FALL OF THE WALL:In a time of financial crisis and international terrorism, the big question is the country's position on war, writes DEREK SCALLY
NADJA GÖHR is one of the few Germans who has no memory of November 9th, 1989.
The day the Berlin Wall fell is the day she was born – nearly a month premature.
“For me it’s just a birthday, though I’m proud I was born when I was,” says Göhr, a history student and daughter of East German athlete Marlies Göhr.
“I just can’t imagine the old system or living in another country.”
Göhr is the new Germany, part of a young generation for whom the Berlin Wall is a historical fact rather than a personal reality.
As a so-called Wendekind – child of change – she was asked this month to give a keynote speech at an awards ceremony for Super Illu magazine, an eastern regional title. It was then she realised how not an issue the German division is for her or her friends.
“For me there is no east or west,” she says, “just different places with their own traditions.” A decade after moving from Bonn, the political class has firmly established a tradition in Berlin: breakfast in Café Einstein.
Forget the Reichstag corridors – this bustling coffee house on Unter den Linden is by far the best spot to watch the new Berlin Republic in action.
Last week was a case in point. Hours before the cabinet swearing in, soon-to-be ministers discussed the imminent reduction in German military service from nine to six months.
Nearby, a politician with a bright future in the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) pondered whether the party should open itself to the Left Party, a renamed and reloaded version of the East German SED.
It is all so normal – in a way few thought possible 20 years ago when this was East Berlin. Then, Margaret Thatcher warned that Germany was poised to launch a “reinvigorated . . . bid to become the most powerful country in Europe”.
Chancellor Kohl complained to then president George Bush that Thatcher’s ideas about Germany were “pre-Churchillian” and, as chancellor of a united Germany, he spent his final years in office proving her wrong.
“We want to be able to represent our interests as Germans,” he told a cheering crowd of 100,000 Berliners hours after the wall had been breached. “But the German house, our house, can only be built under a European roof. That must be the goal of our politics.”
So who was right? In these anniversary-heavy days, foreign policy analysts are weighing up the evidence to see whether the united Germany is punching its foreign policy weight or whether, in the words of an unnamed 1989 sceptic, Germany has become a “big Switzerland”.
The 1990 unification treaty resolved the “German question” of sovereignty and borders and brought to the fore the next question: the German interest and whether Germany would pursue interests at odds with those of the EU.
On European affairs, Chancellor Angela Merkel has returned Germany to the Kohl tradition as EU moderator, with an ear for smaller states.
But time hasn’t stood still: she has less money at her disposal than her mentor for cheque book diplomacy.
Meanwhile, as her new foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, made clear in his only major foreign policy speech to date: “I don’t belong to those people who shy away from thinking and formulating [policy] in terms of the national interest.” What some see as a policy shift is, German officials claim, merely a tightening up of rhetoric.
“We have always had national interests, but before 1989 it was not in the national interest to speak about them,” said Dr Heinrich Kreft, a CDU foreign policy expert. Pressed on the question, he describes the change thus: “If someone is extremely polite, people sometimes presume the person is servile and everything backfires. We distanced ourself from the old strategy because it was no longer necessary and because people were no longer buying it.”
In a time of financial crisis and international terrorism, the big recurring question in the new Germany is the country’s position on war and peace.
Unification and Nato membership have brought new expectations of Europe’s largest country. After Berlin’s first, hugely controversial post-war deployments of soldiers to the Balkans and Afghanistan, it tested its sovereignty and its allies with its No to the US-led war in Iraq.
Proponents of Germany’s moral obligation to peace include Westerwelle, who has described German “diplomatic savoir-faire” as “the source of our political and moral authority”.
Call it the “good German” strategy, but it is one that attracts mixed reviews at home. Critics see a self-satisfied country pointing to past wrongs to justify present inaction, using its “never again” mantra to mask sloth as moral superiority.
“This pretence of moral superiority becomes intolerable when it serves as an excuse to shirk responsibility or to avoid choices,” writes Dr Sylke Tempel, editor of the journal Internationale Politik.
“One cannot be entirely good in asymmetric wars such as the one being fought in Afghanistan, so the choice comes down to engaging in lesser evils to avoid greater ones.”
Some suggest that Germany’s debate on its military role in the world is coloured by a foreign policy twist to “Ostalgia” — the term for nostalgia for the GDR past.
“East Germany presented itself as a pacifist state although it was armed to the teeth,” said the CDU’s Heinrich Kreft. “But now this claim, which no one believed at the time, has become more potent, something politicians in the established parties have not yet been able to challenge.” This pacifist platform has rescued the former SED from political oblivion and found it allies among old West German 68ers, and young globalisation critics who have come together to form the new Left Party. They oppose military deployments in Afghanistan and elsewhere – and even call into question Germany’s Nato membership.
“Pacifist emotions, although strong in Germany in general, run stronger among former East Germans than among westerners,” says Jan Techau of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “They are more critical of the EU, Nato, and the US – the traditional foundations of Germany’s role in the world.”
The Left Party front pokes holes in German foreign policy, pointing out how Berlin criticises the nuclear ambitions of Iran, a country that is simultaneously an important trade partner.
“This, it could be argued from a cynical standpoint, is another mark of German “normalcy” in a world governed by balance sheets and cold, calculating realpolitik,” remarked author Robert Wistrich in the current issue of The American Interest.
On Thursday, Merkel will become the first German leader since Konrad Adenauer to address the US congress.
Two decades after winning back full sovereignty, after a falling out with the White House on Iraq and ongoing rows over Afghanistan troop numbers, Merkel will portray Germany as an international player, but one that feels its way carefully before deciding whether to step forward.
The new Berlin Republic has resisted the imposition of many old West German political assumptions and shrugged off many euphoric expectations from 1989. But the new, old capital retains one similarity with Bonn: the past is as present as ever.