Economic indices, of course, can improve as well as decline, and one could only hope that with time Berlin would shake off the bad habits acquired during the long division and play the more dynamic role that most Germans, and most of the rest of the world, wished it to play. One could only hope, too, that the city would find ways to dismantle its “Wall in the Head”—that formidable barrier to cooperation and understanding. As the German government made its move to Berlin, this debility seemed as acute as ever. In the municipal elections of October 10, 1999, one month after Berlin became the official capital of reunited Germany, the PDS gained its largest victory yet, largely at the expense of Schröder’s sagging SPD. As in earlier elections, the PDS recorded its gains almost exclusively in eastern Berlin, where it won approximately 40 percent of the vote. In the western districts of the city, meanwhile, the CDU generated its best showing since World War II by winning 48.9 percent of the tally. While this election, like a series of earlier SPD defeats, represented a setback for Schröder’s moderate reformist course, it was also a setback for Berlin, which needed a modicum of political consensus to deal with its many pressing problems.
It would be remiss, however, to conclude an assessment of Berlin at this historic juncture by focusing exclusively on the many problems that continue to bedevil this perennially troubled city. As we noted above, the Spree metropolis is once again attracting the nation’s youth—and not just for weekend visits or the annual Love Parade. An influx of young writers, artists, filmmakers, and art dealers is collectively fashioning one of Europe’s most vital avant-garde scenes. Once staid Berlin-Mitte is awash in new art galleries. The newcomers are attracted by a sense of excitement, an edginess, that can be found nowhere else in Germany. Even jaded old-time residents are delighted by the fact that Berlin is getting another chance to become a great world metropolis. The city that some thought might become the “capital of the twentieth century”—and which ended up instead being identified with that era’s many horrors—might yet become, if not the capital of the twenty-first century, one of the most dynamic and progressive centers of the new age. “[Berlin] will be a great city of the next century, but it still has to be created,” declared Karl Kaiser in 1999, whose German Institute for Foreign Affairs had just made the move from Bonn to the new capital. “And I think that it is the open-end-edness that creates this strong sense of intrigue.”
Whether or not Berlin soon rivals New York, London, Paris, or Tokyo on the world stage, it is unlikely to remain as self-effacing in its capital role as did Bonn. While Bonn was a suitable, even ideal, capital for a fledgling democracy trying to find its way in a suspicious world, Berlin is in a better position to represent the German state as it seeks to realize the full potential of its democratic maturity and national reunification. Far from departing from the principles of the “Bonn Republic,” the “Berlin Republic” can perfect and extend those ideals.
The “old” Federal Republic, contrary to Helmut Kohl’s claims, was always a land of immigrants, but it was easier to deny this reality in the Bonn era than is the case with multiethnic Berlin as the capital. Just in time for the move to Berlin, Germany took the first step toward a long overdue revision of its citizenship laws, which heretofore were based almost exclusively on bloodlines. The new law, passed in May 1999, allows any child born in Germany with at least one parent resident in the country for eight years to gain automatic German citizenship. Such an individual can maintain dual citizenship until age twenty-three, then must decide which citizenship to keep. The principal beneficiary of this change is Germany’s well-established Turkish community, which has always been especially prominent in Berlin. Of course, the new law will not mean an end to prejudices or social discrimination, in Berlin or elsewhere, but it does represent a significant shift in the country’s view of itself.
In the Bonn Republic, Germany’s governments kept a wary eye on Eastern Europe even while making strategic economic investments in the region. From the outset, Bonn’s primary concern was to keep the Federal Republic firmly anchored in the European and Atlantic West. Adenauer’s foreign policy was dominated by reconciliation with France and the establishment of strong ties with America. With Berlin as its capital, Germany will maintain its strong Western ties, but it will also look more to the east. Indeed, if the Federal Republic is to realize its full potential as a major European power, it will have to take the lead in integrating those parts of the Continent that are not yet members of the EU into a broader European framework. Here, too, preliminary steps have already been taken. Whereas the old Federal Republic mended fences in the first instance with its neighbors to the west, united Germany has taken measures to improve its relations with Poland. Polish-German ties will undoubtedly be strengthened by having the German capital in Berlin, which is only fifty miles from the Polish border.
The core of the Bonn Republic was the conservative Catholic southwest and even more conservative Bavaria. National unification began the shift away from that core, and it made possible the previously unimaginable victory of a “Red-Green” coalition in 1998. The move to Berlin carries this gravitational shift further and provides the setting for a new, more “experimental” style of German leadership, both at home and abroad. None of the top leaders in the Schröder government hail from Berlin, but they seem more at home on the Spree than on the Rhine. Schröder himself was a leftist student leader in the 1960s before reinventing himself as a centrist “new Socialist.” As minister-president of Lower Saxony he became quite cozy with big business, sitting on the board of Volkswagen and bailing out a steel mill at a cost of nearly $1 billion. Partial to Cuban cigars and Italian suits, he was always impatient with stuffy Bonn, considering himself a man for “new beginnings.” Where better to launch new beginnings than from a city that has always been more than happy to toss away the old in favor of something new?
The “New Berliner” Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the Brandenburg Gate, August 25, 1999
Joschka Fischer, Germany’s new foreign minister, is likewise a former radical turned pragmatist. In his protest-filled youth he was briefly incarcerated for rioting. He remains willing to challenge established doctrine, whether it be the pacifist and noninterventionist shibboleths of his own Green Party, or the deference to Washington, NATO, and Brussels typical of Bonn’s foreign policy in the old days. Like Schröder, Fischer is excited by the prospect of ruling from Berlin, seeing the place more as a city of the future—European and global—than as a frightening relic of the bad old German past. There is, he says, “no negative genius” lurking in Berlin; it will not stir the nationalist in the German soul. “Fears about Berlin will remain only that—fears,” he says confidently. The Berlin Republic will not revert to centralized nationalism, he adds, because Germans have become “passionate federalists,” and also because the nation-state itself has lost much of its power under the influences of Europeanization and globalization. “The nation state in Europe is now a thing of the past, no more than a virtual reality,” he insists. Of course, this is not quite accurate, but it is certainly true that in the age of expanding European unity, multinational corporate mergers, the Internet, and the “Global Village,” the traditional nation-state is a much-diminished force.
Precisely because nation-states have lost some of their clout, however, national identity, expressed partly in terms of patriotic symbolism, remains important. For obvious reasons, expressions of patriotic sentiment have been difficult for the Germans during the past fifty years. In an effort to find an acceptable alternative to traditional flag-waving patriotism, the West German philosopher Jürgen Habermas once proposed a “constitutional patriotism”—reverence for the ideals expressed in the Grundgesetz. But this is a rather bloodless concept, incapable of generating much popular enthusiasm. Germany may not be able to act as a fully “normal” nation for the foreseeable future, but with time it will have to evolve a viable sense of national patriotism distinct from chauvinism. With the fall of the Third Reich now over a half-century in the past, it is reasonable to expect that the Germans might become more comfortable in their own skins. Of course, a transfer of capitals cannot alone accomplish this coming to terms with the national self. Nonetheless, it might just be that Berlin, the city where the Germans have experienced the peaks and depths of their national experience, can help to show the way.