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Not only did Krenz’s accession to power leave more reformist elements in the SED frustrated; worse, he personally appeared clueless in judging the true nature of the public mood. After his election to the post of SED general secretary, he asked the Protestant church leaders when ‘those demonstrations finally would come to end’. After all, continued Krenz obtusely, ‘one can’t spend every day on the streets’.[35] (#litres_trial_promo) Little did he know.
In any case, Krenz was not a credible leader. Rumours were rife about his health and his alcohol problems. And ‘long-tooth’ Krenz, as he was nicknamed – a party hack for more than thirty years – had no plausibility as a ‘reformer’. So, rather than stabilising SED rule, his takeover actually served to fuel popular displeasure with the party and accelerated the erosion of its monopoly on power. What’s more, when the Krenz regime renounced the open use of force, that token concession only emboldened the masses to demand ever more fundamental change. They now felt they were pushing at an open door: ‘street power’ was shaking ‘the tower’.[36] (#litres_trial_promo)
After the fall of Honecker on 18 October, anti-government protest – in the form of peace prayers, mass demonstrations and public discussions – spread right across the country. In the process various currents of criticism flowed together into a surging tide. Long-time dissidents from the churches; writers and intellectuals from the alternative left; critics of the SED from within the party; and the mass public spilling out onto the streets: all these fused in what might be called an independent public sphere. They spoke in unison for people’s sovereignty. Discontent was now open. The long spell of silence had been broken.
On 23 October in Leipzig, 300,000 participated in the Monday march around the ring road. In Schwerin on the Baltic, the ‘reliable forces’ who were meant to come out for the regime ended up in large swathes joining the parallel demo by Neues Forum. Next day the protests returned to East Berlin, whose squares had remained quiet since the brutal crackdown of 7 and 8 October. Overall, there were 145 anti-government events in the GDR in the last week of the month, and a further 210 in the first week of November. Not only were these protests growing, the demands were becoming both more diverse and also more pointed:
Die führende Rolle dem Volk (‘The leading role to the people’, 16 October)
Egon, leit Reformen ein, sonst wirst Du der nächste sein! (‘Egon, introduce reforms, or else you’ll be next!’, 23 October)
Visafrei bis Hawaii! (‘Visa-free travel to Hawaii!’, 23 October)
Demokratie statt Machtmonopol der SED (‘Democracy instead of the SED’s monopoly on power’, 30 October)
Conversely, the SED leadership appeared lost for words. Increasingly unable to win the argument, the Krenz Politburo hid behind traditional orthodoxy.[37] (#litres_trial_promo) In particular, the party was totally unwilling to give up its constitutionally entrenched ‘leading role’ (Führungsanspruch) – which was the principal demand of all those who wanted liberalisation and democratisation.[38] (#litres_trial_promo) To make matters worse, while seeking to reinstate its authority, the regime showed itself bewildered and helpless in the face of the GDR’s deteriorating economic situation. Discussions in the Politburo revolved around how to get consumers more tyres, more children’s anoraks, more furniture, cheaper Walkmen and how to mass-produce PCs and 1 MB chips – not the structural flaws of the economy.[39] (#litres_trial_promo)
Only on 31 October were the stark realities finally laid bare in an official report to the Politburo by the chief planner, Gerhard Schürer, on the economic state of the GDR. The country’s productivity was 40% lower than that of the Federal Republic. The system of state planning had proved totally unfit for purpose. And the GDR was close to national insolvency. Indebtedness to the West had risen from 2 billion Valutamarks in 1970 to 49 billion in 1989.[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo) Merely halting further indebtedness would entail a lowering of the East Germans’ living standards by 25–30% in order to service the existing debt. And any default on debt repayments would risk opening the country to an IMF diktat for a market economy under conditions of acute austerity. For the SED, this was ideologically untenable. In May, Krenz had declared that economic policy and social policy were an entwined unit, and had to be continued as such because this was the essence of socialism in the GDR. So the regime was trapped in a vicious circle: socialism depended on the Plan, and the survival of the planned economy required external credits on a scale that now made East Germany totally dependent on the capitalist West, especially the FRG.[40] (#litres_trial_promo)
Straight after this fateful Politburo meeting, Krenz flew to Moscow for his first visit to the Kremlin as the GDR’s secretary general. There on 1 November he admitted the economic home truths to Gorbachev himself. The Soviet leader was unsympathetic. He coldly informed Krenz that the USSR had been aware of East Berlin’s predicament all along; that was why he had kept pressing Honecker for reforms. Even so, when Gorbachev heard the precise figures – Krenz said the GDR needed $4.5 billion in credits simply to pay off the interest on its debts – the Soviet leader was, for a moment, speechless – a rare occurrence. The Kremlin was in no position to help, so Gorbachev could only advise Krenz to tell his people the truth. And, for a country that had already haemorrhaged over 200,000 alienated citizens since the start of 1989, this was not a happy prospect.[41] (#litres_trial_promo)
Afterwards, Krenz tried to put the best face on things in a seventy-minute meeting with the foreign press, presenting himself as an ‘intimate friend’ of Gorbachev and no hardliner. But the media were not convinced. When Krenz talked policy, he sounded just like Honecker, his political mentor, and he flatly rejected any talk of reunification with West Germany or the removal of the Berlin Wall. ‘This question is not on the table,’ Krenz insisted. ‘There is nothing to reunify because socialism and capitalism have never stood together on German soil.’ Krenz also put a positive spin on the mass protests. ‘Many people are out on the streets to show that they want better socialism and the renovation of society,’ he said. ‘This is a good sign, an indication that we are at a turning point.’ He added that the SED would seriously consider the demands of the protestors. The first steps, he said, would be taken at a party meeting the following week.[42] (#litres_trial_promo)
In truth, the SED had its back to the wall. Desperate, it decided to give ground to the protestors on the question of travel restrictions – to allow an appearance of freedom. So on 1 November the GDR reopened its borders with Czechoslovakia. The result was no surprise, except perhaps to the Politburo itself. Once again the people voted with their feet: some 8,000 left their Heimat on the first day. On 3 November, Miloš Jakeš, leader of the Czech communists in Prague – having secured Krenz’s approval – formally opened Czechoslovakia’s borders to the FRG, thereby granting East Germans a legal transit route to the West. But instead of this halting the frenzied flight, the exodus only continued to grow: 23,000 East Germans arrived in the Federal Republic on the weekend of 4–5 November, and by the 8th the total number of émigrés had reached 50,000.[43] (#litres_trial_promo)
On his return home Krenz pleaded with East Germans in a televised address. To those who thought of emigrating, he said: ‘Put trust in our policy of renewal. Your place is here. We need you.’[44] (#litres_trial_promo) That last sentence was true: the mass flight that autumn had already caused a serious labour shortage in the economy, especially in the health sector. Hospitals and clinics had reported losing as many as 30% of their staff as doctors and nurses had succumbed to the lure of freedom, much better pay and a more high-tech work environment in the West.[45] (#litres_trial_promo)
By this stage, few were listening to the SED leader. On 4 November half a million attended a ‘rally for change’ in East Berlin, organised by the official Union of Actors. For the first time since the fortieth-anniversary weekend, there was no police interference in the capital. Indeed, the rally – which included party officials, actors, opposition leaders, clergy, writers and various prominent figures – was broadcast live on GDR media. Speakers from the government were shouted down, with chants of ‘Krenz Xiaoping, no thanks’. Others, such as the novelist Christa Wolf, drew cheers as she announced her dislike for the party’s language of ‘change of course’. She said she preferred to talk of a ‘revolution from below’ and ‘revolutionary renewal’.
