Checkers affair

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The Checkers Affair was a political affair in German-British relations during German reunification .

history

The trigger for the affair was the apparently launched publication of a secret memorandum by Charles Powell , then private secretary of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher , about a confidential conference later called the Checkers Seminar on the German question , which the British Prime Minister and her Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd had with the US and British Germany experts held Checkers on March 24, 1990 at the country estate . The background to the conference were concerns in the British government, especially Margaret Thatcher herself, about the dynamics, direction and scope of the developments that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and the announcement of the ten-point program of the German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl on November 28, 1989 with regard to Germany as a whole , the Germans and the distribution of political weights in Europe . Thatcher particularly feared an increase in power in the reunified Germany. In February 1990, these fears even went so far that, in a telephone conversation with US President George HW Bush, to his astonishment, she suggested using the Soviet Union as an essential counterweight to German power in Europe.

Before the conference, the experts - the historians Gordon A. Craig , Timothy Garton Ash , Hugh Trevor-Roper , Fritz Stern and Norman Stone, and the journalist George Urban (1921–1997) - had been asked to submit a questionnaire to them the invitation in late February had been sent in confidence in 1990 to prepare for the upcoming issues, including on what the story about a German national character has to say and whether it is consistent national characteristics. In a memorandum on March 25, 1990, Powell summarized the contents and results of the five-hour meeting from his point of view. With a view to the behavior that would be expected of a reunified Germany in the future, the meeting - according to Powell - would also have provided ideas about the alleged characteristics of a permanent German national character: a lack of empathy, strong tendency to self-pity, flattery, fear, aggressiveness , Self-righteousness, harassment, egoism, inferiority complex, sentimentality, tendency to excess, to exaggeration and excess and to misjudge one's own strengths and abilities. The paper concluded with the result that despite some uneasiness, confidence prevailed among the participants. We should be happy about a soon-to-be-united Germany with a democratic, non-communist government - the goal of British politics in 1945. The German-British conflict, which was ominous for the whole of Europe and which arose after Otto von Bismarck's resignation , should not be allowed to revive. The ability of Germans to recognize their faults and character traits may have grown.

The British daily The Independent published the full text of the memorandum in its Sunday edition on July 15, 1990, with a comment by Neal Ascherson under the headline “Be nice to German bullies, PM told” - in German: “Be nice to Germans Ruff, the Prime Minister was told ". In his commentary, Ascherson remarked: “Few member states of the European Community are likely to have ever spoken of one of their partners in such terms.” The next day, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel published Powell's memorandum, subtitled: “At a secret seminar which Mrs. Thatcher called in March, the participants worried about the creepy Germans ”. The reactions of the media to these publications were fierce, although the questionnaire and the general topic of the conference had already been reported on Checkers in German and British newspapers from the end of March to April 1990 without attracting much public attention. The tenor of the memorandum was seen as anti- German . Günther Gillessen wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the people who met on Checkers resembled a group planning "an expedition to a wild mountain tribe in the Hindu Kush". According to a commentator for the Daily Telegraph , the fact that Powell's memorandum had become public was "one of the most serious violations of state apparatus secrecy in recent years".

One of the meeting's attendees, Gordon A. Craig, added to the excitement in the international daily press that was accompanied by the impression "that the meeting was a secret cabal that has only now been uncovered" Checkers, largely responsible for the Ridley affair : On July 14, 1990 - the day before Powell's memorandum was published in The Independent - the British weekly The Spectator reported a conversation with British Trade Secretary Nicholas Ridley in a report in which Ridley presented the then discussed European Economic and Monetary Union as a “German ruse”, “intended to get the whole of Europe under control”. This article, which was received as a sensation in Germany and Great Britain, inevitably determined the interpretations with which the press reacted to the publication of the Checkers memorandum shortly afterwards, according to Craig.

