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Bringing Cold War Democracy
to West Berlin

Within the span of a generation, Nazi Germany’s former capital, Berlin,

found a new role as a symbol of freedom and resilient democracy in the Cold
War. This book unearths how this remarkable transformation resulted from
a network of liberal American occupation officials, and returned émigrés,
or remigrés, of the Marxist Social Democratic Party (SPD).
This network derived from lengthy physical and political journeys. After
fleeing Hitler, German-speaking self-professed “revolutionary socialists”
emphasized “anti-totalitarianism” in New Deal America and contributed
to its intelligence apparatus. These experiences made these remigrés espe-
cially adept at cultural translation in postwar Berlin against Stalinism.
This book provides a new explanation for the alignment of Germany’s
principal left-wing party with the Western camp. While the Cold War has
traditionally been analyzed from the perspective of decision makers in
Moscow or Washington, this study demonstrates the agency of hitherto mar-
ginalized on the conflict’s first battlefield. Examining local political culture
and social networks underscores how both Berliners and émigrés under-
stood the East-West competition over the rubble that the Nazis left behind
as a chance to reinvent themselves as democrats and cultural mediators,
respectively. As this network popularized an anti-Communist, pro-Western
Left, this book identifies how often ostracized émigrés made a crucial con-
tribution to the Federal Republic of Germany’s democratization.

Scott H. Krause is Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow in the Berlin Program for
Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University Berlin.
Routledge Studies in Modern European History

https://www.routledge.com/history/series/SE0246

56 Italy Before Italy

Institutions, Conflicts and Political Hopes in the Italian States,
1815–1860
Marco Soresina

57 Ethnic Cleansing during the Cold War

The Forgotten 1989 Expulsion of Bulgaria’s Turks
Tomasz Kamusella

58 The Peace Discourses in Europe, 1900–1945

Alberto Castelli

59 Israel’s Path to Europe

The Negotiations for a Preferential Agreement, 1957–1975
Gadi Heimann and Lior Herman

60 Liberalism in Pre-revolutionary Russia

State, Nation, Empire
Susanna Rabow-Edling

61 Bringing Cold War Democracy to West Berlin

A Shared German–American Project, 1940–1972
Scott H. Krause

62 Greeks without Greece

Homelands, Belonging, and Memory amongst the Expatriated Greeks
of Turkey
Huw Halstead
Bringing Cold War
Democracy to West Berlin
A Shared German–American
Project, 1940–1972

Scott H. Krause
 First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2019 Scott H. Krause
The right of Scott H. Krause to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-138-29985-6 (hbk)

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To my family on two shores.
Contents

List of figures x
 xii
xv

Introduction 1
Literature 4
An epistemic community crafting political narratives for
democratization 5
Sources 7
Organization of the book 8
Notes 9
Bibliography 11

1 Berlin, capital of ruins, 1945–1948 14

I. Decisions made and deferred at Potsdam, July 1945 16
II. Berlin, Soviet prize of war 17
III. Competing narratives in interpreting postwar Berlin 20
IV. The contested meaning of democracy 26
V. Escalation, 1947–1948 32
Notes 36
Bibliography 41

2 Origins of the Outpost network, 1933–1949 45

I. Political fragmentation of the German Left, 1932–1941 46
II. Wartime exile in New York City, 1941–1949 53
III. Support for “freedom” and origin of the Outpost network 57
IV. Reconstitution of the Outpost network in West Berlin 63
Notes 72
Bibliography 82
viii Contents
3 Rise of the Outpost narrative in the wake of the
Berlin airlift, 1948–1953 90
I. The Berlin airlift as embodiment of the Outpost
narrative 92
II. Berlin activities of Shepard Stone’s Public Affairs Division 96
III. RIAS, the network’s principal media outlet 102
IV. Campaigns to institute Cold War democracy in
West Berlin 107
V. Campaigns to remake postwar social democracy 112
Notes 118
Bibliography 130

4 Triple crisis, 1953 142

I. Background: waging the Cultural Cold War 143
II. Uprising in East Berlin 144
III. The GDR’s obsession with RIAS 149
IV. McCarthyism reaches West Berlin 154
V. Reuter’s death and the network’s resilience 160
VI. 1953 as watershed 164
Notes 165
Bibliography 172

5 Ascent to leadership, 1954–1961 178

I. The emergence of Willy Brandt as new figurehead
of the network 179
II. Brandt as new SPD candidate for a new West Berlin 185
III. Coordinated activities of the network 187
IV. Fashioning West Berlin as the Cold War democracy 194
Notes 205
Bibliography 213

6 Public acceptance and reinterpretation, 1961–1972 221

I. Construction of the Wall as a turning point for network
and narrative 222
II. Broad acceptance of the narrative and creeping
disillusionment of the network 226
III. Marginalization of the past in exile for national
leadership in Bonn 232
IV. Holdouts in Berlin facing a new generation of leftwing
activists 238
 Contents ix
V. Berlin as laboratory of Chancellor Brandt’s
Neue Ostpolitik 242
Notes 244
Bibliography 249

Conclusion: Excavating the Outpost of Freedom on the Spree 255

I. The city 257
II. The narrative 259
III. The network 263
IV. The legacies 267
Notes 269
Bibliography 270

Glossary 273
List of unpublished collections consulted 277
Index 280
Figures

0.1 Ernst Reuter at the Reichstag’s burnt shell, 1948 2

1.1 Life resumes along Tauentzienstraße, West Berlin’s
premier shopping address, 1947 25
1.2 Franz Neumann, 1946 29
1.3 Social Democratic poster for the anniversary of the
Fusionskampf, in which the SPD breaches walls towards
“freedom,” 1947 31
2.1 Hans Hirschfeld, 1952 47
3.1 Berlin children re-enacting the airlift with US Air
Force models circulating in the Western sectors, 1948 92
3.2 Neumann and Reuter at the SPD rally at Hertha
BSC’s Plumpe Stadium in Berlin-Wedding, 1948 94
3.3 Fred G. Taylor and Reuter inaugurate new RIAS transmitter
at Berlin-Britz, 1951 106
3.4 Poster for the May Day festivities featuring the Freedom Bell
and the motto “peace in freedom,” 1951 111
3.5 Reuter and Willy Brandt, at the SPD convention in
Berlin-Neukölln, 1951 115
4.1 Soviet tanks confront protestors at the sectorial boundary on
Potsdamer Platz, 1953 149
4.2 Roy Cohn and G. David Schine in Germany as depicted
by the Social Democratic Telegraf newspaper 156
4.3 Berliners mourn Reuter in front of Schöneberg City Hall, 1953 161
5.1 Brandt presents Karl F. Mautner a ceremonial gavel, 1958 181
5.2 Brandt and Neumann at the decisive SPD convention, 1958 184
5.3 Brandt and Shepard Stone in conversation at
Stone’s New York City apartment, 1961 190
5.4 Poster “Berlin needs Willy Brandt” for the SPD campaign
that presented Brandt as personification of West Berlin’s
defiance against the SED and Soviets, 1958 197
5.5 President Kennedy hosting Brandt during his campaign for the
chancellorship with the media paying close attention, 1961 202
5.6 Brandt campaigning in Dorfmark, Niedersachsen, 1961 203
 Figures xi
6.1 The Wall confronting Brandt and US Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy at Potsdamer Platz, 1962 229
6.2 Stone, Richard Löwenthal, and Brandt in conversation at the
newly opened Aspen Institute Berlin, 1974 242
7.1 Platform for the May Day festivities under the motto
“Berlin remains free,” 1959 262
Acknowledgments

