Soon, however, the Berliners mounted a more forceful counterattack, replete with their own selective interpretations of the German past. Orchestrated by a hastily constructed lobby group called “Berlin as Capital,” the campaign depicted the Spree city as a historic repository of liberty and tolerance, a refuge for unorthodox thinkers, and a paragon of antiauthoritarianism and resistance to tyranny. Berlin may have been the titular capital of the Third Reich, the Berliners argued, but it was never truly nazified and it put up more resistance to the Hitlerites than any other city. Berlin’s historic commitment to freedom was all the more remarkable, the argument went on, because from the dark days of the Thirty Years War through the post–World War II division of Germany, this city had suffered tremendously. Although it could not be held responsible for Germany’s unfortunate historical derailments, Berlin had had to pay more than its fair share of the penalties for these transgressions. Berlin’s service to Germany, especially during the last trial-filled decades of division, justified its claim to being the true heart of the nation.
While these arguments betrayed a good measure of strategic amnesia, Berlin partisans had a point when they charged that the willful forgetting inherent in the opposition to the old capital was especially egregious. As historian Heinrich Winkler (who himself moved to Berlin to take a position at the Humboldt University) cogently stated: “Having their capital, in the full sense of the word, in Berlin would remind the Germans of a past which many people in Bonn prefer to envisage as an invention of the historians. For them, moreover, the ability to identify all historical transgressions with Berlin has always been conveniently exculpatory. . . . This method of detoxifying the German past would be harder to manage if Berlin were the capital.”
The Bundestag decided to hold a vote on the capital question on June 20, 1991. The outcome was anyone’s guess because the new nation’s political class was as deeply divided on this issue as were the chattering classes in academia and the media. The CDU and CSU (Christian Social Union) leaned toward Bonn; the SPD was split down the middle; the FDP preferred Berlin, though not decisively; the Bündnis 90/Greens favored the Spree city, as did the PDS. The so-called Unity Treaty that had been drawn up in July 1990 contained no commitment on the future seat of government because the negotiators feared that a decision one way or the other could jeopardize passage of the treaty. The document merely stated: “The capital of Germany is Berlin. The question of the seat of government and parliament will be decided after the completion of unity.”
Chancellor Kohl, who had been so decisive on the issue of German unification, proved, at least in the early phase of the debate, frustratingly indecisive on the seat-of-government question. For many months he said relatively little on the subject, leaving the nation to wonder on which side he would ultimately throw his formidable political weight. The Bonn contingent chose to believe that the chancellor was in its camp. This seemed a reasonable assumption, since Kohl’s whole political career had been shaped by the “Bonn Republic,” and he considered himself an heir of Adenauer. Although he lacked the old man’s legendary hatred of Berlin, he, like so many West German conservatives, worried about the old capital’s unruliness and leftist proclivities, of which he had gotten a powerful dose during his visit to the city following the Wall’s initial opening. Moreover, he had the typical small-town German’s horror of pulling up roots and moving to a new place, with all the “trauma” of buying a new house, finding a new school for the kids, making new friends, and—most wrenching of all—settling on a new Stammkneipe (favorite pub). On the other hand, Kohl well understood the importance of Berlin to the East Germans. He knew that they would see a decision to keep the federal government in Bonn as a slap in the face. If the “Ossis” (as the eastern Germans now came to be called) were to be successfully integrated into the Federal Republic, Germany’s actual as well as titular capital would have to be located on the Spree. For Kohl, these considerations proved more compelling than his continuing reservations regarding the old capital. As the moment for the crucial Bundestag vote approached, therefore, he began lobbying within his own party for Berlin, hoping to line up enough CDU delegates to tip the balance.
While Kohl worked quietly behind the scenes for Berlin, President Richard von Weizsäcker came out openly and passionately for his native city. He had grown increasingly frustrated with CDU-backed suggestions that his own office, the largely ceremonial federal presidency, should represent the central government in Berlin while the chancellor’s office, ministries, and parliament remained in Bonn. He wrote a memo to Kohl saying, “One thing must be absolutely clear: the presidency cannot serve as decoration for a so-called capital from which all the other governmental agencies are missing.” Not satisfied that he had gotten his point across, Weizsäcker used a ceremony in the Nikolaikirche naming him as newly united Berlin’s first “honorary citizen” to push the old capital’s cause. “Only in Berlin do we come from both sides but truly stand as one,” he declaimed. Berliners, he went on, best understood what unification demanded because they had experienced the division more intensely than anyone else. “Here [in Berlin] is the place for a politically responsible leadership of Germany,” he declared.
Weizsäcker was preaching to the choir on this occasion: the Nikolaikirche in Berlin was a far cry from the “Water Works” parliament in Bonn. On the eve of the parliamentary vote, Berlin’s Mayor Diepgen pronounced himself “cautiously optimistic.” He added, however, that if the vote went against Berlin the city would know how to “shape its own destiny, as it always has in the past.” (Berlin in fact had never shaped its destiny without outside help.) Diepgen was placing his faith in the persuasive powers of Helmut Kohl, who, after having frustrated the mayor with his fence-sitting, promised to speak out in favor of Berlin.
As it happened, the chancellor did speak out for Berlin once the Bundestag debate got underway, but his speech was more folksy than forceful. He told how he had personally come to understand that Berlin was the “obvious capital,” and he said that the government’s move there offered the best hope for the rapid economic recovery of the east. The key speaker for the Berlin cause turned out not to be Kohl but his CDU colleague Wolfgang Schäuble. Although confined to a wheelchair as a result of injuries sustained in an assassination attempt, Schäuble had managed to get himself anointed “crown prince,” the conservatives’ best bet to replace old King Kohl once he finally vacated the throne. Now, in his Bundestag speech, Schäuble acted as if he already were the chancellor. He told his colleagues that the question they had to decide was not so much about jobs, moving costs, or regional power, but “the future of Germany.” He reminded the delegates that they represented “the whole of Germany” in addition to their specific constituencies. Having found their country suddenly thrust back together, their task now was “to complete that unity.” Yet it was not, he went on, only German unity that was at stake here, but the unity of Europe. Just as Germany meant more than West Germany, Europe meant more than Western Europe. Germany had managed to overcome its division because Europe also wished to be united. Therefore, a decision for Berlin amounted also to a decision to “overcome the division of Europe.” Schäuble’s appeal was so passionately put that a number of delegates later claimed that it was the decisive factor in the final vote.