There are few phenomena more baffling to the American observer than the political struggle now taking place in Western Germany between the tendencies led by Kurt Schumacher and Konrad Adenauer. From the cursory press reports, it would appear that it is a matter of conservatism vs. socialism, or pro-Americanism vs. anti-Americanism, or European cooperation vs. nationalism, as represented by Adenauer and Schumacher respectively. But, as Herbert Lüthy here points out, such facile antitheses completely miss the point. It is the issue of the most adequate road to German unity—and ultimately European unity—that is really involved; and this issue will continue to challenge Western policy-makers no matter which German faction is victorious, or which German policy gets the upper hand. The present article is translated from the French by Maurice J. Goldbloom.
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In the first months after the collapse of the Third Reich, Allied and neutral journalists often reported a sentiment voiced by the Germans or written on the walls of ruined cities: “It is a disgrace to be German!” This statement, seemingly so unambiguous, is a master key to the ambiguities of postwar Germany. Spoken by Germans, among Germans, in sincere horror of what had been done in their name, it contained the promise of a new beginning. But uttered by a German before a representative of the victors, before a journalist itching to report it, before occupation authorities in search of “good Germans” to whom to assign jobs, licenses, and the advantages of “collaboration,” it became a suspect and repugnant self-abasement as well as an easy opportunity for guilty persons to wash themselves in a great bath of collective guilt. And finally, when this statement was repeated by the victors in smug consciousness of their superiority to this accursed nation, it became the expression of that self-same national arrogance, that selfsame racist stupidity, conscious or unconscious, for which one reproached the Germans. It is the old parable of the self-righteous man and the publican—with the decisive difference that the publican this time could not confess in front of the self-righteous man. In consequence of all these factors, the theme altered. It was not a “disgrace,” but a “misfortune” to be a German.
So much for German guilt: for some, a subject for profound reflection, scarcely suited for exhibition in the public square; a bad alibi for others—among these, the victors in a war of annihilation which they had waged “totally” with saturation bombing and burning phosphorus; they were behaving as victors have always behaved, annexing and bartering the shreds of the conquered land, tearing away a fourth of Germany, expelling a dozen million Germans who had lived there from generation to generation since the Middle Ages. What was to become of these expellees, no one asked—death would be just what they deserved. So the rump of a devastated Germany was filled with millions of refugees, uprooted, declassed, hopeless, to the unanimous applause of a united, just, and democratic world—in which the Soviet Union claimed full membership. It is somewhat difficult today to recall the atmosphere of general hypocrisy about “democratic war aims,” of reiterated lies about “our great Russian ally,” the murky smoke screen to retain a while longer the illusion of “the unity of the free world”—on which anti-fascism foundered on the very day of victory. All the slovenly solutions which have subsequently cost us so dear, beginning with the formula of “unconditional surrender,” served only to keep up this illusion, the falsity of which was nowhere more clearly visible than in Germany.
This atmosphere was scarcely propitious to conscience-searching. Very quickly, the Germans set about demanding the credentials of their judges. Those who were condemning them—look at what they themselves were doing! In the name of what new and better world were they judging? And the dialogue degenerated into a wrangle of teen-agers: “You’re a rat!” “Well, you’re another!” Then, one fine day, all the world wearied of it; the enemy of humanity was now elsewhere, and all was simply forgotten—the last slovenly solution that formed the logical conclusion of a chain of slovenly solutions.
The conscience-searching failed, and it is a Germany with a troubled conscience that is reconstructing herself continuously before the eyes of a world torn between contradictory fears. Since nothing had been clarified, nothing was settled, and everything remains suspect. To read the reports on Germany in. the foreign press, the very fact that the Germans have returned to work, to the reconstruction of their destroyed industry which must henceforth support a swollen population penned in a reduced space, appears almost to be proof of their indefatigable maleficence.
