History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Yet the opinion polls soon showed that the Alliance ’90 had no chance of winning with this slogan. The SPD initially had an overwhelming lead in the polls, but as the campaign progressed the Alliance for Germany, which people increasingly referred to just as the CDU, gained on it rapidly. The choice was clearly going to be between the medium track and the fast track to unification. As this became apparent, one had the curious spectacle of the communists and the dissidents joining together at the Round Table talks, and in the Government of National Responsibility, to try to save what they thought deserved to be saved from the ruins of the GDR. Sitting in his Spartan government office, one of the most determined and longest-serving dissidents, Gerd Poppe, now a minister without portfolio, explained to me how the government had hastily put together a “social charter” and laws on different ownership, so that there would be at least some formal, codified starting point for the discussion of what “good” from the GDR could be preserved in a larger Germany. The feelings of the former dissidents during this period were profoundly mixed, for whereas in the rest of East Central Europe the Round Tables and the provisional governments were clearly laying foundations for the (re-)building of democracy, here their work was more like throwing up temporary huts, which would be bulldozed away as soon as the real builders moved in.

  1

  Sunday, 18 March, was a beautiful spring day—almost a summer’s day, in fact. The sun shone without ceasing. People voted early, then took off into the countryside. There seemed to be universal good humor. An old lady in Pankow asked how many times she should fold the ballot paper. “You can fold it as many times as you like,” said the volunteer official—“it’s a free election!” By the time I got to the polling station in the small village of Seeberg at midday, nearly 80 percent of the electors had voted. When I say “polling station,” I mean the back room of the local pub. And when I say “80 percent,” I mean about fifty people, for there were only sixty-five electors in this village—and eight of them were on the supervisory electoral commission.

  These electoral commissions, containing, where possible, representatives of the main parties, took their tasks very seriously indeed, scrupulously checking off names and insisting that people use the polling booths. Previously, to use the polling booth was a sign that you were not toeing the line: Good conformists openly marked and folded their paper and put it straight into the box. A friend once described the few paces to the polling booth as “the longest walk of my life.” Another recalled how, at the local government elections only last May, her hand was shaking so much that she could not get her deliberately spoiled ballot paper into the slot. Today, these sounded like tales from a distant epoch.

  In Buckow, where Brecht, in his charming lakeside house, probably wrote his poem about the 17 June rising, there was the same quiet excitement, especially among younger voters. However, when I asked one old woman how it felt to take part in her first free election, she grunted and said, “Well, it was rather complicated.” The agonies of choice! Actually, compared with the system in Poland or Hungary, the election procedure was simplicity itself. All you had to do was put one cross or other clear mark next to the party or party grouping of your choice. According to the election law, no party propaganda was allowed within “some 100 meters” of the polling station. So instead of the canvassers there were the journalists. Interviewers from West Germany’s television asked thousands of voters to repeat their votes on simulated ballot papers.

  Within a few minutes of the polling station closing at 6 P.M., television was able to announce the shock result: a triumph for the CDU. As the evening wore on, the simulated results were replaced by real ones, slightly reducing the scale of the triumph so that the Alliance for Germany narrowly missed an absolute majority. But the message was plain. In the huge metal and glass Palace of the Republic in the center of East Berlin, where three competing German television channels (two West, one East) had their studios on the belle étage, a desperate scrum of reporters mobbed the winners and collared anyone who seemed interesting, while yesterday’s men, such as Mieczysław F. Rakowski, former leader of the former Polish communist party, peered longingly at the limelight. In one corner I spotted Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the hero of ’68 in Frankfurt and Paris, known as Danny the Red. As I approached, he was saying to an interviewer, “You know, I was never a communist.”

  The balladeer Wolf Biermann wandered like a friendly bear through this frantic scene. “Today,” he said, “here in this glass palace, is the funeral of the GDR.” In another corner, the writer Stefan Heym observed, “There will be no more GDR. It will be nothing but a footnote in world history.” The Republic had voted to end the Republic.

  I say “the Republic” advisedly, for in East German popular usage “the Republic” is counterposed to Berlin. And Berlin voted differently: nearly 35 percent for the SPD, only 18 percent for the CDU, and nearly 30 percent for the PDS, the renamed communist party. This last rather astonishing figure may be explained partly by the heavy concentration of former party functionaries and state employees of all sorts in the capital. Yet it seems that the PDS also managed to attract both old and young voters by its skillfully propagated warnings against the cost of “capitalist” unification: unemployment, higher rents, and so forth.

  But Berlin was outvoted by the rest of the country—“the Republic”—and above all by the lands of the south: Thuringia, Saxony, and Sachsen-Anhalt. Before the war, these were strongholds of social democracy. (It is sometimes claimed—although this is hotly disputed—that in the 1950s the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer pressed less hard for reunification than he might otherwise have done because he feared these constituencies would have swung the electoral balance against him.) But now the electoral regions of Dresden, Erfurt, Gera, Suhl, and Karl-Marx-Stadt—that is, as Chancellor Kohl repeatedly insisted, Chemnitz—all turned in votes for the Alliance for Germany of around 60 percent, with less than 20 percent for the SPD and less than 15 percent for the PDS. According to a survey, some 58 percent of workers throughout the country voted for Kohl’s Alliance.

