Bonn at the centre of the world: random reminiscences that never find their way into the history books. (Reflections).

In fin de siecle Bonn, the only game in town changed in the late 1980s from the diplomatic community's constant complaints about the boredom of life in the `small town in Germany,' known affectionately as Bundesdorf or Langweiligsburg, to the bewildering excitement of unification-watching. Given the speed with which it happened, the daily challenge for diplomats and natives alike was to explain what happened yesterday before facing the daunting task of reading the new day's newspaper headlines. Within an amazingly short span of time, the basic architecture of the flawed `settlement' - if it can be described as such - that imposed itself on Europe in 1945 came apart and opened the way for the two Germanys to be reunited, thereby setting the history of Europe on a new course. Throughout the long years of the cold war when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) provided a stalwart shield against Eastern encroachments on Western Europe, there were not many among the Allies who would have taken issue with the often unarticulated German dream of a united Germany: the dream of those who believed in the inevitability of the once-and-future homeland no less than those who prayed for the disappearance of that agonizingly dangerous dividing line. But, in the end, the realization of a dream shared by both romantics and strategic planners brought with it a lot of surprises - the most unexpected of which was that it happened at all.

The process was, most certainly, a triumph for the West - especially as not a single shot was fired. Has history another example of such a cataclysmic revolution happening peacefully? But the unexpected reservations and qualifications and the long-suppressed doubts and challenges that emerged from the onward rush of seemingly uncontrollable events were what made this page - or more accurately, this huge chapter - in the history of our times so fascinating.

A few words about the Stockholm Security Conference, 1984-6 (the so-called CDE, but more properly CCSBMDE) might be a useful beginning for these anecdotal reminiscences. The conference, which began amidst the unabated tensions of the cold war - circumstances that had energized Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's peace initiative - turned out to be more than routinely significant because it elicited the first signs of major changes in Soviet thinking. In the final days of the conference, rudimentary measures for military inspection and verification, which had eluded Western arms control negotiations for years, fell into place quickly in a framework of confidence-building. Few, if any, saw the real significance - although shortly after the conference ended the chief Soviet negotiator was cautiously but confidently predicting sweeping reforms as a result of internal events in the Soviet state. Delphic to be sure - but mind-boggling as a refreshing change from the usual banal Soviet diplomatic `confidences' so common in earlier decades of cold war negotiations and conversations.

But, like the gestation of elephants, it all begins by the dark of night, and it takes some time for anything to happen.

In early 1988, Bonn showed little sign of anything remarkably different from standard cold war postures and reactions. The Berlin Wall remained malevolently intact, and watchtowers, barbed wire, and killer dogs were commonplace as borders and border-crossing points continued to embody the outward dimensions of divisive confrontation and human tragedy. The SNF and modernization debate swirled on with no real prospects for resolution despite seemingly endless and frantic political attempts to solve the problem with words. And yet there was, in some quarters, the quiet suspicion - or was it only hope? - that something might be happening in the closed world to the East. Sooner or later, and as a result in part of the corrosive impact of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) on Soviet thinking, some gesture might well be made to the West, and especially to Germany, perhaps in military terms, but also, and more important, in a humanitarian context: measures to ease some of the restrictions on inter-German travel and family reunification, perhaps, or something similar.

It did not happen quite like that. Although the elements - and especially the `human dimension' elements - were all increasingly present, it took a little time for the final denouement to take shape and gather momentum.

State visits, official visits, working visits have all become so frequent in our times that it is sometimes difficult to assess their importance (if any) one by one. But, in this particular period, it was almost impossible to measure the real significance of each before a new one appeared on TV screens and in headlines. In the autumn of 1988 the chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl, visited Moscow with a supporting party of politicians, officials, and bankers that, gargantuan at the time, could stand respectable comparison in numbers with contemporary Team Canada travels. At the United Nations a month later Mikhail Gorbachev talked about freedom of choice. In June 1989 he visited Bonn in an atmosphere that assured a place for the word `Gorbymania' in the work of German lexicographers. Meanwhile all sorts of extraordinary things were happening in eastern Europe that were difficult to put into meaningful patterns but that were nonetheless aspects of a rapidly changing scene. By the early autumn, Hungary opened its frontier to permit East Germans to move to the West; and the freedom trains were not far behind. And then came the death knell: Gorbachev's visit to East Berlin for a major celebration of the founding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR): the speech in which he referred to the dangers of being left behind must have struck as much terror into the hearts of the East German party faithful as it evoked incredulous joy in the Federal Republic. Was the Soviet Union actually abandoning the GDR? No one could possibly have suspected that we were about to witness the inexorable disintegration of a nation state (of sorts) like a sandcastle on the beach as the tide comes in. No one, least of all the West Germans, for all their theoretical and assumed intelligence advantages in dealings with East Germany, really knew what was happening in the East, so quickly were events producing a political kaleidoscope of chaos. It was almost universally assumed - because anything else was hardly conceivable - that something like the GDR would continue to exist but in a more liberal and humanized form.

It was also assumed that such a residual state would facilitate long-term reconciliation. The federal government even produced a rough blueprint for a Vertragsgemeinschaft, a community of agreements, by which inter-German relations would be governed. It went nowhere because the powerful wave engulfing East Germany had already undermined the foundations of the GDR on which Eastern participation in this community of agreements was to have been built. Some officials in Ottawa grumbled petulantly (the Canadian national preoccupation with being `consulted' was, as usual, alive and well) that this, and indeed other forms of Bonn's responses to the cyclonic winds of change from the East, `had not been vetted by NATO.' It is probably safe to assume that not even all interested officials in Bonn had been `consulted' in many instances. But what would ultimately remain of the GDR was simply not grasped - nor indeed at the beginning could it have been.