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At the moment of the Third Reich’s collapse, the Allied press had been full of sinister predictions—undoubtedly suggested in large part by the propaganda machine of Dr. Goebbels—according to which even the complete occupation of Germany would mean, not the end of the war, but its transformation into a guerrilla war conducted by a clandestine Nazi network, an armed terrorist resistance rich in enormous stocks of arms, perhaps even having underground armament factories. The reporters on the lookout for this underground resistance found only a people crushed, prostrate, amorphous, ready to accept every form of collaboration and every gospel; at most, during the first days of the occupation, there was a poor fanatical street urchin here and there who shook his fist at the Allied flags. Along with the military and police machinery of the totalitarian state, Nazism itself seemed swept from the face of the earth.
Obviously, no faith was placed in this miracle. Reporters and visitors have continued to seek out, record, and pin down every symptom of a reawakening of German nationalism. The detection of signs of nationalism has often been the sole function of their tours of Germany. Eventually they had to find what they were seeking: since 1948 there is no longer any doubt that a new German nationalism is slowly awakening. It sometimes almost seems as if the world was boiling with impatience for it to reappear, thus justifying the opinions it had always held on a Germany eternally incorrigible—and therefore requiring no serious or complicated thought. The facility with which a large part of the international press echoed any slightest manifestation of German impertinence, however isolated and insignificant it might be, exaggerating and twisting it, while remaining silent on all the rest of German reality, is really inconceivable. Skepticism is an honorable quality, and in the case of Germany well justified by past experience; but it can also turn into an obsession and into systematic defamation.
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There is, then, a reawakening of German nationalism. Let us note at once that this word is strangely lacking in precision. The French Petit Larousse laconically defines it: “Nationalism: a determined preference for that which is concerned with the nation”—a banal sentiment, perfectly honorable, and extremely current in France among other places. The Oxford English Dictionary is more explicit, but even less condemnatory: “Nationalism: patriotic feeling, principles, or efforts; policy of national independence.” All these are universally recognized as virtues, if not abroad, at least at home. It seems that “nationalism” only designates a vice when joined with the adjective “German,” and that the vice is particularly in the adjective. What is it that is especially unhealthy about German nationalism?
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For many observers, the mere fact that the Germans do not seem ashamed to be Germans, that they once again dare to affirm themselves, appears in itself to be sufficiently terrible. But even such distortions of judgment have some relation to the facts: it is true that German nationalism is “something else again.” It is not a nationalism that is the natural expression of an existing nation, but rather a nationalism without a nation, one that is willfully and aggressively in search of a nation to create. There is nothing paradoxical about this. To a certain extent, this could even be the truest definition of nationalism: an unhealthy effort to compensate for the absence of national consciousness. The old nations of Western Europe have no need of nationalism; they exist, and their nationalism is only a survival from a past effort, or an atavism which reawakens when their existence is threatened. Germany does not as yet exist as a nation, and many misunderstandings derive from trying to attribute to it, by analogy, a national personality which it does not have.
France, England, Spain, each has a continuous national history of a thousand years, in an almost changeless framework, with a stable geographical and spiritual center. Germany has neither a common history, nor framework, nor center; “Germany,” until the 19th century, was a geographical expression as empty of national feeling as “Europe.” Neither the Empire of the Middle Ages nor that of the Hapsburgs was a prefiguration of “Germany”; they were always supranational empires, “Roman,” the succession to which was tied up with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Western and Eastern Germany do not have a hundred years of history in common, and the fundamental trait of the various histories of Germany written in the last century by Germans is a sort of bad conscience in the face of this lack of solidarity. Western Germany, rich, commercial, industrial, completely oriented toward the West and toward Italy, has never troubled itself about the age-long struggle of the Germans in the East on the frontiers of the Slav world; as little as the Emperor Frederick II, in his duel with the Papacy and in his Sicilian adventure, troubled or even informed himself about the battle which a handful of Eastern Germans were at the same moment waging at Liegnitz against the Mongols of Genghis Khan; as little as the court of Versailles and its German allies, conducting a war of spoliation against the Holy Roman Empire, troubled themselves about a Vienna that was in their time being besieged by the Turks. Neither continuity, nor unity, nor solidarity, neither nucleus nor exact outline—except for the past eighty years, Germany has existed only in the form of a vague imperative, not as a nation, but as an intermittent will to be a nation, a nationalist drive which rises periodically like an attack of fever.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Germany is today a victim of that fever. If one does not let oneself be taken in by official speeches and electoral demagogy, one is astounded by the indifference of the Germans of the West to those of Central Germany under Soviet rule, to their old capital in distress, to the refugees from Polonized or Russified Eastern Germany who have lost everything—even to the evacuees from bombed cities in their midst who were stranded in certain areas of West Germany and now would like to return home. For example, the city of Hamburg has adamantly refused to permit its own evacuees to return from Schleswig-Holstein, that poorhouse of the Republic, where the number of refugees of all origins exceeds by far the number of natives. When once the iron corset of the national state which united them was burst, the sense of national unity also went to bits. The Germans are not a nation: but they have a bad conscience toward themselves, and this bad conscience is the basic trouble with “German nationalism,” which is often little else than a vociferous attempt to compensate for a lack of fundamental patriotism. Here is the whole origin—even literary—of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”
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But is this nationalism of bad conscience no more than a gratuitous aberration of the German spirit? Has German unity no real imperative of any kind?