Much like the subject of this study, this book results from a web of transat-
lantic exchanges. Thus, I am grateful for the support I have received from
individuals and institutions in Europe and North America, which I can only
acknowledge here.
Transnational research requires cost-intensive international travel. I have had
the good fortune of receiving generous support from a host of institutions to
make historical research across two continents possible. The University of North
Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill provided an institutional home for this project,
while fellowships from the Doris G. Quinn Foundation and UNC Graduate
School allowed for sustained periods of research. A doctoral fellowship by the
German Historical Institute, Washington, DC (GHI) gave me the chance to con-
sult American repositories. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD),
Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, Carolina Center for Jewish
Studies, American Council on Germany (ACG), and Central European History
Society each funded archival research across Europe. A Leibniz-DAAD
Postdoctoral Fellowship for the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF)
Potsdam and a Max Kade Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the Berlin
Program for Advanced German and European Studies provided a privileged
environment for finalizing the manuscript.
Dedicated staff in the archives consulted greatly enhanced the effec-
tiveness of these research trips. In particular, I would want to thank
Sven Haarmann and Meik Woyke at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Bonn,
the wonderful staff at Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library,
Ingrid Wichtrup at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv Potsdam-Babelsberg,
Lydia Kiesling at the Landesarchiv Berlin, and Ronald Coleman at the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum. Maren Roth at the LMU Munich not only
gave me access to Melvin Lasky’s papers, but also freely shared insights
from her own research. Rüdiger Lentz and Lena Kiesewetter at Aspen
Germany gave me unrestricted access to the Institute’s internal archive,
setting a model of transparency. Margaret Stone MacDonald took a leap of
faith and opened her father’s private papers for me. I am privileged that two
subjects of the study, the late Egon Bahr and the late Harold Hurwitz took
their time to share their perspective on West Berlin’s inner workings.
 Acknowledgments xiii
The UNC History Department brings together a unique array dedicated
scholars, creative researchers, and patient educators. Discussions with
Konrad Jarausch were crucial for conceiving the project and have shaped
it as it developed. For years he has taken his time – often at short notice
– to offer his perspicacious advice, while deliberately leaving all creative
decisions to me. Christopher Browning, Klaus Larres, Don Reid, and Ben
Waterhouse wrote countless letters of recommendation on my behalf, but
also took a keen interest in this project far beyond any call of duty. Susan
Pennybacker has helped tremendously in navigating the politics of the inter-
national Left. The depth of her expertise on the political Left across conti-
nents still astounds me, despite having benefitted from it so often. Within
the corridors of Hamilton Hall, I profited immensely from the ideas and
good humor of Nicole Bauer, Friederike Brühöfener, Peter Gengler, Tobias
Hof, Derek Holmgren, Max Lazar, Fabian Link, Steven Milder, Alex Ruble,
and Philipp Stelzel.
The opportunity to interact with numerous practitioners of the profession
on both sides of the Atlantic greatly improved this study in multiple ways. I
remain indebted to Willi Oberkrome (Freiburg) for his continuing interest
in my work. Daniel Stinsky (Maastricht) has helped me tremendously in
discussions and leading me to important Swedish files and Ford Foundation
records. I thank Mathieu Gilabert (Fribourg), Michael Hochgeschwender
(LMU Munich), Peter Hoeres (then Mainz), Vincent Lagendijk (Maastricht),
Paul Nolte (Free University Berlin), Jens Späth (Saarbrücken), and Britta
Waldschmidt-Nelson (then GHI Washington) for the opportunity to pres-
ent my work in their research colloquia and panels. I have benefitted from
an ongoing discussion with David Barclay (Kalamazoo) on West Berlin
who has graciously shared his own research. Jeffrey Herf (Maryland) and
Siegfried Weichlein (Fribourg) made important suggestions regarding the
postwar transformation of the SPD.
The ZZF Potsdam boasts an enviable brain pool for research on European
postwar history. I have profited from Martin Sabrow’s expertise on the GDR
and the autobiographical genre. Frank Bösch has been instrumental in con-
sidering the relationship between West Berlin and the Federal Republic
analytically. Jan-Holger Kirsch continues to provide exemplary editorial
support for publications, blending intellectual curiosity with meticulous
professionalism. Hanno Hochmuth’s passion for urban history sparked an
international working group on Berlin’s history from an integrated perspec-
tive. Countless discussions with Stefanie Eisenhuth on the United States’
special relationship with Berlin have shaped this project. I am grateful for
her humor, suggestions, and patience.
Travel for this project was greatly facilitated by friends who made me feel
at home in each city on the itinerary, among them Theresa Buth and Lukas
Schützenmeister, Michael Cameron and Joshua Reitenauer, Michalina
Golinczak, Anna Kohn, Regina and Alexander Preker, Mathias Rodorff,
and Laura Yacovone and Scott Harrison. Over the course of this project, a
xiv Acknowledgments
host of people made Berlin not only the subject of the research, but a great
place to live. Sigrid Reuter made a balcony Pappelallee’s most exciting social
hub, rain or shine. Brigitte and Lothar Lenz introduced me to many West
Berlin institutions that remain. Stefanie Eisenhuth and Hanno Hochmuth
excavated post-Socialist gems from under the surface of Bio-Bohème and
EasyJet-set. Daniel Bißmann, Björn Grötzner, Candice Hamelin, and Stefan
Thierfelder offered diversion and suggestions over countless coffees. While
hundreds of thousands of Berliners stubbornly ignore the Brandenburg
woods surrounding the city, Julie Ault, Adam Blackler, Jenna and Peter
Gengler, the Hacovones, Laura Kiel, and Christoph Tollmann have shared
my passion for places such as Schwedt, Seelow, or Sperenberg.
Production of the manuscript was greatly facilitated by numerous indi-
viduals and institutions. Julie Ault, Alyssa Bowen, Emily Dreyfus, Scott
Harrison, Mark Hornburg, Margaret Stone MacDonald, Caroline Nielsen,
Sylvia Roper, Michael Skalski, and Lars Stiglich closely read drafts at var-
ious stages; their comments and suggestions greatly improved the clarity
of my writing. The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung generously opened its vaults
for images. Klaus Wiegrefe (Der Spiegel) convinced me that my research
on undercover American payments to the West Berlin SPD could still
attract an astounding amount of public interest in Germany. I am grate-
ful for the openness of the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation to
these disclosures. My research has since benefitted tremendously from the
expertise of the Foundation’s Wolfram Hoppenstedt, Julia Hornig, Jürgen
Lillteicher, Bernd Rother, and Wolfgang Schmidt. The 2017 Willy Brandt
Prize for Contemporary History is as much an honor as an opportunity to
fully explain the cooperation between American occupiers and local Social
Democrats in postwar Berlin.
Years of work on this transnational network and the at times precarious
existences of its members have made me regard my own transatlantic life
as manageable and privileged. From childhood on, the journeys of the late
Josef Krause, and the Soonpää clan’s Helvi M. Lippand and Heljo Alari
have raised my interest in the human dimension of seismic events. Their
biographies reflect uprooting, but also the reconstruction of a livelihood
that they have shared with millions during the twentieth century. I would
not have been able to explore such historical processes analytically without
the unwavering support of my parents Kadri and Achim. They have shaped
my life in more ways than I can imagine. Dedicating this work to them is the
least that I can do.

SHK
Berlin, February 2018
A note on naming conventions
and language

In a city formed by strife, political statements extended to naming conven-

tions. West German parlance preferred “Berlin (West)” before settling on the
less clunky “West-Berlin” to stress the politically induced fragmentation of
the larger city. GDR counterparts insisted on “Westberlin” to stress the sep-
arateness of the Western sectors. In this regard, writing in English offers the
opportunity to refer to the Western sectors and their municipality simply as
“West Berlin” without making a political statement. Conversely, “East Berlin”
refers to the 1945 Soviet sector that Soviet authorities and German Commu-
nists named the “Democratic Sector,” before rebranding it as “Berlin, capital
of the GDR.” In this book, “Berlin” refers to contemporaries’ conception of
entire Berlin in its boundaries set by the 1920 Groß-Berlin-Gesetz that amal-
gamated the city. These boundaries also outline those of the present-day state
“Land Berlin” in a reunified Germany.
Unless a published translation has been available, all translations from
German to English are my own.
Introduction

The Soviet blockade of Berlin’s Western sectors in June 1948 shocked

Berliners and their American occupiers alike. While American authorities
responded by instituting an airlift, Governing Mayor Ernst Reuter con-
centrated on sustaining his constituents’ morale. As he addressed nearly
300,000 Berliners at a protest rally on September 9, 1948 (Figure 0.1), Reuter
elevated their daily plight to epic proportions, exclaiming that Berlin’s
Western sectors formed “an outpost of freedom” against “the force of
darkness.” Moreover, he implored “the peoples of the world,” and North
Americans in particular, to “look upon this city” as an example of demo-
cratic resistance to totalitarian ambitions.1
Yet, in 1948 Berlin was one of the most unlikely places to look for
inspiration. The city Reuter addressed was a half-city under siege. The
“bulwark” consisted of rubble: ruins of the capital of the Thousand-Year
Reich had collapsed in apocalyptic fashion only three years earlier. World
War II, unleashed by orders signed in Berlin, had consumed the city as its
last European battlefield in April 1945. And despite the ubiquitous scars
of war, 2.1 million people were crammed into the three Western sectors of
Berlin alone, making them the largest city population in Germany by a wide
margin.
After achieving victory in 1945, the Soviet authorities immediately set
up an administration both to support civilians in Berlin and advance
its own interests. The Soviet Union pledged to govern the former Nazi
Reichshauptstadt in cooperation with its American, British, and French
allies, who occupied their respective sectors in July of that year. Yet, over
the next three years disagreements between the United States and the
Soviet Union over municipal administration exacerbated tensions between
local German Social Democrats and Communists. Skirmishes between
the estranged left-wing parties escalated into one of the first battles of the
Cold War, whose front lines cut across the city. In June 1948, the Western
Allied sectors improvised to form their own collective municipal structure,
West Berlin, thereby precluding further Soviet interference. The Soviets
responded by blocking the vital coal and grain deliveries from the nascent
Federal Republic, popularly known as West Germany, to West Berlin in
 2 Introduction

