03 October 2004

Eine Reich

When the Germans were crazy they had a saying: One Nation!. One People! One Leader!

They said it in German, of course, and it must have been chilling to hear it shouted by thousands carrying torches, or sputtered by that strange man with the odd mustache from the podium. I get the willies hearing it on the scratchy audio of Leini Riefenstahl's film ''Triumph of the Will.''

Now everybody is fine. The medication is just right, the dosage manageable, and no one is looking east or west with longing, are we? Good Germany .

I looked through the news this morning on rising. Most of the right teams won and some deserving ones lost. There are some spectacular murders, and more hearts-and-minds activity in Faluja from precision air dropped munitions. The politicians are whirling in these last weeks. The spin-doctors are telling W not to slouch at the podium, and not grimace so much on the split screen. His performance at the debate didn't look Presidential, or that was the consensus of the learned panelists on Gordon Peterson's Washington Week television show last night.

I saw the note that formal unification of Germany happened today in 1990; I remember that vividly, but only in the blur of the preparations for the next war. We were flowing troops forward to the Desert to stop Saddam in his tracks, or so we thought. Actually we were getting ready for the Storm. Only a few planners knew what we were really up to, and I was running around worrying about sanctions, and bugs and gas, and analyzing what seemed to be a formidable ground and air threat, augmented by weapons of mass destruction.

Consequently, I did not pay as much attention to the end of another war as I should have.

I wished I could have joined the party. It started at Midnight on Tuesday, just about the time I was slogging down I-395 to get away from the Pentagon for a few hours.

The first second of Wednesday was marked by the ringing of a copy of the Liberty Bell, donated to the people of West Berlin when times were tense. The black, red and gold banner of the Federal Republic rose slowly up the pole in front of the Reichstag. That pole had flown a number of flags, most notably the battle flag of the Soviet Red Army.

A large crowd, getting progressively more intoxicated, began to sing the West German national anthem, now the anthem for a united Germany . It used to start out with ''Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles,' but those lyrics have been excised by law.

Now the words say something like ''Unity and justice and freedom for the German fatherland,'' something inane and correct.

Lothar de Maiziere, the only freely elected Prime Minister in the history of the Democratic Republic, shut his nation down in the Schauspielhaus Concert Hall. It was an appropriate place to do it. The building had been severely damaged by bombs in 1944, and the interior was gutted by fire in the last attack by the Red Army. It remained a ruined hulk for more than thirty years.

It took until 1976 for the GDR to decide to recreate the original's interior, making it a sort of counterpoint to West Berlin 's ultra-modern Philharmonie. One of a reunited Germany's challenges was going to be that it was about to have two of everything.

The Prime Minister looked out across the sea of notables and said that the GDR would formally accede to the Federal Republic at midnight. He proclaimed the end of illusions, and announced a farewell without tears.

Then the symphony broke into a rendition of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the ''Ode to Joy.''

It was a good way to go out. Who would have thought that the gray, stiff GDR would exit with class?

Certainly I didn't. I thought the whole system of East and West had us all trapped like bugs in amber. I had been in Germany in 1985 on a trip to visit the naval intelligence kids assigned to London and Stuttgart and Rota, Spain . I was an assignments officer, and I was preparing the game plan to move the young officers for the next year, keeping all the chessmen placed properly to continue the Cold War.

It was a ten day trip, and I had a weekend to kill, damn the bad luck. I spent it with a buddy who had a car and lived in a country village near Vaihingen. He worked at the European Command headquarters which occupies the wartime Kaissern of the 34th Panzer Division.

Planning our activities that Friday night, we thought about going south to Berchtesgarten to look at Hitler's aerie of the Eagle's Nest on the mountain, or perhaps blast up to the frontier of the German Democratic Republic on the autobahn and pass through the sealed corridors that lead to former capital of the Reich. We thought about taking our uniforms to do the Berlin Treaty thing, where you go in uniform to the East, but in the end we drank more strong German beer and slept later than we planned the next morning.

We went to Cologne instead, to visit the Roman museum and follow the line of advance of the Third Army to the Rhine at Remagan, and then into the heart of Germany, pulling up short to let the Russians take the prize of Berlin. We could have got there first. But the leadership thought the Soviets had earned the right to enter the capital first. 

I thought our little jaunt would be sufficiently unromantic that I would not get in trouble when I got home.

''So, you went to the snow-capped Bavarian Alps without me?''

''Nah, I drove around the countryside with an old service buddy looking for a railroad bridge that fell down forty years ago.''

''That's better.''

With the whole weekend before us, we laughed over our beer and thought that we would always have an opportunity to go to Check Point Charlie in our Service Dress Blue Uniforms and demand access, per the treaty terms that divided the capital. The Russians always reluctantly allowed it, and the GDR's VoPo stooges would open the gates whether they likd it or not.

Can it be fourteen years already that the commanders of the Allied Kommandantura, France, Britain and the US, met? The Brit Colonel who was in the rotating chair thaat day banged down the gavel, and closed the last meeting, ceding authority to the Germans.

There is a Mercedes dealership on top of the old Fuhrerbunker, and most places you can't even tell where the Wall was, or what it meant that day when the first panel came down. I was in the eastern Mediterranean that day, and some of the people on the ship asked me what it meant, like a Cold Warrior would know what to do when WW II actually ended.

"Well," I said, "It means the continents great economic power is vstly increassed. The Russians are going home, and ultimately, we probably will, too. The Germans have one state, a reunified people, and one parliamentary leader."

I thought about it. It sounds much different in German.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra