RONALD REAGAN, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II all enjoy firmly established reputations as giants of the late twentieth century. Each will be remembered for unwavering stands that hastened the demise of the Soviet Union and its global empire of anti-democratic power and ideology. When the history of the period is fully sorted out, though, there is a fourth central figure, a leader far less acclaimed in his own time, who is certain to get his due. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s legacy is truly remarkable — so much so that history will likely regard him as one of the most influential figures of modern Europe.
Pope John Paul II proved to be a remarkable strategist who brilliantly combined symbolism and rhetoric in his effort to de-legitimize Soviet Communism and its conquests. Ronald Reagan rebuilt America’s military might and took the offensive against entrenched Soviet power around the globe. Margaret Thatcher was Ronald Reagan’s staunchest ally in the struggle against the "evil empire" and will also be remembered as the one who stiffened the spine of an American president when the use of force was needed to counter Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s aggression.
But Helmut Kohl’s influence throughout this period was equally important. In a showdown over the deployment of U.S. intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the early 1980s, Kohl reaffirmed Germany’s tie to the West at a critical moment in Cold War history. His stand helped reinvigorate Western resolve, which in turn contributed to the Soviet Union’s "new thinking" in the mid-1980s. Kohl also unified his country — peacefully, with Soviet consent, as a member of NATO, and all within a year of the breach of the Berlin Wall. Finally, Kohl more than anyone else set on course the historic process of Europe’s economic and political integration. Even if the endpoint of European unification remains unclear — and the benefits still very much a matter of doubt — the process is under way, and its implications will be profound.
In all three cases, Kohl faced enormous obstacles, tenacious opposition, serious risk, and an almost epic level of uncertainty. Would neutralist forces succeed in pulling Germany away from the West, thereby destroying the Atlantic Alliance and the U.S. commitment to remain engaged in Europe? Were East and West Germany not destined to remain permanently separate, a division born in the aftermath of world war, sealed by the Cold War, and tacitly blessed by a continent wary of German power? Given centuries of division, rancor, and war, how could Europe ever come together in a more permanent, peaceful union? In all three cases, Kohl seized what he (and sometimes he alone) saw as opportunities. And in all three cases, the new facts on the ground he was able to create simply collapsed the seemingly formidable arguments of opponents and doubters. Relatively unsung though the German chancellor of 16 years may be, the Europe of today is a product of his vision and action more than those of any other.
The jaundiced German view
PERHAPS THE PLACE Kohl will get his full and complete due will be in his home country. Kohl’s entire career had been one of bumbling, stumbling, and bad breaks; of being tactically outmaneuvered and dismissed by opponents and experts as a dilettante. Franz-Josef Strauss, the legendary and sharp-tongued governor of Bavaria, once said that he was fascinated by Kohl’s television appearances because they gave "the impression that anybody could be chancellor."
Biographers described Kohl as dull and unoriginal, a teacher of political platitudes and a politician ever prepared to wait out the hard problems. Comedians and cabaret performers made careers out of Kohl’s political missteps and grammatical lapses, all of which somehow seemed to fit with the physical impression of this lumbering, overweight giant (Kohl is 6’4" and weighs well over 300 pounds). Kohl was the man "who ate far more than his fellow citizens, but scarcely carried more weight." The attacks were unrelenting. "Rarely has a West German politician been subjected to so much criticism, humiliation and derision," the London Times observed. Strauss once swore that Kohl, at the age of 90, would be writing memoirs entitled "Forty Years as Chancellor Candidate."
Through four consecutive federal elections, Kohl loved seeing what he called "the long faces" of the vanquished on election night. In sweet revenge, he also adorned the wall outside his office in the chancellery in Bonn with the covers of prominent magazines that had falsely forecast his electoral defeat and political demise over the years. Not only did he win, he ran Germany for 16 years, eclipsing Konrad Adenauer’s 14-year marathon run as the Federal Republic’s first chancellor and outlasting such contemporaries as George Bush, François Mitterrand, and Margaret Thatcher.
The ride was often bumpy. There was, at Kohl’s urging, Reagan’s ill-fated commemorative visit in 1985 to the German military cemetery at Bitburg. The exercise in reconciliation erupted in bitter controversy upon the discovery that in addition to the ordinary German soldiers buried there, so too were members of the SS. There was Kohl’s ill-timed comparison of Mikhail Gorbachev — soon to become the chancellor’s fast friend — to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1986. There was Kohl’s momentary refusal in 1990 to recognize the inviolability of Germany’s eastern border with Poland — which gave the Poles, and the rest of Europe, serious pause during the unification process.
