‘German Question’ Raises Hopes, Fears : East’s Refugee Exodus Puts Spotlight on Reunification Issue

The sensitive issue of German reunification has surfaced again as a burning political topic in Europe--very much discomfiting the major players involved.

The resurgence of the “German Question”--the diplomatic code phrase for reunifying the two Germanys--is the unwelcome result of the refugee crisis and near-paralysis of the East German Communist regime, hobbled by the health of its leader, Erich Honecker.

“We West Germans have been busy reassuring our allies that the German Question was not on our agenda,” said Gert Krell, executive director of Frankfurt’s Peace Research Institute, in a conversation. “But now nobody can escape from the question.”

Most West German and Western Alliance officials, as well as those in East Germany and the Soviet Union, would just as soon keep the “German Problem,” as it is also called, on the far back-burner, or off the stove entirely.

They favor stability rather than unrest in Eastern Europe, and nobody wants to rock the boat by bringing up the inflammatory question of German reunification. For the lingering German dream of ending the country’s division after World War II and forming a powerful nation of 80 million people is almost everyone else’s nightmare, conjuring up the possibility of an aggressive Fourth Reich.

Curiously, the latest discussion has been revived not by nationalistic West Germans but by outside events: the fear that the inflexible East Berlin regime could fall sooner rather than later, with such a collapse leading to a sudden de facto move toward reunification.

On World’s Agenda

Chancellor Helmut Kohl recently informed the Bundestag, “The developments of the past few weeks have made clear that the German Question has stayed on the agenda of world politics.”

U.S. Ambassador to West Germany Vernon A. Walters declared that German reunification could occur in the “near future.”

And the subject was a recurrent one, although not scheduled, in the corridors at the annual meeting of experts of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) two weeks ago in Oslo.

Furthermore, the argument has roiled the West German political scene. Some opposition Social Democrats criticized Kohl’s statement on the grounds that it would encourage even more East German trouble and refugees--with which the Bonn government is ill prepared to deal.

“Kohl went too far,” said one German political analyst. “The last thing (to do) is to give this issue prominence. We want stability now--not reunification.”

And Horst Afheldt, with the Max Planck Society in Starnberg, said: “We have been spending billions of marks subsidizing East Germany to keep it stable. We don’t want an empty room in East Germany. That could be catastrophic.”

One Western diplomat in East Berlin believes that Kohl’s statement was simply a device to fend off critics from the right-wing Bavarian branch of his party, the Christian Democratic Union, and the far-right party, the Republicans.

The opposition Social Democrats are also divided on whether to maintain friendly relations with the East Berlin regime in the interests of inner-German harmony and stability or to damn them for the repressive measures that have led to the refugee exodus and talk of reunification.

But most responsible West Germans are trying to keep the volatile reunification issue in perspective. For the fact is, according to various polls, that the issue has not generated much concern among ordinary Germans, who, while theoretically in favor of reunifying sometime in the future, are not eager to lower their standard of living to accommodate 17 million additional Germans in a poorer state.

“Some commentators have accused Bonn and its allies of tiptoeing around the German Question,” said Karl Kaiser, director of the Foreign Policy Institute of Bonn, at the IISS meeting in Oslo. “I believe the question can be resolved only within the context of the integration of Europe, with Germany as an essential element. It will still essentially be a step-by-step process.”

There is considerable disagreement among foreign policy specialists about the predicted dissolution of the East German regime and what role Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev might play in such a situation.

“There is no way the German Question is going to wait in the wings until all of the other European security problems are settled,” said one diplomat.

Enno von Loewenstern, editorial page director of the conservative West German paper, Die Welt, goes further, declaring: “Gorbachev said something about history deciding on the German Question in a hundred years or so. But history is deciding right now; the fall of communism in East Germany and the reunification of Germany are hardly a matter of even a few years any more.”

Regime Well Entrenched

But most observers believe that the East German regime is still well entrenched.

Whatever form reunification may eventually take, almost every West German analyst and official agrees, it will not be the return to the 1937 borders of the Third Reich, as other Europeans sometimes worry.

As Karl Kaiser put it: “Reunification suggests putting back together two old geographic and political elements from 40 years ago. But they are both gone today.”

And Gert Krell adds: “The German Question should no longer be seen in terms of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. We no longer have that old nationalism, and were talking about economic integration within the European Community. We are in a totally different world than in the 1950s.”

It was then, in 1952, that Chancellor Konrad Adenauer spurned the tentative offer of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to reunify Germany in return for neutralism and demilitarization.

And though the former wartime allies support German reunification in principle, few officials in Washington, London, Paris and Moscow have favored putting the principle into action.

As a senior adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said brusquely over lunch: “We are very happy with Germany the way it is: divided. Smell of reunification makes them unreliable allies.”

And a central element of post-war French policy has been to forge unbreakable links with West Germany, directing Bonn’s energies to the Western Alliance and ending the bloody cycle of Franco-German wars. In this, France has been successful: The Paris-Bonn relationship is at the core of the European Community.

Any realistic talk of German reunification must take into account Moscow’s views: East Germany is its key buffer state against the supposed threat from the West, and there are 380,000 Soviet troops stationed there to prove it.

“The key as ever lies in Moscow,” said a diplomat in East Berlin.