Who has Power in hand, then proceeds according to his own judgment, for the life of the State can not stand still even during the twinkling of an eye.—Bismarck, January 27, 1863.

All depends on me, on my existence, because of my political talents. Probably no one will ever again have the confidence of the whole German people as I have. . . . For us it is easy to make decisions. We have nothing to lose; we have everything to gain.—Hitler, August 22, 1939.

One Germany does not exist. . . . At present, there are two German states. . . . Everything else is unimportant.—Ulbricht, November 26, 1955.

A century ago, one unification of Germany was accomplished. The enthusiasts of Germanism were not satisfied: they had already set their hearts on “every clod of German soil” also in Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands—and indeed even in the Baltic provinces of the Czarist Empire. But Otto von Bismarck, the chief architect of that unification, gave German nationalism only a secondary place in his general universe of political values. In February 1864, he was still saying of himself, “I am a Prussian, not a German.” (He was also a monarchist, a Christian, a romantic, a believer in the constructive efficacy of measured force, and a respecter of the social stabilities derived from status and property.) In the foundation work of his Reich, German nationalism was a distrusted intoxicant, to be employed only in carefully controlled quantities. He worked, by preference, with more reliable ingredients—popular obedience and Prussian Machtpolitik. That a few million Germans, more or less, would be included or excluded from the new united Germany was, for his measured acceptance of limits, a matter of secondary, tactical consideration. The Germans of Austria could not readily be separated from their Danubian involvements. Well, then, do without them! To try to bring other Germans into the Reich would be to turn Europe upside down. No such gambling! How would the world be luckier if—in a topsy-turvy Europe—all Germans came somehow to live in one state, rather than in three or more?

Prussia is dead; much of its de-historicized remains have become inert building materials for the new Leninist states of Eastern Europe. And that former united Germany, led first by a greatly gifted innovating Prussian and last by a greatly gifted monstrous Austrian, has been torn apart. Is another Germany now to be put together? Why?

An Erhard and a de Gaulle, a Wilson and a Johnson are today found variously moved, by conviction or in pretense or cajolery, to speak for a re-uniting of Germany. Some years ago, Moscow used to issue statements which could be interpreted as endorsements of this same German national objective. (Then indeed Moscow was in the habit of asserting that only Western militarism kept Germans apart.) Are we to conclude, from all this, that another unification of Germany is a credible prospect for the 1960’s? More important, is German unification an end that a reasonable person should now seek to advance? Is it perhaps even—as Messrs. Johnson and Rusk have publicly asserted—high on the agenda of a responsible world politics?

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The Europe of the Late 1960’s

Our Europe of the second half of the 1960’s, in which the problem of German unification is again posed, fancies itself all dynamism and commitment. It does indeed swiftly grow rich in steel and nylon, houses and autos and telephones. East and West, for fifteen years now, Europe has participated in one of the great historic experiences of economic advance. But the political life of Europe consists dominantly of stabilities and abstentions. Stabilities at home. Abstentions in the great world.

In the West, the Communist parties have been effectively excluded from the City since 1948; for them, the road to power is closed. And those parties of Left and Right which are serious contenders for the exercise of the public power have hardly been so near to one another, in policy, during the present century. (In the happy phrase of the British New Statesman of March 8, 1963, “The real issue, indeed, between Labour and the rest is one of some sophistication.” And sophistication would be no less required to define the current thrust of political differences in Germany or Sweden or the Netherlands.) The prevailing hierarchies of wealth, income, and public influence are not today under serious challenge in any country of Western Europe. Is it more meaningful to say that, in these countries, socialism has been absorbed or that it has been exhausted? In either case, nowhere in this great area, except in the backwaters of Spain and Portugal, are the dominant socialisms greatly feared. And nowhere does any thoughtful and informed person now anticipate decisive improvement in the quality of life from the mere adoption of further measures of socialization.

