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No Reciprocity. The crisis had actually begun three weeks ago over quite a different cause. At that time, the dispute, as so often in the past, focused on the status of Berlin and the plan of the West German government to convene an electoral college there this week to choose the new President for the Federal Republic. The West Germans claim that the western half of the divided city is part of the Federal Republic. In their opinion, the convocation of the Federal Assembly there symbolizes West Berlin's political inclusion in West Germany. But the Soviets and East Germans maintain that West Berlin is a separate political entity that rests on Communist territory, and that the West Germans have no right to conduct political business there.
For a few days last week, it seemed as if the episode could be avoided entirely. Bearing an important message, Ambassador Tsarapkin helicoptered 170 miles from Bonn to Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger's weekend home in Stuttgart. Over glasses of light Swabian wine, the two men chatted amiably as the Soviet diplomat explained a way out for both sides. If the West Germans would withdraw the Federal Assembly from West Berlin, the East Germans would allow West Berliners to pass through the Wall during the Easter holidays to visit relatives in East Berlin, the first such passage permitted in three years.
After declaring that he was "encouraged" by the Soviet initiative, Kiesinger asked Mayor Schütz to be ready to enter negotiations with the East Germans. Schütz sent a representative into East Berlin to open the talks. His envoy returned disappointed. The East Germans demanded the cancellation of the Federal Assembly before any other issue could even be discussed. Signaling a switch in the Soviet position, Izvestia bluntly asserted that West Germans could expect no reciprocity for removing the Federal Assembly from West Berlin.
The West Berlin Senate tried once more to reopen negotiations with East Germany, but a telex reply from East Berlin only reiterated the earlier Communist intransigence. Western diplomats were puzzled by the sudden reversal in Communist tactics. After all, even East German Boss Walter Ulbricht had sent a compromise proposal similar to Tsarapkin's to West Germany. Ultimately the most widely accepted supposition in the west was that Ulbricht had only reluctantly gone along with the initiative in the first place. By that theory, he later succeeded in persuading the hard-liners in the Kremlin leadership to override the compromise offer and insist on conditions that were patently unacceptable to West Berlin and West Germany.