Europe 1952/53: Between the Iron Curtain and the Coal and Steel Community

The film begins on the Rhine, Europe's most important waterway. Ships from many nations pass one another, but at the borders, everyone must stop first. The narrative then jumps to Luxembourg. In late summer 1952, people from six nations came together there for a project without precedent: the European Coal and Steel Community, soon known in German as the Montanunion. The film calls it the birth of today's European Union and an opportunity for young people after years of deprivation.

At the turn of the year 1952/53, according to the film, people in Luxembourg, Paris, Bonn, Brussels, Rome and The Hague looked to the future with uncertainty. The newsreel showed the new situation. Dwight D. Eisenhower, war hero and until recently NATO's Supreme Commander in Europe, had become the 34th President of the United States, a soldier at the head of the West. During a tactical atomic bomb test, around 2,000 soldiers took up forward positions, as a psychological test and in front of rolling film and television cameras. The film describes the mood as a mixture of fear, thrill and confidence from which no one could escape.

In the East, the newsreels celebrated Stalin's birthday with sentences such as: The people love Stalin because Stalin loves the people. According to Eastern propaganda, the enemies of freedom and the warmongers were in the West. It showed tanks rolling across West German fields, crushing harvests and terrifying women and children. Between the blocs lay Germany, an arena for the race between the systems.

In Bonn, Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer clearly pursued a Western course. The Federal Republic stood at the beginning of the economic miracle, and the Ruhr, with its mines and steelworks, was the heart of the resurgent industry. To the neighbors, however, the smoking chimneys looked more like a threat, since coal and steel had always been the basis of the arms industry. According to the film, the French would have preferred to detach the Ruhr from the West German state altogether. Since 1949, an international authority led by the Western powers had controlled the Ruhr from Düsseldorf. Even though Germans were already sitting at the table there, it could not be a permanent solution. Working in the Atlantikhaus was the young Marie-Rose Ibach, daughter of a French father and a German mother, whom the film follows through the years that followed.

The film shows at several points how deep the mistrust ran. Only recently, Hitler's soldiers had marched down the Champs-Élysées, and those footsteps still echoed in people's minds. Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, a Hamburg high school graduate, recounts a bicycle trip through southern France in 1952. He had taken his father's military canteen from the wardrobe and wore it on his belt because he thought it was great to walk around with a canteen like that. One evening in a restaurant, he noticed people gathering at the bar and looking at him and his friend with hostility. Only then did he realize that the German canteen was seen as a provocation, because the people there knew such canteens.

American political PR countered this with positive examples. One film portrayed the Provençal village of Gémenos, where former German prisoners of war had stayed instead of returning to Germany. Even the war memorial had been created by a German, and the film shows the baptism of a boy with a French mother and a German father. The documentary nevertheless notes that the Franco-German relationship remained complicated.

One striking finding of the film concerns American involvement. A promotional film that opens lyrically, about the European people who, despite borders, were essentially one, had been produced with US money. According to the documentary, dozens of American agencies promoted the European idea. A US government PR agency was based in Bonn, right alongside the American High Commissioner. The money came from official sources in Washington and covertly from secret CIA funds, and the goal of the campaign was the United States of Europe. Even the Marshall Plan had been part of the American Cold War strategy.

Georges Berthoin, then a young French government official, recalls American inspections of Marshall Plan funds that reached right into the factories and that he felt were inquisitorial. He says he objected along these lines: If the Americans wanted all of Europe to become communist, they should carry on like this. What was needed was cooperation between the national authorities and the Marshall Plan administration.

According to the film, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, a forum of eleven states without decision-making powers since 1949, was also supported at its founding with money from Washington, from the CIA-linked American Committee on United Europe. NATO's headquarters were in Paris, and American uniforms were part of the street scene in the city and in the suburb of Marly-le-Roi.

