Press Release
The German Ambassador to the United States and a former Western journalist working for an East German newspaper reflected on their personal experiences and the political circumstances that led to peaceful reunification of Germany twenty years ago.
Four factors had been crucial in ending the separation of Germany into the BRD and the GDR, Germany’s Ambassador to the United States, Klaus Scharioth, noted: The peaceful revolution, which began in churches across the GDR; Gorbachev’s decision not to deploy troops along Germany’s Eastern border; the CSCE process begun 1975 in Helsinki and the trust of powerful allies, who believed in the strength and future of a unified Germany.
Speaking at a joint McCloy Scholarship Program/Future of Diplomacy Project panel discussion on the twentieth anniversary of the reunification of his country, Scharioth praised the people of East Germany and the “civil courage” they displayed, following the examples of the Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia and the Solidarnosc movement in Poland. The civil rights leaders in Eastern Germany had been the “right people at the right moment,” he said. He praised their courage to demonstrate publicly in a state in which individual actions were closely monitored by the overt and covert secret police, the STASI. Demonstrators, he said, were able to draw strength from the fact that they knew their story was being broadcast to the West and internationally. This could in large part be attributed directly to the CSCE process and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which allowed Western journalists into the GDR for the first time.
These acts of personal courage had been met with unprecedented political courage by allies on both sides: Instead of repeating then-recent history, by sending in Soviet troops to quell mounting discontent, former USSR-leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had chosen the diplomatic and not the military response. The other panelists, Elisabeth von Thadden, currently an editor at German weekly Die Zeit and R. Nicholas Burns, Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project agreed that the unprecedented level of trust among key players at the negotiation table had been instrumental in the negotiations that would eventually lead to a unified Germany in November 1990. Burns had been a direct witness of the US negotiation strategy in the 2+4 talks which paved the way for reunification, while von Thadden had reported on events in the East, as a Western journalist working for a GDR newspaper.
Scharioth, expressed his deep gratitude to the United States “without whom, Germany would not be united today.” President George H.W. Bush’s grasp of the historic dimension of the event and his decision not to “dance on the wall” but to support President Gorbachev as an ally rather than an enemy, had been decisive, Burns added.
While the removal of the physical wall between the two Germany’s did not take long, the divisions between the German peoples were less easy to erase.
“As children we were waving to the guards on the watchtowers at the inter-German border to show them that we were humans and not capitalist creatures,” Elisabeth von Thadden said, recounting one of her childhood memories.
The experience of Germany’s division raised the question of what formed a “German identity,” Matthias Risse, professor of philosophy and public policy at the Kennedy School noted in his contribution. He speculated that this discourse was far from complete.
The panelists also discussed the confluence of domestic events that had contributed to this peaceful revolution. They shared their views on why the street protests had not turned violent. Both Scharioth and von Thadden underlined the important influence of the churches and the civil disobedience practiced by East German security officials. Coincidence had also played a role, Scharioth said responding to a question: Had East German party official Günter Schabowski not misinterpreted official orders, the border would never have been opened.
Connecting the past with the present, von Thadden made a reference to German political theorist Hannah Arendt. She painted an optimistic picture , saying that the story of “Germany’s reunification is a sign that there can be joy, not only joy in private at home, but political joy.”