COVER PROFILE
Ambassador Peter Wittig
New Cold War on the Horizon? Not Likely, Says German Envoy by Larry Luxner
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oreign embassies in Washington are often adorned with statues, monuments and memorials honoring their countries’ most important heroes, and now the German Embassy has one too: a three-ton, original concrete remnant of the Berlin Wall, covered in colorful graffiti and encased in plexiglass to protect against the elements. This concrete monolith, complete with rebar poking out the sides, towers nearly 12 feet high and its smooth, rounded top is exactly 15.75 inches thick — which the East German communists who built the hated wall determined was the ideal diameter to stop would-be freedom seekers from grabbing on and hoisting themselves over the top. A quarter-century after its destruction, similar segments of the Berlin Wall have been donated to at least 100 institutions around the world, including three in the District of Columbia: Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, the Newseum and the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. But the slab that now graces the German Embassy on Reservoir Road is unique, because it bears the autographs of many famous people, including the three heads of state without whom the Berlin Wall would have never fallen: President George H.W. Bush, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. This hulking symbol of oppression was unveiled at a Nov. 13 ceremony, during which Brent Scowcroft, who was Bush’s national security advisor at the time, proudly added his signature to the dozens already there. At the top of the gray monument, in large red letters, is the slogan “Wir sind das Volk (We Are the People),” a tribute to those who made the toppling of the Berlin Wall possible 25 years ago. “It was a moment nobody will ever forget,” Peter Wittig, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, told The Washington Diplomat in a recent interview.“I was in New York at the time, and I sat glued to my TV watching Tom Brokaw reporting live from Berlin. He had the great fortune to arrive on Nov. 9, 1989, and basically saw the events unfolding before his very eyes.” Recalling that dramatic night as if it were yesterday, Wittig remembered how a member of the East German Politburo clumsily announced that people who had assembled on the communist side of the border were now free to leave — a premature declaration blurted out at the end of an otherwise monotonous, scripted press conference. “It was a farcical end to East Germany, because that guy, in bureaucratic fashion, read out a text that nobody really understood,” Wittig said. “People asked, ‘Does that mean immediately?’ He said,‘Yeah, immediately.’That was the trigger. People stormed out of their apartments and crossed the wall. Brokaw interviewed that guy in English, and it was his scoop of a lifetime.” In October, Brokaw joined Wittig at the German Residence for the annual Unity Day reception; this year’s festivities featured clunky Trabant cars on the gardens to offer a glimpse into East German life.While today, the fall of the Berlin Wall may seem like an inevitable consequence of history, at the time, the happiness of the moment was mixed with plenty of foreboding. “My heart was filled with joy, but as a professional diplo-
January 2015
Photo: Larry Luxner
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It’s not easy for Germans to realize that the era of cooperation with Russia is gone…. We have to salvage a dialogue with Russia, but at the same time we have to be very firm. Talking to each other doesn’t mean giving up on our principles. And one of the core principles we stand for is territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders. — Peter Wittig
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ambassador of Germany to the United States
mat, I was thinking about the future,” Wittig said. “The Soviet Union still had hundreds of thousands of soldiers on German soil. One couldn’t predict what they would do. I was worried that this could get out of hand.” Wittig’s vague fears of a Soviet backlash never materialized. The wall fell, East and West Germany officially reunified a year later, Moscow’s client states all got rid of their communist dictatorships and the Soviet Union itself soon disintegrated into 15 separate republics. “Rather quickly, Eastern European states that used to belong to the Warsaw Pact became democracies, eventually joining the European Union,”Wittig said.“For my country, it meant that we were surrounded only by friends. All of a sudden, we found ourselves part of the same political family, and we entered into a very cooperative relationship with Russia.”
But it now appears the Moscow-Berlin honeymoon is over. It’s been nearly a year since widespread protests in Kiev led to the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych — splitting the country apart and turning the Kremlin’s relationship with the West upside-down. Following Yanukovych’s ouster last February, Russian President Vladimir Putin moved quickly to occupy strategic positions throughout Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, while separatists — egged on by Russian-speaking locals long distrustful of the central government in Kiev — began attacking official targets in eastern Ukraine. As 2014 dragged on, tensions worsened. Putin officially annexed Crimea, Moscow-backed rebels took over parts of Ukraine’s industrial east, and in July, a Malaysian Airlines jet was shot down over rebel-controlled territory, killing all 298 people on board. Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service — relying on satellite images and diverse photo evidence — eventually concluded that pro-Russian separatists near Donetsk had blasted Flight MH17 out of the sky, using a captured Ukrainian Buk air defense missile system. In September, the two sides negotiated a ceasefire in Belarus, but the so-called Minsk Protocol failed to take hold and hopes for a dialogue have since faded. Ukraine’s civil war has now killed an estimated 4,300 people (1,000 of them since the truce went into effect) and forced more than a million people to flee their homes. Meanwhile, relations between the West and Russia have plunged to lows reminiscent of the Cold War. The United States and European Union slapped sanctions on Moscow, criticizing it for trying to create a new “frozen conflict” in the region, while Putin accuses NATO of reneging on its pledge not to encircle Russia. Somewhat in the middle of this geostrategic tug of war is Germany, which has been a key interlocutor with Russia, a major trading partner and energy supplier (Germany gets
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