Wolf was one of thousands of opposition activists who desired a better, genuinely democratic and independent GDR. Quite definitely they did not see the Federal Republic as the ideal. They did not want their country to be gobbled up by the dominant, larger western half of Germany – in a cheap sell-out to capitalism. People like Wolf and Bärbel Bohley, the artist founder of Neues Forum, had stuck with the GDR despite all its frustrations; in their minds, running away was the soft option. So they now wanted to reap the fruit of their hard work as dissidents. They were idealists who aspired to a democratic socialism, and saw the autumn of 1989 as their chance to turn dreams into reality.
But Ingrid Stahmer, the deputy mayor of West Berlin, had a different perspective. With GDR citizens now freely flooding out of the country through its Warsaw Pact neighbours, she remarked that the Wall was soon going to become history. ‘It’s just going to be superfluous.’[46] (#litres_trial_promo)
On Monday 6 November, close to a million people in eight cities across the GDR –some 400,000 in Leipzig and 300,000 in Dresden – marched to demand free elections and free travel. They denounced as totally inadequate the latest loosening of the travel law, published that morning in the state daily Neues Deutschland, because it limited foreign travel to thirty days. And there was a further question: how much currency would East Germans be allowed to change into Western money at home? The Ostmark was not freely convertible, and up to now East Germans had been allowed once a year to exchange just fifteen Ostmarks into DMs – about $8 at the official exchange rate – hardly enough for a meal, let alone an extended trip.[47] (#litres_trial_promo)
So the pressure was intense when the SED Central Committee gathered on 8 November for its three-day meeting. Right at the start, the entire Politburo resigned and a new one – reduced in size from twenty-one members to eleven – was elected, to create the appearance of change. In the event, six members retained their seats, while five new ones were named. Three of Krenz’s preferred new Politburo candidates were rejected and the party gave the position of prime minister to Hans Modrow, the SED chief in Dresden – a genuine reformer. As a result, the party elite was now visibly split. What’s more, on the outside of the party headquarters, 5,000 SED members protested openly against their leaders.[48] (#litres_trial_promo)
Next day, 9 November, the party struggled to think up responses to people’s demands in the streets. In late afternoon the Central Committee came back to the problematic travel regulations. A short memo was drawn up and passed to the secretary of the Central Committee, Günter Schabowski, who had been appointed that morning as the SED’s media spokesman but did not attend that part of the discussions. At 6 p.m. Schabowski briefed the world media on the day’s deliberations, in a press conference broadcast live on GDR TV.[49] (#litres_trial_promo)
It was a long and boring meeting. Near the end Schabowski was asked by one journalist about the alterations in the GDR travel law. He offered a rather incoherent summary and then, under pressure, hastily read out parts of the press statement he had been given earlier. Distracted by further questions he omitted the passages regarding the grounds for denying applications both for private travel and permanent exit applications. His omissions, however, only added to the confusion. Had the Central Committee radically changed its course? A now panicky Schabowski talked of a decision to allow citizens to emigrate permanently. The press room grew restless. The media started to get their teeth into the issue.
What about holidays? Short trips to the West? Visits to West Berlin? Which border crossings? When would the new arrangements come into effect? A seriously rattled Schabowski simply muttered ‘According to my knowledge … immediately, right away.’ Because they had not been given any formal written statement, the incredulous press corps hung on Schabowski’s every word, squeezing all they could out of them.[50] (#litres_trial_promo)
Finally someone asked the fatal question: ‘Mr Schabowski, what is going to happen to the Berlin Wall now?’
Schabowski: It has been brought to my attention that it is 7 p.m. That has to be the last question. Thank you for your understanding.
Um … What will happen to the Berlin Wall? Information has already been provided in connection with travel activities. Um, the issue of travel, um, the ability to cross the Wall from our side … hasn’t been answered yet and exclusively the question in the sense … so this, I’ll put it this way, fortified state border of the GDR … um, we have always said that there have to be several other factors, um, taken into consideration. And they deal with the complex of questions that Comrade Krenz, in his talk in the – addressed in view of the relations between the GDR and the FRG, in ditto light of the, um, necessity of continuing the process of assuring peace with new initiatives.
And, um, surely the debate about these questions, um, will be positively influenced if the FRG and NATO also agree to and implement disarmament measures in a similar manner to that of the GDR and other socialist countries. Thank you very much.
The media was left to make what they wanted of his incoherence. The press room emptied within seconds. The news went viral on the wire services and soon made its way via TV and radio into living rooms and streets of Berlin. ‘Leaving via all GDR checkpoints immediately possible’ Reutersreported at 7.02 p.m., ‘GDR opens its borders’, echoed Associated Pressthree minutes later. At 8 p.m. on West German TV, the evening news Tagesschau – which millions of East Germans could watch – led with the same message. Correct in substance, these headlines were, of course, in formulation much balder, bolder and far-reaching than the small print of the actual East German Reiseregelung, or the reality on the ground.[51] (#litres_trial_promo)
But during the course of this damp and very cold November evening, reality soon caught up – and with a vengeance.
Over the next few hours, thousands of East Berliners converged on the various checkpoints at the Wall, especially in the centre of the city – to see for themselves if and when they could cross. They were not put off by East German state television or the police telling them to come back next morning at eight o’clock when the bureaucracy would be all ready. Instead they kept shouting: ‘Tor auf!’ (‘Open the gate!’). At Bornholmer Strasse, some sixty armed border guards – commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger, who had been doing the job since 1964 – sat in their tiny checkpoint huts, totally outnumbered, and without any instructions from on high. Both the Central Committee and the military top brass, locked away in meetings, were unreachable. So the men on the front line had to make their own decisions. At around 9 p.m. they began to let people through: first as a trickle, one by one, meticulously stamping each person’s identity card – the idea being these exiters would not later be let back in. Then, at around 10.30 p.m., they lifted the barriers in both directions and gave up trying to check credentials. It was as if the floodgates had been opened. People poured across into West Berlin. No East or West German politicians were present, nor any representatives of the four occupying powers. There were just a few baffled East German men in uniform, soon reduced to tears as they were overcome by the emotion of this historic moment.[52] (#litres_trial_promo)
Within thirty minutes, several thousand people had squeezed their way to the other side. Somewhere in the chaos a young East German quantum chemist called Angela Merkel was swept along by the crowd. After a quiet sauna evening with her friends, she just wanted to experience for herself German history in the making. Once on the western side of the Wall, she phoned her aunt in Hamburg and joined the celebrations before heading back home – wondering what 9 November would mean for her.[53] (#litres_trial_promo)
By midnight – after twenty-eight years of sealed borders – all the crossings in Berlin were open; likewise, as news spread, any other transit point along the border between the two Germanies. Neither the GDR security forces nor the Red Army did anything to prevent this. Not a single shot was fired, and no Soviet soldier left his barracks. Now, thousands of East Berliners – of all ages, from every walk of life – were making their way on foot, bike or car into the western half of the city – a forbidden place hitherto only glimpsed from afar. At Checkpoint Charlie, where Allied and Soviet tanks had been locked in a tense face-off in August 1961 as the Berlin Wall went up, the jubilant horde of visitors was greeted by cheering, flag-waving West Germans, plying them with flowers and sparkling wine.