Figure 0.1 E
 rnst Reuter at the Reichstag’s burnt shell, 1948.
Sammlung Telegraf, © AdsD.

order to test the makeshift polity’s viability. Thus, all at once West Berliners
had to come to terms with defeat in a war that had shattered their city and
their moral legitimacy, anti-Soviet resentments, and two competing politi-
cal visions of postwar reconstruction.
In this chaos, Reuter’s phrase Outpost of Freedom formed the basis of
a comprehensive narrative intended to reframe West Berlin’s political cul-
ture. This narrative inspired West Berliners to reinvent their political iden-
tity as besieged defenders of liberal democracy in the Cold War. Casting
themselves in this light conferred significant benefits on West Berliners: it
offered them political relevance within the emergent Cold War paradigm,
an orientation for constructing a new political framework, and for many,
the convenient opportunity to gloss over the incriminating legacies of the
Nazi era. Hence this narrative proved particularly appealing to shape the
political convictions of a broad range of West Berliners during the postwar

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 Introduction 3
era. However, the portrayal of truncated Western Berlin as the outpost of
freedom could not gain acceptance as the result of a single airlift, but had to
be culturally ingrained over time.
This transformation was not a logical consequence of the Cold War, but
the political project of a transnational network of leftist activists shaped in
wartime exile. During World War II, émigré German Social Democrats had
come into close contact with American left-liberals through their shared
opposition to Hitler. The two sides reconnected in postwar Berlin, both of
them determined to resist Communism and hoping for an electable Left
in the future. Members of this remigré2 network occupied important posi-
tions in West Berlin’s political and media establishments and included key
former exiles such as Reuter, his successor Willy Brandt, Marshall Plan
funds distributor Paul Hertz, and municipal public relations director Hans
Hirschfeld. On the American side, the network comprised Shepard Stone,
high commissioner John J. McCloy’s director of public affairs, and Karl
F. Mautner, liaison officer to West Berlin’s City Hall, among others. This
unique network of remigré Social Democrats and liberal American occu-
pation officials constructed and popularized the Outpost narrative to serve
their shared political goals.
This network collaborated quietly, but promoted the narrative of Outpost
of Freedom intensely in the public sphere. Given the high profile of its mem-
bers, the network could enlist considerable resources within West Berlin’s
municipal government, media outlets, and American occupation authori-
ties. The network gained control of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the
dominant political party in West Berlin, and utilized Berlin’s most popular
radio station, the American-run Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), to
promote the Outpost narrative. Promoting the image of Berliners defending
democracy against the Communist threat also elicited both open and covert
financial support from the American government, culminating in President
Kennedy’s triumphal 1963 visit to West Berlin.
Members of the network derived four distinct political benefits from
the narrative they championed. First, it summarized the stance of both
the American and West Berlin administrations against the Soviet Union
and its East Berlin allies in the Cold War. Second, it shored up support
for anti-Soviet policies among West Berliners by offering them moral cred-
ibility and a basis for ongoing anti-Communism under the single slogan of
“Freedom.” Third, it gave remigrés the opportunity to justify their return
to their homeland. Finally, the narrative offered a blueprint for a distinct
variant of German democratization based on the remigrés’ personal expe-
rience in exile, emphasizing Social Democratic ideals of civil rights as much
as inculcating anti-Communism in the guise of anti-totalitarianism.
This book retraces the genesis of the Outpost of Freedom narrative,
explores its political effects, and reveals the network of German–American
remigrés that promulgated it. Specifically, the study shows how the narrative
developed out of an intentional interpretation of Berlin’s pre-Nazi twentieth

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4 Introduction
century history. In addition, it analyzes the reasons behind the narrative’s
popularity and influence, initially as a bold claim, then as an ambitious polit-
ical agenda, and subsequently as shorthand for a staggering transformation.
Ultimately, re-examining the transatlantic network’s promotion of the
Outpost of Freedom narrative from 1941 to 1972 opens fresh perspectives.
It highlights the role of remigrés in postwar German history, reveals the
political influence of informal German–American networks, and examines
West Berlin as an alternative laboratory of German democratization. These
developments necessarily touch on larger issues in postwar history, includ-
ing the extent to which Germans internalized democratic principles, the leg-
acy and impact of anti-Communist sentiments, and the exportability and
sustainability of liberal democratic political frameworks.

Literature
This study of West Berlin in the first decades of the Cold War re-informs
multiple chronologically and geographically disparate historiographic
debates. Berlin has long stood for the Cold War in symbolic terms, but, in a
debate dominated by political and diplomatic histories, the symbolic value
necessarily obscures the active role played by the city’s inhabitants, in effect
marginalizing the impact of Berlin’s rancorous urban politics.3 Since the
end of the Cold War, Volker Berghahn and Michael Hochgeschwender have
respectively brought the role of transnational Cold War networks to light in
their path-breaking studies of Shepard Stone’s sprawling contacts and the
Congress for Cultural Freedom.4 This book supplements the existing liter-
ature by linking the activities of a transnational network to one of the Cold
War’s focal points, Berlin. As a study on the political utility of popularized
narratives, it adds to the collection of research on the cultural dimensions
of the Cold War and its repercussions.5
The remigré network operated in a unique urban space. West Berlin was
simultaneously a flashpoint of global confrontation, the former capital of an
abolished nation-state, and a vibrant metropolis in ruins. While each indi-
vidual context has received considerable attention, scholarship has under-
estimated this dynamic – and all too often tense – interplay between global,
national, and local factors. For example, overviews of postwar (West)
German history tend to cover West Berlin selectively as simply another West
German metropolis.6 From the vantage point of urban history, surveys of
Berlin tend to portray the city’s division as a painful but temporary episode,
neglecting how contemporaries perceived the Cold War’s volatility.7 More
specific research on the Western Allies’ presence and its effects on democra-
tization has centered only on the period before the collapse of the Wall and
inevitably lacks the privilege of hindsight.8 Consequently, this book adds to
a burgeoning scholarship9 that seeks to connect these artificially compart-
mentalized literatures by integrating the perspectives of local and global, to
grasp the unique links between both that the locale offered.
 Introduction 5
Moreover, a seeming contradiction invites renewed research on the
then-nascent Federal Republic of Germany. For the past two decades, his-
torians have increasingly questioned the interpretation of West Germany’s
postwar years as a purely restorative Adenauer Era,10 while systematic
research has unearthed the disconcerting persistence of Nazi alumni net-
works in the Federal Republic’s bureaucracies in new detail.11 While stud-
ies such as Das Amt on Nazi veterans in the Federal Republic’s diplomatic
corps have gained the well-deserved attention of historians and the wider
public alike, the unique German–American remigré network operating in
Berlin serves as an important counter example.
The challenges faced by refugees in exile have been documented ever
since opponents of the Nazi regime fled the Reich. While a burgeoning lit-
erature explores the impact of exile on luminaries of high culture such as
Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, Thomas Mann, and Franz
Werfel,12 fewer scholars have focused on the politics of exile themselves.
Notably, former émigrés themselves have written about the political divi-
sions among the German-speaking exiles over the best strategies for oppos-
ing National Socialism and their visions for Germany after Hitler.13 Since
the 1970s, a new generation of scholars, who came to age after the war, have
conducted considerable research to raise awareness of émigrés as victims of
the Nazis.14 The return of émigrés to Germany and the remigrés’ difficult,
often incomplete reintegration into postwar German society have attracted
renewed interest since the 1990s.15 For example, in her succinct overview of
the remigré phenomenon in both postwar German states, Marita Krauss
noted the “particular success” of remigrés within the SPD, as exemplified by
Brandt’s chancellorship.16 Even so, the reasons for the comparative success
of Social Democratic remigrés have remained unexplored; in particular,
historians have neglected the role of networks and their transatlantic com-
position. Thus, West Berlin’s postwar history offers an important case study
for the political influence of remigrés.

