Only at the end of his era, the celebrated Helmut Kohl came into the open and publicly confessed to have disregarded laws, because the breath of history was always more important.[ 1 ] The comments of subordinate dependents (initially not provided for in the "breath of history"), with which Kohl is now called to account from within his own party, can perhaps help to make a final end to an anti-democratic tradition of German power elites reaching back into the 19th century, namely to imagine to be borne by the very breath of history.
In December 1999 I therefore remember an episode in December 1986 at Christmas time, that was to haunt me for weeks and months (it does, in fact, haunt me up to now). Then, suddenly, a small skirt corner of that monster coat of 'great history', that Kohl had succumbed and under that he intended to bundle all others, seemed to lie bare. Just a mere scrap - but a rare discovery. Could Holmes and Watson not deduce from it the mental macrocosm of its owner, if they only tried hard enough?
The recent confessions of Kohl (and meanwhile of others, as well) appear as the last domino handled carelessly, from which everything tumbles livel and mercilessly back into the past. This fits well into what Holmes and Watson found out in 1986. In short: The contemporary dismantling of Kohl is a satisfaction for all the pains he caused others by just not tumbling over his swollen concepts of history and ego ideals much earlier.[ 2 ] The present collapsing of Kohl frees particularly of having been helplessly represented by his political ideas and ideals.
As is well known, the methods of Holmes and Watson (that is: of their creator) were based only marginally on the question whether these methods withstand scientific criticism. They rather served the purpose to lead to the culprit and above all - to entertain the reader. There was hardly any alternative to applying 'Holmes and Watson' to Kohl's scrap - when faced with the Christ-child of 1986: 'Goebbels'. I greet the change of year 1999/2000 with this reminiscence:
Andrew Nagorski, head of Newsweek's Bonn bureau, had been through quite a lot in December 1986. Together with Newsweek editor Maynard Parker he had interviewed German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl some weeks before. But he had not succeeded in adjusting what Mr Kohl had spoken (and lectured) onto tape within one hour and a half to Newsweek's interview format of one printed page: It had become two printed pages. No simple decision, what should be printed and what should not be printed.
Actual subject of the interview had been this: Only recently US President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev had met on Iceland and had made comprehensive statements of intent on the issue of disarmament. In this situation the opinion of Helmut Schmidt's successor as German Federal Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was well in request. It was to become Newsweek's first ever recognition of Mr Kohl after his office incorporation: Kohl was to be the first state chief to see Reagan immediately after Reykjavik.
The political waves rose: Failure or not? Had Reagan given away too much to Gorbachev for the sake of the forthcoming elections for US-Congress? And in German foreign policy a turning away from the Brandt policy and a turn to the conservative-right variant of the policy of détente emerged. German parliamentary elections were about to be held on Jan 25, 1987.
The two printed pages with Kohl's interview-blend appeared in Newsweek's October 27th issue, a hotchpotch of great historical outlines directed staight to Reagan himself, who could already now look up what Mr Kohl would soon tell him personally. "I'll tell him that he should give order to his staff ..." (to do this and that) - "And I'll tell him: "Ron, be patient. Don't allow yourself to be pushed. You're in a good position." Newsweek's cover of October 1986 still echoes the constellation: "After the Iceland Summit: Where do we go from here? Kohl to Reagan: 'Ron, be patient'".
Whether Reagan could eventually heed Kohl's pieces of advice is doubtful, however, because the Kohl interview astonishingly led to a new Ice Age between the Federal Republic of Germany (under Kohl) and the Soviet Union (under Gorbachev). And this is how it happened:
To begin with, the disparity of Kohl's lecture captured on tape and Newsweek's limited line capacity led to many dots and dashes in the printed text. Apart from Nagorski, who had put the text together, a number of other persons had worked on the text, as well. Nagorski's text version had been submitted to the Chancellor's office. Government spokesman Ost and the chief interpreter (the latter had been present during the interview), went through the text and revised it. As a matter of course only the English translation was printed. What Kohl had said in German, for the time being stayed the secret of the Newsweek editorial staff. The printed text could nevertheless now be regarded as a semi-official document.
However, Newsweek in the fall of 1986 caught Kohl on the peak of a rhetoric that had tempted the latter to produce some stylistic blunders before, no doubt to draw even with Franz-Josef Strauß, his right-wing competitor, and to parry the power claim of the CSU, Strauß' party: The 'grace of his late birth' e.g. (that he had been born too late to eventually become a Nazi-criminal) had dawned on the chancellor a long time before - in a speech delivered in Israel.