In Eastern Europe, socio-political stability seems, to an outsider, even greater. (At best, the road from Leninism to democracy will be longer than the road from the traditional absolutisms to Leninism.) Eastern “revisionism” and “polycentrism” are, in my judgment, greatly over-esteemed by their Western admirers. One can, I think, easily overvalue the freedom to dance the twist, to paint abstractly, and even to reject buying shoes that do not fit. Each of the governing Eastern oligarchies—in Poland or Yugoslavia quite as in the Soviet Union—still today beats down every suggestion of a challenge to its political monopoly. The only fundamental political challenge which acquired mass support in the past decade was crushed in October-November 1956, when Russian armed force put down the Hungarian revolt against the single-party state. Since then, there have occurred within the hearing and sight of an outsider only individual acts of rejection. The national Communisms do claim liberty from Moscow, but this claim, like the “liberty” which the feudal baron asserted as his territorial immunity from the king’s law, is a double-edged sword—one against the monarch, one against the subject. No national Communism has accorded its own subjects that measure of civil, political, and personal freedom which Bismarckian Prussia would have been ashamed to deny.

In domestic politics, stability; in world politics, abstention: this is the dominant pattern of contemporary Europe. To world political abstention, however, three exceptions are commonly named. One is indeed great, one limited, one specious.

Abstention is of course not a settled policy for the USSR. Recently, in Khrushchev’s day, the Soviet Union undertook a more far-flung, more initiating, and more risk-taking role in world politics than Stalin ever sustained—or indeed even than Lenin advocated after October 1920. This venturesome Soviet involvement in world-wide targets of opportunity may be resumed. The United Kingdom also is still a more-than-European power, though her independent role is limited. (It is not convincing that the Wilson government explains retention of an independent nuclear force in 1965 by reference to a possible need for separate use of this weapon “east of Suez.” One cannot imagine Britain’s undertaking a nuclear operation today, east of Suez or west of it, without United States participation.) And a considerable French role in world politics—surpassing tight limits in Western Europe—belongs to the world of make-believe. De Gaulle’s rhetoric of France as a great independent world power may serve one constructive purpose, within France: it may, for less sophisticated Frenchmen, cover recent national wounds and sustain national self-esteem.¹ But in world politics, France is today either a coalition associate or a nuisance: she is not qualified for a third role.

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If we look for the “ideal type” of contemporary European abstentionism, we may find it in the international posture of the enlightened, sympathetic people of Sweden. Three decades of Social Democratic government: much welfare provision, little nationalization. Membership in the United Nations: how little it costs, and how little it means! With 7.7 million people, an 80,000-man defense force. Defense expenditure over 4 per cent of Gross National Product (U.S.: 8 per cent). The highest standard of living in Europe: Gross Product over $2100 per capita. A competitive international supplier, willing to trade with anybody—and counting this willingness for virtue.² Official foreign aid in 1963—a derisory $3 per capita. In sum: stability, prosperity, and abstention.

But we miss the point if we see in Sweden the deviant case of the European “unaligned.” The representative aligned European country—East and West—is not greatly more concerned with world politics than is Sweden. The East, apart from the USSR, is particularly abstentionist. Yugoslavia is its formally unaligned counterpart of Sweden. But a Hungary or a Czechoslovakia, despite membership in the Warsaw Pact and in the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, is not greatly more involved than is Yugoslavia. The USSR secures from the 100,000,000 population of her six associates in the Warsaw Pact (excluding Albania) a publicized participation in development projects in Cuba or North Vietnam or Africa: this is a participation of $1 per capita. Publicity again; in recent years, the military forces of some Warsaw Pact associates, particularly the East German and Polish, have engaged in advertised exercises jointly with Soviet troops. But the advanced weapons are all Russian; the non-Russian forces seem equipped only to join in resisting the Nazi invasion of World War II. These Eastern associates do conspicuously add Communist voices at the United Nations, and in other councils. But their world involvement is otherwise narrowly limited. They do in fact approach the role of comprehensive Communist abstentionism sometimes mistakenly attributed to the USSR.