No matter the missteps, though, Kohl had incomparable stamina. He always had a knack for returning to the big ideas. And time and again, he pursued these big ideas assiduously, forever exploiting the hesitation or overconfidence of his opponents.
The missile test
KOHL'S LONGETIVITY AS CHANCELLOR owed much to his approach to power. He was, in a word, ruthless. Within the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), rivals were politically extinguished or exiled to provincial posts. Kohl insisted on complete party discipline and loyalty. He always valued loyalty, he often said, over being liked. Even when backbenchers traveled abroad, the chancellor personally signed off on the trip and knew precisely where they were going and with whom they were meeting.
Within the chancellery itself, Kohl gathered around himself a small, close circle of advisors. The circle included Juliane Weber, Kohl’s private secretary. She had no formal policy role, but she had the chancellor’s ear on everything. The circle also included Kohl’s long-time aide and national security advisor Horst Teltschik, who recalls that when Kohl sent him abroad on consultations and Teltschik would ask for instructions, the chancellor would merely say, "you already know what I think." It was a "family business," writes historian Iring Fetscher, "where emotional and personal ties were more important than anything else."
Notwithstanding the calculating power politician who controlled his party with an iron grip, Kohl’s public persona was another matter. Kohl’s personal style, his preferences — even his appearance, perhaps — represented a down-to-earth predictability, comfort, and affluence that ordinary Germans seemed to crave. Charles Lane once argued, half-seriously, in the New Republic that Kohl won elections because he was so fat. Vote for me, went the subliminal message, and you, too, will be satisfied and secure. There may be something to this. Kohl epitomized that untranslatable German coziness known as Gemütlichkeit.
The chancellor adored devouring platefuls of his favorite Rheinpfalz specialty, Saumagen (stuffed pig’s belly). He liked speaking in his regional Pfälzisch dialect. He slipped into his favorite, well-worn cardigan every chance he got. Visitors often described his family home in Oggersheim near Ludwigshafen as perfectly tidy, dust-free, and neat — right down to the pajamas hanging in the closet, pressed neatly, and folded on hangers. He and wife Hannelore’s favorite excursion was to Wolfgangsee in neighboring, German-speaking Austria. (Kohl speaks no language but German.) By one count, the couple had vacationed there 27 times in a row. Straightforward, safe, and utterly bürgerlich, Kohl had the touch. And it always seemed to work with voters on election day.
For all his down-to-earth folksiness and popular habits, Kohl was never very popular with the German people when ranked against contemporaries. In response, he liked to say he was interested in winning elections, not popularity contests, although it had to have annoyed him that his smooth foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, always ranked higher in the polls.
The fact that Kohl was never much tempted by populism served him well. In the early 1980s, a powerful anti-American, anti-war populist movement swept across Europe, threatening to derail the deployment of U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles. Many a West German politician was going wobbly because of public opposition to the Pershings. And far more was at stake for the Atlantic Alliance than just new missiles.
By the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in what was accepted at the time as a key measure of global nuclear strength: strategic launchers. Soviet expansion was on the march. Pro-Moscow regimes were sprouting like mushrooms from East Asia to Africa to Latin America. President Carter was contemptuously dismissing America’s "inordinate fear" of communism, while his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, explained that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the American president shared "similar dreams" for their nations. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was preparing to gain an additional edge by deploying a new generation of intermediate-range weapons: the ss-20 missile, capable of striking the United States’ NATO allies. The West was in retreat. Literally. A Presidential Review Memorandum leaked to the press in August 1977 suggested that, in the case of a Warsaw Pact attack, NATO troops might need to fall back to the Rhine before regrouping for a counterattack.
Kohl’s predecessor, Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt, recognized the threat and helped coordinate a response to the increasing imbalance. Schmidt was one of the originators of a two-track strategy to deal with the ss-20s, according to which the new American missiles would be deployed while negotiators simultaneously sought the reduction or elimination of this class of weapon. NATO’s 1979 decision to deploy some 500 cruise and Pershing missiles quickly emerged as the focal point of a ferocious debate in Western Europe. As Josef Joffe of the German daily Süddeustche Zeitung puts it, the debate may have been argued in the "language of nuclear weapons" but was, at its core, about politics.
