Germany Neither East Nor West
Szamuely, George
George Szamuely GERMANY NEITHER EAST NOR WEST Reunification has left the Germans crabby, cowardly, and conveniently anti-Communist. Berlin Since last summer, the world media have been...
...Another risk to German security comes from the amalgamation of the two armies, in which the West German Bundeswehr has absorbed 50,000 soldiers from the East German Volksarmee...
...Grass's essential frivolity has by now consigned him to the margins of the debate...
...The FRG has been the world's largest exporter, with $324 billion in exports in 1988, compared to Japan's $265 billion...
...From the fall of the Berlin Wall until the October 3 elections, they were in the safekeeping of the East German ministry of interior...
...According to its constitution, Germany may not have nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, or station troops outside NATO areas...
...As far as they are concerned, the past is another country...
...His predecessor Markus Wolf, meanwhile, had disappeared and was apparently living in Moscow, though the German government claims it does not know his whereabouts...
...This is not to deny that the cost of rectifying forty years of Communist mismanagement will be staggering...
...The nightmarish accounts of life in East Germany belie the chancellor's optimism...
...Will informers then be liable to prosecution...
...The idea was to ensure that the tens of thousands of East German spies stationed in West Germany would seize the opportunity to come forward, rather than go to work for new masters, chiefly the KGB...
...Liberals will inform you that the much-lauded daycare system was a manifestation of an impoverished society in which married women had no choice but to work to make ends meet...
...I am full of respect for the officers who tell me they cannot forget their lives of the last thirty years, that they do not want to serve in the Bundeswehr, that they will leave the army...
...We have never been an anti-Communist magazine," says Hoyng, "but the ease with which we now use terms like `Stalinist,' `old-guard Stalinist,' and hard-line Stalinist' worries me a bit...
...asks Hans Hoyng, deputy foreign editor of Der Spiegel "Even in my magazine . . . you What happened last year was not the way reunification was supposed to have come about...
...Obviously they were acting in violation of West German law...
...No attempt has been made to extradite Wolf, it is explained, because any trial would be political in nature...
...True, but at least West German women could travel to the Netherlands and make use of the abortion clinics there, and not have to risk being butchered by inferior doctors...
...But why should East Germany come to West Germany...
...The Hallstein Doctrine (according to which West Germany would break diplomatic relations with any state that recognized East Germany) was abandoned...
...A great nation's period in purgatory is over...
...A visitor to Germany will be struck by the frequency of the complaints about unification...
...As if the prospect of a free market were not sufficiently chilling, there is always Auschwitz, which "makes a future unified German state impossible...
...The debate is painfully reminiscent of the one conducted in postwar West Germany...
...Whether the new Germany will look west or east is anybody's guess...
...In fact, a reckoning is already taking place...
...It seems questionable that much of a case exists against either man...
...But a socialist confederation of Germany just might be...
...This unease involves more than the relatively simple matter of tax increases or higher interest rates to check the inflationary pressures arising from the costs of reunification...
...as they do when the Federal government tries to get rid of GDR judges still sitting on the bench or party hacks still teaching in the universities...
...The SPD, once the party of reunification, boasting of its special relationship with the East German Communists, now vents its fury at the appallingly low moral caliber of the citizens of East Germany...
...Everyone agrees that at least the perpetrators of these murders should be put on trial...
...The most obvious were the most spectacular: the shooting of people trying to escape to the West...
...Its leaders like to contrast the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats of Fast Germany...
...Like Mondale before him, he proclaimed that his victorious opponent would do the same thing, even if he refused to admit it...
...After the collapse of their system, one has to wonder whether what we wrote was okay...
...Although these issues are under discussion in other formerly Communist regimes, there are differences...
...Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, a group of East German writers published a statement "Fur Unser Land," rejecting reunification and expressing commitment to the "humane values" of an East Germany shorn of its Stalinist trimmings...
...But the fury with which her erstwhile liberal admirers turned on her came as a profound shock...
...Most of the rest spiedon their neighbors...
