Into the Cosmos Page 37
early 1950s. But Ulbricht’s SED was suspicious of the drive to liberal-
ize socialist politics unleashed by Khrushchev, a sentiment that was only
reinforced by the Hungarian uprising in November 1956. Thereafter,
the fear of the pitfalls of national routes to socialism, identified by the
SED as “Titoist revisionism,” pervaded politics in the GDR and allowed
a “frost” to reemerge. Ulbricht reasserted his authority and, finding
himself on stronger ground, targeted internal party opposition that had
246 Heather L. Gumbert
sought greater de-Stalinization, democratic reforms, and the emergence
of a more humane socialism.16 In this context the SED sought to shore up
ideological commitment through a new campaign of ideological transfor-
mation, once again meeting economic and geopolitical challenges with
political solutions.
During the SED’s Thirtieth Party Conference in January and Febru-
ary 1957—the first meeting of the SED since the cessation of protests in
Hungary—the party announced the change of course. The SED declared
that the GDR belonged to the “socialist camp,” rejected further social or
political liberalization, and called for greater partisanship among party
members.17 This ideological hardening found expression in an agitation
campaign introduced over the course of 1957. The campaign had two
goals: to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over the West, and to
transform East Germans into socialist citizens by cultivating a “social-
ist consciousness.” The SED hoped to accomplish this through stepped-
up agitation against “Western imperialism,” renewed emphasis on the
lessons of Marxism-Leninism, and the creation of a new, socialist, Ger-
man culture. Central Committee members denounced manifestations of
(Western) “decadence” in East German art and called on East German
artists to create a “socialist German culture” following the principles of
“socialist realism.” At the Bitterfeld Conference of 1959 the SED chal-
lenged artists and workers to “overcome the gulf between art and life,” by
rejecting visual abstraction and bringing art closer to the people, thereby
encouraging the transition to socialism.18
The campaign to transform East Germans into socialist citizens
reached its zenith at the Fifth Party Congress in July 1958. The “con-
struction of socialism” was the main focus of the conference. The SED
claimed to view this as primarily an economic problem—transform the
economic foundation of society and social transformation will follow—
and called for East German production to “overtake” and “outstrip” the
West German economy by the early 1960s.19 But the impatient party also
concluded that “the socialist ‘education’ of the people [was] the key to solv-
ing the upcoming economic and political tasks.”20 They called for the uni-
fication of entertainment and culture, which should be “put into service
for the development of socialist consciousness.”21 Ulbricht promulgated
his Ten Commandments, the basis of a new “socialist morality.” These
commandments included, among others:
Cold War Theaters 247
1. You always must campaign for the international solidarity of the working
class and all working people ( Werktätigen), as well as for the steadfast connection of all socialist countries.
2. You must love your fatherland and always be ready, to stand up with whole
strength and ability for the defense of the workers’ and peasants power. . . .
6. You should protect and enhance the People’s property.
7. You should always aspire to improve your performance, be economic, and
reinforce the socialist work ethic. . . .
9. You should live cleanly and decently, and respect your family.22
By 1959 the strategy of raising the living standard alongside a cam-
paign of training people to become socialists appeared to be working:
the numbers of people fleeing the GDR had dropped to its lowest point
(143,917) since 1949.23 But the campaign to increase ideological commit-
ment among the people faced renewed challenges, including increasing
economic instability that unleashed a new wave of people leaving the
GDR, compounded by uncertainty surrounding the future of Berlin. Be-
tween 1958 and 1961 there were renewed efforts to conclude the Berlin
issue. Khrushchev threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East
Germany, giving the SED control of the Allied transports routes to West
Berlin, while John F. Kennedy sought to retain Allied rights and access
to West Berlin.
For his part Ulbricht increasingly applied as much pressure as pos-
sible on Khrushchev to permit some kind of border closure. The unstable
demographic situation helped him make an effective case for closing the
border. By early July 1961 the Soviet ambassador to the GDR, Mikhail Per-
vukhin, estimated that perhaps two hundred fifty thousand people were
crossing back and forth across the border each day. That month the SED
implemented stricter policies dealing with border crossing, such as reg-
istering Grenzgänger (border-crossers), demanding Western currency for
rent payments, and restricting the purchase of such desirable goods as
cars, apartments, and television sets to East Germans who actually lived
in the GDR.24 The numbers of border-crossers who left the GDR jumped
sixfold by the end of July.25 Whatever the reason behind individuals’ deci-
248 Heather L. Gumbert
sions to cross the German border—including traveling to their places of
work or residence, visiting friends or family, going shopping and on other
outings, or even leaving for the West (or returning to the East)—media
narratives had begun to define the problem using the language of Ab-
werbung (enticement), Menschenhandel (people-smuggling), and Kopfjäger (headhunters). Such language cast the problem as a criminal matter of
the seduction and entrapment of otherwise loyal citizens of the GDR,
rather than reporting it as a domestic issue of people choosing to leave
the republic.26 In this charged context Khrushchev finally assented, al-
lowing Ulbricht to proceed with plans to blockade the border.
