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The 9th of November 1989. Helmut Kohl was beside himself. Here he was, sitting at a grand banquet in the Radziwill Palace in Warsaw with the new leaders of Poland – Mazowiecki, Jaruzelski and Wałęsa – in a wonderfully festive atmosphere, together with a delegation of seventy, including Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and six other ministers of his Cabinet. But all around him people were murmuring ‘Die Mauer ist gefallen!’ (‘The Wall has fallen!’). Throughout that Thursday evening, as the chancellor tried to make polite chit-chat with his hosts, he kept being interrupted – receiving updates on little slips of paper and being called out to take phone calls from Bonn. All the while Kohl was desperately trying to think.[1] He was in the wrong place at the right time – the most dramatic moment of his chancellorship, perhaps of his whole life. What should he do?

Moment of reconciliation: Kohl, Mazowiecki and Genscher in Warsaw

Kohl’s mood had been very different when the dinner started. His five-day visit, in the planning for months, was intended as a milestone in West Germany’s relations with one of its most sensitive neighbours. History hung heavy in 1989. This was fifty years after Hitler’s brutal invasion of Poland, beginning a war that led to the extermination of 6 million Polish citizens (half of them Jewish), the obliteration of the city of Warsaw after the abortive rising of 1944, and the absorption of Poland into the Soviet bloc in 1945. Germany had a lot to answer for, and the process of reconciliation by Bonn had been long and painful. It had been an SPD chancellor, Willy Brandt, who made the first and more dramatic move in December 1970, dropping to his knees in silent remorse at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. Kohl’s trip was the first time a Christian Democrat chancellor had visited Poland. But he was not simply catching up with his political rivals and trying to redress the past; he also wanted to make a statement about the future, about the Federal Republic’s commitment to Poland’s resurrection as a free country in its post-communist incarnation. So the German chancellor had been delighted to sit down at the banquet that evening. Delighted, that is, until he got the news from Berlin.[2]

As soon as the dinner was over, the Germans held a crisis meeting over coffee. The situation was extremely delicate. The Polish leadership wanted to stop Kohl from going to Berlin, warning that this would be taken as a blatant snub. Horst Teltschik, the chancellor’s top foreign-policy adviser, was also hesitant. ‘Too much has been invested in this trip to Warsaw,’ he warned, ‘too much hangs on it for the future of German–Polish relations.’ Among the events on Kohl’s itinerary were a visit to Auschwitz – as an act of penitence for the Holocaust, preceded only once, by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (also SPD) in 1977 – and a bilingual Catholic Mass in Lower Silesia shared with Mazowiecki, set up as an act of reconciliation with the Poles. The mass was to be held in a place – the Kreisau estate of Graf von Moltke, one of the July 1944 Christian conservative plotters against Hitler – that symbolised a ‘better Germany in the darkest part of our history’, as the chancellor later put it. Kohl giving the kiss of peace to Mazowiecki linked up with his other iconic act of reconciliation: holding hands with Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984. But this gesture in Silesia was also intended to speak, at home, to the Vertriebene – the ever-prickly members on the right of his own party who had been expelled from the eastern German territories when these were absorbed into the new Poland (and the Soviet Union) after 1945.[3]

Upon leaving the Radziwill Palace, Kohl rushed to the city’s Marriott Hotel, where the West German press corps was staying, to answer their questions. And he remained for several hours because only in a Western hotel was it possible to see the news on German TV and to access a sufficient number of international phone lines. At midnight, when he spoke once more to the Chancellery, staff there confirmed that the crossing points in Berlin were opened. They also conveyed a sense of the massive flows of people and the joyous atmosphere in the once-divided city. Putting down the phone, the chancellor – pumped up with adrenalin – told the journalists that ‘world history is being written … the wheel of history is spinning faster’.[4]

Kohl decided to return to Bonn as soon as diplomatically feasible. ‘We cannot abort the trip,’ he observed, ‘but an interruption is possible.’ Next morning, 10 November, he placated his Polish hosts with a Brandt-style visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and a promise that he would be back within twenty-four hours. By the time he left Poland together with Genscher and a handful of journalists at 2.30 p.m., his destination had changed. While at the Ghetto Memorial, Kohl had received more disturbing news. Walter Momper, the SPD mayor of West Berlin, was organising a major press event, featuring his fellow socialist and former chancellor Willy Brandt, on the steps of the city hall (Schöneberger Rathaus) at 4.30 p.m. that very day. Brandt – the mayor of West Berlin when the Wall went up in August 1961 and then the celebrated chancellor of Ostpolitik – was now going to hog the limelight as the Wall came down. With barely a year to go before the next Federal elections, Kohl could not afford to be upstaged – especially when an earlier CDU chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had been conspicuously absent from Berlin during those fateful days in 1961 when the eastern half of the city was walled in.

It was all very well to want to go to Berlin. But getting there in November 1989 was no simple business. West German aircraft were not permitted to fly across GDR territory or land in West Berlin because of the Allied four-power rights – another legacy of Hitler’s war. So Kohl and Genscher flew circuitously through Swedish and Danish airspace to Hamburg before boarding a plane specially provided by the US Air Force for the flight to Berlin. Both men used the journey to frantically scribble their speeches. As much as they were partners, they were in the end also political rivals jockeying for position. After this humiliating diversion, they landed at Tempelhof, right in the centre of the city, just as the celebration at the Schöneberger Rathaus was about to begin. Sharing the spotlight with Brandt, they addressed a crowd of 20,000 and world media on the very steps from which, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy had declared ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’[5]

That evening, three key figures of FRG politics each put his own spin on the momentous events of the last twenty-four hours. Brandt, in keeping with his Ostpolitik strategy of ‘small steps’, talked of the ‘moving together of the German states’, emphasising that ‘no one should act as if he knows in which concrete form the people in these two states will find a new relationship’. Genscher opened his address by emotionally recalling his roots in East Germany, from which he fled after the war: ‘My most hearty greetings go to the people of my homeland.’ He was much more emphatic than Brandt about the underlying fact of national unity. ‘What we are witnessing in the streets of Berlin in these hours is that forty years of division have not created two nations out of one. There is no capitalist and there is no socialist Germany, but only one German nation in unity and peace.’ But, as foreign minister, he was anxious to reassure Germany’s neighbours, not least the Poles. ‘No people on this earth, no people in Europe have to fear if the gates are opened now between East and West.’[6]

Chancellor Kohl spoke last. While the sea of Berlin lefties had cheered Brandt and Genscher, they had no patience with the bulky conservative Catholic politico from the Rhineland. Here party enmity, regional pride and explosive emotions combined; the spectators tried to drown out every word of Kohl’s speech with boos, catcalls and whistling. The chancellor felt his anger rise at the behaviour of what he called contemptuously the ‘leftist plebs’ (linker Pöbel). Suppressing his fury, he ploughed on doggedly. Mindful of the upcoming election, Brandt’s iconic place in the history of Deutschlandpolitik and the way that Genscher had grabbed his moment on the balcony in Prague, Kohl ignored the crowd in front of him and spoke to millions of TV viewers, especially in the GDR. He sought to present himself as the man who was really in control, the true leader and statesman. He urged East Germans to stay put and to stay calm. He reassured them: ‘We’re on your side, we are and remain one nation. We belong together.’ And the chancellor made a particular point of thanking ‘our friends’ the Western allies for their enduring support and ended by playing the European card: ‘Long live a free German fatherland! Long live a united Europe!’[7]

For many – at home and abroad – Kohl’s expression of nationalism went too far. An ominous phone message from Gorbachev was received during the rally. He warned that the Bonn government’s declarations could fan ‘emotions and passions’ and went on to stress the existence of two sovereign German states. Whoever denied these realities had only one aim – that of destabilising the GDR. He had also heard rumours that a furious German mob had plans to storm Soviet military facilities. ‘Is this true?’ he asked. Gorbachev urged Kohl to avoid any measures that ‘could create a chaotic situation with unpredictable consequences’.[8]

Gorbachev’s message summed up the turmoil of the past couple of days, and it also did not appear to bode well for the future. Kohl sent a reply assuring the Soviet leader that he need not worry: the atmosphere in Berlin was like a family feast and nobody was about to start a revolt against the USSR.[9] But, with a profound sense of risk in the air, these were fraught and uncertain times for the chancellor. Would his three Western allies react as negatively as Gorbachev? As soon as he got back to his Bonn office later that evening, despite his exhaustion, he tried to arrange phone calls with Thatcher, Bush and Mitterrand.

