The Two-Plus-Four Treaty took effect on October 3, 1990, which Germany henceforth celebrated as its “Day of Unity.” Significantly, the main ceremony was held in Berlin, Germany’s once (and, as it would turn out, future) capital. The occasion was marked by restraint rather than hubris—a far cry from the triumphal scene in Versailles in 1871. Speakers at a gathering in the Philharmonie promised that a new Germany would not mean a new German nationalism. The official declaration of unity was issued at midnight at the Reichstag, a fitting choice given that building’s weighty symbolism.
On December 2, 1990, Berliners elected the first unified city council since 1946. The results called into question the degree to which the city was really unified. The CDU won 47.8 percent of the vote in the west but only 24.3 percent in the east, giving it an overall total of 40.4. By contrast, the PDS garnered 24.8 percent in the east and a measly 1.3 percent in the west. Because of the PDS’s strong showing in the east, the SPD did not win enough there to overcome the CDU’s dominance in the more populous west; its overall total was 30.4. West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper (SPD), who had fervently hoped to become reunified Berlin’s first chief executive, had to step aside for the GDU leader Eberhard Diepgen. As he took office, Diepgen promised a bright future for Berlin, but the stark division revealed by the electoral result constituted a danger sign. The new mayor also faced the difficult task of convincing Bonn to retain Berlin’s generous federal subsidies now that the city was no longer a lonely outpost of Western democracy. As Momper put the matter: “Now he [Diepgen] has to bring us the bacon from Bonn, or he won’t be able to fulfill the people’s expectations.”
Capital Question
The most contentious domestic issue raised by the unification of Germany involved the location of the new nation’s seat of government. Should the principal power base remain in Bonn or move to Berlin? Berlin had always been the national capital in principle—Bonn being just a stand-in pending reunification—but, as everyone knew, the real capital was where the government was. Technically, the seat-of-government/capital question should not have come up at all, for according to an early parliamentary resolution governmental power was supposed to return to Berlin once political conditions permitted. A Bundestag resolution of November 3, 1949, which confirmed Bonn as West Germany’s provisional capital, declared: “The leading organs of government will shift their seat of operations to the capital of Germany, Berlin, as soon as free, equal, and direct elections are held throughout Berlin and in the Soviet Occupation Zone.” Throughout the period of division, leading West German politicians paid lip service to this goal of “returning to Berlin.” The fact of the matter, however, was that many West Germans had become content with Bonn as their seat of government and had no desire to see Berlin retrieve its earlier status. Bonn had brought safety and prosperity, they said; Berlin as national capital had brought nothing but war and misery. The “Bonner” were quite prepared to ignore the Bundestag’s Berlin resolutions, or, if necessary, to pass a new law enshrining the Rhine city as united Germany’s permanent capital. The pro-Berlin faction had most East Germans on its side, but the citizens of the “new states” had relatively little clout in the new Germany. If Berlin was indeed to become united Germany’s principal power base, its partisans would have to triumph once again over a host of resentments and negative images attached to the Spree metropolis.
The debate over Bonn versus Berlin commenced shortly after the Wall came down and reached a dramatic climax in a historic Bundestag vote in the summer of 1991. Because the issue was seen as crucial to the nature and direction of the new nation, it galvanized the entire populace, becoming fodder for heated discussions in living rooms, university lecture halls, factory cafeterias, and newspapers across the country. Noted scholars did their best to put the matter in historical perspective. Advocates on both sides battled for the moral high ground, sometimes concealing lower motives such as economic interest and political advantage. (Pro-Bonn parliamentarians, for example, tended not to mention that their personal property holdings would probably lose value if the government moved to Berlin.) Although the debate had a partisan aspect from the beginning, the major parties ultimately split along regional and internal ideological lines. Old allies parted ways and new combinations emerged among some of the strangest political bedfellows in modern German history.
The Bonner had the initial advantage owing to inertia, geographical strengths, and the nature of German unification. The unification process, after all, had involved the absorption of East Germany into the Federal Republic. Did it not make sense then to keep the principal seat of government in Bonn, which, in contrast to the defunct GDR’s former capital, continued to function as a center of power? Given all the challenges that the new nation faced just in pulling itself together, was it prudent to add the additional challenge of moving the seat of government? Unification was likely to be expensive: Would it be wise to escalate that cost with a capital transfer? Bonn was geographically close to the hubs of United Europe and NATO, while Berlin was on the eastern periphery of the European Union and even of the new Germany (in the old Reich, Berlin had been near the geographical center, 800 kilometers from Aachen in the west and 800 kilometers from Tilsit in the east, but in the new configuration it was just 90 kilometers from the Polish border). The Federal Republic’s foreign partners had gotten used to Bonn as the seat of German power: why unsettle the situation with a return to Berlin?
Above all, why make such a move when the old power center was so freighted with heavy historical baggage? Bonn partisans needed hardly remind their fellow Germans—but they did so anyway—that Berlin had held sway during the rise of “militaristic Prussia,” the disastrous Weltpolitik of the Second Reich, the failed democratic experiment of Weimar, the moral and political catastrophe of National Socialism, and the Stalinist dictatorship of the GDR. As Fritz Fischer, a historian famous for his work on imperial Germany’s drive for world power, argued, Berlin was never “a capital of the heart” for the vast majority of Germans. He said that “a return to Prussia,” would revive repressed memories of the horrors of Prussian-German history and awaken legitimate fears among Germans and foreigners alike. Adenauer had been right, Fischer said, to distrust the eastern-oriented megalopolis and to put his faith in Bonn, which symbolized “the tight connection between the Federal Republic, Western Europe, and America.”
Of course, not all those who argued against Berlin focused on the same historical liabilities. Conservatives in the anti-Berlin faction emphasized the city’s reputation for unruliness and “ungovernability.” They recalled its communist agitators, radical students, and riotous Chaoten. Leftists and liberals opposed to Berlin, by contrast, recalled the city’s function as the capital of Prussian authoritarianism. They were inclined to downplay the fact that Prussia and Berlin had also been centers of the German Enlightenment and democratic idealism in the pre-Bismarckian era, and bastions of beleaguered democracy in the Weimar period. Those who focused on Berlin as the capital of the Third Reich, meanwhile, tended to ignore the fact that it was not Berlin but Munich that had been the birthplace of Nazism and “capital of the movement.”
Hammered by this barrage of criticism from their fellow Germans, Berliners seemed at first somewhat shell-shocked. Having just heard their town hailed as a harbinger of the new era of unity and freedom, they now saw it condemned as a prime symbol of the bad old times and thus unfit to serve as capital of a democratic Germany. Their initial response was to take shelter in trusty prejudices regarding the Bonner, whose attacks they loftily dismissed as the product of provincial small-mindedness. They also fell into self-pity, bewailing the fact that, as one Berlin journalist put it, “many Germans never liked Berlin,” seeing it in the way that Americans saw New York City—“an evil place, even if lively and exciting.”