At stake was whether the bond between America and Europe would be affirmed or ruptured at a critical moment in Alliance history; whether Soviet intimidation would be checked or appeased at the crossroads of the East-West standoff; and whether the Western democracies would summon the political and moral resources needed to continue fighting the Cold War. The outcome was far from certain.
While Jimmy Carter led the United States, the Europeans were wallowing in their own malaise. The supposed "moral equivalence" of the two superpowers was the intellectual fashion of the day. And in the front-line state, Germany, there was massive resistance to the deployment of new American missiles. Leading German intellectuals urged their country to become the peacemaker between East and West — to drive for independence from the two opposing blocs. Significant segments of public opinion across Europe were becoming convinced that their continent would turn into "a shooting gallery" for the superpowers. Millions of protesters took to the streets. Nowhere was the intensity of debate as raw, nor the stakes as high, as they were in Germany. Hundreds of thousands descended on Bonn in 1981 and 1982. Their ranks included trade unionists, church activists, doctors, lawyers, even delegations from the German military and groups from Kohl’s CDU.
The German media provided their own tireless contribution to the campaign. Rudolf Augstein, publisher of the popular weekly Der Spiegel, saw "no principle difference" between Soviet politburo meetings and the political discussions among Western governments. A senior editor at another popular weekly, Stern, published a book entitled Do the Russians Want War?, in which the author argued that the Soviets had every right to fear American aggression.
Reagan’s election in 1980 gave the peace movement an enemy against whom to rally. Petra Kelly, a leader of Germany’s new Greens, suggested that the West’s nuclear codes be encased in the heart of a child so Reagan would have to rip open the child’s heart when he was ready to begin his nuclear war. It was a time of growing demonstrations, blockades, human chains, and death’s-head costumes. The memories of terrorism at the hands of the Baader-Meinhof gang were vivid. Members of Germany’s peace movement threatened to make the country "ungovernable." At times, the prospect did not look unachievable.
Because of his pro-missile stance, Schmidt was becoming isolated within his own party. Members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had fallen prey to Soviet and East German propaganda, which pleaded with Germans to protect the continent from "a nuclear Auschwitz." In turn, leading Social Democrats advocated unilateral disarmament and a nuclear-free Europe. Schmidt’s party colleague Egon Bahr called for a "security partnership" with the Soviet Union. In the run-up to the 1983 general elections, the Social Democrats experimented with the anti-missile slogan "In the German Interest," suggesting a direct clash with American and NATO interests. While Schmidt argued vehemently that no authentic peace policy could "overlook the contradiction between the system of free democracies and Communist dictatorship," his party turned a deaf ear. Schmidt’s demise came about, at least in part, because he was unable to stem the sprawling anti-nuclear revolt.
This was the climate in which Kohl became chancellor in October 1982, after a no-confidence vote against Schmidt. The onslaught of neutralism, anti-nuclear pacifism, and outright anti-Americanism he inherited was formidable, and still on the rise. Kohl, the former governor of Rhineland-Palatinate, was a tabula rasa on the subject of foreign policy. His knowledge and experience seemed trivial in comparison with those of his predecessor. Kohl came from the provinces, from the land-locked Rhineland region, and was taunted by critics as an inexperienced country bumpkin, a Provenzler. It made matters no easier that Kohl lacked the majority government Margaret Thatcher had in Great Britain and was forced to rule in a coalition that continued to include Schmidt’s dovish foreign minister, Genscher. Guided by instinct and conviction, though, Kohl seemed to grasp from the outset what was most important.
The new chancellor understood the horror of war better than many of the younger peace activists themselves. Growing up during World War II, Kohl personally experienced most of the 124 allied air attacks on his hometown of Ludwigshafen — 40,000 explosive bombs and 800,000 incendiary bombs delivered in all. Eighty percent of the city was destroyed. Kohl also understood the dangers of social upheaval. The demise of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s demonstrated compellingly how lethal political and social fragmentation could be to German democracy. And Kohl saw how the euromissile debate was tearing at the fabric of West German society.