He rang Thatcher first, at 10 p.m., because he thought that conversation would be ‘the most difficult’.[10] On the face of it, however, it went well. The prime minister, who had been watching events on television, said that the scenes in Berlin were ‘some of the most historic which she had ever seen’. She stressed the need to build a true democracy in East Germany and the two of them agreed to keep in close touch: Thatcher even suggested coming over for a half-day meeting before the upcoming European Council in Strasbourg early in December. Throughout the conversation, there was no mention of the word ‘unity’, but the chancellor clearly sensed that she felt ‘unease’ at the implications of the situation.[11]

He was able to extricate himself in less than half an hour, ready for what promised to be a more agreeable chat at 10.30 p.m. with George Bush. Kohl started with a survey of his trip to Warsaw and the economic predicament of Poland, but the president wasn’t interested. Cutting in, Bush said he wanted to hear all about the GDR. Kohl admitted the scale of the refugee problem and expressed scepticism about Krenz as a reformer. He also let off steam about those ‘leftist plebs’ who had tried to spoil his speech. But his assessment, overall, was very positive: the general mood in Berlin was ‘incredible’ and ‘optimistic’ – like ‘witnessing an enormous fair’ – and he told Bush that ‘without the US this day would not have been possible’. The chancellor could not stress enough: ‘This is a dramatic thing; an historic hour.’ At the end Bush was extremely enthusiastic: ‘Take care, good luck,’ he told Kohl. ‘I’m proud of the way you’re handling an extraordinarily difficult problem.’ But he also remarked ‘my meeting with Gorbachev in early December has become even more important’. Bush was right, the long-awaited tête-à-tête between him and the Soviet leader – only recently scheduled to take place in Malta on 2–3 December – could now not come soon enough.[12]

It was not possible to talk with Mitterrand that night. When they did speak at 9.15 the next morning Kohl took the same line but with an appropriately different spin. Not forgetting that 1989 was the bicentenary of the start of the French Revolution, the chancellor likened the mood on the Kurfürstendamm (West Berlin’s main shopping street) to the Champs-Elysées on Bastille Day. But, he added, the process in Germany was ‘not revolutionary but evolutionary’. Responding in similar vein, the French president hailed events in Berlin as ‘a great historical moment … the hour of the people’. And, he continued, ‘we now have the chance that this movement would flow into the development of Europe’. All very positive, of course, but perhaps also a reminder of traditional French concerns to see a strong Germany firmly anchored in the European integration project. Kohl had no problem with this and he was happy that both of them emphasised the strength of the Franco-German friendship.[13]

After talking to Mitterrand, Kohl took a call from Krenz – who had been pressing for a conversation. The two spoke for nine minutes – politely but insistently on both sides. Krenz was emphatic that ‘currently reunification was not on the political agenda’. Kohl said that their views were fundamentally different because his position was rooted in the FRG’s Basic Law of 1949, which affirmed the principle of German unity. But, he added, this was not the topic that should concern them both at the moment. Rather, he was interested in ‘getting to decent relations between ourselves’. He looked forward to coming to East Germany for an early personal meeting with the new leadership. Yet, he wanted to do so ‘outside East Berlin’ – the familiar FRG concern to avoid any hint of recognition of the GDR’s putative capital.[14]

The last of Kohl’s big calls – and the most sensitive of all – was with Gorbachev, before lunch on 11 November. Kohl set out some of the grave economic and social problems now facing the GDR, but stressed the positive mood in Berlin. Gorbachev was less testy than in his initial message to Kohl the previous day and expressed his confidence in the chancellor’s ‘political influence’. These were, he said, ‘historical changes in the direction of new relations and a new world’. But he emphasised the need above all for ‘stability’. Kohl firmly agreed and, according to Teltschik, ended the conversation looking visibly relieved. ‘De Bärn is g’schält’ (‘The pear has been peeled’) he told his aide in a thick Palatinate accent with a broad smile: it was clear that Gorbachev would not meddle in internal East German affairs, as the Kremlin had done in June 1953.[15]

Kohl could now feel reassured about his allies and the Russians, yet these were not his only worries. As he got off the phone he must have reflected on his own Deutschlandpolitik – its future direction and the responsibilities that now weighed heavily on him. All the more so, given what he had learned in Cabinet that morning about just how unstable the situation really was.

So far that year, according to the Interior Ministry, 243,000 East Germans had arrived in West Germany, as well as 300,000 ethnic Germans (Aussiedler) who could claim FRG citizenship: in other words, well over half a million immigrants in ten months. And this was before the fall of the Wall. The economic costs were also escalating. According to the Finance Ministry, DM 500 million had to be added to the budget in 1990 just to provide emergency shelters for the recent influx of GDR refugees. And an additional DM 10 billion a year for the next ten years might be required to build permanent housing and provide social benefits and unemployment payments. Moreover, the FRG was already subsidising the GDR economy to the tune of several billion a year. And far more would clearly be needed if the GDR were to be propped up sufficiently to stem the haemorrhage of people. But for how long could it be sustained? And what would happen if Germany unified? Revolution was certainly turning the East upside down, but life for West Germans was evidently changing as well – and not all those changes were welcome.[16]

Even if, in the short term, such spending on the GDR and on the migrants was economically feasible, any talk of raising taxes to cover the costs was politically impossible for Kohl and his coalition partners in an election year. The recent rise in the FRG of the Republikaner (the radical right’s new party) reflected growing resentment at the immigrant crisis and dismay at the financial burden to be carried by West German citizens.[17]

Although Kohl had talked about ‘stability’ to Gorbachev and to his Western allies, as he flew back to Warsaw on the afternoon of 11 November to pick up the threads of his Polish visit, he must have seen how difficult it would be to keep the GDR functioning. But, of course, he had no real desire to do so in the longer run. The ‘stability’ he was now beginning to contemplate was how to facilitate a peaceful and consensual transition to a unified German state – a project that had been inconceivable just two days before.[18]

*

How had this Rubicon been reached, only five weeks after the grand celebrations to mark the fortieth anniversary of the East German state?

In reality the big party on 7 October was a facade, to paper over the huge and growing cracks in the communist state. As soon as Gorbachev left East Berlin for Moscow, demonstrations erupted across the city and elsewhere in the GDR and the authorities now cracked down hard. The 7th was the day of what had become a monthly protest against the May election fraud. Nevertheless, while those who had fled the country amounted to tens of thousands, the number of dissidents and those openly antagonistic to the regime was still relatively small, especially outside the big cities of Dresden, Leipzig and East Berlin. Protests and demonstrations were quite contained, involving no more than several hundred people. Formal opposition groups had only just been created since the opening of the Austro-Hungarian border: by the beginning of October some 10,000 people belonged to Neues Forum as well as Demokratie Jetzt, Demokratischer Aufbruch, SDP (SozialDemokratische Partei in der DDR) and Vereinigte Linke. These smaller groupings were mostly associated with Neues Forum. Millions of GDR citizens remained passive and hundreds of thousands were still willing to defend the state.[19]

The atmosphere in those days was tense and uncertain – the rumour mill was in overdrive about what might happen next. At the top, Erich Honecker envisaged a ‘Chinese solution’ to counter the mounting protests over the anniversary weekend (6–9 October),[20] prefigured in East Berlin when Stasi boss Erich Mielke jumped out of his bulletproof limo on the evening of 7 October screaming to police ‘Haut sie doch zusammen, die Schweine!’ (‘Club those pigs into submission!’).[21] That night in and around Prenzlauer Berg near the Gethsemane church, police officers, plain-clothes security forces and volunteer militia attacked some 6,000 demonstrators who shouted ‘Freedom’, ‘No violence’ and ‘We want to stay’, as well as bystanders, with dogs and water cannons – beating and kicking peaceful citizens and throwing hundreds into jail. Women and girls were stripped naked; people were not allowed to use the toilets and told to piss or shit in their pants. Those who asked where they would be taken were told: ‘Auf eine Müllkippe’ (‘To the landfill’).[22]

Unlike similar scenes in other East German cities, where foreign journalists were banned, the images from East Berlin that weekend soon went around the world. And when those arrested were released and talked to the press, what they told the cameras about merciless brutality by the riot police and abuse at the hands of the Stasi interrogators was both really shocking and also entirely believable. Because many of them were simply ordinary citizens, some even SED members, not militant protestors or hardcore dissidents.[23]