Bitburg (a ceremony on a cemetery before graves of members of the SS), the siding with Austrian President Waldheim (who had to resign because of allegations of his involvement in war crimes) were behind Kohl. And his reference to 'concentration camps' in der GDR still weighed heavily on the country. (Juergen Link in the Berlin paper taz on Jan. 8, 1987 wrote on "The GDR as a concentration camp: Kohl as a political symbolist"). Kohl was backed by Heiner Geissler's, the CDU's general secretary's denunciation of pacifists as having been responsible for the Nazi-Regime. And - the so-called 'historians' debate' (on how to replace Hitler by Stalin as the main responsible in the war era) was just about to develop into the "smoldering fire" (the daily Frankfurter Rundschau of Dec 27, 1986).
And now Kohl - at least according to Newsweek's English wording of the interview - had now matched Gorbachev with Goebbels what should finally cost the disarmament dialogue two valuable years in which this dialogue came to a virtual standstill.
When Kohl's mentioning of Goebbels began to have its effects in November 1986, the accusations rushed. Kohl government spokesman Ost got under bombardment by his press colleagues, because he had blamed Newsweek (literally) of "forgery". No wonder, as also Kohl suggested a "forgery" or a misleading quotation or a wrong cut etc. This however could be understood in such a way, that Kohl had expressed himself completely non-misleadingly in the original interview, and that he had given no kind of reason whatsoever for allegations that he had matched Gorbachev with Goebbels.
What then came about amounted to a sensation. Newsweek broke the rules of journalistic discretion and played the appropriate sequence of the original tape to the convened world press in Bonn. However, what only came out was what was already known: that Nagorski had shortened Kohl's recorded wording for the printed version and that government spokesman Ost and the interpreter had built harmless additions into the shortened version.
What must have come over Newsweek's editorial staff before they decided on stepping before the world press, in addition to the fact that this concerned Germany, a country, that until then had occurred in the magazine only in passing? Did one not make future interview partners mistrustful? Which journalistic results would the confrontation with Kohl have for Nagorski and the Bonn Newsweek bureau? If these and other considerations were ever made, they had apparently weighed small. The anger must have been great.
Anger, not mere journalism-ethical considerations may have motivated this step before the public on Newsweek's own behalf. Because - when the tape was available to the world press, what brought it more than that the magazine had - in spite of cuts - precisely represented what Kohl had actually said? Newsweek could therefore be quite sure of its cause. Would a decent clue or the friendly transmission of the tape to the Chancellor's office not have done the same work?
Obviously not, because even, when Kohl was confronted with the tape, he insisted that he had been misunderstood: He had not had the intention to offend Gorbachev. In this way Kohl saw even less reason for an excuse. However, also Nagorski was not fully off the hook. The Goebbels-Gorbachev analogy must have occurred immediately to him as something spectacular. The experienced correspondent will have anticipated the effect. If, therefore, he took this spectacular episode of the interview into the magazine, why then not really completely? Why did he, in this spectacular passage, cross out certain intermediate parts of Kohl's train of thought? And why did he not mark the omissions just here, in this delicate passage?
Therefore, Nagorski was quite criticizable. Unless, he shortened in order to suppress things, that apparently had been too much for him, the American patriot. Or he had initially wanted to only prevent even greater disaster and had tried in a way to protect Kohl (and others and also other things).
The last chapter finally followed. When the Bonn press had learnt about the full wording of the incriminated passage, a further miracle came about. From now on the full wording became unimportant again. The public debate dropped the long tape version and turned back to Newsweek's short printed version. One still reproached Kohl because of the two sentences: " ... der versteht was von PR. Goebbels verstand auch was von PR ..." ["(Gorbachev) ... understands public relation. Goebbels (...) was an expert in public relations ...].
The German press agency (dpa) just felt pity enough to offer its subscribers an extra by adding Kohl's substantial sentence: "Man muss doch die Dinge auf den Punkt bringen" ["One must bring things to the point"], rather supporting the questionable assumption, that by this Kohl had intended to emphasize the Goebbels-Gorbachev analogy. But from now on the entire German daily press passed on to their readers that version of Kohl's Newsweek interview.
No wonder, that the SPD opposition in the German Bundestag was not much better informed, but had also no interest in closer information. In a debate in the Bundestag, the opposition speakers reduced the whole thing still further to the size of an "alehouse" and in this way, disposed of it.[ 3 ] Indeed, the keyword "alehouse" would have allowed a new interpretation and a new insistence. Because if Kohl had poured his heart out in the interview and had openly said what he really meant, did that not prompt the question, what on earth he had intended to say? Especially, as Kohl went on to assure, that he had not intended to offend Gorbachev and had been misunderstood?