Yet Kohl remained unyielding in the conviction that the missiles were necessary. They were needed for military reasons, as a countermeasure to the Soviet ss-20s. They were also needed, however, as an unmistakable affirmation of Germany’s commitment to the Alliance and the Federal Republic’s integration in the West. In standing firm, Kohl confronted the Soviets — and the Social Democrats, the Greens, the peace movement, the intellectuals and academics, the nationalists on the German Right, and the media. He had to face down dissent in his own party, too, as some CDU members had themselves become agitated about public opinion. He insisted there was a difference between a populist movement and a popular majority. Germany would be governed from the Bundestag, and not from the streets, he repeated adamantly.
Kohl’s instincts were validated by German voters at the polls in 1983. The election focused on two issues: unemployment and nuclear weapons. An influx of visitors from Washington and Paris — and from Moscow — underscored the importance of the latter issue as seen from abroad. Mitterrand tried to offer Kohl support through an address to the German Bundestag. Kohl ran on a staunchly pro-West, pro-missile platform. The choice voters had was unambiguous. Kohl won — as did Margaret Thatcher that year in Britain, where Labor took its worst defeat since 1918. Their anti-nuclear, anti-American rivals did not reflect majority opinion. The debate continued, but Kohl’s election meant that the Pershing missiles could begin deploying. Leaving nothing to chance, the first arrived within 24 hours. "To the surprise of Soviet leaders and even of many Western leaders, [West Germany] successfully resisted Soviet pressures," writes Jeffrey Herf in War by Other Means.
In his memoirs, Kohl remembers the euromissile debate as "one of the most dramatic in German postwar history." It was also one of the most dramatic in Cold War history. The deployment meant that the Soviets had lost a crucial opportunity. "We knew how sorely tested West Germany’s loyalty to NATO was at that time," East German spymaster Markus Wolf recalls in his autobiography. According to Kohl, "Gorbachev himself" would later tell the German leader "that the steadfastness of NATO in this decision substantially contributed to the ‘new thinking’ in the Kremlin." It was one of many factors, to be sure. The Soviet economy was imploding by the mid-1980s. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was vexing the Kremlin. It is nearly certain, though, that had the alliance split over the euromissiles, NATO would have suffered a devastating, perhaps fatal, blow, and the Cold War would have taken a dangerously inauspicious turn.
The road to unification
MARGARET THATCHER HAD A HABIT of lecturing Helmut Kohl. Endlessly, according to him. He could never get a word in edgewise, Kohl recounts in his memoirs. In her eyes, Kohl was guilty of an "exaggerated" coziness. He was too gemütlich, she thought. What’s more, he was rude. Thatcher was apparently forever miffed after a meeting with Kohl once in Salzburg, when he suddenly informed her that he had to interrupt their conversation to dash to another appointment. A few minutes later, Thatcher is said to have spotted the chancellor sitting in a sidewalk cafe drinking his coffee and devouring a mammoth cream pastry.
The story may be apocryphal, but it is a fact that Thatcher and Kohl never got along. They did stand together through the end of the Cold War. But things changed drastically once the Berlin Wall came down. On November 10, 1989, the day after the Wall fell, Kohl telephoned Thatcher to bring her up to date on the momentous events. Thatcher coolly recommended that Kohl call Gorbachev. The Soviet leader would explain to the chancellor why unification was out of the question. It was clear from the outset that Thatcher had no intention of helping Kohl unify Germany. Nor would she ever share his enthusiasm for the economic and political unification of Europe.
The British prime minister was right about the Soviet view of unification. She was also right about the general mood in Europe in late 1989. Nearly everyone opposed unification. The Poles were visibly nervous, the Dutch predictably against. French President Mitterrand — in keeping with the old adage that such was the French affection for Germany, they were glad to have two of them — turned up in East Berlin before Christmas to do his bit to shore up the communist regime. Like Thatcher, Mitterrand feared upsetting the balance of power in Europe. Similarly, he worried about what a resurgent Germany might be like.
Even the Americans were initially reluctant. There had been concerns on the other side of the Atlantic, once again, about whether the Germans were drifting away, this time seduced by the siren call of Gorbo-mania. Kohl may have succeeded in getting the American missiles deployed in Germany in the first half of the decade, but in the last half of the 1980s, harsh criticism of the United States and its posture in arms control talks was manifest throughout Western Europe. In West Germany, attitudes were becoming generally less favorable to Washington, with a majority of West Germans in some polls supporting cooperation equally with the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1988, Kohl had visited Moscow, accompanied by five cabinet ministers, 70 business and banking leaders, and a $1.7 billion bank line of credit for exports to Reagan’s evil empire. The trip raised eyebrows in Washington.
