3 OCTOBER. East Germany joins the Federal Republic. The “Day of German Unity”
GERMANY UNBOUND
HE WISHED TO BE THE CHANCELLOR OF A LIBERATED, NOT A DEFEATED Germany, said Willy Brandt on the evening of his election victory in 1969. Yet only on 3 October 1990 did Germany liberate itself. Not all alone, of course. Every German politician pays tribute to Gorbachev, to the pioneers of emancipation in Eastern Europe, to the Americans, French, and British, without whom, as authors say in their acknowledgments, this book could never have been written. But it was the Germans who wrote the book.
For all the discontinuities of West German policy since 1949, one can but admire the grand continuity in which all chancellors from Adenauer to Kohl, all foreign ministers, all federal governments over forty years, now this way, now that, now in the West, now in the East, pursued the cause of German liberation.
Historians will argue whether Adenauer’s integration into the West or Brandt’s Ostpolitik contributed more to the success of the past year. There is much to be said for the claim that the East Central European year of wonders, 1989, was a late triumph of Adenauer’s “magnet theory”—the idea that the attraction of a free and prosperous West Germany embedded in a free and prosperous Western Europe would sooner or later draw the unfree and impoverished East Germany irresistibly toward it. But could the magnet have exerted its full attractive force if the blocking Iron Curtain had not first been drawn back by the Ostpolitik, which Willy Brandt launched in the late 1960s? And it was not Bonn’s Western but rather its Eastern ties—above all, those to Moscow—that directly permitted the transformation of an East German movement for freedom into an all-German state of unity.
Yet this East German rising for freedom was not contemplated in Bonn’s policy toward East Germany. Those in the GDR who contributed most to Germany’s peaceful October revolution—the tiny minority of human- and civil-rights campaigners—had benefited least from the Federal Republic’s governmental policy toward the GDR. Bonn politicians now ritually celebrate the “peaceful revolution.” Two years ago, most of those same politicians would have described it as “dangerous destabilization.” Yes, it was a “dangerous destabilization” that made German unification possible. Without the brave minority that faced down armed police on the streets of Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin, the ultimate goal of Bonn’s policy would never have been achieved—Gorbachev or no Gorbachev. (The real greatness of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner consists in the ability to accept often undesired and unintended faits accomplis—or what Mr. Gorbachev likes to call “life itself.”)
The pioneers of social emancipation and democratization in the GDR were then overtaken rapidly by those who wanted to have done with the GDR altogether. By this time, the two parallel sets of negotiations for unification—the “internal” ones, between the two German states (“1 + 1”), and the “external” ones, between the two German states and the four post-1945 occupying powers (“2+4”)—were already under way.
Chancellor Kohl, after giving initial consideration to alternative models, such as that of a “treaty community” or confederation, had decided by the end of January to go full steam ahead for one federal republic. The votes of the East German population gave him the domestic political strength to do this. It was his political decision, against the advice of most experts, to introduce monetary union on 1 July and to do so with a large degree of one-to-one parity (deutsche mark to GDR mark). This had a traumatic impact on the East German economy—according to West German statistics, industrial output in August 1990 was down 51 percent from that of August 1989—which in turn imparted a desperate urgency to the last months of negotiation.
To describe these seven hectic months of intricate negotiation would require not an essay but a compendium. The 31 August treaty on unification between the two German states is a book in itself—243 pages of small print in the official government bulletin. Formally, they were “1 + 1” and “2+4” negotiations. In practice, they were “½” and “1 + 1 + 1” negotiations. The first and last freely elected East Berlin government was not an equal partner in the German-German talks. The Bonn government basically set the terms of the internal unification, its officials drafting treaties that bore a remarkable resemblance to the finished product. Many East German politicians and intellectuals in both halves of Germany were understandably miffed by this procedure. “Anschluss,” said some. Yet was it not for this that the majority of the people had voted in March? And, despite widespread economic distress, the majority expressed its basic satisfaction with the result, on 14 October, in the first elections for the five reconstituted Länder of the former GDR. Chancellor Kohl’s CDU was the overall winner everywhere except in Brandenburg (where the Social Democrats’ leader is a prominent Protestant churchman) and secured more than 45 percent of the vote in Saxony and Thuringia.
