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For a growing number of East Germans, meanwhile, unification could not come too soon. They knew their state was bankrupt, and with the ongoing exodus conditions for those who remained were only getting worse. Now even basic foods were in short supply. For the easterners who considered rapid unity as the only way out, Chancellor Kohl, whom they began to call “our Helmut,” emerged as a possible savior, a messiah wrapped in the West German flag. Their task was to convince Kohl that the time for unity was now, not ten years hence.

Pro-unification East Germans got their chance to deliver this message when Kohl paid a state visit to Prime Minister Modrow in Dresden on December 19, 1989. Huge crowds waving West German flags greeted the chancellor’s plane at the airport. The people made a point of ignoring Modrow and cheering Kohl. For the chancellor, this reception was a revelation. As he later wrote, he now knew that “the GDR was at an end” and that unity had to come soon. He decided to deliver a major address on the German question in a place that could accommodate the thousands of East Germans who were descending on the Saxon capital. He chose the square in front of the bombed-out Frauenkirche, an appropriate selection given East German Protestantism’s prominent role in the opposition. Thinking about his speech, he decided to avoid “nationalistic” bombast, for he worried that with any encouragement his audience might break out in a rousing chorus of “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.” Once he stood before the sea of chanting people, however, he could not suppress an element of nationalist pathos. After extending greetings “from all your fellow citizens in the Federal Republic,” he declared: “My goal remains, when the historical hour allows it, the unity of our nation. I know that we can reach this goal when we work toward it together.” Later, with the thunderous chants still ringing in his ears, Kohl said to an aide: “I think that we’ll achieve unity. It’s coming. The people want it, it can’t be stopped. This [GDR] regime is definitely at an end.”

On December 22 Kohl struck another blow for German unity by presiding, along with Modrow and the mayors of West and East Berlin, over the official opening of the Brandenburg Gate to pedestrian traffic. Kohl had never before set foot in East Berlin. He had once tried to enter via Friedrichstrasse, only to be turned away as “unwanted.” Now, as he stood at the historic gate, he declared that he would do all he could to promote German unity. He and Modrow each released a white dove while church bells rang, an orchestra with players from both east and west played Beethoven’s Ninth, and East Germans waved GDR flags with holes cut in the middle where the state emblem had been. West Berlin mayor Walter Momper, now reconciled to rapid unification, declared: “Berlin is still divided, but the people are no longer separated and the city has regained its old symbol.” A week later, on New Year’s Eve, that august symbol was transformed into a giant jungle gym as hundreds of Berlin youths clamored up its sides and partied on the top, doing serious damage to the quadriga.

Although Kohl was well received in Berlin when he helped to open the Brandenburg Gate, the Spree city was not in the front rank of the rush to German unity. Ordinary Berliners on both sides of the now-derelict Wall were certainly excited over the prospect of unity, but the city’s opinion-makers were often blasé or even hostile toward the project. It became fashionable among the leftist intelligentsia of West Berlin to condemn the easterners’ longing for unification as a lamentable submission to the lure of Western materialism. Aware that the lowly banana was a symbol in the East of capitalist plenitude, West Berlin students brought bundles of the fruit to the Wall and threw them at easterners coming across to shop. Not having had to live under “real, existing socialism” themselves, the Western leftists were unhesitant to advise easterners to be content with their “purer” social system. Other Western intellectuals, taking a rather less condescending tack, rejected unification on the grounds that Germany, given its criminal past, did not deserve to be a single nation. A united Germany, it was claimed, would inevitably pose a danger to its neighbors. As Günter Grass put it in a New York Times piece on January 7, 1990:

Our neighbors watch with anxiety, even with alarm, as Germans recklessly talk themselves into the will to unity. . . . There can be no demand for a new version of a unified nation that in the course of barely 75 years, though under several managements, filled the history books, ours and theirs, with suffering, rubble, defeat, millions of refugees, millions of dead, and the burden of crimes that can never be undone.