  To label this a “swing to the right” would be, at best, a half-truth. It is true that, as elsewhere in the former Eastern Europe, the more straightforwardly anticommunist the party, the better its chance. Here, as elsewhere, forty years of communism calling itself socialism has made socialism a dirty word. But it would be wrong to suggest that people went from one extreme to the other. The neo-Nazi far-right groups that made such a terrible impression on international television with their rowdy behavior and chants of “Foreigners out!” at the later Leipzig demonstrations remained marginal. Even the markedly conservative DSU got no more than 15 percent of the vote in its original southern heartlands, and just 6.3 percent overall. What people chose—in spite of its past as a puppet party—was the moderate, liberal conservative CDU, which alone got almost twice the SPD vote (40.9 percent to 21.8 percent). This was, first and last, a vote for Chancellor Kohl and the fast track to unity. Anschluss? Yes, please!

  Bärbel Bohley, the artist who was one of the founders of the New Forum, commented bitterly that “people really have no more trust in their own strength. They are swapping the tutelage of the old SED for that of the CDU and hope that not the red but the black state will do everything for them.” Again, this seems to me at best a half-truth, seen from the rather special and atypical viewpoint of East Berlin. An old friend in Dresden drew my attention to an article in the West German weekly Der Spiegel by an East Berlin intellectual that said, in effect, “We don’t need unification now that the Wall is open.” If I want to get a Western book, observed the author of this article, I just take the train to Bahnhof Zoo (in West Berlin) and pop down to the Heinrich Heine Bookshop there. But, said my friend, that’s precisely what you can’t do from distant Dresden. If you want to have easy access to books—or building materials or clothes or cars—from the West, then you need unification. And, anyway, only the privileged intellectual would have the hard currency to slip over so
casually to pick up a book—hard currency earned, for example, by writing an article against unification in the West German weekly Der Spiegel.

  Moreover, for the people of Dresden, this is not a loss but a gain in identity. For what they identify with is not the GDR but the old Land and former kingdom of Saxony. (The grand duke, I understand, proposes to move back to Schloss Moritzburg.) Here, on the dusty housefronts and outside the neglected, antiquated factories, you see everywhere two flags: black, red, and gold for Germany; green and white for Saxony. And it is as the reconstituted Land of Saxony, not as the former GDR, that the Saxons wish to join the Federal Republic.

  In the country at large, it seems to me, the real motto of the campaign—though no one, to my knowledge, actually used it—was Adenauer’s slogan from the 1950s: “No Experiments!” They had experienced enough experiments to last several lifetimes: Hitler’s experiments, Stalin’s experiments, Ulbricht’s and Honecker’s. They’d had quite enough of being guinea pigs. There were certainly aspects of West German life and attitudes about which they had reservations. But so far as the economic, political, and legal system was concerned, West Germany’s was the best one going. Arguably, it was the best system Germany had ever had. Now they wanted to have it as fast as possible: first the deutsche mark of course, but not just the deutsche mark, also the free press, the rule of law, local self-government, and federal democracy. In many ways, their priorities also recalled those of the 1950s in West Germany—starting with the passionate drive to rebuild for private happiness from the ruins. Understandably, the enthusiasm was greatest among the young, while the middle-aged were more worried about their abilities to adapt, and the old were concerned about the conversion rate and the values of their pensions. Indeed, the old might remark wearily, like the grandmother in Edgar Reitz’s film Heimat, “Yet another new era!”

  There are plainly immense problems of learning democracy for people who have lived even longer than Czechs or Poles under successive dictatorships, although the Czechs and Poles, unlike most East Germans, were not able to watch democracy in practice every night on their television screens. But it is deeply condescending to suggest that this vote was simply a sellout or a cop-out and little short of revolting for intellectuals in the West to suggest that the East Germans should try—as it were, on our behalf—yet another experiment. (Why the hell should they? If you want to make another experiment, kindly perform it on yourself.)

  To be sure, in comparison with Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia, there is a certain special melancholy about East Germany’s transition to democracy. For it is only of the first phase of the revolution—from the great Leipzig demonstration of 9 October 1989 to the opening of the Wall on 9 November—that people can say, with justified pride and unqualified truth, “We stood up for ourselves! We did it our way!” The first peaceful revolution, the first self-liberation in German history, did not remain a self-liberation. East Germany did not first build its own democracy and then join hands with West Germany. From 9 November, the liberation, though still the work of Germans, was led as much by West as by East Germans. But it remains a liberation. And, with all due caveats, the prospects for a swift, successful transition to a flourishing market economy, a stable parliamentary democracy, and the rule of law are now brighter in this central patch of old Europe than east of the Oder or southeast of the Erzgebirge.

