America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Helmut Kohl deserves credit for what is happening in Germany, but not quite as much as his occasionally bumptious demeanor suggests. He's in some danger of becoming the Goodyear blimp of the international diplomatic circuit, soaring above everyone from Houston to Zheleznovodsk, inflated with the self- satisfaction of a politician on a roll. He is that, of course, but he ought to be more. And less. The world is watching not because Kohl is leading his Christian Democratic Union into an election later this year but because his country is triumphing over two of the great curses of this century, fascism and communism. He would do well to convey less of a sense of politics and more of a sense of history.

Now that it is ending, the postwar division of Germany can be seen for what it always was -- an unnatural act and, almost inevitably, a temporary condition. Nazi war criminals could be hanged, but their nation could not be permanently drawn and quartered. The zones occupied by the Western Allies merged, naturally, into the Federal Republic within five years. East Germany was always a rump state, unnaturally dependent on an ideology and a reign of fear, both imposed by Moscow. The beginning of the end came last October, when Mikhail Gorbachev visited East Berlin and announced, almost in so many words, that Erich Honecker was on his own. For a Soviet puppet, that means the end. The juggernaut of unification was under way. Kohl found himself in the driver's seat largely ex officio: he happened to be the Chancellor of West Germany when the Soviet Union let East Germany go, which meant letting it come home.

In the months since, Kohl, along with the skilled and dogged Hans-Dietrich Genscher, has made some perspicacious moves, such as his detailed and reasonable plan for confederation in November. But he scared and angered his Eastern neighbors by letting them think he was leaving open the possibility that a unified Germany might press revanchist claims on parts of Poland. His retreat on the issue this spring was an occasion more for relief than for congratulation.

It would do Kohl no harm to acknowledge a debt to a courageous and controversial predecessor. In 1969 Willy Brandt launched his Ostpolitik of reconciliation and rapprochement with the East. It was the first major sustained breakthrough of the cold war in Europe. Brandt went a long way toward allaying Soviet fears by signing a renunciation-of-force treaty with Moscow. He propitiated many of Germany's other former enemies by dropping to his knees in front of a memorial to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto. Most important, Brandt formally recognized the German Democratic Republic. He was criticized at the time for granting legitimacy to a cruel and dictatorial regime, but the long-term strategic effect turned out to be the opposite: ending the G.D.R.'s isolation increased its susceptibility to the gravitational pull of the West and hastened the day of unification.

U.S. officials used to grumble that Ostpolitik was a parochial policy that allowed the Soviets to cut separate deals with Bonn, drive a wedge into NATO and nudge the Federal Republic toward neutralism. When Brandt fell in 1974, more than one champagne bottle popped open in Washington.

Before the East German elections earlier this year, Brandt was a stump speaker and nostalgia figure at campaign rallies. His Social Democrats lost because the people of the G.D.R. have had their fill of anything that even sounds socialist. But they still owe much to the author of Ostpolitik. What Willy Brandt did two decades ago helped make it possible for them to elect a unity Chancellor this year.