KOHL WARRIOR
Andrew Gimson says that the former
Chancellor's achievements were greater — and his conduct worse — than his enemies realise
Berlin THE time has come to say a word in defence of Helmut Kohl. It is not an easy task, for the collapse of his reputation has been amazingly rapid and complete. Each day brings new revelations of the lies and tricks practised during the 16 years of his chancellorship, and new expressions of horrified surprise that such deliberate law- breaking could occur in the pristine world of West German politics. Each day brings some previously unthinkable humiliation for the former Chancellor: on Tuesday the announcement that the award to him of the Westphalia Peace Prize had been sus- pended. The hounds of the Berlin press vie with each other to sink their teeth into Herr Kohl and the many lesser Christian Democrats who were drawn as willing accomplices into his illegal system of party financing. Germany is written off by its own editorialists as a 'land of lies', espe- cially since a second scandal has come to light involving the acceptance of free flights by Johannes Rau, the ineffably pious German President, and a large circle of his Social Democrat colleagues.
It would be tempting but unfair to blame priggish liberal commentators for getting the whole affair out of proportion. At sev- eral dinner parties in Berlin in recent weeks I have talked to solid upper-middle- class Germans of conservative tempera- ment who are just as shocked as the press is by the growing evidence of Herr Kohl's systematic law-breaking. Nor has the for- mer Chancellor helped his own case by maintaining a pig-headed silence on the crucial question of where the money for his secret bank accounts came from. His claim that he did not even know about the party's hidden funds in Switzerland and Liechten- stein beggars belief.
But the first point to make on Herr Kohl's behalf is that anyone who ever mis- took him for a squeaky-clean upholder of the German constitution was ridiculously naive. Anyone with eyes to see (and Ger- mans such as Professor Wilhelm Hennis saw this in the 1970s) knew on the slightest acquaintance that he was an unscrupulous power politician who would strike any low blow to safeguard his own position. Herr Kohl escaped by the skin of his teeth from an earlier scandal about illegal party fund- ing. He lied in 1985 when he claimed under oath to a parliamentary committee investi- gating the Flick affair that he had no know- ledge of the Staatsbiirgerliche Vereinigung, a money-laundering operation set up in 1954 to channel contributions from big business to political parties.
The Flick affair turned out to involve such a large number of leading West Ger- man politicians that it was felt no very rig- orous consequences could be drawn from it. It showed that, among the political class, secret donations were considered no more reprehensible than you or I might find employing a babysitter without registering her for tax and social-security contributions. Standards may have changed since the fall of communism, but for most of Herr Kohl's political career keeping the show on the road was considered infinitely more impor- tant than worrying whether every last book- keeping rule had been obeyed.
Consider the man's extraordinary gifts. He had an insight into the realities of power that was worthy of A.J.P. Taylor, and a genius for making himself useful. In the 1980s he stood firm against the mighty West German peace movement, ensuring that Nato did not falter on the brink of vic- tory. Only months after the role of Cold War warrior became redundant, he seized the chance to reunify Germany; all the more impressive a piece of opportunism when one remembers that the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 took him totally by surprise. And then, without rest- ing for one moment on his oars, he espoused a new cause where his gifts as a practical politician would prove indispens- able during the 1990s.
I came across another right-to-roamer.' Whether one loves or loathes the euro, one ought to register a certain astonishment that it exists at all. The German people were staunchly against the new currency, and so in its bones was the Bundesbank. Herr Kohl was wonderfully adept at turning this opposition to his advantage: he became the man of principle who for the sake of Europe took on the combined forces of saloon-bar and expert monetary opinion. I did not think he would win this battle, and there were times when informed opinion in Bonn believed he would have at least to accept a postponement of the euro, but with almost his last reserves of political craft he pushed the project through.
This was only possible because the Social Democrats and the Greens — the parties which defeated him at the general election of September 1998 — believed more sin- cerely than his own coalition in the rightness of giving up the national currency. It is true that in the quarter-century from 1973 during which he led the Christian Democrats Herr Kohl extirpated resistance in his own ranks, acquiring such an ascendancy that his own party was unable to inflict on him the fate of Margaret Thatcher. But one can hardly blame Herr Kohl for the fact that the whole of .the mainstream opposition and also a majority of the German press believed there was no alternative to his European policy and were determined to allow the German people no say in the matter.
The CDU was an organised hypocrisy, with Herr Kohl doing the organising but almost everyone else in German politics endorsing the hypocrisy that he led an essen- tially democratic party. The first time I saw the massed ranks of his parliamentary fol- lowers was after Herr Kohl's victory at the general election in 1994, when the Bun- destag met in the Reichstag in Berlin, and Stefan Heym, the East German novelist and mischief-maker, had the privilege as oldest member of making the inaugural speech. Orders were issued to Herr Kohl's followers that none of them was to clap this dangerous bolshevik, an edict Mr Heym exposed to utter ridicule by issuing a condemnation of Stalinism that none of the CDU felt able to applaud. A more brutish and subservient spectacle than those hundreds of silent MPs would be hard to imagine.
Herr Kohl dealt with the European issue by preventing the views of two-thirds of the German people from being expressed in parliament. While Britain's Conservatives have nearly destroyed themselves by argu- ing about Europe, the Christian Democrats have achieved the same effect by giving up argument altogether. Herr Kohl killed his party's ability to think, and to condemn him now on the much lesser charge of fid- dling the books is unjust. Not since Al Capone was done for tax evasion has a more irrelevant verdict been reached against a public figure.
Andrew Gimson has been appointed foreign editor of The Spectator.
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