An epistemic community crafting political

narratives for democratization
This book examines the way the German–American remigré network crafted
the Outpost of Freedom narrative in two steps: first as their own explanation
for a dislocating experience, then promoting it after the war as a facet of the
wider German democratization process. As such, it contributes to the discus-
sion on the seemingly swift popular acceptance of liberal democratic frame-
works across Western Europe in the postwar era. In the context of Germany
in particular, it seeks to foster a better understanding of democratization by
scrutinizing the remigré network as an epistemic community.
Interpreting West German postwar history as a case study of open-ended
“democratization” has raised highly significant questions. Scholars from
both sides of the Atlantic have questioned the first incarnation of the term
6 Introduction
as an objective of American occupation policy and characterized it instead
as a societal learning process.17 Thus, they have underscored the cultural
dimension of democratization, in which a host of shifting social norms – also
known as westernization – buttressed the process.18 Interpreting democra-
tization as a societal transformation combines the analytical rigor needed
to appropriately describe empirical developments with the flexibility to
cover the many manifestations of the process in politics, culture, and eco-
nomics. Most notably, it offers a framework to examine how an elite net-
work could influence this multifaceted process. This framework avoids the
reductive model of a one-way transatlantic transfer, in which American
knowhow brought Germans back to democracy after Nazi barbarism. The
multi-decade efforts of a network consisting of Germans and Americans
working together to promote their vision of an anti-Communist, left-liberal
democracy contradicts such sweeping assessments. Instead, the impact of
this network suggests a much more contingent and open-ended evolution.
Peter M. Haas has defined an epistemic community as the “shared set of
normative and principled beliefs, which provide a value-based rationale for
the social action” and “common policy enterprise” of their members.19 In
political science, this concept has inspired indispensable work essential to
understanding the emergence and governance of European institutions.20
Indeed, political scientists have explained converging cultural and eco-
nomic norms across Western Europe as the result of shared cultural atti-
tudes within informal transnational networks.
In the context of postwar Berlin, the concept of epistemic communities
serves as a framework to examine the remigré network at the center of this
study. In particular, the concept aids in analyzing underutilized personal
papers most effectively, for instance, by reuniting scattered correspond-
ence. This study first traces the experiences of the fight against National
Socialism, exile, and disillusionment with Soviet-style Communism that
formed the set of convictions that the German members of the network
shared despite their different backgrounds. Second, it examines the remi-
grés’ social actions in postwar Berlin and the underlying rationales. Third,
it recreates their common policy enterprise of portraying Berlin’s western
sectors as the showcase of Cold War Democracy. Hence, the concept of
epistemic communities offers a path to analyze how these self-described
“anti-totalitarian” activists first made sense of – and then thrived in – what
was arguably the most confusing place in the bipolar postwar world, Berlin.
Discovering and examining this network of propagandists of “freedom”
allows two interventions. First, it adds nuance to the conception of democ-
ratization as a consistent transfer of cultural attitudes21 from a newly minted
superpower to a shattered society by stressing the translation of cultural
concepts performed by intermediaries such as the remigrés. Second, it high-
lights the challenges the political left encountered in postwar Germany and
the extent to which American officials contributed to the restructuring of an
anti-Communist Left in West Germany.
 Introduction 7
Sources
Tracing the composition and actions of this informal network relies on
archival holdings across the United States, the Federal Republic, and sur-
rounding Europe. In particular, the author has consulted three types of
sources extensively: first, the official files of the United States, West and
East Berlin, and West and East German governments; second, the personal
papers, or Nachlässe, of the remigré network’s members; and, third, the
records of contemporary media coverage and internal media outlets.
The author conducted extensive research in the files of the Berlin
Senatskanzlei – the chancellery of the municipal administration – which are
held at the Landesarchiv Berlin, to understand the policies pursued by the
West Berlin city government. Notably, these files often remain regrettably
silent about the advocates, context, and intentions of particular policies,
as well as competing alternatives, instead simply recording the policies
implemented. Nevertheless, they offer insights into the policies increasingly
formulated by the remigré network as its members came to hold key posts
within West Berlin’s government. They include memoranda from and to
Governing Mayors Reuter and Brandt. Records pertaining to the municipal
public relations directors Hans Hirschfeld and Egon Bahr were especially
revealing regarding the political exploitation of the Outpost narrative and
how these men planted it in different media outlets.
On the American side, this study consulted the files of US authorities in West
Berlin and media operations in postwar Germany, both held at the National
Archives in College Park, Maryland. These files, covering the American occu-
pation in its various guises as the Office of Military Government (OMGUS)
from 1945 to 1949, the High Commission for Germany (HICOG) from 1949
to 1955, and the State Department’s US Mission to Berlin after 1955, offer
crucial documentation on how officials sought to reconcile the mission of
reorienting German political attitudes after National Socialism with waging
the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its German Communist allies. To
support this delicate political balancing act, US policy makers built up large-
scale media operations in postwar Germany. Coordinated by the Public
Affairs Section (PUB) of OMGUS and HICOG, US assets such as RIAS were
later transferred to the United States Information Agency, the global outlet
of the American government in the Cultural Cold War. PUB files emphasize
the political significance of the work of these US organizations. During his
tenure as HICOG Public Affairs director from 1949 to 1952, Shepard Stone
turned PUB into a political actor in its own right. Stone not only established
extensive backchannel communications with contacts throughout the West
German political elites, but also became one of the most trusted political
advisors of his mentor, US high commissioner John McCloy. Together, the
files of both the American occupation and media outlets highlight the sur-
prising leverage of the remigré network in shaping the priorities of American
Cold War foreign policy. The network’s German members quickly shed their
8 Introduction
pariah image by advancing the Outpost narrative, which resonated deeply
among their de jure American supervisors.
The picture conveyed by files of the former East German Democratic
Republic (GDR) stands in contrast to the documentation from Western reposi-
tories. For this study, the author examined files from the Bundesarchiv Berlin’s
Central Party Archive of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED),
the GDR’s dominant Communist Party; East Berlin’s municipal administra-
tion at the Landesarchiv Berlin; and the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,
East Germany’s Stasi secret police at the Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-
Unterlagen, Berlin (BStU). These materials proved crucial in two regards.
First, they offer insights into the GDR’s reaction to the Outpost narrative
and its regretful recognition of the narrative’s effectiveness in the Cold War.
Second, East German intelligence memoranda confirm that the silence of
West Berlin files on many key issues that complicate the historian’s task was
intentional and merited. While the veracity of Stasi records is often problem-
atic, these espionage dispatches from West Berlin are still vital to understand-
ing the political tensions that tore the city’s fiber. Carefully cross-examined
against West Berlin and American documentation and placed in context, they
illuminate both the GDR’s efforts to counter the Outpost narrative and its
alarm over the remigré network’s exploitation of that narrative.
Close examination of the personal papers of network members has
proven an effective way to reconstruct the network’s composition and aims.
In particular, reassembling correspondence scattered across Germany,
France, Sweden, and the United States helped to balance the government
files’ intentional silence. For instance, this strategy offered insights into
the candid communication among the network’s members. For example,
the papers of Hans Hirschfeld at the Landesarchiv Berlin, RIAS director
Gordon Ewing at the George C. Marshall Library in Lexington, Virginia,
and Shepard Stone at the Rauner Special Collections at Dartmouth College
in Hanover, New Hampshire, collectively illuminate the coordination of the
campaign to counter McCarthyism in West Berlin.
To assess the remigré network’s efforts to popularize the Outpost narra-
tive through mass media, this study relies on research in both RIAS broad-
casts and files. Deutschlandradio Berlin maintains an extensive archive of
RIAS audio files and programming, while the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in
Potsdam-Babelsberg holds the bulk of RIAS’s internal files. These contain,
for instance, correspondence between network members and RIAS journalists
that provides insight into the editorial policy of RIAS. In combination, the
four sets of sources illuminate the remigré network’s cohesion and the political
utility of the Outpost narrative in achieving the network’s goals in new detail.

Organization of the book

After an introduction to conditions in postwar Berlin, this study is organized
chronologically. It traces the remigré network’s formation from its origins in
 Introduction 9
Nazi-imposed exile in the 1930s through the development of the Outpost nar-
rative until the Quadripartite Agreement of 1971/1972 that awkwardly nor-
malized the status quo in Berlin as the cornerstone of Chancellor Brandt’s
Neue Ostpolitik. Each of the six chapters explores a transition in the narra-
tive or the network, advancing it in greater detail. Overall, this study reveals
that a path existed from the margins of exile to the Federal Republic’s most
eminent posts, and that path ran through West Berlin. This book throws
light upon that route, the remigré network’s success in tacking against the
currents of the Cold War, and the American support the network elicited.

