The Secret of Genscher's Staying Power: Memoirs of a 'Slippery Man'

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Author Hans-Dietrich Genscher

Publisher Broadway Books

Year 1998

Pages 752 pp.

Price $40.00

If we don't count Bismarck, the Reich chancellor who was always his own foreign policy man, Hans-Dietrich Genscher is good for at least two superlatives. With 18 years at the helm of the Foreign Ministry, he was the longest-serving German foreign minister of all time. And he was probably the smartest of them all-more intelligent than the Kaiser's minions Holstein and Bulow, Hitler's diplomatic hustler Ribbentrop, or the men who came before and after him in the Bonn republic.

Was Genscher also the greatest? No, that accolade must go to Gustav Stresemann, the foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. Within three years, from 1923 to 1926, this brilliant manipulator had turned Germany the pariah into the road master of European diplomacy. He got the French occupiers out of the Rhineland, and he separated them from their wartime British allies. He wheedled the Dawes Plan out of the Americans, which lightened a crushing reparations burden and also helped distance the United States from the vengeful French. While securing Germany's western borders through the Locarno Pact, he set up a revisionist game in the East. Finally, he drew Soviet Russia into the German orbit: in the Treaty of Berlin, each country undertook not to join in Western combinations against the other. By 1926, Stresemann had vastly improved the strategic position of the Reich. For he had broken the encirclement by France, Russia, and Britain that had proved the Kaiser's downfall.

Stresemann was the master strategist, but Genscher was the master tactician-so much so that Richard Burt, the U.S. ambassador in the early 1980s, would end up calling him a "slippery man." The compliment was hardly misplaced, for Genscher was indeed hard to pin down. What did he want, and where did he want to take his country? From his rhetoric, it was usually impossible to tell.

He loved to wrap himself in the fog of bienpensant oratory. Genscher, the diplomat's diplomat, was an exemplar of political correctness before PC was even a gleam in a deconstructionist's eye. His favorite shibboleths were "bloc-transcendence," "peace order," "responsibility," "cooperation." He would drive his Western allies to distraction by drenching them with verbiage, and before the stuff was translated into halfway comprehensible English, he was off on yet another trip to yet another capital where the nuances of his d‚marches were ever so slightly different. He probably spent more time in the air than in his office on Bonn's Adenauerallee.

Did he say one thing and do another, as the Americans and the British always suspected? Such an indictment would hardly hold up in a court of law because Genscher's discourse was so voluble and so cloudy as to flummox even the most hardened prosecutor. To do an interview with him meant transcribing 6,000 words and then whittling them down to about 1,200-and usually without the benefit of a single memorable quote.

BETWEEN THE SUPERPOWERS

Do his memoirs help ex post facto? In 1992 Genscher abruptly resigned from office after 18 years, during which he had survived 6 American secretaries of state. Three years later he published his memoirs in German, a tome that weighed in at 1,030 pages of pure text (plus glossary and index). Mercifully, the English translation encompasses only 752 pages total, and the type is bigger too. But reading through them will hardly crack the enigma. Was he a soft-spoken nationalist draped in a European flag? Was he a compulsive schemer who set up a new game every day-or a cold-eyed calculator who wanted to rearrange the chessboard permanently in favor of Germany?

Genscher the author is hardly more crisp than was Genscher the foreign minister-though in private, he is one of the wittiest and most amusing interlocutors this reviewer has ever encountered. "Discretion" was and remains Hans-Dietrich's middle name. So what made him tick?

A good place to start is at the beginning, in 1974, when he moved to the head of the Foreign Ministry. "After a few months spent familiarizing myself with the tasks of the German foreign minister, I began to immerse myself with the tasks of the German foreign minister, I began to concern myself with the question of how Germany's voice could make itself heard within the Western Alliance." This was the leitmotif: Genscher as Voice of Germany-a game that would elevate the man and the country. Plus, not to forget, his Free Democratic Party (FDP), which, though the holder of the electoral balance that had made and broken many a government, was always struggling for survival.

The FDP, which Genscher led from 1974 to 1985, has been an extraordinary force in German electoral politics. With one exception (1966-69), it has always been part of the governing coalition. Making and unmaking chancellors, it helped Konrad Adenauer rule from 1949 to 1963, when it forced him to resign in favor of Ludwig Erhard. In 1969 it abandoned its traditional Christian Democratic partner to throw its support to the Social Democrat Willy Brandt. In 1982 it toppled Brandt's successor, Helmut Schmidt, by switching to the Christian Democrats, putting Helmut Kohl into the chancellor's office. In all these maneuvers, Genscher played a decisive role.

How was Genscher to amplify the country's voice? West Germany, merely a half-nation, was both pivot and victim of the global conflict between the superpowers. While bound to the West, it was also drawn to the East-to the threat and the promise that was the Soviet Union. Moscow's best divisions, backed up by plenty of nuclear weapons, were encamped just across the border, and the Kremlin held the key to the barbed-wire and concrete gates between the two German states.

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