  2

  The reunification of Germany began on 9 November 1989. It happened from below. Wherever I went in East Germany, I found evidence of new ties: from person to person, family to family, enterprise to enterprise, town to town, Land to Land. I talked to a floor tiler in Buckow. His cooperative had established links with a West German firm. They just came knocking on the door. I gave a cheerful agricultural worker a lift home from the pub/polling station in Seeberg. Yes, he said, a baron from West Germany was going to invest in their poultry farm. The Reclam publishing house (East) has come to an arrangement with the Reclam publishing house (West). And so on.

  Yet this election was a turning point. It closed the second phase of the revolution and opened the period of formal negotiation about the terms of unification between the democratically elected governments and parliaments of the two postwar German states.

  The process of unification is of such complexity, with so many interacting unknowns, that merely to indicate the main issues would require another essay. Whereas the Bundesbank president initially observed that the currency union should come at the end of the transformation to a market economy, it will now come at the beginning: probably by early July, according to the Bonn government. “Engagement in spring, marriage in the summer, and then off on holiday,” said the West German economics minister blithely. But who knows what will come after the honeymoon? Inflation for the West? Mass unemployment for the East? How will a swift currency union be reconciled with East Germany’s Soviet and East European trade? And how will the new government resolve the ghastly tangle of claims on expropriated, nationalized, collectivized, or socialized property in the GDR?

  The critical argument for a hasty currency union was to stem the hemorrhage of emigration from East Germany, and the Bonn government announced that the special treatment for migrants from East Germany will end simultaneously with the introduction of the deutsche mark. But what guarantee is there that this will halt the flood? The Länder of East Germany will still be much poorer than those of West Germany, with lower wages for the same work and a condition of profound social and economic dislocation. How will the social and economic strains of unification affect popular attitudes in East and West? Could they boost the vote for the far-right Republicans? East German society has scant experience of living peacefully with either political conflicts or foreigners. One of the more worrying side effects already observable in both East and West is a street-level tendency to see an answer to the problem of accommodating more Germans (including those from elsewhere in Eastern Europe) in the accommodation of fewer foreigners (Turks in the West, Vietnamese in the East, and Poles all over). Then there is the terrible problem of so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung—“overcoming” the past—in East Germany: Witness the Schnur case and the beginning of a verification procedure to check that the people elected on 18 March had not formerly worked for or collaborated with the Stasi. There are no completely reliable figures, but if one takes the estimates made by the commission dissolving the State Security Service, then it would appear that at least one in every hundred GDR citizens was an official or unofficial collaborator.

  And these are only a few of the internal aspects of unification. I have not begun to list the problems that most exercise the outside world: the so-called external aspects of unification, the stuff of the “2 + 4” talks, the ending of Allied rights over Berlin and “Germany as a whole,” the Polish frontier treaty, the difficult substantive issues of integration into the European Community and, most intractable of all, the whole complex of political-military security arrangements, the future of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

  For years, German politicians have never tired of repeating that the key to German unity lies in Moscow. Recently Chancellor Kohl’s main foreign-policy adviser, Horst Teltschik, was reported as saying that the key to German unity now lies in Bonn. Even if he actually formulated it a little more cautiously, the basic point is right. Moscow has, of course, still a great deal to say, above all on security issues. But even on security issues the first question at the moment is, What do the Germans want? Yet they disagree among themselves about what they want, as the SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine has recently demonstrated once again in advocating what would amount to German withdrawal from NATO.

  ON THE EVENING of 18 March, Chancellor Kohl was so full of himself that I was afraid he might burst. Exuding sentimental assurance, he obviously felt that the CDU had won not only the East German elections but also the West German elections in December and that he would therefore go down in history as the chancellor of German unity. The SPD, by contrast, had hoped to sail into the federal elections
with the wind from an East German triumph behind it and was shocked by the defeat. I would not be quite so confident as the chancellor. As the East German elections themselves showed, the firmest predictions can be overthrown. We are in unchartered waters: The chancellor has raised great expectations, and there are any number of things that can go wrong in the process of unification. Nobody knows exactly what has begun. All that is certain is what has ended. This has a name. It is called the German Democratic Republic.

  Late that night, I found myself wondering how Brecht would have reacted. Had he offered himself, like Heym and Biermann, to the television interviewers in the frantic melee of the Palace of the Republic, he would probably have said something clever and dishonest. But, in the tranquil privacy of Buckow, I think his lyric spirit—honest in spite of the man—might perhaps have written:

  THE SOLUTION

  In the election of 18th March

  The people

  Dissolved the republic and

  Chose another.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1990

  24 MARCH. Margaret Thatcher summons a group of historians and specialists on Germany to a private meeting at Chequers to discuss German unification. See below, p. 50.

  8 APRIL. The second round of Hungarian parliamentary elections produces a government majority for the nationalist Hungarian Democratic Forum.

  9 APRIL. Leaders of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland meet in Bratislava to discuss Central European cooperation. They will subsequently become the “Visegrád group.”