultke, Dietmar, “Keiner kommt durch.” Die Geschichte der innerdeutsche Grenze 1945–1990 (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 33Google Scholar.

2 Patrick Major makes a similar point in Major, Patrick, Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1Google Scholar. For example, a recent volume dealing with 1989 as a global transformative year is titled “The Fall of the Berlin Wall.” Engel, Jeffrey A., The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

3 The list of studies of divided Berlin and different aspects of life of the city leading to or emanating from the building of the Wall is too long to recount here. Some examples from recent years include Roggenbuch, Frank, Das Berliner Grenzgängerproblem (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008)Google Scholar; Harrison, Hope M., Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Hertle, Hans-Hermann, Jarausch, Konrad H., and Kleßmann, Christoph, eds., Mauerbau und Mauerfall. Ursachen—Verlauf—Auswirkungen (Berlin: Links, 2002)Google Scholar; Major, Behind the Berlin Wall; Wolfrum, Edgar, Die Mauer. Geschichte einer Teilung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Sahlins, Peter, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar. I share this critique of existing studies of the inter-German border with Edith Sheffer. See her summary of the deficiencies of these studies in Edith Sheffer, “Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008), 9–10. Patrick Major also criticizes studies of the inter-German border for overly emphasizing physical aspects of the border. See Major, Behind the Berlin Wall, 6–7. Sälter, Gerhard, Grenzpolizisten. Konformität, Verweigerung und Repression in der Grenzpolizei und den Grenztruppen der DDR 1952 bis 1965 (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2009), 2Google Scholar, and the authors cited in footnote 3 also argue that until now there was an overemphasis in research on these aspects of the border. For some recent examples, see Baumgarten, Klaus-Dieter and Freitag, Peter, eds., Die Grenzen der DDR. Geschichte, Fakten, Hintergrunde (Berlin: Edition-Ost, 2005)Google Scholar; Schultke, “Keiner kommt durch”; Lapp, Peter Joachim, Gefechtsdienst im Frieden—Das Grenzregime der DDR (Bonn: Bernard & Grafe, 1999)Google Scholar; Janowitz, Axel, “Die Geschichte der innerdeutsche Grenze,” in Grenze—mitten im Deutschland, ed. Eichsfeld, Grenzlandmuseum e.V. (Heiligenstadt: Cordier, 2002), 25–42Google Scholar.

5 Most of these narratives were published in edited volumes. For some examples, see Steffens, Heiko, Ollrogge, Birger, and Kubanek, Gabriela, eds., Lebensjahre im Schatten der deutschen Grenze (Opladen: Leske + Budrich Verlag, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zietz, Rudolf, Erlebnisse an der Grenze im Harz (Duderstadt: Mecke, 2003)Google Scholar; Hartmann, Andreas and Doering-Manteuffel, Sabine, eds., Grenzgeschichten. Berichte aus dem deutschen Niemandsland (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1990)Google Scholar; Hohmann, Joachim S. and Grischok, Gerhard, eds., Grenzland Rhön (Hünfeld: Rhön Verlag, 1997)Google Scholar; Grafe, Roman, ed., Die Grenze durch Deutschland. Eine Chronik von 1945 bis 1990 (Berlin: Siedler, 2002)Google Scholar.

6 For some of the most recent works, see Ullrich, Maren, Geteilte Ansichten. Erinnerungslandschaft deutsch-deutsche Grenze (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2006)Google Scholar, which analyzes memorial culture along the inter-German border through the years of division and unification. Sheffer, “Burned Bridge,” is an extremely rich micro-study of the development of this border between two towns that emphasizes the agency of frontier residents in this process. The first publication out of this excellent dissertation was Sheffer, Edith, “On Edge: Building the Border in East and West Germany,” Central European History 40 (2007): 307–339CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As this article is being prepared for print, the book based on her dissertation is scheduled to appear in several months. See Sheffer, Edith, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2011)Google Scholar. Astrid M. Eckert of Emory University is working on a project to analyze different aspects of West German state and nation building as they took place along the inter-German border. She began this project with an investigation of border tourism in the FRG. See Eckert, Astrid M., “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border’”: Tourism to the Iron Curtain in West Germany,” Zeithistorische Forschung/Studies in Contemporary History 8, no. 1 (2011): 9–36Google Scholar. Jason Johnson is preparing a dissertation at Northwestern University with the working title “Dividing Mödlareuth: The Incorporation of Half a German Village into the GDR Regime, 1945–1989.” These projects, and my own, owe a lot to the late Daphne Berdahl's fascinating anthropological study of the village of Kella in the transformative years of German unification. Berdahl, Daphne, Where the World Ended: Reunification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar. See also the report from a recent workshop on the history of the inter-German border that brings together some of the people mentioned above and others and suggests that the transformation of perspective in studying the inter-German border is gathering momentum: Tagungsbericht Grenze—Konstruktion Realität Narrative, June 24–26, 2010, Hannover, in H-Soz-u-Kult, July 28, 2010, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=3213.

