The Political Legacy of Helmut Kohl (2017)
Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl Dies at 87

Far worse for the chancellor was the role he played in the party donations scandal. In that affair, Kohl worked together with other party leaders in his effort to obtain amnesty for all those donors -- but especially for those who received donations in the party's headquarters -- who had been giving or obtaining illegal donations and violating tax laws for years. Kohl was particularly groveling on behalf of the donors who, he said, had only wanted to help the party and had unknowingly violated the law. "They should pay their back taxes, but they should not be prosecuted," he argued. Fifteen years later, he would ask that the same approach be applied to himself. In fact, Kohl had his party's treasurers in mind, whom amnesty would have protected from prosecution. And that's precisely why the audacious plan failed after Kohl's own ally in the party, former German Constitutional Court President Ernst Benda, accused the party of trying to become its "own judge and jury."
The Miracle of Bremen
The repercussions of the party donor scandal persisted for a long time to come. When Otto Schily, at the time a member of the Green Party in parliament, sought legal action against the chancellor, accusing him of falsely testifying before a parliamentary subcommittee, then-CDU Secretary-General Heiner Geissler tried to cover for Kohl with the strange claim that the chancellor had suffered a brief "blackout." It turned out to be the ultimate insult to Kohl, who never forgave Geissler. But voters didn't seem to care much about this and other shortcomings on the chancellor's part. They seemed to think he just needed to practice a little more. But Kohl had also been making some foreign policy gaffes at the time -- when, for example, he sought to proclaim the innocence of his generation -- born in 1930 -- in the Holocaust with his flippant remark that they had the "mercy of late birth." Or when he compared Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev -- just as he was beginning to restructure his ossified state -- to Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, a man he said also had a good understanding of PR. Then he forced U.S. President Ronald Reagan to visit a military cemetery in the city of Bitburg, even though members of the SS had been buried there. Within the party, support for Kohl only began to slip when, at the end of the 1980s, the CDU began losing ground in important elections and a serious adversary emerged from within the ranks -- the very same CDU Secretary-General Heiner Geissler that Kohl had brought into politics.In September 1989, Kohl then experienced and celebrated the threefold "Miracle of Bremen." At a party conference held in the West German city, the revolt Geissler had initiated swiftly collapsed after the chancellor announced the imminent opening of the Iron Curtain along the Austrian border as a result of secret talks with Hungary. He did not, as Geissler had hoped, get voted out as party chief -- and neither did he get replaced with the desired candidate, Lothar Späth. Kohl had attended the conference in poor health and under high doses of pain medication because he had delayed a needed prostate operation.He was then able to watch miracle number three from his sick bed as he anxiously followed the erosion of the Eastern Bloc. First Hungary, then Poland and later Czechoslovakia were suddenly able to determine their own futures after Gorbachev renounced the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty for Soviet satellite states. Many East Germans were quick to sense the shift that was happening. Thousands of them traveled to other Eastern European countries and sought protection in the buildings of West German embassies there. But Kohl and his most important adviser Horst Teltschik were likewise sensing what Willy Brandt had prophetically told the Bundestag in September 1989: "I will openly express my feelings that an era is coming to an end" -- an era of arms buildups and the Cold War and, for Germany at least, one of the Berlin Wall and barbed wire. Shortly before its 40th anniversary, Eastern Germany was teetering on the brink. Thousands of its citizens had occupied the West German Embassy in Prague.Chancellor Kohl, still bedridden, wanted to personally facilitate their departure on site, but doctors forbade him from traveling. Which explains why it was left to his deputy, Foreign Minister Hans-Dieter Genscher, to speak from the embassy balcony in Prague, uttering what is likely the most famous unfinished sentence in history: "We have come to you in order to inform you that today, your departure..." It would remain Genscher's most important contribution to the reunification process. Because from that point on, up to and after the fall of the Wall, which happened while Kohl was in Poland, the chancellor took over control: unflinchingly and with both conviction and diplomatic finesse. It was the performance of his lifetime.According to his own telling of events, he realized following his visit to Dresden in mid-December that reunification could not be stopped. "The people want it." Concurrently, then-East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow requested 15 billion deutsche marks in aid from West Germany. Kohl considered the sum to be grotesquely exorbitant. He would rather, he told his adviser Teltschik at the time, send the money to the Soviet Union in order to win over Moscow's support for unification.
