Aaay lmao

well, he was chancellor for 16 years and the last election he won (1994) was rather close. particularly in the west, people were rather unhappy about the immense cost of the reunification, realising that the "flourishing landscapes" kohl promised we would soon have in the east, would require hard and enduring work considering HOW backwards eastern germany was in many regards.

so naturally he had to deal with that and a certain political fatigue. i would, however, not claim that the biggest "stain" on his legacy is that he just held on to power despite being "past it". he was the dominating figure of his party, showed no signs of not being up to the task or a lack of work ethic and motivation - in fact, it was a lack of clear leadership in his main opposition party, the social democrats, that prevented an earlier replacement of him as chancellor...

I see. Thanks for the insightful post.

RIP

one of the most important political figures has left us and one of last real personalities in german politics, when this guy entered the room it became dark for a moment ^^
i dont blame him for the more or less failed promise of "flourishing landscapes" (those words haunted him forever), we know by now that rebuilding the east is a long and difficult process that is still far from completed
what mattered is that we became one country again and he achieved it

and he was a true european with a vision of a coorperating europe with sovereign nations and solid and stable management
must have hurt to see the EU turn into a gigantic bureaucratic monster breaking its own laws

our current political landscape could use a guy like him

we shall never see his like again

while you can't outright "blame" him, it's not that realistic estimations hadn't already predicted at the time that it wouldn't be as easy as he suggested. you could even say that not going with the euphoric tone of many at that time, being realistic about what a giant effort the reunification of germany would be, cost lafontaine the elections in 1990. so it's not something you could only realise with hindsight. that being said though, i personally think that it still was the right decision at the time, a delay would have just increased the gap between the two germanys.

also, i think the "flourishing landscapes" comment is a bit overstated here simply because of the unusual choice of words, it's not really something that "haunted" him. sure, his political opponents held it against him but it's not like the majority of the population holds a grudge and thinks it was the wrong decision overall or even an outright broken promise. in fact, the cdu used it in one of their election posters in 1998...

This post was edited by fender on Jun 17 2017 04:04pm

for me personally its the only decision you can make, no matter the cost

after watching an interesting documentation recently (on WDR i think) i have to say though that the policy after the unification had some serious flaws and wasted billions
modernisation of cities and towns comes to mind, people tried to surpass each other throwing money at our eastern cities
we see the result now, cities like dresden look just fine, take the car to the rural areas in saxony and you feel like in siberia
many people feel betrayed and of course they blame helmut kohl, the guy in charge

i have heard many complaints tbh, there are quite a few sentiments and that "anti-east" attitude still exists, which is more related to the entire eastern block from back in the day than our fellow countrymen i guess
and there are still many (mainly older people obviously) that are upset with western germany pumping over 1 trillion into the east, claiming that it didnt accomplish a lot, which i strongly disagree with, but its still understandable

repairing is always harder than destroying and i think we are doing alright, taking into account that the unified germany exists for about 2/3 of the time the socialist madness ruled in the east

No matter how much money you pump into a former communist country, it's very hard to pull it out of the gutter and keep it growing at the same rate as it's capitalist counterparts.

I can't speak for the specific case of East Germany, but I know that several countries from the old communist block have had a lot of trouble getting economy running due to the lack of demand of the population there. One of the positive things communism actually delivers is that the industry focuses on reducing demand, creating only what is necessary, and trying to make their products as long lasting as possible. Even today there are people in former Czechoslovakia that use the same fridges, microwaves, etc they've been using since the 1970s. The communist governments made sure to make long lasting products to reduce costs, as opposed to how it works in the capitalist world where products are intended to become obsolete so that people keep consuming and money keeps rolling around. So in many former communist areas it has happened that once in a capitalist system, the people had no need to create as large of a demand as the companies willing to invest there needed, making companies lose a lot of money and reducing the potential economic growth.

that is true, older craftsmen that returned to the former east after unification have reported that their colleagues were still using the same tools/machines from just right after the war
and while we all appreciate well-engineered stuff there was no way you could keep up at an open market like this and so the industry dissolved

i would like it more if we would go for long lasting products for the right motives

Yeah, so would I, but unfortunately that's not how capitalism works

Since in capitalism money is generated as cash flows, the system would collapse if we weren't constantly spending... and we wouldn't spend if out products lasted forever.