Germany is dangerous, all the world has agreed on this point; but the world is coming to be aware of the fact that the absence of Germany is also dangerous. It is this crossroads of Europe, this buffer zone between our highly differentiated peripheral civilization and the huge amorphous mass of the Eurasian plains, which is dangerous; and what one calls the German danger exists, as it were, independently of the Germans. Germany in the last war was erased from the political map of the world, and that empty space where the victors met one another is more than ever charged with dangers of war. This may prove nothing except that this buffer zone, deprived of natural barriers and of natural centers, all sand and marsh, has required and continues to require a concentration of forces, the maintenance of an artificial dike. And it might at least stimulate us to reflect on whether certain reactions and certain fits of fear or aggressiveness that we impute to the German “national character” are not the result of a situation which would have implanted a similar image on no matter what population was placed at this crossroads of Europe.
It is quite usual these days to lump millions of individuals under a common term so as to be able to define all these different human beings simply by their nationality, as if they had chosen it or as if nationality were an innate quality. The fashion is to deduce the institutions and history of a people from inherent psychological qualities supposedly peculiar to it, while forgetting the only thing that this people really has in common, its collective situation in the face of other organized collectivities. This procedure, which replaces explanation by myth, is at the bottom of all racism. The fact is that during its very short history of eighty years, Germany has existed only by virtue of an iron corset wrapped around herself to keep her from disintegrating. Nationalism made do for national consciousness, the uniform replacing organic unity—whence the diseased importance of the uniform and of nationalism. And, simplifying somewhat, it is the frontier or, rather, the absence of a frontier in the East that has imposed on Germany an armor of which many of the Germans of the South and West felt no need, and by which Europe has always been alarmed.
All those visible rancors and resentments of a nation mutilated, parceled out, and cut to pieces, which one lists under the common denominator of “nationalism,” are today nothing but a diffused and impotent vapor; for them to become a motive force, it is necessary that they be captured by an engine directed toward a goal. The old engine, which was driven off the rails by a lunatic, no longer exists. The Republic of Bonn converts nothing of this vapor into energy. It suffices to look at the map of what was once Germany—and the universal prating about an imaginary “line of the Elbe,” for example, shows well how very few people take the trouble to look at the map—to ascertain that this Western Germany, situated in a semicircle around the Russian zone (itself “cored” by the Western enclave of Berlin), will never be viable; and that Bonn, that provisional center placed prudently west of the Rhine, will never be able to become a capital—as little as Vichy, whose atmosphere it strangely recalls. What is the engine that can capture “German nationalism”? In other words, toward what end is it possible for this confused human and industrial potential, this enormous German reality, to be directed?