Resistance in the West
Half a year later, as he and Gorbachev  met both in Moscow and in the Caucasus Mountains to negotiate the size of reunified Germany's future military as well as its alliance loyalties, Teltschik was busy figuring out how much reunification would cost. According to his calculations, 15 billion deutsche marks would have to be paid to the Soviet Union -- but to Moscow, and not to East Germany , so as not to prolong the country's existence.Kohl, of course, couldn't simply buy East Germany from his Soviet counterpart. He also had to overcome significant resistance in the West -- from Margaret Thatcher in London, for example, and François Mitterrand in Paris, but also from several smaller neighbors who feared an enlarged Germany for historical reasons. The chancellor was able to do so because he linked German unification tightly with the process of European unity, ultimately producing unification on multiple levels: the German and the European, embedded in a currency union in addition to regulations for an internal market free of customs and border controls. "That is why," Kohl would write in his diary not long later, "I tied the introduction of the euro to my own political destiny."It is useless to ask if German reunification would have come about without the promised discarding of the D-mark: The euro is here and the common currency has benefited eurozone member states more than it has hurt them. It is also useless to consider the question, hypothetical as it is, as to whether a different chancellor would have done the same thing: Helmut Kohl was at the right place at the right time -- and he made but few mistakes as he grasped for the cloak of history.Back home in the Oggersheim district of Ludwigshafen, he dictated to his wife Hannelore the 10-point roadmap that would lead to reunification just one year later. In the development of the roadmap, the Ramstetter brothers acted as his advisors -- one of them was a pastor and the other a teacher in Ludwigshafen. The two had helped Kohl previously with the formulation of his Christmas address. Kohl, the man of the people, was both eager and able to avoid groups of experts or advisors from ministries, political coalitions or academia. From that point on, he was his own adviser, convinced he knew what the people wanted. And he was usually right.The most serious error underlying reunification and the Unification Treaty between the two parts of Germany, as we know today, was rooted in a vast deceit. East Germany and its state statisticians had invented economic numbers to cover up the country's impending bankruptcy. And nobody except for those who had produced the numbers knew anything about it.Even in September 1990, an economic research institute predicted that reunification would not prove deleterious to either the East or the West and would actually result in a profit within two years. The Unity Treaty likewise includes a reference to "revenues" generated by the agency formed to privatize East German enterprises (the Treuhandanstalt), from which East German citizens were to receive a share. Despite the rosy predictions, however, the project quickly produced billions in debt. And Chancellor Kohl made the mistake in the first post-reunification election campaign of categorically ruling out tax increases. It allowed him to win the election easily, but things quickly went downhill from there. Even German President Richard von Weizäcker, traditionally a largely ceremonial position that keeps away from day-to-day politics, openly criticized Kohl's generosity: "Unifying means learning to share," he said.
Kohl Had No Real Plan for Future in Final Term
It was only four years later, following his fourth re-election, that Kohl suddenly realized that there was a need to change course, criticizing German society by saying that the country's people lived in a "collective amusement park." People were retiring, he complained, "at a younger and younger age, staying in university longer, working for fewer years over the course of their lives and taking more vacation." He did nothing, however, to address the issues he had identified.Even as politicians and analysts were complaining about the necessity of reforms, Kohl and his last cabinet bumbled along with neither political élan nor a plan. Behind the scenes, though, Kohl was working during this period on the fulfillment of the promise he had made to Germany's European neighbors in 1990 in exchange for their approval for reunification. He wanted to push European unity forward with a common currency and strengthen integration in the hopes of removing the fear of an overly strong Germany.One part of his concept was successful: The euro was introduced and border controls within Europe now seem like something out of the European Middle Ages. But it was left to Kohl's successor Gerhard Schröder to push through necessary reforms in the form of his package of social welfare cuts known as Agenda 2010. It was voted into law with the approval of all parties represented in parliament, but has since come to be intimately associated with Schröder's Social Democrats, and the party has been punished severely by voters ever since as a result.It is interesting, though, to briefly consider the question: What would have happened if Kohl had, shortly before the retirement he had planned for himself, attempted to push through similar social reforms? He and Wolfgang Schäuble, who Kohl had designated as his successor, would have gone down in history as the "chancellors of reform" -- and it seems likely that Chancellor Schäuble would have been re-elected.