...Even Kohl was wary of dealing with the East German Christian Democrats at first, preferring the Demokratischer Aufbruch, which, like the Neues Forum, Bundnis 90, and other parties that emerged in the autumn of 1989, quickly faded into insignificance...
...Not once did he declare that some things are worth paying for...
...There has to be some sort of reckoning with 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 the past—not just that of the East, but that of the West as well...
...Some will tell you that East and West Germany had acquired different national characteristics over the last forty years, and that the two should not have been united until the citizens of each state got better acquainted with one another...
...asks Hans Hoyng of Der Spiegel...
...In Stavropol last July, Helmut Kohl—head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and now chancellor of the entire nation—pledged that a united Germany would have armed forces of no more than 370,000 men...
...To some extent she was a victim of the system, but to some extent even Goebbels was a victim of the system," says Detlef Kuhn...
...You would not have read, 'Honecker, the Stalinist' two years ago, neither in Stern, nor in Der Spiegel, nor in much of the general press...
...Then why not hire former members of the Stasi to work for the Federal Republic's intelligence services...
...She was criticized for her lack of daring in comparison with, say, Vaclav Havel...
...Yet the evidence is to the contrary...
...German capitalists are no more eager than their American or British counterparts to make bad investments...
...Needless to say, not all of Eastern Europe is a secure market for German manufactured goods...
...Older people, though of course happy at reunification, claim to take even greater pleasure at seeing young people greet the long-awaitedevent with barely stifled yawns...
...The East Germans are lazy and unable to do anything until someone issues them a command...
...The publishers of Wolf's memoirs, Bertelsmann, canceled the book upon the issuance of a warrant for his arrest on the grounds that Wolf had led them to believe he would not be prosecuted...
...Will it be DM100 billion...
...That West Germans from left to right were falling over themselves to curry favor with Honecker when he made his triumphal state visit in 1987 is already ancient history...
...In February 1990, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that West Berlin mayor Walter Momper favored not reunification but a "democratization" of East Germany that would allow it to retain its Eigenstaatlichkeit, or individual character...
...Wolf, an East German novelist, was a self-proclaimed socialist and a member of the SED who had built up a following of sorts in the West...
...W hat will become of the factories producing goods no one wants to buy...
...When Kohl put forward his ten-point plan to reunite the nation shortly after the opening of the Berlin Wall, he envisaged a fifteen-year process, but even this not particularly daring program elicited widespread protest in West Germany...
...His observation is not as astonishing as it might sound...
...West German counterintelligence sources believe that KGB espionage is on the rise...
...Even those who have emerged in free elections will declare that informing was a way of life in East Germany, that if you did not cooperate you would lose your apartment, your job, your child's place in the university...
...Until a year ago, neither conservatives nor liberals nor social democrats did very much for the unification of Germany," says Detlef Kan, president of a West German think-tank that used to specialize in studying the institutions of East Germany...
...This is the source of the distinct lack of enthusiasm displayed by Lafontaine and the Social Democrats...
...DM500 billion...
...There are still Communist collaborators in place at the local level...
...Where is the much-vaunted German idealism that, one assumes, would urge the rapid dissemination of all the benefits the fat and prosperous West Germans have enjoyed for years...
...The administration of justice falls within the responsibility of the Liinder ministries of justice...
...Reunification] is 90 percent a good development, but it is no reason to go back to nationalism...
...They are entitled to all of the extremely generous welfare benefits of the traditionally paternalistic West German state without having contributed a pfennig to the public kitty...
...Labor is cheaper but the infrastructure inferior...
...Every day the estimates rise...
...Oskar Lafontaine, the candidate of the Social Democratic party (SPD) in the October 1990 elections for chancellor, spent most of last year urging a halt to the unification process, then its slowing down, and when this led nowhere he ended up complaining about how much it was all going to cost...
...The reunification of Germany may yet go disastrously, and, if it does, Kohl and the Christian Democrats will be blamed for it...
...At the urging of justice minister Hans Engelhard, Helmut Kohl put forward a proposal to amnesty minor spies from the two Germanys...
