Exactly half a century ago, in 1972, the Federal Republic experienced a particularly turbulent time. The dispute over the “Ostpolitik” promoted by Willy Brandt, the first social-democratic chancellor, and his liberal foreign minister, Walter Scheel, tended towards his decision. The treaties concluded in 1970 with the communist governments in Moscow and Warsaw were finally to be ratified by the Bundestag. These so-called Eastern treaties announced a renunciation of violence and promised peaceful cooperation. Its real purpose, however, was the recognition of the borders created after 1945, including the Oder-Neisse border.
That meant the de facto recognition of Poland’s westward shift after the Second World War by the Bonn Republic, which claimed to be acting on behalf of the entire German people – the GDR, of course, had never called Poland’s western border into question. One has to realize that in 1970 the end of the Second World War and the expulsion of millions of Germans from the former Prussian eastern territories were hardly further back than today’s September 11, 2001. This past was painfully close, the displaced persons were extremely present as a separate population group. There were still unhealed feelings of loss, deep hurts, longings for a lost home. Anyone who used the language of the GDR to speak of “resettlers”, like Arno Schmidt, provoked and hurt.
The chancellor’s deselection failed – money had flowed out of the GDR
That’s why there were discussions in West German society, the severity of which reached into the families. At the time, no one spoke of a “divide in society,” but there was a lot of irreconcilability between supporters and opponents of “Ostpolitik.” In the weeks leading up to the ratification date on May 17, 1972, the already narrow majority of the social-liberal government melted down so much due to spectacular defections by MPs from both government factions to the Union that a “constructive vote of no confidence” seemed possible in accordance with the provisions of the Basic Law: the chancellor was voted out of office by electing a new chancellor. This failed on April 27, 1972, to the general surprise of dissidents in the Union – it later came out that money had flowed, including from the GDR.
What a drama: twenty months of ongoing disputes in the country, resignations from the governing parties, dissidents in the opposition, everything close, everything hanging by a thread. The rescue of Brandt and Scheel depended on two votes. Although the “Eastern Treaties” could then be ratified, also with a narrow majority, the social-liberal government saw itself so weakened that it called early federal elections for November, which were used to vote on Ostpolitik as a whole. Why only in November? Because in the summer the Olympic Games in Munich were to take place unencumbered by an election campaign – a date of national importance because it was conceived as a counterpoint to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Brandt won and was able to complete his work with the most delicate part, a “basic contract” with the GDR.
It amounted to the de facto recognition of Germany’s dual statehood without sacrificing the legal position of the Federal Republic with a view to later reunification. After all, visits and travel opportunities between the two German countries were now opened up, and all kinds of low-threshold cooperation began. Of course, this contract was also the subject of fierce disputes, which most recently ended up before the Federal Constitutional Court. His strict interpretation of the text of the contract then played a role again in 1989/90 when the reunification was brought into legal form. All of this marked a turning point in national self-image, which was felt by all politically conscious contemporaries.
No one who could read and hear half could escape the excitement
Epic speech battles in the Bundestag, sharp, often bitter comments in the press accompanied these months. Nobody who was already able to read and hear at that time, not even children, could escape this excitement. Anyone in their early sixties today must have come into contact with politics for the first time – at least that’s how the author of this article felt. Bundestag debates were broadcast live on Bayerischer Rundfunk Southgerman newspaper, The parents, who, like many people at the time, believed that they had given up too much and received too little with the “Eastern Treaties”, were inclined towards Brandt’s new policy.
Radio, two television programs, a newspaper on paper – that was the media menu for an average family back then. In the educated middle class, the television was still gladly left out: surveys at school showed that a third of the parents’ homes did not have a television set. Well, that was at the humanistic high school, so it was hardly representative. Much later, after reunification, one could coolly boast that one had also grown up without western television, and that in Munich.
