Word: kohl
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...opening session had been intended to cover only procedural matters, but was forced into substance by a dispute that illustrates how quickly old apprehensions are resurfacing. Alarmed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl's ambiguity about the status of postwar German-Polish borders along the so-called Oder- Neisse line, the Poles demanded a seat at the table for discussions of their frontiers. Paris and London backed Warsaw -- something that sounded depressingly reminiscent...
...hours of discussion, the conferees announced that they had agreed to invite the Poles to join in when the meetings focus on the Oder- Neisse line. In a belated attempt to reassure other Europeans who feel stampeded by the rush to unification, Volker Ruhe, general secretary of Kohl's Christian Democratic Union, said the process was so complex that it might take two to three years to complete. A single state would not be achieved, he said, "as long as the external questions are not settled...
...Kohl, meanwhile, was busy with internal politics, stumping for East Germany's March 18 election in support of a conservative alliance there that is linked to his CDU and laying the groundwork in West Germany for balloting in December. Appealing to both sets of voters is complicated, and sometimes contradictory. Kohl told a cheering rally in the Eastern city of Cottbus that the two states would be joined in a currency union "as fast as possible." He pledged that individual East German savings accounts would be redeemed one for one in deutsche marks (the black market rate...
Determined to go into December's election as "the unification Chancellor," Kohl has been summoning up on the hustings the name of Otto von Bismarck, who first achieved a united Germany in 1871, and closing with the call, "God bless our German fatherland." But it has also dawned on him that his politically motivated equivocation over Poland's borders -- a play to German right-wing sentiment -- has been damaging. Kohl last week emphasized that a unified Germany would have "good relations with all countries in East and West, and I name Poland in first place." No one need fear...
Israel harbors the deepest dread, as the collective survivor of the Holocaust that slaughtered 6 million Jews. "We cannot know where German enthusiasm may lead," Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir wrote to Kohl not long ago. "The Jewish people cannot be enthusiastic about this union." Despite a carefully nurtured reconciliation between Jerusalem and Bonn, which has paid $33 billion in reparations to Jews, memories are powerful. When Foreign Minister Moshe Arens, aware that Bonn has often been Israel's best friend in Europe, said he did not "foresee any breakdown of the democratic institutions in West Germany," the daily Ma'ariv...