The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

John le Carré published The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963, only two years after the Berlin Wall divided Germany’s capital city in half. The building of the wall marked the climax of a crisis that had been simmering since the end of World War II (WWII). Following the collapse of the Nazi regime in the spring of 1945, the victorious Allied powers divided the whole of Germany into four occupation zones, under the respective control of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union. They likewise divided Berlin into four zones, although the city itself was entirely within the Soviet zone. Berlin accordingly became a focal point of the conflict between the Soviets and the West known as the Cold War. The Soviets had suffered inconceivable losses during WWII, and they responded with a brutal and extractive occupation policy in their section of Germany. The West feared that an overly weak Germany would make the Soviets the dominant power on the continent. The Soviets in turn feared that the atomic bomb would encourage the West to move against the Soviets while they were still recovering from the war, as the US had been building a ring of air bases within striking distance of Soviet cities and factories. Plans originally called for elections to form a new German government, but the Soviets took de facto control of the political parties in their own zone, and the West refused the Soviet insistence on German neutrality (which would make Germany unable to arm itself against the Soviets). The result was the fracturing of Germany into two states, the Communist Democratic Republic of Germany in the East, and the Federal Republic of Germany in the West.

The division of Germany made the situation in Berlin even more complicated. The western half of the city became an outpost within a Communist German state under Soviet occupation. It also became a haven for a huge number of defectors fleeing from the East to the West, many of whom were the most educated and prosperous among the population. Enraged and embarrassed, the Soviet and East German governments looked for ways to staunch the flow. Throughout the 1950s, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened to sign a treaty with East Germany that would grant it full power over the city, which would have forced the Western powers to either retreat or defend it with force. Khrushchev failed to carry through on these threats, as he was no less fearful of full-scale war than the Western powers, but he still needed a solution to the Berlin problem. On August 13, 1961, East German forces abruptly sealed the border between the two halves of the city and began construction on a series of fortifications that would become known as the Berlin Wall. Although this was a flagrant violation of the postwar treaty regarding the division of the city, the administration of US President John F. Kennedy refrained from interfering rather than risk a conflict. The Berlin Wall became a powerful symbol of Cold War divisions, as well as a focal point of intrigue among the dueling intelligence services seeking to gain information from the opposite side. For Le Carré, it also symbolized a paradoxical condition in which the Communist and Western worlds became more separate even as the tactics that they utilized to compete with and gain advantages over one another became eerily similar.