But once we have seen that Budapest and Prague are not much more involved in world politics than are Belgrade and Stockholm, we may perhaps also be better prepared to understand NATO-Europe. The reality is simple: for twelve states of Europe, from Oslo to Istanbul, memberships in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and in a stalemated United Nations are today twin instruments of an abstention from world political commitments only moderately less disengaging than that of Sweden.

In potential, NATO-Europe is something more considerable than the Warsaw Pact group. Exclude North America from NATO; include the USSR with Warsaw: NATO may still have the capacity to surpass Warsaw in every field of human achievement. In numbers alone, though it has nearly 300,000,000 people, NATO-Europe is about a tenth fewer than the Warsaw group inclusive of the USSR with all its reach to the Pacific. But NATO-Europe is far more industrialized, and its annual output is considerably higher. In the West also are the older centers of European civilization, still richly productive.

Yet this great NATO-Europe is not a factor in world affairs equal to the USSR. For such a world role, Western Europe lacks the political constitution and, more fundamentally, the desire. NATO-Europe does not even try to defend itself. Its annual defense expenditure is now about $19 billion. This aggregate is the equivalent of one good year’s advance in NATO-Europe’s Gross National Product. At a guess, the $19 billion is also less than half the defense expenditure of the poorer Warsaw group. NATO-Europe does not accept the burden of self-defense: it relies upon the restraint of the USSR and the support of the USA. And sometimes perhaps it ventures a modest prayer, “Gentlemen of East and West, please shoot over my head!”

In adhering to NATO in 1949, the United States pledged itself to defend Western Europe. The European adherents pledged themselves to contribute to this defense what they might severally, from time to time, determine to be appropriate. Any notion of extending the geographical range of the alliance quickly wilted (though de Gaulle did suggest, a decade later, that France and Britain might each be given an equal role with the USA in policy decisions). Without major exception, all other NATO associates have looked on unsympathetically while the British, the Dutch, the French, and the Belgians were each enmeshed separately, for many years, in the dismantling of a colonial empire. In this context, the European consensus came to be identified with avoidance of extra-European political involvements. (Trade alone remained universally blessed. Adam Smith never matched this recent worship of trade!) Nominally, of course, all were prepared to be good children and to do, in any part of the world, whatever a United Nations of unanimous (or veto-free) Great Power leadership might decide should be done. But, as—in the face of the great Communist versus anti-Communist split—there was no such United Nations, this goodness burdened not at all.

NATO is a valued association and, in some places, an amity. But NATO is not, and never has been, an equal alliance. Still less is NATO a general sharing in world obligations. During fifteen years, attitudes toward world political engagement have not only failed to move together; they have moved apart. The USA has inclined—irregularly, but in a long consistency—toward greater world-wide commitments, through multiple associations. Western Europe has moved toward abstention. Where there is no remote equality in involvement, there cannot be equality in decision.

No abstentionism is so poor but it can afford a coat of moral righteousness. The one that comes cheapest is, “A plague on both your houses!” But advanced abstentionist societies have craftsmen capable of producing coats of many colors. British tailors and French couturiers may claim to lead the world.

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Two of the Germanics

In our Europe of the late 1960’s, the two big Germanies, East and West, are flesh of the common flesh. (There is, of course, a third Germany—Austria—but that is also only marginally exceptional.) Both are stable and abstentionist societies. In both, ordinary men—and even extraordinary ones—now characteristically look for such sweetness as life may afford to individual good fortune and to general progress in the existing order of society, not to any great political change. And in both, the leaders of state today shape and limit their political involvements closely to dealing with distinctively German questions. Perhaps the German is today a more than average lumpish exemplar of the contemporary European. But this is a view to which shining exceptions will be found, and so general a judgment cannot, at best, entirely overcome subjectivity.