That did not make the Americans popular. The US journalist Janet Flanner, who had lived in Paris since the 1920s, noted a growing anti-Americanism. The French, she wrote, were tired of their country still being occupied after seven years of peace. In Paris alone, several thousand Americans worked in American offices, and many French people felt that most of them talked and drank too much and too loudly in public. NATO was formally multinational, but according to the film, the Americans called the shots. Marie-Rose Ibach also experienced this resentment.

According to the film, France in the early 1950s was poor and dependent on the United States. In Vietnam it was waging war over a lost colony, North Africa was simmering, and on top of that came housing shortages, a supply crisis and inflation. The price of a kilo of pork rose within a year from 380 to 540 francs. The US nevertheless needed the country as its most important NATO partner in the center of Europe. A quoted American analysis stated that the growing pessimism of the French was heightening their sense of inferiority within the Atlantic community. As a result, they feared Germany's role in Western defense more and were more critical of American leadership.

Later, the film quotes a CIA assessment according to which the rapid deterioration of the foreign trade balance and the uncertain financing of increased defense burdens had brought France to the brink of national bankruptcy. The faltering economy drove members to the communist-dominated trade unions. As a countermeasure, an American agency supported the building of non-communist workers' organizations.

As a way out of this dilemma, the plan of Foreign Minister Robert Schuman took shape at the French Foreign Ministry in Paris: a common market for coal and steel. Luxembourg, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and the Federal Republic were to give up a piece of their sovereignty for it. After its signing, the film calls the plan "Columbus's egg," because the common market both integrated and controlled Germany.

At almost the same time, on the Lech, the prison gates opened for 33 former inmates who had been pardoned by the American High Commissioner. Among them was the industrialist Krupp, who had been convicted as a war criminal. The film interprets his release as a sign that the industry of the Ruhr was needed.

According to the film, for the Federal Republic the Schuman Plan was an essential step from pariah to partner in Europe. In early 1952, the newsreel celebrated its ratification in the Bundestag as the Federal Republic's first major foreign policy decision, a decision for Europe. An evening torchlight procession through Bonn by young supporters of the Europa-Union, however, had been organized and financed with American money. The press in the six countries celebrated the treaty, but it did not have only friends.

Many young people were skeptical of Bonn's line. Kuhlbrodt says that the state Adenauer wanted was not their state. He remembers election posters with the slogan "Socialism, our enemies," which showed a person being killed. He tore down such posters, he says, because he could not stand this hate-mongering.

In East Berlin, from 1951 onward, the Stalinallee was built, a grand boulevard a good two kilometers long modeled on Moscow. Those in power proudly presented buildings with elevators and garbage chutes for activists and heroes of labor. The writer and communist Alfred Kantorowicz had returned from exile in the US to the GDR, the supposedly better Germany. In his diary, he mocked the fanfare that accompanied the construction of an apartment building in their country, as if a new era of architecture had dawned. Elsewhere, he wrote, people built more and better houses without anyone but the tenants asking about them. His magazine "Ost und West," a forum for dialogue, was soon banned. Freedom of opinion had no place in Stalinism, the film says.

The real ruler was SED leader Walter Ulbricht. He announced that the five-year plan foresaw a doubling of peaceful industrial production compared with 1936, a pace that no capitalist country could achieve. Kantorowicz described the country under Ulbricht like this: Every theater, every tax office, every party office was a barracks, every visitor a recruit.

A central narrative thread follows Rudolf Dertinger, then 15 years old. He describes himself as not exactly conformist, but not rebellious either. He was in the FDJ, as one practically had to be, and had earned the badge for good knowledge in bronze. His father, Georg Dertinger, was the GDR's foreign minister and a member of the East German CDU. Rudolf remembers the privileges: When his father became minister, a huge hamper arrived one evening with wine, grapes and oranges that could not be bought anywhere. Another time, two Russian soldiers hauled a radiogram with a record player into the house. His father's chauffeur drove him to boarding school, the Catholic seminary in Heiligenstadt near the West German border, in the ministerial limousine, with an escort car for protection. He naturally enjoyed that, he says.