The external negotiation was basically between the Federal Republic, the Soviet Union, and the United States, in that order. The Bonn government makes no secret of the fact that it was the United States, rather than France or Britain, that was its crucial Western supporter in the whole process. Washington was not just self-evidently more important in talks with Moscow but also more unreservedly supportive than London or Paris—a fact that has done some damage to the Franco-German “axis.” Yet the central negotiation was that between Bonn and Moscow. In Moscow in February, Chancellor Kohl secured Gorbachev’s assent to unification in one state. In Stavropol in July, he secured Gorbachev’s assent to the full sovereignty of the united state, including its membership in NATO—although a NATO redefined by the “London Declaration” a few days before. Soviet troops would leave Germany by 1994.
In return, the united Germany would have no atomic, biological, or chemical (“ABC”) weapons and no more than 370,000 men and women under arms; it would make a hefty financial contribution to the repatriation costs of Soviet troops; and it would become, even more than it was already, Gorbachev’s leading partner in his desperate attempt to modernize the Soviet Union and bring it “to Europe.” That was the essential German-Soviet deal, which opened the door to unification on Adenauer’s terms. To celebrate this remarkable deal, Kohl and Gorbachev appeared in V-necked cardigans and open shirts. Surrounded by men in suits, they peered into a Caucasian river and mused upon the meaning of life itself.
In Europe these days, “sovereignty” is a controversial word—and not just for Mrs. Thatcher or Jacques Delors. When German conservatives celebrate Germany’s recapture of full sovereignty, German liberals (and liberal conservatives) hasten to say, “But of course this is no longer sovereignty in the classical sense,” and “After all, we share sovereignty in the European Community.” So let us put it more precisely. Until 3 October 1990, the Federal Republic had somewhat less freedom of action than the United Kingdom or the French Republic, both de jure and de facto. After 3 October 1990, it has almost precisely as much de jure, and de facto slightly more. Britain and France have no comparable international treaty restrictions on their armed forces. But their relative economic weaknesses and their geographical positions give them less room for maneuver than Germany, which is once again the great power in the center of Europe.
The liberation from the bonds of the Western Allies’ residual rights over Berlin and “Germany as a whole” is but a marginal advantage by comparison with the liberation from the half-nelson grip of Soviet control over East Germany. At a meeting in Moscow just a few days after unification, I heard a very senior German official say simply, “Now we are no longer open to blackmail.” “Are the Russians our brothers or our friends?” asked an old East German joke. Answer: “Our brothers—you can choose your friends.” By 1994, at the latest, the brothers will be gone—and Germany can choose her friends.
3 October will now officially replace 17 June, the anniversary of the East German rising of 1953, as “the day of German unity.” A better description might be “the day of German liberty.” Externally, the new German state is free—and can use its freedom of action for
good or ill. Internally, more than sixteen million men and women are free who until a year ago were not. Of course, they have hard times ahead. Of course, their new freedom is relative. But one of the messages of the East Central European 1989 is precisely to warn against the confused and exaggerated relativization of values in which all too many German intellectuals indulged so wordily throughout the 1980s.
A few weeks before the great day, we had to stay with us in Oxford a young man, Joachim. As the son of a very remarkable Protestant priest in East Berlin, he had been prevented from completing an ordinary secondary schooling. When I visited him in the early summer of 1989, at the rectory behind the Wall, he described to me how small demonstrations to protest against the falsification of the local-election results in May, as well as the East German leadership’s endorsement of the repression on Tiananmen Square in early June, had been brutally dispersed. Here, in this very garden, the marchers had assembled. There, on that street, they had been “pulled away,” the police dragging them along the cobblestones by their long hair. He was pale, nervous, angry.