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It would have been well for the Western statesmen to ask themselves, immediately after the war, what they were going to do, or what they wanted the Germans to do. Germany was at their disposal, without will, without means of action, without an imaginable future; for several years it awaited a word, a direction, an idea from those who had conquered it. What did they expect of the Germans? What did they wish to do with their total victory? While victors were mistrustfully investigating the obscure wills of the Germans, at a time when nothing depended on the Germans, the latter were asking anxiously what their conquerors’ intentions were. But nothing was forthcoming. To the extent that the Western allies had, and imposed, ideas, they were ideas relevant to the past, not to the present, and still less to the future. They had forgotten to think beyond military victory, beyond unconditional surrender, so as to escape thinking about the conditions of the surrender.
Consequently, the Germans set about working out their own views of a possible future. And it would seem that they have drawn more constructive lessons from their defeat than the victors have up to now drawn from their victory. Three quite coherent major political viewpoints have been defined: Schumacher’s democratic nationalism, Adenauer’s European federalism, and a neutralism that is still unorganized.
The situation of Germany, occupied by, and partitioned between, the victors, is such that every taking of a stand on “domestic” politics is likewise the taking of a stand in the international conflict between East and West; there is no domestic politics in Germany. One of the positions which would have been logically possible, a pro-Soviet orientation, is practically devoid of adherents outside the Soviet zone, where it is imposed by force. The experience of Russian occupation in Central Germany, of the Russian reality by hundreds of thousands of prisoners, the uninterrupted exodus of refugees from the Russian zone, and above all the mass expulsion of millions of Germans from the former Eastern provinces, have rendered Germany impervious to Soviet propaganda, at least for the present and the near future.
For the two major parties that constitute the government and the opposition in Bonn, the taking of a pro-Western stand is perforce the absolute point of departure. It is only within this framework that the struggle takes place between the official, “defensive” policy of integrating a “little Germany” (that of the West) into a little Europe (that of the West), and the “Western offensive,” “Great Germany” policy of the Socialists. But there is also a “neutralist” ideology that toys with an Eastern orientation on the model of the Treaty of Rapallo, and which has come to light since the consolidation of the Western republic: it has become particularly defined in the course of the discussions on rearmament, and its hour may come if Western hesitations end by discrediting the Western orientation of present-day Germany.
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The first party to take a stand in the conflict between East and West, at a time in 1945 when almost nobody outside of Germany would admit a conflict existed, was the Social Democratic party. This stand was embodied in its struggle against the threat of fusion with the Communist party—that is to say, its absorption by the latter—a policy imposed by the Soviet authorities in the East and favored in general by the Allied authorities in the West. The center of this struggle was Berlin, where resistance to the demands of the Soviet authorities, masters of the place and the only ruling group having a clearly defined political will, meant risking imprisonment in a concentration camp or sudden death. In back of the Berlin Socialists, many of whom had already known the Nazi camps, there was no authority either German or Allied, but only the West German Socialist party of Schumacher. Without retelling once again the history of the “Battle for Berlin,” one can assert that without that little noticed resistance of the Berlin Socialists in 1945–46, which spread slowly to the entire population and to the “bourgeois” parties of Berlin, and whose suppression in the Russian zone only came much later, there would have been no aerial bridge and no free Berlin.
West Berlin is the only incontestable success of democracy in Germany. Its resistance to the new totalitarian repression, the responsibilities and risks which each inhabitant had to assume personally and daily—as, for instance, in the difficult and unpublicized decision of individual Berliners to refuse registration in the Soviet rationing offices at the moment when the blockade was imposed, when West Berlin was practically without coal and food, and when there was not yet any guarantee of the desire or ability of the Allies to feed and hold Berlin—ended up by creating a situation where it was morally impossible for the West to abandon that city to Soviet reprisals. Here, for the first time, the Germans were not the objects of military administration but partners whose civic courage counted for as much as the Allied planes. The result is confirmed by all visitors to Berlin: the atmosphere of this “free city,” wrecked, poverty-stricken, and isolated, but proud of having defended its liberty, contrasts strangely with the unbreathable atmosphere of Bonn, the artificial capital whose liberties are the result of defeat, imposed by the victors and accepted willy-nilly by the vanquished.