‘I don’t know what we’re going to do, just drive around and see what’s going on,’ said one thirty-four-year-old East Berliner as he sat at the wheel of his orange Trabant chugging down the glittering Kurfürstendamm. ‘We’re here for the first time. I’ll go home in a few hours. My wife and kids are waiting for me. But I wasn’t going to miss this.’[54] (#litres_trial_promo)
At the Brandenburg Gate, the most prominent landmark of the city’s division, hundreds of people chanted on the western side ‘The Wall must go!’Then some climbed on top of the Wall and danced on it; others clambered over and headed right through the historic arch that for so long had been inaccessible to Berliners from either side. These were utterly unbelievable pictures – captured gleefully by American TV film crews for their prime-time news bulletins back home.[55] (#litres_trial_promo)
All through the night and over the next few days, East Berliners continued to flood into West Berlin in vast numbers – 3 million in three days, most of whom came back.
The open Wall: Potsdamer Platz, 12 November 1989
They saw the promised land – and were being bribed to savour it. While in the East, banks and travel agents lacked sufficient foreign (DM) currency reserves to exchange for every traveller even the permitted maximum of fifteen Ostmarks, in the West long lines of East Berliners formed in front of the West Berlin banks to pick up the DM 100 ‘Welcome Money’ – about $55 – that the FRG had always given East Germans on their first time in the West. Spending their own, free DMs in the shiny emporia of the consumer society, they filled up their plastic bags with precious goods – often as simple as bananas, oranges or children’s toys – and carried them back into the grey streets of the socialist utopia.[56] (#litres_trial_promo)
It was in those days that all the talk about revolution and renewal in the GDR totally evaporated as a credible political project.[57] (#litres_trial_promo) Not for opposition intellectuals, of course – for the idealist alternative left and the earnest socialist reformers such as Bohley and Wolf – or even for the new echelon of younger SED functionaries. They denounced all talk of reunification as reactionary Heim ins Reich patriotism, derided capitalist culture as materialist trash and condemned consumption and foreign travel as the new opium of the masses.[58] (#litres_trial_promo) But most of the ‘masses’ took no notice. For them, the idea of reforming the GDR and of pursuing a ‘third way’[59] (#litres_trial_promo) between SED-state socialism and Western capitalism was now dead. That was the true revolution: popular rejection of the old regime and no affirmation of any new socialist-democratic vision of society. Why stay in a broken communist state when you could start a new life amid the temples of capitalism? Or even demand the merger of East Germany with the West?
*
How was it that the GDR experience turned out so differently from that of Poland and Hungary? In part because in the GDR the transition from communism began much later and developed much faster. Poland and Hungary had entered the process of political transformation in earnest in the summer of 1988; in the GDR the first rumblings of protest did not occur till May 1989 and street demonstrations only began in September. In part, too, because the Polish and Hungarian economies were in a far worse state than East Germany’s, so their tortuous navigation out of a command economy towards the market offered little attraction in the GDR. Indeed, the politico-economic transition produced more shortages and hardship than the people had bargained for. But it was also because the East German party state had failed, despite forty years of assiduous effort, to inculcate a sense of GDR patriotism. In Hungary and Poland the changes were rooted in national unity; this was not so in the GDR, where unity became all-German, not East German.
The GDR regime was also much more hard-line and unreconstructed for much longer. Only in East Berlin was a ‘Chinese solution’ seriously considered – and not just because Tiananmen happened after Polish and Hungarian reforms had got into their stride. Honecker was locked in the past, totally wedded to his state and his version of real socialism. Yet while the GDR might have been the technologically most advanced country in the Eastern bloc, it was also more dependent on the USSR than its neighbours because of the size of the Red Army presence and because the GDR was an artificial polity, created and sustained by Moscow. As Brezhnev had told Honecker back in 1970, ‘Erich, I tell you frankly, don’t ever forget this: the GDR cannot exist without us, without the Soviet Union, its power and strength. Without us there is no GDR.’ Honecker’s problem in 1989 was that Gorbachev was definitely not Brezhnev. He wanted radical reforms and, furthermore, had renounced the use of force. For Honecker, that would spell the end of his rule – and indeed of the SED itself.
Out of this face-off between East Berlin and the Kremlin came domestic political paralysis. There was no Chinese-style crackdown in Leipzig on 9 October to crush the protests, no transfer of the Tiananmen ‘contagion’ to Europe. This indicated a fundamental divide between the Asian and European transitions from the Cold War – between the use of repression and a consensus on non-violence. And the GDR’s policy paralysis did not go away even after Honecker was toppled, because Krenz refused to allow any breach in the SED’s monopoly on power until after the ‘fall of the Wall’.
In fact, the reforms in Poland and Hungary had little effect on developments in the GDR. Where Hungary did matter was as an exit rather than an exemplar. It was the opening of the Hungarian border with Austria and the ensuing exodus of East Germans that proved the real catalyst for change within the GDR. The impact was intensified by the opening of Czechoslovakia’s frontier with West Germany, and ultimately by the collapse of the inner German border as well. Once East Germans started to move en masse, the ‘German question’ was back in people’s minds. That’s why the moment of political convergence with Poland and Hungary was so brief – a matter of three weeks or so before the fall of the Wall and then Kohl’s policy offensive undermined the aspirations of Neues Forumand its allies for a reformed socialism. It also made nonsense of the efforts of Hans Modrow – hailed by many in the GDR as the ‘German Gorbachev’ – to form a new and stable government and to negotiate in a Polish-style round-table process with the opposition. Before round-table talks even began, the SED disintegrated at all levels, amid corruption scandals and a string of resignations, and in early December it was renamed the PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus) and its monopoly deleted from the constitution. The brief ‘Krenz era’ was history.