7 See Thomas Lindenberger, “Diktatur der Grenze(n). Die eingemauerte Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde,” in Mauerbau und Mauerfall, ed. Hertle, Jarausch, and Kleßmann, 203.

8 See an example of assigning all the initiative in the division of Germany to the east based on looking at the most visible steps and interpreting them as having exclusively internal eastern causes in Lindenberger, Thomas, “‘Zonenrand,’ ‘Sperrgebiet’ und ‘Westberlin.’ Deutschland als Grenzregion des Kalten Kriegs,” in Teilung und Integration. Die doppelte deutsche Nachkriegsgeschichte als wissenschaftliches und didaktisches Problem, ed. Kleßmann, Christoph and Lautzas, Peter (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2005), 102–104Google Scholar.

9 For details about the first division of the Eichsfeld in 1815–16, see Hussong, Ulrich, “Die Teilung des Eichsfeldes im Jahre 1815,” Eichsfeld Jahrbuch (1993): 5–92Google Scholar; Aufgebauer, Peter, “Geschichte einer Grenzlandschaft,” in Das Eichsfeld. Ein deutscher Grenzraum, ed. Aufgebauer, Peter et al. (Duderstadt: Mecke, 2002), 75–76Google Scholar.

10 Sheffer, “Burned Bridge,” 560–70. I thank Edith for first pointing out to me the similarity between the two stories as I was working on an early version of this article.

11 See Steininger, Rolf, Eine Vertane Chance. Die Stalin-Note vom 10. März 1952 und die Wiedervereinigung (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1985), 9Google Scholar, for a summary of the document's content. For many years, scholars and politicians in Germany and elsewhere debated the sincerity of this suggestion and the reaction of the Allies and the German government. See Wettig, Gerhard, “Stalin and German Reunification: Archival Evidence on Soviet Foreign Policy in Spring 1952,” The Historical Journal 37 (1994): 411–419CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Loth, Wilfrid, Die Sovjetunion und die deutsche Frage (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 12–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Kilian, Werner, Die Hallstein-Doktrin. Der diplomatische Krieg zwischen der BRD und der DDR 1955–1973 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), 14–15Google Scholar; Auerbach, Ludwig, “Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein,” in Adenauer und die Folgen, ed. Netzer, H. J. (Munich: Beck, 1965), 92–105Google Scholar.

13 Gray, William Glenn, Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949–1969 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 11–12Google Scholar. See also Kilian, Die Hallstein-Doktrin, 18–19.

14 To avoid using the title “German Democratic Republic,” West German speakers usually referred to it as “the Soviet Zone” (Sovietische Besatzungszone, or SBZ) or “the so-called GDR” (die sogenannte DDR). Some preferred “central Germany” (Mitteldeutschland), alluding also to the Germanness of the territories annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union that belonged to Germany before World War II.

15 Gray, Germany's Cold War, 30–37; Kilian, Die Hallstein-Doktrin, 13–18; Booz, Rüdiger Marco, “Hallsteinzeit.” Deutsche Aussenpolitik 1955–1972 (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1995), 17–20Google Scholar.

16 Gray, Germany's Cold War, 37–40; Kilian, Die Hallstein-Doktrin, 18–23; Booz, “Hallsteinzeit,” 17–19.

17 Gray, Germany's Cold War, 193–198; Kilian, Die Hallstein-Doktrin, 339–340; Booz, “Hallsteinzeit,” 97–104. As a unique phenomenon in international relations, the Hallstein Doctrine was analyzed and studied by many. The three books quoted above, published in the space of eight years, summarize well its inception, different practices, difficulties, effects, and eventual demise. See also Geyer, Martin H., “Der Kampf um nationale Representation. Deutsch-deutsche Sportbeziehungen und die ‘Hallstein Doktrin,’” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgschichte 44 (1996): 55–86Google Scholar.

