Ash, a British scholar and journalist, does credit Ostpolitik for removing the German bogey. When Chancellor Willy Brandt dropped to his knees at the Warsaw ghetto monument in 1970, he did more for reconciliation than an army of diplomats. With its strategy of encouraging an ever-growing flow of visitors from the Soviet bloc, Ostpolitik was also successful in “weaving” closer human ties through an increasingly permeable iron Curtain. But Ash contends that the fundamental premise of Ostpolitik proved wrong. “West German policymakers had aimed at reform from above,” he writes. “Instead, the change came through rebellion from below.”
It was a premise with destructive consequences. Living through what Ash describes as “a 28-year-long hostage crisis” from the time the wall went up, West German politicians succumbed to escalating blackmail. They paid huge ransoms to Erich Honecker’s regime to “buy free” political prisoners and other East Germans. Along with a variety of other payments to the East German authorities, Bonn ended up subsidizing them to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
This allowed Honecker to ignore pressures for reform, making life for the remaining “hostages” all that more miserable. While convincing themselves they were encouraging more moderate policies from above, West German leaders competed with each other to embrace Honecker and other Eastern European Communist leaders, turning their back on grass-roots dissent from below. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt disdained Jimmy Carter’s humanrights crusade and cringed at Ronald Reagan’s ringing denunciations of the imposition of martial law in Poland. Brandt, who had endeared himself to the Poles in 1970, shocked them 15 years later by meeting with Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, who had launched the crackdown on Solidarity in Poland, while refusing to see Lech Walesa.
Later, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a Christian Democrat, offered more rhetorical support for opposition movements in Eastern Europe than his Social Democratic predecessors, but did not change the basic thrust of Ostpolitik. As Ash points out, the American approach of encouraging change from below, not German policy was vindicated by history.
Infused by his firsthand knowledge of Eastern Europe’s transformation, Ash is at his best when describing how West German leaders lost their way in the tricky years of the cold war, only to stumble upon a kind of victory that they had never imagined. At times, his chronicle sags under the weight of the nebulous official policy pronouncements he endlessly cites to make his case; and the latter sections on Germany after unification offer only a meandering introduction to the new era. But in systematically debunking the myths of Ostpolitik and exposing the more egregious behavior of its most fervent proponents, Ash has no equal.
