Uber alles? - East Germans flee to the West

AS THE East Germans came, a hundred an hour, in their tin-can cars with power-tool motors, across the border from Hungary to Austria, they demonstrated, for the redundant nth time, what lengths average, unheroic people will go to to taste freedom, even if they have been raised to be slaves. Some of the refugees who hailed from East Berlin, after passing through Austria, kept going until they had flown to West Berlin: traveling several hundred miles, through four countries, in order to move from one part of town to another.

Their effect on the two Germanies is bound to be profound. For East Germany, the flight was a humiliating rejection. It was the only Eastern European country, economists liked to say, that had made Marxism even half work. But that was not good enough. Appropriately, Erich Honecker, the septuagenarian Party boss, reportedly suffering from incurable cancer, was incommunicado. He might better have skipped through Budapest himself.

West Germany, meanwhile, has experienced a most dramatic inducement to focus on things German. The East Germans aren't the only homecoming refugees it has been taking in these days: there have actually been greater numbers of "ethnic Germans" returning from remote immigrant communities in Hungary, Russia, and other points east. These Germans are virtually foreigners, however, sundered by decades--in some cases centuries--of life abroad (the Volga Germans moved to Russia under Catherine the Great). The refugees from across the postwar border are brothers and cousins, whose return packs a real emotional punch.

What punch does it pack for Eastern and Western Europe, and for us? "We have accepted," a Hungarian official told one reporter, "that the Brezhnev doctrine is over." That doctrine was simple: What we (that is, the Soviets) have, we keep. Certainly there is a lot Gorbachev still intends to keep. Full political independence isn't going to come to Hungary anytime soon, much less to Lithuania. Moscow has evidently decided, however--and Hungary would not have opened its borders without Moscow's approval--that it can afford to release a few thousand restless Germans.

What might Mosdow gain, at our expense? There has been a good deal of fretting, prompted by newspaper photographs of all those jubilant blonds, over the prospect of German reunification. To the extent that this is simple kraut-bashing, it is ignoble. This generation of Germans is not responsible for the fact that their elders began the last two world wars. There is nothing morally or politically wrong with German reunification per se.

But a neutralist Germany, or even two Finlandized Germanies, would be unacceptable. Henry Kissinger, Evan Galbraith, and others have been warning, since the time of the INF treaty, that the true target audience of glasnost and perestroika was Western Europe. To West Germany, the alpha fish of Western Europe, Gorbachev holds the added lure of a restored homeland.

Americans welcome the good fortune of individual Germans in achieving their freedom; we would welcome a reunited Germany, with full political and economic freedom, tomorrow. But until then, there are worse things than separation.