If Kohl wanted unification the following year, he would hardly be pushing on an open door. The obstacles were daunting, including at home. Some SPD oppositionists were ambivalent. Berlin’s mayor, Walter Momper, insisted on describing the November 9, 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as "a day of seeing each other again," studiously staying clear of unification talk. Others, like party leader Oskar Lafontaine, opposed unification outright, complaining loudly about West German arrogance — and the costs of an eventual merger. Public opinion was hesitant. Kohl’s own foreign ministry advocated a "go-slow" approach.
Like nearly everything else in his career, Kohl’s own public stance on unification had been anything but smooth and consistent over the years. His early speeches did not mention the topic. When he referred to the "German people," clearly he was talking only about the citizens of West Germany. In the 1970s, Kohl adopted the language of détente and Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik. Unification talk was out of fashion, considered overly provocative and highly politically incorrect by leading Social Democrats and mainstream intellectuals. Many even fought for full recognition of the East German state and the abolition of "antiquated" institutions like the Salzgitter Center, the archive for documentary evidence of East German human rights abuses.
Kohl never went to such an extreme. He clearly wanted Germans to benefit, however, from the small-scale "human improvements" that the East German regime was bestowing. The East Germans used human rights as their Soviet patrons did: as barter for Western technology, trade, aid, and enhanced political legitimacy. In German-German relations, Bonn’s largess helped to increase telephone contacts for ordinary citizens. Travel opportunities for East Germans to the imperialist neighbor expanded, albeit in limited and carefully controlled circumstances. West German authorities were permitted to purchase in greater volume the freedom of East German political prisoners, who were shipped to the border in exchange for hard currency.
Like the German Left, Kohl also succumbed to some of Ostpolitik’s dangers. In 1987, for instance, Kohl received East German dictator Erich Honecker in Bonn, thus assisting communist Germany in taking an unprecedented and desperately coveted step in its ongoing campaign for legitimacy. To give Kohl his due, however, he never strayed far. In one of his first trips to Moscow as chancellor, he informed Yuri Andropov that he was determined to accept the deployment of American missiles — and that he remained fully dedicated to the goal of German unification; it was an icy visit. During Honecker’s West German trip, Kohl insisted on broaching the issue, to his guest’s complete discomfort and chagrin.
Nevertheless, it was not surprising, in the weeks before and the days immediately after the breach of the Wall in Berlin, that Kohl proceeded cautiously. Mitterrand noticed. So did the Poles. Lech Walesa had shocked Kohl during a visit by the chancellor to Warsaw just before the fall of the wall with the prediction that unification was imminent. No one in Kohl’s inner circle had forecast as boldly as Walesa. Kohl himself had conceded just a year earlier that he did not expect to see unification during his lifetime. Suddenly, the chancellor was beginning to grasp what was at stake.
On November 28, 1989, three weeks after East Germany’s border was opened, Kohl stunned the Bundestag — and the world — by unveiling a 10-point plan for German unity. There were no opinion polls or focus groups to test the political popularity of unification. Kohl simply went forward.
He chose not to inform the allies. Nor did he share the plan with his foreign minister, whose habit it had often been either to steal the limelight or to dilute the chancellor’s position. He ordered that the text of the speech be sent to President Bush as it was being delivered, accompanied by a detailed note explaining what he was trying to do. Kohl sought a confederation and, if the Germans so wished, he gently suggested, the eventual unification of the two German states. The Soviets, the French, the British — they were all unhappy with the chancellor’s initiative. Even the Americans felt somewhat uneasy, although they quickly backed Kohl unambiguously. Kohl had set the agenda, outflanking opponents at home and clarifying Germany’s ambitions for the international community.
Unification quickly gained unstoppable momentum. By winter, 3 million to 5 million East Germans were sitting on packed suitcases, West German authorities estimated, ready to come west if German democracy and the D-mark did not come to them. In the end, they drove the process. They determined the pace. But it had been Kohl who had made unification politically conceivable and acceptable. He did so by keeping his country in NATO and by making it clear over the next few months that he would wrap the new Germany as tightly as he could in the mantle of Europe. The Soviets pushed hard against NATO membership for the united Germany. Kohl’s foreign minister may have had his own ideas; the U.S. had intelligence reports suggesting that Genscher envisaged, with Germany’s coming unification, the end of the alliance. But Kohl prevailed.
