Late that evening we got back to Hotel Petersberg to find a dozen and a half Russian and foreign journalists waiting for us in the lobby. Back to business. Most of the labour was mine, but the questions were of all kinds and Raisa had to step in too.
‘Mikhail Sergeyevich’, one of the journalists said, ‘quite apart from political issues, your friends in Germany want to know how you are both personally feeling after leaving the political stage?’ I turned to my wife. ‘I would like Raisa Maximovna to answer that.’ ‘Incidentally’, the journalist added, ‘how is your health, Raisa Maximovna?’ She was often asked that. People knew that after the August 1991 coup, when there was a real threat to the life of our whole family, she had had serious health problems, been in hospital several times and received treatment at home. By this time the worst was behind us, so she did not dwell on it:
How are we feeling? We have very mixed feelings. As far as my health is concerned, after what happened in Crimea during the coup everything is pretty much back to normal. If you want to know how we are feeling more generally, things are of course very difficult, even depressing. I don’t mean in our personal life so much. Not everyone may agree, but I will say it anyway: after all that Mikhail Sergeyevich started in 1985, many things have changed, and now we are very disturbed about what is going on in Russia. Because today almost no one in our country is living well, so how could we be feeling happy?
In the Petersberg lobby, journalists came to sit close to us one after the other. It was like one long, relentless interview. The clock struck midnight, 2:00 am in Moscow…
The second day of our visit was taken up with talking to the leaders of West Germany’s main political parties. After every meeting there seemed to be an impromptu press conference. It was not only presently active politicians who wanted to meet us. We had a conversation with Chancellor Helmut Shmidt. He was a social democrat, but, after resigning in 1982, seemed more or less to have retired from politics. He published and contributed to Die Zeit, a weekly newspaper much respected in Germany, particularly in elite intellectual circles. Even after becoming an ‘ordinary citizen’, Schmidt remained a highly respected authority.
Each of the 16 West German Länder, or provinces, had an office in Bonn, and the minister-president of the Saarland, Oskar Lafontaine, gave a lunch in our honour at their legation with the leaders of the Social Democratic Party. The most striking figure at the table was Willy Brandt, honorary chairman of the party and someone who has his place in the history of Germany and Europe. It was he who, with like-minded colleagues, succeeded in ending the seemingly unchallengeable 20-year dominance of the Christian Democrats to become the first Social Democratic chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
It was Brandt too who, during an official visit to Poland, as a sign of penitence, demonstratively knelt down at the monument to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto, although he personally would seem to have had nothing to repent. At a young age, the left-wing socialist Herbert Frahm (Brandt’s real name) fled from the Nazis to Norway, then Sweden, and became a political refugee.
Brandt was the first major West German politician to visit the German Democratic Republic. It was he who gave the impetus to West Germany’s ‘New Eastern Policy’, when, despite the atmosphere of the Cold War, he began building good relations with the Soviet Union and the other East European countries.
Willy Brandt and I had long had an affection for each other. I knew he was seriously ill, but at the dinner he and all the others seemed to have forgotten about that. There were jokes and jibes and tall stories and a wonderfully easy atmosphere. Brandt drank a couple glasses of wine and laughed happily and infectiously. On this occasion there was hardly any mention of politics. Only when the dinner was almost over did Brandt extend to me an invitation to come to Berlin in the autumn to the next congress of the Socialist International to give a major speech. I promised I would, and kept my promise. Alas, Brandt was unable to attend that congress, his illness having entered its final phase.
We bade each other a warm farewell in Bonn, neither of us aware that we would never meet again.
That evening, the official programme specified there was to be ‘a dinner hosted by Minister of Foreign Affairs Genscher and Mrs Genscher for M. S. Gorbachev and R. M. Gorbacheva at the home of the Minister of Foreign Affairs’. Among all our warm German acquaintances, Barbara and Hans-Dietrich Genscher are linked to us, I am not embarrassed to say, by a bond of true friendship. Of course, it helped that I saw Genscher as someone who had a profound understanding of our policy of New Thinking. That did not mean our relations were always blissfully idyllic: I had the interests of my country to defend and Genscher those of his. Sometimes these did not coincide. At times, Genscher was defending the position of Chancellor Kohl in dialogue with me when it was not difficult to imagine that his own views differed from those of his chief. Genscher gave no hint of that, however, and conducted himself with meticulous political propriety.
Over the years that Genscher negotiated with the Soviet leaders on behalf of his government, I came first to trust him, and then to like him, as I do people of integrity who are open and honest.
At the time of our arrival, Genscher was on business in Copenhagen, but flew specially to Bonn to see us, before returning to Denmark to continue his visit. That gesture by the deputy chancellor and foreign minister said a great deal. Early the next day, we visited Villa Hammerschmidt, the presidential palace. Richard von Weizsäcker, the president of West Germany and, after 1990, the first president of reunified Germany, and his wife invited me and Raisa to breakfast.
In 1941, at the age of 20, Weizsäcker was an officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, in Russia. He was no admirer of Hitler, but neither was he a member of the Resistance, although some of his friends were involved in plans to assassinate the Nazi dictator. Weizsäcker learned from his experiences, proof of which was evident after he became president of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was he who formulated a different understanding of the significance of 8 May 1945 for the present generation of Germans: ‘As time has passed, it has become increasingly plain that we all need to declare today, 8 May, the day of our Liberation, the day we were all of us liberated from the inhuman system of national socialism’s violent domination.’ Anyone familiar with the post-war development of West Germany will confirm that, even in a country that had advanced along the road to democracy, for a politician of such a rank this was a bold political act.
From Bonn we travelled to Munich. At the airport, in spite of the rain, hundreds of people were waiting just to say a kind word, shake our hands, or give us some small souvenir. Throughout our three days in Bavaria, we felt we were at the epicentre of some great earthquake, not frightening, not terrible, but engulfing us in paroxysms of friendliness. On Max-Joseph-Platz we had a ceremonial meeting with the townspeople. Thousands had gathered. Every window of the adjacent houses was thronged with people who wanted to watch the proceedings. Great bunches of people festooned every conceivable eminence, kerbs, concrete flower containers and balconies. The people of Munich greeted their guests from windows and roofs, waving flags, scarves and even bedsheets.
On 6 March, the minister-president of Bavaria invited us to a lunch at the Antiquarium, a huge vaulted hall built in the sixteenth century as a museum for antique sculptures, but soon converted into a banqueting hall. Destroyed during the war, it was restored and is now used for the minister-president’s receptions.