18 Edith Sheffer recounts the story of border-crossing relations between Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg in the 1950s. The district administrator of the eastern district was fired in 1958 for agreeing to discuss issues of content with his western colleagues, and the mayor of Neustadt decided to disregard pressures from Bonn and continue with public official meetings with his colleagues from the east, drawing much media attention in 1959–60. Sheffer, “Burned Bridge,” 565–68.

19 For preparations to the announcement of the new border regime in the GDR, beginning in early May, see BAMA, DVH 27 Pt7493. For the purposes of the argument in this paper, see especially 50, 63–67. See also Besondere Massnahmen an der D-Linie, Weimar, May 3, 1952, in BAB, DO 1, 20.0/642, for measures to tighten and even seal parts of the border as early as May 3. See a good step-by-step document analysis of the weeks leading to the declaration of the new border regime in Bennewitz, Inge and Potratz, Rainer, Zwangsaussiedlungen an der innerdeutsche Grenze. Analysen und Dokumente (Berlin: Links, 1997), 26–33Google Scholar. For the broader context of this policy change in the GDR, see Ross, Constructing Socialism, especially part 2 beginning on 51. For the Soviets' instructions to the East Germans as early as April 1952, see Lapp, Gefechtsdienst im Frieden, 19–20.

20 These arrangements operated for more than five years at that point and are generally referred to as “little border traffic” (kleine Grenzverkehr). All community councils received a detailed copy of the new order stating explicitly that “Die Bestimmungen über den kleinen Grenzverkehr sind mit Wirkung vom 26.5.52 aufgehoben” (the regulations governing the little border traffic are abolished as of May 26, 1952). See, for example, KrAEich, Kirchgandern B14. This element was an important part of the new border regime, and the central command of the border police worked on different versions of its phrasings in advance. See BAMA, DVH 27, Pt 7493, 50.

21 Edith Sheffer, “The Foundations of the Wall: Building a ‘Special Regime’ in the Borderland,” unpublished paper presented at the German Studies Association's Annual Conference, 2006, describes in detail the effects of this new policy on the frontier population and references the major works on this issue. See also Potratz, Rainer, “Zwangsaussiedlungen aus dem Grenzgebiet der DDR zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland im Mai/Juni 1952,” in Grenzland. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutsch-deutschen Grenze, ed. Weisbrod, Bernd (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1993), 57–69Google Scholar; and the very useful collection of documents pertaining to the deportation of frontier residents in the GDR in Bennewitz and Potratz, Zwangsaussiedlungen. Different state agencies in the GDR wrote daily reports on the implementation of the new border regime and the atmosphere along the border. See, for example, KrAEich, EA HIG 192; ThHStAW, Land Thür. MdI Nr. 3039, 4–9; BAB DE 1, 6084, 178–179, 185–186.

22 KrAEich, Kirchgandern B14. In practice the border police department at that time was undermanned, under equipped, and not in a position to impose such regulation in a strict manner.

23 McCloy to State Secretary, May 28, 1952, and July 2, 1952, in NARA-CIV RG 59 1311/250/59/17/7/11/1.

24 Ross, Constructing Socialism, 51. I argue that the transformation in GDR policy Ross discusses was expressed in the clearest manner in the area of border policy.

25 See Mitchell, Timothy, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 77–96Google Scholar; and Eyal, Gil, The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 7–8, 12, 108–119Google Scholar. For a development of the theory elaborated by these two authors regarding the connection of the boundaries between state and society with the borders between states, and for an application of this conceptualization to the history of German division, see Sagi Schaefer, “Ironing the Curtain: Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2011), 34–38.

26 Following Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, I chose not to employ the term “identity” in this article. They suggest the use of “identification” instead because “As a processual, active term derived from a verb [it] lacks the reifying connotations of ‘identity.’ It invites us to specify the agents that do the identifying. And it does not presuppose that such identifying . . . will necessarily result in internal sameness . . . Identification . . . is intrinsic to social life; ‘identity’ in the strong sense is not.” Brubaker, Rogers and Cooper, Frederick, “Beyond ‘Identity,”’ Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quote on 14.