In the early autumn of 1989 he wrote to me from West Berlin. He had fled across the frontier from Hungary to Austria. (On the first attempt, the Hungarian border guards had caught him and turned him back.) Life in the West seemed to him in some ways poorer than in the East, he wrote—“inwardly poorer.” But he was still glad to be here—“and I hope to remain so.” Yet the separation from his family, just a few miles away in East Berlin, was very bitter. His little brother and sister had insisted that their mother take them to a point near the Wall where, clambering on some stones, they could at least see their big brother, a distant figure waving from a platform on the other side.
Now, in the early autumn of 1990, he was a different man: bronzed, confident, relaxed. He had just been to America for the first time. “That’s great!” he kept exclaiming colloquially. He was just off to Dublin to improve his English. But he would probably go back to join his family in Berlin for Christmas. Suddenly he was the citizen of a free, prosperous, and—dare one say?—normal country. The word liberation has long been tainted in Central Europe, and most especially since the Soviet “liberation” of 1945. But there comes a time when even the most polluted words must be reclaimed. This, in a single life, was liberation.
So when, around half past two on the morning of 3 October, as we wandered through the streets of Frankfurt, none of our party being perhaps entirely sober, Adam Michnik turned to me and said, “Now tell me, Tim, what do you really feel about German unification?” my immediate response was, “You know, I really am pleased.” And when, seven hours later and not perhaps entirely rested, I set out from the Hotel Unter den Linden in the former East Berlin to walk westward through the Brandenburg Gate (look for the new asphalt, it’s all that’s left of the Wall) and across a corner of the Tiergarten to the official ceremony for German unity in the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall, my step was light.
At first glance, I thought the governing mayor had acquired a wig. But when he began to speak, I, together with the rest of the gala audience in the Philharmonic, soon realized that this was an uninvited guest. He had walked through all the security controls and right up to the microphone. Before him, in the first row, sat President Richard von Weizsäcker, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and grand old Willy Brandt, and behind them the country’s most important political leaders. If the uninvited guest had been a terrorist with a gun, he could have decapitated the German body politic on the day of unification.
Fortunately, he was just a nutcase with a cardboard folder, containing a long speech. “Allow me fifteen minutes,” he said, and began a complicated tale of some outstanding grievance against the justice ministry. After several seconds of silent bewilderment, the audience began loudly to applaud him, hoping to clap him away. He would not stop. The master of ceremonies, in white tie and tails, politely asked him to leave the stage. On he went, describing in detail the excellent wine he had drunk in the course of his extensive litigation. The interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, could be seen rising from his seat. After whispered consultations and a good minute more of barmy speech plus ironic applause, two plainclothes policemen very gently led this Herr Walter Mitty away. (According to subsequent press reports, they simply took him out to the entrance and released him into the holiday crowds.) Then, at last, we looked down on the familiar bald pate of the governing mayor of Berlin, the next speaker on the official program.
Far more than any of the official speeches, the proclamation of peace and goodwill to all men, the painfully responsible press commentaries, more even than the grave and beautiful cadences of Richard von Weizsäcker, this little incident exemplified everything that was good about the forty-one-year-old Federal Republic of Germany: civil, civilian, civilized. The small deed matched the big words—and the music, which was splendid.
With hindsight, since Wolfgang Schäuble was actually shot and badly wounded by another disturbed man at a rally less than a fortnight later, the episode looks less amusing. And of course, the German police are not always so civil. That same afternoon, there was what seemed a quite excessive police turnout in the center of Berlin to control a demonstration against unification by squatters, anarchists, and the far left. Riot-squad vans roared through the former Checkpoint Charlie (now a flea market) into the former East Berlin, and police helicopters clattered overhead, as if to say, “We are the masters now.” Yet the way in which Herr Mitty was treated was nonetheless representative of celebrations that were peaceful and merry without being triumphalist.
