Egon Bahr, Who Laid Groundwork for German Reunification, Dies at 93

Egon Bahr, a prominent Social Democrat whose efforts to improve West Germany’s relations with the Soviet bloc helped pave the way for German reunification 45 years after World War II, has died, the party announced on Thursday. He was 93.  Party officials said he had died overnight.

Mr. Bahr, an architect of Ostpolitik, West Germany’s Cold War policy of rapprochement with Moscow and its client states, was active to the last in his efforts to reduce more recent East-West tensions. He visited Moscow last month to join the former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in a public plea for continued détente between Germany and Russia — the cause to which Mr. Bahr devoted much of his life.

A divided Germany, and the divided city of Berlin in the heart of East Germany, became the front lines of the Cold War after World War II ended in 1945, but Mr. Bahr — a journalist and later a key aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt (and alter ego, some said) — never lost hope that his country would one day be whole again.

He believed that the best way to narrow, if not erase, Germany’s division was through patient negotiations on the basis of shared interests, not overwhelming strength. He called his approach Ostpolitik, aimed at normalizing relations with all of West Germany’s Communist neighbors to the east.

Mr. Bahr’s moment had arrived two decades earlier, in 1966, when Mr. Brandt, the longtime Social Democratic mayor of embattled West Berlin and later the party leader, was appointed foreign minister in a coalition government. He made Mr. Bahr, his mayoral press secretary, the chief of planning in the foreign office. Three years later, when Mr. Brandt became chancellor, he named Mr. Bahr his chief of staff and a ranking member of his brain trust.

Mr. Bahr was convinced that the key to unification lay in Moscow, and his first step under Chancellor Brandt was to open talks with the Soviet Union on a treaty renouncing the use of force between Germans and Russians. The meetings began in January 1970.

He also began talks with the East German Communists that led to a transit agreement. Then, in December 1972, he successfully negotiated a treaty between East and West Germany on governing a divided Berlin, rounding out an agreement signed four months earlier by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France.

Mr. Bahr left the government in May 1974, when Mr. Brandt resigned after the arrest of his personal secretary as a Communist spy. But a few months later Helmut Schmidt, the new Social Democratic chancellor, appointed Mr. Bahr minister for economic cooperation with developing countries. 

He continued to press for reunification after Mr. Brandt’s resignation in 1974, remaining in the cabinet for two years under Mr. Brandt’s successor, Mr. Schmidt. And he continued to hold top leadership posts in the Social Democratic Party after Mr. Schmidt was driven from office by a coalition of Free Democrats and Christian Democrats.  - Read More at NYT

Egon Bahr, Who Laid Groundwork for German Reunification, Dies at 93

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