That Darn Pledge
Kohl, though, proved adept at preventing such a scenario. He was always the chancellor of campaign promises, not a man of reforms or of insight into harsh societal realities, such as falling birth rates or the financial shape of pension and health care funds. And he certainly didn't trust his hand-picked successor.Kohl did not, as had been internally agreed, step down prematurely to make way for Schäuble. It was left to the voters to push him out of office in 1998, likely because they were yearning for a new face and new ideas. And so Kohl cleared the way for his successor Schröder, but left only hurdles in the path of Schäuble, who took over leadership of the CDU.When arms lobbyist Karl-Heinz Schreiber reported a donation he had made to the CDU and state prosecutors began taking an interest in the party's finances, Kohl gratuitously admitted that he had made a "mistake" and had accepted more than 2 million deutsche marks from a benefactor, but said that he had given his word to never reveal where the donation had come from. The result was an earthquake in the CDU of unforeseen strength. At the insistence of former party allies, he resigned from his position as honorary chairman and Schäuble withdrew from all official party functions -- clearing the way for the rise of then-CDU General-Secretary Angela Merkel.
From Then On, Kohl Avoided the Public Eye
Indignant, bitter and disappointed, Kohl withdrew from day-to-day politics -- weakened by two knee operations and a bad fall, ill and limited in both his motor functions and verbal articulation. Before doing so, however, he collected private donations in order to compensate for the damage his illegal activities had done to the party.From then on, he avoided the public eye even more -- and he stayed away from the media, which he had never held in high regard. It seemed as though he was waiting for a form of rehabilitation: He, the chancellor of reunification, the European statesman, did not want his legacy sullied by slush funds and dirty deals -- and seemed to think he could wait it out.In October 2010, Kohl once again found himself at the center of global attention. He was considered to be a favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize that year, but the committee in Oslo ultimately opted for Liu Xiaobo of China. Kohl, though, was unperturbed: It wasn't the first time he had been on the list, he said.In the final years of his life, media attention was primarily focused on Kohl due to his private life: the suicide of his wife Hannelore, who suffered from an incurable allergy to light; his second marriage to Maike Richter-Kohl, a former Chancellery employee who was 34 years his junior; and the estrangement from his two sons, Walter and Peter. All of it had the elements of a vast family drama, in which the public at large had great interest.And then Kohl also engaged in a legal battle with his former biographer Heribert Schwan. A former journalist with German public broadcaster WDR, Schwan had recorded around 600 hours of interviews with Kohl shortly after the party donation scandal and published portions of the discussions in a book in fall 2014. Kohl was furious, particularly given that he, in his interviews with Schwan, had made extremely disparaging remarks  about Angela Merkel and other politicians from both the CDU and opposition parties.Until the very end -- even after a bad fall from his wheelchair in 2006 and despite his poor physical state and extreme difficulties speaking -- Kohl sought to defend his political legacy with the help of his second wife. In 2014, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he didn't just arrange for the republishing of a book in which he described the path to German reunification. That same year, he also released a slim volume called "Out of Concern for Europe."Now, Helmut Kohl has died. Historians, journalists and party allies will likely spend the next several days saying that, while he made some mistakes, he always wanted the best for his party, his country and, of course, for his legacy. In that order.It would, however, have been even better if the party soldier had thought a bit less about his party and a bit more about his country. In his book about Europe, he wrote: "Trust is just as valuable as it is fragile. It can't be bought, it can't be forced, it must be earned -- over and over again." It seemed as though Kohl were passing judgment on himself, a man whose donation scandal eroded many people's trust in politics. But there is no such thing as a perfect chancellor. And one thing is certain: When it comes to the unity of Germany and Europe, Helmut Kohl was a great statesman.
