TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=89TT2361> <title> Sep. 11, 1989: East-West:Breaching The Wall </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 Sep. 11, 1989 The Lonely War:Drugs </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> WORLD, Page 32 EAST-WEST Breaching the Wall </hdr><body> As a flood of refugees flees Honecker's hard-line state, new questions emerge about the eventual reunification of divided Germany By William R. Doerner They congregate in campgrounds along Hungary's 215-mile border with Austria, poring over shared photocopies of maps of back roads and footpaths leading to the frontier. Some still hesitate about going. Others simply abandon their Trabant automobiles near the border to make the final approach on foot, scrambling toward Austria and freedom through brambles and berry bushes. Hungarian border guards, normally under official orders to prevent the torrent of unauthorized border crossings, sometimes fire shots into the air to scare the escapees but just as often turn a blind eye to their desperate flight. Some of the refugees are guided by red arrows pinned to trees along the border by Austrian farmers, who last provided such services to the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956. The fleeing East Germans are finally welcomed by signs that read YOU ARE IN AUSTRIA. The exodus from East Germany crescendoed last week as the summer tourist season drew to an end. With 200,000 East Germans still visiting Hungary, officials in Bonn said it was possible that up to 1 in 10 would eventually attempt to defect to West Germany; some 2,000 have already declared their intention not to return home by checking into a Red Cross camp in Budapest. Amid a flurry of diplomatic activity last week, Hungary agreed to allow visiting East Germans to cross unimpeded into Austria, and Vienna suspended normal visa requirements. West Germany, whose constitution grants citizenship to any East German seeking asylum, notified Austrian railroad officials that trains for "mass transfer" would soon be required. Four new resettlement camps were being set up in the southern state of Bavaria to house the human tide, supplementing two permanent facilities already filled to overflowing. The refugee preparations, said West German Red Cross officials, were the country's biggest since the end of World War II. It was an apt historical allusion. Last week's rush to escape coincided with the 50th anniversary of the event that ultimately resulted in a divided Germany: Hitler's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, which touched off the war. The dramatic refugee flight stems from a largely symbolic act undertaken by Hungary on May 2. To show its desire to improve ties with the West, the government of Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth began ripping out the barbed wire along a 150-mile-long stretch of the rusting Iron Curtain. East Germans, rarely permitted to travel abroad but able to secure permission to visit Hungary with relative ease, recognized the lightly guarded border as a possible new escape hatch. First in trickles and then in droves, they fled into Austria, where they were given passage to West Germany. More than 6,000 East Germans have defected so far this year. They joined another much larger -- and perfectly legal -- exodus. In the first seven months of 1989, more than 46,000 East Germans were allowed to make a "permanent departure" from their homeland, most to West Germany. East German authorities, of course, could cut back on both kinds of traffic by denying exit permits and taking other administrative measures. But if the flood continues at its present rate, more than 100,000 East Germans will have crossed the border of their divided land by year-end, the most since the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. The sudden spurt in refugee traffic from East to West, from Communism to capitalism, serves as fresh testimony to the deep divisions etched across the map of Germany since the Allies vanquished the Third Reich and carved it into two nations. Paradoxically, however, the refugee rush also comes at a time when both Germans and non-Germans are starting to re-examine those divisions and ponder whether they must remain forever in place. Over the centuries "the German question" has haunted Europe, pitting Teuton against Slav, Catholic against Protestant, Habsburg against Bourbon. Today, ever so tentatively, it is being raised anew in the form of whether German reunification might one day be possible. Until that day, East Germans have good reason to leave, frustrated that their country's economy, long the provider of the highest standard of living in the Communist bloc, is now stagnating and disenchanted with the 18-year rule of Erich Honecker, a stern holdout against Gorbachev-style reform. With such Communist neighbors as Poland and Hungary experiencing a bracing splash of economic and political change, East Germany remains shackled by a regime that refuses to look beyond a Stalinist status quo. "There is a sense of resignation," says Walter Priesnitz, a top official in Bonn's Ministry for Intra-German Affairs. "They believe nothing will change." Once under orders to shoot escapees, East German authorities are now permitting many of their citizens to leave. Honecker may be using legal emigration as an escape valve for the discontented. Says an official of the Intra-German Affairs Ministry: "He really seems to think that if he lets the discontented ones leave, the country will become more stable." West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, concerned about the domestic political consequences of the refugee influx, has called upon Honecker to undertake reforms so that East Germans will not feel compelled to flee. So far, the East German leader has failed even to return Kohl's telephone calls. One reason for Honecker's silence and East Germany's apparent paralysis could be the leader's poor health. Honecker has not appeared in public since Aug. 14. West German intelligence officials say he was scheduled for a gallbladder operation, but the surgery was apparently unsuccessful; presumably Honecker was suffering from something more serious than gallstones, perhaps cancer. Honecker's departure could bring to the fore questions about German reunification that were only whispered while the cold war endured. Germans, East and West, long seemed resigned to two states, each championing the ideological cause of a competing superpower. That mood of resignation is changing. Germans feel uncomfortably caught between worry and hope as they contemplate the implications of an astonishing transformation in East-West relations. No longer can the Germanys remain immune to the churn around them, the expectation of more comprehensive disarmament, the ferment of democratization in parts of the Soviet bloc, the apparent metamorphosis of the Soviet Union into a