Weizsäcker was preaching to the choir on this occasion: the Nikolaikirche in Berlin was a far cry from the “Water Works” parliament in Bonn. On the eve of the parliamentary vote, Berlin’s Mayor Diepgen pronounced himself “cautiously optimistic.” He added, however, that if the vote went against Berlin the city would know how to “shape its own destiny, as it always has in the past.” (Berlin in fact had never shaped its destiny without outside help.) Diepgen was placing his faith in the persuasive powers of Helmut Kohl, who, after having frustrated the mayor with his fence-sitting, promised to speak out in favor of Berlin.
As it happened, the chancellor did speak out for Berlin once the Bundestag debate got underway, but his speech was more folksy than forceful. He told how he had personally come to understand that Berlin was the “obvious capital,” and he said that the government’s move there offered the best hope for the rapid economic recovery of the east. The key speaker for the Berlin cause turned out not to be Kohl but his CDU colleague Wolfgang Schäuble. Although confined to a wheelchair as a result of injuries sustained in an assassination attempt, Schäuble had managed to get himself anointed “crown prince,” the conservatives’ best bet to replace old King Kohl once he finally vacated the throne. Now, in his Bundestag speech, Schäuble acted as if he already were the chancellor. He told his colleagues that the question they had to decide was not so much about jobs, moving costs, or regional power, but “the future of Germany.” He reminded the delegates that they represented “the whole of Germany” in addition to their specific constituencies. Having found their country suddenly thrust back together, their task now was “to complete that unity.” Yet it was not, he went on, only German unity that was at stake here, but the unity of Europe. Just as Germany meant more than West Germany, Europe meant more than Western Europe. Germany had managed to overcome its division because Europe also wished to be united. Therefore, a decision for Berlin amounted also to a decision to “overcome the division of Europe.” Schäuble’s appeal was so passionately put that a number of delegates later claimed that it was the decisive factor in the final vote.
Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin when the Wall went up, also spoke forcefully about Berlin’s mission now that the city was reunited. He too admonished his colleagues not to be guided by narrow considerations like personal comforts and moving costs when the demand of the hour was “to show solidarity with the east.” He then went for the Bonners’ jugular with a pointed historical comparison. Would anyone have expected France, he asked, to keep its government in idyllic Vichy once the end of foreign control over Paris allowed a return to the Seine? Not surprisingly, the implication that Bonn was Germany’s Vichy inspired howls of protest from the Bonner, and even from Kohl. Undaunted, Brandt went on to belittle the Bonn contingent’s proposal for a division of labor in which Berlin would remain Germany’s “symbolic capital” while Bonn kept the real power. Germany, he said acidly, did not need “a separate capital for cocktail receptions.” The old capital, having stood “as an outpost of freedom through difficult times,” surely deserved more than “an honorary title devoid of real content.”
Another eloquent appeal for Berlin came from the East German politician Wolfgang Thierse (SPD). The choice the Bundestag faced, he said, was “not between two cities.” The deeper issue involved “the future social and political development of Germany,” whose “completed unity” could be decisively advanced through a move to Berlin. At stake also was the relationship between east and west in Germany, the identity of the unified German state, Germany’s relationship to its own history, and finally, Germany’s understanding of the meaning of Europe.