In fact, it all seemed almost too good to be true. Like the East Central European revolutions of 1989, the German wonder of 1990 was so swift, peaceful, and civil that it is still hard to believe it has really happened. If the first unification of Germany was made with blood and iron, the second took only words and money. Among the countless intellectuals asked by newspapers for their response to unification, the (once East) German writer Reiner Kunze stood out. “I expect of Germany,” he replied, “that after 3 October 1990 it will prepare itself for this day.”
There is still a vast gulf between the new pays légal and the pays réel, between the legal fact of unity and the social fact of continued division. On the backstreets, in the factories, and in many, many heads, the GDR still exists. Something like one out of every ten from the former GDR workforce is unemployed. Pensioners have been terribly hard hit by the upward leap in prices. Tenants fear for their security—not to mention their low rents—as old private landlords return or new ones arrive. And the psychological adaptation after forty years of socialism is perhaps even more difficult than the material ups and downs.
How long will it take before Germany is prepared for 3 October 1990? One reads widely varying estimates of the number of years it will take before the five Länder of the former GDR are pulled up to a level comparable with that of even the poorest Land of the old Federal Republic. Undeterred by their failure to reveal the full disastrous state of the East German economy in the past, the economists and research institutes are making confident predictions about its future. As diverse are the estimates of the financial cost of reconstructing East German industry. The round figure of a trillion deutsche marks over ten years is tossed about. Chancellor Kohl has bravely promised an official guess at the costs, even before the federal election on 2 December. The finance minister, Theo Waigel, does not quite say, “Read my lips,” but reckons the government should be able to get by without major tax increases. In the former GDR, as elsewhere in the former Eastern Europe, the costs and problems of economic transformation are far bigger and more fundamental than in Western Europe after 1945. But if anyone in Europe can master the task of postcommunist economic reconstruction, it is the Germans.
The real question is less the economic cost than the political implications of the economic cost. These will be seen first on the streets rather than in parliament. The enthusiasm with which ordinary West Germans greeted their l
iberated compatriots a year ago has largely evaporated, as the newcomers take scarce housing and jobs from poorer West Germans and jam the checkout lines at the cheaper supermarkets. But the swelling resentment against the so-called Ossis is sweetness and light compared with street attitudes toward Poles, Romanians, and Turks. In a West Berlin supermarket, a sign says, “Polish citizens may only purchase one carton.”
At present, the new Germany is home to some five million foreigners, out of a total population of seventy-eight million. With the social tensions that will arise from the reconstruction of the East, the tolerance even of those foreigners who have lived in Germany for a long time is likely to diminish. Already one hears of second-generation Turkish-German citizens losing their jobs to East Germans. It is here, on the streets, that the political culture of the Federal Republic will be put to the test.
At the same time, with the combination of political liberation and economic disintegration in the former Eastern Europe and Soviet Disunion, the press of would-be immigrants or Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) will increase, adding to the existing pressure from across the Mediterranean. A new specter is haunting Western Europe: the specter of a huge postcommunist movement of peoples, something like the great Völkerwanderung of the early Middle Ages. This is a formidable challenge for the whole European Community but for Germany above all.
How will it cope? By building a new wall along Germany’s new eastern frontier, the Oder-Neisse line? Or by opening to the East while supporting, with more billions of deutsche marks, the transformation to a market economy from Poznan to Vladivostok, thus encouraging people to stop wandering westward? The answer given by Germany’s political leaders is, not surprisingly, a qualified version of the latter possibility rather than the former. “We lift our voice for a constructive and common Ostpolitik,” said President Weizsäcker in his 3 October speech. “All the frontiers of Germany should become bridges to our neighbors.” But, even as he spoke on the day of unity, a visa requirement was introduced for all Poles, many of whom had previously been able to travel without visas to East Germany and West Berlin. So, if the German-Polish frontier is a bridge, it is a half-closed one. Reality did not quite match up to rhetoric. However, the Bonn government has now declared its readiness in principle to lift the visa requirement for Poles as it has already done for Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks.
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