TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073090/07300011.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 29

AMERICA ABROAD

Bringing Kohl Down to Earth


By Strobe Talbott


    Helmut Kohl deserves credit for what is happening in
Germany, but not quite as much as his occasionally bumptious
demeanor suggests. He's in some danger of becoming the Goodyear
blimp of the international diplomatic circuit, soaring above
everyone from Houston to Zheleznovodsk, inflated with the
self-satisfaction of a politician on a roll. He is that, of
course, but he ought to be more. And less. The world is
watching not because Kohl is leading his Christian Democratic
Union into an election later this year but because his country
is triumphing over two of the great curses of this century,
fascism and communism. He would do well to convey less of a
sense of politics and more of a sense of history.

    Now that it is ending, the postwar division of Germany can
be seen for what it always was -- an unnatural act and, almost
inevitably, a temporary condition. Nazi war criminals could be
hanged, but their nation could not be permanently drawn and
quartered. The zones occupied by the Western Allies merged,
naturally, into the Federal Republic within five years. East
Germany was always a rump state, unnaturally dependent on an
ideology and a reign of fear, both imposed by Moscow. The
beginning of the end came last October, when Mikhail Gorbachev
visited East Berlin and announced, almost in so many words,
that Erich Honecker was on his own. For a Soviet puppet, that
means the end. The juggernaut of unification was under way.
Kohl found himself in the driver's seat largely ex officio: he
happened to be the Chancellor of West Germany when the Soviet
Union let East Germany go, which meant letting it come home.

    In the months since, Kohl, along with the skilled and dogged
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, has made some perspicacious moves, such
as his detailed and reasonable plan for confederation in
November. But he scared and angered his Eastern neighbors by
letting them think he was leaving open the possibility that a
unified Germany might press revanchist claims on parts of
Poland. His retreat on the issue this spring was an occasion
more for relief than for congratulation.

    It would do Kohl no harm to acknowledge a debt to a
courageous and controversial predecessor. In 1969 Willy Brandt
launched his Ostpolitik of reconciliation and rapprochement
with the East. It was the first major sustained breakthrough
of the cold war in Europe. Brandt went a long way toward
allaying Soviet fears by signing a renunciation-of-force treaty
with Moscow. He propitiated many of Germany's other former
enemies by dropping to his knees in front of a memorial to the
victims of the Warsaw ghetto. Most important, Brandt formally
recognized the German Democratic Republic. He was criticized
at the time for granting legitimacy to a cruel and dictatorial
regime, but the long-term strategic effect turned out to be the
opposite: ending the G.D.R.'s isolation increased its
susceptibility to the gravitational pull of the West and
hastened the day of unification.

    U.S. officials used to grumble that Ostpolitik was a
parochial policy that allowed the Soviets to cut separate deals
with Bonn, drive a wedge into NATO and nudge the Federal
Republic toward neutralism. When Brandt fell in 1974, more than
one champagne bottle popped open in Washington.

    Before the East German elections earlier this year, Brandt
was a stump speaker and nostalgia figure at campaign rallies.
His Social Democrats lost because the people of the G.D.R. have
had their fill of anything that even sounds socialist. But they
still owe much to the author of Ostpolitik. What Willy Brandt
did two decades ago helped make it possible for them to elect
a unity Chancellor this year.