The Drama of German Unification
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
The Drama of German Unification Rebuilding a House Divided By Hans-Dietrich Genscher Translated by Thomas Thornton Broadway. 580 pp. $40.00. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News...
...To the Germans, though, it had the greatest significance...
...Genscher arranged for their travel to safety by train across the GDR, then he flew to Prague to personally assure the frightened and mistrustful refugees that they were not being lured into a trap...
...The agreement reached in Helsinki had three "baskets": military security, economic cooperation and human rights...
...The Soviet Union most strongly favored this as cementing its position in Eastern Europe...
...One was the Palestinian terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics in Munich...
...There was to be no temptation toward neutrality, let alone any of the old independent Schaukelpolitik...
...The memoirs of this peripatetic, indefatigable diplomat reflect a man shaped by the events of his time...
...Thousands also crowded into the German Embassy in Prague...
...First and foremost, Bonn continued Konrad Adenauer's basic policy of unbreakable solidarity with the West, harmony with the United States and core partnership with France...
...Helsinki Watch groups sprang up everywhere, including the Soviet Union...
...One follows Genscher through a labyrinth of meetings: bilateral, with Western allies, Central European neighbors and, above all, Soviet leaders...
...Genscher's sparse portraits of the two are the best in the book...
...it would be firmly embedded in Europe...
...Genscher played a major role in the unification drama that moved so quickly to a head with the exodus of East Germans through Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the summer of 1989...
...But Genschern home was in the Soviet zone of occupation...
...His twin objectives were to build democracy and unite Germany...
...Germany, the obvious first battlefield of a third World War, was disturbed that the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks had left the Soviet Union with overwhelming numerical superiority in this weapon, given its SS-20s...
...He faced opposition at home and among the allies, as well as a full-blown Moscow propaganda storm...
...the American term "administration" used for European governments...
...That required a carefully calibrated effort on several fronts...
...The other was the Guillaume affair...
...The vehicle devised was the TwoPlus-Four Treaty: The Federal Republic and the democratically elected successors to the Communists in the GDR proclaimed their union...
...In characteristic fashion, Genscher goes through this episode fairly quickly...
...the USSR, Great Britain, France, and the United States relinquished their last residual rights of occupation and control as the victors of World War II...
...Nor do more than light brush strokes limn Genscher's occasionally rocky relationship with Chancellor Helmut Kohl...
...Rebuilding a House Divided is by no means all dull...
...Although the Minister of Interiormust have known, too, of the dubious links between Herbert Wehner, Brandt's chief Social Democratic Party antagonist, and the rulers of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), nothing is said about that either...
...In all this Genscher had the firm backing and also the leadership of Chancellor Kohl...
...He had to cope with two disasters...
...They stressed Basket HI, human rights...
...Genscher had good luck playing the game of three-dimensional diplomatic chess...
...Nevertheless, the climax of the book, and of the Foreign Minister's career—the process of reuniting Germany in 1989 and 1990—is so intrinsically fascinating that it keeps the narrative moving despite its complexity...
...And in Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Kohl and he found like-minded leaders and friends who also had the idea of a common European house...
...In part, that meant persuading the still Communist regime in Budapest to break with East Berlin and allow tens of thousands to flee to Austria...
...Genscher endorsed Thomas Mann's desire for a European Germany rather than a German Europe...
...Peaceful change was the key to German reunification...
...While serving as Foreign Minister in successive governments from May 1974 until he decided to resign in May 1992, however, Genscher mostly worked behind the scenes in countless conference rooms and face-to-face meetings...
...multilateral in the UN, NATO, the CSCE (now OSCE), EU, WEU, and other alphabet forums...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent When Hans-Dietrich Genscher was Foreign Minister of Germany, he traveled so much that some jested about his being paid by the mile...
...His main concern was the central problem of those years: building respect and influence for his country among its allies and neighbors in a way that eventual unification—and the consequent presence of an 80 million-strong German economic powerhouse in the heart of the Continent —would not be seen as a nightmare come true...
...Genscher wanted to redress the balance by having Pershing II rockets and cruise missiles placed in West Germany and other NATO countries...