Similarly, Neues Forum and other opposition groups such as Demokratischer Aufbruchwere undermined by the ‘post-Wall’ divergence between political activists and the general mass of GDR citizens. Just when the opposition’s dream of realising a democratic and reformed socialist GDR seemed finally within reach – as commentator Timothy Garton Ash wrote, putting the ‘D for Democratic’ into the GDR – the whole idea was stillborn. The round-table talks were set for 7 December, but over the previous four weeks 130,000 more people emigrated to the FRG. In the Leipzig Monday demonstrations the slogan ‘Deutschland einig Vaterland’ (‘Germany the united fatherland’) was heard for the first time as early as 13 November; a week later ‘Wir sind das Volk’ had transmuted into ‘Wir sind ein Volk’ (‘We are one people’). In contrast to Hungary and Poland, it was the GDR’s opening to the West and the prospect of unification that made the crucial difference. Hungarians and Poles had to imagine an alternative future for themselves at home; East Germans could look to the reality of an existing alternative on their own doorstep: a prosperous, functioning West German state, run by compatriots. And they did. As Garton Ash also observed, it was at once a chance and a tragedy for East Germany that ‘the boundaries of social self-determination and national self-determination were not the same’.[60] (#litres_trial_promo)
Significantly, Germany’s national story had wider repercussions. When we talk today about the fall of the Wall, what comes into our minds is the image of the Brandenburg Gate and people dancing on the Wall. But in fact the Gate was in no man’s land; it was not a crossing point and, after the extraordinary night of 9 November, it would remain closed for another six weeks. Not until 22 December was the Wall opened at the Gate. This is a reminder that the media was at once a catalyst, a shaper and a multiplier of events. Even in one day, the headlines shifted from ‘The GDR Opens its Borders to the Federal Republic’ (10 November) to ‘Wall and Barbed Wire Do Not Divide Anymore’ (11 November). A local moment full of contingency was quickly transformed into an event of universal significance. As an experience of liberty through the overcoming of physical separation, the end of the Wall had a meaning and resonance which spread fast and far beyond Berlin.
In the process, the focus of the story rapidly shifted away from the politicians (especially Schabowski and his botched press conference) making history through blunders and happenstance to a narrative of ordinary people bringing about revolutionary change. And then, even more abstractly, as GDR politicians and Western journalists who drove events that night were edited out of the story, ‘the fall of the Wall’ became a magical and highly symbolic moment in history. The dancers on the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate became the ultimate symbol of freedom for 1989 – rather like the way, at the other end of the spectrum, the man in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square became the year’s ultimate symbol of repression.[61] (#litres_trial_promo)
*
The fall of the Wall had certainly not been Kohl’s moment. And he was struggling to catch up for the next three weeks. But then he would seize the initiative with a vengeance.
Most of November was spent responding to the demands of others, rather than working out his own agenda. On the 9th, that momentous night for Germany, he had not even been in the country. When he finally escaped from Poland and got to Berlin next day, he had been shouted down by the crowds. Soon he had to rush back again to Warsaw to wrap up the interrupted visit. But the Poles were harder to placate – because it was no longer just a matter of burying the past but alleviating fears about the future. After the three culture-focused days of reconciliation – at Auschwitz and in Silesia – the trip was rounded off by a carefully calibrated finale. Kohl announced an aid package amounting to $2.2 billion – the largest by far from any Western government (Bush had offered $100 million when he was in Poland in early July). And the chancellor wrote off $400 million in West German loans since the 1970s. With these measures he wanted to forestall any fresh talk about a peace treaty for the Second World War, which would raise the unhappy issues of reparations and the Oder–Neisse border with Poland. So in the press conference, when finally asked about the elephant in the room – ‘reunification’ – the chancellor replied ‘We do not speak about reunification but about self-determination.’[62] (#litres_trial_promo)
Moment of penitence: Kohl at Auschwitz
Kohl was clearly careful how he spoke publicly about unity, preferring to argue his case around the strict legal principles of the East Germans’ right to self-determination and the provision in the FRG’s Basic Law that unity should be attained through the exercise of the Germans’ free will. Kohl, of course, assumed that when East Germans had the opportunity to choose, they would opt for unification. He had made this point in his state-of-the-nation address on 8 November, before the Wall was breached, and reiterated it at greater length, again in the Bundestag, on 16 November.
‘Our compatriots in the GDR must be able to decide for themselves which way they want to go in the future,’ the chancellor declared. ‘Of course we will respect every decision that is being made by the people of the GDR in free self-determination.’ On the question of economic assistance, he added that this would be useless ‘unless there is an irreversible reform of the economic system, an end to a bureaucratic planned economy and the introduction of a market economy’. In other words, self-determination was in principle entirely free but was also susceptible to a little bribery.
In his speech Kohl made a deliberate nod towards Bonn’s Western allies and their suppressed concerns about a resurgence of German nationalism. ‘We are and remain a part of the Western system of values,’ he insisted, adding that it would be a ‘fatal error’ to slow the process of European integration.[63] (#litres_trial_promo)
His cryptic statement about ‘Europe’ was, however, insufficient to allay all fears. This became evident when Kohl travelled to Paris for a special dinner of European Community heads of government on 18 November. Mitterrand, then holding the rotating position of president of the EC, had invited his colleagues to the Elysée Palace at very short notice – keen to ensure that the EC 12 would be an active partner for the reforming states of Central and Eastern Europe but without allowing the Community to be deflected from the already ongoing processes of deeper economic and political integration. In particular, the French president worried that, after the drama in Berlin, plans for economic and monetary union (EMU) might no longer take centre stage at the upcoming EC Council meeting in Strasbourg on 8–9 December. He believed that those plans were all the more urgent precisely because of the great transformation sweeping across the Soviet bloc. And he wanted the EC to make this position public well before the Bush–Gorbachev summit talks in Malta on 2–3 December.[64] (#litres_trial_promo)
Mitterrand therefore had a clear agenda when speaking for ‘Europe’. But, as the leader of France, he was acutely nervous about where Germany was now going. He and Kohl had not met since that epoch-making night of 9 November and he wanted to use the gathering in Paris to talk face-to-face with his German counterpart. They did so, according to Kohl’s memoirs, in a short tête-à-tête before the dinner. Mitterrand avoided mentioning the issue of reunification but Kohl – conscious of what was in the air – raised it himself. ‘I talk to you as a German and as chancellor,’ he said, and then solemnly pledged his active commitment to building Europe. More reflectively, he added: ‘I see two causes for the developments in the East: that the alliance [i.e. NATO] stayed firm thanks to the dual-track decision[65] (#litres_trial_promo) and the fact that the European Community has evolved in such dynamic fashion.’ Thus, succinctly, he underlined Bonn’s intertwined loyalty to the Western alliance and the European project.[66] (#litres_trial_promo)
Having put his own cards on the table, Kohl joined Mitterrand for dinner with the other EC leaders. The meal, in one of the opulent salons of the Elysée, went smoothly. Not even a word was ‘whispered’ about unification, Kohl would later recall. Instead Mitterrand went on about the need to support the democratisation processes in the East at large. He argued for constant prudence and against anything that might destabilise Gorbachev. Yet the German question was clearly hanging there, unspoken.