In Berlin, the democratic cause is identified with the national cause—a situation too rare in German history, and the true prerequisite for all national democratic consciousness. This outcome has dispelled the bitterness of defeat, the mists of Nazism, and the specters of the Third Reich; Berlin is today the only German city where it is impossible to show Veit Harlan’s movies, and where the former “culture-bearers” of the Third Reich cannot return to the stage. And this free city in the center of the Soviet zone has become the secret capital of East Germany; its mere existence prevents the consolidation of the Communist regime, and it acts as a center of resistance where new forms of opposition to a new totalitarian oppression are gradually being worked out, a place of refuge in which there arrive daily hundreds of refugees from the East and whose proximity makes it morally possible for the Germans of the East to continue to hold out against Stalinization. This resistance is not simply “anti-Russian,” although the atrocities of the Red Army when it entered Berlin have obviously played an emotionally decisive role; for Ernst Reuter, the admirable Lord Mayor of Berlin, a true militant humanist, former People’s Commissar of the USSR in the early period of the Russian Revolution, former professor in Istanbul during the Hitler regime, a citizen of the world who speaks Russian and Turkish as fluently as English, the battle of Berlin is a battle for the liberation, not of Eastern Germany, but of that Europe of which Warsaw and Prague are as much a part as Paris and Rome. Berlin has become a city that gives courage to free men.
For one who has been raised on the old catchwords about the kadavergehorsam (“as obedient as a corpse”) Prussian, what has happened here must seem miraculous; but it is the catchwords that were false. I was present in Berlin at a lecture by a Frenchman, a man of letters, who gravely expounded the old theme of the fatal Prussian spirit, only to realize suddenly and with inexpressible embarrassment that these people whom he was addressing, and who did not answer at all to his definitions, were the very same Prussians—he had simply not taken into account that this free city where he felt himself so much at ease was none other than the old Prussian metropolis. He might have learned there a healthy skepticism toward the professors of literature and the literature of professors.
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If I have written at such length of Berlin, it is because the experience of Berlin can make comprehensible the German point of view that is least understood, or most misunderstood, abroad: that of German Social Democracy. For Kurt Schumacher, it is absolutely necessary to seize this historic occasion when the cause of democracy can at last be fused in the German consciousness with the national cause, when the demand for German unity is a demand for liberty for all Germans, when the rejection of partition means the rejection of a new totalitarian dictatorship imposed on Eastern Germany; it is necessary at all costs not to compromise this cause by a servile collaboration with the Western occupation authorities and to avoid a repetition of the Weimar experience, when German democracy seemed to mean little but submission and impotence. German democracy will be militant, “resistant,” or it will not be.
Nationalism? Jacobin nationalism certainly, and certain oratorical excesses of Schumacher are motivated by a very consciously calculated tactical aim: not to let the inevitable fevers and resentments of this wounded country be captured by a new Hitler. This great, frightening-looking cripple who has emerged from Hitler’s concentration camps with a broken body, one arm and one leg amputated, who keeps going and active only by the effort of a fanatical will, is a difficult and not very reassuring partner; but Schumacher is nonetheless a true representative of that mutilated and disfigured Germany which is seeking a new road.
From Schumacher’s point of view, the Federal Republic of Bonn, that “smaller Germany,” is acceptable only as a provisional solution. And every policy which looks to its consolidation, to the acceptance of the partition of Germany as definitive, and which turns its back on the Germans of the East, is a policy of treason, a “policy of Vichy,” in the fierce phrase which is heard in Bonn. There again we see the importance of Berlin, that outpost of the West which does not politically form a part of the Republic of Bonn, and whose very existence prevents the definite crystallization of the two separate Germanies; if the presence of that free city in the center of the Soviet zone blocks the consolidation of the Eastern Republic, it also blocks the consolidation of the Republic of Bonn. Berlin prevents the Germans of the West from forgetting that their state is provisional, and that the line of partition can last ten days or ten years, but can never become definitive.
