Joel of Far Outliers, citing Tony Judt, takes a look at East Germany’s West German admirers at the height of the Sunshine Policy Ostpolitik. Here’s just a sample:
Preoccupied with ‘peace’, ’stability’, and ‘order’, many West Germans thus ended up sharing the point of view of the Eastern politicians with whom they were doing business. Egon Bahr, a prominent Social Democrat, explained in January 1982 (immediately following the declaration of martial law in Poland) that Germans had renounced their claim to national unity for the sake of peace and the Poles would just have to renounce their claim to freedom in the name of the same ‘highest priority’. Five years later the influential writer Peter Bender, speaking at a Social Democratic Party symposium on ‘Mitteleuropa’, proudly insisted that ‘in the desire for detente we have more in common with Belgrade and Stockholm, also with Warsaw and East Berlin [emphasis added (by Judt)], than we do with Paris and London.’
In later years it would emerge that on more than one occasion national leaders of the SPD made confidential and decidedly compromising statements to high-ranking East. Germans visiting the West. In 1987 Bjorn Engholm praised the domestic policies of the GDR as ‘historic’, while the following year his colleague Oskar Lafontaine promised to do everything in his power to make sure that West German support for East German dissidents remained muted. ‘The Social Democrats’, he assured his interlocutors, ‘must avoid everything that would mean a strengthening of those forces’. As a Soviet report to the GDR Politburo noted in October 1984, ‘Many arguments that had previously been presented by us to the representatives of the SPD have now been taken over by them’.
Does any of this sound eerily familiar?
Read the rest on your own.
7 Comments
I, as a German citizen, agree with the criticism of the “Ostpolitik”.
At least, even among the staunchest West German admirers of Communism nobody ever suggested turning back East German refugees…
I spent entirely too much time trying to figure out why the title of the post seemed like the opposite of the content.
Than I realized it was talking about West German fans of East Germany, not Fans of West Germans in East Germany.
I was equally confused at first…
I caught part of this movie on TV not too long ago — there will definitely need to be a Korean version someday:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye_Lenin%21
Fits in very nicely with this piece, which I purloined from the “Arts and Letters” website. The pro-East German West Germans and pro-Nork South Koreans are hardly alone.
http://www.city-journal.org/ht.....acket.html
But the West Germans were not the driving force toward unification in 1990. It was done by the first free national election in the GDR were the East
Germans voted for parties which supported the unifaction. Unification was part of the West German constitution, FRG. But in the beginning of the process before March 1990 even western conservative politicians were reluctant to think that way. Helmut Kohl included.
Jens-Olaf is right on this one - the prospect of unification was downright unpopular among segments of the West German population in 1989 and early 1990.
Thus the political class was most reluctant to push the issue…