Until now, critics of the unification policy in East and West have agreed on two points: the principle of “restitution before compensation” and the policy of the Treuhand poisoned German-German relations. How we were taken to task for the Volkskammer’s acceptance of the principle of “restitution before compensation”! Now the unification politicians are being taken to task for the opposite.
The thesis of Volkskammer impotence can be readily refuted: it had to accept accession and pass the treaties, with a two-thirds majority, no less. The Volkskammer would have rejected a unification treaty that would have reversed the land reform. The Federal Government, claims Constanze Paffrath, should not have agreed to a prohibition on restitution under any circumstances, “not even at the price of reunification.” But without unification, nobody would have gotten anything back! This shows that the law and politics are two different things, and one hears the merciless fiat iustitia, pereat mundus*: “justice” even at the price of the end of the world.
We imagine this in very concrete terms. The citizens of the GDR proclaim: “We are one people!” The Federal Government responds: “But only if you give our citizens their lost property back.” The quarrel goes back and forth – and the world is amazed. On November 9, [1989], the Germans were the happiest people, shortly thereafter they are behaving like a family in an inheritance quarrel. The Federal Government did not in fact do everything conceivable to bring about complete restitution. Fortunately, it did not use the threat of the failure of unification.
But is has been proven, so goes one argument of the plaintiffs before the European Court for Human Rights, that the Soviet Union never made the prohibition on restitution a condition of unification! Therefore, Helmut Kohl lied. The fact is that Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev did not negotiate about restitution – not because the issue was secondary, but because it had already been settled by the time they met in July 1990. In all treaty negotiations, only the open questions are discussed in top-level talks; those that have already been agreed upon at the bureaucratic level are not reopened, otherwise one would never be finished with anything. When Helmut Kohl met then-Prime Minister Modrow in Dresden in 1989, they agreed on a joint commission that would deal with the property question. The de Maizière government could pick up on this preliminary work. The Soviet Union was brought into the negotiations. The result was the Joint Declaration by the two German governments of June 15, 1990. It stated: “Expropriations on the basis of occupation law or occupational jurisdiction (1945 to 1949) cannot be reversed. The governments of the Soviet Union and the GDR see no possibility of revising measures taken at that time. The government of the FRG acknowledges this in view of historical developments. It is of the opinion that the right to make a final decision on possible state compensation must be reserved for a future all-German parliament.” In that sense Gorbachev was quite right when he stated in a letter dated July 5, 1994: “On my level as President of the USSR, this question was not discussed, and there was most certainly no talk of a choice between either a prohibition on restitution or the treaty.”
[ . . . ]
* Literally: Let there be justice, though the world perishes – eds.
print version
return to list
previous document