Notes
1. Ernst Reuter, “Rede auf der Protestkundgebung vor dem Reichstags-
gebäude am 9. September 1948 gegen die Vertreibung der Stadtverord-
netenversammlung aus dem Ostsektor,” in Schriften, Reden, edited by Hans
E. Hirschfeld and Hans Joachim Reichhardt, Vol. 3, 4 vols. (West Berlin:
Propyläen Verlag, 1974), 477–79.
2. This book uses the term remigrés to highlight their adaptation of foreign
experiences to local customs; see: Arnd Bauerkämper, “Americanisation as
Globalisation? Remigrés to West Germany after 1945 and Conceptions of
Democracy: The Cases of Hans Rothfels, Ernst Fraenkel and Hans Rosen-
berg,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 49, Nr. 1 (1. August 2004): 153–70,
doi: 10.3167/007587404781974243. This term avoids false dichotomies between
“exile” and “emigration” and instead focuses on émigrés and remigrés as cul-
tural translators.
3. Cf. Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s name, Germany and the Divided Conti-
nent (New York: Random House, 1993); John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War. A
New History (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg
1947–1991. Geschichte eines radikalen Zeitalters (München: C.H. Beck, 2007).
4. Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe:
Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Michael Hochgeschwender,
Freiheit in der Offensive? der Kongress für Kulturelle Freiheit und die
Deutschen (München: Oldenbourg, 1998); Giles Scott-Smith, Western
Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network: Cold War Internationale
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
5. Thomas Lindenberger, Marcus M. Payk, and Annette Vowinckel, eds. Cold
War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2012).
6. Cf. Axel Schildt und Detlef Siegfried, Deutsche Kulturgeschichte: die Bundes-
republik, 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (München: Hanser, 2009).
7. Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: a History of Berlin, 1st Carroll & Graf
edn (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998); David Large, Berlin (New York:
Basic Books, 2000); Wilfried Rott, Die Insel: eine Geschichte West-Berlins
1948–1990 (München: Beck, 2009).
8. Udo Wetzlaugk, Die Alliierten in Berlin, Vol. 33, Politologische
Studien (Berlin: Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz, 1988); Harold Hurwitz, Die
Anfänge des Widerstands, Vol. 4, 4 vols, Demokratie und Antikommunis-
mus in Berlin nach 1945 (Köln: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1990); Arthur
Schlegelmilch, Hauptstadt im Zonendeutschland, Vol. 4, Die Entstehung der
Berliner Nachkriegsdemokratie 1945–1949 (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1993).
10 Introduction
9. Hanno Hochmuth, Kiezgeschichte: Friedrichshain und Kreuzberg im geteilten
Berlin, (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017); Stefanie Eisenhuth, Die Schutz-
macht: Die Amerikaner in Berlin 1945–1994 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018);
Konrad H. Jarausch, Scott H. Krause, and Stefanie Eisenhuth, eds. Cold War
Berlin: Confrontations, Cultures and Identities (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
10. Cultural history studies of the Federal Republic precipitated this turn, cf.
Axel Schildt, ed. Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und “Zeitgeist” in
der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre (Hamburg: Christians, 1995). Earlier ini-
tial political histories of the Federal Republic have stressed the conservative
dominance during this time, cf. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Nach 25 Jahren: Eine
Deutschland-Bilanz (München: Kindler, 1970); Wolfgang Benz und Detlev
Moos, Das Grundgesetz und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1949–1989:
Bilder und Texte zum Jubiläum (München: Moos & Partner: Rehm, 1989).
11. Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: the Politics of Amnesty
and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Patrick
Wagner, Hitlers Kriminalisten: die deutsche Kriminalpolizei und der Nationalso-
zialismus zwischen 1920 und 1960 (München: C.H. Beck, 2002); Eckart Conze
et al., Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich
und in der Bundesrepublik, 2. Auflage (München: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010).
12. Most recently Gerd Gemünden, Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema,
1933–1951 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Jost Hermand, Cul-
ture in Dark Times: Nazi Fascism, Inner Emigration, and Exile (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2013); Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile
Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
13. Claus-Dieter Krohn, “Anfänge der Exilforschung in den USA. Exil, Emi-
gration, Akkulturation,” in Exilforschungen im historischen Prozess, edited
by Claus-Dieter Krohn, Erwin Rotermund, und Lutz Winckler (München:
Edition Text+Kritik, 2012). For an example of this scholarship, cf. Lewis
Joachim Edinger, German Exile Politics: the Social Democratic Executive
Committee in the Nazi Era (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1956).
14. Claus-Dieter Krohn, “Vorwort,” in Exilforschungen im historischen Prozess,
edited by Claus-Dieter Krohn, Erwin Rotermund, und Lutz Winckler
(München: Edition Text+Kritik, 2012), xiii.
15. For Berlin, see Siegfried Heimann, “Politische Remigranten in Berlin,” in
Rückkehr und Aufbau nach 1945: deutsche Remigranten im öffentlichen Leben
Nachkriegsdeutschlands, edited by Claus-Dieter Krohn und Patrik von zur
Mühlen (Marburg: Metropolis, 1997), 189–210.
16. Marita Krauss, Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land: Geschichte der Remigration
nach 1945 (München: C.H. Beck, 2001).
17. Ulrich Herbert, “Liberalisierung als Lernprozess: Die Bundesrepublik in der
deutschen Geschichte – eine Skizze,” in Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland:
Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980, edited by von Ulrich
Herbert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 7–44; Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler:
Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 14.
18. For an introduction to westernization, see Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie
westlich sind die Deutschen?, Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20.
Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), www.gbv.de/dms/
faz-rez/FR120000225302501.pdf
19. Peter M. Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Pol-
icy Coordination,” International Organization 46, no. 1 (1992): 3, doi:10.1017/
S0020818300001442.
 Introduction 11
20. Cf. Michael Gehler, Wolfram Kaiser, and Brigitte Leucht, eds. Networks
in European Multi-Level Governance: From 1945 to the Present (Vienna:
Böhlau Verlag, 2009); Tanja A. Börzel und Karen Heard-Lauréote,
“Networks in EU Multi-level Governance: Concepts and Contributions,”
Journal of Public Policy 29, Special Issue 02 (2009): 135–51, doi:10.1017/
S0143814X09001044.
21. For proponents of a consistent transfer, cf. Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich
sind die Deutschen?, 12–13, 34–47.

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Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Bauerkämper, Arnd. “Americanisation as Globalisation? Remigrés to West Germany
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1, 2004): 153–70. https://doi:10.3167/007587404781974243
Benz, Wolfgang and Detlev Moos. Das Grundgesetz und die Bundesrepublik
Deutschland, 1949–1989: Bilder und Texte zum Jubiläum. München: Moos &
Partner: Rehm, 1989.
Berghahn, Volker. America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone
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Bracher, Karl Dietrich. Nach 25 Jahren: Eine Deutschland-Bilanz. München: Kindler, 1970.
Conze, Eckart, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, and Mosche Zimmermann. Das
Amt und die Vergangenheit: deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der
Bundesrepublik. 2. Auflage. München: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010.
Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm. Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung
und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1999.
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 By no arguments on his part, however subtle, could he evade
Joanna’s right of succession to the Castilian throne; yet in her state
of mental weakness its acknowledgment handed over the practical
control of public affairs to her King-Consort; and with the Archduke
Philip established as a hostile element in Castile, and Louis XII. an
enemy hovering on the Pyrenees, Aragon and her King would have
fared ill indeed.

FERDINAND OF ARAGON

CARVED WOODEN STATUE FROM

CATHEDRAL AT MALAGA

Ferdinand’s marriage relieved the immediate tension of such a

possibility; but its achievement courted even greater national
disaster. The birth of a son could only mean the destruction of the
union between Castile and Aragon, on which the foundations of
Spanish empire had been laid; while by the terms of the marriage
treaty Ferdinand also risked the dismemberment of his own
dominions. Louis XII. was willing to cede as dowry for his niece the
rights over Naples which he had failed to maintain by force of arms;
but the price he demanded in return was the restoration of that half
of the Kingdom which was guaranteed to him by the original
Partition Treaty, should Germaine and the Spanish monarch have no
heirs.
This bargain made and cemented by large quantities of Spanish
gold to indemnify Louis for the expenses to which he had been put
during the Neapolitan wars, the French King proceeded to forbid the
Archduke and Joanna a passage through France, until they had
arrived at some amicable understanding with Ferdinand as to the
future government of their kingdom. Philip, seeing himself
outwitted, sulkily complied, and, in the Treaty of Salamanca (signed
in November, 1505) agreed that he, his wife, and father-in-law
should “jointly govern and administer Castile,” Ferdinand receiving
one half of the public revenues.
The peace thus extorted by circumstances was never intended to
be kept; and, from the moment that the new King and Queen of
Castile put foot in their land, they did their uttermost to encourage
the growing opposition to Aragonese interference. Ferdinand,
thwarted and ignored by his son-in-law and deserted by the
Castilians, at length departed in dudgeon to visit the kingdom that
Gonsalvo de Cordova had won for him in Naples; but it was not
destined that the work to which he and Isabel had given the greater
part of their lives should come to nought. In the autumn of 1506 the
Archduke Philip died at Burgos; and Joanna, sunk in one of her
moods of morbid lethargy, referred those of her subjects, who would
have persuaded her to rule for herself, to Ferdinand’s authority.
From July, 1507, when Ferdinand returned to Spain, till his death
in January, 1516, he governed Castile as regent; while the loss of the
only child born to him of his union with Germaine de Foix preserved
his dominions intact for “Joanna the Mad” and her eldest-born, the
future Emperor Charles V. Naples, it is true, by the terms of his
second marriage treaty should have been once more divided with the
French Crown; but the Catholic King was to reap the reward of
loyalty to the Holy See, and received a papal dispensation from the
fulfilment of his inconvenient pledge.
Victories on the North African coast against Barbary pirates and
the conquest of Southern Navarre closed his days in a halo of glory;
and he passed to his final resting-place beside Isabel in the Royal
Chapel at Granada regretted even by the Castilians and mourned by
the Aragonese as their “last King.” Henceforth Spain was to be one
and undivided.
“No reproach attaches to him,” says Guicciardini of Ferdinand,
“save his lack of generosity and faithlessness to his word.” Peter
Martyr declares that “contrary to the belief of all men he died poor.”
Like Henry VII. of England he had been quick to lay hands on
wealth, doling it out to others with the grudging reluctance of the
miser; but the exhausted treasury he left showed that his main
inspiration had been economy not avarice. His ambitions had been
expensive, and Spain was to pay heavily both in money and the more
precious coin of human life; but the fact that she could afford to
enter the great national struggle with France at all marks the
economic transformation that had taken place since the days of
Henry IV. of Castile. She had passed from industrial infancy to
prosperity and an assured commercial position; her population had
increased; peace at home had given her financial security; while as
the depôt for European trade with the New World vistas of profit
opened before her.
The Catholic sovereigns were not blind to this great future, and the
legislation of their reign dealt largely with measures for fostering
national industries. If such protection was often misguided it was
like the over-anxious care of a mother, that may be as dangerous to a
child’s welfare as the opposite vice of neglect. Each age has its
theories of political economy and looks back with superior contempt
on the failings of its predecessors. To twentieth-century eyes the
economic outlook of the fifteenth is often exasperatingly foolish; yet
in the days of Ferdinand and Isabel it appeared the height of wisdom,
and efforts to put it into practice were eagerly demanded by the
Cortes. Industry, it was felt, must be wrapped in the cotton-wool of a
myriad restrictions; it must be artificially nourished and subjected to
constant supervision and interference, or it would die of exposure to
the rough-and-tumble of competition. That industrial death might be
sometimes due to sheer weariness of life in intolerable fetters was a
diagnosis of which no mediæval economist would ever have dreamt;
and Ferdinand and Isabel firmly believed that their paternal
legislation must prove a panacea for every public ill.
 GRANADA CATHEDRAL, ROYAL
CHAPEL, TOMB OF FERDINAND AND
ISABEL

