The Poles needed ten years to eliminate communist rule gradually and by means of very complicated procedures, ten years before the first freely elected post-war prime minister was able to take office. It took the Hungarians around ten months to do more or less the same thing. The Germans in the former GDR managed to overthrow an inflexible communist regime without a civil war in ten weeks. The Czechs and Slovaks succeeded in freeing themselves from the stranglehold of the all- knowing and all powerful communist party in ten days. In Romania the decision against totalitarianism was taken in little more than ten hours.

This time comparison shows the accelerating speed with which the infectious and dynamic nature of freedom enabled these peoples to prevail over their only seemingly omnipotent suppressors. To this extent the year 1989 marks the end of European totalitarianism. It also stands for the rightness of a key assumption in political thinking, an assumption fewer and fewer people believed in, the longer the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe were enclosed by monopoly party structures: In other words the assumption that the desire for freedom can only be suppressed by force for a limited period of time. The year 1989 will go down in European history as the year of self-liberation.

The implosion of the communist system in Central and Eastern Europe placed the subject of German unity on the political agenda, both in Germany and in the international community—not overnight by any means, but ineluctably over a period of months. The fall of the Honecker regime and the opening of the Brandenburg Gate were preceded by key events. The most important prerequisite was Gorbachev’s dropping of the Brezhnev Doctrine, a fact that received little attention initially. This motivated the American ambassador in Germany, Vernon Walters, on taking his post in April 1989 to predict that Germany would be reunited during his time in Bonn. Nobody believed it.

In the summer thousands of GDR citizens made use of their holidays to occupy the German embassies in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw with a view to persuading the authorities to let them go to the Federal Republic of Germany.

The Hungarian head of government, Nemeth, announced the first test of a totally new policy to Chancellor Kohl during a secret meeting held in August. He agreed to open Hungary’s borders early in September. When this happened, at midnight on September 10th, 1989, a refugee flow began that resulted in more than 340,000 people from the GDR, most of them young, moving to the Federal Republic of Germany by the end of 1989. Mass demonstrations brought about the collapse of the Honecker regime and the opening of the German-German border on November 9th by his successor, Krenz.

On November 11th, Chancellor Kohl conducted two telephone conversations that provided him information on potentials and necessities for his future policy on Germany. His first interlocutor was Egon Krenz, who had been elected General Secretary of the SED on November 8th. In this conversation, which was later published, the two sides advocated a strengthening of cooperation. Kohl asked Krenz what fundamental changes he intended to make. The new SED-boss responded diffusely and evasively.

Afterwards Chancellor Kohl had a telephone conversation with Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev, in which he told him about the conversation with Krenz. Kohl informed Gorbachev of his assessment that Krenz had no chance of succeeding as long as he was not willing to institute genuine reforms. Gorbachev did not contradict this forecast. Shortly before that, on November 10th, Gorbachev had sent Kohl a message expressing his concern regarding the safety of the Red Army in the GDR. By this means the Soviet General Secretary indicated to Kohl that the Red Army would remain in its barracks, regardless of what might happen.

The "Ten-Point Programme for Overcoming the Division of Germany and Europe" which the Chancellor presented in his policy statement to the German Bundestag on November 28th was a logical consequence of the events that had taken place in the previous weeks. Since the summer the Bonn government had been able to assume that German unity would become a focus of German and international policy. The Chancellor, the Foreign Minister and all leading politicians in the government made use of international meetings and contacts to promote the prospect of gradually overcoming the division of Germany and to request support for this.

On December 19th 1989 Chancellor Kohl travelled to Dresden for a meeting with the new prime minister of the GDR, Hans Modrow. At the time, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets from the airport to the meeting place in a demonstration for German unity. At the latest by the evening of this December 19th, having ended his speech to the people of Dresden Kohl understood that the desire being shown by the people to achieve unity as rapidly as possible. The German political agenda for the year 1990 could thus only be that of bringing about unification as rapidly as necessary and in as orderly a manner as possible.

The year 1990 began with mass demonstrations in the GDR in support of German unity. The autumn chant "we are the people" was altered, replacing the definite article with an adjective expressing the call for unity: "we are one people". All attempts undertaken in the autumn by the SED or by the democracy movement to legitimate the idea of maintaining two states in Germany by asserting separate cultural or social identities failed.

This led to a uniquely rapid change in attitudes towards the German question among opinion leaders in the Federal Republic of Germany. With very few exceptions, journalists who had still pleaded in favour of two separate states in November and December altered their stance and advocated German unity. The same is true of opposition leaders who, except for the Greens, paid tribute to the popular will clearly recognizable in the mass demonstrations.

