ABSTRACT
When the boundary between the Eastern and the Western sectors of Berlin was sealed off on 13 August 1961, Brandt’s relations with the Kennedy administration quickly reached their all-time low. The reaction of the Americans, realistically the only power that might have been able to do something about the Wall as it went up, was the big question in the hours and days after the first barriers had appeared. ‘When are the Americans coming to put an end to this nightmare?’ the Mayor was asked by a bystander in the morning of 13 August, when he inspected the border after having rushed back to Berlin from West Germany.2
Brandt set off to find out. The Mayor, who held the Allied Kommandantura (to which he was technically
subordinate) in a certain disdain, had always taken the view that, if the commandants wanted something, they should come to see him – ‘but’, in Bahr’s words, ‘now he wanted something’ and for the first time Brandt set foot in the Kommandantura.3 Brandt himself later admitted that he could not think of effective countermeasures to suggest that morning either, but the least he demanded of the commandants was some form of action to prove the ability to act: a protest issued to all Warsaw Pact states, a protest distributed through the media, military patrols along the boundary. Lacking authorization from their governments, however, the commandants invariably declined or put off Brandt’s requests.4 According to some contemporary reports, an excited Brandt told the commandants rudely ‘Gentlemen, last night you let Ulbricht kick you in the arse’ and upon leaving the Kommandantura remarked publicly that given their reaction ‘the entire East is
