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104 The election campaign of 2002 was conclusive proof that the Berlin republic had replaced the Bonn republic, the republic of West Germany. Centered in the Rhineland and facing west, Bonn was close geographically and culturally to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam. It was small, even cozy, and it reassured rather than frightened both the German people and their neighbors . It was a town—and a republic—without much history. Its scale was modest, as were its pretensions. The seat of the Berlin republic, in contrast, is a city of 3.5 million inhabitants , located within an hour of the Polish border. The city itself stretches over 343 square miles, making it one of the largest in Europe in geographical area. Historical reminders and monuments are everywhere. There is the Brandenburg Gate; the Reichstag building, torched during the Hitler era; August Bebel Platz, where the book burnings took place in 1934; the column celebrating the victory over France in the Franco-Prussian war; the Landwehr canal, into which Rosa Luxembourg’s body was thrown in 1919. There are, of course, remnants of the division of the country into east and west during the cold war: the few remaining segments of the Berlin Wall, for example, and the ugly and cavernous Palast der Republik, which housed the East German parliament. The scale of Berlin symbolizes the new Berlin republic. The new government quarter, centered around a renovated Reichstag and a monumentally large chancellery (which Schröder described to Bush as“my White House”) is vivid proof of the new self-image of a more ambitious, sovereign, and Central European Germany. The politics of Berlin are less contained as well. Berlin has a large working-class population, major intellectual and academic 6 Welcome to the Berlin Republic *ch06 9/1/04 2:15 PM Page 104 communities, and a substantial immigrant population of Turks and Germans from Russia, Poland, and other parts east. The politics of the street and mass demonstrations is an old Berlin tradition.At the same time, the role of ideas and of ideology is more prominent than it was in Bonn, given Berlin’s three universities and its large artistic and literary communities. On the other hand, business and the commercial middle class are underrepresented. What is most striking, besides Berlin’s scale and sense of history, is its easternness . There are still two Berlins, east and west, but the east is now the larger and has received most of the private and public investment since unification .Well over half of the population of the capital lived their lives in East Germany, and Berlin was selected to replace Bonn in part because it represented a visible commitment to unification. Yet the socialization, political culture, and economic prospects of the more than 17 million Germans who were born and raised in the former East Germany have been very different from those of their western compatriots. As the discussion of public opinion in the previous chapter indicates, eastern Germans’ views of the United States, both as a socioeconomic model and as a world power, are more restrained and suspicious than those of western Germans. Berlin Is Not Bonn Early in the Bonn republic, a famous book titled Bonn ist nicht Weimar argued that the Bonn republic would avoid the fate of the Weimar Republic because of the remade political culture.1 Today it is equally appropriate to add that Berlin is not Weimar, but it also is not Bonn. The 2002 election suggested the first political and cultural clues to how the Berlin republic would differ from that of Bonn, and the debate over the war in Iraq reinforced the initial indications. During the campaign, a number of key taboos of the Bonn republic were openly challenged or abandoned, including the taboo against speaking of Germans as victims of World War II, the taboo against voicing any criticism that might appear to be anti-Semitic, the aversion to declaring an independent German Way, and of course, the taboo against a German government openly opposing a major U.S. policy that Washington saw as vital to its national security. Berlin’s opposition to the war in Iraq also created a major new departure in German policy toward France, as Germany abandoned its old practice of positioning itself between Paris and Washington and instead openly sided with Paris against Washington , creating, in fact, a counter-coalition that included Russia. Not bad for one year. Welcome to the Berlin Republic 105 *ch06 9/1...

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