...The Germans have overcome this stage...
...And if such a state is nevertheless insisted upon, it will be doomed to failure...
...De facto acceptance of East Germany came with Willy Brandt and Ostpolitik, setting in motion a process that would lead, many Social Democrats thought, step by step to full recognition of East German statehood and citizenship...
...Reagan did not raise taxes in his second term...
...Even if they were to, it doesn't seem the West German authorities would be all that interested in whether what they had to say was information or disinformation...
...Just as it suddenly emerged after World War II that there was nobody around who had not been involved in the anti-Nazi resistance and who did not oppose Hitler from the start, so today people boast that they were anti-Communist from the day the Cold War broke out...
...In fact, West German states (Lender) under SPD control had contributed nothing to the agency's existence for years...
...One does indeed...
...There will be no reunification...
...West Germany poured billions of marks into the East German economy...
...Was he not right to be unenthusiastic...
...But it was extraordinary that the candidate of the Social Democrats, who since 1945 had prided themselves on being more aggressive thanthe Christian Democrats in seeking to overcome the artificial division of Germany, should consider higher taxes an argument against unification...
...the memories are there...
...We as journalists have to ask ourselves, what did we write about the GDR during the last twenty years...
...People will tell you how small-minded the Saxons are and how officious the Prussians...
...There were surely some bad characters at the top of the Communist police state, they argue, but most people were just going about their daily business...
...The Adenauer policy—binding West Germany economically and politically to the West and militarily to NATO—had been tried and found wanting...
...What happened last year was not the way reunification was supposed to have come about...
...Ah, but surely East Germany had (and will have until the end of this year) laxer abortion laws...
...With the members of Comecon now trading in hard currency at world prices, and with future oil prices uncertain, it's unlikely that East European countries will be able to import much from Germany...
...Yet a sanctimonious consensus prevails...
...For one, the murder of Germans exercising their right to travel cannot simply be ignored...
...Will Europe once more fall under its sway...
...On October 3, spymaster Werner Grossman was arrested on a warrant issued some time earlier, but was released the next day...
...And while the two countries would retain their separate statehoods, Germany would become the leading exemplar of socialism in the world, just as Marx had envisaged...
...None of the figures sounds implausible...
...But what has happened to the files...
...An enterprise of such magnitude must have had a fantastic network of informers...
...millions more belonged to front organizations for the young, the trade unions, and other social groups...
...Although the justice ministry let it be known that spies who turned themselves in could expect lenient treatment, very few have chosen to take up the offer...
...Unemployment is at 10 percent and rising...
...People knew who was informing on them...
...Today—and for the foreseeable future—the Germans are preoccupied with one thing only: how to unify two states that ran on political systems whose fundamental incompatibility formed the dividing line of the modern world...
...The younger generation is more in favor of Europe," says a delighted Hans-Joachim Veen, director of research at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Bonn...
...Oskar Lafontaine was articulating something that the generation that has grown up in West Germany is feeling...
...Whose orders...
...Many would be delighted to see democracy come to East Germany...
...The truth is that, after a lot of grumbling, most Germans accepted partition as a fact of life...
...A more typical response has been to adjust ones position rapidly...
...In 1989, West Germany (the FRG) had George Szamuely is a writer living in New York City...
...In the months that followed, as their compatriots demonstrated their eagerness to be rid of those "humane values," the reputation of Christa Wolf and her colleagues began to sink...
...Moreover, the East German SPD had to call itself the SDP for the first two months of its existence because the West German SPD, believing a Communist-run East Germany still viable, wanted the name to maintain its entree with the Fast German rulers...
...There would then be enough trials to last the lifetime of anyone who was around on October 3. On the other hand, Honecker, Mielke, the Stasi, the spy chief Markus Wolf and his successor Werner Grossman, the traitors Hansjoachim Tidge and Klaus Kuron, who worked for West German counterintelligence—surely, they can be put on trial...
...First of all, their country will be like any other, without minefields, barbed wire, and armed guards in the middle of it...
