The Berlin Wall’s uneventful construction forced West German policy change on eastern revisionism

Evidence

By the mid-1960s, two developments forced a change in West German policy, beginning with the full recognition that the Western Allies would not seriously challenge the Cold War divide. The unwillingness of the United States, the strongest of the Allies, to intervene in the East German workers’ uprising in 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 should have been the handwriting on the wall. Yet the GDR’s decision in August 1961 to enclose West Berlin with a wall and barbed wire and shut down the last escape hatch to the FRG with little more than verbal condemnations from the West, ended months of inter-Allied conflict over the city’s status. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 192

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Germany lost forty percent of its 1937 territory through postwar border changes — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 179; Expellee organizations sustained West German revanchism by reinforcing refusal to accept the postwar border — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 190; West German expellee policy was effectively modernizing despite restorative rhetoric — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 394 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Expellee organizations sustained West German revanchism by reinforcing refusal to accept the postwar border #expands (0.82) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 190
• West German expellee policy was effectively modernizing despite restorative rhetoric #qualifies (0.75) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 394
• A small expellee-functionary group could veto major West German foreign policy initiatives. #expands (0.75) — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 247
• Exposure to the transformed Heimat eroded commitments to territorial revisionism #expands (0.72) — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 1091