In the fall of 1998, the career of Helmut Kohl, Germany's apparent
chancellor-in-perpetuity, was terminated after sixteen years in
power. Only Prince Bismarck, with nineteen years at the helm of the
Second Reich, had ruled Germany longer. The defeat of the sixty-eight
year-old chancellor ended not just a political cycle of extraordinary
length. October 27, 1998, the day Gerhard Schroeder was sworn in as
the Federal Republic's seventh chancellor, marked the end of an era
in German history.
Born in 1930, Helmut Kohl was the last chancellor who had actually
experienced World War II, the surrender of the Third Reich, and the
rebirth of West Germany under the loaded guns of the occupiers. While
his successor Schroeder was in grade school, Kohl witnessed the
secular equivalent of transubstantiation: when victors turned into
allies, when the most hated people on earth were granted a place in
the community of Western nations. To this day, Kohl fondly recalls
how his first dark suit, the one he wore on the night of his prom,
had come out of an American care package--as had his wife-to-be
Hannelore's gown. Unlike Schroeder and his cohorts, Kohl was already
an adult during the darkest days of the Cold War between the Berlin
Blockade of 1948-49 and the Berlin Wall of 1961.
Today, Germany's foreign and defense policy is run by a trio of men
born between 1944 and 1948 who have been formed by very different
memories. Gerhard Schroeder, the oldest, was seventeen when American
and Soviet tanks faced each other across the freshly built Wall near
the Brandenburg Gate in 1961. Rudolf Scharping, the defense minister,
was fourteen. And Josef ("Joschka") Fischer, the foreign minister,
was thirteen. But the dividing line between the Kohl and Schroeder
generations is not just a matter of biology.
