Years of Renewal by Henry Kissinger

Author:Henry Kissinger [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-06-20T22:00:00+00:00

Helmut Schmidt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher: Alliance and Unification

History played a dirty trick on Helmut Schmidt. With his interest in architecture, music, and political economy, Schmidt was the most erudite of Germany’s postwar leaders. In addition, he had that special quality marking the great leader of being able to grow with the challenge. But, to achieve greatness, a statesman must possess not only knowledge and character; he needs also to be blessed with the opportunity for a heroic response. Schmidt had the intrinsic attributes, but history did not vouchsafe him the opportunity to fulfill ultimate tasks. Among his predecessors, Konrad Adenauer will be remembered for having brought a defeated Germany from unconditional surrender into full membership in the Western Alliance; Willy Brandt for reconciling it with the countries to the east; Helmut Kohl for bringing about German unification. Schmidt never had comparable opportunities. He conducted the affairs of his country with intelligence and skill, even flair. But it was not given to him to repeat the drama of Brandt or to carry out the fulfillment of Kohl.

Schmidt was destined to be a transitional figure on many different levels: between Germany’s past as an occupied and divided country and its future as the strongest European nation; between its obsession with security and the need to participate in building a global economic world order; between his Social Democratic Party’s belated commitment to the Atlantic Alliance and the reappearance of some of its earlier nationalist, even neutralist, tendencies. Schmidt navigated these shoals with wisdom and skill. He was the European leader with the best comprehension of the political and social implications of the energy crisis. Because of his service as defense minister, he had an unusual grasp of the political dangers implicit in Soviet nuclear predominance in Europe.

But energy is one of those subjects more conducive to demonstrations of competence than of greatness and, in the aftermath of Vietnam, defense ceased to be a fashionable subject. Schmidt pursued wise policies with respect to all of these subjects. But he was brought down in 1982—ironically a little more than a year after winning an election—because his own party was no longer prepared to support American missile deployment in Europe and because his coalition partner, the liberal Free Democratic Party, sensing Schmidt’s declining base, abandoned the joint government.

Helmut Schmidt had entered politics almost as an afterthought, his first love having been architecture and city planning. Had he possessed sufficient funds at the end of the Second World War to pursue time-consuming studies, he probably would have devoted his extraordinary energy and intelligence to rebuilding Germany’s war-ravaged cities. As it was, Schmidt chose political economy, the least expensive course of study—something his interlocutors in later years have occasionally had cause to regret when subjected to thoughtful but insistent and lengthy disquisitions.

That Schmidt had wound up in the Social Democratic Party was dictated above all by his birthplace. Since Hamburg had been a Social Democratic stronghold for the better part of a century, membership in another party would have consigned him to commentator or observer roles incompatible with his activist temperament.

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