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE,

MADRID

Low prices demanded a cheap labour-market, therefore the

obvious step was to fix a maximum wage for the worker, that he
might not hope to exceed however worthy of his hire. Cheap labour
must live, therefore a maximum price must be placed on corn that
the wage-earner might be enabled to buy bread. Were grain grown
for neighbourly love not a profit, this solution of an almost universal
difficulty might have succeeded; but agriculture was never popular in
Castile, and such arbitrary dealings tended to depress it still further.
Farmers turned for their profit to the production of wine or oil, or
with a still keener eye to business devoted their energies to sheep or
cattle breeding. This was the staple industry of rural districts, so
extensive and flourishing that in the fourteenth century it had
established a kind of trades-union, or mesta to look after its interests
and secure it privileges. During the winter months the cattle fed at
will on the wide tablelands of Castile; but with the coming of summer
their owners drove them to pasture in mountain districts such as
Leon and Galicia. It was on these journeys to and fro that agriculture
and grazing came into conflict; for where the herds had passed they
left a wilderness. Legislation indeed forbade the trampling down of
vineyards and of meadows of corn or hay, but compensation for
these damages was difficult to obtain from a corporation so powerful
that it had won for itself a large measure of royal protection. Tolls
paid on the migratory cattle formed a considerable part of the public
revenue; and kings of Castile had thus been persuaded to foster a
trade so lucrative to their own pockets, granting graziers not only
immunity from certain imposts but also special rights with regard to
wood-cutting and the freedom of the regular cattle-tracks from any
enclosure or limitation. Ferdinand and Isabel renewed these
privileges and in 1500 placed a member of the Royal Council at the
head of the mesta, bringing that important body under their
immediate control.
If the laws of the maximum and the protection of rival industries
hit agriculture hard, so also did the alcabala, a tax of ten per cent. on
the sale-price of all goods. Originally imposed as a temporary means
of raising money, it had become one of the main sources of the
sovereigns’ revenues, and, while it burdened every commercial
transaction, laid a triple charge on corn in the form first of grain and
then of meal and bread.
The alcabala has been described by a modern historian as “one of
the most successful means ever devised by a government for
shackling the industry and enterprise of its subjects”; and Queen
Isabel herself seems to have realized its blighting nature, for, in 1494,
she agreed, on Ximenes’s advice, to commute it in the case of certain
towns for a fixed sum to be levied by the municipality. Even so, the
question of its legality still troubled her conscience; but the request
in her will that a special committee should collect evidence and
decide the matter justly was, like her kindly thought for the Indians
of the New World, afterwards disregarded.
Perhaps it may be asked how, under such adverse circumstances
agriculture survived at all; yet at the beginning of the sixteenth
century Castile was not only growing sufficient corn for her own
needs but even exporting it to the rest of the peninsula. The
explanation lies in a comparison not with the gigantic production of
modern times, but with the preceding age, when the scorching breath
of anarchy had withered the fields. The government of Queen Isabel’s
reign, if it favoured the more popular cattle-trade, at least protected
the farmer and labourer from pillage; while, by forbidding the tolls
which, during Henry IV.’s misrule, territorial lords had levied at will
at every river-ford and turn of the road, it gave a sudden freedom to
the circulation of corn as well as of other merchandise. Even more
effective was the abolition in 1480 of the export duty on grain, cattle,
and goods passing from Castile to Aragon, whereby the cornfields of
Murcia were enabled to compete with its grazing lands, until at
length a series of bad harvests restored the old predominance of the
live-stock industry.
The real decline of agriculture, like that of industry, was to set in at
the close of the sixteenth century under Isabel’s great-grandson. The
reign of the Catholic sovereigns and the early years of Charles V.
stand out as a golden age of commercial prosperity. The production
of wool and silk increased almost tenfold; the fairs drew foreign
merchants from every part of Europe; while Flemish and Italian
artisans, attracted by an offer of ten years’ freedom from taxation,
settled in the large towns to pursue and teach their handicrafts.
 BURGOS CATHEDRAL

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE,

MADRID

The numberless pragmaticas, or royal proclamations and

ordinances, issued at this time show how vigilant was Ferdinand and
Isabel’s interest in all that concerned the welfare of their land. In
1486 the cloth-workers of Murcia complained that their trade was
being killed by external competition; their looms stood idle, and
whereas 50,000 sheep had been needed in old days to provide them
with wool, now only some 8000 grazed in their meadows. The
response to their petition was a command that for two years no
woollen fabrics should enter Murcia; while the import of silk thread
from Naples, that threatened the silk industry of Granada, was
similarly forbidden. These are only two instances of measures that
ranged from awarding bounties to owners of ships of six hundred
tons and upwards by way of encouraging navigation to minute
instructions as to shoes, hats, embroideries, and armour.
 Much of this scheme of protection was well-considered and
beneficial. Since merchant ships were liable to be impressed in time
of war, the navy, once almost negligible, throve rapidly on the royal
preference shown to large vessels, and also owing to a law
commanding that no goods should be shipped in a foreign craft while
there was a Spanish boat in the harbour. The small merchantmen
suffered of course; but the squadron that the sovereigns dispatched
to Flanders with the Infanta Joanna in 1496 presented the proud
array of one hundred and thirty vessels containing some two
thousand souls.
Legislation usually has its dark side; and the sovereigns’ efforts to
establish the commercial progress of their land on a sound basis
were vitiated by the theory which they shared with their age that
precious metals are not merely a convenient medium of exchange but
an object of value in themselves. The lust of gold had been the curse
that Columbus carried with him to the New World to corrupt his
earthly paradise, blinding the settlers to the true wealth of its soil. It
was to be the curse also of Spain, where the glitter of bars and ingots
was to draw men away from the humbler yet necessary occupation of
a life in the fields to adventure their fortunes across the ocean, or to
overcrowd the streets of Seville, the home market of the Western
Continent.
“Gold” and “ever more gold” was the popular cry; and Ferdinand
and Isabel, in their eagerness that their new discovery should not
enrich other nations, passed stringent laws forbidding the export of
precious metals. The Spanish merchant, at the home frontier or
harbour, must state from what locality he came, where he was going,
and for how long, and how much coin he had with him;—his answers
being written down and signed in the presence of three witnesses,
that any subterfuge might afterwards be confuted. The foreign
merchant had not even this indulgence. In exchange for what he
imported from his own country he must take back neither coin nor
bullion, however small the quantity, but exports in the form of goods
manufactured in Spain; and these by a proclamation of 1494 might
not include brocades nor embroideries woven or worked with gold
thread.
Thus by excessive care what might have been a lucrative industry
was ruined; the more that sumptuary laws prohibited the wearing of
rich stuffs in Spain itself save by a limited part of the population. A
desire for splendid clothing, like the love of beauty, is imprinted deep
in human hearts, and “fine feathers” are the usual accompaniment of
commercial prosperity; but Ferdinand and Isabel regarded with
horror what they considered as the growing extravagance of the
lower classes. The latter were intended to work, not to flaunt fine
stuffs in the faces of the aristocracy; and the silk-trade, its growth
watered by protection, was stunted by restrictions on its sales.
On the splendour of Isabel and her Court we have already
remarked; but it is significant that, at Tordesillas in 1520, the
Commons nevertheless looked back to the reign of the Catholic
sovereigns as a time of economy, complaining to the young Emperor
that the daily expenses of his household were ten times as great as
those of his grandparents. Ferdinand and his Queen were gorgeous
in their dress and ceremony; but it was the considered maintenance
of their ideal of dignity not the careless extravagance of those who
spend what others have earned, and therefore fail to realize its true
value.