Kohl’s "Europapolitik"
IF OTHER EUROPEANS were wary of a united Germany, it was a wariness shared first and foremost by Kohl himself. He was keenly concerned that the devils of his country’s past might re-emerge. He never really trusted Germany. And he saw the only possible solution as Germany’s elaborate and manifold integration into Europe. This was Kohl’s Europapolitik, the political project closest to his heart and the progress toward which was probably his proudest achievement in office.
"Ever closer" union had been always part of the European Community’s ethos. In fact, European unity had been the idea of princes and poets, statesmen and philosophers for centuries. If Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman were the architects of the modern post-World War II quest for European unification, then François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl became the men who translated the design into reality. For Kohl, German unification and European unification were, as he liked to put it, two sides of the same coin.
Bismarck once said that he often found the word "Europe" in "the mouths of those politicians who wanted from other powers something they did not dare to demand in their own name." And so it was to an extent in modern Europe, too. For some, European unity was the continent’s answer, for example, to globalization. As the nation-state withered away, went the logic, a European Union (E.U.) that pooled resources and sovereignty would become a formidable transnational actor well positioned to represent Europe’s political and economic interests in the world. For others, such as Europe’s smaller countries, European unity was the key to maximizing their own leverage and influence. They feared being overrun or ignored by the major powers on the continent, especially Germany and to a lesser degree France, the UK, and Italy. They believed that a unified Europe would at least assure them a place at the table.
For the French, ceding sovereignty to supranational European institutions represented an immense gamble. To avoid being dominated by its neighbor across the Rhine, Paris has made the calculation that it will gain a net advantage in its relationship with Berlin, the Germans having relinquished their cherished D-mark in this European bargain and given up the hegemony of the Bundesbank. European Commission President Jacques Delors wrote once that "creating Europe is a way of regaining that room for maneuver necessary for ‘a certain idea of France.’ "
For his part, Kohl always accepted French vanity and ambition, just as he felt obliged to respect European, especially French, fears about Germany. Adenauer had once counseled Kohl that in dealing with France he should always bow once to the German flag and twice to the French. And so Kohl would argue that deeper integration would indeed embed Germany in Europe, prevent the re-nationalization of German foreign policy, and, in turn, make German power more palatable for its neighbors.
This did not mean relinquishing German national interests. On the contrary, it meant that the postwar Federal Republic of Germany had become particularly adept at pursuing its interests, as Timothy Garton Ash argues in his book, In Europe’s Name. In fact, Kohl made European economic and political union a priority for German foreign policy a decade ago precisely because he understood Germany’s ceding of sovereignty as a necessary price to pay for national unity.
The campaign for a single European currency — an initiative that had always been seen by virtually all its proponents as a step toward greater political integration — formally began in 1969. But it was the Maastricht Treaty, negotiated in 1991 and promoted by Kohl and his French allies, that pushed the process and accompanying debate to center stage.
Once again, Kohl was swimming against the stream. True, unlike the euromissile debate, Kohl’s campaign for economic and political union faced no appreciable resistance from any of the mainstream political parties in Germany. But not everyone could understand why Germany, or for that matter others, would give up so much for an uncertain future. In France, the Maastricht Treaty passed by referendum, but it did so by a wafer-thin margin. In Denmark, it failed. In Germany, it would have likely failed as well, had it ever been put to the test. "D-mark nationalism" had become a permissible sort of ersatz patriotism for the Germans after the trauma of the Holocaust and World War II. They loved the mighty mark as a symbol of achievement, rebuilding, and stability. Kohl faced formidable criticism in the media. A range of publications, from the tabloids to popular magazines like Der Spiegel to the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, traditionally very pro-Kohl, all raised questions about the chancellor’s ambition to trade the stable D-mark for a new and untested European currency. It was no surprise that Italians in great number favored giving up the lira. They wanted to import monetary virtue and export traditional Italian vice. The Germans feared just the opposite. Not surprisingly, Germany’s central bankers started as reluctant participants in Kohl’s politically motivated project.
In Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher emerged as the strongest opponent of "Europe." Thatcher feared that a stronger, more deeply integrated E.U. would reflect German and French preferences in economic matters and be at fundamental odds with Anglo-Saxon tastes. She also contended, more importantly perhaps, that Germany would inevitably dominate such a union, and that such dominance would invariably give rise to the malign nationalism Helmut Kohl sought to make extinct. Kohl was unpersuaded; he remained unwavering in his commitment to economic and political union. Step by step, he outmaneuvered the British prime minister.
