Berlin полностью

The prospect of One German Volk was not uniformly welcomed by the powers that had defeated Germany in 1945 and presided over its division. After all, as the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper had noted in June 1989, the “delicate balance of Europe” was based precisely on that division. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher reportedly observed the events in Germany with great “unease.” She worried that a united Germany would be “much too large and powerful” for its own good, and, more importantly, for the good of its neighbors. French president François Mitterrand was equally discomforted by the thought of a united Germany. His stance reflected France’s traditional distrust of its eastern neighbor, a wariness best summed up in François Mauriac’s famous aperçu that the French loved Germany so much that they were glad there were two of them. Following the Wall’s collapse, Mitterrand did all he could to thwart or delay the drive for German unification. He warned Foreign Minister Genscher that German unity might plunge Europe into a chaotic maelstrom reminiscent of 1913/14. In December 1989 he visited Moscow to enlist Gorbachev’s help in keeping the Germans in their place. Gorbachev needed no French prodding: as soon as the Berlin Wall was breached he urged Chancellor Kohl not to do anything that might undercut the GDR government’s efforts to stay alive through reforms and economic renewal. This process would take “much time,” he cautioned.

Among the major foreign leaders whom Kohl consulted at that moment, only American president George Bush proved unambiguously positive about the developments in Germany. Like most Americans, he did not harbor that deep distrust of Germany that was second nature to many Western Europeans, Russians, and Poles. As he later wrote in his memoir, A World Transformed: “I was, of course, mindful of Germany’s history of aggression, but I knew the country had done a lot to live down its Nazi past, to compensate for the horrors it had inflicted on Jews and others across Europe. . . . I did not believe that all present-day Germans should have to pay forever for what some of their countrymen had done in the past.” Bush saw immediately that German unification might bring a strategic advantage to the West, namely, a shift of NATO’s operational area significantly closer to the Soviet Union. When Kohl called him right after the Wall came down, Bush wished him “much luck and God’s blessing.”

Kohl knew that he would need all the luck he could get in the coming months. He was worried that unification might be hard to control given the “hereditary burden” with which the SED had saddled East Germany. He suggested privately that Germany would be best off if unification did not come until the end of the century. At the same time, however, he believed that certain intermediary steps might be initiated toward a kind of quasi unification. Taking up a proposal from Modrow for a “contractual community” between the two Germanys, Kohl put before the Bundestag on November 28 a Ten-Point Program calling for “confederative structures between the two states in Germany with a view to creating a federation.” This step, his program stipulated, should be taken only after a democratic government had been freely elected in the GDR. Point Ten of the program looked toward German unification, but the timing was left vague: “With this comprehensive policy we are working for a state of peace in Europe in which the German nation can recover its unity in free self-determination. Reunification—that is regaining national unity—remains the political goal of the Federal government.”

Its cautious language notwithstanding, Kohl’s Ten-Point Program caused a tremendous sensation. Most of Germany’s partners thought that the chancellor was moving much too fast. Thatcher and Mitterrand were apoplectic. German unification, announced the Iron Lady, was “not on the agenda.” Gorbachev, who had just accused America’s ambassador to Bonn of “acting like a German gauleiter” for having openly embraced German unification, now told a group of Russian students: “There are two German states. History saw to that. And this fact is generally accepted by the world community. . . . That is the reality, and we must work on the basis of that reality. . . . I do not think that the question of the reunification of these states is currently a pressing political question.” President Bush, once again, did not echo the naysayers. Determined to bolster Kohl’s position, he professed himself quite satisfied with the latter’s initiative. “I feel comfortable,” he told the chancellor. “I think we’re on track.”