Matters came to a head on Monday 9 October in Leipzig, which had been the epicentre of people-protest for the past few weeks. In fact the Monday night demo there had become a weekly feature since the first gathering by a few hundred in early September, spilling out spontaneously – as numbers grew exponentially – from the evening prayers for peace (Friedensgebet) in the Nikolaikirche in the city centre to a big rally along the inner ring road. On the night of 25 September, the fourth such occasion, 5,000 people had come together; a week later there were already 15,000, calling for ‘Demokratie – jetzt oder nie’ (‘Democracy – now or never’), and ‘Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit’ (‘Freedom, equality, fraternity’). On the march, they chanted defiantly ‘Wir bleiben hier’ (‘We stay here’), as opposed to the earlier ‘Wir wollen raus’ (‘We want out’), while demanding ‘Erich laß die Faxen sein, laß die Perestroika rein’ (‘Erich [Honecker] stop fooling around, let the perestroika in’). Each week, Leipzigers became more daring in their activities and more vehement in their demands.[24]

The 9th of October was expected to be the largest ever protest – facing off against the regime’s full display of force. With this in mind, the Leipzig opposition groups and churches had disseminated appeals for prudence and non-violence. The world-renowned conductor Kurt Masur of the Gewandhaus orchestra, together with two other local celebrities, enlisted the support of three leading SED functionaries of the city government, and issued a public call for peaceful action: ‘We all need free dialogue and exchanges of views about further development of socialism in our country.’ What’s more, they argued, dialogue should not only be conducted in Leipzig but also with the government in East Berlin. This so-called ‘Appeal of the Six’ was read aloud, as well as being broadcast via loudspeakers across the city during the evening church vigils.[25]

Honecker, for his part, was determined to make an example of Leipzig. The state media replayed footage of Tiananmen and endlessly repeated the government’s solidarity with their comrades in Beijing.[26] When Honecker met Yao Yilin, China’s deputy premier, on the morning of the 9th, the two men announced that there was ‘evidence of a particularly anti-socialist action by imperialist class opponents with the aim of reversing socialist development. In this respect there is a fundamental lesson to be learned from the counter-revolutionary unrest in Beijing and the present campaign’ in East Germany. Honecker himself was positively bombastic: ‘Any attempt by imperialism to destabilise socialist construction or slander its achievements is now and in the future nothing more than Don Quixote’s futile running against the steadily turning sails of a windmill.’[27]

As darkness fell that evening, 9 October, with memories fresh of horrors from Berlin, many expected a total bloodbath in Leipzig. Honecker had pontificated that riots should be ‘choked off in advance’. Some 1,500 soldiers, 3,000 police and 600 paramilitary backed by hundreds of Stasi agents were ready. ‘It is either them or us,’ police were told by their superiors. ‘Fight them with no compromises,’ the interior minister ordered. The army had been given live ammunition and gas masks; the Stasi were briefed by Mielke in person; and paramilitaries and police were also called up in readiness.[28] Around 6 p.m., after prayers at the Nikolaikirche and neighbouring churches, the crowd struggled out into the streets. With more people joining the march all the time, an estimated 70,000 slowly pushed their way out onto the ring road.[29]

Marching for democracy on the Leipziger Innenstadtring

Yet the dreaded confrontation never took place. The local party was unwilling to make a move without detailed instructions from the leadership in East Berlin. The army and police were not prepared for the size of the crowd, double what they had expected. Above all, Honecker’s word was no longer law. An intense power struggle was now under way in East Berlin. Egon Krenz – twenty-five years Honecker’s junior – had been plotting a coup for some time. But, despite his recent ‘fraternal’ visit to Beijing, he did not wish to be saddled by Honecker with the opprobrium of a Tiananmen solution at home, because that would stain his own hands with German blood while allowing the elderly leader to blame him for the violence. This left the party paralysed between hardliners, ditherers and reformers. And, with no clear word that night from Berlin, the local party chief did a volte-face. Heeding the Appeal of the Six, he ordered his men to act only in self-defence. Meanwhile, the Kremlin had issued a directive to General Boris Snetkov, commander of the Western Group of Soviet Forces with his HQ in Wünsdorf near Berlin, not to intervene in East German events. The Red Army troops on East German soil were to stay in their garrisons.

So the ‘Chinese card’ was never played. Not because of a deliberate decision by the SED at the top, growing out of a change of heart, but because of the distinct absence of any decision. Time passed. The masses kept marching. There was no violence. The repressive state apparatus that Mielke had pulled together was not confronted with fearsome ‘enemies of the state’ or anarchic ‘rowdies’ but by well-disciplined ordinary citizens bearing candles and speaking the language of non-violence. What they wanted was recognition by the governing party of their legitimate quest for basic freedoms and political reform: their slogan was ‘Wir sind das Volk’ (‘We are the people’).[30]

New facts on the ground had been created. And a new demonstration culture had emerged – spilling out from the church vigils into the squares and the streets. The regime’s loss of nerve that night dispelled the omnipresent climate of fear. This would change the face of the GDR. The civil rights activists and the mass of protestors were beginning to merge.

It was a huge victory for the peaceful demonstrators and an epic defeat for the regime. ‘Die Lage ist so beschissen, wie sie noch nie in der SED war’ (‘The situation is so shitty, like it never was in the SED’), summed up one Politburo member on 17 October.[31] Next day Honecker resigned – officially on health grounds – and Krenz took over as party boss.[32] But that did not improve the public mood: the people interpreted the power transfer as the result of their pressure from below rather than as the outcome of party machinations and manoeuvrings going on ever since Honecker was taken seriously ill during the Warsaw Pact meeting in Bucharest in July.[33]

Egon Krenz at the Volkskammer as the New Party Secretary of the SED in East Berlin

Krenz promised the Party Central Committee on 18 October that he would initiate a ‘turn’ (Wende). He committed himself to open ‘dialogue’ with the opposition on two conditions: first, ‘to continue building up socialism in the GDR … without giving up any of our common achievements’ and second, to preserve East Germany as a ‘sovereign state’. As a result, Krenz’s Wende amounted to little more than a rhetorical tweak of the party’s standard dogma. And, in similar vein, the personnel changes he made among the leadership were largely cosmetic. There was, in short, little genuine ‘renewal’ in the offing: clearly Wende did not mean Umbruch (rupture and radical change).[34]

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] 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]

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] 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] 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]

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] 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]

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]

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]

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]

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] 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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’ Reuters reported at 7.02 p.m., ‘GDR opens its borders’, echoed Associated Press three 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

It was in those days that all the talk about revolution and renewal in the GDR totally evaporated as a credible political project.[57] 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] But most of the ‘masses’ took no notice. For them, the idea of reforming the GDR and of pursuing a ‘third way’[59] 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 Forum and 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 Aufbruch were 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]

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]

*

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]

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]

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]

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] 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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] 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] 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]

Particularly striking was the denunciation of unification from Egon Bahr, who in the 1960s had designed Neue Ostpolitik based 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] 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]

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] 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] 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]

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]

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 Ostpolitik and Osthandel that had been signed by the two states over the previous few decades.[84]

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] 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]

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]

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]

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] 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]

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]

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]

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]

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] 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]

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]

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] 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 Deutschland might 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]

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] 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]

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]

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] 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] 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] Thereafter Germany disappeared from the Times’s front 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 news was eclipsed by the latest act of Baader–Meinhof terrorism, the shock killing of Kohl intimate, Alfred Herrhausen.[105]

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] 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]

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]

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]

On 29 November president and chancellor talked for thirty minutes. First, they discussed arrangements for a meeting as ‘personal friends’ straight after Malta, from which it was agreed to exclude Genscher. Kohl would bring only his unification mastermind Teltschik – a decision that once more underlined the institutional and personal rivalry between the Chancellery and the Foreign Ministry. Then Kohl explained in more detail how he hoped to proceed towards unification. Despite the display of solidarity at Strasbourg a week before, the chancellor remained concerned about the extent of Mitterrand’s support. He also made clear his reliance on the United States. ‘History left us with good cards in our hands,’ he told Bush. ‘I hope with the cooperation of our American friends we can play them well.’ The president, as usual, did not waste words. ‘I am very supportive of your general approach. I note your stress on stability. We feel the same way. Stability is the key word. We have tried to do nothing that would force a reaction by the USSR.’ Bush went on to amplify this latter point. He recognised that the Soviet economy was doing much worse than he had previously realised, yet Shevardnadze had stated proudly that the Soviets did not want America to ‘bail us out’. So help would have to be offered ‘in a sensitive way’. But Bush and Kohl agreed that Western aid would be needed because ‘we want him to succeed’. The chancellor was gratified by the conversation, thanking Bush for his ‘good words’ – ‘Germans East and West are listening very carefully. Every word of sympathy for self-determination and unity is very important now.’[110]