27 The project was completed in 1933. This arrangement became a problem and was discussed and negotiated repeatedly on many levels from the early 1950s. See, for example, Verbindungen nach Westdeutschland, die die Staatsgrenze berühren, Worbis, June 11, 1963, in KrAEich, EA WBS Nr. 7241.

28 Correspondence on this issue, beginning in March 1951, can be found in ThHStAW, Land Thür., Ministerium d. Finanzen Nr. 1397. See especially documents from March 28, 1951 (Kreisrat Worbis to Th. MdI), April 30, 1951 (internal memo Th. Landesfinanzdirektion). See also many other examples detailed in the document from May 5, 1951 (inspection report of Th. MdF detailing the different local and regional solutions).

29 Oberkreisdirektor Dud to Regierungspräsident Hildesheim, Dec. 4, 1953, and Regierungspräsident Hildesheim to Oberkreisdirektor Dud, Jan. 23, 1954. Both in KrAGö, LK DUD Nr. 61. The quote is from the second letter.

30 Further correspondence throughout 1954 is in the same file, including a report from a surprise visit of one council member from Duderstadt in Worbis. Some examples include Oberkreisdirektor Dud to Vorsitz. d. Kreistags WBS, Feb. 23, 1954; Vorsitz. d. Kreistags WBS to Oberkreisdirektor Dud, March 4, 1954; Aktenvermerk by Garre on visit in Worbis, Aug. 18, 1954. All in KrAGö, LK DUD Nr. 61.

31 Gleitze was born in 1902 in Seeburg, about five miles northwest of Duderstadt as the crow flies. After retiring he served in the district council and in the council of the city of Duderstadt. He died in 1989, just three weeks before the border opened. For details about Gleitze's life and career, see http://de.academic.ru/dic.nsf/dewiki/930693 (last accessed June 27, 2010). Gleitze earned a Ph.D. in national economy at the University of Rostock in 1927, after having written a dissertation about the development of plot sizes in the district of Duderstadt and its consequences. On the front cover of his dissertation, below his name and title, Gleitze added “from Seeburg in the Eichsfeld.” See M. Gleitze, “Die Verteilung und Bedeutung der Betriebsgrössen in der Landwirtschaft des Kreises Duderstadt” (Ph.D. diss., Rostock University, 1926).

32 Oberkreisdirektor Duderstadt to Regierungspräsident Hildesheim, June 1, 1953, in KrAGö, LK DUD Nr. 61.

33 Undated Kreistag protocol, KrArGö, LK DUD Nr. 61. This western policy prohibiting border-crossing meetings between officials was not unique to the Eichsfeld. Edith Sheffer writes that Bavarian officials forced city councillors in Neustadt to cancel meetings they had already agreed to participate in at the same time. See Sheffer, “Burned Bridge,” 562–3.

34 Rat d. Gemeinde Holungen to Vorsitz. d. Rates d. Kreises Worbis Dec. 20, 1954. KrAEich, Holungen B58.

35 The SED was the East German ruling party. For the letter with the reassuring details about Iseke's background, see Rat d. Gemeinde Holungen to Vorsitz. d. Rates d. Kreises Worbis, Feb. 21, 1955. KrAEich, Holungen B58. See also Palmowski, Jan, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 229–31Google Scholar.

36 I thank Frau Regina Huschenbeth, director of the Eichsfeld district archive, for allowing me to use this map.

37 See one example of the invitations to West German Eichsfeld communities and to the western district of Duderstadt, titled “Eichsfeld Homeland Gathering, a Contribution to Peace and Unity” (Eichsfelder Heimattreffen, ein Beitrag für Frieden und Einheit), in KrAGö, LK DUD Nr. 61.

