For a country that only celebrated its 60th birthday last year, the Federal Republic of Germany has had more than its share of impressive leaders. Konrad Adenauer led his new country into freedom and an alliance with the countries of Western Europe and the United States at a time when that was not foreordained, while Ludwig Erhard was setting the economic policies (the social market) that created the economic miracle of post-war West Germany.
Willy Brandt worked to establish ties with the east while also emphasizing Germany’s (i.e., West Germany’s) true repentance for the Holocaust. Helmut Schmidt continued the policies of his predecessors, while arguing and supporting the need for NATO to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe in response to the threat of Soviet SS-20 missiles.
And then there was Helmut Kohl. Helmut Kohl, the provincial politician from Rheinland-Pfalz, always seemed to be underestimated, which was probably to his advantage. In an interview with Die Zeit, a German news magazine, Helmut Schmidt, who was forced out of office by Kohl in 1982, said: "Actually, I underestimated him into the autumn of the year 1989".
Unlike most Europeans and probably most Germans, Helmut Kohl believed in German unification. When the chance came in 1989, Helmut Kohl grabbed it. Even before the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989, Chancellor Kohl was giving loans to a Hungarian government that had cracked open its own little bit of the wall in August and September of 1989. Once the Berlin Wall fell, Helmut Kohl, with the support of President George H.W. Bush, moved quickly. Just three weeks after the fall of the Wall, when nobody really knew what would happen, but everybody assumed it would take a long time, Helmut Kohl presented a ten-point plan to the West German Bundestag which pointed toward unification by way of a series of federal structures between West and East Germany.
Even though that plan was overtaken by events, Helmut Kohl was not. As things kept moving faster and faster, Kohl was always there, along with Bush, pushing, cajoling, negotiating, to achieve his dream of German unification. And it was a unification of Germany within the North Atlantic alliance, which helped facilitate the entry of so many other countries of central and east Europe into NATO and the European Union, where their freedom and security could be insured, too.
Today, April 3, is Helmut Kohl’s eightieth birthday. Happy Birthday, Chancellor Kohl!
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* Update (4/3/10 10:50 pm): A reader raised a question about this comment in the fourth paragraph: "Unlike ... probably most Germans, Helmut Kohl believed in German unification." Let me clarify this. I did not mean most Germans did not want unification. What I was trying to say was that most Germans did not expect unification. They wanted it, but they did not think it would happen for a long time. Chancellor Kohl, on the other hand, seemed to believe in the real possibility of unification. And when the chance came, he took it.
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