The undiminished flow of resettles made it evident that it would necessary to bring the process of unification to a rapid conclusion. Here it becomes clear that the people in the former GDR played a leading role in the political decision-making processes of the year of 1990, as was the case already in the autumn of the previous year, and that the political leaders in West and East Germany attempted with varying degrees of skill to steer this popular will.

As a result of the disastrous situation the East German economy was in, the Bonn government was forced to deal, first of all, with economic and financial matters.

In January the German-German Economic Commission met for the first time, in East Berlin. The West German government offered the GDR six billion marks low-interest loans in addition for the support of small and medium sized businesses. The cabinet committee on German unity, established by the Chancellor on February 7th, was to focus its activities primarily on the economic challenge.

The Bonn government made use of all the options available to gain foreign policy support for its unification policy. On February 10th in Moscow Kohl and Genscher received assurances from Gorbachev that Moscow would not stand in the way of German unity. A few days later the United States and the Soviet Union agreed on reducing their forces in Central Europe to a level of 195,000 men each. In Ottowa the foreign ministers of the four World War II Allies and the two German states agreed on a series of conferences referred to as the Two-Plus-Four process with a view to eliminating Allied rights regarding Germany as a whole. In the same month President Bush and Chancellor Kohl expressed their support of NATO membership for a unified Germany.

Kohl was in constant contact with President Bush and President Gorbachev as well as with his European counterparts in London, Paris, Brussels, Rome and elsewhere in all phases of the unification process. Personal meetings at conferences and reciprocal visits were supplemented by numerous contacts by letter and telephone. At the same time, Foreign Minister Genscher travelled incessantly in Europe as well as back and forth across the Atlantic and, in doing so, pulled the Americans, the Soviets and the Europeans closer together. The Chancellor and his Foreign Minister succeeded in achieving the necessary amount of consensus during these decisive months.

The SPD was the first of the major parties to provide massive support of the newly founded SPD organization in East Germany. The CDU found this a great deal more difficult, since its East German counterpart had collaborated with the SED for decades. It was not until a fundamental change in personnel at all party levels had taken place and the "Alliance for Germany" had been formed on February 5th that the CDU party chairman gave the go-ahead for wide-ranging election campaign support. At the urging of Helmut Kohl the CDU in the GDR, the German Social Union (DSU) supported by the CSU, and the Democratic Awakening (DA) group, a derivate of the autumn revolution, joined forces in this alliance.

The result of the People’s Chamber election contradicted all the predictions that had been made by the polls and the media. The "Alliance for Germany" emerged from the election as the clear winner, with a total of 48.1 per cent of the vote. The CDU alone received more than 40 per cent, making it nearly twice as strong as the SPD, the party that had gone into the race as the favourite.

In the GDR the grand coalition government under Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere took up its work in April. It committed itself to the objective of following an orderly path to German unity.

The Bonn government began to engage in an effort to achieve what it had always refused earlier GDR governments. The objective now was to gain as much international support for East Berlin as possible. On April 21st EC foreign ministers agreed to a three stage plan aimed at integrating the GDR in the European Community. On April 28th the EC heads of state and government agreed to German unification as a policy objective. A few days later Foreign Minister Genscher opened the first ministerial round of the Two-Plus-Four talks in Bonn, the most important topic of which was the Alliance membership of a united Germany. On June 3rd President Bush and Soviet President Gorbachev declared in a joint press conference that the Alliance preference of a united Germany could be decided by the Germans themselves. Shortly thereafter Lothar de Maiziere became the first GDR Prime Minister to visit the United States and was received in Washington by President Bush.

The close and continuous cooperation between Bonn and Washington proved to be of particular value in this phase of the unification process. With his willingness to engage in disarmament President Bush contributed in large measure to Gorbachev no longer seeing a "Western threat" and accepting a strategic withdrawal from Central Europe. Bush calmed the Western European capitals whenever fears were voiced. He helped to develop the Two-Plus-Four formula and, with a large measure of diplomacy he helped to ward off demands expressed by other European countries to take part in the negotiations.

From the outset, President Bush and his administration supported the German unification process actively and without reservation, leaving no doubt as to the fact that the reunification pledge of earlier years continued to be valid in the new situation. The close personal relationship between Bush and Kohl did not leave the slightest doubt as to the sincerity of mutual assurances. Chancellor Kohl did not doubt for a second that the American president would stand by his obligations. Conversely, the American president could be sure that the German government would under no circumstances entertain the idea of leaving the Atlantic Alliance. The American president backed the German chancellor in this very important phase of ensuring the success of the unification process in foreign policy terms.

