Germany’s First Pledge: ‘Peace Only’

A newly united Germany on Wednesday embraced the second chance that history has handed it, vowing to serve as a model of peace and democracy in Europe.

With the black, red and gold flag now flying over nine frontiers, German leaders strove to reassure their neighbors--and the world--that the nation’s new-found sovereignty poses no threat.

“In the future, German soil will be a source of peace only,” Chancellor Helmut Kohl declared in a message to governments worldwide.

Subdued celebrations and a handful of protests by the radical left marked the national holiday as Germans struggled to absorb a sea of emotions ranging from unbridled joy to bitter resentment.

President Richard von Weizsaecker reflected on the “great and serious obligation” that unity brings the country 45 years after the Third Reich crumbled and Germany was divided.

“The history in Europe and in Germany now offers us a chance as never before,” Von Weizsaecker said in a solemn, two-hour Ceremony of State at the Berlin Philharmonic hall.

“We are living through one of those extremely rare phases of history in which something truly can be changed for the good,” he said. “Let us not for a moment forget what this means for us.”

Said Kohl: “Through its regained national unity, our country wants to serve the cause of global peace and advance the unification of Europe. . . . At the same time, we stand by our moral and legal obligations resulting from German history.”

The first all-German Parliament in nearly 60 years is scheduled to convene today in the Reichstag building in Berlin, now the capital. Bonn remains the seat of government, however, and debate is still open over whether, when and how the transfer will take place.

In the reborn capital of Berlin, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the Brandenburg Gate, the city’s central Arc de Triomphe, to stroll down what once was the old city’s most elegant avenue, Unter den Linden.

Many wore German flags as shawls. One woman twirled an umbrella in the same tricolors. Everywhere, it seemed, the banner flew in what just the day before had been East Berlin, capital of a country that, at the stroke of midnight, had erased itself.

“I just can’t grasp it all,” said Erhard Retzloff, a former East German, who sat nursing a German beer from the old western side at a picnic table in Marx-Engels Platz. Behind him, the huge hammer-and-compass emblem of the Communist state was missing from the front of the Palace of the Republic, where the ousted government once sat.

“I didn’t believe I would see this day,” Retzloff said. “No one did.”

Even the food stands at the street fair reflected the new cosmopolitan cachet of what was once a harsh and dreary alter ego to the neon glitz of West Berlin.

Vendors dished out Belgian waffles, Thai noodles and French crepes while loudspeakers blared the unlikeliest of songs--”We Built This City on Rock ‘n’ Roll.” A floating discotheque bobbed nearby in the Spree River.

And the brand new nation suffered its first food shortage--the sausage stands all ran out of mustard.

The alternative Greens party, which opposed unification on grounds it amounted to annexation or a buyout of the old East Germany by the West, mocked the day by handing out free condoms to celebrants with a leaflet urging “safe unity.”

Not everyone was celebrating, though.

A few blocks away, about 10,000 grim-faced punkers and leftists marched in protest of a united Germany, waving East German flags and shouting, “Germany, shut up!” Riot police flanked the protesters.

“We are afraid for Germany and of Germany,” said Hermann Ooster, a 32-year-old former East German carrying the flag of his defunct homeland with one hand and pushing a baby carriage with the other.

“We’re afraid for Germany’s neighbors, especially the Poles,” he said, adding that reunification was dangerously nationalistic.

“It would have been better to wait 20 years and give East Germany a chance to find its own way as a democracy so it could join the Federal Republic as an equal partner,” Ooster said.

“We feel absolutely no joy today,” he insisted. “Only fear.”

Authorities reported a handful of similar protests elsewhere in the country, as well as a few clashes involving neo-Nazis.

In Schwerin, north of Berlin, about 150 right-wing extremists chanted the Nazi slogan, “Sieg Heil!” and clashed with a smaller number of leftist counterdemonstrators, the British news agency Reuters reported.

It said about 100 neo-Nazis also hurled rocks, bottles and firecrackers at police in Leipzig and fought with counterdemonstrators. Leipzig was the birthplace of East Germany’s democratic revolution last autumn.

Sporadic fights also marred celebrations in Bonn, Frankfurt and Goettingen in the west and Leipzig, Magdeburg and Schwerin in the east, Reuters reported.

Von Weizsaecker, at the Ceremony of State, declared “We are the people,” quoting the chant that began in Leipzig last October. “With these four great and simple words, an entire system was shattered and brought down,” the president recalled.

With the change of one word, the chant last autumn became the first call for German unity--”We are one people.”

With that now accomplished, Von Weizsaecker said, Germans face the task of integrating their two disparate societies.

“We must now learn to understand each other better,” he said. “For people in the West, the joy over the fall of the Wall was infinitely great.

“That the unification might have something to do with their personal life, however, is not clear to many, or even highly unwelcome,” Von Weizsaecker said. “It cannot remain that way.”

Many citizens in the affluent western half of Germany have complained that the multibillion-dollar price tag on unification will lower their standard of living, boost their taxes and strain social benefits. They complain of housing shortages and unemployment rates that are expected to worsen in the long process of modernizing the eastern half of the country.