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Kohl's beliefs about EMU and governing style are examined, along with the policy ideas of Stoltenberg and the power of the Finance Ministry and of the Bundesbank over EMU. Particular attention is paid to attempts to fend off challenges to develop the EMS. Crucial to this account is the role of Genscher and then of Kohl in preparing the Hanover European Council and in sustaining the political initiative by binding in the Bundesbank through Pöhl's role in the Delors Committee. The role and impact of German unification was central to the reframing of EMU in 1989–90 and to Kohl's leadership role.

The influences on German negotiating positions are examined from the preparation for the IGC through to the end game. The focus is on Kohl, Waigel, Köhler, and Lautenschlager, as well as what happened inside the Bundesbank. A key question is why the German government accepted irreversibility at Maastricht. The Franco–German relationship emerges as central to the negotiations, along with Kohl's determination to save the treaty. German negotiators had to learn to trust the French, to move beyond coronation theory, and to pacify German public opinion by ensuring that the single currency was at least as stable as the D‐mark.

Particular attention is paid to the legacies of Adenauer (on primacy to European unification) and Erhard (on the social market economy) and the problems of reconciling these two aspects of post‐war German tradition. The Ordo‐liberal concept of stability culture is identified as centrally important. The German negotiating style is characterized as rule‐based. Kohl is set in the context of German tradition.

This chapter examines the Soviet restoration model and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's revivalist model. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) hoped to use its weight as a victor in the Second World War to restore the old quadripartite mechanism of four-power control exactly as it used to be in 1945, before subsequent layers of Cold War modifications created room for German contributions. This restoration model, which called for the reuse of the old Allied Control Commission to dominate all further proceedings in divided Germany, represented a realist vision of politics run by powerful states, each retaining their own sociopolitical order and pursuing their own interests. Meanwhile, Kohl's revivalist model represented the revival, or adaptive reuse, of a confederation of German states. This latter-day “confederationism” blurred the lines of state sovereignty; each of the two twenty-first-century Germanies would maintain its own political and social order, but the two would share a confederative, national roof.

This chapter details how Helmut Kohl still had to secure building permits to start work even after the prefab model emerged as the winner among the models. Kohl particularly had to convince Gorbachev because he needed some form of permission from not only Moscow but also Warsaw to proceed with his plans for East Germany. Close cooperation between Kohl and the Bush administration ensued—which involved the chancellor and his aides making repeated trips to the States in spring and summer 1990, often just weeks apart—with the mission of finding ways to convince their NATO allies to make reform a reality in time to sway Gorbachev. In the second half of 1990, Kohl got the building permits that he needed to move the prefabricated structures that had served West Germany well—its alliance, constitution, currency, and market economy—eastward to replace the ruins of Eastern socialism.

An analysis is made of the creation of new European Union (EU) spaces for cooperation in policing and immigration policies. The Treaty of Rome was silent on both topics, and before the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU), European Community (EC) states had begun to coordinate their responses to specific problems – such as terrorism, drugs, and asylum seekers – usually on a bilateral basis, with multilateral forms of cooperation fragmented, ad hoc, and outside EC structures. The chapter has three main sections, the first of which briefly describes the institutional landscape in policing and migration in Europe before the TEU. Section 2 assesses the major internal and external changes – the Single Market and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, respectively – that provoked the move toward institutionalizing police and migration cooperation at the EU level; it devotes particular attention to the domestic crisis in Germany resulting from massive migrations from the east, and the policy entrepreneurship of Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Section 3 analyses how the Third Pillar of the TEU, that on Justice and Home Affairs (in which policing and immigration policies were combined) borrowed from existing institutions – most notably the Second Pillar (the Common Foreign and Security Policy); the Amsterdam Treaty (1996) then partially separated policing and migration again – but with a completely different institutional structure within the European Union.

Britain passed the ten-year mark of European Community (EC) membership in January 1983. The next year and a half were to be the roughest ever in Britain's often tetchy relationship with her partners. One issue dominated the Community's agenda: the British budget rebate. Early in the year, the European Commission, under its President Gaston Thorn, published a Green Paper on EC financing. Most helpful to Britain was the Green Paper's explicit recognition of the need to correct budgetary imbalances. The Stuttgart Declaration was a classic example of the way the EC/European Union has evolved over the years, a brief, relatively peaceful, interlude on the way to the last, fraught, stages of the argument over the EC budget and Britain's contribution to it. The negotiations continued through to 1984. Britain, and Margaret Thatcher in particular, felt they had a lot to contribute.

This afterword focuses on the NATO expansion. NATO's future formed a key part of the negotiations on German unification. In early February 1990, James A. Baker III, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Helmut Kohl all discussed with Mikhail Gorbachev the prospect that if he allowed Germany to unify, NATO would not subsequently move eastward beyond its 1989 border, in other words, not even into East Germany. Gorbachev responded orally that any expansion of “the zone of NATO” would be “unacceptable,” but nothing was written down and no formal agreements were reached. Ultimately, the representatives of the United States and West Germany expertly outmaneuvered Gorbachev in the negotiations over German unification in 1990. They accomplished their goals of expanding NATO to East Germany and of leaving open the door for future expansion to Eastern Europe.

This chapter recounts how Helmut Kohl became German chancellor on October 1, 1982. Three days after he became Germany's chancellor, Kohl travelled to Paris to meet French President François Mitterand. In concluding his conversation with Mitterand, Kohl recognized that Germany would remain a colossus in the center of the continent and thus a potential menace. Kohl made clear his intention to keep nationalistic tendencies in check and work towards a pro-European future, but what that meant in practical terms was unclear. Four years after Kohl became chancellor, the only “pro-European” advance was the 1986 Single European Act (SEA). However, despite his “pro-Europeanism,” Kohl supported the SEA only passively. Through the years since Kohl had become chancellor, prospects of monetary unity had receded further.

