Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died on Friday at the age of 87, was the man who put German history to bed. It was also he who, with his idealism, helped lay the groundwork for the current confrontation between Russia and the West.
A local dialect speaker from Rheinland-Pfalz, Kohl was once summed up by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher with a sigh and three words: “He’s so German.”
He was a local politician, an activist for the Christian Democratic Union since his teens, who was ultimately brought low by a local scandal that involved illegal slush funds.
However, in the 1980s, he was reluctantly thrust into the international limelight by the historic opportunity to reunite Germany. He did the best he could for his country, although, like other major players at the time, he was overtaken by events. The world he helped shape baffled him and did not quite turn out as he dreamed.
On Nov. 10, 1989, then-US president George H.W. Bush asked for Kohl’s impressions of what was going on in Berlin, where the Berlin Wall was no longer stopping people from crossing the border.
“At Checkpoint Charlie, thousands of people are crossing both ways. There are many young people who are coming over for a visit and enjoying our open way of life. I expect they will go home tonight,” Kohl said.
Even at that point, when Communism was all but dead, Kohl was thinking in terms of two Germanys, in terms of the East reforming itself or losing its best people to westward migration.
However, soon it was clear that the imploding Soviet Union was in no position to prop up the German Democratic Republic any longer.
Less than a year later, Kohl flew to Moscow to negotiate with then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on whether a united Germany could be a NATO member. Kohl thought Gorbachev would demand that the country remain neutral — or ask for money to consent to NATO membership.
Kohl’s advisers later named all kinds of numbers Germany would have accepted as a fair price — 50 billion to 80 billion deutsche marks.
Kohl himself later said even 100 billion marks would not have been too much. Kohl got off with a promise to spend about 300 million marks to send Soviet troops back home from Germany and help build housing for them.
The Russian troops’ retreat was personally important to Kohl. His wife, Hannelore, had been raped by Soviet soldiers at the age of 12. She could not stand to meet with Gorbachev or hear the sound of Russian.
There was all this history to take care of. Kohl the local politician did his best to make sure it was buried. He arranged emergency funding for the foundering Soviet Union and then, after its collapse, for the bankrupt Russia.
He negotiated the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which relieved tensions sufficiently enough for a freshly united Germany to join a united Europe. Even the Deutsche mark would cease to exist as part of the deal.
Germany would just wipe the slate clean and lead a quiet life as a European province in the US’ shadow. It would be a peaceful country once and for all, after paying all its dues.
However, Kohl did not factor in what his efforts to resolve Cold War rifts with the West would do to the giant to the East.
He always distrusted Gorbachev — he considered him an unreconstructed Communist who was simply forced to bow to adverse circumstances.
However, he became friends with Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin — even going to the bathhouse together.
Yeltsin dreamed of a Europe that would include Russia as it included Germany.
At an informal meeting with then-French president Jacques Chirac and Kohl in 1998, Yeltsin tried to discuss with them his concept of “greater Europe,” including an overland transport corridor to link London with Moscow and even steps toward a common labor market such as mutual degree recognition.
In a memoir, Yeltsin quoted Kohl as saying at the meeting: “France and Germany bear a special responsibility for EU policy and they want to do everything so that no one — globally or in Moscow — would get the impression that the processes under way in Europe lead to the isolation of Russia.”
However, Yeltsin soon realized that the Europeans were not interested in integrating Russia. They just wanted him to acquiesce to their project. That missed opportunity is at the heart of the tension between Russia and Europe today.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly mentioned a Western promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of united Germany. That promise — a vague one, to be sure — is attributed to Kohl and his former minister of foreign affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
However, Germany could not really stop the NATO expansion, any more than Kohl could expand the EU to encompass Russia.
The quiet, post-historic Germany he was building did not do that kind of thing. He was not responsible for the Western rejection of Yeltsin’s impoverished, corrupt, brash and naive Russia — but it has held firmly to the German leader’s assurances.
In 1998, the year Kohl met with Yeltsin and Chirac “without ties,” he lost an election to Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder. A year later, the party funding scandal broke and Kohl retired from politics.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, his protege and disciple, took over the party and defeated Schroeder in 2005; in his last years, Kohl, in a wheelchair and speaking with difficulty, was not happy with what he saw as Merkel’s adversarial style, including with Russia.
He grumbled that she was “destroying his Europe.”
In 2014, Kohl’s former biographer published a book of interviews that included a quote in which Kohl reminisced disdainfully about Merkel’s lack of skill with a fork and knife at official receptions.
Two months ago, Kohl won 1 million euros (US$1.12 million) in compensation from the book’s author; he did not deny saying what was in it, just that he ever allowed the publication of these quotes.
Indeed, under Merkel, German history has resumed, although perhaps she has been as reluctant an agent of this history as Kohl himself. For better or for worse, the German chancellor has increasingly come to be seen as united Europe’s leader, a role that will be almost institutionalized after the UK leaves the EU.
A Pew Research poll shows that although most Europeans have a positive view of Germany and confidence in Merkel, majorities in Greece, Italy, Spain and Poland believe Germany wields too much influence in Europe.
That is something Kohl did his best to avoid. Lately, he had been warning Europeans, particularly Germans, not to take a punitive approach to the UK as it exits.
Kohl’s legacy of peace and soft power is still strong.
However, like Yeltsin before him, he took a lot of unfinished business with him.
I cannot help regretting that, even though I understand it is probably unfair.
Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion Web site Slon.ru.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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