It may seem both anachronistic and insensitive to call East Germany a stable polity. Twelve years ago, in June 1953, the people of East Germany rose in rebellion against their Communist masters; it was a rebellion far wider than any with which Germans opposed National Socialism. In fifteen years before the August 1961 erection of the Berlin wall, about four-million Germans, a fifth of the whole Eastern population—and these the younger and more skilled—voted against German Communism with their feet, by running away. Every Leninist society denies the civil liberties of dissent and the political liberties of choice: East Germany is no exception. In the dualism of consent and coercion in which all societies are involved, every Leninism leans hard to the side of coercion: East Germany leans especially hard. Indeed, among all current Leninist regimes, the East German is probably most widely felt to be alien and repressive by its own people. Yet, particularly since the building of the Berlin wall, the regime seems stable. There is no opportunity to go; one makes the best of staying. Moreover, no authoritarian regime of the past half century has failed to enlist much of the emotional involvement of its young people—providing only that it reached out toward them. (This regime attracts the young particularly by doing more for their technical training than do most societies.) And while East Germany has relatively smaller regular armed services (106,000) than has Sweden, it has a large number (70,000) of para-military men on security and border duty: they guard and intimidate. Fear is also mightily reinforced by the 20 divisions which the USSR stations on East German territory (compared with 2 in Poland, 4 in Hungary). For the present, coercive persuasion succeeds.

East Germany stabilizes also by being the most prosperous Leninist society. Her 17¼ million people (including East Berlin) have a per capita national income in the range of a third higher than that of the USSR. In part, this foremost position reflects the smaller role of agriculture. Only 18 per cent of East Germans work in farming, compared with 44 per cent in the USSR and 60 per cent in Rumania.³ But in agriculture itself East Germany is also foremost; she applies thirteen times as much fertilizer per sown acre as the USSR and twice as much as Czechoslovakia. She wisely does not export food (except sugar); she imports it, and concentrates her own farming on high-value dairy and meat production. And, in industry, too, East Germany is concentrated in the machinery, equipment, and chemical branches which yield the higher values. Today she operates under a “New Economic System” of less-centralized planning. In each of 1962 and 1963, her real output apparently grew by only about 3 per cent, but in 1964 a more satisfactory growth seems to have been achieved—approaching 5 per cent. Annual production of passenger cars is moving toward 100,000; though this is hardly on the scale of West Germany’s 2½ million, it is half the output of the USSR and much more than that of any other Communist country. Household electrical appliances are being supplied. Personal saving is reportedly high; there is something to save for.

This progress of East Germany gratifies its 17¼ million people the less because they constantly compare with West Germany, where some 59 million people live much better. (Only in technical training—some would say in education—is East Germany ahead.) While the East built some 372,000 dwellings in 1960—64, the West built about 2,860,000. It would be a generous estimate which would put per capita consumption in East Germany above 75 per cent of West.

West Germany has built social stability on its greater economic success, as well as on intimate popular knowledge and rejection of the Eastern alternative. The German standard of living is not yet as high as the Swedish or Swiss. But in 1965 the West German is clearly the largest national economy in Europe after the Russian. Gross National Product is roughly $115 billion, or $1950 per capita (U.S. $3400). Gross investment in 1965 is likely to be in the range of $32 billion—a little less than a third of U.S. investment. Output per hour worked has risen by more than 5 per cent annually since 1950; this meant a doubling in productivity during fourteen years, and it brought more than a doubling in real hourly wages. (Representative wages of men in industry are now about $50 a week.) It is a silly propaganda that this great economic expansion was accomplished without extensive government participation in the economy. In 1962, the Social Democratic government of Sweden had current revenues of 40 per cent of the entire Gross National Product. A relatively non-participationist government, Switzerland, collected 17 per cent; the USA, being in between, collected 28 per cent. But the government of West Germany collected 38 per cent. By this naive measure, West Germany’s “socialization” of the economy was hardly distinguishable from Sweden’s.