38 For applications to participate from the western Eichsfeld, see Oberkreisdirektor Kreis Duderstadt to Vorsitz. d. Rates d. Kreises Worbis, June 11, 1956, in KrAGö LK DUD Nr. 61. The same file also includes the program of the event and some newspaper reports on it. See Eichsfelder Heimatbote, July 21, 1956, “Das ganze Eichsfeld—ungeteilt” as cut and saved in the district archive in the western part of the Eichsfeld, KrAGö LK DUD Nr. 61. For more details on the contents of the celebration, the number of participants, and the locals' perspectives on its impact, see Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation, 229–234. It is hard to determine exactly how many participants came from the western part of the Eichsfeld region. Palmowski relies on GDR newspaper reports and on locals' memories to say that there were as many as eight hundred participants from the west (230), but permits were issued for only 250, who boarded buses and traveled the long way through Wartha. See Duderstadt, Stadt, Die Grenze im Eichsfeld (Göttingen: Verlag Göttinger Tageblatt, 1991), 16Google Scholar. The additional participants must have arrived via shorter, unofficial, and illegal routes.

39 According to Edith Sheffer, this was the case in Sonneberg and Neustadt at that time as well. Officials and residents of the two border towns were overwhelmingly in favor of border-crossing meetings and ceremonies; they voted for them when given the chance, held them in spite of repeated reprimands and prohibitions, and still remember them fondly today. Sheffer, “Burned Bridge,” 564–68.

40 In his first report, he emphasized that in the conversations with his colleagues from the neighboring GDR district, they avoided discussions of any political questions (“unter Vermeidung aller politischen Fragen”) and concentrated on this kind of local issues. See Oberkreisdirektor Duderstadt, Aktenvermerk, July 12, 1956, in KrAGö LK DUD Nr. 61.

41 Under this title, state and party officials, organizations, and citizens of the GDR were encouraged to contact West Germans and persuade them of the peaceful, just, and moral way of the East German state so as to win them over for the eastern positions in the Cold War. For examples of “all-German work” in other frontier areas, see Sheffer, “Burned Bridge,” 342–45.

42 See Rat d. Kreises Worbis an den Rat d. Stadt Heiligenstadt, Nov. 24, 1955, in StArHIG Rep II, IA Nr. 560.

43 See the invitation to the event in StArHIG Rep II, IA Nr. 560.

44 Extensive correspondence on both sides of the border deals with the effects on transportation. See, for example, Oberkreisdirektor Dud to Regierungspräsident Hildesheim, Dec. 4, 1953, KrAGö, LK DUD Nr. 61 (district administrator explaining to his superior that severing the border-crossing road passing through his district town had turned the town into a “dead corner” on the map); Besprechung über Bahnbuslinie 1200, Sept. 14, 1956, in StaADud, Fuhr 142 (administrators trying to convince representatives of the national railway company to reactivate a bus line connecting border villages). Kalikombinat Werra-Merkers, May 3, 1962, in BAB, DY 30 IV 2/12/73, 157–159 (changes in restricted zone regulations created transportation problems for this mining company). See also Gemeinde Wahlhausen to Ministerium d. Innern, Jan. 26, 1946, in KrAEich EA HIG Nr. 402/I (the damages to dairy farmers in frontier villages).

45 After the event in Holungen, both Lower Saxon and federal offices wanted clarifications from Gleitze. They did not mind cultural exchanges but wanted to know the aim of meetings with local politicians that he planned. See memos in NLA-HStAH Nds. 50 Acc. 96/88 Nr. 705 and Gleitze's twenty-three-point document in KrArGö, LK DUD Nr. 61.

46 State agencies continued to supervise these contacts. The Lower Saxon Ministry of the Interior sent a division head (Ministerialrat) to question Gleitze on his interactions with eastern colleagues in February 1957. See Ministerialrat Nullmeyer to Oberkreisdirektor Gleitze, March 1, 1957, in KrArGö, LK DUD Nr. 61. For a list of the official cross-border meetings and events in the Eichsfeld in those years and a brief discussion of the optimistic atmosphere they brought, see Stadt Duderstadt, Die Grenze im Eichsfeld, 16–18.

47 The district administrator transmitted these instructions to the official who was to greet the visitors. See Oberkreisdirektor Gleitze to Landrat Diedrich, Duderstadt, Oct. 6, 1956, KrArGö, LK DUD Nr. 61.