Commenting on the phone call to the press straight afterwards, Bush said: ‘I feel comfortable. I think we’re on track.’ Having been mocked when vice president for his reluctance to indulge in what he had called the ‘vision thing’, he was asked about how he saw Europe’s future over the next five or ten years.[111] The president was now sufficiently relaxed to joke: ‘In terms of the “vision thing”, the aspirations, I spelled it out in little-noted speeches last spring and summer, which I would like everyone to go back and reread. And I’ll have a quiz on it.’ When the laughter died down, Bush continued, ‘You’ll see in there some of the “vision thing” – a Europe whole and free.’ And, he added, ‘I think a Europe whole and free is less vision than perhaps reality.’ But the president had to admit: ‘How we get there and what that means and when the German question is resolved and all of these things – I can’t answer more definitely.’[112]

The mood was much less positive in Moscow. Kohl was moving too fast and planning Europe’s future ‘without taking the view of the other Germany at all into account’, declared Vadim Zagladin, one of Gorbachev’s advisers. The Soviet leader – on a state visit in Rome – told Italian premier Giulio Andreotti bluntly that ‘two Germanies remained the reality’ and that ‘the reunification of FRG and GDR was no topical issue’. Kohl, he said, was ‘playing the revanchist tune for the forthcoming elections’. Later in the press conference, Gorbachev added, ‘Let history decide. It is not necessary to initiate something or push forward half-baked processes.’[113] There was also a backlash in West European capitals. Thatcher let Kohl know in no uncertain terms that unification was ‘not on the agenda’ and French diplomats publicly expressed strong reservations about the chancellor’s ‘precipitate’ action.[114]

Kohl, it seemed, had unleashed a firestorm and the man who had to do the firefighting was Genscher. The foreign minister had been totally blindsided just a few days before when the chancellor dropped his ‘Ten Point’ bombshell. Obliged to grin and bear it, Genscher congratulated Kohl through gritted teeth in the Bundestag and then told the world that the policy laid out in the Ten Points represented nothing less than ‘the continuity of our foreign, security and Deutschland policies’. Of course, Genscher resented that he had been sidelined as Kohl’s coalition partner.[115] Yet he had done the same to Kohl on the Prague balcony a few months before. And they had different instincts about how unification should be achieved – Kohl favouring the Adenauer line of Westbindung, drawing East Germany into the Federal Republic and into the Western alliance, whereas Genscher was more inclined to extending Ostpolitik into a full pan-European architecture. But despite their rivalry, despite their differences on means, the two men fundamentally agreed on ends, namely German unity. For Genscher, this was a matter of both head and heart. That’s why, swallowing his pride, he was willing to play firefighter and try to bring London, Paris and Moscow onside.

Technically, of course, the foreign minister did not have responsibility for Deutschlandpolitik because inner-German relations did not constitute ‘foreign’ policy. Nevertheless, Genscher was now drawn fully into the unification issue because of the external complications it engendered – relations with the FRG’s neighbours, Four Powers’ rights, the prerogatives of the superpowers, the domain of international organisations as well as questions of territory and security. As Genscher saw things, it was his duty to build international consensus and pave the way to unity.

Moscow would obviously be the most problematic obstacle, requiring the greatest amount of persuasion. What’s more, the Soviets held strong cards: they were a nuclear superpower, one of the Four Powers and had more than half a million troops and dependants stationed in the GDR. This gave the Kremlin several options. It could press for a pan-European structure. Or offer Germany unity for neutrality, as Stalin tried in 1952. It could simply say nyet to unity, or decide to use force to hold the GDR in place. But were things really secure in the Kremlin? Would perestroika be reversed? What about the deteriorating economy? Could secessionist demands from the republics be contained? Might there even be a coup?

And so, a week later, on 5 December Genscher flew into the Soviet capital – on a dark, gloomy afternoon in the middle of a snowstorm. As his motorcade crawled into the city, it passed another heading in the opposite direction towards the airport. This was Krenz, Modrow and other SED dignitaries who had just finished their own business in the Kremlin. Genscher speculated wryly that the Soviets had orchestrated events so as to avoid an awkward German–German encounter in the airport.[116]

Tension was therefore already in the air. And what followed proved to be the ‘most disagreeable encounter’ with the Soviets that Genscher could ever remember. So ill-tempered was his meeting with Gorbachev that he later asked the German notetaker to write up the meeting in a somewhat more emollient tone.[117] ‘Never before and never afterwards have I experienced Gorbachev so upset and so bitter,’ Genscher remarked in his memoirs. The Soviet leader was unable to restrain his anger at Kohl’s lack of consultation. According to Chernyaev he had been fuming for days, though this may have been due to pressures at home as well as the worsening situation in Eastern Europe at large. Whatever was going on in Gorbachev’s mind, Genscher was a convenient target for his wrath. In fact, Genscher felt, at times Gorbachev was so furious that it was simply impossible to discuss important issues with any seriousness.[118]

Genscher, however, was not flustered and loyally defended the chancellor’s policies. He underlined that Germany would never ‘go it alone’, that the Federal Republic was firmly tied into the EC and CSCE (i.e. the Helsinki Final Act), and that the ‘growing together of the two German states’ would have to be fitted into these frameworks. He also affirmed Bonn’s Politik der Verantwortung (‘politics of responsibility’) and that the FRG adhered to its treaty commitments, not least on the Polish border. This, he said, was important to stress in the light of Germany’s ‘history, its geopolitical position and the size of its population’. Gorbachev let him say his piece but then retorted angrily that Kohl’s Ten Points were wholly ‘irresponsible’ and a grave ‘political mistake’ which presented an ‘ultimatum’ to the East German government; Kohl was trying to prescribe a particular ‘internal order’ for the GDR, a sovereign state. ‘Even Hitler didn’t allow himself anything like that!’ Shevardnadze piped up.

By now seething, Gorbachev denounced Kohl’s programme as ‘genuine revanchism’, delivered as an ‘address to subjects’ and nothing less than a ‘funeral’ of the European process. He was getting into his stride. The Ten Points were ‘irresponsible’. German policy was in a total ‘mess’ (Wirrwarr). ‘The Germans are such an emotional people.’ Don’t forget, he added, ‘where headless politics had led in the past’.

Genscher cut in: ‘We know our historic mistakes and have no intention of repeating them.’

‘You,’ said Gorbachev, ‘had a direct role in developing Ostpolitik. Now you are endangering all this,’ just for the sake of ‘election battles’. He kept criticising Kohl for ‘running around’ and ‘taking hasty actions’ which ‘undermined the pan-European process that had been laboriously developed’.

Gorbachev also tried to drive a wedge between Genscher and Kohl. ‘By the way, Herr Genscher, it seems to me that you only found out about the Ten Points in the Bundestag speech.’

Genscher admitted that this was true but added ‘It’s our internal affair. We resolve this ourselves.’

Well, said Gorbachev drily, ‘you can see for yourself that your “internal affairs” has annoyed everybody else’.

The Soviet leader ended with something like an olive branch. ‘Don’t take everything I said personally, Herr Genscher. You know that we have a different relationship to you than to others.’ The implication seemed clear: Genscher was not Kohl. The foreign minister was getting it in the neck because the chancellor was not present. Gorbachev felt frankly betrayed by Kohl. It was a far cry from their balmy June evening on the banks of the Rhine. Relations would clearly take time and effort to repair.[119]

Although Gorbachev and the Soviet Union were the main problem, Kohl and Genscher faced problems on their Western front as well. And in London there was a leader as fiery as Gorbachev and at least as critical of any moves towards German unification – not least because Margaret Thatcher was hung up on history. Born in 1925 and raised in the provincial Lincolnshire town of Grantham, she had come of age during Hitler’s war, amid the mythology of Britain’s ‘finest hour’. This permanently coloured her view of post-war Germany. Trained first as a research chemist and as a barrister, she had entered Parliament as a Tory MP in 1959 at the height of the Cold War and became prime minister twenty years later, just as détente was freezing over. Since then, her decade in power had been marked by a radical programme of economic liberalisation and a forceful nationalism for which she gained (and relished) the nickname ‘Iron Lady’.

