Germany: Rigmarole

The world at large is not in the habit of regarding the German question as a laughing matter. The pundits view it with the utmost gravity; they can, of course, draw on abundant evidence from the past to justify their alarm. It is not for me to quarrel with their pronouncements, but what they fail to see is the ludicrous side of German events. I should like to redress the balance. Granted that the opening of the Berlin Wall was a moment of high drama, but the consequences turned into low comedy almost overnight.

In itself, absurdity is hardly a newcomer on the German political scene. For the better part of 30 years, unification had been an article not of faith but of cant. Nobody took it seriously, nobody believed in it, and in the West at least, there was hardly anyone who really wanted it. One Chancellor after another talked about it absentmindedly, rather like an old lady reciting her Rosary, a performance that became even more embarrassing when the red carpet was rolled out during Erich Honecker’s state visit in Bonn in 1987.

As soon as ordinary people from Dresden and Potsdam, wearing tennis shoes and loaded with plastic bags and perambulators, were seen hobbling through the underbrush across the Hungarian border in the fall of 1989, crowding embassies in Warsaw and trains in Prague, there were raised eyebrows and mixed feelings in Bonn and elsewhere. For there is nothing dearer to the heart of responsible statesmen than stability. Yalta may have had certain drawbacks, but it was an arrangement one had learned to live with — and in the end any situation seemed acceptable as long as it was “under control.” Was it not a bit inconsiderate on the part of all those Poles, Hungarians and Czechs, of Charter 77 and all, to rock the boat? And now even the placid, nondescript East Germans were taking to the streets, without giving a thought to the delicate balance of power prevailing in the Old World, to the problems of NATO, to the risk involved in any sort of change.

The nervous fiddling in Bonn was nothing compared with the havoc wrought in East Berlin. In hindsight it is clear that the fall of the Berlin Wall was due not to strategic planning, but to a sudden loss of nerve. A single ambiguous sentence uttered at a press conference, a mere slip of the tongue, was enough to start an avalanche. The unification of Germany was set off not by grand design but by a blunder.

The political leaders on both sides were caught off guard. While the “masses” did not lose a moment, organizing a sort of national jumble sale, changing money, swapping rumors, pulling down fences and repairing bridges, the statesmen scurried from summit to summit, looking more and more nonplussed as they poured forth a torrent of declarations, cautionary tales and contingency plans.

When they finally came round to understand that they were faced with a fait * accompli, they swallowed their misgivings and tried to regain control. This turned out to be rather difficult, for by now not only East Germany but half a continent was out of hand. It would have taken a nimble man indeed to handle a problem of such dimensions. Whatever else may be said about Helmut Kohl, he is not known to have a light foot.

When he saw the night of revelry round the Brandenburg Gate and the flag- waving crowds in Dresden, he decided that the time was ripe for him to make History. Blinded by the vision of enthusiastic voters carrying him on their shoulders, he decided to forge ahead — never mind the bickering of the Poles, the reluctance of the Soviets and the suspicions of the rest of the world. Kohl was not to be ruffled by the specter of a Fourth Reich evoked by foreign or domestic critics who accused him of jingoism, and for a few weeks he enjoyed one historic moment after another and put on more and more weight.

But very soon the euphoria subsided and the outlook palled. From the very start there had been portents that had escaped the West German government’s notice: a conspicuous absence of rousing meetings in the streets of Frankfurt and Cologne, a strange lack of passion, a suspicion of second thoughts. No amount of force-feeding on the part of the media had managed to intoxicate the West German populace. Faced with a flood of newcomers from the East, it began to worry about the cost of unity, about jobs, housing problems and rising interest rates. In the opinion polls, more than two-thirds complained about the excessive haste of unification.

And such pedestrian sentiments were fully reciprocated by a growing part of opinion in East Germany. Citizens there, used to safe and easy jobs, subsidized rents and cheap food, began to panic about the pitfalls of capitalism. They also resented the idea that the fruits of 40 years’ labor had proved to be rotten and that East Germans would continue to be, for years to come, the poor relatives of their Western counterparts.

Irritation on both sides erupted in a bout of frenzied haggling about the rate at which the flimsy East German currency, popularly known as aluminum chips, would be exchanged against the bullish deutsche mark. In the event, both sides felt vaguely cheated. The day after an agreement was finally signed, a Munich paper ran the headline, A NICE START: EAST GERMAN GOVERNMENT SWINDLING US FOR 7.5 BILLION!

It looks as if Kohl’s Great Historic Moment has been rather brief. A bit of schadenfreude may be in order, though the entertainment value of our family squabble is in rapid decline. The truth of the matter is that the Germans have acquired a normality bordering on the tedious. They have become a nation of successful shopkeepers, incapable of a greatness that the world, in any case, is better off without.