Germany Unbound
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
BERLIN — After two decades, a unified Germany is coming into focus, like some lumbering creature emerging from the mist. Its election result no longer merits a Page 1 story in The New York Times, but it’s still the European behemoth. And it’s not the Germany we knew.
When I moved to Germany in 1998 there was great excitement over the birth of the “Berlin Republic” and the end of the “Bonn Republic.” The capital was moving back to the Prussian plains after a half-century interlude in the unthreatening Rhineland. Bonn had been a retreat from history. Now, as some ministries moved into refurbished former Third Reich buildings, a united Germany came face to face with its specters.
The Berlin Republic — the phrase never quite stuck although Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s center-left coalition liked it — was full of feverish inquiry. Berlin itself was a vast building site of empty spaces that begged the question: What new Germany will fill them?
In that city taking form, a subterranean Germany surfaced from decades of self-imposed silence to ask if it could be proud, if it could speak of its millions of World War II dead, if it had done penance enough for the Holocaust, if it had attained “normality,” if its Auschwitz-forged sentence was forever to be an economic giant and a political midget.
(More here.)
NYT
BERLIN — After two decades, a unified Germany is coming into focus, like some lumbering creature emerging from the mist. Its election result no longer merits a Page 1 story in The New York Times, but it’s still the European behemoth. And it’s not the Germany we knew.
When I moved to Germany in 1998 there was great excitement over the birth of the “Berlin Republic” and the end of the “Bonn Republic.” The capital was moving back to the Prussian plains after a half-century interlude in the unthreatening Rhineland. Bonn had been a retreat from history. Now, as some ministries moved into refurbished former Third Reich buildings, a united Germany came face to face with its specters.
The Berlin Republic — the phrase never quite stuck although Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s center-left coalition liked it — was full of feverish inquiry. Berlin itself was a vast building site of empty spaces that begged the question: What new Germany will fill them?
In that city taking form, a subterranean Germany surfaced from decades of self-imposed silence to ask if it could be proud, if it could speak of its millions of World War II dead, if it had done penance enough for the Holocaust, if it had attained “normality,” if its Auschwitz-forged sentence was forever to be an economic giant and a political midget.
(More here.)
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