On August 13, 1961, Germans in East and West awoke to the news
that the GDR authorities had closed most of the Berlin border to through
traffic. Throughout the night East German soldiers had erected tempo-
rary barriers of barbed wire, which were soon to be replaced with less-
permeable concrete pylons and later a full-fledged wall. The official deci-
sion declared: “For the prevention of enemy activities of the revanchist
and militarist forces of West Germany and West Berlin, a control will
be introduced on the borders of the GDR including the border to West
sectors of greater Berlin, as is common on the borders of any sovereign
state.”27 GDR authorities claimed a sovereign right to close the border.
Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, referred to the border closure
instead as a “concentration camp” built by a “clique that calls itself a gov-
ernment.”28 The GDR’s preeminent television propagandist, Karl Eduard
tion barrier.”29
In the GDR television coverage of the events on August 13 expressed
no criticism of the border closure, but rather conveyed the impression of
normality and stability in the GDR. The nightly news anchor read the au-
thorities’ resolution to close the border, reporting the events of the day as
something that had been looming on the horizon since the foundation of
the republic. Images supported the announcer’s assertion that it was “an
entirely normal day” in East Berlin. Across the border, however, there was
an atmosphere of crisis: GDR television anchor Klaus Feldmann claimed
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had convened a conference of high-level min-
isters “in a feverish hurry” in response to the blockade. But the reaction
of other Western leaders did not match the anxiety of the West Germans.
The East German newscaster was quick to point out that neither Kennedy
nor Charles de Gaulle had responded to the “crisis,” or even broken off
Cold War Theaters 249
their weekend vacation plans.30 Thus the initial narrative of the border
closure in the state-run media tried to dispel any notion of a crisis, cast-
ing it as a defensive measure that would strengthen the GDR state and its
citizenry and weaken the power of the Federal Republic and West Berlin.31
The period of the border closure marked the beginning of a battle for
hearts and minds and against dissent in the republic.32 Though rooted
in the longer-standing campaign to build socialists, this renewed effort
sought to define the boundaries between East and West more aggres-
sively. For example, it depicted the Soviet Union as a modern, industrial
nation where “per-capita production would overtake that of the most pow-
erful and rich country the USA.”33 By contrast, stories about the Federal
Republic focused on the revelation of war criminals in powerful positions
of the government, exposed West German militarism, detailed corporate
bankruptcies and massive layoffs, and decried the lack of sufficient health
care and basic social services in the West.34
After August 13 authorities sought to identify and root out border-
crossers of a new kind. Now that the borders were impermeable, the
border-crossing transgression was purely ideological. State authorities
pursued dissenters, so-called slackers and the work-shy. Loyal members
of the Free German Youth group purged their troops of those who openly
criticized the wall. Newspapers reported with approval malicious attacks
on other people for similar transgressions, at least one of whom had to be
admitted to hospital. Some denounced their own coworkers for “insult-
ing Comrade Walter Ulbricht” or calling for free elections.35 Television
and newspaper reportage embraced the campaign to prevent ideological
border crossing and increasingly moved away from the representation of
pan-German themes (previously geared toward preparing Germans for
reunification on the basis of socialism) in favor of stories focusing on the
GDR’s relationship with the socialist countries and their achievements.36
In the weeks following the border closure, Titov became a central figure
in the new narrative; he was a shining example of the superiority of the
socialist camp and just the kind of person East Germans might want to
have on their side.
Titov in Space
The Soviet space program had been under way for several years by the
time German Titov reached space. The Soviets had achieved a number of
250 Heather L. Gumbert
firsts: the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the (ill-fated) flight of the space dog Laika that same year, and the first successful animal flight (of Belka and
Strelka) in 1960.37 The possibility of putting men in space—and at this
point authorities had not yet considered women cosmonauts—first arose
in January 1959, when authorities began to discuss the parameters for se-
lecting potential candidates.38 In February 1960, Titov was among twenty
young men chosen to train for spaceflight.39 A year later Yuri Gagarin
became the first man in space, with Titov in reserve as his backup pilot.