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But the policy of Bonn is precisely to consolidate Western Germany. Practically speaking, it has accepted the partition of Germany and the loss of Central and Eastern Germany, if not as definitive, at least as lasting, and even sees in it an opportunity for the entrance of a reduced Western Germany, more acceptable and less frightening to its partners, into a European community with a Franco-German basis. This is, crudely put, the point of view of the Catholic politicians in power—the vision of a “small Germany,” Western and Catholic (the loss of the essentially Lutheran Center and East has given the Catholics almost a majority in the Republic of Bonn), integrated into a “small Europe,” likewise Western and Catholic. This idea also has its fanatical representative, whose fanaticism, very different from that of Schumacher’s, is taciturn, patient, and crafty—none other than Chancellor Adenauer. Despite the verbal concessions which he is compelled to make to public opinion on the theme of German unity, he sees in the “little Germany” of Bonn the great and unique chance for that European unity and above all that Franco-German union which is his genuine obsession. Barricaded behind that article of the constitution which prevents the overthrow of the government by a “negative majority,” and which still assures him of a year and a half of power, he perseveres in his policy of European federation, with a fierce will to leave behind him, at the end of those eighteen months, the structure of a solidly built Franco-German Europe which his successors, whoever they may be, will not be able to unmake.
Compared to this grand design, none of the problems which agitate the German press and public opinion really counts for him, neither the Ruhr Statute nor the Occupation Statute nor the conditions of the “formal agreements” with the Allies; all these are merely passing things which will be forgotten the day that “Europe” becomes a reality. He is ready to accept anything that can serve this idea. To win the trade unions for it and play them off against the Socialist opposition, this doughty old bourgeois, raised in the stable and conservative society of the Second Reich before 1914 and reputedly linked to the big heavy industries and the banks, has—over the astonished heads of his conservative ministers—granted the unions “co-determination,” the right to equal participation in the control of industry. This “reactionary” would be willing to ratify a Socialist revolution if that could facilitate the realization of European Union.
On the other hand, he fights against anything that might endanger the desperately slow progress of his European policy. Despite some courtesy visits, the defense of Berlin has been of little interest to him; and if, compelled by the force of public opinion, he finally deigned to reply to the “unity proposals” of Grotewohl, he did so in a reticent manner clearly calculated to put an end to that inconvenient discussion. Public opinion? It will come over to his side, he believes, the very day that the idea of Europe passes from the realm of discourse to that of reality. But the Western powers, and above all France, would do well to bethink themselves also of that deadline of 1953; if at the end of Adenauer’s mandate his European policy remains stalemated and can only offer the Germans proclamations of good will, that chance will be lost, and, as far as it is humanly possible to foresee, lost permanently. The European enthusiasm of Germany in 1949-50 has frozen up in the face of the delays and the empty slogans of Strasbourg, Adenauer’s party is everywhere in retreat, his personal position within the party is challenged more and more, and Germany, if she feels herself rejected by the West, will withdraw to a policy of “Germany alone.”
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This policy of “Germany alone” is beginning slowly to take form in “neutralist” tendencies, still confused, contradictory, and disorganized, but which in the course of the discussions on German rearmament have attained the force of a tidal wave. There is not one neutralism, but dozens, and all kinds of people are found among them—pacifists and generals (even pacifist generals), Lutheran pastors, industrialists fascinated by the possibilities of the markets of the East, Russian agents, pan-Germans, conscientious objectors, neo-Nazis, sincere idealists, and Machiavellians of every sort. Everything is there, from the profound horror of a new war that could destroy what remains of Germany, from the instinctive refusal to take up arms which might be used against other Germans recruited in the East, from the popular “ohne mich,” from the ideal of the peacemaking mission of a Germany reunited and made neutral between the two blocs, to simple blackmail, and the large calculations of power politics. Once disembarrassed of all her occupying powers, a Germany left to herself and having regained her unity could carry on the policy of seesawing between the two blocs, sell herself to the one offering more, play a double game for her own account—in short, start all over again.
The majority of the little groups, “circles,” or “movements” which one thinks of as neo-Nazi all profess neutralism—which is by no means to say that all neutralism is “neo-Nazi.” It is necessary to be wary of this ill-defined term; inadequately converted old Nazis, or even new ones, can infiltrate everywhere—into the “democratic offensive” of Schumacher or into Adenauer’s Europeanism as well as into “neutralism.” But not only can they infiltrate, they can also be absorbed. They, as well as the others, are seeking a road for Germany, and the others as well as they can relapse into a militarist nationalism if Germany finds all other ways barred.
