Word: kohl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fear, both imposed by Moscow. The beginning of the end came last October, when Mikhail Gorbachev visited East Berlin and announced, almost in so many words, that Erich Honecker was on his own. For a Soviet puppet, that means the end. The juggernaut of unification was under way. Kohl found himself in the driver's seat largely ex officio: he happened to be the Chancellor of West Germany when the Soviet Union let East Germany go, which meant letting it come home...
...months since, Kohl, along with the skilled and dogged Hans-Dietrich Genscher, has made some perspicacious moves, such as his detailed and reasonable plan for confederation in November. But he scared and angered his Eastern neighbors by letting them think he was leaving open the possibility that a unified Germany might press revanchist claims on parts of Poland. His retreat on the issue this spring was an occasion more for relief than for congratulation...
...would do Kohl no harm to acknowledge a debt to a courageous and controversial predecessor. In 1969 Willy Brandt launched his Ostpolitik of reconciliation and rapprochement with the East. It was the first major sustained breakthrough of the cold war in Europe. Brandt went a long way toward allaying Soviet fears by signing a renunciation-of-force treaty with Moscow. He propitiated many of Germany's other former enemies by dropping to his knees in front of a memorial to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto. Most important, Brandt formally recognized the German Democratic Republic. He was criticized...
Waving expansively at the snow-topped Caucasus Mountains, Mikhail Gorbachev observed with a grin that he and Chancellor Helmut Kohl were already in the foothills and wanted "to develop our relations further upward." After two days of talks, their cordiality escalated to outright chumminess. They emerged from a resort lodge in sweaters and open-necked shirts to stroll bantering through the fields and flowers of the Russian countryside. At the resort spa of Zheleznovodsk, they jubilantly announced that they had swept aside the last significant obstacles to uniting Germany by the end of the year. Yes, Gorbachev said, a unified...
...Soviet Union, Britain and France -- must still formally sign off on unification this fall, the Zheleznovodsk agreement caps nine months of dizzying change in Europe and signals the beginning of a fresh era. As Gorbachev put it, "We are leaving one epoch in international relations and entering another." Added Kohl: "The future has begun...