Thatcher worked assiduously and in detail to block Kohl’s plans. She tried to create tactical alliances, including with members of Kohl’s own euro-skeptical Bundesbank. Karl Otto Pöhl, the Bundesbank’s president, from time to time was outspokenly critical of European monetary union. By quoting Pöhl at one European Community meeting, Thatcher was successful in getting mention of a European Central Bank removed from the text of a communiqué. Even such little victories were hard for her to achieve. Thatcher disliked Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, but failed to convince Kohl or the French to favor her candidate for the Commission, the Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, who shared at least some of Thatcher’s Euro-skepticism. In the 1980s, she had tried to block reference to European Monetary Union in the Single European Act. Her efforts were in vain. Later, she would also oppose the establishment of an E.U. committee to report on monetary union and try, once again unsuccessfully, to undermine its formation.
All the while, Kohl was winning support from the United States and, more important, working closely in tandem with the French, whose political clout is central to E.U. decision making. He never gave up trying to persuade Thatcher of the logic of his design. On a private visit once to Kohl’s home near Ludwigshafen — an invitation that Kohl had pressed on the British prime minister — Thatcher’s foreign affairs advisor Charles Powell became the object of Kohl’s sermon. Kohl wanted Thatcher to see him on his home ground, close to the border of France, deep in the heart of continental European history and conflict. And on an excursion to the cathedral in Speyer, Kohl took Powell aside, behind a tomb in the crypt, to explain his case for merging Germany’s identity into that of a wider Europe. Kohl really was a good European, he wanted to explain. No one could doubt the sincerity of Kohl’s objectives. As Henrik Bering writes in his new biography of the German leader, Helmut Kohl, his "goal was [always] to break the pattern of destructive nationalism and war in Europe."
Kohl never convinced Thatcher of this means. Powell says he was prepared to report the conversation to Prime Minister Thatcher when they got on the plane, but stopped when Mrs. Thatcher flopped onto her seat, flung off her shoes, and proclaimed: "My God is he German!" By May 1998, it simply didn’t matter any more. Thatcher was gone, the German public — and the Bundesbank — had reconciled to the coming reality of a single European currency, and across Europe, Kohl had his allies firmly in place. Whether the euro succeeds over time economically or politically, it was another remarkable achievement for Kohl.
Abroad and at home
MONETARY UNION was also an achievement about which, at the time he stood for election last year, scarcely an ordinary German seemed to care. While settling the big strategic questions, Kohl had failed to tackle other issues. In 1998, questions about the euro and any eventual political union remained distant, abstract and overly complicated for most Germans.
Kohl’s domestic record, on the other hand, was not complicated at all, and the facts were catching up with him. Under his leadership, Germany moved from economic pacesetter in the 1980s to battered and bloated welfare state in the 1990s. Kohl repeatedly failed to introduce reforms in the Germany economy that industry and the younger mavericks of his own CDU were urging on him. Germany was saddled with double-digit unemployment. The welfare state needed slimming down. Adding insult to injury, poor Helmut Kohl had to endure the wrath of his struggling countrymen in eastern Germany. He had led them out of communism and into the Western fold; but had also prematurely promised "blooming landscapes" in the east within three or four years of unification. Amidst rumors of the unthinkable — a revolt against the chancellor within the CDU — Kohl’s perennial and formidable campaign machine this time visibly staggered toward the finish line of his last election.
And so it was that Kohl’s career as chancellor finished, in a sense, as it began. When he arrived at CDU headquarters in Bonn on election night last September, the halls were packed with the party faithful, drinking their beer and nibbling on snacks. The outcome was already clear. The feeling was anti-climactic. The mood was, well, upbeat. It was as if they had known in advance and were already prepared to move on.
Lackluster and stumbling a bit, Der Dicke ("the fat one") had run out of gas. His concession speech referred to the big battles of the past. In truth, Kohl had lost the skirmishes, many of them. He had stumbled at times, terribly. But he tackled the big things mightily. Kohl had helped win the Cold War. He reunified his country. He won the battle over the euro. It was a remarkable run, those 16 years. In time, the world, the historians, even the Germans themselves will come to acknowledge the greatness of Helmut Kohl.