less threatening neighbor. President Mikhail Gorbachev has, perhaps unwittingly, breathed life into the long somnolent "German question"; his frequent calls for "a common European home" seem to suggest the possibility of a single German state. In West Germany, where Gorbachev's potent appeal for a more open Europe has gripped the imagination, there is also a growing tremor of nationalism, an emotion long suppressed. West Germany risked an open split in the NATO alliance last spring to reflect a national consensus against maintaining and modernizing U.S. short-range missiles on West German soil. A last-minute compromise by George Bush prevented a full-fledged alliance crisis, but the emotional debate over Western nuclear strategy has yet to run its course. Gunter Gaus, Bonn's envoy to East Germany from 1974 to 1981, appears to speak for many of his countrymen when he criticizes NATO for having become the "regional instrument of America's world power" instead of fulfilling its original purpose as a "West European defense alliance with American participation." Equally strong is the emotional tug from the East. All West German political parties share the conviction that their country has a special role to play in Eastern Europe, including East Germany. "German history and culture are more tightly linked with our neighbors in central Europe than with E.C. nations such as Portugal and Spain," says Peter Glotz, a Social Democratic Bundestag member. The country "cannot turn its back on its close neighbors in the East and seek a future with nations that have played no role in its history or culture." The risk is that West Germany, forced to choose between allegiance to the West and its commitment to a future that includes Eastern Europe, could be tempted to go it alone. In some ways, the groundwork for German reunification has already been laid. Economic ties between the two Germanys, worth an estimated $7 billion a year, are expected to increase, with Gorbachev's blessing. Ironically, East Germany has enjoyed something like associate status in the E.C. because Bonn treats inter-German trade as internal commerce, unencumbered by tariffs or customs barriers. That arrangement allows East Germany to sell its products throughout the Community. Some observers, like political commentator Lothar Lowe, a West Berlin expert on the Soviet bloc, foresee a steady rapprochement between East and West Germany as separate states linked in an intimate economic relationship, akin to that between the U.S. and Canada. But it will be no simple matter to dislodge the prevailing wisdom, honed over four decades, that the division of Germany is essential for European stability and that reunification would create a Germany too powerful and perhaps too aggressive to contain. Few have forgotten how an economically and militarily powerful Germany stood at the center of two world wars in this century. Gorbachev himself waffles when asked about that ramification of his "common European home," saying that his concept does not envision border changes. Most European leaders agree, at least in private, with Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who insists, "There are two German states, and there must remain two German states." Most U.S. leaders concur, no matter how often they pay lip service to the notion of eventual reunification. U.S. policy, reiterated by Bush as recently as May, when he visited West Germany, calls for German "self-determination," in the relatively safe belief that most East Germans given the choice would opt for the West. But the emergence of a single Germany, should such a choice ever be given, appalls many U.S. foreign policy observers. "The prospect of a German power in the middle of Europe is a real one," says Gregory Treverton, senior European Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations. "The prospect of a stable German power is not a real one." What worries some, says William Hyland, editor of the quarterly Foreign Affairs, is the possibility of German neutralism in the event of reunification. "As the strongest European power, a reunited Germany cannot remain in the European Community and it cannot join the East," he says. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for his part, does not rule out the possibility that West Germany might return to its historic ties to the East. Unless Bonn is offered its proper place in a united Europe by the rest of the West, he said it will "surely pursue its own course." It is also hard to imagine that the vast majority of European nations would respond with equanimity to the re-emergence of a united Germany, despite the fact that 13 of them are allied to West Germany in NATO. Any such possibility remains virtually unthinkable within the lifetime of those who suffered through World War II in France, Britain, Belgium or the Netherlands. Though hardly a joking matter, their attitude is aptly summed up by the observation of novelist Francois Mauriac that "I love Germany so much I am glad there are two of them." Opposition to German reunification is hardly limited to the West. A recent survey of Poles found that 33% of them believe that Germans continue to harbor "evil intentions" toward their neighbor. Besides, any reunification scenario that involves even modest liberalization in East Germany -- and virtually all of them do -- would instantly be vetoed by Honecker and his hard-line allies. The East German leader only last January predicted that the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the fatherland's division, could stand for a hundred years. Honecker talks of East Germany as the "frontline bastion of socialism." If it ever occurs, reunification might take some form other than single nationhood. The two Germanys could come closer as a confederation, perhaps within the embrace of an enlarged, supranational E.C., where it would wield little more weight than, say, powerful regions like Bavaria do today inside West Germany. More likely, they will grow together as some form of democratization comes to Communist East Germany, or through a flood of uncontrolled immigration. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher, observed during the Great Depression that the "crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In the interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." Neither the sudden eruption of refugee traffic this year nor the gradual rekindling of the German question means that either Germany is necessarily in a crisis. But neither country, as the black-and-white postwar era fades away, is without its morbid symptoms. East Germany is locked into an anachronistic political and economic system that even its oldest practitioners in Moscow have branded a failure. West Germany, despite its vast wealth and growing clout on the world stage, remains sadly uncertain which way to turn. --James O. Jackson and Frederick Painton/Bonn </body></article> </text>