Some members of NATO tried to move quickly to establish diplomatic relations with what some saw as a new centre of authority or residual state emerging in East Berlin. No longer would relations be conducted, as many of the Allies, including Canada, had done, through their Warsaw embassies as dual accreditations. The Icelandic ambassador to Bonn presented his credentials in East Berlin, becoming the first NATO ambassador, probably the first diplomat of any stripe, and probably the last as well, to be concurrently accredited to two German capitals from Bonn, in an ironic reversal of the Hallstein Doctrine that had been in force in a long-ago world. Canada was preparing credentials, but the process was abandoned when it became clear that no one in East Berlin knew just who the head of state was (or would be, the next day), and the speaker of the Volkskommer was not sure that she was the proper public figure to preside at such a portentous diplomatic happening. `Let's wait and see.' And so Canada was deprived of a distinction achieved, so far as is known, by Iceland alone.

In the midst of all this chaos, the vision of a world without a GDR - and indeed a lot of other things as well - was beginning to emerge with some clarity. Greatly to the surprise of those who admired Kohl's decisive determination to take the tide of history at its flood and to lead Germany on to fortune (or, in Kohl's view, to its destiny), there were voices in the public debate that lamented the inevitable death of the German `socialist' tradition whose heartland and homeland had been largely geographically congruent with the GDR. A not insignificant group of Greens, writers, and intellectuals asked whether an effort should not be made to prevent this. For Kohl and his immediate advisers, such an argument was unthinkable: this was no time for misguided socialist romanticism and historical nostalgia. It was instead an opportunity - perhaps fleeting - to achieve what Germans had dreamed of since the end of the war, a reunited homeland. And making it possible was a Soviet Union itself in the throes of transformation. If only to answer the painful debate over short-range nuclear forces (SNF), only a fool would forego such an opportunity by adopting a go-slow policy. Ever true to his training as a historian, Kohl's single-minded determination to move forward without hesitation and without wrestling with enormous philosophical doubts was probably the outstanding feature of the Bonn political landscape for months.

What disappointed Kohl deeply was the initial lack of spontaneous enthusiasm among some of the Allies for the prize he was grasping at so vigorously. He must have asked himself why not everyone seemed to be rejoicing at the prospect of an undivided Germany without the wall and all it stood for. Reticence and hand-wringing in the face of what was clearly inevitable seemed to Canada a poor substitute for policy, regardless of how others may have assessed the risks. Was it even conceivable in the minds of others more powerful than we that there might be effective measures that could be orchestrated to stop or deflect this headlong rush to satisfy the pent-up desires and frustrations of generations of Germans? Unification was going to happen. Was it in the broader interest for this to occur against the efforts of Germany's postwar friends who had always implicitly or explicitly envisioned a freely united Germany as a desirable (if realistically unattainable!) objective? A Germany reunited without the blessing and active support of its major friends might have been tempted to lapse into a sullen and self-preoccupied mood, which would have been the worst possible outcome for all concerned. The Germans were realistic in their assessments of the power factors involved and knew how serious the reservations in Paris and London and to a lesser extent in Washington were. But Canada's early and decisive rejection of such a `go-slow' option was noted in Bonn and publicly appreciated by Kohl. In any event, the Canadians were the first (or among the first few) to welcome the prospect of German unification despite our own share of painful memories.

But what to make of Margaret Thatcher's apparently active hesitation? And above all, what of France, supposedly Germany's most devoted friend and partner as the `engine' of a united Europe? Bonn officials could scarcely believe what they heard from Paris. As the East German sandcastle was in the final stages of being swept away, senior officials at the Elysee were exploring the possibility of an official visit by President Francois Mitterrand to `the other half of Germany' in response, they said, to an invitation issued by Erich Honecker many years ago. By then, Honecker had disappeared from the scene. After all the fine rhetoric and all the planning for a new united Europe based on a Franco-German entente, the shattered Germans could only conclude that the French still believed in the aphorism of Francois Mauriac: `We love Germany so much that we are glad there are two of them.'

The office of one of Kohl's senior advisers was dominated by an enormously enlarged black and white photograph of Kohl and Mitterrand holding hands at Verdun. A clever and politically sensitive photographer had captured the two leaders in sharp silhouette: an enormous Kohl and a much smaller Mitterrand in an attitude symbolizing permanent friendship between the two countries. A powerful visual image and statement. When the possibility of an East German visit became known, this powerful visual image and statement was quickly put into storage with the comment: `They didn't really meant it.' Perhaps for good and sufficient reason, the French were not in the forefront of Germany's Allies in welcoming the scarcely believable political realities emerging beyond their eastern frontier. And perhaps the attitudes of Britain and some other Allies are also understandable, even if the reasons were different. Mercifully the shadows of ambiguity they cast across the path of history were relatively short-lived.

But there were no signs of ambiguity in the attitudes of ordinary Berliners. One cold morning in November I visited the Wall just behind the Reichstag, partly, I confess, to join the ranks of the souvenir hunters. I still derive pleasure from the memory of the sight of `a little old lady' - always a special category of Berliner - taking her own revenge on this obscenity of a monument. She had donned her woebegone, old (probably pre-war), and unfashionably short fur coat and a pair of Adidas running shoes of more modern vintage, and marched defiantly up to the wall to confront it boldly and to contribute to its destruction vigorously with her screwdriver and hammer, humming quietly to herself something that sounded remarkably like the Ride of the Valkyries. And on that cold, bright morning, could anyone with the slightest knowledge of the unbelievable things that had been happening have argued convincingly that the notion of Brunnhilde and her horse galloping triumphantly across the German heavens was nothing more than pure Wagnerian fantasy?

Provost, Trinity College, University of Toronto. Mr. Delworth was Canada's ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany from 1988 to 1992.