Bachelor Thesis: Update 1

For my bachelor thesis I’m doing research on the position of the Dutch government and media in reaction to the building of the Berlin wall in 1961. The Berlin wall fascinates me, as it was the symbol of the classic Cold War division between the West and the East.

With my short trip to Berlin I wanted to ‘experience the history’: see the leftovers of the Wall, and see if there was a difference between East and West Berlin. It proved to be a bit of a disappointment, there was not much left of the Wall and the pieces were scattered all over the city. The Wall is now commercial; you can buy ‘real’ bits of it everywhere. Anyone who believes that crap do an IQ-test. If you would combine all the ‘real pieces’ of the Wall currently for sale, you can probably construct a wall of a length much longer than the original wall.

May, 1st
This morning I went to the National Archive in The Hague. I was very curious if my research would go smoothly. The part of the archive I need (pieces from the minister-council, contact between embassies etc) might not be accessible, because 1955-1964 was recently moved from the Ministry of State to this National Archive. And indeed, when I got there, the woman behind the info-desk told me that it was not accessible yet… A classmate of mine who was also doing research today told me the reason why this part of the archive was inaccessible: some high placed person has to sign some forms and then all will be fine. Bureaucracy!!!
The first two hours were spent with two women helping me to find out what to do now. At length, I could see some notes from the minister-council regarding the Berlin-crisis from August-September 1961. Not the result I was hoping for, but there’s nothing I can do about it at the moment. I worked through these notes for the next two hours and now I’m stuck.

May, 12th
Last Friday I received an email from the National Archive, with information about the section I have to consult. It is finally made public! So with 2 weeks delay, I’m now back in the archive and I just filed in my request to see a particular piece. The whole process is painstakingly slow. I just spent the first three hours solely searching through the index of this archive. The index is about 2,000 pages spread over two maps and I was scanning for the words: Germany, East Germany, Berlin, and Crisis. You can imagine that it takes hours to manually do that, especially since you don’t want to miss anything that might be of importance. Historic research will get easier in the future, when all archives are made digital, but until then it’s time consuming labour. While searching the index, I made a sheet with the numbers of the files that might be important on my laptop using Numbers (that’s the equivalent of Excel for Mac OS).
After searching through the first 3 boxes with paperwork from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs I’m glad to be able to say that I found some information that’s worth reporting. My knowledge about the Berlin Crisis is very superficial, especially when it comes to the position of the Dutch government. It’s fun to explore what was going on in the government circles those days. I read correspondence going from the embassy in Berlin to The Hague, and reports about how to handle the crisis. Some of these reports held surprising insights for me, the anti-left sentiments where much more prominent than I had realised. Also, there was a general feeling that the Russians had ‘won’ Berlin. Information like this is very valuable for my thesis.

I left the archive after some 6 hours. It’s not really a place you want to hang out longer than necessary; the archive is packed with retired folks doing research on their family history. Some old people even look at you with a face that betrays surprise, like ‘what are you doing here?’ Well, there are still people who like to study history. I’ll update my research status as I progress. Tomorrow I’ll spend the morning in the university library looking through old newspapers 😉