This chapter examines Anselm Kiefer’s works that address the changing terms of debate, and shows the relationships of art to politics and politicians to culture. By understanding the shifts in Kiefer’s painting, this chapter clarifies widely held ideological positions that regarded the Nazi perpetrator in a very different light. It also gives an account of how Chancellor Helmut Kohl took up a variation on these new positions during his rise to power in the early 1980s. For Kohl and Kiefer, the question of the perpetrator could be subsumed or supplanted by the mystifications of culture, which indicated a very different response to the Nazi.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Kohl government and the American Jewish community during the 1980s. Helmut Kohl wanted to “normalize” West Germans’ relationship to the Nazi past. The unprecedented boom in American Holocaust memorial culture, however, challenged such policies, especially with regard to the image of Germany abroad. The chancellor and his closest advisors personally dealt with and reacted to these issues, and they perceived relations with American Jewish organizations as a particular challenge in this context. The chapter explores some of the most contentious episodes of German–Jewish relations during the 1980s, such as the Bitburg controversy and German plans to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, but also explores how German diplomats and politicians at home dealt with American memory of the Holocaust, as well as Jewish organizations and Holocaust survivors in the United States.

On 15–16 July 1990 the German and Soviet leaders Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev held summit talks in Moscow and in the Caucasus. Their meeting sealed the deal on Germany regaining full sovereignty upon unification and allowing unified Germany to remain in NATO. The chancellor’s use of chequebook diplomacy also facilitated a bilateral treaty for Soviet troop withdrawals over four years from eastern Germany. The Caucasus summit thereby brought the Cold War to an end in the country that had been its original cockpit. It was thus Kohl, not Bush, who wrapped up the practical questions that shaped Europe’s post-Cold War security order—after Bush elicited Gorbachev’s consent on matters of principle, including a nation’s right to choose its alliance. The diplomacy of 1990 between Bush, Gorbachev, and Kohl allowed the United States to remain a European power and thus a shaper of the continent’s evolution after the Cold War.

This chapter explores the opposition of the Kohl government and its associates to the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. Kohl and his advisors perceived the USHMM as a state-sanctioned reduction of German history to the Holocaust and as an “anti-German museum.” For more than a decade, German intermediaries tried to persuade the museum planners to integrate postwar German history and the history of German anti-Nazi military resistance into the exhibition concept in order to show that not all Germans had been Nazis during the Third Reich and that the Federal Republic was distinctly different from Nazi Germany. However, museum representatives—many of them survivors of the Holocaust—considered the German requests for a modification of the Holocaust narrative illegitimate.

This chapter discusses West Germany’s return to conservatism during the early 1980s. Olick asserts that this political shift began with the downfall of Schmidt, whose continued commitment to Western solidarity caused him to lose support. He explains how, after Schmidt’s loss of popularity and the dissolution of the social-liberal coalition in the fractured Bundestag, the 1982 election of Helmut Kohl as chancellor helped shape this new conservatism. According to Olick, Kohl was a pragmatic Catholic committed to Western integration and a social market economy who argued for a return to the values of the Adenauer era. Olick describes Kohl’s emphasis on value and necessity of historical consciousness despite his rhetorical passivity regarding Germany’s role in the two World Wars. The last part of the chapter focuses on Kohl’s 1984 trip to Israel and insistence on the normalcy of German-Israeli relations, which Olick views as an indication that no such normalcy existed.

The book’s final chapter traces how many of the protagonists of this book became a major public phenomenon around the time that Helmut Kohl was elected Chancellor in 1982. It charts the other ‘68ers’ short ‘march through the institutions’ and assesses their programmatic, strategic, and cultural impact on the CDU from the 1970s into the 1980s. Second, it analyses the role that commemorations of 1968 and generational claims played in their rise to public prominence. It shows that the other ‘68ers helped to shape memories of the student movement in important ways and, from the 1980s into the early 2000s, were key players in the memory wars about how exactly 1968 had transformed West German politics and society.

In this chapter, Olick narrates the election of Richard von Weizsäcker as federal president in 1984 and describes his neoconservative politics. According to Olick, Von Weizsäcker pushed for a reconceptualization of German history due to a perceived lack of German national identity. Olick then gives a summary of the Bitburg Affair, an incident that provoked tensions between the United States and West Germany due to Ronald Reagan’s reluctance to visit Bitburg. Olick uses a speech in which Kohl accepted responsibility more clearly and demonstratively than before but ignored important distinctions between groups of people and victims to show West Germany’s political attitudes at the time. Reagan’s visit in 1985 to Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen was accompanied by protests and was remembered as a debacle, which Olick argues demonstrated the opposite of the reconciliation and historical responsibility that Kohl was trying to establish. Olick concludes with a discussion of a speech by Von Weizsäcker that conveys an argument for the importance of continued painful memory, as well as the Historians’ Dispute, regarding historical comparison of Nazi crimes.

In this chapter, Olick explains Kohl’s general program of value renewal through cultural policy and historical orientation, characterized by an emphasis on the notion of regional identity. He also identifies the controversial support of Gorbachev in 1987 by the Free Democrats. Olick proceeds by analysing and summarizing Philipp Jenninger’s 1988 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, which was poorly received in the Bundestag and led to Jenninger’s resignation. According to Olick, Jenninger’s speech was misinterpreted as a defense of anti-Semitism despite its true message and its powerful critique of German postwar attitudes. To illustrate how Jenninger’s speech was truly different from other German political and historical rhetoric, Olick compares the speech with another one in which Kohl employs a rhetorical frame that acknowledged everyone’s historical suffering and argued for putting it all behind as history.