...The story concerned a young woman who had fallen afoul of the Stasi, and whose every subsequent movement was closely observed...
...people who never worked for the Stasi may suddenly have acquired records indicating that they did...
...the latter served for years as one of the Blockparteien that maintained putative independence but supported the regime on every issue...
...And how far should the prosecutions go...
...Despite all the talk of prosecuting Honecker, nothing much has happened to him...
...The guards who did the shooting will doubtless claim that they were only following orders...
...If you don't toe the line, you won't get anything," he said in a speech now reprinted in his book, 7ivo States—One Nation...
...Peter Frisch, vice president of the Federal Office of the Protection of the Constitution, says: "No doubt there is a risk, but we trust that many members of the Volksarmee had doubts about the regime they were serving...
...As for their victims, the industrial workers, who is going to spare them...
...environmental controls are less onerous but management less competent...
...France has 460,000 men in its armed forces, Britain 306,000...
...Helmut Kohl and the Christian Democrats, who came to power in 1982, did not really count, for they were seen largely as "useful idiots," unable seriously to change a policy developed by much cleverer men like Willy Brandt, Egon Bahr, and Herbert Wehner...
...Therefore, if the two Germanys were to come together, West Germans would have to change their "consciousness" of East Germany, whether the facts warranted it or not...
...The June 17 national holiday commemorating the 1953 Berlin uprising would also have to go...
...Her privileged status in East Germany was contrasted with that of a poet like Wolf Bierman, who never followed the party line and was eventually booted out of the country for his troubles...
...It has not been a bad place to grow up...
...Gunter Grass, needless to say, advanced this interpretation...
...Gunter Grass, for one, reacted with fury: "The new instrument of torture will be the market economy...
...Together, France ($958 billion) and the United Kingdom ($839 billion) have an economy 36 percent larger than that of the new Germany...
...Honecker received his annual financial tribute for dumping on his neighbor anyone to whom he no longer wished to extend his beneficent rule...
...that, in their eagerness to swallow East Germany in one gulp, the Christian Democrats had failed to appreciate that the country was absorbing lethal doses of poison...
...Had he not said all along that unification would prove very costly...
...One East German interior minister, Peter-Michael Diestel, was forced to resign for hiring members of the Stasi to conduct the de-Stasification...
...The Soviet Union, which exports 3-4 million barrels of oil a day, is a different story...
...In the event of catastrophe, critics will be quick to point out that they had said all along that the pace of unification should have been more measured...
...The two German states and the partition of Europe will be there forever unless some kind of socialism overcomes it," is how Enno von Loewenstern, editorial-page editor of Die Welt, characterizes what used to be the SPD's hidden agenda...
...Even at the higher estimate, a united Germany would have a GNP of $1,406 billion—less than a third that of the U.S., and half that of Japan...
...It will probably be able to import high-tech goods from Germany...
...No one in the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe has seen the East German documents, and its staff boasts of its scrupulous regard for civil liberties in refusing to look at them...
...Berlin Since last summer, the world media have been speculating feverishly on the subject of Germany...
...With each additional Deutschmark, Oskar Lafontaine exulted...
...Soviet commercial espionage is made easier by the continued presence of 380,000 Soviet troops on German soil...
...According to Erhard Eppler, one of the movers behind the West German Social Democrats' joint declaration with the East German Communists in 1987, it's no wonder Kohl's Christian Democrats are pushing for a wide-ranging amnesty, "because in the East CDU, which is now part of the [greater] CDU .. . there are thousands of Stasi members and Stasi collaborators...
...Or more...
...To a certain extent, she is right...
...The best kept a low profile...
...Although the SPD was resoundingly defeated, now as before the influence of the left in Germany far exceeds its mediocre showing at the polls...
...Emulating the stance that Walter Mondale adopted with such spectacular success in 1984, Lafontaine last year promised to raise taxes in the unlikely event of his winning...
...They could at least have avoided the cash-for-prisoners deals that they conducted under Ostpolitik...