Her foreign policy was traditional, built around ideas of a balance of power. Thatcher was passionate about the ‘special relationship’, assiduously cultivating Ronald Reagan. She was equally ardent about nuclear deterrence, advocating the modernisation of NATO’s theatre nuclear forces and pushing through the deployment of cruise missiles despite fierce opposition from the left. She was as convinced as Reagan that communism was an ideology of the past and therefore endorsed Gorbachev’s reform policies, though keeping a wary eye on their consequences for Soviet power. Within Europe she was a ferocious critic of deeper economic and political integration, especially the Delors Plan, although she did sign up enthusiastically to the single market in 1986. And as the Soviet bloc crumbled in 1989, her biggest fear was that a new German hegemon could destroy the European equilibrium, painfully constructed over four decades. The combination of a single currency and a unified, sovereign Germany in the centre of Europe would be simply ‘intolerable’, she told Mitterrand on 1 September. She had, she said, ‘read much on the history of Germany during her vacation and was very disturbed’.[120] Three weeks later, in similar vein, she informed Gorbachev that ‘although NATO traditionally made statements supporting Germany’s aspirations to be reunited, in practice we would not welcome it at all’.[121] In other words, even before the Wall had fallen, she was clearly ‘on the warpath’ against German unity.[122]

Thatcher seemed to object to pretty much everything, and didn’t hide it. Yet she had little to offer in the way of practical alternatives. She longed to see the end of communism but dreaded the effect this might have on the European power balance. When Genscher visited her on the day after Kohl’s speech, she worried about Gorbachev’s fate. If Germany unified, the Soviet leader fell and the Warsaw Pact disintegrated, what then? It was imperative, she lectured Genscher, to first develop democratic structures in Eastern Europe. She insisted that political freedom in Eastern Europe would only be sustainable if economic liberalisation were properly implemented, and blamed Gorbachev for being too fixated with repairing socialism rather than ditching it. The changes now under way in Eastern Europe, geared towards freedom and democracy, must take place against a ‘stable background’. In other words, she said, ‘one should leave the other things as they are’. History had shown that Central Europe’s problems always started with minority issues; if one tinkered with borders, everything would unravel. That was how the First World War had broken out. Ten days ago in Paris, she asserted, unification and borders had not been on the table; now Kohl’s speech had shaken all the foundations.

Genscher tried to calm her down by refocusing on the topic of conventional arms-reduction talks to stabilise the heart of Europe. He, of course, wanted to persuade the Soviets to withdraw their troops from eastern Germany. But Thatcher jumped on that. She didn’t want Soviet troop withdrawals if that meant the Americans would pull out as well. For her, it was not just a question of strategic balance or European security, the troop question was also about keeping the Germans under control.[123]

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd sat in on the whole meeting, but hardly said a word. He had little opportunity whenever Thatcher went on the rampage. But the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) was genuinely concerned about the line Thatcher was taking.[124] An internal FCO memo on the day of Genscher’s visit acknowledged that Germans ‘see our position as being outside the mainstream’. As indeed did Washington: the president was ‘taking his distance from us on the Warsaw Pact and on German reunification’. As for Thatcher’s obsession with Gorbachev’s political fragility, the FCO considered this greatly exaggerated because Gorbachev himself was ‘not intervening to stop communism being swept away in Eastern Europe’. So there was a real danger that ‘we are being plus royaliste que le roi’. And they warned against a status quo policy and being left behind by not being seen to share Bush’s vision of a Europe ‘whole and free’. If, in extremis, the PM decided to block German unification by asserting Britain’s position as one of the four victor powers, ‘we should not count on carrying anyone else with us’.[125]

Thatcher was simply not on the same page as her diplomats. Not only was she blunt with Genscher, she did not hesitate to speak out against Kohl, whom she disliked personally – a fat, sausage-munching, Teutonic stereotype – as well as resenting him as the embodiment of the colossus of Europe.[126]

The British prime minister was the most outspoken Western critic of the Ten Points but Genscher also had difficulties with the French president. Mitterrand was shocked at being left in the dark by Kohl – especially after their intense discussions throughout November, in Bonn, Paris and Strasbourg. Kohl had even written to him at length on the 27th about the future of economic and monetary union without dropping a hint of what he would announce next day about unification. Nevertheless, biting his tongue, Mitterrand told the press in Athens where he was on a state visit, that although he expected the Four Powers to be kept in the loop by Bonn, the German desire for unity was ‘legitimate’ and that he had no intention of opposing their aspirations. What’s more, he said, he trusted the Germans to make sure that the other European peoples would not be confronted by German faits accomplis made in secret.[127]

When Mitterrand met Genscher in the Elysée Palace, their forty-five-minute encounter was polite but rather distant. Invited to speak first, Genscher highlighted his credentials as a European. He insisted that the FRG was fully committed to EC integration and willing to engage with the East. He believed that the destiny of Germany must be tied to the destiny of Europe. European reunification could not happen without German reunification. Nor did he want the dynamism of the EC’s integration process to be left behind because of the energy devoted to reshaping East–West relations. And NATO, too, should get engaged – not least because America’s presence in Europe and on German soil was an ‘existential necessity’.[128]

Mitterrand heard him out but then delivered his own lecture, expressed with mounting intensity, as he reflected on his personal odyssey through two world wars. Born in 1916 – the year of the Franco-German slaughterhouse at Verdun – Mitterrand was himself a veteran of 1940. Like any patriotic Frenchman, he had historical obsessions about Germany. But, like most of France’s post-war leadership, especially since the Adenauer–de Gaulle entente of 1963, he was deeply committed to Franco-German reconciliation, to fostering the ‘special relationship’ between Paris and Bonn and to the leading role of their two countries in European integration.[129] Although a socialist and therefore ideologically at odds with the Christian Democrat chancellor, he and Kohl had become good friends – famously standing hand in hand in 1984 at the Verdun memorial. Despite such public displays of friendship, however, Mitterrand remained ambivalent about the German state.[130]

German unity looked fine as long as it remained a distant prospect. Mitterrand had told Thatcher in September that he was less alarmed than she, not only because he believed that the EC, and specifically the single currency, would act as a restraint, but also because he did not envisage German unification happening quickly. Gorbachev, he told her confidently, would never accept a united Germany in NATO and Washington would never tolerate the FRG leaving the Alliance: ‘Alors, ne nous inquiétons pas: disons qu’elle se fera quand les Allemands le décideront, mais en sachant que les deux Grands nous en protégeront’ (‘So let’s not worry: let’s say it will happen when the Germans decide, but in the knowledge that the two superpowers will protect us from them’).[131]

But now, Mitterrand told Genscher, things had clearly moved on. With Europe in flux, old territorial questions had been awakened. One could not even rule out a return to 1913, and a world on the brink of war. It was imperative that unification, whenever it occurred, should be caught in the safety net of an even more consolidated European Community. If that integration process was disrupted he feared that the continent might return to days of alliance politics. And he made clear to Genscher that he saw Kohl as being disruptive, acting as the ‘brake’ on EMU. Up to now, he added, the Federal Republic had always been a motor in the European unification project. Now it was stalling. And if Germany and France did not see eye to eye at the Strasbourg summit in December, others would profit. Thatcher would not only block any progress on Europe but would also gang up with others against German unity.

Unlike Thatcher, Mitterrand accepted that German unity was unstoppable and, indeed, justifiable. But he insisted that this unstoppable process must be properly integrated within the EC project. ‘Europe’ not only helped absorb his ingrained suspicions of the Germans, he also felt it gave him leverage over Bonn: that was the benefit of subsuming the Deutschmark in the single currency. Whereas Thatcher, who was far more Germanophobe, had no such weapons in her armoury: she loathed the European project and abhorred a single currency. Indeed she was increasingly on the margins of European politics. Not that this worried the British prime minister. Indeed she seemed to love it when she was in a minority, convinced of her own rectitude.[132]

‘Helmut! Can we start?’ – ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’: Priorities at the European Council in Strasbourg

This was the atmosphere in which the EC leaders gathered in Strasbourg on 8–9 December. Now Kohl, not Genscher, had to face the music – and he didn’t enjoy it. As he wrote later in his memoirs, he could not remember such a ‘tense’ and ‘unfriendly’ meeting. It was like being in court.[133] Unification was on everyone’s mind. Long-standing colleagues who had appeared so trusting of the FRG’s European-ness, now seemed terrified that Bonn would go its own way – like a train that was suddenly moving faster and faster and might go in a totally different direction from what anyone had expected. Kohl felt that the room was full of questions: was he still trustworthy? Was the FRG still a reliable partner? Would the Germans remain loyal to the West? Only the leaders of Spain and Ireland embraced the idea of German unification wholeheartedly. Kohl felt Belgium and Luxembourg would not cause problems. But everyone else had their fears and did not conceal them. Giulio Andreotti of Italy openly warned of ‘pan-Germanism’; even Kohl’s fellow Christian Democrat, Ruud Lubbers of the Netherlands, could not hide his distaste for Germany’s unification ambitions.[134]

But it was Thatcher who really got under Kohl’s skin. Her hobby horse throughout the two days was ‘inviolability of borders’. She brought it up in the first working meeting, and Kohl was greatly irritated because he sensed that her target was not Poland’s western border but the divide between East and West Germany. Over dinner that evening, haggling over the wording of the summit communiqué, Thatcher even threatened to veto the whole thing if the CSCE principle of ‘inviolability of borders’ was not explicitly spelled out. Kohl again lost his temper, angrily reminding her that EC heads of government had on numerous occasions affirmed what she was now questioning: German unification through self-determination according to the Helsinki Final Act. Thatcher erupted: ‘We have beaten the Germans twice! And now they’re back again!’ Kohl bit his lip. He knew she was saying blatantly what many others around the table thought.[135]

He was particularly sensitive because he knew Thatcher and Mitterrand had held their own tête-à-tête earlier in the day. What he did not know was that during the meeting, she pulled out of her famous handbag two maps showing Germany’s borders in 1937 and 1945. She pointed to Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia: ‘They will take all of this, and Czechoslovakia.’ Mitterrand played along with her at times – for instance saying that ‘we must create special relations between France and Great Britain just as in 1913 and 1938’ – but he also stated calmly that unification could not be prevented, adding ‘we must discuss with the Germans and respect the treaties’ that had affirmed the principle of unification. But Thatcher would have none of it: ‘If Germany controls events, she will get Eastern Europe in her power, just as Japan has done in the Pacific, and that will be unacceptable from our point of view. The others must join together to avoid it.’[136]

But they didn’t. When the communiqué was published it was clear that France and Germany had stuck together, firmly committed to both monetary union and German unification. What’s more, the others who had griped were all now on board.

