Die Einheit: Das Auswärtige Amt, das DDR-Außenministerium und der Zwei-plus-Vier-Prozess ed. by Horst Möller, et al. (review)

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of German reunification, the Institute of Contemporary History Munich-Berlin—the leading research institute on contemporary German history—has published an 800-page edition comprising 170 documents related to the reunification process. The sources transcribed here originate from the Foreign Ministries of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and the vast majority of them were only recently declassified specially for this commemorative volume.

The editors date the start of the reunification process to May 1989 when the GDR’s fate was largely sealed by the Hungarians dismantling the Iron Curtain at the Austrian border. Even though this act did not mean the border had ceased to be impassable, the pictures in the media suggested otherwise. Officials in the West German Foreign Ministry even saw themselves compelled to warn the media against “encouraging GDR Germans to entertain false hopes by spreading ultimately one-sided reports about the disbanding of borders and the liberalization of the regime of departure from Hungary” (Doc. 1). Nevertheless, the numbers of GDR citizens refusing to return to the GDR from their holiday abroad in the hope of being able to travel to West Germany via Austria kept rising. The “Pan-European Picnic” at the Austrian-Hungarian border in August 1989 provided an opportunity for the greatest mass flight since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The Hungarians had neither the desire nor the will to engage in a show of solidarity with the GDR, theoretically their alliance partner. Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn told his opposite number in Berlin, Oskar Fischer, that it was no longer possible “to return to the border regime of the past toward Austria. . . . What has to be taken into consideration now is the great importance [Hungary] attaches to its relations with Austria” (Doc. 2). Thus, what put the final nail into the GDR’s coffin was Hungary’s foreign policy toward Moscow, egged on toward full emancipation by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policy and the country’s newly found westward orientation. One cannot quarrel with the editors’ view that reunification was one of the results of the transformation process that altered Eastern Europe beyond recognition, a result that was demanded impetuously by an ever-increasing number of Germans after the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

The assessments of the West German Foreign Ministry underscore once more how unwillingly decision-makers, above all in London and Paris, faced up to the fact that the right of self-determination had to be conceded to the Germans as well. Resentment and the fear of a revanchist Germany were omnipresent. Many documents therefore focus on a European peace order favored by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, in which NATO and the Warsaw Pact are seen to be engaged in a process “of incremental rapprochement,” potentially leading, in a long-term perspective, to existing differences being largely “eroded” altogether. Although this approach, which was prevalent in the Foreign Ministry, was in line to a great extent with the Soviet need for security (p. 22), it was at odds with Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s vision. What was conveyed to the Foreign Ministry was the message that accession to NATO of a reunited Germany might “ultimately be acceptable for Moscow” (Docs. 65 and 71) if the USSR’s misgivings about NATO were allayed by substantial disarmament, if NATO itself underwent significant change, and if the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) process was intensified. In the Foreign Ministry in Bonn, the CSCE dimension was seen as the “golden bridge” across which Moscow might be persuaded to move toward acceptance of “German unity” (p. 29).

When the Two-plus-Four talks got under way in May 1990, the Soviet Union turned out to be in need of a much more...