This illustration, created by the British cartoonist Peter Brookes, appeared on the front cover of *The Spectator* on 24 February 1990, accompanying the article One Fatherland (Homeland), by Timothy Garton Ash.
On the map, West Germany (FRG) is depicted as a face whose features resemble those of the then Chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Its mouth is swallowing up East Germany (GDR), which is depicted like any other country, without any personification whatsoever.
Brookes thus depicts a process of absorption rather than a union of equals. In 1990, the FRG had a population of around 62 million, compared with the GDR’s 16.5 million, and its per capita GDP was several times that of East Germany. Garton Ash himself also uses similar language in his article, in which he compares the reunification process to a Anschluss voluntary, in reference to the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. Garton Ash also cites a survey from that period: 67 % per cent of West Germans surveyed believed that the process was moving too fast.
The front page was published in the midst of German reunification. The Berlin Wall had fallen three months earlier and, in February 1990, the four Allied powers of the Second World War (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France) and the two Germanies had agreed, at the Ottawa conference, on the framework for negotiations that would become known as ‘Two plus Four’.
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