Instead of this, the SPD opposition followed the simple question asked and answered by the German press, namely, whether Kohl had "compared" [Gorbachev to Goebbels] or not. He had - and that was it.[ 4 ] From the far Dornstetten in the Black Forest even Erhard Eppler [a prominent SPD intellectual] made a sign of refusal [ 5 ] : "The theory of totalitarianism in which Kohl grew up is behind the analogy. NS = Bolshevism, Goebbels = G [Gorbachev]. And both may have bad objectives but refined means" - what supported the insult thesis, but it did not explain, why Kohl denied this thesis so steadfastly against the obvious evidence.
Did therefore Helmut Kohl's protestations - that he didn't have any offence in mind, when Goebbels occurred to him - have indeed a deeper basis? And was it a possibility that the omissions in the printed text of the incriminated interview part occured, because they rather offended the Newsweek-journalist and US American Andrew Nagorski than Gorbachev? Above all - were there too few German journalists present in Bonn who were in the position to understand the German, spoken by their own Chancelor on tape, or were these journalists unfamiliar with spoken texts or even with texts in general?
During a telephone inquiry in December 1986 Andrew Nagorski, on the one hand, reacted in a delighted manner but he also seemed concerned and embarrassed. Perhaps because such checkbacks - for instance by journalist colleagues - had obviously not reached him until this date. On the other hand, Nagorski's alerted and extremely tense politeness spoke volumes, at the same time. No doubt, the publication of the tape section had been thought to refer to something obvious, which had been offered to the Bonn press in anticipation of the press to take it up, deal with it, translate the results into journalistic phrasing and go public.
But Nagorski readily agreed to forward to me the recording of the interview section that the Bonn press had also listened to. Finally Andrew Nagorski asked the question deciding for him and devastating for the German journalism: "You are a journalist?" I had to answer truthfully: "No, no, I'm a teacher." Nagorski: "Oh."
The following analysis was written between December 1986 and January 1987 and has recently been worked over. Andrew Nagorski left the Bonn Newsweek editorial staff in the fall of 1988 and took on a management function with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. From 1990 to 1996, Nagorski led the Newsweek bureaus in Warsaw, then in Moscow. Andrew Nagorski was Newsweek bureau chief in Berlin since July 1996.
In December 1999 the journalist returned to the Newsweek central bureau in New York. The present manuscript was sent him there for attention and for the occasion of comment. Andrew Nagorski and Newsweek have raised no objections against the manuscript or the publication of the tape recording.
[ 1 ] The British daily Sun gloatingly reports: "Former German leader Helmut Kohl could be jailed for five years over a slush fund scandal. Prosecutors said yesterday they were investigating his role in illegal political financing. Kohl, 69, the architect of the European Union and the failing euro currency, has admitted he controlled secret accounts while running the Christian Democrats party. He confessed to receiving £625,000 in anonymous donations between 1993 and 1998 and keeping them off the books - breaching German laws. The probe could end in Kohl being prosecuted and locked up. His party might also be hit with massive fines. Kohl was German Chancellor for 16 years and one of the most powerful people in Europe. He was booted out of office last year and replaced as leader by Gerhard Schroeder, head of the Social Democrats. Kohl's spokesman said he would cooperate with investigators. A statement added: "He places his faith in the work of the authorities and will support it." " In: The Sun (30.12.1999) / Kohl may be jailed. From Allan Hall in Berlin.
[ 2 ] "Saxon prime minister Kurt Biedenkopf (CDU) requested the party to step once and for all out of shadow of the old chancellor. The task was "to leave the speculative system of thinking, the structures of behaviour, the conceptions of politics of the past which was deeply embossed by Helmut Kohl", Biedenkopf stated in the weekly 'Der Spiegel' " In: Frankfurter Rundschau Dec 31, 1999.
[ 3 ] After the Hamburg elections of Nov 8, 1986, that resulted in a SPD minority government tolerated by the Greens - CDU: 41.9; SPD 41.8; Greens: 10.4; FDP: 4.8 (not any more represented in the regional parliament)
[ 4 ] The findings, presented in this dossier, were forwarded in early 1987 to the press, to radio stations and to representatives of the then SPD-opposition in the German Bundestag. There was no constructive response.
[ 5 ] Personal relation
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