Western Civilization - History Of European Society

The New Belle Époque: Democracy and Prosperity Since 1975 655

The Bonn Constitution of West Germany, adopted
in 1949, had encompassed the dream of a reunified
Germany. Its preamble stated that “the entire German
people is called upon to achieve by self-determination
the unity and freedom of Germany.” The cold war post-
poned the German dream of reunification to a distant
future. The USSR uncompromisingly opposed any pos-
sibility of a strong, unified Germany near its frontiers.
Many Westerners privately preferred the division of
Germany; it had facilitated the postwar Franco-German
rapprochement and the progress toward the European
Union. Most Germans had accepted the reality of two
Germanys—West Germans helped by their prosperity
and East Germans by their comparative success within
the Eastern bloc. The formal recognition of division,
the absence of a German problem on his frontier, and
the successful arms negotiations of the age of détente,
had been essential factors in facilitating the Gorbachev
revolution—as important as the victory of American
technology and spending to win the arms race or the
unyielding pressure for human rights and freedom from
within.

When the revolutions of 1989 upended the long-

standing political realities in central Europe, the chan-

cellor of West Germany was given the unexpected

opportunity to become the Bismarck of the twentieth

century. Helmut Kohl was an unlikely man for this

comparison, but he succeeded in the role with remark-

able ease. Kohl, like Adenauer before him, came from a

conservative Catholic family from the Rhineland. He

was the first chancellor from the generation too young

to have had an active role in World War II, being fif-

teen when the war ended. Kohl had taken a Ph.D. in

political science and immediately entered local politics

as a pragmatic, rather than ideological, conservative. By

1976, he had become the leader of the German conser-

vative party, the Christian Democratic Union. In 1982

he engineered the ouster of the socialist chancellor,

Helmut Schmidt, by persuading a small third party, the

Free Democrats, to abandon their coalition with

Schmidt and form a new majority with Kohl and the

CDU. Kohl promised “a government of the middle”

and followed a moderate course. He embraced the

Illustration 32.6

The Fall of the Soviet Union.With the fall of the Soviet

Union in 1991, one of the most widely repeated scenes was the de-

struction of the icons of the Communist regime. Hundreds of mon-

umental statues of Lenin and Stalin were toppled, but none of these

acts better symbolized the end of Communism than the one shown

here: A fourteen-ton statue of Felix Dzerhinsky (the founder of the

Soviet secret police) is lowered outside of the KGB headquarters in

Moscow.