This Kohlian abomination

In the year when East and West Germany were being reunited Günter Grass felt he must start keeping a diary. He was sure what was taking place was a dreadful mistake:

At night I often toss and turn, haunted by images of a Germany that can no longer be mine. This Kohlian abomination: egomaniacal, bombastic, jovial, tough, condescending, domineering, feigning harmlessness.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl was a power politician of genius. Although taken by surprise by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, he soon saw how to make himself the architect of reunification. Grass was dismayed to see how easily the Germans were led by this philistine.  On visiting Karl-Marx-Stadt, an East German city which was soon to regain its proper name of Chemnitz, Grass records with disgust:

Recently Kohl was here and asked the masses, in the style of Goebbels at the Berlin Sports Palace, ‘Do you want German unity? Do you want our prosperity?’ It does not get any more vulgar than that.

Grass is a man of the left, but his political insights are those of a writer with an ear for the bogus. After several days on a German delegation to Poland, he exclaims in Danzig, or Gdansk, the city where he was born: ‘Please, no more after-dinner speeches that assign every problem to a united Europe for solution.’

Kohl fell with joy on the project of European unification. It offered him a new and yet more bombastic opportunity to show off his architectural abilities. One result is the euro: a Kohlian abomination which falls outside the period covered by this diary, which runs from 1 January 1990 to 1 February 1991. But Grass did see the launch of an earlier currency union designed by Kohl, the one-for-one link between the East and West German marks, and comments that ‘the actual effect is worse, more botched, and uglier than my worst imaginings’.