Finally Margaret Thatcher could contain herself no longer. Over dessert she exploded to Kohl: There could be ‘no question of changing Europe’s borders’, which had been confirmed in the Helsinki Final Act. ‘Any attempt to raise this or the issue of German reunification would risk undermining Mr Gorbachev’s position,’ she warned, and would ‘open the Pandora’s box of border claims right through Central Europe’. Kohl was visibly taken aback at her outburst, which upset the whole mood of the dinner. Struggling to respond, he cited a 1970 NATO summit declaration, in which the allies had expressed their continued support on the issue of German unity. Thatcher retorted that this endorsement happened at a time when nobody seriously believed that reunification would ever take place. But Kohl dug in. Be that as may, he said coldly, NATO agreed on this declaration and the decision still stood. Even Thatcher would not be able to stop the German people in their tracks: they now held their fate in their own hands. Sitting back, his ample girth filling the chair, he looked the British prime minister in the eye. Angrily, she stamped her feet several times and shouted: ‘That’s the way you see it, you see it!’[67] (#litres_trial_promo)
To Kohl it was quite clear that the Iron Lady was determined to uphold the status quo. For her, borders were immutable; even their peaceful change was simply not on the agenda. This also applied to the inner German frontier, which he – like most Germans – did not consider as an international border, never mind the Oder–Neisse frontier with Poland.
Although shaken by Thatcher’s diatribe, Kohl was conscious that her rooted antipathy to the European project meant that she was an outsider in the EC’s decision-making. And she could not play the American card because Kohl was already certain that Bush supported the principle of German unification. What worried Kohl much more was that Mitterrand just sat there quietly, seeming to approve of Thatcher’s words. Had he egged her on? Was this an Anglo-French axis in the making? The chancellor began to wonder whether the French leader was playing a double game.[68] (#litres_trial_promo)
Only two weeks earlier, Mitterrand had told Kohl in Bonn that he did not fear German reunification. On the other hand, at the end the French president entered the caveat that he would have to consider what in practice worked best in the interests of France and of Europe. There was, in other words, an ambiguity in the French position: Mitterrand thought plenty of time should be allowed for German unification (‘la nécessaire durée du processus’), while, simultaneously, the process of creating an ever-closer European union should be speeded up. This double dynamic of largo and accelerando was evidently something that mattered to the Frenchman. And it made the chancellor just a little bit uneasy. But he placed his trust in their history of partnership and cooperation going back to 1982.[69] (#litres_trial_promo)
Kohl was beginning to realise that the EC, or certainly one of its leading members, was going to demand something in return for going along with his talk about a united Germany. Piecing together their discussions in Bonn and then Paris, he recognised that it was essential to convince Mitterrand of the FRG’s continued commitment to completing European monetary and political union – and not just as a fellow traveller but as a fellow shaper using the power of the Franco-German tandem. This mattered even more because Kohl had no illusions about the coolness felt towards German unification by many Europeans, not least the Italians and the Dutch.
The chancellor decided to confront the issue head-on in Strasbourg on 22 November at a special meeting of the European Parliament, convened to discuss recent events in Eastern Europe. In his address, he issued a clarion call that the division of both Europe and Germany be ended. Not only London, Rome, Dublin and Paris belonged to Europe, he declared, but also Warsaw and Budapest, Prague and Sofia. And, of course, Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden. German unity could only be achieved within this larger, pan-European process of unification: ‘In a free and united Europe, a free and united Germany.’ ‘Deutschlandpolitik’ and ‘Europapolitik’ were, Kohl said, ‘two sides of the same coin’.[70] (#litres_trial_promo)
Kohl had made a point of asking Mitterrand to attend his speech. When the president did so, it was taken as a clear endorsement of what the chancellor was saying. For Kohl, Strasbourg proved a great success. At the end the European Parliament passed an almost unanimous resolution (only two MEPs out of 518 voting against) saying that East Germans had the right to ‘to be part of a united Germany and a united Europe’.[71] (#litres_trial_promo)
The German chancellor had spoken to Europe and gained its approval. And with Bush not particularly fazed about the matter, leaving the initiative to Kohl, there was hope that at a later point even Thatcher might be brought into line with the help of the Americans, if not the French and the EC. None of this, however, could obscure the fact that at home pressure was mounting on Kohl to spell out clearly and openly how he intended to achieve German unification – because so far the chancellor had been distinctly circumspect about the specifics. And he was being buffeted from all sides.
Among the many voices who demanded that the chancellor come out strongly for unification was Rudolf Augstein, editor of Der Spiegel. In his magazine on 20 November he wrote a column entitled ‘Sagen, was ist’ (‘To say what’s what’). Augstein could barely conceal his impatience. Rather than hiding behind talk about European unity, he argued, the Kohl government should face up to the truly popular desire for German unity. The question that should be addressed was not if, but how, unification could be made to happen.[72] (#litres_trial_promo)
Similarly outspoken for unity was Alfred Herrhausen, head of Deutsche Bank, an advocate of European economic integration and also an adviser to the chancellor. In an interview he pointed out the reality that as soon as foreign investment was allowed in the GDR, the West German economy would very quickly swallow up that of the East. Referring to an idea currently being floated about possible GDR membership in the EC, Herrhausen said that, as a banker, he thought it desirable in the short term but, speaking as a German citizen, he would definitely not want to forgo the historic opportunity for unity. That, for him, seemed to supersede everything else.[73] (#litres_trial_promo)
Yet Kohl was also under pressure from those who did not believe in unification.