...WTI here is a lot of uneasiness I among West Germans, particularly of the younger generation, about being pulled out of their cozy Federal Republic into something new and different," says Christoph Bertram, an editor of the weekly Die Zeit...
...And for this reason they will serve the new Germany...
...Yet, just as most of the glowing accounts of life in East Germany came not from willful ignorance but from cold political calculation, so today the frequently expressed astonishment at the reality of life under Communism is not without deviousness...
...Obviously those of Erich Honecker and Erich Mielke, minister for state security...
...The worst belonged to the Stasi...
...Iwo million East Germans belonged to the Communist party...
...But there are serious crimes that cannot be swept under the rug...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 19...
...However crude and opportunistic the SPD's argument, East Germany's past casts a giant shadow over the new Germany's future...
...Critics are already questioning the character of the 17 million new citizens...
...But under what law would they be prosecuted...
...A prosecutor who had been particularly zealous in enforcing Communist law might fight his suggested removal by threatening to expose his colleagues...
...It was rejected by the Bundestag...
...ant and Hegel had taught the Germans that there was no being that was not already a consciousness of being...
...After all, if it is fair to say that the East Germans could have behaved more bravely and more honorably, so could have the West Germans...
...But it is far from obvious that the addition of 17 million countrymen and an industrial base of questionable value will turn Germany into a superpower...
...Yet embarrassments continue...
...Where are the East German Havels and Walesas and Sakharovs...
...The past must not be allowed to rule the future," Rita Siissmuth, the Christian Democrat speaker of the Bundestag, declared recently...
...Lafontaine was certainly articulating something, but it is hard to believe that a mere forty years—thirty, if you count back only to the building of the Berlin Wall—would be long enough to produce two genuinely separate states...
...But the SPD is hardly well posi- tioned to bring up East Germany's crimes...
...But there are serious dangers to the assumption that everyone except Honecker, Mielke, and one or two sadists within the Stasi was simply an opportunist, an assumption that Egon Bahr takes to its most bizarre conclusion: "Members of the Volksarmee are proud to have gained more freedom of thought and behavior vis-a-vis the Soviet Union than their comrades from the Bundeswehr vis-a-vis the United States...
...The Communists, it is alleged, were the most talented, the most skillful, the best educated people in Fast Germany...
...From top to bottom, it is suggested, East Germany was staffed by toadies, apparatchiki, and informers...
...The author claimed it was largely autobiographical...
...In early 1990 she published Was bleibt (What Remains), a novel she claimed to have written in 1979 but kept hidden in her drawer, fearing reprisals from the regime...
...Officers with the rank of colonel and above are not being taken, and there is a "security" test...
...In the meantime, the East German socialists insisted that the Russians were hanging by their tails from trees and that they were the only ones who had a viable socialism going...
...In August 1987, the Social Democrats and the ruling East German Communists issued a position paper proclaiming common roots in the European humanistic tradition and pledging both parties to continue to extend "democracy and human rights...
...They want unification only because they think it will enable them to acquire BMWs and Mercedes without working for them...
...West Germany would adopt the collectivist institutions of the East, East Germany the democratic processes of the West...
...It is not that the Social Democrats are not raising important issues: an overeagerness to forgive and forget creates problems, as Germans of an older generation found when their offspring turned on them in the 1960s...
...Honecker and his colleagues," says Stephan Wanner, the ministry's press spokesman...
...Yet letting bygones be bygones, particularly when they involve something as barbaric as the Berlin Wall, will inevitably raise questions as to the seriousness of the German commitment to all the wonderful things they pledged themselves to on October 3, 1990...
...But there is a problem here: while the top men in East Germany have been removed, many bureaucrats remain in place...
...Isn't West Germany better, where only half of married women work...
...a GNP of $1,210 billion, compared to $5,199 billion for the United States and $2,874 billion for Japan...
...Is Germany the coming superpower...
...It is those, especially, that I would like to integrate into the forces...