From today’s perspective, that was an incredibly manageable opinion environment in which individual voices had an almost unimaginable weight. One such voice was the historian Golo Mann, the famous son of Thomas Mann, who had at that time reached the pinnacle of his fame with his Wallenstein biography – a thousand-page tome that sold well and was reviewed for pages. His “German history in the 19th and 20th centuries” offered the history of the current debates in which he, a manic writer, intervened on many forums.
The most important conservative supporter of Brandt’s Ostpolitik: the historian and publicist Golo Mann.
(Photo: imago/United Archives)
One of them was the Southgerman newspaper, in which Golo Mann kept a “political diary” from Christmas 1970 to July 1972, in the box with a picture, in the political part, always announced on the first page. Eleven longer articles, each a quarter of a page long, appeared during this period. And they were all events.
Golo Mann was the most important conservative supporter of Brandt’s Ostpolitik. The fact that left-wing writers like Günter Grass or Walter Jens supported them made little impression on the bourgeoisie, especially in Munich. But golo! He was also a Bismarck admirer, ennobled by family and emigration, and much more popular as a writer than most novelists. In 1968, the year of the revolt, he of all people had received the Büchner Prize, he quarreled irritably with students in podium discussions, and his anti-Marxism, brought with him from the interwar period, was undeniable.
And yet he fought for the contracts of Willy Brandt! No, they are not a happy event, “just the melancholy final stroke under a long-written text”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.”The contract does not create anything final, that was there before, but he says it .” The bitterness of the elderly about the loss of their homeland – “yes, who wouldn’t sympathize with it. But ultimately, the loss is one in which everyone who participates in the German culture has a share. After all, all of us who consciously experienced those times are marked by them. Finally we’re all still being pushed out, year after year.”
How clever was this mourning, which allowed the opponents their rights! Nevertheless: “The old bloody game with national borders has come to an end.”
Power-political realism and historical melancholy: Golo Mann set the tone
The tone was thus set in 1970, which combined power-political realism with historical melancholy. With this mixture, Golo Mann was able to repeatedly express very unpleasant truths, such as the futility of asking the GDR to suspend the order to shoot at the border. “Since the GDR was once there, unfortunately, it was constituted in such and such a way that it needed the Wall (…). The Wall would not have had this effect if one could have climbed it in comparative safety.” Peter Hacks couldn’t have said it colder.
The core of the treaties is not the “renunciation of violence”, but “the inviolability of the borders”, i.e. the recognition of realities, Golo Mann repeatedly told the conservative opposition. The supposed realists made a fool of themselves with illusions, as Mann wrote in a caustic detailed commentary on a Bundestag debate in April 1972. For him, the resistance was just “world theater”, and the vote of no confidence had not yet taken place. Golo Mann said the most important thing back in 1971: With the treaties, Bonn was only catching up on what the Western European countries had long since done. In doing so, the Federal Republic removed a stone on the way to European unification. And at the end of 1972 the summary: “The peace that is emerging in Europe is based on the fact that both power blocs have behaved defensively over the years and despite appearances.”
Sweet bliss to be able to politically contradict my father, who was not very amused, armed with such quotations! The counter-authority was at the breakfast table, highlighted with a picture and box. In any case, in some biographies, the day on which one confronts one’s parents politically for the first time is an important date – at least back when things were a bit more authoritarian. But glory to a newspaper that, in a turbulent time, knew how to give space to such a voice from the depths of history. Back then, Golo Mann gained at least one more young reader for his books, and in this way soon for his father Thomas: After all, wasn’t the “Buddenbrooks” also a historical presentation, that of “German history in the 19th and 20th centuries ” added color and life?
Golo Mann’s first contribution to the SZ series proved to be visionary twenty years later: “There was a saying over the portal of a forestry academy that I think Bismarck quoted somewhere: We reap what we didn’t sow, we sow what we will not reap. Perhaps another federal government will reap later; the opposition, which is still singing, ‘It should be the whole of Germany.'”
In 1972 lines of flight that stretched from the distant past into the future met, and we can say we were there.