On monetary union, the EC 12 ignored vehement objections from Thatcher, and took a new and important step towards creating a central bank and a common currency. They agreed to call a special intergovernmental conference in December 1990 – after completing closer coordination of economic policies under the Delors Report’s stage 1, scheduled for July, and getting through the FRG elections (to satisfy Kohl). Clearly the recent upheavals in Eastern Europe had added impetus to economic integration. Mitterrand argued that the Community needed to be strengthened to face the challenge of helping the ‘emerging democracies of Eastern Europe as they move toward greater freedom and to handle the growing prospect of German reunification’. This French-led consensus left Thatcher in her familiar position as the sole opponent of accelerated integration, extending also to her refusal to sign a Community Charter of Social Rights that everyone else happily approved. Its broad endorsement of labour, welfare and other workers’ rights was supported as an important counterweight to the strongly pro-business orientation of much of the integration agenda.[137]

In a separate statement, EC leaders also formally endorsed the idea of a single German state, but they attached some conditions which were intended to ensure that German unity did not cause European instability. ‘We seek the strengthening of the state of peace in Europe in which the German people will regain its unity through free self-determination. This process should take place peacefully and democratically, in full respect of the relevant agreements and treaties and of all the principles defined by the Helsinki Final Act, in a context of dialogue and East–West cooperation. It also has to be placed in the perspective of European integration.’ In other words, Western integration and pan-European security, underwritten by the United States, were integral to any process of German unification.

The EC statement did not ignore their ‘common responsibility’ for closer cooperation with the USSR and Eastern Europe in what was called ‘this decisive phase in the history of Europe’. In particular, it stressed the EC’s determination to support economic reform in these countries. There was also an affirmation of the European Community’s future role: ‘It remains the cornerstone of a new European architecture and, in its will to openness, a mooring for a future European equilibrium.’[138]

Kohl was enormously relieved. Despite all the arguments, his Ten Point gamble had paid off. With Europe and America fully behind him,[139] it seemed that he was now free to develop Deutschlandpolitik in the way he wanted.

*

As soon as he got back to Bonn, Kohl started planning the details of his meeting with Hans Modrow in Dresden, which was scheduled for 19 December. But no West German chancellor could take anything for granted. That seemed to be the lesson of forty years of history – with the FRG always beholden to the occupying powers, always bearing the burden of the Hitler era, always edgy about its lack of sovereignty.

One worry was the French announcement on 22 November that Mitterrand would visit the GDR on 20 December. Why now? Ostensibly his trip was simply to reciprocate Honecker’s visit to Paris in January 1988 but Kohl was aggrieved that he – the most interested party – was being upstaged. At a deeper level, he felt that the French president was being two-faced – professing support for Kohl and the drive for unity yet apparently cultivating a failing state for France’s own benefit. Moreover, on 6 December Mitterrand had met Gorbachev in Kiev to talk over Germany and Eastern Europe. Getting to the GDR ahead of Mitterrand was therefore the main reason for fixing the Kohl–Modrow meeting for the day before.[140]

On 8 December, there was another bombshell. Kohl learned that the ambassadors of the Four Powers were going to meet in Berlin to discuss the current situation. And not merely in Berlin but in the Allied Kommandatura – notorious to Germans as the centre of the occupation regime of the 1940s and a venue not used since 1971 when the Quadripartite Agreement on access to the city had been signed. The Soviets, apparently taking advantage of the EC summit, called for the discussion to be held on 11 December, just three days later. Asked if Bonn would be displeased about the meeting, a senior French official retorted: ‘That is the point of holding it.’ The Kohl government was indeed furious; its anger subsided only when the Americans promised to make sure that the agenda was limited to Berlin rather than straddling the German question as a whole. On the day itself, robust diplomacy by the Americans was required to kill off this rather crude Russian ploy to give the Four Powers a formalised role in deciding the German question.[141]

Coming just a few days after Gorbachev’s explosion to Genscher, the Soviet powerplay at the Kommandatura persuaded the chancellor that he had to make a determined effort to explain his Ten Points to Gorbachev and disarm Soviet criticism. He instructed Teltschik to draft a personal letter to the Soviet leader, eventually running to eleven typescript pages laying out a very carefully constructed argument.

In it Kohl explained that his motivation for the Ten Points had been to stop reacting and running after events, and instead to begin shaping future policies. But he also insisted that his speech was couched, and must be understood, within the wider international context. He referred specifically to the ‘parallel and mutually reinforcing’ process of East–West rapprochement as evidenced at Malta, closer EC integration as agreed in Strasbourg, and the likely shifts of the existing military alliances into more political forms and what he hoped would be the evolution of the CSCE process via a follow-up conference (Helsinki II). In these various processes, the chancellor emphasised, his pathway to unity would be embedded. He added that there was no ‘strict timetable’, nor had he set out any preconditions – as Gorbachev wrongly alleged. Rather the speech gave the GDR options and presented a gradual, step-by-step approach that offered a way to weave together a multitude of political processes. Kohl then summarised the ten points in detail before stating at the end of the letter that he sought to overcome the division of both Germany and Europe ‘organically’. There was no reason, he insisted, for Gorbachev to fear any German attempts at ‘going it alone’ (Alleingänge) or ‘special paths’ (Sonderwege), nor any ‘backward-looking nationalism’. In sum, declared Kohl, ‘the future of all Germans is Europe’. He argued that they were now at a ‘historical turning point for Europe and the whole world in which political leaders would be tested as to whether and how they had cooperatively addressed the problems’. In this spirit, he proposed that the two of them should discuss the situation face-to-face, and offered to meet Gorbachev wherever he wanted.[142]

This weighty letter, however, appeared to have no effect. On 18 December, the evening before his visit to Dresden, the chancellor received a letter from Gorbachev. Kohl assumed this would be a reply but Gorbachev addressed other issues.[143] In a brusque two pages the Soviet leader referred only to the Genscher visit and reiterated the USSR’s view that the Ten Points were virtually an ‘ultimatum’. Like the GDR, he said, the Soviets viewed this approach as ‘unacceptable’ and a violation of the Helsinki accords and also of agreements made in the current year. Finally, referring to his speech to the Central Committee on 9 December, Gorbachev highlighted the GDR’s Warsaw Pact membership and East Berlin’s status as a ‘strategic ally’ of the USSR, and he asserted that the Soviet Union would do anything to ‘neutralise’ all interference in East German affairs.[144]

Having heard much of this already via Genscher, Kohl was not seriously put out. What the letter seemed to show, he felt, was that Gorbachev was under the spell of Hans Modrow’s visit to Moscow on 4–5 December. Having not himself visited East Germany since the 7 October celebrations, the Soviet leader had no first-hand feeling of the situation or the popular mood. Taking his cue from Modrow – with his talk of reformed communism, continued East German independence, and a treaty community with the FRG – perhaps the Soviet leader was anxious to demonstrate his commitment to the GDR. That, at any rate, was the most positive reading of Gorbachev’s letter. A more pessimistic take was to focus on the Kremlin leadership’s rejection of the ‘tempo and finality’ of the German–German march toward unity and Gorbachev’s evident concern for ‘the geopolitical and strategic repercussions of this process for the Soviet Union itself’.[145]

The battle of the letters strengthened Kohl’s determination to exploit the window of opportunity before Christmas – to take the measure of Modrow and, at last, to immerse himself in East Germany’s revolution. Ironically, the West German chancellor had since the fall of the Wall travelled to West Berlin, Poland, France and most recently Hungary – but not to the GDR itself. This omission was finally rectified on the morning of 19 December when Kohl, Teltschik and a small entourage from the Chancellery landed in Dresden. Foreign Minister Genscher was not on board.