They did not let themselves be imprisoned behind the bars of pomp [wrote the
Royal Council to Charles, soon after Ferdinand’s death] for it seemed to them that
there was greater security in the good reputation of their government than in the
magnificence of their household.

It has been urged as an instance of parsimony in contrast to their

personal expenditure that the Catholic sovereigns, in spite of their
professed love of learning, did not with the exception of the College
at Avila found or endow any school or college; and had the education
of their land depended solely on the support of the royal treasury
such criticism would be just. It will be seen however that, given the
momentum of royal encouragement, private enterprise, often almost
as well endowed as sovereignty and with far less claims upon its
purse, was quite capable of acting “Alma Mater” to the would-be
scholars of Spain.
The civil wars of Henry IV.’s reign had, it is true, developed muscle
and sword-play rather than the literary mind; but the blows suffered
by culture at the hands of anarchy, though heavy, had not proved
mortal. Men were still alive who recalled the artistic traditions of the
Court of John II., Isabel’s father, and rejoiced to see their revival
under his daughter. It was not only that Isabel herself, by her own
studies and the careful education of her children, set an example
which an obsequious Court must necessarily follow; but her whole
attitude to life expressed her belief in the importance of this learning
that the average young noble would otherwise have held in little
esteem.
In 1474 the art of printing was introduced into Spain; and before
the end of the century presses were set up in Valencia, Saragossa,
Barcelona, Seville, Salamanca, Toledo, and all the large cities of the
two kingdoms. The Queen, quick to realize the power this invention
might become, granted freedom from taxation to German and Italian
printers of repute; just as she had encouraged the advent of picked
engineers and artisans that the best brains of Europe, whatever the
line of their development, might be at her disposal. Spanish books,
classics, and classical translations were published; while, in contrast
to the heavy tariffs usually levied on imports, foreign books were
allowed free entrance into the home markets.
Isabel’s own library displayed a catholic taste in literature; the
collection ranging from devotional works and treatises on
philosophy, grammar, and medicine, to manuscript copies or
translations of Latin, Greek, and Italian authors, such as Plutarch,
Livy, Virgil, Aristotle, and Boccaccio; together with national
chronicles, and collections of contemporary poems.
When she and Ferdinand built the Church of San Juan de los
Reyes, as a thanksgiving for their victory over the Portuguese at
Toro, they also endowed the Convent attached to it with a library;
while they took a deep interest in the foundation of the University of
Alcalá de Henares, of which Ximenes de Cisneros laid the foundation
stone in 1500, the building being finally open to students eight years
later. Queen Isabel was then dead; but the glory of Alcalá may be said
to radiate from her reign, which had seen a man of Cisneros’s
intelligence appointed to the Archbishopric of Toledo, to use its
wealthy revenues not like Alfonso Carrillo of old for violence or
alchemy but for the furtherance of education and knowledge.
Cisneros had been in Italy, and his scheme of endowment showed
that for all his austerity he had not remained wholly uninfluenced by
the spirit of the classical renaissance. Of the forty-two professorships
at Alcalá, six were devoted to the study of Latin grammar, four to
ancient languages, and four to rhetoric and philosophy.

COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS

FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA

GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.

The Archbishop had once denounced the idea of an Arabic version

of the Scriptures to Fra Fernando de Talavera as “pearls cast before
swine”; but though he condemned the languages of his own day as a
medium for Holy Writ, maintaining that ordinary people would
through ignorance misinterpret truths to their souls’ damnation, yet
the crowning work of his life was to be an edition of the Bible in the
principal languages of the ancient world. Under his criticism and
supervision the first Polyglot Bible was printed in 1517 a few months
before his death; the Old Testament being printed in Hebrew, Latin,
Greek, and Chaldean; the New Testament in Greek and the Vulgate
of Saint Jerome. The errors of such a mighty work in that unscientific
age were naturally many; but the mere fact of its production shows
that the literary spirit was keenly alive. It was a triumph for Alcalá;
and the name of the new university soon became famous in Europe.
 Other educational institutions were also founded in this reign at
Siguenza, Valladolid, Toledo, Santiago, and Avila; mainly through
the enterprise of wealthy Churchmen; the College of Santa Cruz at
Valladolid, like Alcalá de Henares, owing its origin to an Archbishop
of Toledo, though to Ximenes’s predecessor, Cardinal Mendoza.
Well-endowed professorships and the report of the growing
enthusiasm in Spain for classical knowledge drew scholars of repute
from Italy, some by direct invitation to lecture and teach, others in
the train of nobles anxious by their patronage to display their literary
taste.
The Lombard, Peter Martyr of Anghiera, whose name we have so
often mentioned, accompanied the Count of Tendilla on his return
from an embassy at Rome, and was at once requested by the Queen
to open a school for the young Castilian aristocracy, which was
prone, in his own words, “to regard the pursuit of letters as a
hindrance to the profession of arms that it alone thought worthy of
consideration.”

COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS

FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA

GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
 Martyr preferred to follow the fortunes of the Christian army in
Granada to their conclusion, probably judging that until the Cross
had triumphed he would receive little attention; but on the
establishment of peace he began to lecture in Salamanca, the oldest
university in Spain, “Mother of the Liberal Arts,” as Lucio Marineo
fondly called her. He also opened schools in Valladolid, Saragossa,
and other important cities. The young Duke of Villahermosa,
Ferdinand’s nephew, and the Duke of Guimaraens, Isabel’s cousin,
set an example by their attendance to other youths of high birth, till
Peter Martyr’s house was thronged with students, convinced that
classical and philosophical knowledge would enhance their military
laurels rather than detract from them.
Martyr’s own Latin style, as shown in his copious letters to
illustrious contemporaries, and in his account of the New World, was
for the most part crude; but what it lacked in elegance was
counterbalanced by vigour and the accuracy and insight of his
information. He is thus a valuable authority for Isabel’s reign, like his
fellow-countryman the Sicilian Lucio Marineo, whose encyclopedic
work De Memorabilibus Hispaniæ throws considerable light on the
Spanish history of his day. Marineo was introduced to the Castilian
Court in 1484 by the Admiral, Don Fadrique Enriquez, and from that
date till 1496 held the post of Professor of Latin Poetry and
Eloquence in the University of Salamanca. So great was the
enthusiasm inspired by his lectures that they were attended not only
by the ordinary student but by archbishops and bishops, and many of
the leading nobles and ladies of the Court.
Less remembered now, but famous then, was the Portuguese,
Arias Barbosa, who founded the study of Greek in Salamanca. He
had been educated in Italy, the reputation of whose universities was
still to lure young Spaniards from the rival institutions of their own
land. It was indeed a happy influence, for numbers of the most
promising students returned home to widen the outlook of Castilian
scholarship by the light of foreign methods and research.
Of these the greatest was undoubtedly Antonio de Lebrija, who has
been called the “most cultivated and original of all the Spanish
humanists of his time.” An Andalusian by birth, he had been sent at
nineteen to the University of Bologna, and, after ten years’ study in
Italy, settled down first in Seville, and then at Salamanca and Alcalá
to teach and publish what he had acquired. One of the editors of the
Polyglot Bible, he left works not only on theology but on law,
archæology, history, natural science, and geography. Perhaps those
of most lasting value to his countrymen were his Latin dictionary
published in 1492, and his Spanish and Latin grammars.

COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS

FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA

GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.

COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS

FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA

GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.

His daughter Francisca also maintained the literary reputation of

the family as professor of rhetoric at Alcalá. In an age, when the love
of letters had been inspired largely by a cultured Queen, it was
natural that the sexes should share their enthusiasm; and Isabel’s
tutor, Beatriz de Galindo “La Latina,” and other ladies famous for
their classical knowledge, lectured publicly at Salamanca and
elsewhere to large audiences.
“Learning” had become a fashion, as in the time of John II.; and
the literature of the day bore the stamp of the courtly atmosphere in
which it had been bred. The old rough-hewn ballads with their
popular appeal had yielded to polished lyrics, often purposely
obscure in meaning, and filled with classical allusions and conceits;
the epics of national heroes, such as “King Rodrigo” and “the Cid,” to
sober chronicles of contemporary events or to imaginative fiction,
the more highly eulogized as it increased in extravagance.
In the pompous and long-winded speeches introduced into
historical scenes after the manner of Livy, in the Dantesque allegory
and amatory verses addressed by Spanish “Petrarchs” to their
“Lauras,” may be seen the outcome of the literary demand for
translations of Latin authors, and the masterpieces of the Italian
Renaissance. At the same time the union of the two kingdoms under
Ferdinand and Isabel secured for the Castilian tongue its final
triumph over those of Catalonia and Valencia; though the stately and
vigorous conqueror acquired in the struggle something of the
romantic spirit and spontaneous gaiety, with which Provençal
troubadours had endowed its rivals.