...The Erfassungsstelle Salzgitter, the West German agency that collected data on murders committed by the Fast German regime, would have to be abolished...
...To most Germans, however, the reunification of last October 3 is a source, if not exactly of pride, then of relief...
...But was this pair acting in violation of East German law...
...East Germany, clearly one of the great losers of history, now receives nothing but insults...
...Last December, one of the founders of the East German Social Democrats, Ibrahim BOhme, was forced to resign after being accused of spying on East German writers for the Stasi...
...While it is possible the Germans will tear up their constitution, break their pledge to Gorbachev, and develop a nuclear capability, no one who has traveled around Germany recently can think it likely...
...This is an extraordinary performance, and accounts for the perpetually strong Deutsch-mark, but it is also a source of vulnerability: German economic growth depends heavily on the performance of other countries...
...Those who served Communist masters out of fear or opportunism will now gladly serve their new rulers...
...Lafontaine, Eppler, and Hans-Joachim Vogel mumble words to the effect that "we do not need the grace of a short memory," but they are no keener than "We as journalists have to ask ourselves, what did we write about the GDR during the last twenty years...
...Germans west and east assumed that Honecker and the Stasi would be there forever...
...Though it is never too late to learn, there is something unseemly in the eagerness with which people now articulate positions that a few months ago they would have labeled "fascist" or "antediluvian...
...Is the return on investment higher in Warsaw than in Dusseldorf...
...Germans have got used to making radical readjustments...
...Even the SPD's leadership admits today that the party lost in the Volkskammer elections of March 1990 not because they were on a plane too lofty for the electorate, but because they failed to embrace reunification with sufficient enthusiasm...
...both, of course, are nuclear powers...
...Exports account for 26 percent of the GNP in West Germany, compared to 5 percent in the U.S...
...To Germans, the proverbial glass is always half-empty, and today, with the eyes of the world on them, they are likely to go out of their way to sound as unexultant as possible...
...hence, the Russians are bound to say no...
...Late last year, a new warrant was issued for his arrest, but could not be served since he was residing at a Soviet military base...
...Secondly, the dreadful Honecker regime has gone, and by 1994 there should be no more Soviet troops stationed on German territory...
...In 1988, exports to the Soviet bloc accounted for only 5 percent of the West German total, because German exports—telecommunications, robots, scientific equipment—presuppose a certain economic and industrial sophistication on the part of the importing country...
...How are the two armies to be integrated...
...Shortly after the opening of the wall, he was arrested and then released...
...The petulance over the enormous financial burdens that are about to be imposed on the West stands in contrast to the daily agonizing—right across the political spectrum—about the need to do something to alleviate the plight of the Third World...
...These attacks came in the stolid pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung...
...But is it fairto pretend that for forty years the laws of the Federal Republic also applied to the citizens of the GDR...
...Second, the regime went to a lot of trouble to infiltrate and sabotage the institutions of West Germany...
...First of all, will the 6 million citizens on whom the Stasi kept files be allowed access to them...
...When workers are sacked from their jobs no one cries "Annexation...
...To this day, no charges have been leveled against him...
...Their negligible contribution to the Western effort in the Persian Gulf reached a fatuous conclusion just prior to the January 15 deadline when foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher proposed that the West offer Iraq a pledge to secure a democratic form of government for Kuwait...
...Lafontaine may well be right on the need to raise taxes...
...What happens to the former members, informers, and files of the Stasi, East Germany's ruthless secret police...
...It is difficult to know ahead of time how the sums will work out—especially when no one knows how much will be left over when the costs of unification have been added up...
...Some people fear unemployment...
...The Christian Democrats won out then, as they almost certainly will do again...
...Their factories are already being closed down...
...Alfred Dregger, leader of the CDUCSU faction in the Bundestag, assured me that he would rather integrate the Volksarmee into the Bundeswehr than have them engaging in terrorism...
...Lothar de Maiziere, East Germany's first non-Communist prime minister, who went on to become deputy leader of the all-German CDU and minister without portfolio in the Kohl government, has had to resign amid allegations that he was a Stasi informer...
