Gorbachev Fondly Remembered in Germany for Enabling Unity

BERLIN (AP) — Mikhail Gorbachev was hugely popular in Germany for enabling the country’s reunification after four decades of post-World War II division and setting the stage for the peaceful collapse of communism that made it possible.

Even 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev was hailed with chants of “Gorby! Gorby! as he attended a 2014 anniversary ceremony in the reunified capital.

The Cold War border that divided Germany into the capitalist West and the communist East after World War II seemed immovable when Gorbachev came to power in the mid-1980s. But just over five years later, the country reunified as a member of NATO and with the commitment to withdraw Soviet troops.

Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at 91, he was remembered fondly and gratefully in Berlin, and also with a hint of melancholy at a time when the invasion of Ukraine has torn Russia and Germany apart.

“I don’t think we could imagine reunification at all during the Cold War,” veteran lawmaker Wolfgang Schaeuble, West German interior minister at the time and one of the country’s main negotiators for unity, told ARD television. “And then it happened, in peace and freedom, without a drop of blood, could not have been imagined without Gorbachev.”

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany and worked as a scientist there, said that “Mikhail Gorbachev also radically changed my life, I will never forget him.”

Shortly after taking power in Moscow, Gorbachev had begun the process of reform and increasing openness. Without that, Merkel said, “the peaceful revolution in East Germany would not have been possible.”

In 1989, pressure for change mounted in the communist countries of Eastern Europe, including East Germany, whose long-time hardline leadership had little desire for reform.

Visiting East Berlin for the country’s 40th anniversary celebrations in October 1989, amid protests by demonstrators chanting “Gorby, help us,” Gorbachev is said to have warned his leaders that “life punishes those who are too late.” “. Whether he actually said those words is controversial, but they summed up his message.

Merkel said she could still remember the fear she and others felt at the time of the military crackdown.

“But this time … no tanks rolled, no shots fired,” he said. “Instead, Mikhail Gorbachev reproached the aging leaders of East Germany with the phrase: ‘Life punishes those who are too late.'”

Just over a month later, under pressure from ever-larger demonstrations, the East German government opened the heavily fortified border that had prevented most of the country’s population from traveling west.

In an interview with Germany’s Stern magazine in 2013, Gorbachev said he hadn’t woken up to the news of the fall of the Wall—a pivotal moment in the collapse of communism in the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc—“and it wasn’t necessary .”

“Our position was clear from the beginning,” he said. “We knew that Europe cannot live with a divided Germany, with a time bomb. I understood that the Russians and the Germans have to reconcile.”

“We were convinced that the reunification of the Germans was in everyone’s interest, even if Britain and France initially opposed it,” he added.

Gorbachev, who recalled growing up amid the horrors of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, said he had forgiven the Germans.

The road from the fall of the Berlin Wall to German reunification just under 11 months later was astonishingly fast. Gorbachev and his relationship with then West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl received much of the credit.

In February 1990, Kohl said during a visit to Moscow that Gorbachev had “unambiguously promised that the Soviet Union will respect the decision of the Germans to live in one state, and that it is up to the Germans to determine the time and the way to do it”. unification.”

In July, Kohl visited Gorbachev’s home region of southern Russia and returned with a Gorbachev agreement to allow a united Germany to remain in the NATO military alliance and for the full withdrawal of Soviet troops from the east by 1994. .

The informal “cardigan diplomacy” of the two leaders contrasts sharply with the current state of German-Russian relations, which are frozen after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Foreign Minister Olaf Scholz lamented that Gorbachev had paved the way for democracy in Russia but died at a time when “democracy in Russia has failed.”

Gorbachev, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said, “also represents how relations between Russia and Europe could have developed.”

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More AP stories on Mikhail Gorbachev here: https://apnews.com/hub/mikhail-gorbachev

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