Volume 38, Number 1 & 2 · January 17, 1991
The East German Disaster
By Simon Head
Das Deutsche Wagnis
by Klaus von Dohnanyi
Droemer Knaur, 326 pp., DM 36
Helmut Kohl's victory on December 2 was among the most decisive in the forty-one-year history of the newly enlarged Bundesrepublik, but there is a fragility about his triumph that the voting statistics do not reveal. Kohl campaigned as the architect of unification and, as the opinion polls suggested, this was the achievement that carried him to victory.[1] But Kohl also ran as the candidate who could best deal with the one big task of unification still remaining: the rehabilitation of the East German economy. Since the two German economies united in July 1990 Kohl has been consistently upbeat about the economic prospects for eastern Germany. 'We must,' he said in October, 'do everything we can to transform the five new Länder (states) into blooming landscapes within three, four, five years,' and he has never expressed doubt that this could be done.[2]
Review, 3953 words
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