Kohl was a tactile politician, with keen antennae for public moods. He may have talked with passion about German unity to the Bundestag in Bonn but – as he admitted in his memoirs – it was when he encountered the cheering crowd at Dresden airport on that icy Tuesday morning that he really got the point. ‘There were thousands of people waiting amid a sea of black, red, and gold flags,’ Kohl recalled. ‘It suddenly became clear to me: this regime is finished. Unification is coming!’ As they descended the stairs onto the tarmac, there was another telltale sign: an ashen-faced Modrow gazing up at them with a ‘strained’ expression. Kohl turned round and murmured: ‘That’s it. It’s in the bag.’[146]

The leaders of the two Germanies sat next to each other in the car as they were driven at a snail’s pace into the city. They made small talk about their upbringing: Modrow, unmoving and self-conscious, went on about his working-class background and how he had risen from being a trained locksmith to completing an economics degree at the Humboldt University in Berlin. But Kohl was not really listening. His eyes were on the crowd lining the streets. He could barely believe what he saw. Nor could Teltschik, who captured the scenes in his diary: ‘whole workforces had come out of their factories – still wearing their blue overalls, women, children, entire school classes, amazingly many young people. They were clapping, waving big white cloths, laughing, thoroughly enjoying themselves. Some were simply standing there, crying. Joy, hope, expectation radiated from their faces – but also worry, uncertainty, doubt.’ In front of the Hotel Bellevue, where the formal talks were to take place, thousands more young people had congregated shouting ‘Helmut! Helmut!’ Some held banners proclaiming ‘Keine Gewalt’ (‘No violence’).[147]

Kohl and his aides felt exhilarated. During a brief pit stop in the hotel everyone had to unburden their feelings. They knew it was a ‘great day’, a ‘historical day’, an ‘experience that cannot be repeated’. After all that, the formal meetings were something of an anticlimax. The East German premier – stressed out, eyes down – went through his party piece about the need for economic aid and the reality of two German states – none of which particularly moved Kohl. When Modrow proposed that the Germanies first create a ‘community of treaties’ and then talk about what to do next ‘in about one or two years’, Kohl was incredulous. Demanding a frank and realistic talk about cooperation, he told Modrow there was no way he was coming up with DM 15 billion, nor would he allow any money, of whatever sum, to be designated by the historically loaded term ‘Lastenausgleich’ (‘compensation’).

By the end of the forty-five minutes a shaken Modrow realised that he had to operate on Kohl’s terms. That meant dropping his demand that the Joint Declaration they were going to sign should refer to a ‘treaty community originated by two sovereign states’. The chancellor totally rejected the language of ‘two states’ because that risked cementing the status quo and propping up the mere shell of an East German state. Instead, he focused on the German people and their exercise of the right to self-determination. By now Kohl was quite clear in his mind about what East Germans wanted: a single, unified Deutschland.[148]

Who’s boss? Kohl with Modrow in Dresden

After a rather stiff lunch and a press conference with journalists, the chancellor walked to the ruins of the Frauenkirche – destroyed in the Allied firebombing in 1945. In his memoirs Kohl claimed he had spoken to the crowd spontaneously, but in fact a speech had been prepared very carefully with Teltschik the night before. Amid the blackened stones of the eighteenth-century church – which had become a ‘memorial against war’ and a prime site in 1989 for anti-regime protests – Kohl climbed on a temporary wooden podium in the darkening winter evening. He looked out at a crowd of some 10,000. Many were waving banners and placards proclaiming such slogans as ‘Kohl, Kanzler der Deutschen’ (‘Kohl, Chancellor of the Germans’), ‘Wir sind ein Volk’ (‘We are one people’) and ‘Einheit jetzt’ (‘Unity now’).[149] But, presumably, blending into the mass of people were operatives of the Stasi and the Soviet security services – maybe even the KGB’s special agent in Dresden, Vladimir Putin.

His throat tight with emotion, the chancellor began slowly, feeling the weight of expectation. He conveyed warm regards to the people of Dresden from their fellow citizens in the Federal Republic. Exultant cheers. He gestured to show he had more to say. It got very quiet. Kohl then talked about peace, self-determination and free elections. He said a bit about his meeting with Modrow and talked of future economic cooperation and the development of confederative structures, and then moved to his climax. ‘Let me also say on this square, which is so rich in history, that my goal – should the historical hour permit it – remains the unity of our nation.’ Thunderous applause. ‘And, dear friends, I know that we can achieve this goal and that the hour will come when we will work together towards it, provided that we do it with reason and sound judgement and a sense for what is possible.’

Trying to calm the surging emotions, Kohl proceeded to speak matter-of-factly about the long and difficult path to this common future, echoing lines he had used in West Berlin the day after the fall of the Wall. ‘We, the Germans, do not live alone in Europe and in the world. One look at a map will show that everything that changes here will have an effect on all of our neighbours, those in the East and those in the West … The house of Germany, our house, must be built under a European roof. That must be the goal of our policies.’ He concluded: ‘Christmas is the festival of the family and friends. Particularly now, in these days, we are beginning to see ourselves again as a German family … From here in Dresden, I send my greetings to all our compatriots in the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany … God bless our German fatherland!’

By the time Kohl ended, the people felt serene – mesmerised by the moment. No one made any move to leave the square. Then an elderly woman climbed onto the podium, embraced him and, starting to cry, said quietly: ‘We all thank you!’[150]

That night and next morning Kohl talked with Protestant and Catholic clergy from the GDR and leaders of the newly formed opposition parties.[151] All his meetings in Dresden simply proved to Kohl that the GDR elites were in denial about the desires of the broader public. The crowds in Dresden did not want a modernised GDR standing alone, as touted by the opposition, or an update of the old regime, led by Modrow and the renamed communists (PDS) in some kind of confederation with the FRG. Twenty-four hours amid the people of Dresden convinced the West German chancellor that his Ten-Point Plan was already becoming out of date. In what was now a race against time, those ‘new confederative structures’ he had been advocating were too ponderous and would take too long. The chancellor no longer had any inclination to support the Modrow government – clearly a flimsy, transitional operation that lacked any kind of democratic legitimacy and was merely trying to save a sinking ship from going under fast.[152]

Kohl could suddenly see a window of opportunity opening up in the midst of crisis. The cheers of the East German crowds spurred him on and served as the justification for dramatic action. As would-be driver of the unification train, he was now ready to move the acceleration lever up several notches. And he was also energised by the overwhelmingly positive reception in the media for his Dresden visit – both at home and abroad. The common theme next day was that a West German chancellor had laid the foundation for unification, and had done so on East German soil.[153]

Dresden was the beginning of a veritable sea change in public perceptions of Kohl. He had bonded with the people. He had addressed the East Germans repeatedly as ‘dear friends’. He had clearly relished being bathed in the adulation of the masses. The chants of ‘Helmut! Helmut!’ revealed the familiarity East Germans had suddenly come to feel for the West German leader. With all this shown live on TV in both Germanies, the chancellor and this mood of exuberant patriotism flooded into German living rooms from Berlin to Cologne, from Rostock to Munich.[154]

There were, of course, similar cheers for Willy Brandt at an SDP rally in the GDR city of Magdeburg on the same day. Hans-Dietrich Genscher was also greeted enthusiastically when he returned to East Germany to speak in his home town, Halle, and in Leipzig on 17 December.[155] But Kohl in Dresden outshone both of them by miles. Rarely had the chancellor – often the butt of ridicule as a clumsy provincial – experienced such an ecstatic reaction in his own West Germany. With national elections in the FRG now less than a year away and German unity looming as the dominant issue, Dresden was the best public-relations coup that the chancellor could have dreamed of.

Nor was there much international competition. On 19 December, the same day Kohl spoke in Dresden, Eduard Shevardnadze became the first Soviet foreign minister to enter the precincts of NATO[156] – another symbolic occasion in the endgame of the Cold War. On the 20th François Mitterrand became the first leader of the Western allies to pay an official state visit to the East German capital – another bridging moment across the crumbling Wall.[157] But both of these were almost noises off compared with Kohl’s big bang. What’s more, these initiatives were striking mainly by reference to the past, whereas the chancellor was looking to the future and everyone now knew it.[158]

What made that point transparently clear was the brief instant on 22 December – a rainy Friday afternoon just before the Christmas holiday – when Kohl and Modrow formally opened crossing points at the Brandenburg Gate. Watching the people celebrating the unity of their city, Kohl exclaimed: ‘This is one of the happiest hours of my life.’ For the chancellor at the end of that momentous year – less than a month after his Ten Point speech – Dresden and Berlin were indeed memories to savour.[159]

*

The end of 1989 was not happy for everyone, of course. As the Western world ate its Christmas dinner, TV screens were full of the final moments of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. The absolute ruler of Romania for twenty-four years and his wife were executed by soldiers of the army that, until just a few days before, he had commanded.