Günter Grass, the leftist author and public intellectual, came out strongly against the idea of ‘a conglomeration of power’ in the heart of Europe, calling instead for ‘a confederation of two states that have to redefine themselves’. In other words, he wanted a ‘settlement’ between West and East. The past was dead, he insisted. ‘There is no point in looking back to the German Reich, be it within the borders of 1945 or 1937; that’s all gone. We have to define ourselves anew.’[74] (#litres_trial_promo)
Oskar Lafontaine of the SPD, Kohl’s direct rival for the chancellorship, also took a diametrically opposite position from the chancellor. Amid the turmoil before the fall of the Wall, he had warned of the ‘spectre of a strong fourth German Reich’ that was ‘scaring our Western and no less our Eastern neighbours’.[75] (#litres_trial_promo) And on 8 November, after Kohl lauded unity through self-determination, Lafontaine blasted the goal of a unified nation state as ‘wrong and anachronistic’.[76] (#litres_trial_promo) Once the borders were open Lafontaine denigrated the heady, almost delirious, atmosphere as ‘national drunkenness’ and, hard-nosed, asked whether it was right that all East German citizens who came west should simply get access to the FRG’s social security benefits. Mindful of the impending Federal elections, he was trying to play on the anxieties of West Germans – who, according to Gallup polls, were prepared to help East Germany financially but without tax rises for themselves.[77] (#litres_trial_promo)
Particularly striking was the denunciation of unification from Egon Bahr, who in the 1960s had designed Neue Ostpolitikbased on the idea that ‘change through rapprochement’ would pave the way to unity. Before 9 November he had said that people should stop ‘dreaming or nattering on about unity’.[78] (#litres_trial_promo) And he had rejected the priority given to the ‘lie’ of unification – spluttering that it was ‘poisoning’ the atmosphere and causing ‘political pollution’. Afterwards he took a cautious line, keener on a slower approach to unification and hiding behind Lafontaine.[79] (#litres_trial_promo)
Within the SPD, only Willy Brandt, Bahr’s old patron, spoke out for unity. It would be inconceivable, he declared, to ‘batten down the hatches in the West’.[80] (#litres_trial_promo) German unity was now only a question of time and it should not come only after Europe’s unity had already been achieved. In this way Brandt distanced himself from the Lafontaine–Bahr line in his own party but, more generally, those on the left who privileged a pan-European framework, or Gorbachev’s ‘Common European Home’, within which Germany could unite.[81] (#litres_trial_promo) He also set himself apart from Genscher’s ‘Europa-Plan’, tossed out in October, which airily suggested that the East Europeans, including the GDR, would be integrated into the EC, at the same time as Brussels kept marching towards monetary and political union.[82] (#litres_trial_promo)
And so, ironically on the issue of German unity, the position taken by Lafontaine and Bahr was closer to that of the GDR’s political opposition (and even reformers within the SED) than to the stance of their own Federal government in Bonn. Indeed, the writers and clergy representing the opposition in East Berlin called on 26 November for the independent self-sufficiency of the GDR, believing that they still had the chance, as ‘equal neighbours to all European states to develop a socialist alternative to the FRG’.[83] (#litres_trial_promo)
Kohl and Teltschik were particularly troubled by a statement from the East German prime minister, Hans Modrow, in his first ‘government declaration’ on 17 November. He promised secret multiparty elections for 1990 as well as a root-and-branch overhaul of the command economy, but not an outright shift to the market. Modrow said he was confident that decisive change in East Germany would end ‘unrealistic and dangerous speculation about reunification’. He proposed that a stabilised GDR was a prime condition for wider stability in Central Europe, even across Europe as a whole. In this vein, looking to Bonn, he declared that his government was ‘ready for talks’ to put relations with West Germany ‘on a new level’. His aim was a ‘treaty union’ which would build on the complex of political and economic treaties of Ostpolitikand Osthandelthat had been signed by the two states over the previous few decades.[84] (#litres_trial_promo)
Modrow had made the first official statement from either the FRG or the GDR on how to move forward on relations between the two Germanies. He had beaten Kohl to it and, furthermore, clearly sought to stall the drive towards unification. West German criticism of the chancellor became more strident. The editor of Die Welt asked on 19 November, ‘Are we letting others dictate the blueprint for unity?’[85] (#litres_trial_promo) And the co-founder of the extreme-right Die Republikaner party Franz Schönhuber saw in Kohl’s silence the chance to raise his party’s profile, putting top of the list in his election programme ‘reunification’ and ‘regaining’ the Eastern territories.[86] (#litres_trial_promo)
Yet Kohl still held back. On Monday 20 November a worried Teltschik noted in his diary: ‘international as much as domestic discussion over the chances of German unity has fully erupted and can no longer be stopped. We are more and more conscious of this, but the chancellor’s directive remains the same: to exercise restraint in the public discourse. Neither within the coalition, and therefore domestically, nor on the foreign plane, does he want to open himself to attack.’
Teltschik saw this as a decisive moment for Kohl, at home and abroad. Chewing things over with Kohl’s inner circle that evening, with an eye on the ‘election marathon’, they concluded: ‘The high international reputation of the chancellor should be used more in domestic politics, and the German question could serve as a bridge to improve his image.’ The opposition should be confronted ‘head-on’.[87] (#litres_trial_promo)
With all this still swirling around in Teltschik’s head, next day in the early-morning briefing with Kohl, they took in the implications of Monday’s mass demonstrations across East Germany with the unmissable new slogan ‘Wir sind ein Volk’. ‘The spark has ignited,’ he thought. He was also turning over in his mind a line from Augstein’s column, echoing a famous phrase from Adenauer, ‘der Schlüssel liegt im Kreml’ – the key to unity lies in the Kremlin.[88] (#litres_trial_promo)
The first big item on his diary that day, 21 November, was a meeting at 10.30 a.m. with Nikolai Portugalov, on the staff of the Central Committee of the CPSU, with whom he had meetings fairly frequently. Although finding Portugalov rather foxy, even slimy, Teltschik respected his intellect and grasp of the German scene and always relished such opportunities to get news directly from Moscow and not via arch rival Genscher’s Foreign Ministry. On this occasion, however, Portugalov’s manner was unusually grave. He said he was conveying a message for the chancellor himself and then handed over a set of handwritten pages about Soviet thinking on the German question.
One paper was entitled ‘Official Position’. This mostly reaffirmed the pledges made by Kohl to Gorbachev about non-interference in GDR affairs, and included references to their 12 June summit. For now, it stressed, there ought to be a modus vivendi between the two German states, and envisaged Modrow’s proposal of a treaty union as the way forward. Otherwise the GDR would find itself existentially threatened. Significantly, the paper also declared bluntly that an all-European peace order was an ‘absolute prerequisite’ for resolving the German question.[89] (#litres_trial_promo) Such a peace order would, of course, take years to establish but the document showed some signs of movement. It indicated that the idea of German–German rapprochement through a confederation was something the Soviets were already discussing at the Politburo level and were prepared to accept in principle. Indeed it echoed a message received in Bonn from the Moscow embassy that Shevardnadze, in utterances on 17 November, had rejected unilateral changes of the status quo but approved the idea of mutual peaceful changes within ‘an all-European consensus’.[90] (#litres_trial_promo)
What really grabbed Teltschik’s attention, however, was the document headed ‘Unofficial Position’. This began, rather theatrically: ‘The hour has now come to free both West and East Germany from the relics of the past.’ After a few generalities about the immediate situation, Teltschik was struck by an almost languid proposition: ‘Let’s ask purely theoretically: if the Federal government envisaged pushing the question of “reunification” or “new unification” into practical politics …’ Developing this hypothesis, the paper said it would be necessary among other things to discuss the future alliance membership of both German states and, more specifically, how to extract West Germany from both NATO and the European Community. And, on the other side, what would be the consequences of a future German confederation within the EC? This, pondered the paper, could become the germ of a pan-European integration project, but, then, how could the Soviet Union conduct its trade within East Germany via Brussels and cope with EC import taxes and other regulations? The paper stated bluntly that, ‘in the context of the German question, the Soviet Union was already thinking about all possible alternatives, effectively thinking the “unthinkable”’. The paper ended by saying that Moscow could ‘in the medium term’ give a ‘green light’ to a German confederation, providing it was completely free from foreign nuclear weapons on its soil.[91] (#litres_trial_promo)