48 For the eastern administrators, who were not elected but appointed by the ruling party, keeping to the lines dictated from above was crucial for keeping their jobs and their chances of advancing. In her dissertation, Edith Sheffer tells of the dismissal of an eastern district chairman who went too far in his negotiations with his western colleagues and promised progress on substantial issues. Sheffer, “Burned Bridge,” 565–66. According to Jan Palmowski, residents of Holungen were convinced that the secretary of their district council had been fired because he had allowed the Heimatfest to take place. Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation, 233–35.

49 Leiter d. Katasteramtes an d. Oberkreisdirektor Duderstadt, Aug. 22, 1956, KrArGö, LK DUD Nr. 61.

50 The whole file NLA-HStAH Nds. 50 Acc. 96/88 Nr. 705 is dedicated to this issue, documenting more than a hundred pages of correspondence and memos from the years 1949–1958. See especially DDR Minister für Aufbau to Regierungspräsident Lüneburg, Nov. 2, 1950, Bundesminister für gesamtdeutsche Fragen to Nds. MP, Dec. 21, 1951, and Nds. Minister d. Justiz to Oberlandgerichtpräsident Celle, Jan. 4, 1957.

51 Flächsig to Gleitze, July 30, 1956, and Gleitze to Flächsig, Aug. 24, 1956, both in KrAGö, LK DUD, Nr. 61.

52 The newspaper stories were cut and saved at the district archive in the same file with the correspondence. See KrArGö, LK DUD Nr. 61.

53 Gleitze and his colleagues were probably under some pressure from journalists to justify the visit. When they crossed to the east, entry was denied to the journalists who accompanied the delegation, which did not help to make the media representatives favorable toward the whole affair.

54 The story from the Südhanoversche Zeitung was typed word for word and saved in the district archive in the GDR part of the Eichsfeld. See KrArEich, EA HIG Nr. 402/I.

55 See both letters in KrArGö, LK DUD Nr. 61.

56 Oberkreisdirektor Gleitze to Vorsitz. d. Rat d. Kreises Flächsig, Jan. 15, 1958, in KrArGö, LK DUD Nr. 61. Edith Sheffer also suggests that press wars played an important part in border-crossing meetings. She convincingly shows that as long as western city officials hoped to achieve pragmatic progress in their negotiations, they were happy to keep them away from public view. When real progress was impossible, the border-crossing exchange turned into a press war. Sheffer, “Burned Bridge,” 567–68.

57 Full reports by the participants of this delegation, including newspaper reports from the west, are in KrArEich, EA WBS Nr. 2248.

58 I did not find a copy of this letter. I deduced its content from the draft of the reply letter. See Entwurf: an Oberkreisdirektor Gleitze, Duderstadt in KrArEich, EA WBS Nr. 2248.

59 Entwurf: an Oberkreisdirektor Gleitze, Duderstadt in KrArEich, EA WBS Nr. 2248. I have not found a final version of this letter in either the western or eastern archives, so I assume it was not sent. I think that it was too explicit regarding interventions from state agencies to pass censorship (see the next footnote). This makes the draft even more interesting in my view. Flächsig had not simply reiterated the formal version of his state (as in the reply regarding the border checkpoint quoted above), but invested in clarifying the points.

60 For example, he wrote that he could not offer any explanation for the fact that Gleitze did not always receive the newspaper that Worbis sent him regularly. He wrote that he also did not regularly receive the paper sent to him from Duderstadt, especially during the time of the Geneva Conference. For that, too, he “could offer no explanation.” Flächsig knew very well that GDR secret services, which monitored border-crossing mail, were responsible for the missing mail. He knew, too, that they would read this letter, as well.

61 Shears, David, The Ugly Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1970), 180–81Google Scholar.

62 This issue is dealt with in more depth in my dissertation. Schaefer, “Ironing the Curtain.” See also Schaefer, Sagi, “Border Land: Property Rights, Kinship, and the Emergence of the Inter-German Border in the Eichsfeld,” in Praktiken der Differenz. Diasporakulturen in der Zeitgeschichte, ed. Rürup, Miriam (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009)Google Scholar.

63 See, for example, the story of a boy from Duderstadt on his first visit to the GDR in Lüdge, Klaus, “Reise vom Eichsfeld ins Eichsfeld 1971,” in Erzählungen von der deutsch-deutsche Grenze, ed. Röhlke, Cornelia (Efurt: Sutton Verlag, 2001), 84–85Google Scholar.