The family lived in Kleinmachnow, right on the border with West Berlin. Zehlendorf was five minutes away by bicycle. For the students, checkpoints did not matter. Rudolf spent wonderful summer days at the Wannsee, met people who spoke English and had chewing gum, and was invited to birthday parties. For moments, the Cold War seemed far away, the film says.

Georg Dertinger supported the East German state despite the SED dictatorship. His son describes his father's stance this way: One could not refuse; one had to get involved, prevent the worst and resist the division. It had to be possible for the two parts of Germany to come together again, in a way that both the Soviet Union and the West could approve. The film counters that the matter had in fact long been decided.

According to the film, NATO arose out of mistrust of the Soviet Union. Stalin had promised democracy to many countries in Eastern Europe and broken that promise. The West's answer was deterrence. One partner was still missing: the Federal Republic. That the Germans, under whom Europe had only just suffered, should be armed again was the shared goal of the Americans and Adenauer. At the first four-power conference with the foreign ministers of the three Western powers, the subject was the General Treaty, which was to place relations on the level of an equal partnership.

In March 1952, Stalin made the Western powers a surprising offer: a peace treaty for a neutral, undivided and democratic Germany between the blocs. The film describes the effect as electrifying. Much in the note corresponded to the ideas of Georg Dertinger, who was in constant contact with the Soviets and believed his work was now bearing fruit. According to his son, the only thing that surprised him was that it contained something he himself would not have dared to write into it: an army of its own of, as Rudolf thinks, perhaps 100,000 men. The Western powers and Adenauer immediately rejected it. Stalin had broken his word too often, the film says.

East Berlin's campaign against Adenauer's Western course also resonated in the Federal Republic. As a high school student, Kuhlbrodt marched with a torch in a communist demonstration in Hamburg and sang songs in the style of "Build up, build up, Free German Youth." Today it sends a chill down his spine, but back then he had the feeling it would get him somewhere. In May 1952, 30,000 pacifists, leftists and communists traveled to Essen to protest against rearmament and the General Treaty. The demonstration was banned at short notice, the young people gathered anyway, and shots were fired. The young Munich communist Philipp Müller died. Eastern propaganda used the "Essen Bloody Sunday" as proof of Adenauer's alleged "reign of terror."

After the note was rejected, the tone in East Berlin escalated. At rallies against the "General War Treaty," the Barracked People's Police marched along, since the GDR, too, had long since switched to rearmament. Kantorowicz noted a wave of nationalist instincts that threatened to flood everything, and quoted headlines from "Neues Deutschland" such as "Oath of the German Patriots."

For the signing, the General Treaty was renamed the Germany Treaty, which according to the film sounded nicer. Rearmament was to take place within a common European army in the closest coordination with NATO, supported by the same six countries as the Schuman Plan. For the Western powers and the chancellor, economic and military cooperation were one and the same. Adenauer declared that this path was the only possible one to reunification in peace and freedom. Kantorowicz was depressed both by West German rearmament and by East Berlin's response: "We," too, would now have an army again, with generals, officers and muskets. In Italy, too, many viewed rearmament with concern. Luciana Castellina was outraged by the US feature film "The Desert Fox," which in 1952 portrayed Hitler's favorite general as a broken hero.

In Italy, the scars of war were compounded by a more deeply rooted poverty: an underdeveloped economy, poor sanitary conditions in the cities and feudal structures in the countryside. The US invested 1.5 billion dollars in Marshall Plan aid, more than in the Federal Republic, and according to the film this was not the only reason they were welcome. What remained invisible were the many hundreds of thousands of dollars with which the CIA financed the conservative parties.

The film considers a rigid anti-communism hardly enforceable in Italy, because the people were too individualistic. Italian communism, it says, was more popular and cheerful, and the dark sides of the dictatorship of the proletariat receded behind revolutionary romanticism. Castellina tells of communists who marched to the cathedral with red flags, hammers and sickles to assert the right of communists to be confirmation sponsors for children. For her, the Soviet Union was the country where, for the first time in history, the revolution had been made, and she was glad of that.

