The Great Divide

"And so that contact, that meeting of minds, and almost of hearts, which seemed to have taken place four months ago is -for the moment -broken. We stand looking at each other across a great divide." Thus did Britain's Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan pronounce the epitaph of the spirit of Geneva.

In the final days of the foreign ministers' conference, Russia's Vyacheslav Molotov disposed brusquely of any illusion that the Russians might make concessions in the only area where the West had any real hope of progress. Every Western proposal for improved East-West contacts was either "inadmissible" or "interference" with Russia's internal affairs. "We will not grant freedom of propaganda calling for an atomic attack," he snapped, or for importing "all kinds of scum of society thrown out by the peoples of the countries of socialism and people's democracy."

In the end, the Big Four issued a two-sentence communique that mentioned no progress and did not schedule any future meeting. The West also issued its own communique for the ears of the Germans, expressing their sympathy with the "sense of cruel disappointment to the German people, East and West," and Dulles dispatched a private letter to Chancellor Adenauer pledging the U.S. to continue its efforts to reunite Germany. Geneva II was over.

In France and Britain, editorialists busily explained that no one had seriously expected much of the "spirit of Geneva" anyway. West Germany's tough old Konrad Adenauer, who dislikes uncertainty, heard the results almost with relief: reality was better than illusion. He briskly ordered the stalled rearmament program pushed through, so that West Germany could have four divisions by the end of 1956. On his behalf, a spokesman declared gratefully that in Geneva the West had "made the cause of reunification their own." But Socialists and members of the FDP, even some of Adenauer's own Christian Democrats, raised the familiar complaint, dating from the Berlin Conference, that the West had never asked the Russians the crucial question: Would they allow reunification if West Germany got out of NATO?

The theory of the unasked question is a myth that many German politicians desperately cling to. At Geneva the West had forced Molotov to admit plainly again and again, that whether or not West Germany is in NATO, Russia would never consent to free elections, which would allow West Germany to "swallow up" Communist East Germany. Already Molotov's admission had forced a new line in East Germany itself: free elections is a dirty term; after all, free elections had not prevented the emergence of Hitler. Wrote the party organ Neues Deutschland: "The lessons taught the German people as a result of their belief in the fairy tale of free elections under an imperialistic power are so bitter that anyone who forgets them for one single moment becomes a traitor to his country."

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