...The IRBM story had a sequel, in which Genscher vehemently opposed the British and American suggestion to upgrade short-range Lance missiles, lethal for Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia...
...The thread that commands attention and respect is his design for uniting Germany in a united Europe without leaving any dangling problems similar to those that destroyed the Versailles system...
...This is because Rebuilding a House Divided tends to read like the author's official diary...
...As Minister of Interior during his first five years ( 1969-74) in the coalition cabinets of the Federal Republic of Germany (FDR), Genscher was responsible for domestic security...
...He enjoyed full American support...
...His dogged pursuit of German interests marked one of the real crises of the 1980s—the struggle over the stationing of intermediate-range (between 300 and 3,500 miles) nuclear missiles in Europe...
...Less would have been better...
...Genscher writes that General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev later said the deployment of the IRBMs, coupled with NATO's offer to negotiate their total elimination, and not President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, had brought about the reversal in the Kremlin's attitude...
...Drafted in the last months of the War, he had the good fortune of serving in the Army under General Walter Wenck, who promised his men that he would lead them into American, not Soviet, captivity...
...Basket I stressed the inviolability of existing European boundaries, except for peaceful change by agreement...
...Communist East Germany had planted Gunter Guillaume in the office of Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt...
...Nor are matters helped by the typographical and grammatical errors one encounters, or the generally poor translation (e.g...
...It created a forum for dialogue with the Soviet Union on all kinds of issues in a broader context than had been permitted in the tight arena of the Cold War...
...Genscher rightly remarks that Western principles remained intact while the Soviets' were undermined...
...In 1952 he went west, joined the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) and before long rose to national prominence...
...But while luck helped, it could not have done so without the labor and character that Hans-Dietrich Genscher invested in the enterprise...
...There he swam against the Communist stream until he concluded that the effort was hopeless...
...There must be no peace treaty, the two men felt, lest the sovereignty and international prestige the Federal Republic had attained over the years be called into question by any of Adolf Hitler's many victims...
...To this end, he labored incessantly to erect a European structure, overarching the Iron Curtain, that would house all its members as equals and commit them to common standards of humanity...
...He is appalled that the investigation by the FDR's equivalent of our FBI extended to Brandt's private life...
...The chronicling of repetitive speeches, meetings and conversations, together with a fair amount of boilerplate, should have been pruned by competent editing...
...Moreover, unified Germany had to be a member of NATO and, as such, surpass Bismarck by making friends of all the countries around it, including France, Poland and Czechoslovakia...
...The new Germany would not be a loose cannon...
...Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko tried to pry the Germans loose with hair-raising threats, but Bonn stood firm...
...One story had it that, flying back to Bonn from Washington, his plane passed another headed west over the Atlantic and he waved a greeting—to Hans-Dietrich Genscher...
...To Washington, the CSCE seemed an exercise in pious generalities that would at least do no harm...
...it is a worthy, often dull recounting of a decent, patriotic man's progress toward his dual goals...
...The majority of the 35 participating nations had a different view...
...To accomplish this objective he especially devoted himself to improving relations with Russia, but in a manner that would not stir Western suspicions as Brandt's Ostpolitik had done...
...The Europeans had insisted on the inclusion of the United States and Canada in the conference...
...His family gave him a Christian ethic and a liberal democratic outlook that he maintained through the Nazi years...
...The two Germanys, Genscher believed, had to come together in a mutual act of free will, not as a result of the Federal Republic simply annexing the GDR...
...The account of these protracted, tortuous negotiations is almost stupefyingly dense...
...In 1975 he helped bring the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) to a successful conclusion...
...Basket III set a standard to which Moscow, a signatory, could be held—as it was, with ever growing effect—in the biennial review conferences that followed...
...In explaining why, he makes it clear that he believes disclosure of Brandt's peccadilloes would have made no difference, yet does not include a word about them...
...France and Britain overcame their fears...
...In a word, this is not one of your trendy kiss-and-tell political exposés...
...Genscher was born in Halle, in central Germany...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 19