In many regions, in the Po Valley, in Apulia, Basilicata and Sicily, crowds of farm laborers worked the land of a single large landowner. Castellina recalls how from 1946 to 1948 the peasants took to the streets spontaneously, not the communist elite from prison and exile, with signs such as "We want to do it like in Russia" and "The land to those who work it." Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi pushed through a land reform which, according to the film, fell far short of the left's demands but was a small step forward. An American-produced film celebrated the lottery of plots of land in southern Italy.

According to the film, the Americans' fear of communists was at its peak: in the US, Senator McCarthy's witch hunt was raging, and in Western Europe people feared Moscow's fifth column. The film describes France as more diverse and tolerant. Janet Flanner wrote that one of the reasons for anti-Americanism was the hysterical hunt, mocked by the French, for a few communists hiding like moths in an office carpet. An eyewitness adds that in France communists were integrated, and taking an interest in communism was a normal electoral choice.

In spring 1952, a huge cultural festival took place in Paris, organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with music, theater, literature and masterpieces of modern art from American museums. Officially, the money came from wealthy patrons; in reality, according to the film, it came from the CIA. It calls the festival the most spectacular cultural propaganda operation since the war, with an anti-communist thrust. Its impulses matched the Parisian mood of new beginnings, experimentation and libertinism, of Picasso, Piaf, existentialism and Montmartre. Kuhlbrodt raves that in Paris they always had the feeling they belonged there. There were plays that could never have been staged that way in Hamburg, the Cinémathèque Française and the first jazz clubs. France, he says, was the cultural center of Europe.

With the failure of the Stalin Note, according to the film, Ulbricht no longer had to show any consideration. The SED Central Committee decided to propose the planned construction of socialism to the party conference. The film describes this as the final Sovietization: expansion of the military, priority for heavy industry, production cooperatives and higher work quotas. An eyewitness who considered Ulbricht a completely uneducated, inaccessible apparatchik calls the raising of the quotas classically capitalist: more work for the same money, just dressed up differently. Small private businesses, he says, were cut down in sometimes outlandish ways, and craftsmen were pushed into cooperatives, unless they simply took off right away.

The refugee camps in West Berlin filled up. Because the land route was blocked, people were flown to West Germany via a small airlift. In Heiligenstadt, Rudolf Dertinger experienced classmates suddenly no longer being there. The regime responded with closures and harassment; at Helmstedt, the clearance of freight transports took up to 64 hours. Georg Dertinger believed, his son says, that one could not abandon the people. If everyone ran away, what would become of the country? Looking back, his son also sees this as an attitude with which one perhaps glossed over the world a little.

In summer 1952, the tensions receded for a moment. At the Olympic Games in Helsinki, Germans took part again for the first time since the war, though only as a West German team without GDR athletes. According to the film, it allowed national pride again for the first time. The great hope was 1,500-meter world record holder Werner Lueg. In return for sports-political support for the ostracized Germans, Luxembourg had hired the German star coach Woldemar Gerschler, an advocate of interval training. Jean Hamilius, a member of the small Luxembourg team, remembers at least an hour of running training every day, ten times 300 meters with a minute's rest, which was pretty tough for him.

All of Germany was eagerly awaiting Lueg's victory, but the 1,500 meters was won by the Luxembourger Barthel. Gerschler was resented for it, and a German commentary complained that the gold medal had been snatched "from the outstretched hand." Luxembourg was in a national frenzy. Hamilius does not want to call it nationalism, but patriotism: He was not German and not French, but Luxembourgish.

Until summer 1952, Luxembourg had been a sleepy little town, the film says. Only 14 days before the start was it decided that it would become the seat of the Coal and Steel Community. Planning groups and industry representatives frantically searched for houses and offices. Hamilius, an economist and the son of the mayor, applied as a committed European but received no answer. He suspects political reasons: There were Luxembourgers who did not want him.