Teltschik was electrified by what he read. This combination of blue-sky thinking and diplomatic flexibility was unprecedented and sensational. How to balance the ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ papers was difficult but they clearly revealed that what Moscow was saying publicly was not necessarily a guide to what it might be willing to do. Rushing out of the meeting with Portugalov, Teltschik managed to have a word with Kohl before the chancellor’s next appointment. Their conversation was only brief but Teltschik had sown the seed in Kohl’s mind that, in view of the signals from Moscow, this was an opportune time to go onto the offensive. Kohl was reinforced in this opinion during the afternoon when his head of Chancellery, Rudolf Seiters, returned from a trip to East Berlin, full of news about the reforms under way and the talk about treaty union. Before he left for his trip to Strasbourg – to square François Mitterrand and the EC – Kohl told Teltschik to have something ready for his return. For the first time the chancellor talked about taking a ‘step by step’ approach on the German question. An overall political strategy was finally beginning to germinate.[92] (#litres_trial_promo)
While Kohl was away, Teltschik was alarmed to learn, first, that Mitterrand was going to visit East Germany before Christmas and also intended to meet Gorbachev in Kiev on 6 December. Even more disconcerting, Paris had not informed Bonn in advance, before the news appeared on the wire services. What, Teltschik wondered, were the French and Soviets plotting? Yet news from Genscher, visiting Washington, was much more encouraging: the foreign minister had stressed the momentum of ‘unification from below’ and warned against any attempt at interference by the four victor powers. To his delight, at the State Department Baker had simply responded by stating America’s full support for German unity without any caveats. And so, with a green light from Washington, positive signals from Moscow, and endorsement in Strasbourg from Mitterrand and the EC, Teltschik found himself frantically planning a speech for Kohl – what would be a ten-point programme.[93] (#litres_trial_promo)
In their evening meeting on Thursday 23 November, Kohl agreed with Teltschik that Deutschlandpolitik was the boss’s job (Chefsache) and that it was now time to lead opinion formation both in Germany during an election year and with regard to the Four Powers (i.e. the US, the USSR, France and the UK as Allied victors of the Second World War). Otherwise his government would be faced with a diktat.[94] (#litres_trial_promo) It was also decided then that Kohl would present his proposals for achieving German unity at the earliest suitable opportunity, which would be five days later, on 28 November, during the Bundestag’s scheduled debate on the budget. So a small team of eight, led by Teltschik, worked around the clock in utmost secrecy to prepare a draft of the speech. On the afternoon of Saturday 25th this was taken by car from Bonn to the chancellor, who was at his home in Oggersheim.[95] (#litres_trial_promo)
So obsessed was Kohl about possible leaks, or even being talked out of the speech by his coalition partner or his NATO allies, that everybody in the know was sworn to total silence. For the rest of the weekend, he worked over the draft with a handful of trusted friends and his wife Hannelore, scribbling corrections and queries on the draft and periodically calling Teltschik on the phone. Then, on Sunday night, he asked Hannelore to type up an amended version on her portable typewriter.[96] (#litres_trial_promo)
As he finalised the draft, several key concerns were in Kohl’s mind. In the run-up to the Federal elections, he was keen to position himself as a true German patriot and the chancellor of unity – ahead of the Liberal Genscher who had been promoting his own ‘Europa-Plan’ and who, on the Prague balcony, had stolen the show from Kohl once before. Nor did he want to be overshadowed by the SPD’s great figurehead, the Altkanzler Brandt, who had nearly eclipsed Kohl in Berlin on 10 November and was now presenting unification as the culmination of his own Ostpolitik. It was also for electoral reasons that the chancellor decided to omit any mention of the Oder–Neisse line, even though he personally accepted it as Germany’s eastern border. After all, to remove the final obstacle in the way of his Warsaw trip he had supported the 8 November Bundestag resolution assuring the inviolability of Poland’s post-war borders.[97] (#litres_trial_promo) But Kohl was cautious not to rub things in further with the expellees. He could not be sure that these traditionally CDU voters might not be seduced by Schönhuber’s Republikaner propaganda for the restoration of Germany’s 1937 borders.
Another of Kohl’s concerns was the language regarding the various stages of German rapprochement and merger on the way to a unified state. Instead of picking up on the Modrow term ‘confederation’, Kohl preferred the phrase ‘confederative structures’ so that nobody in the CDU should have reason to accuse him of setting in stone a Zweistaatlichkeit of two sovereign German states, as was apparently envisaged by Lafontaine, Bahr and other SPD rivals. At the same time, his own, looser phrase was intended to placate the Soviets and East German officials as well as GDR opposition groups, all of whom feared an overt Anschluss on the lines of 1938: the socialist GDR swallowed up by the capitalist FRG. In the long run, of course, Kohl did aspire to a full Bundestaat or ‘federation’, in other words a unified state. But he did not have any clear idea yet what this new Deutschlandmight look like, though he was sure it should be a Bundestaat, not the Staatenbund or ‘confederation’ that East German political elites imagined. And so, Kohl thought, by talking of eventual ‘unity’ his speech could both reflect and amplify the public mood in East Germany – the still diffuse but increasingly vocal yearning for unity expressed in recent protest slogans such as ‘Deutschland, einig Vaterland’and‘Wir sind ein Volk’. Indeed, offering Einheit (‘unity’) as the ultimate destination in his speech, he could present ‘from above’ a vision for East Germans ‘below’ that would make them look west.
There were so many ‘what ifs’ to keep in mind. Kohl could barely grasp all the implications. At this stage, he envisaged that the whole intricate process of rapprochement, closer cooperation and eventual unification would take a decade at least. But he was clear about the basic point. That weekend in Oggersheim, he was psyching himself up for a surprise offensive – to put German unity unequivocally on the international agenda.[98] (#litres_trial_promo)
The eagle arises: Kohl presents his 10 Points to the Bundestag in Bonn
On Tuesday 28 November at 10 a.m. Helmut Kohl addressed the Bundestag. Instead of droning on, as expected, about the budget, Kohl dropped his bombshell of a ‘ten-point programme for overcoming the division of Germany and Europe’.[99] (#litres_trial_promo) Kohl first talked about ‘immediate measures’ to deal with the ‘tide of refugees’ and the ‘new scale of tourist traffic’. Second, he promised further cooperation with the GDR in economic, scientific, technological and cultural affairs, and also, third, greatly expanded financial assistance if the GDR ‘definitively’ and ‘irreversibly’ embarked on a fundamental transformation of its political and economic system. To this end, he demanded that the SED give up its monopoly on power and pass a new law for ‘free, equal and secret elections’. Because the East German people clearly wanted economic and political freedom, he said he was unwilling to ‘stabilise conditions that have become untenable’. This was not so much negotiation; more like an ultimatum.
At the core of the speech (points four to eight), the chancellor presented his road map to unity – namely to ‘develop confederative structures between both states in Germany … with the aim of creating a federation’. All this would be done in conformity with the principles of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, as part of a larger pan-European process: ‘The future architecture of Germany must fit in the future architecture of Europe.’ Kohl noted that his plan also accorded with Gorbachev’s idea of a Common European Home, as well as the Soviet leader’s concept of ‘freedom of choice’, in the sense of the ‘people’s right to self-determination’ as set out in the Final Act. In fact, Kohl reminded the Bundestag, he and Gorbachev had already expressed their agreement on these issues in their Joint Declaration of June 1989. But in the dramatically new circumstances of November the chancellor wanted to go further. He argued that the European Community should now reach out to the reform-oriented states of the Eastern bloc, including the GDR. ‘The EC must not end at the Elbe,’ he proclaimed. Opening up to the East would allow for ‘truly comprehensive European unification’. With this he neutralised and effectively absorbed Genscher’s ‘Europa-Plan’.