Romania was the last country in the Soviet bloc to experience revolutionary change. And it was the only one to suffer large-scale violence in 1989: according to official figures 1,104 people were killed and 3,352 injured.[160] Here alone tanks rolled, as in China, and firing squads took their revenge. This reflected the nature of Ceaușescu’s highly personal and arbitrary dictatorship – the most gruesome in Eastern Europe. Having gone off on his own from Moscow since the mid-1960s, Ceaușescu had also stood apart from Gorbachev’s reformist agenda and peaceful approach to change.

So why, in this repressive police state, had rebellion broken out? Unlike the rest of the bloc, Ceaușescu had managed to pay off almost all of Romania’s foreign debts – but at huge cost to his people: cutting domestic consumption so brutally that shops were left with empty shelves, homes had no heat and electricity was rationed to a few hours a day. Meanwhile, Nicolae and Elena lived in grotesque pomp.

Despite such appalling repression, their fall was triggered not by social protest but by ethnic tensions. Romania had a substantial Hungarian minority, some 2 million out of a population of 23 million, who were treated as second-class citizens. The flashpoint was the western town of Timişoara where the local pastor and human-rights activist László To˝kés was to be evicted. Over the weekend of 17–18 December some 10,000 people demonstrated in his support, shouting ‘Freedom’, ‘Romanians rise up’, ‘Down with Ceaușescu!’ The regime’s security forces (the Securitate) and army units responded with water cannons, tear gas and gunfire. Sixty unarmed civilians were killed.[161]

Protest now spread through the country as people took to the streets, emboldened by the examples of Poland, Hungary and East Germany. The regime hit back and there were lurid reports of perhaps 2,000 deaths. On 19 December, the day Kohl was in Dresden, Washington and Moscow independently condemned the ‘brutal violence’.[162]

In Bucharest, Ceaușescu, totally out of touch with reality, sought to quell the chaos through a big address to a mass crowd on 21 December, which was also relayed to his country and the world on television. But his show of defiance was hollow. On the balcony of the presidential palace, the great dictator, now seventy-one, looked old, frail, perplexed, rattled – indeed suddenly fallible. Sensing this, the crowd interrupted his halting speech with catcalls, boos and whistles – at one point silencing him for three minutes. The spell had clearly been broken. As soldiers and even some of the Securitate men fraternised with the protestors in the streets, the regime began to implode. Next morning the Ceaușescus were whisked away from the palace roof by helicopter, but they were soon caught, tried by a kangaroo court and shot – or rather, mown down in a fusillade of more than a hundred bullets. Their blood-soaked bodies were then displayed to the eager cameramen.[163]

But Romania was 1989’s exception. Everywhere else, regime change had occurred in a remarkably peaceful way. In neighbouring Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov – who boasted thirty-five years in power, longer than anyone else in the bloc – had been toppled on 10 November. Yet the world hardly seemed to notice because the media was mesmerised by the fall of the Wall the night before. In any case, this was simply a palace coup: Zhivkov was replaced by his foreign minister Petar Mladenov. It was only gradually that people power made itself felt. The first street demonstrations in the capital, Sofia, began more than a week later on 18 November, with demands for democracy and free elections. On 7 December, the disparate opposition groups congealed as the so-called Union of Democratic Forces. Under pressure, the authorities decided to make further concessions: Mladenov announced on the 11th that the Communist Party would abandon its monopoly on power and multiparty elections would be held the following spring. Yet the sudden ousting of Zhivkov did not produce any fundamental transfer of power to the people, as in Poland, or a radical reform programme, as in Hungary. Hence the preferred Bulgarian term for 1989: ‘The Change’ (promianata). In a few weeks, the veritable dinosaur of the Warsaw Pact had been quietly consigned to history.[164]

Most emblematic of the national revolutions of 1989 was Czechoslovakia. The Czechs witnessed the GDR’s collapse first-hand, as the candy-coloured Trabis chugged through their countryside and the refugees flooded into Prague.

Driving to freedom: Trabis in Czechoslovakia

But their own communist elite had an uncompromisingly hardline reputation and so change came late to Czechoslovakia. Indeed, Miloš Jakeš, the party leader, had rejected any moves for reform from above, as in Hungary and Poland. Yet there was context. Memories of 1968 – only two decades earlier – were still vivid and painful. But then they were galvanised by the scenes at the Berlin Wall on 9–10 November. A week later, on the 17th, the commemoration for a Czech student murdered by the Nazis fifty years before, rapidly escalated into a demonstration against the regime which the police broke up with force. This was the spark. Every day for the next week, the student protests mushroomed – drawing in intellectuals, dissidents and workers and spreading across the country. By the 19th the opposition groups in Prague had formed a ‘Civic Forum’ (in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, the movement was called ‘Public against Violence’) and by the 24th they were in talks with the communist government – which was now dominated by moderates after the old guard around Jakeš had resigned. The two key opposition figures – each in his own way deeply symbolic – were the writer Václav Havel, recently released from imprisonment for dissident activities as a key member of the Charter 77 organisation – and the Slovak Alexander Dubček, leader of the Prague Spring in 1968. The formal round-table negotiations took place on 8 and 9 December. The following day President Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-communis government in Czechoslovakia since 1948, and then stepped down.[165]

The pace of change had been breathtaking. On the evening of 23 November Timothy Garton Ash – who had witnessed Poland’s upheavals in June and then the start of Czechoslovakia’s revolution – was chatting to Havel over a beer in the basement of Havel’s favourite pub. The British journalist joked: ‘In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks; perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!’ Havel grasped his hand, smiling that famous winning smile, summoned a video team who happened to be drinking in the corner, and asked Garton Ash to say it again, on camera. ‘It would be fabulous, if it could be so,’ sighed Havel.[166] His scepticism was not unwarranted. Admittedly the revolution took twenty-four days not ten, but on 29 December Václav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly in the hallowed halls of Prague Castle.

The playwright becomes president: Václav Havel and the Velvet Revolution in Prague

Although this was for the moment a transitional government – free elections would not be held until June 1990 – the transformation was truly profound. This had been a ‘Velvet Revolution’: smooth and swift, on occasion even merry. By comparison with Poland, Hungary and GDR, opposition politics in Prague had been improvised by amateurs – but they had been able to learn from the mistakes of the others, as well as from their successes. And what’s more, revolution in Czechoslovakia came without the pain of deepening economic crisis, with which the new governments in Warsaw and Budapest had to grapple. And so by the New Year, Czechoslovakia found itself firmly on the road towards political democracy and a market economy.[167]

So much had changed in only two months. At the start of November 1989, it was still possible in Eastern Europe to imagine a future for communism, albeit in a reformed state. But within weeks no one could doubt that it was in irreversible decline. And by the end of the year ‘those who had come too late’, as Gorbachev put it in East Berlin, had most certainly been punished (Ceaușescu, Zhivkov and Honecker), while those who had never let themselves be silenced (notably Havel and Mazowiecki) had now replaced the leaders they previously denounced.

The fact that Gorbachev presided over these variegated national exits from communism without intervening also allowed Kohl more leeway and gave hope for his mission in 1990: to bring the two Germanies closer to unity. The chancellor set the tone in his New Year message, expressing the aspiration that the coming decade would be ‘the happiest of this century’ for his people – offering ‘the chance of a free and united Germany in a free and united Europe’. That, he said, ‘depended critically on our contribution’. In other words, he was reminding his fellow Germans – so long weighed down by the burden of the past – that they had now been given the opportunity to shape the future.[168]

But the new architecture could not be constructed by Germans alone. With the communist glacier in retreat – indeed melting before one’s eyes – and the ascendant Western Europe opening out, the stark, two-bloc structure of Cold War Europe had cracked asunder. The pieces would now have to be put together in a new mosaic and this would require not merely the consent but also the creative engagement of the superpowers.

In other words, Kohl might have had his problems with Mitterrand and especially Thatcher, but they were mere stumbling blocks. When it came to building a new order around a unifying Germany, this could be achieved only by working with Bush and Gorbachev. Yet both these leaders were deeply preoccupied in late 1989 with their own problems: how belatedly, to create an effective personal rapport after their slow, at times frosty, start. And, more than that, how to manage the delicate business of moving beyond the Cold War in the heart of Europe.