Unchained Eagle : Germany after the Wall

by Heneghan, Tom

• ISBN13: 9780273650126
• ISBN10: 0273650122
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-01-01
• Publisher: Financial Times Prentice Hall

Table of Contents

Foreword	xiii
Acknowledgements	xv
To the Berlin Republic	1	(12)
Kohl's legacy	3	(1)
Fears for reunification	4	(3)
``All politics is local''	7	(6)
SHEDDING THE POST-WAR CHAINS
Before the fall	13	(8)
The disunited past	14	(2)
The ice thaws	16	(1)
Stabalitat uber alles	17	(4)
The Iron Curtain crumbles	21	(10)
The floodgates burst open	23	(4)
Life punishes those who come too late	27	(2)
9 November 1989	29	(2)
The Wall falls	31	(18)
``We can't hold up any more''	32	(1)
Kohl seizes the initiative	33	(3)
Mistrust abroad	36	(1)
SPD on the spot	37	(2)
Meanwhile in the East	39	(1)
The rush to unity	39	(3)
The frantic fortnight	42	(3)
East Germany votes	45	(4)
From treaties to unity	49	(16)
Turning the economy around	50	(2)
The Unity and Election Treaties	52	(3)
The Two Plus Four treaty	55	(1)
The meetings	56	(2)
Unity at last	58	(1)
The campaign finishes	59	(6)
DISUNITED GERMANY
The helpless giant	65	(14)
Protesters fill the gap	67	(2)
Chequebook diplomacy	69	(2)
The home front	71	(1)
Yugoslavia implodes	72	(3)
Germany gets its way	75	(4)
The Bonn-Berlin debate	79	(10)
The permanent provisional capital	80	(1)
Berlin! Berlin?	81	(2)
The search for consensus	83	(1)
The vote	84	(3)
The foot-dragging begins	87	(2)
The ugly Germans	89	(15)
The return of the repressed	90	(3)
The asylum debate and neo-Nazi violence	93	(3)
Confusion as violence spreads	96	(4)
Rebels without a cause	100	(4)
Another past to live down	104	(14)
Difficult targets	105	(2)
The man without a face	107	(1)
The Honecker trial	108	(2)
Prisoners of German history	110	(1)
History and hysteria	111	(1)
Inside the beast	112	(2)
Stolpe slows the steamroller	114	(1)
Crimes and culprits	115	(3)
The blossoming landscapes	118	(13)
Making aquariums out of fish soup	119	(2)
Erhard's worst fears come true	121	(1)
The Truehand	122	(5)
The turnaround	127	(4)
Towards a German Europe?	131	(12)
Two sides of the same coin	132	(2)
The road to Maastricht	134	(4)
The monetary mess	138	(2)
Widening, deepening, narrowing, excluding	140	(3)
Ossis and Wessis	143	(11)
We are the people! Who are we?	144	(1)
Ossis	145	(3)
Ostalgie	148	(2)
Wessis	150	(1)
Life in a redivided land	151	(3)
Electing a lame duck	154	(13)
SPD up, Kohl down	155	(1)
The super election year	156	(2)
The red socks	158	(2)
The second all-German election	160	(1)
Single country, split electorate	161	(1)
Change in continuity	162	(5)
FOUNDING THE BERLIN REPUBLIC
Normal at last?	167	(11)
Painful anniversaries	168	(2)
8 May	170	(1)
The European neighbour	171	(2)
The Bosnia Tornado vote	173	(1)
The SPD on the move	174	(2)
Enter the new era	176	(2)
No money at home, new money for Europe	178	(13)
Consensus or confrontation?	179	(2)
Reforming Europe the German way	181	(3)
``The euro speaks German!''	184	(2)
King Kohl	186	(5)
Time for a change	191	(10)
``Hello, candidate!''	192	(1)
The new politics	193	(1)
Kohl's European dream sours	194	(2)
The New Centre	196	(2)
The election	198	(3)
The past that will not pass away	201	(10)
Slave labour, Nazi gold, fascist prayerbooks	202	(2)
The Holocaust memorial	204	(1)
Wehrmacht crimes	205	(1)
The willing listeners	206	(5)
Red-Green in power	211	(13)
Where's Schroder?	212	(3)
Life after Helmut	215	(1)
Oskar quits	216	(1)
Germans as liberators	217	(2)
Europe again	219	(1)
The Third Way	220	(4)
The Berlin Republic	224	(17)
Burying the Bonn Republic	226	(3)
Winds of economic change	229	(2)
The East, ten years later	231	(2)
Welcome to the Berlin Republic	233	(8)
Index	241

Excerpts

The division of Germany has fascinated me ever since I first saw the Berlin Wall I the summer of 1968. My high school study tour had just arrived from New York and the Wall was the first place we visited. The crude cinder-block barrier and barbed wire were a grim sight. Standing on an observation platform looking over into East Berlin, I tried in vain to imagine what it would be like to have a wall like that running through Times Square. Three years later, when I was a student at Gottingen University in West Germany, the Iron Curtain was only a short drive away. It was a jagged gash splitting what would have otherwise been just pleasant rolling countryside. I found East Germans to be friendly, well-informed and curious about the West. By contrast, West German students I knew ignored the East, revealing a mental border as interesting as the actual frontier itself. My career with Reuters gradually took me across Europe and Asia, but I always wanted to return to Germany someday to see it with a correspondent's eye. The opportunity came in early 1989, when I was a news editor in exotic Hong King and West Germany seemed singularly boring by comparison. But there was a general election coming up in 1990 and Helmut Kohl's grip on power looked shaky. That might liven things up a bit, I thought as we settled into sleepy Bonn. A few months later, I was in East Berlin and the Wall was wide open. As I fired off story after story throughout that night, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that anything could happen. The end of communism, the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and NATO-in a flash, it all seemed possible. The fact that all but the last option actually did come about shows how much depended on the ugly Wall that fell that night. Another by-product of the Wall's fall-the emergence of Helmut Kohl as Europe's leading statesman-seemed so unlikely that nobody thought of it then. In the months and years that followed, there was much talk about all the other developments now possible. Germany could become more assertive, Germany might dominate Europe, German nationalism could revive, Germany might turn to the East-there were any number of theories based on the country's behaviour in the past. From a front row seat in Bonn, however, the picture looked quite different. If anything, the West Germans seemed to want as little change as possible. They were doing very nicely in their prosperous, pro-European, post-nationalist Federal Republic and didn't really want to rock the boat. On countless issues during and after reunification, what struck me most was their deep conservatism and reluctance to stand out again. Helmut Kohl's party financing scandal has shown the world the local politician we journalists often saw in Bonn. Europe's towering statesman could look quite different at home as he dithered on important issues or calculated his options through the prism of petty rivalries and local election schedules. Although his slush funds were not known about the tie, they fitted into the pattern of the machine politician determined to keep a tight grip on his power base. During my eight years in Germany, spanning episodes from Mikhail Gorbachev's triumphant visit to Theo Waigel's failed bid to snatch Burndesbank gold, I covered most of the main events and issues dealt with in this book. This including travelling all around the country and reporting on Kohl in Bonn, at party congresses, on the campaign trail and on foreign trips as far away as Moscow, Tokyo and Denver. After moving to Paris in 1997, I returned for Gerhard Schroder's election on the following year. In June 1999, when the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia had ended, I rode into Prizren with the German army to report on the liberation of Kosovo. That mission was a fitting way for Germany to crown a confused decade as it struggled to Adjust to its new role in the world. Most uncredited material in this book is based on my repor