The first session took place in the town hall. It was the hour of Jean Monnet, who had worked for years in the background as a French economic planner, had conceived the Schuman Plan and had gained experience in France and, during the war, in the US. Now he headed the Coal and Steel Community, and Georges Berthoin was his closest associate. The High Authority moved into offices in Luxembourg's old railway administration building. Marie-Rose Ibach had left NATO and was one of around 200 staff members. She describes Monnet as a great worker. The High Authority, she says, was total chaos; no one knew exactly what they were doing, and Monnet was the only one who saw clearly. They knew they were opening a very difficult, completely unexplored period. For the first time, different nationalities worked together; for Germans and French people, it was an extraordinary adventure.

Ibach describes everyday life together as uncomplicated. She shared an apartment with a Frenchwoman, a German woman lived above them, and Luxembourgers on the ground floor. Everyone was mixed and got along well, and she had no problems with nationalities. According to Hamilius, there were concerns among older Luxembourgers about foreign influence. It was rumored that the court and the church, among others, had reservations, but it did not go very far. The film also shows the leisure time of the mostly young staff, with excursions between the Moselle, the Eifel and the Ardennes, a tea dance organized by the High Authority itself and evenings in the cafés of the old town. It speaks of six countries and 155 million people on the way to the future.

While Moscow celebrated 35 years of the October Revolution, the Eastern Bloc closed ranks under Stalin's direction. Kantorowicz noted that in the world powers' game of chess they were merely an advanced pawn, protected until it was worth sacrificing, despite all the fanfare of the local potentates. Georg Dertinger's all-German dream was over, and according to the film he feared his dismissal or worse. His son interprets the logic of those in power this way: They no longer needed bourgeois politicians as figureheads; now they were turning the GDR into a real GDR.

On Christmas Day 1952, Dertinger celebrated his 50th birthday with a large reception. The Soviet ambassador and Otto Grotewohl came with praise and congratulations, and the father told the mother that nothing could happen to them now. On January 16, 1953, at around 8:38 a.m., the school principal took Rudolf out of class. Outside stood two men in leather coats who said his father wanted to speak to him in Berlin. Suspecting nothing bad, he got into the car. In the official villa on Majakowskiring in Pankow, he found his sister, his younger brother, the housekeeper with her son and two or three Stasi men, but not his parents. They put "Neues Deutschland" in front of him, which reported at the bottom of the front page that Foreign Minister Georg Dertinger had been arrested as a spy. After that, the children were stuck there.

On January 31, 1953, a hurricane swept across the North Sea. At three in the morning, the first dikes broke on the Dutch coast, and soon the country was flooded from Rotterdam to the Belgian border. The telephone lines went down, and it was only on Monday morning that the government declared a state of emergency. In the Netherlands alone, more than 1,800 people died. According to the film, a German offer of help was at first accepted only hesitantly; the wounds of the war were too deep. Then Bonn was able to send the newly founded Federal Agency for Technical Relief. Dutch voices expressed satisfaction that the help was bringing the two peoples closer and serving the European idea. American, British and Belgian airmen also helped. A quoted report noted that the American aid had left a deep positive impression on the Dutch. The film sees this as another building block for the cohesion of the West.

In February 1953, a train carrying German coal to a French ironworks crossed the border without inspection. Meanwhile, at the High Authority on the Place de Metz, a practical question arose: How were six nations with five languages supposed to talk to one another?

Stalin died on March 5, 1953, after a stroke, which according to the film changed the situation in the East at a stroke. Radio stations broadcast the mourning for days, an attaché secretly filmed the funeral procession from the US embassy, and Johannes R. Becher wrote the verse: "Stalin means freedom, Stalin means peace." Even in the juvenile detention center where Rudolf Dertinger was awaiting his espionage trial, mourning was ordered. He remembers everyone being gathered together in an assembly room. Western communists were also shaken. "L'Humanité" appeared as a ten-page special edition with a huge photo of a smiling Stalin. According to the film, it took years before the majority of communists in the West, too, bid him farewell in their minds.

Meanwhile, the Coal and Steel Community was working at every level. At the Belval steelworks near Esch, Monnet gave the signal for the tapping of the first European pig iron, inscribed "Europa." It had been produced in Luxembourg from French ore, Belgian limestone and Dutch and German coke, with the participation of Italian workers. The film presents a Dior show in Munich as another image of rapprochement.

