A journalist once asked Helmut Kohl if he ever spent sleepless nights thinking about history, and the German chancellor responded, “When I get up at night, I’m not thinking about history, but about plundering the refrigerator.” At six feet four and over three hundred pounds, he gave an answer that wasn’t surprise.
Indeed, that is the image most Americans have of the man who ruled Germany from 1982 to 1998 — sixteen years, the longest tenure of any German leader since Kaiser Wilhelm. Kohl is not remembered for grand speeches or witticisms, but simply as the jolly German giant — a man who, before state dinners, would secretly eat a real dinner in case the official menu lacked substance. According to a former Water-gate hotel employee, whenever Kohl was in town, the staff was instructed, “If the man orders a steak, make sure to bring him three.” His dinners with Bill Clinton in Georgetown were notorious for the mountains of pasta served.
And yet, there is surely more to the man than that. He didn’t accidentally stumble into history or just happen to be there when the Berlin Wall came crumbling down. And in Helmut Kohl, the new authorized biography, Henrik Bering makes it his mission to convince us that the chancellor played a pivotal role at the height of the Cold War and thereby truly belongs in the pantheon of great leaders of the postwar era. Bering is the first non-German to take up the chancellor, and his book is welcome, for previous works on Kohl — including his autobiography, Karl Hugo Pruys’s Kohl: Genius of the Present, and Werner Maser’s Helmut Kohl: The German Chancellor — were badly translated and received little attention in America.
Not a conventional chronological biography but a series of essays on Kohl’s influence on the issues critical to Germany, Bering’s Helmut Kohl concentrates more on the chancellorship and less on Kohl’s time as minister-president of his home state, chairman of the state party, employee of the large BASF firm, farmhand working for the Allies, and member of the Hitler Youth. Yet his life before the chancellery is equally fascinating — and equally important.
Kohl was fifteen in 1945 and trained for antiaircraft work. But when World War II ended in May, he and his fellow Hitler Youth members scattered. Foraging the fields near Augsburg, he was caught by Polish forced laborers, who beat him mercilessly and sent him to work on a farm until the Americans allowed him to return to his hometown of Ludwigshafen in the Rhineland, a city lying in ruins. That was the extent of Helmut Kohl’s participation in the Third Reich, though his brother was killed by debris from a downed Allied bomber and his father-in-law was the engineer who designed the Nazis’ anti-tank bazooka. In a controversial address before the Israeli Knesset years later, Kohl spoke of his “grace of a late birth” which many took to express his thankfulness for not having had to make difficult decisions like enlisting in the Wehrmacht.
At sixteen, Kohl joined the newly founded Christian Democratic Union led by Konrad Adenauer. He climbed steadily up the party’s ladder and at age thirty-nine finally unseated the aging Peter Altmeier as minister-president of the Rhineland-Palatinate province. He was always the upstart, challenging the older generation, many of whom were leaders during the Weimar Republic. As he got older and larger, Kohl became an easy target for his opponents, both from within the party and outside. The jokes ranged from his appetite for Saumagen (pig stomach) and Eisbein (pig knuckles) to the jowls that eclipsed the knot of his tie, and he was often portrayed as a country boob.
After losing on his first try for the chancellery in 1976, Kohl finally won in 1982 after the breakup of Helmut Schmidt’s Social Democrat-Free Democrat coalition. It’s hard to recall just how bad conditions were at the time. Tensions between the Federal Republic and its eastern neighbor had reached a breaking point. The Soviets had begun to replace their SS-4s and SS-5s in East Germany with the new SS-20s, each carrying multiple warheads and capable of being launched at a moment’s notice. Perceiving this as the serious threat that it was, President Reagan (widely viewed by Germans as an inexperienced cowboy actor) pressed for the stationing in West Germany of American Pershing II medium-range nuclear missiles — much to the dismay of Chancellor Schmidt.
