invitation to attend a ceremony to mark the re-opening of the Brandenburg Gate, and tried to convince Soviet leaders that, as traditional allies, France and Russia had a common interest in blocking German ambitions. Indeed, the French were banking on Gorbachev to veto German unity—as Mitterrand explained to his advisers on November 28th 1989, ‘I don’t have to do anything to stop it, the Soviets will do it for me. They will never allow this greater Germany just opposite them.’
But once it became clear that this was not so—and following Kohl’s decisive victory in the East German elections—the French President adopted a different tack. The Germans could have their unity, but at a price. There must be no question of an enhanced Germany taking an independent path, much less reverting to its old middle- European priorities. Kohl must commit himself to pursuing the European project under a Franco-German condominium, and Germany was to be bound into an ‘ever-closer’ union—whose terms, notably a common European currency, would be enshrined in a new treaty (to be negotiated the following year in the Dutch city of Maastricht).[317]
The Germans agreed readily enough to all the French conditions (though the maladroit character of France’s diplomatic maneuvers chilled relations for a while)—an echo of earlier days, when Bonn agreed after 1955 to confine ‘Europe’ to the original six countries in order to assuage French anxiety over the restoration of full sovereignty to Germany. Kohl even concurred in the coming months over a range of minor concessions designed to reward Paris for its forbearance.[318] Unification was well worth some appeasement of Germany’s nervous European neighbours. In any case Kohl—born in Ludwigshafen and like his fellow Rhinelander Adenauer instinctively disposed to look west—was not unduly troubled at the idea of tying Germany ever more closely to the European Community.
But most important of all, the German Chancellor had the wind in his sails, as any contemporary photograph of him will confirm: German unification had the full backing of the United States. Like everyone else, the administration of President George Bush initially supposed along with its allies that German unification could only come at the end of the series of unpredictable changes unfolding in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and then only with Soviet consent. But Washington was quicker to catch the prevailing mood, especially after a February 1990 poll showed that 58 percent of West Germans favored a united and
The US thus committed itself wholeheartedly to support for Kohl’s objectives, to ensure that Germans were never required to choose between unity and the Western alliance. Under pressure from Washington, the French and British accordingly agreed to sit down with the Soviet Union and representatives of the two Germanies and thrash out the terms of the emergence of a new Germany. These so-called ‘4+2’ talks, conducted by foreign ministers from February to September 1990, culminated in a Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, signed in Moscow on September 12th.
With this treaty, which formally recognized the borders of a future Germany as those of the two present German states, the four-power status of Berlin was brought to an end, expiring at midnight on October 2nd 1990. The Soviet Union agreed to allow a united Germany to remain in NATO, and terms were reached for the withdrawal of the Red Army and the departure of all foreign troops from Berlin (to be completed four years hence, after which only a small complement of NATO troops would remain on German soil).
Why did Mikhail Gorbachev so readily allow German unification to go forward? For decades the Soviet Union’s primary strategic objective had been to maintain the territorial
Gorbachev, like everyone else in 1990, was flying blind. No-one, in East or West, had a plan telling them what to do if the GDR disintegrated; and there were no blueprints for German unification. But the Soviet leader, unlike his western counterparts, had no good options. He could not realistically hope to prevent German unity except by reversing his benign public announcements of recent years and seriously damaging his own credibility. He did initially oppose the absorption of a united Germany into NATO; and even after conceding the point in principle[319] continued to insist that NATO troops not be allowed to move 300 kilometers east to the Polish border—something US Secretary of State James Baker actually promised to his Soviet counterpart in February 1990. But when that promise was later broken Gorbachev was helpless to intervene.
What he
Having secured the best terms it could, Moscow agreed to abandon the GDR. Playing Sidney Greenstreet to Washington’s Bogart, the Soviet Union made the best of a bad hand and relinquished its diminutive, resentful East German sidekick with the requisite protestation but few real regrets. It made more sense to build a strategic relationship with a friendly and appreciative new Germany than to make an enemy of it, and from the Soviet perspective a united Germany, firmly grasped—and contained—in the Western embrace, was not such a bad outcome.
The GDR was not much loved. But it did not pass entirely unlamented. In addition to West German intellectuals like Gunter Grass and Jurgen Habermas who feared for the soul of a reunited ‘greater’ Germany,[320] many East Germans who had known no other homeland had mixed feelings when ‘their’ Germany was swept away from under them. Two generations had grown up in the GDR. They might not have believed its more egregiously absurd self-descriptions, but they could not be entirely deaf to official propaganda. We should not be surprised to learn that long after 1989 children in eastern German secondary schools continued to believe that East German troops had fought alongside the Red Army to liberate their country from Hitler.
This inculcated misperception was part of the GDR’s core identity and did nothing to ease its disoriented former citizens’ transition ‘back’ into Germany, particularly as ‘their’ Germany was systematically excised from the official record. The names of towns, streets, buildings and counties were changed, often reverting to pre-1933 usage. Rituals and memorials were restored. This was not the recovery of history, however, but rather its erasure—it was as though the GDR had never been. When Erich Mielke was prosecuted and sentenced for murder it was not for crimes he authorized as head of the Stasi but rather for a political assassination committed in the 1930s, the evidence provided by Nazi interrogation records.
Rather than engage the GDR’s troubled history, in other words, its former subjects were encouraged to forget it—an ironic replay of West Germany’s own age of forgetting in the Fifties. And as in the early years of the Federal Republic, so after 1989: prosperity was to be the answer. Germany would buy its way out of history. To be sure, the GDR was a decidedly suitable case for treatment. It was not just its institutions that were falling apart— much of its material infrastructure was decrepit. Two dwellings in five were built before 1914 (in West Germany in 1989 the figure was less than one in five); a quarter of all houses lacked a bath, one third had only an outdoor toilet, and more than 60 percent lacked any form of central heating.
As in its dealings with Moscow, Bonn’s response was to throw very large sums of money at the problem. In the three years following unification total transfers from Western into Eastern Germany amounted to the equivalent of 1,200 billion euros; by the end of 2003 the cost of absorbing the former GDR had reached 1.2
