Germany's Cassandra: twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunter Grass still thinks reunification was a bad idea.

• Author: Hockenos, Paul
• Position: Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland: Tagebuch 1990 - Book review

Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland: Tagebuch 1990

(On the Road From Germany to Germany: Diary 1990, German ed.)

by Gunter Grass

Steidl Verlag, 255 pp.

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Twenty years ago, writer Gunter Grass, Germany's most noted Nobel laureate, began a special diary. The Berlin Wall, which had divided Germany for over a quarter century, had been torn down, unleashing huge questions about Germany's destiny and its place in the wider world. Grass felt that witness demanded to be kept. The opening of the German-German border gave him the previously unimaginable opportunity to travel through the German Democratic Republic during the brief, adrenaline-charged interregnum between the wall's fall (November 1989) and unification (October 1990). During that period, Grass--ever the public intellectual--was not only an observer but, as he has been since the postwar fifties, an active participant in the debate over the historically loaded German Questions.

The publication this year (in German only) of the Grass diaries, Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland: Tagebuch 1990 (On the Road From Germany to Germany: Diary 1990), nearly two decades after German unification provide a thoughtful antidote to the flood of self-congratulation that is certain to accompany the anniversary celebrations this year and next. Those observations are stark, perhaps in retrospect overly so: Grass was one of the nation's most outspoken critics of unification and its architects--U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and the special object of Grass's reprobation, conservative West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the undisputed father of unification.

It is hard today to imagine any other outcome than unification as it transpired, namely the eastern territories' total incorporation into the Federal Republic and the united Germany's immersion in NATO. There are few today who'd contest unification, who'd wish there were two Germanys again. But it is worth remembering that many German leftists, particularly those schooled in postwar West Germany, initially balked at the prospect of "reuniting" Germany at all, which was still, as they saw it, atoning for the sins of its recent past. Gunter Grass, born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk) in 1927, was a generation older than the skeptical baby boomers but no less cautious about rousing a virulent nationalism that postwar democratization may have mellowed but not purged.

In the diary, which is punctuated with Grass's...