The central theme of Kohl’s speech was working towards a ‘condition of peace in Europe’ within which Germans could regain their unity. This, he made clear at the end, could not be separated from wider questions of international order. ‘Linking the German question to the development of Europe as a whole and to West–East relations’, he declared, ‘takes into account the interests of everyone involved’ and ‘paves the way for a peaceful and free development in Europe’. Speedy steps would be required towards disarmament and arms control. Here the West German chancellor was appealing directly to the superpowers and to his European allies.
What Kohl did not say is as revealing as what he did say. He omitted the Polish border, and he also made no reference to Germany’s membership of NATO, present or future, or to the Reserved Rights of the Allied powers on German soil. Even on his ultimate goal – German unity – Kohl was circumspect. ‘No one knows today what a reunified Germany will ultimately look like.’ But he kept affirming the German people’s ‘right’ to unity, and he stated emphatically: ‘That unity will come, however, when the people of Germany want it – of this, I am certain.’ The chancellor pointed expansively to the pattern of ‘growing together’ that was part of ‘the continuity of German history’. State organisation in Germany, he added ‘has almost always meant a confederation or a federation. We can certainly draw on these historical experiences.’ Kohl may have been looking back to the Bismarck era (the Norddeutscher Bund of 1867 and the Reich of 1871), but he was surely drawing on his own lifetime – the model of the post-war Federal Republic.[100] (#litres_trial_promo)
The chancellor was relieved to have delivered the speech and exhilarated by its reception. In the lunch break he told aides that the reaction of MPs had been ‘almost ecstatic’. What about Genscher, Teltschik asked mischievously – aware that the foreign minister had been totally out of the loop. Kohl grinned. ‘Genscher came over to me and said: “Helmut, this was a great speech.”’[101] (#litres_trial_promo)
For the first time Kohl’s plan started to clarify the relationship between the processes of German unification and European integration as being interwoven but separate. Neither should impede the other and they could take place at different speeds. German unification must be effected within the framework of the EC but the specific evolution and form of future inner German relations was up to the Germans to decide for themselves.
In sum, Kohl had proposed a blueprint for that new relationship between the two Germanies, and one clearly based on Bonn’s terms. Reflecting ‘the greater political self-assurance’ of the Federal Republic – ‘already widely recognised as a weighty economic power’, as Vernon Walters, the US ambassador to the FRG, put it – Kohl had presented the world with a fait accompli and set the agenda.[102] (#litres_trial_promo) And as East Germany unravelled, far more rapidly than anybody had expected, other leaders now had to respond to what the chancellor had put on the table. Coming from a man who had been in essentially reactive mode for the previous three weeks, it was an extremely skilful demonstration of political leadership.
*
What’s striking in retrospect is the lack of public attention devoted to Kohl’s speech internationally. This was, however, hardly surprising at the time given the drama that was beginning to unfold across Czechoslovakia. On the day Kohl addressed the Bundestag, the front page of the New York Times ran as its main headline ‘Millions of Czechoslovaks Increase Pressure on Party With 2-Hour General Strike’. A foretaste of Kohl’s speech was buried on page 14 stating that he would ‘call for a form of confederation’, mainly to dispel criticism that his reaction to the ‘tumultuous changes taking place in East Germany’ had been ‘passive and grounded in West German party politics’.[103] (#litres_trial_promo) On Wednesday 29 November, Czechoslovakia was again the main news with a banner headline across the paper’s front page ‘Prague Party to Yield Some Cabinet Posts and Drop Insistence on Primacy in Society’. Kohl and his ‘confederation outline’ got a small box lower down the page.[104] (#litres_trial_promo) Thereafter Germany disappeared from the Times’sfront page for the rest of week, with Prague continuing to dominate the news, together with the weekend’s Soviet–American summit in Malta. Even in the Federal Republic, the story was seen as an essentially domestic issue. In any case from Thursday, all other newswas eclipsed by the latest act of Baader–Meinhof terrorism, the shock killing of Kohl intimate, Alfred Herrhausen.[105] (#litres_trial_promo)
Despite the lack of immediate public reaction, however, the ‘Ten Point’ plan was a ticking time bomb. Whatever Kohl might have hoped, his speech naturally opened him up to comment, mostly critical, from all the major powers. Because in his vision, as Ambassador Walters put it, ‘the German states, virtually alone, would plan their future’.[106] (#litres_trial_promo) Now that the chancellor had gone out on a limb, he had to gear up for another round of international diplomacy to rebuff the criticism, and secure, if not acceptance, at least tolerance for his blueprint for German self-determination. This round would go on until the middle of December.
The first and most important person to be kept happy was Bush. The chancellor had sent the president a pre-emptive letter on the morning of his speech – the only advance warning he sent out. Kohl couched it as a steer on how the US president should handle Gorbachev at Malta but his lengthy missive offered a wide-ranging analysis of the revolutionary processes in Europe, the situation in the Soviet Union and the imperatives for arms reduction, both strategic and conventional. This was all a prelude to what was really on his mind, namely how Bush should discuss the German question at Malta. Kohl made a point of linking Gorbachev’s ‘freedom-of-choice policy’ in 1989 with America’s grand design in 1776 for ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. He stressed that the current bid for emancipation was coming from the people themselves – Poles, Hungarians, Czechs as well as East Germans – and that this was no simple turn to the West but a historically significant movement for reform emanating from within each nation and its distinctive culture. With this statement he sought a neat way out of any Western ‘victory’ rhetoric while at the same time giving weight to the core theme of his letter, ‘self-determination’: so crucial for his approach to resolving the German question. Only then did the chancellor discuss unification – the longest element in his message – setting out his Ten Points. With an eye on the upcoming summit, Kohl explicitly asked Bush for his support, insisting that the superpowers must not simply sort out Germany over his head, like Roosevelt and Stalin in 1945. There should not, he told Bush, be ‘any parallel between Yalta and Malta’.[107] (#litres_trial_promo)
Interestingly Egon Krenz also wrote to Bush about Kohl’s speech – a striking sign of the times in that he clearly realised that Moscow’s support would no longer be sufficient to ensure the GDR’s survival. Krenz warned of ‘nationalism’ and ‘a revival of Nazi ideas’ – clearly pointing the finger at Bonn – and asked the president to support the status quo, in other words the two German states as members of ‘different alliances’. Krenz never got a reply. Bush knew he was a nobody whose days in office were numbered.[108] (#litres_trial_promo)
But the president picked up the phone next morning to talk to Kohl. The White House had immediately grasped the implications of the Ten-Point Plan, seeing it as a strategic move in international politics rather than a mere tactical game on the domestic plane. Scowcroft was concerned about Kohl’s bold, unilateral step but Bush, though surprised, was not particularly worried. He knew that the chancellor could not pursue unification on his own and doubted that Kohl would want to alienate his closest ally. ‘I was certain he would consult us before going further,’ Bush reflected later. ‘He needed us.’[109] (#litres_trial_promo)
