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Kohl understands the visceral suspicion of Germany among its neighbors and says, "I cannot deny our history." At the same time, he insists that it is time to recognize how much Germany and the world have changed. Kohl was 15 when the war ended. He calls himself the first Chancellor of the post-Hitler generation, and he firmly believes a little patriotism without nationalism would be good for the country.
As early as 1976, when Kohl made his first run for Chancellor, he said one of his ambitions was to work with foreign leaders "to bring about a more normal relationship with the Germans." On his first visit to Moscow in July 1983, he asked Kremlin leader Yuri Andropov, "What would you say as a Soviet patriot if Moscow and the U.S.S.R. were divided?" A return to normality has been his constant theme. "I am strictly against having Germany singled out," he said in a TIME interview last month.
After Kohl came back from the Soviet Union last week, he was asked how it felt to be the man of the hour. "When people come to write about my period of office," he replied, "I would be very happy if they say that I made a contribution to finding the happy medium again for the Germans."
He summed himself up in that one sentence. He has no driving ideology and no grand visions, other than that Germany must be unified and anchored peacefully inside Europe. He really is the German Everyman, striving for the Utopia of ordinariness. Says Robert Leicht, political commentator for the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit: "I often disagree with Kohl, but I take it for granted he is a harmonizer. His whole life is dominated by the idea that we must fit in the framework. It makes him a man who deserves to be trusted."
The notion of a framework helps explain why Kohl is so committed to the increased integration of the European Community and German membership in NATO. He says the isolation of the Weimar Republic was one of the worst mistakes made after World War I ended, and he vows to keep it from being repeated. "Germany is part of the Western community of shared values," he says.
While Kohl is riding the tide of popularity today, his earlier course was often rough. Though he rose very quickly in local Christian Democratic Party politics, he lost his first bid for Chancellor and was outmaneuvered in 1980 by his purported ally, Franz Josef Strauss, who became the candidate that year. Kohl grew up in the provincial politics of the Rhineland-Palatinate, where he was minister president from 1969 to 1976. He has spent almost his entire adult life as a workaday politician, cultivating thousands of grass- roots contacts and even now spending hours a day chatting with local pols on the phone. His values are those of the large middle class that supports him. Small wonder: he is middle class himself -- conservative, monolingual, a lover of plum tarts and whipped cream.
West German journalists and politicians prefer cosmopolitan polish, and were quick to label him a bumbler. While he did not lose his longing for normalization after becoming Chancellor in October 1982, he often left foreign policy in the hands of his coalition partner Genscher, the leader of the Free Democrats.