France, however, remained in crisis. From April 1953 onward, there were repeated strikes. A small strike in the upholstery shop of the state-owned Renault works grew to 10,000 strikers and led to the lockout of 37,000 people, who were demanding 25 francs more per hour. Governments changed, but the misery remained. Charles de Gaulle gave voice to the unease. A quoted American report describes him as an opponent of a united Europe that would deal a death blow to French national sentiment. De Gaulle, it says, claimed that NATO had turned France into an American protectorate without providing corresponding protection, and wanted France's defense in French hands. Should the situation deteriorate considerably, he could make history once again, according to the assessment.

Berthoin reports that Moscow, too, was watching the Coal and Steel Community with suspicion. As he recalls, a small Soviet embassy in Luxembourg grew to more than 35 diplomats in order to follow what the High Authority was doing. The Soviet ambassador asked him why Monnet had never given a speech against the Soviet Union. Monnet never did, Berthoin says.

Poor supplies, party dictatorship and harassment drove more and more people across the Iron Curtain, which American propaganda seized upon, for example in the escape of the 21-year-old Hungarian prima ballerina Nora Kovács and her husband. According to the film, 200,000 people fled the GDR in the first half of 1953, more than ever before. The film calls this a declaration of bankruptcy for SED policy. Ulbricht was summoned to Moscow, and Stalin's successors forced him to change course. On June 11, "Neues Deutschland" published a public self-criticism stating that mistakes had been made. Kantorowicz noted that an acquaintance had been shaken by a crying fit during a phone call. It was said that Ulbricht's days were numbered, and that the hoopla for his 60th birthday had already been canceled.

The excessive work quotas at the Stalinallee construction site, however, had not been withdrawn. Discontent and hatred of the functionaries and their good life grew. Thousands of workers followed the call to strike and marched to the House of Ministries. They tore sector barriers out of the pavement and demanded unification with the West and equal democratic rights. The red flag on the Brandenburg Gate was torn to shreds. For a moment, it looked like the end of the GDR; the People's Police and the Stasi seemed helpless. Around midday, shots were fired at Potsdamer Platz, Soviet tanks stood behind barriers, and a state of emergency was declared. Kantorowicz noted that now one could only work for change from within; the helplessness was universal.

A week later, a memorial rally took place in front of Schöneberg Town Hall. According to the film, Adenauer saw the uprising as confirmation of his Western integration policy. The film calls the rally a gesture of genuine mourning and at the same time a staged event, because one of the coffins laid out was empty: The GDR authorities had not released the body of a West Berliner who had been killed. Kuhlbrodt says that friends who thought like communists remained his friends. But he found the upper class around Ulbricht unsympathetic, because it reminded him of regulations and surveillance methods like those of the Nazi era. The West eventually opened its storerooms to East Germans. The film sees this as both an offer of help and propaganda proof of which system worked better.

At the end, the film draws a brief conclusion. Luxembourg, it says, became one of the most important places of a united, peaceful Europe for decades, despite the contradictions at the beginning. Hamilius also sees missed opportunities: Had Luxembourg been more welcoming back then, it might be the capital of Europe today. Ibach hopes that her daughter or her granddaughter, who lives in Belgium, will experience even more of this Europe. She remains an enthusiastic European to this day.

Rudolf Dertinger served three and a half years in juvenile detention for espionage and then went to the West. Alfred Kantorowicz fled to the Federal Republic in 1957, where he was accused of insufficient opposition to the GDR regime. Dietrich Kuhlbrodt became a public prosecutor and an actor in Christoph Schlingensief's underground films. Janet Flanner returned to New York in 1975 after five decades in Paris and died three years later. Jean Hamilius made a career as an auditor and politician in Luxembourg. Luciana Castellina was expelled from her party in 1969 but remained a convinced communist and became a Member of the European Parliament. Georges Berthoin lives in southern France; the film calls him the last survivor of Europe's founding circle.