In August 1961, Titov got his chance, becoming only the second man to
orbit Earth.
The Soviets appear to have timed the mission to happen shortly be-
fore the border closure in Berlin. In early July 1961, Walter Ulbricht had
traveled to Khrushchev’s vacation house in the Crimea to once again seek
the leader’s approval to go ahead with the border closure.40 Soon after, in
mid-July, the head of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolev, made the
trip to the Crimea. There he informed Khrushchev that plans were under
way for a second Vostok flight to follow up Gagarin’s successful launch that April. With his promise to Ulbricht in mind, Khrushchev agreed and
reportedly requested that such a flight should happen before August 10.41
Titov’s Vostok 2 mission launched on Sunday, August 6—one week to the
day before the border closure in Berlin.
Titov’s mission was to extend the amount of time a cosmonaut spent
in space, while further determining the effects of weightlessness on hu-
man physiology. The spacecraft orbited Earth seventeen times before re-
turning, landing at predetermined coordinates in the Soviet Union. Dur-
ing his flight Titov experienced serious discomfort at times. He became
extremely disoriented during the launch and initial orbits, could not dif-
ferentiate between Earth and space, and reported not being able to shake
the feeling of being “upside down.”42 At other points during the flight
he felt extreme fatigue, dizziness and nausea, and suffered from vertigo
and headaches.43 He found food unappealing, though Moscow television
broadcast pictures of Titov eating lunch.44 He described reentry into the
atmosphere as “staring into the blazing maw of an erupting volcano.”45
Despite his discomfort, Titov had quite a ride. He observed “dawn”
and the subsequent twilight every forty-five minutes.46 He reported Earth
appeared as a “planet enveloped in a blue coating and framed with a bril-
liant, radiant border,” and he marveled at the “terrible intense brightness
of the sun contrasting with the inky blackness of the planet’s shadow
Cold War Theaters 251
with huge stars above glittering like diamonds.” Titov described Earth’s
stunningly intense colors: the “strangely mottled leopard skin with green
jungle” that was Africa; the “rich indigo blue” of the Indian Ocean; the
Mediterranean, which “glistened like a vast sea of shining emeralds”;
and the “startling salad-green color” of the Gulf of Mexico.47 He even
captured a short film of Earth’s horizon with an onboard movie camera.
He took manual control of the aircraft for almost twenty minutes and
described the sensation as a “tremendous feeling to manipulate with just
my hand the mass of a spaceship plunging through a vacuum at nearly
eighteen thousand miles per hour!”48 Titov’s ability to control the aircraft
would make big news in the coming months.
> Media Narratives
As in the case of the Berlin Wall, media narratives were an increas-
ingly integral component of the Cold War, and the space race was no
exception. Here was an aspect of the Cold War that was fantastic. By the
early 1960s Soviet accomplishments had expanded the boundaries of the
“known world” and perhaps even the realm of human understanding.
Soviet accomplishments were dramatic; they were visual; they were ex-
plosive in their political and scientific implications; and they immediately
became wrapped up in the propaganda battle between East and West. In
the United States and West Germany newspaper narratives disparaged
the accomplishment as mere politics. The New York Herald Tribune com-
plained that “the red leader ‘turned what might have been a great drama
of suspense, which all the world could share, into a tool of Soviet diplo-
macy—and has, thereby, cheapened it.’” The New York Times claimed that
“all this brilliance was marred by the transparent Russian propaganda
campaign . . . to exploit this latest Soviet space feat for political and psy-
chological warfare ends.” West Berlin’s Der Abend wrote that Khrushchev would use the spaceflight to “blackmail” the West. The New York Mirror explicitly drew the connection between the Vostok 2 mission and the Berlin Wall: Titov’s flight was “designed by Khrushchev to intimidate the
world and the West in particular on the issue of Berlin.”49 For the Los
Angeles Times this was but one indication of more nefarious motives; they quoted Bernard Lovell, a renowned British “space watcher,” who claimed
that “this [was] another important step in the Russian plan to populate
the solar system beginning with the invasion of the moon in a few years’
252 Heather L. Gumbert
time.”50 Western news reports, on the whole, approached the flight with a
mixture of awe, skepticism, and fear.
Upon his return Titov, like Gagarin before him and others, like Val-
entina Tereshkova, who followed him, became an instantly recognizable
figure and traveled to other parts of the world as a goodwill ambassador.
The Western media treated the cosmonauts with respect as well as some
skepticism, expressing doubt about details of their stories, some of which
were more earthshaking than others in their implications. During his