While these arguments betrayed a good measure of strategic amnesia, Berlin partisans had a point when they charged that the willful forgetting inherent in the opposition to the old capital was especially egregious. As historian Heinrich Winkler (who himself moved to Berlin to take a position at the Humboldt University) cogently stated: “Having their capital, in the full sense of the word, in Berlin would remind the Germans of a past which many people in Bonn prefer to envisage as an invention of the historians. For them, moreover, the ability to identify all historical transgressions with Berlin has always been conveniently exculpatory. . . . This method of detoxifying the German past would be harder to manage if Berlin were the capital.”
The Bundestag decided to hold a vote on the capital question on June 20, 1991. The outcome was anyone’s guess because the new nation’s political class was as deeply divided on this issue as were the chattering classes in academia and the media. The CDU and CSU (Christian Social Union) leaned toward Bonn; the SPD was split down the middle; the FDP preferred Berlin, though not decisively; the Bündnis 90/Greens favored the Spree city, as did the PDS. The so-called Unity Treaty that had been drawn up in July 1990 contained no commitment on the future seat of government because the negotiators feared that a decision one way or the other could jeopardize passage of the treaty. The document merely stated: “The capital of Germany is Berlin. The question of the seat of government and parliament will be decided after the completion of unity.”
Chancellor Kohl, who had been so decisive on the issue of German unification, proved, at least in the early phase of the debate, frustratingly indecisive on the seat-of-government question. For many months he said relatively little on the subject, leaving the nation to wonder on which side he would ultimately throw his formidable political weight. The Bonn contingent chose to believe that the chancellor was in its camp. This seemed a reasonable assumption, since Kohl’s whole political career had been shaped by the “Bonn Republic,” and he considered himself an heir of Adenauer. Although he lacked the old man’s legendary hatred of Berlin, he, like so many West German conservatives, worried about the old capital’s unruliness and leftist proclivities, of which he had gotten a powerful dose during his visit to the city following the Wall’s initial opening. Moreover, he had the typical small-town German’s horror of pulling up roots and moving to a new place, with all the “trauma” of buying a new house, finding a new school for the kids, making new friends, and—most wrenching of all—settling on a new
While Kohl worked quietly behind the scenes for Berlin, President Richard von Weizsäcker came out openly and passionately for his native city. He had grown increasingly frustrated with CDU-backed suggestions that his own office, the largely ceremonial federal presidency, should represent the central government in Berlin while the chancellor’s office, ministries, and parliament remained in Bonn. He wrote a memo to Kohl saying, “One thing must be absolutely clear: the presidency cannot serve as decoration for a so-called capital from which all the other governmental agencies are missing.” Not satisfied that he had gotten his point across, Weizsäcker used a ceremony in the Nikolaikirche naming him as newly united Berlin’s first “honorary citizen” to push the old capital’s cause. “Only in Berlin do we come from both sides but truly stand as one,” he declaimed. Berliners, he went on, best understood what unification demanded because they had experienced the division more intensely than anyone else. “Here [in Berlin] is the place for a politically responsible leadership of Germany,” he declared.
