Berlin полностью

The Two-Plus-Four Treaty took effect on October 3, 1990, which Germany henceforth celebrated as its “Day of Unity.” Significantly, the main ceremony was held in Berlin, Germany’s once (and, as it would turn out, future) capital. The occasion was marked by restraint rather than hubris—a far cry from the triumphal scene in Versailles in 1871. Speakers at a gathering in the Philharmonie promised that a new Germany would not mean a new German nationalism. The official declaration of unity was issued at midnight at the Reichstag, a fitting choice given that building’s weighty symbolism.

On December 2, 1990, Berliners elected the first unified city council since 1946. The results called into question the degree to which the city was really unified. The CDU won 47.8 percent of the vote in the west but only 24.3 percent in the east, giving it an overall total of 40.4. By contrast, the PDS garnered 24.8 percent in the east and a measly 1.3 percent in the west. Because of the PDS’s strong showing in the east, the SPD did not win enough there to overcome the CDU’s dominance in the more populous west; its overall total was 30.4. West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper (SPD), who had fervently hoped to become reunified Berlin’s first chief executive, had to step aside for the GDU leader Eberhard Diepgen. As he took office, Diepgen promised a bright future for Berlin, but the stark division revealed by the electoral result constituted a danger sign. The new mayor also faced the difficult task of convincing Bonn to retain Berlin’s generous federal subsidies now that the city was no longer a lonely outpost of Western democracy. As Momper put the matter: “Now he [Diepgen] has to bring us the bacon from Bonn, or he won’t be able to fulfill the people’s expectations.”

Capital Question

The most contentious domestic issue raised by the unification of Germany involved the location of the new nation’s seat of government. Should the principal power base remain in Bonn or move to Berlin? Berlin had always been the national capital in principle—Bonn being just a stand-in pending reunification—but, as everyone knew, the real capital was where the government was. Technically, the seat-of-government/capital question should not have come up at all, for according to an early parliamentary resolution governmental power was supposed to return to Berlin once political conditions permitted. A Bundestag resolution of November 3, 1949, which confirmed Bonn as West Germany’s provisional capital, declared: “The leading organs of government will shift their seat of operations to the capital of Germany, Berlin, as soon as free, equal, and direct elections are held throughout Berlin and in the Soviet Occupation Zone.” Throughout the period of division, leading West German politicians paid lip service to this goal of “returning to Berlin.” The fact of the matter, however, was that many West Germans had become content with Bonn as their seat of government and had no desire to see Berlin retrieve its earlier status. Bonn had brought safety and prosperity, they said; Berlin as national capital had brought nothing but war and misery. The “Bonner” were quite prepared to ignore the Bundestag’s Berlin resolutions, or, if necessary, to pass a new law enshrining the Rhine city as united Germany’s permanent capital. The pro-Berlin faction had most East Germans on its side, but the citizens of the “new states” had relatively little clout in the new Germany. If Berlin was indeed to become united Germany’s principal power base, its partisans would have to triumph once again over a host of resentments and negative images attached to the Spree metropolis.

The debate over Bonn versus Berlin commenced shortly after the Wall came down and reached a dramatic climax in a historic Bundestag vote in the summer of 1991. Because the issue was seen as crucial to the nature and direction of the new nation, it galvanized the entire populace, becoming fodder for heated discussions in living rooms, university lecture halls, factory cafeterias, and newspapers across the country. Noted scholars did their best to put the matter in historical perspective. Advocates on both sides battled for the moral high ground, sometimes concealing lower motives such as economic interest and political advantage. (Pro-Bonn parliamentarians, for example, tended not to mention that their personal property holdings would probably lose value if the government moved to Berlin.) Although the debate had a partisan aspect from the beginning, the major parties ultimately split along regional and internal ideological lines. Old allies parted ways and new combinations emerged among some of the strangest political bedfellows in modern German history.