...This organization kept files on 6 million Germans, including 2 million in the West...
...S o far the record of the German government in defending its constitutional prerogatives has been unimpressive...
...Stasi operatives may have had their records erased...
...Tens of thousands of files have been removed, shipped to the Soviet Union, tampered with, falsified...
...German unification on the basis of capitalism, democracy, and NATO membership came as a shock to the German left...
...But this hardly proves Germany will dominate the Soviet Union...
...The issue of what people have done in these past forty years will not go away," explains Christoph Bertram, "because these files are still around...
...For many, recalling all this today is embarrassing...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 17 could read that the situation of women, of education, of child and health care was better in East Germany...
...The SPD has always taken the position that socialism went wrong in the Soviet Union . . . but if we do it, we will show the world that socialism with a human face is possible...
...In Germany it is not within the competence of the Federal Ministry of Justice to decide whether proceedings should be initiated against Mr...
...the leaders of the two Germanys paid state visits to one another...
...Taxi drivers in West Berlin say East German drivers are taking their customers away, while they are unable to reciprocate because their new compatriots cannot afford the exorbitant fares of the new German capital...
...Eppler has a point...
...DM300 billion...
...And, for ideological reasons, they couldn't do that...
...Progressives had, until recently, regarded as the sine qua non of futurehumanity something called the "Third Way" (between capitalism and socialism, that is...
...L ast summer's "Christa Wolf con- troversy" showed German liberals at their bandwagon-hopping worst...
...therefore, far from being a tool of the Honecker regime, as her detractors had painted her, she was its critic all along, and even its victim...
...Fast Germany, the visitor will be staggered to discover, destroyed its environment, persecuted homosexuals and ethnic minorities, and ran a secret police more intrusive than anything the detested West succeeded in instituting...
...And how good could the education system have been, people ask sarcastically, if it indoctrinated its students with Marxist-Leninist dogma...
...even during the twelve months leading up to reunification, not all Germans were doing very much to advance it...
...There is more to this than the human impulse to be on the winning side...
...They will want to see their dossiers in order to clear themselves...
...It seemed as if it would go on forever...
...de facto recognition was eventually granted to East Germany...
...N ational security notwithstanding, a glaring problem with this forgiving attitude toward former Communists is its lack of fairness...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 the Christian Democrats to investigate East Germany's past, especially after having seen the East German Social Democrats, newly established and seemingly on the way to electoral triumph, become a magnet to every kind of opportunist...
...Is Germany the economic motor that will set the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe moving...
...Patriotism is no longer an appropriate value...
...The former party, with its origins in the churches, was created after the wall came down...
...Roads and railways must be renovated, nuclear power plants made safe, rivers cleaned up, buildings made to conform to West German safety standards, artworks assessed after years of damage and neglect...
...The anti-Communist Christian Democrats, on the other hand, want to let bygones be bygones...
...Most Germans feel primarily European...
...East Germany (the GDR) had a GNP between $102 and $196 billion...
...Kohl may in his third (he has waffled needlessly on the issue...
...The SPD, once the party of reunification, boasting of its special relationship with the East German Communists, now vents its fury at the appallingly low moral caliber of the citizens of East Germany...
...Like fellow writers Stefan Heym and Heiner Muller, she served as an advertisement for a Germany more cultured—and, shall we say, more German?—than the Americanized Federal Republic...
...For them to go into an uncertain future is not something that comes easily...
...Should the former East German leaders be prosecuted...
...some resent the amount of tax revenue that will be diverted eastward...
...To be sure, this was never going to be the East Germany of Ulbricht and Honecker...
...Though, in public at least, reunification was abandoned, it remained the unstated premise of the liberal intelligentsia's Ostpolitik...
...What is shocking is the almost complete absence of joy that their compatriots from the East will never—one hopes—have to live under the likes of Ulbricht and Honecker again...
...They occupied leading positions in society, and consequently their expertise and knowledge of local issues will be needed for the development of the five newly reconstituted Lander...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
