Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the GDR

The spring and summer of 1990 were marked by foreign policy negotiations on fundamental questions: Would the Soviet Union allow a united Germany to join the Western defence alliance – NATO? Would the Allied reserved rights be terminated? Would Germany attain full sovereignty? In this process the GDR was represented by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On March 18, 1990, the first free elections in the GDR took place. Pastor Markus Meckel became the new foreign minister. A few days earlier, officials had met in Bonn to prepare the end of Allied reserved rights in both parts of Germany. For the new GDR foreign minister, the timing of the appointment sent a clear signal. He recalls.

“On March 14, four days before the free election in the GDR, the first meeting of officials took place, who then discussed the question of the agenda and such things, those were very central questions. We found that scandalous. It made it clear that the others were not interested in the GDR at all. Not only not in the non-democratic GDR, but also not at all in the question of the legitimacy of the GDR government. Anyone who arranges such a meeting four days before the election says: It doesn't matter what they look like. We don’t want to deal with them anyway. That was essentially what this date meant. At first, it seemed a bit more elevated – from a personal point of view – by the friendly acceptance into the circle of foreign ministers. But then it became very clear that this was the policy from the very beginning: We were not supposed to play a role, but to be a number in this numbers game. Nevertheless, I think we succeeded in contributing some things in terms of content at a few points."

During the Two Plus Four negotiations in East Berlin on June 22, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze made unexpectedly sharp remarks and seemed to backtrack on earlier concessions. His West German counterpart, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, recalls how it became clear to him that domestic political considerations in the Soviet Union were behind this.

“Shevardnadze, of course, had to take the mindset in Moscow into account. I knew that he was facing a party convention. But to be certain that my assessment was correct, I took him aside when we left the negotiating room and I said: The democratization process in Moscow seems to have reached such a stage that the Soviet foreign minister – as is sometimes the case here as well – once again takes a particularly tough position on some issue before a party convention. Then he smiled at me without answering the question. It was clear to me then: he had not made this speech to our address."

In July 1990, West Germany’s Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher travelled to the Caucasus with Chancellor Helmut Kohl for negotiations with the Soviet Union. At issue were the terms of a possible NATO membership for a reunified Germany. Looking back, Genscher says that the breakthrough came even before the German-Soviet meeting.

“When I came to the Caucasus, the Soviet Union’s consent to the NATO membership of the united Germany had long been given. This had already happened during Gorbachev’s visit to the United States in the conversation with President Bush. There had also been a press conference there. Now it was about questions regarding the duration of the presence of Soviet troops on the territory of the GDR and about payments that we should make. But that just happened in a climate that the pictures express quite truthfully. You knew you had reached a point where you could create a completely new partnership and you could pick up where you left off a year earlier, where we had a stroke of luck in German history: namely, that first President Bush and then Secretary General Gorbachev had been in Bonn, in early summer. And we were in that historic year of 1989 actually at a peak of our relations with both world powers, with the United States of America and with the Soviet Union.”