In 1998, Hanns Jürgen Küsters and Daniel Hofmann published more than 1,600 pages of documents from the German Federal Chancellery pertaining to the German reunification process of 1989–1990. Now, Andreas Hilger, a leading expert on German-Soviet relations, has provided a selection of 49 documents from the West German Federal Foreign Office.
Important disagreements initially existed between Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl of the Christian Democrats and his coalition partner and foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher of the Free Democrats, about the future of a reunited German state. Whereas Kohl regarded membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the only possible option for a reunited Germany, Genscher was in favor of a European security system in which NATO and the Warsaw Pact would become “increasingly sidelined” and could eventually be “dissolved,” as he put it at a special meeting of the Western European Union in Luxembourg on 23 March 1990. Genscher's...