Unchained Eagle: Germany after the Wall Book

Tom Heneghan took up a Reuters posting in Germany in the spring of 1989. There could hardly have been a more fortuitous time. Unchained Eagle documents one of the most significant and defining decades in this mighty, and mightily troubled, country's history. Six months after he arrived, the Berlin Wall came down, bringing with it an euphoria matched only by the post-unification hangover of economic and social inequality, and resurgent nationalism. When Ossi (East German) in his Trabi met Wessi (West German) in her BMW, the fearful pedestrians included France and Britain, who feared the strategic consequences. The massive figure of Helmut Kohl ensured that a unified Germany overcame the "wall in the head" which remained long after the brickwork gave way. When a second icon--the former Chancellor himself, "150 kilos of history made flesh"--also fell, to slush fund revelations, the new incumbent, Gerhard Schröder, had already proved younger, flashier, and thoroughly at ease with the modern sound-bite culture. The era of the heavyweight statesman--Kohl, Mitterand, Thatcher--had given way to the Herr Blair Bunch.Thomas Mann said in 1945 "We do not want a German Europe, but a European Germany". By the close of Heneghan's excellent book, studded with portentous and sensitive anniversaries--the liberation of Auschwitz, the fall of the Wall--Germany had begun to deal responsibly with its duplicitous past, both Nazi and Stasi, and forge a future in line with such a sentiment. The smallest unified German state ever, but uniquely with undisputed frontiers, had stopped bankrolling Europe, and had progressed from the Bonn Republic to the Berlin Republic, and even joined the notional Brussels Republic. It had also seen the rest of Europe finally stop "projecting old fears onto new problems", and in Bosnia, taken its first, tentative steps towards defensive military engagement. Heneghan's writing displays the hallmark impeccable standards of Reuters: accurate, objective, judiciously wry journalism, squeezing sense and concise copy from hours of speeches and acres of print. And, by the time he signs off, he's happy to report of Germany that "it was finally a normal country". --David VincentRead More