Shortly after the memorandum was published, Stone, Ash and Stern tried to correct the picture of the meeting on Checkers in articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , which appeared between July 18 and 26, 1990, and to emphasize that it was an optimistic one Assessment of the likely consequences of a unified Germany. In an essay published in 1991 in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Craig criticized the fact that the memorandum had partially taken the participants' thoughts and concepts out of context and wrongly placed the focus on the subject of a German national character. The historians among the participants would have preferred "to talk about German behavior, and not generally, but at specific periods." Stone noted in a comment in the British newspaper The Sunday Times on September 23, 1996 that this Memorandum was not a falsification of what was said at the Checkers meeting. Rather, it is a rather clever document, written with a certain irony.

Assessments

In retrospect, the historian Andreas Wirsching sees the Checkers affair as a turning point in the British perception of Germany. Until then , the skepticism towards Germany that had prevailed during the time of National Socialism and the Second World War, foreign policy has since become more flexible and public perception has shifted. Even if the British press continued to allude to the German National Socialist past, a “more realistic assessment” of the present day Germany prevailed. In his book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018), the Irish columnist Fintan O'Toole takes the view that ideas of the real danger of a hostile German superiority in Europe developed by Ridley and Thatcher in 1990 and represented politically persisted among English “reactionaries” and associated themselves with ideas of an imperialist European Union. Such “paranoid fantasies” are also behind Brexit .

literature

  • Timothy Garton Ash : The Checkers Affair . In: The New York Review of Books , September 27, 1990, p. 65. Also in: Timothy Garton Ash: History of the Present. Essay, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s . Vintage Books, New York City 2001 (Original at Random House, New York City 1999), ISBN 0-375-72762-0 , pp. 50 f. ( Google Books ).
  • Gordon A. Craig : The Checkers Affair of 1990. Observations on the Press and International Relations . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Volume 39 (1991), Issue 4, pp. 611–623 ( PDF ).
  • Charles Powell : What the PM Learned about the Germans . In: Harold James , Marla Stone (ed.): When the Wall Came Down: Reactions to German Unification . Routledge, New York / London 1992, p. 233 f. ( Google Books ).
  • Lachlan R. Moyle: The Ridley-Checkers Affair and German Character. A Journalistic Main Event . In: Harald Husemann (Ed.): As Others See Us. Anglo-German perceptions . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 978-3-63146-677-3 , p. 107 ff.
  • Lothar Kettenacker : Britain and the German Unification, 1989/90 . In: Klaus Larres , Elizabeth Meehan (eds.): Uneasy Alies. British-German Relations and European Integration Since 1945 . Oxford University Press, New York 2002, ISBN 0-19-829383-6 , pp. 99 ff. ( Google Books ).
  • Günther Heydemann : Between resistance and obstruction. Britain's role and politics under Margaret Thatcher during the reunification of Germany in 1989/90 . In: Germany Archive , Volume 42 (2009), Issue 1, pp. 31–43, especially pp. 38–41.
  • Cory Jones: A Year of Incoherence: Germanophobia in the Thatcher Administration and British Policy Regarding the Prospect of German Re-unification between November 1989 and November 1990 . Dissertation University of Bristol, 2015 ( PDF ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Henry Mance: Thatcher saw Soviets as allies against Germany. National Archives 1989–1990: Premier feared reunified Germany could dominate Europe . Article dated December 30, 2016 on ft.com (Financial Times) , accessed December 31, 2016
  2. ^ Günther Gillessen : British inconsistencies . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 20, 1990, p. 1
  3. ^ Dominic Lawson: Saying the Unsayable About the Germans . In: The Spectator , issue of July 14, 1990, p. 8 f. ( PDF )
  4. ↑ Gordon A. Craig, pp. 618 f .; also Timothy Garton Ash, p. 50
  5. ^ Gordon A. Craig, p. 620
  6. ↑ Norman Stone : Cold War: “Germany? Maggie was absolutely right, ” Sunday Times article , September 23, 1996, retrieved from margaretthatcher.org
  7. ↑ Andreas Wirsching: The price of freedom. History of Europe in our time. CH Beck, Munich 2012, p. 64 f.
  8. ^ Fintan O'Toole: The paranoid fantasy behind Brexit . Article from November 16, 2018 on theguardian.com portal , accessed on November 17, 2018