Kohl’s rise in Bonn was the turning point in U.S.-German relations. While his predecessor stressed Ostpolitik and cooperation with the Soviet Union, Kohl was an Atlanticist. On his first official visit to Washington, he made clear the importance he attached to cooperation with America, much to the relief of the Reagan administration. The decision to deploy the Pershing missiles was wildly unpopular (when Vice President Bush visited West Germany, his motorcade was pelted by rocks). Even before Kohl took office, Brezhnev warned of “walls of fire” and the East German dictator Erich Honecker talked about the coming “ice age.” As Bering puts it, “The Soviet game was to cut a wedge between America and its European partners, forcing the latter into a state of weak neutrality and de facto Soviet domination.”
But the missile deployment in late 1983 did not usher in the apocalypse. And four years later, Reagan and Gorbachev signed a treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces. Bering quotes Kohl:
It is my conviction that we would not have achieved German unification if we had not in 1983 started to deploy the middle-range missiles on German soil. Mikhail Gorbachev himself once told me that the steadfastness of NATO in this decision substantially contributed to the new thinking in the Kremlin. The Soviet leadership had to acknowledge that they had no chance of driving a wedge between Europeans and Americans, between Germany and the United States.
Kohl’s commitment to cooperation with America shouldn’t have come as a surprise. When Reagan asked him if he had a favorite American president, the chancellor picked Harry Truman. Kohl never forgot Truman’s efforts to rebuild Germany through the Marshall Plan or the CARE packages that prevented millions of Germans from starving to death.
The other crucial issue that Kohl faced was reunification. Again, it’s hard to remember that just sixteen years ago, many in the West claimed to prefer a divided Germany. Some, like Margaret Thatcher, were wary of a united Germany possessing, in her words, “a Teutonic lust” for reunification without conducting “massive consultations” with the other Allies. (The chancellor and the British prime minister never got along that well; Thatcher was given to lecturing Kohl and fending off his attempts to break in by saying, “Don’t interrupt me” and “You talk all the time.”) Bering quotes an Italian prime minister as adding, “God save us from the eventuality of German unification.” Resistance to unification from within was equally strong. Social Democrats accused Kohl of demagoguery and scoffed at the idea of a united Germany, while Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, often given to grandstanding, suggested that a position of neutrality was the key to unification and that the country would then act as mediator between East and West.
But Kohl held his ground, and with the events of 1989 and 1990 unfolding too rapidly for either Honecker or the Soviets to contain, the idea of one Germany became reality. And with reunification achieved and Kohl believed to be largely responsible, his reelection to the chancellery in 1990 was easy. The eastern Lander voted overwhelmingly for his party, and if Helmut Kohl had retired at that moment, he would be remembered as perhaps the most popular chancellor in German history.
But he decided to press forward and begin the integration of the east, an integration that to date has cost over $ 130 billion. The East German economy in 1990 was a shambles. Only 25 percent of households had a telephone, strip mines had scarred the countryside, and many towns were simply uninhabitable. The costs of modernizing the east required heavy and unpopular taxes on the population of the west — and then Kohl made the decision to exchange the East German mark at a rate of one to one with the West German mark. The president of the Bundesbank, Karl-Otto Pohl, resigned in protest, warning that the result would be skyrocketing unemployment. (Pohl was correct: By 1994, unemployment in the east would hover around 35 percent.)
In Helmut Kohl, however, Henrik Bering argues that the choice was right. “The decision on the Mark exchange rate was an essential part of Kohl’s strategy on unification — to prevent easterners from moving west.” Unfortunately, as a political decision, it would cost Kohl his leadership of Germany.
After he barely survived the 1994 election, many assumed that Kohl would shortly hand over power to Wolfgang Schauble, his former chief of staff and interior minister. But when Schauble was shot and crippled by a mentally deranged gunman, Kohl was left without a clear successor — while the Social Democrat Gerhard Schroder had the support of a people dissatisfied with rising unemployment and empty promises of “blooming landscapes” in the east. East Germans were particularly enraged at Kohl’s newly created privatization agency, which they held responsible for massive layoffs, liquidating 3,500 businesses, and shutting down 190 government-sponsored enterprises.
It was all too much even for a giant of a man like Helmut Kohl to overcome, and in 1998 he was sent packing in the wave of social democratic victories across Europe. But Henrik Bering’s new book reminds us of what even many Germans seem to forget: The arms race, the Warsaw Pact, and a people divided against each other no longer pose a threat. And for that, they have, in good part, Helmut Kohl to thank.
Victorino Matus is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
