For upwards of seventy years , it was the central issue of European politics, and therefore even of world politics. For another forty years, it was the issue that dared not speak its name. For a few years, it became mentionable, as something that might happen "someday." Then, with breathtaking suddenness, in the course of a single year it happened. And life went on.
"It" was German Reunification. This writer remembers the day, just after formal reunification, when a TV news business reporter began to say "the West German Deutschmark" and had to correct himself on camera to simply "German Deutschmark." For a few days, the fact of German unification dominated the headlines. But soon it was driven almost off the front page by the Persian Gulf crisis. The "special relationship" between the U.S. and united Germany, so lately proclaimed by George Bush and Helmut Kohl, vanished almost immediately in the face of German lack of enthusiasm for active military participation in the Gulf. Most recently, Germans have begun to discover, awkwardly, that there may now be just one German state, but there are still in many ways two German peoples.1 The euphoria of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the swift reunification has faded. The new single Germany, in a new Europe, is only just beginning to emerge. But it can fairly be said that the story of German unification is, in many ways, the story of the twentieth century.
Romantics began to dream of a united Germany at the dawn of nationalism in the late eighteenth century. Then there was no ________
1Tyler Marshall, "East Meets West and Resents It," Los Angeles Times (March 16, 1991), A1., c. 1. "Germany," but only a mass of German ministates: kingdoms, principalities, "free cities," and other fragments of the old medieval Holy Roman Empire. German unification was first actually carried out in the years 1866 1871, under the "iron chancellor," Otto von Bisma...