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04 September 2009
Different Reactions in West Germany and America
This article is excerpted from The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 2.5 MB).
By: Edwina S. Campbell
On November 9, 1989, I was on a speaking tour in West Germany for the United States Information Agency. I spent the day in Saarbruecken, took a train to Frankfurt, read for a while, went to sleep early, and woke up the next morning without having heard about events in Berlin. No one mentioned them over breakfast. When I finally turned on the television mid-morning, on every channel, reporters stood in front of the Wall while people behind them chipped away at it. I sat down on the bed, dumbfounded, and stared at the TV.
What do you do on a bright, cold day on which the world’s strategic tectonic plates are shifting? I visited Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, which in 1848 had witnessed the failed attempt to create a unified, democratic Germany. A lot of schoolchildren were touring the church, but no guide explaining the events of 1848 deviated from the script to mention the path to unification being carved in the Berlin Wall at that moment. I heard no conversation about the opening of the Wall until that evening, at the political science conference I was attending at the university.
I’ve been grateful ever since that I never did get to Berlin on that trip; the atmosphere there was unique. Throughout West Germany in the coming days, I had the same experience that I’d had in Frankfurt. I encountered a huge divide between academics, politicians, and diplomats, on the one hand, and most West Germans, on the other, in the interest they showed in the opening of the Wall. When I did engage people in conversation, some were nervous or even fearful about unfolding events, but many professed to be simply indifferent.
My experience that long-ago November says something important about the rocky course of German-American relations since the mid-1990s. Perhaps the greatest difference between the two countries, culturally and politically, is their attitude toward change. The opening of the Wall ushered in a period of global political change unprecedented, at least, since 1918, and perhaps simply unprecedented. The trans-Atlantic paradigms of the 20th century became inadequate, but an understandable desire to cling to them persisted in Germany.
West German foreign policy was built on two virtues: stability and predictability. In 1989 these were the pillars, of Bonn’s Ostpolitik, pursued since the 1970s and of its even more long-standing ties to the NATO alliance. On November 9, 1989, that era of stability and predictability ended, and the West Germans I encountered that month instinctively seemed to know it and to shy away from the reality of what was happening in Berlin.
Americans have a different history. We tend to view moments of political unpredictability and instability as opportunities to seize, not crises to be feared. This can make us overly optimistic about our ability to deal with change, and the trans-Atlantic crises of the last few years reflect that, as well. The American belief that a problem can be solved inevitably clashes with the German conviction that situations must be managed.
Both are right. On November 9, 1989, the four-decades-old Cold War was solved because the Allies had collectively managed their often tense relationship with the Soviet Union. The answer to “the German question” similarly emerged from a decades-long trans-Atlantic strategic dialogue. Both countries need to remember that answers to today’s global political questions can only emerge from a willingness to continue that dialogue in the century ahead.
[Edwina Campbell has served on the faculty of the United States Air Force’s Air University since 2003, and before that in a number of academic and analyst positions. She has served as a U.S. diplomat, specializing in political-military affairs, and her publications include Consultation and Consensus in NATO and Germany’s Past and Europe’s Future. The views expressed in Campbell’s essay are hers alone and not those of Air University, the United States Air Force, or the U.S. Department of Defense.]
