“The fact is,” Günter Grass, one of West Germany’s most celebrated writers, told an audience in 1990, “I fear a Germany simplified from two states into one. I reject this simplification, and would be much relieved if it did not come about.”
Amid the general euphoria of the months that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, Grass was not alone in his reservations about what might come to pass in a reunified Germany.
There were some foreign leaders, Margaret Thatcher foremost among them, who resisted it on the ground that the resulting economic superpower would inexorably become the dominant force in Europe and slip back into its old habits of arrogance.
But Grass had other concerns. He worried that western values, and particularly capitalism,