In Washington at the end of May President Bush succeeded in convincing President Gorbachev that the United States had no intention at all of taking advantage of the internal problems being experienced by the Soviet Union to gain advantages for itself. This certainty was an important prerequisite for the reorientation of Soviet policy in the German question.

In these few months domestic political activities were focused in primarily on preparing for economic and monetary union. At the beginning of May the two German governments agreed on the currency conversion rates. The German-German Treaty went into effect on July 1st, 1990. At this time the GDR transferred its sovereignty with regard to financial and monetary policy matters to the Bonn government and to the Bundesbank in Frankfurt.

A few days after July 1st negotiations began in East Berlin on the second German-German treaty, the Unification Treaty. Within a very limited period of time agreements had to be reached on all areas of public life, aimed at overcoming the discrepancies that had arisen between regulations in the Federal Republic of Germany and those in the GDR in the 40 years the country was divided and, at the same time, to create transitional rules in those areas in which the takeover of West German regulations would have led to unacceptable situations and injustices for people in the GDR.

Chancellor Kohl invited the chairmen of the coalition parties and the SPD as well as other leading politicians of these parties to the Chancellery for late-night meetings on a number of occasions to discuss and clarify these and other controversial issues in the Unification Treaty. In these nightly sessions the CDU chairman succeeded in achieving a consensus in the coalition and compromises between the coalition and the SPD on the controversial elements of the Unification Treaty. All major problems and controversial points were dealt with on a thousand pages of typed manuscript and hundreds of pages of appendices. The Unification Treaty was signed on August 31st. On September 20 the Bundestag and the People’s Chamber approved the treaty with the necessary majority, opposed only by the votes of the PDS and the Greens. A day later it was approved by the Bundesrat. Two days later it was signed into law by the Federal President.

Domestic policy issues dominated in this phase. However, it was also in this phase that foreign policy activities required to safeguard unification to be completed. Chancellor Kohl achieved a breakthrough during his meeting with Gorbachev in the Caucusus Mountains. There Gorbachev assured him that united Germany would be granted full sovereignty and after that be able to decide freely on alliance membership. This success of German diplomacy was preceded by a NATO special summit in early July at which NATO extended a "hand in friendship" to the Warsaw Pact and all NATO members welcomed German unification and expressed their wish for German membership in NATO.

The smooth timing of domestic and foreign policy activities, the huge volume of regulatory requirements and the time pressure created by the people in the GDR demanded a maximum of concentration, improvisation and imagination from the decision makers in Bonn and East Berlin, whether politicians, diplomats or senior ministerial officials. The result attained is rewarding enough. The German dream of living united and free was fulfilled on October 3rd 1990.

However, it is worth taking a look at the first all-German election to be held since 1932 in December 1990 and the result it produced, giving the Bonn government coalition a viable majority of nearly 55 per cent of the vote. Foreign commentators rightly described this landslide victory for the Kohl government as a plebiscite on German unity and its architect, Helmut Kohl.

The most important result of the election in December is the fact that 20 million voters supported the policies of the Kohl government and gave it their mandate for the future. The CDU/CSU won 43.8 per cent of the overall vote.

The December election also showed that the German electorate tends to avoid unpredictable risks, prefers concentration and continuity in the political system and likes to see it when their politicians work to full physical and mental capacity. In summarising my remarks I would like to say that the German unification process can be diagnosed as the fundamental challenge for the German political system and that the political system has stood the test - at least as far as the German electorate is concerned.

It is now 14 years since Reunification and, in the meantime, many problems have arisen which can be attributed to 40 years of division. However, all in all, it can be said that the process of Reunification has been a success. Even Helmut Kohl’s successor to the office of Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, who, in his capacity as the Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, had always taken a critical and sceptical stance on Kohl’s Reunification policies, is now very pleased with the results. And the world has become a better place with at least this particular problem having been solved. Thank you for your attention.

References:

1. Elisabeth Pond: Beyond the Wall. Germanys Road to Unification, Washington D.C. 1993.
2. Peter H. Merkl: German Unification in the European Context, University Park, Penn. 1993.
3. Timothy Garton Ash: In Europa’s Name. Germany and the Divided Continent, New York 1993.
4. Philip Zelikow, Condoleezza Rice: Germany unified and Europe transformed. A study in statescraft, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press 1996.
5. Wolfgang Uwe Friedrich (ed): Germany and America, Essays in honor of Gerald R. Kleinfeld, New York, Berghahn Books, 2001.