All this, so far, is confusion and fever thinly covering a vast depth of apathy that is perhaps the most disquieting characteristic of the physiognomy of German politics. Here, the picture strangely resembles that of France, even in the contradictory fears, even in the wave of “neutralism” too confused to become a positive political force, even in the profound solitude of the pan-European statesmen—Adenauer or Schuman—condemned to maneuver with a public opinion whose apathy merely allows, but does not help at all, the elaboration of a constructive policy. The state of Germany is as disquieting to the Germans themselves as it is to their neighbors; from an untenable status quo, all roads seem to lead toward the unknown.
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With these troubled depths in the background, the surface politics of Bonn reduces itself almost to a single combat between two men, Adenauer and Schumacher. Aside from them—and aside from Ernst Reuter, who plays his role apart in a city apart, outside the Federal Republic—there are only subalterns, politicians of the second rank, and parlor prophets. This combat is carried on with that cold hatred of which only men are capable who are profoundly convinced of the historical importance of their points of view and of the urgency of seizing the only chance of avoiding new catastrophes.
It is not possible here to follow these two points of view through all their windings; but whoever takes the trouble to understand them will find that positions which are superficially most astounding become logical deductions from a single fundamental idea. Thus for Adenauer, the “European army” is simply one more means, and indeed the most effective means, for the promotion of Franco-German union. For Schumacher, it is one more danger which threatens to make the division of Germany definitive. An additional contrast: to the purely defensive “little Germany” of Adenauer, it matters little that Franco-German military fusion is, for the present, the fusion of two impotences; while Schumacher’s “policy of the offensive” obviously seeks support, not from France, but from the United States and the Atlantic coalition. We know that his apparent “no”’ to the idea of German rearmament was in reality a “yes, but”; yes, but on condition that this rearmament take place behind a curtain of Allied forces concentrated in Germany in such a way as to bar any Russian “preventive intervention,” and that the armed force to be built up be conceived in an offensive spirit, i.e., capable, if war ever becomes inevitable, of carrying it beyond not only the Elbe but the Oder. One turns defensively toward the West, the other aggressively toward the East; it is this which has been called the German Janus. But nothing can cause Germany not to have these two faces.
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In the preference of the Allies goes to one of these political concepts—that of Adenauer, as it seems—it is urgent to act on the consequences of that choice. Germany is again at our disposal, ready to take the road that we open to her; what is not possible, although it seems to be the secret desire of the Allies, is to bind Germany to the West without binding the West to Germany. And the little clevernesses which permit us to “gain time” and to put off the day of reckoning will serve only, in the end, to dissipate Europe’s last chances.
But it is also well not to deceive ourselves; the opposition between Adenauer and Schumacher is more one of means than of fundamentals. The road of integrating a Western “little Germany” into a Western “little Europe” seems reassuring at first glance, especially in contrast with Schumacher’s program. Without offensive purposes, content with the debris of the Europe that remains outside the new Russian empire, it seems to assure the petty tranquillity of the West. But what for Adenauer may appear the final point of his European policy will be its starting point. Once we have gone beyond the “German problem,” if we have the imagination and the courage eventually to go beyond it, it will meet us again, transformed into the “European problem.” A reestablished Germany, even if she is Western, democratic, and European, will never consent definitively to her own mutilation. Once again, it suffices to look at the map to see that the line of demarcation traced between Frankfort and Weimar will never be an acceptable frontier, as little for a united Europe as for Germany alone. A Europe that would consent to its own definitive mutilation would be just as much damned as a Germany that would lastingly content herself with the Republic of Bonn. European feeling, “European nationalism,” to the extent to which it takes shape, will rest on the same bases of bad conscience which we have found in “German nationalism”: What hast thou done with thy brother? And this is without doubt why one does not like to look at Germany, that shattered mirror of a disfigured Europe—who likes to look at himself? Once the German screen has vanished, Europe will be face to face with itself.
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