Spanish literature [it has been said] takes its root in French and Italian soil ... yet
it may be claimed for Spain ... that she used her models without compromising her
originality, absorbing here, annexing there, and finally dominating her first
masters.

Her era of literary fame was to dawn under the Emperor Charles
V., and reach its zenith with his son; but tokens of the coming glory
may be traced to a much earlier date when, amid the florid weeds of
imitation or pedantry, there yet bloomed occasional flowers of
genuine beauty and sweetness. Such are the Coplas de Manrique,
stanzas written on the death of his father by the brilliant young
soldier Jorge Manrique, a partisan of Queen Isabel in her early
struggles. Longfellow has rendered them into English verse with a
charm, that, if it does not attain to the imperishable grandeur of the
original, yet in its quick sympathy bridges the centuries.

COINS, FERDINAND

FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA

GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.

COINS, FERDINAND

FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA

GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.

Behold of what delusive worth

 The bubbles we pursue on earth,
The shapes we chase;
Amid a world of treachery;
They vanish ere death shuts the eye,
And leave no trace.

Time steals them from us,—chances strange,

Disastrous accidents, and change,
That come to all;
Even in the most exalted state,
Relentless sweeps the stroke of fate;
The strongest fall.

Who is the champion? Who the strong?

Pontiff and priest, and sceptred throng?
On these shall fall
As heavily the hand of Death,
As when it stays the shepherd’s breath
Beside his stall....

Tourney and joust, that charmed the eye,

And scarf and gorgeous panoply,
And nodding plume,—
What were they but a pageant scene?
What but the garlands, gay and green,
That deck the tomb?...

His soul to Him, Who gave it, rose;

God lead it to its long repose,
Its glories rest!
And though the warrior’s sun has set,
Its light shall linger round us yet,
Bright, radiant, blest.

These are a few of the forty-two stanzas, in which with almost

flawless simplicity of style Manrique mourns in his own personal loss
the sorrow and regret of all the human race. He begins with the
vanity of life; he ends with a plea for resignation; not an Omar
Khayyam’s bitter surrender to inevitable destiny but a confident trust
in a God who is both Creator and Saviour.
Other verses of Manrique are to be found in the various
cancioneros, or collections of Castilian poetry and song, that were
gathered together in the course of the fifteenth century; but none
deserve nor have reaped the same applause. In 1511, a Cancionero
General was printed at Valencia, that may be taken as typical of
Queen Isabel’s reign and those of her father and brother. It declared
its contents as “many and divers works of all, or of the most notable
troubadours of Spain”; and it is indeed a varied collection of
devotional hymns, moral discussions, love-songs, ballads, riddles,
villancicos or poems supposed to be of rustic origin, and invenciones
or rhymes concocted by the chivalry of Castile to explain the devices
on their shields.
In all there are over eleven hundred pieces; but few, especially of
those that represent the close of the century, have the note of
distinction. The true spirit of song is sometimes there, rising with
sudden power and conviction in scattered lines or stanzas; but for
the most part imprisoned in a maze of forms and unrealities that
leave our emotions and our imaginations cold. The butterfly is still
enwrapped in the chrysalis.
Spanish prose, during the reign of the Catholic Sovereigns, was in
the same transitional stage as poetry. The promise of good things
was working to its fulfilment, but the harvest would be reaped in
another age. In the national chronicles, the oldest form of prose
literature, this change may be seen at work. The narratives of the
reign of Henry IV., covering the earlier years of Isabel’s life, are mere
annals, sometimes more or less impartial as in the case of “Enriquez
del Castillo,” or else frankly partisan, like the pages that bear the
name of Alonso de Palencia.[12] Their value lies either in their
picturesque style, or in the descriptions of scenes, at which the
authors themselves were present.
12. This chronicle is probably a rough extract of part of Mosen Diego de
Valera’s Memorial de Hazanas,—taken in its turn from Palencia’s Las Decadas de
Las Cosas de mi Tiempo, which was originally written in Latin.
The same may be said of Andres Bernaldez’s Historia de Los Reyes
Católicos, one of the most valuable authorities for the reign of
Ferdinand and Isabel. Bernaldez, parish priest of Los Palacios near
Seville, was no ambitious historian; and it is not his lack of bias nor
his well-balanced judgment that has won him the thanks of posterity,
but rather the simplicity with which he recounts events that he
himself had witnessed or that had touched him nearly. We are
grateful that he had the kindly thought of memorizing his
impressions of the war in Granada, and of recalling the deeds of the
hero Columbus, who once stopped in his house; but the work of
sifting the grain of his information from the chaff is left to his
readers.
In Hernando de Pulgar, author of the Cronica de los Reyes
Católicos, on the other hand, we find what might be called the
historical consciousness in embryo. The beginning of this work
which relates to a period before 1482 when he became official
historiographer and secretary to the Queen is often wildly inaccurate;
but the latter portion which is much more careful shows an attempt
to produce a chronological summary that should give to each event
its due importance. If the style is sometimes heavy, its very prolixity
provides a wealth of circumstantial detail; and though his admiration
for the sovereigns, and in especial for the Queen, have laid him open
to the charge of flattery, the tone of his chronicle is in the main
neither illiberal nor fulsome.
It is to a later reign and Zurita’s Anales de Aragon that we must
turn for the first piece of real historical work founded on a study of
original documents and contemporary foreign sources; but in
descriptive power Hernando de Pulgar remains infinitely Zurita’s
superior. Besides his Cronica de Los Reyes Católicos, he wrote also
Claros Varones, a series of biographical sketches of illustrious people
of his own day. They are carefully drawn portraits, by many critics
considered his best work; but their realism is impaired by his
tendency to blur the fine edges of appreciation with over-enthusiastic
praise.
It is the courtier’s temptation, which the trend of the Castilian
literature of his time towards exaggeration would do little to
mitigate. Fantasy not realism was the popular demand amongst the
cultured in their leisure hours; and those, for whom the ballads were
too rough and the chronicles too heavy, fed with delight on
“Romances of Chivalry” as insipid in style as their adventures were
far removed from real life. Cervantes, in the story of his mad Knight,
Don Quixote, was to kill these monsters of imagination with his
satire, but in condemning the whole brood as fit material for a
bonfire he spared their original model, Amadis de Gaula. The latter
is found by the Priest and the Barber, Master Nicholas, on the
shelves of the old Knight’s library.
 This, as I have heard say [exclaimed the Priest], was the first book of chivalry
printed in Spain, and all the rest have had their foundation and rise from it;
therefore I think, as head of so pernicious a sect, we ought to condemn him to the
fire without mercy.
Not so, Sir [answered the Barber], for I have heard also that it is the best of all
books of this kind; and therefore as being singular in his art he ought to be spared.

With this judgment the Priest at once concurred.

The exact source from which Amadis de Gaula emerged is buried
in mystery. It bears the stamp of French influence; but, in the form it
appeared in Spain during the fifteenth century, was a translation by
Ordoñez de Montalvo of the work of a Portuguese Knight who fought
at the battle of Aljubarrota. Gaula, the kingdom of Amadis’s birth is
Wales;—the time—“not many years after the passion of Our
Redeemer”; but neither geography nor chronology is of much
importance to the romance that relates the wanderings of an
imaginary Prince, his love for “Oriana, the true and peerless lady,”
daughter of an imaginary King of England, and his encounters with
other Knights and various magicians and giants; until at length a
happy marriage brings his trials to a temporary conclusion.
The immense popularity that this book enjoyed led to innumerable
imitations; one of them, the story of “Esplandion” a supposed son of
Amadis, by Montalvo himself; but all reproduced and exaggerated
the faults of the earlier book, without achieving the charm of style
that here and there illuminated its pages. The heroes of these
romances are indeed a dreary company, differing only, as it has been
said, “in the size of the giants they slay and in the degree of
improbability of their colourless adventures and loves.”
A variation of this type of literature were the “Visionary
Romances,” of which the Carcel de Amor or Prison of Love is
perhaps the best example. This was the work of a fifteenth-century
poet, Diego de San Pedro, who describes how in a vision he saw
“savage Desire” lead an unhappy Knight in chains to torture him in
the Castle of Love. This victim’s release brings allegory to an end,
and introduces a wearisome round of adventures much in the style of
the ordinary romance. The Carcel de Amor was printed in 1492, and
delighted the Court of Ferdinand and Isabel; but Cervantes’s Priest
and Barber, had they found it, would have undoubtedly pitched it