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In the period immediately following the destruction of Hitler’s regime, a quite different idea of socialization was put forward in Germany. Simplifying, we may identify that different socialization with the views of Kurt Schumacher—until his death in August 1952 the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD)—in 1945 just emerged from a Nazi concentration camp. First: that German society bears special responsibility or guilt for National Socialism. Second: that German capitalism is particularly involved in this responsibility or guilt. Third: that an honest break with an evil past therefore involves the demolition of German capitalism and its replacement by a democratic, socialist regime. Fourth: that, as this new German regime will be neither capitalist nor Communist, it should not be tied by long-term engagements either to East or West. Fifth: that Stalin will place no insurmountable obstacle in the way of the unification of Germany on this democratic, socialist basis.

In contrast to Schumacher’s views, there emerged (and crystallized by 1948) an equally comprehensive opposing interpretation of the German past and future. This contrast culminates in the rejection of socialization. In parallel simplification, the rejection can be identified with the views of Konrad Adenauer, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Five counter-propositions suffice. First: that the Nazi phenomenon was not specifically German, though some Germans bear special guilt for it. Second: that German capitalism is no more specially involved in responsibility for National Socialism than are German workers, professors, politicians, or priests. Third: that private enterprise needs to be preserved because it is efficient and constitutes a shield against dangerous concentration of power in institutions carrying the authority of the state. Fourth: that a democratic Germany, preserving private property, and renewing its connection with Christian tradition, must be united with the West. Fifth: that Stalin may be induced to permit the unification of Germany by the demand of all decent Germans, backed by the power and pressure of the West; he will not, out of good will, concede anything to a democratic Germany.

It is not my purpose here to probe the elements of truth and falsehood in these two sets of views. But it is very much my purpose to emphasize how completely the views of Adenauer have prevailed—in the SPD as well as in the CDU. With the acceptance of these views has come the practical cessation of serious political controversy in West Germany. Society has become stable. Political life now stands ready for the ultimate stability of the Grand Coalition (Grossblock) .

Neither in the Empire of Bismarck and Wilhelm nor in the Weimar Republic was Social Democracy an accepted element of German society. Authoritarian conservatism, middle-class liberalism, and irrationalist nativism were usually joined in regarding Social Democracy as outside the circle of civilized society. And, at least in theory (except in extraordinary times, as during the early years of World War I), the rejection was mutual: Social Democracy constituted an alienated sub-culture, self-consciously professing the objective of creating a quite different society.⁴ By 1959, all this was dead and buried. Today the SPD is a party of democratic humanism, not of socialism. Its Godesberg Program of 1959 rejects nationalization; embraces private property; favors competition; accepts only “as much planning as necessary”; bows toward the churches; supports national defense; and prepares the way for the later (from 1961) claim of the SPD to be the staunchest supporter of Western alliance. At Godesberg, one of the more articulate spokesmen for the new line, Fritz Erler, sounded a note of decisive breach with the Social Democratic past:

We are fighting not the state, but a false policy of the government and its majority . . . we are fighting not against the state, but for the state, and, in fact, not the state of the distant future, not the state only in a reunified Germany, but the state in this Federal Republic, which we wish to govern.

It was only the finishing touch in this convergence of policies when, in the winter and spring of 1965, the leadership of the SPD suggested that the parliamentary elections of September 1965 might well produce a Grand Coalition of SPD and CDU—after the model, no doubt, of Austria. The idea of a Grand Coalition with what they once named clerical reaction (Kapitalismus, Klerikalismus, und Konservatismus) had already been put forward, by the SPD, twice in 1962. In March 1965, at a news conference in Heidelberg, Willy Brandt, as SPD candidate for the Chancellorship, endorsed the idea of a Grossblock quite explicitly; the time had come, he said, to “. . . fight for a common front on all domestic and policy questions.” In May 1965, the SPD and the CDU came together for just such a coalition in the Land government of Lower Saxony. There the Free Democrats (FDP) separated themselves from the SPD precisely because they found these Social Democrats now too clerical! True, in the spring of 1965, some CDU leaders still publicly denied the possibility of a coalition with the SPD: the CDU, they said, must win a majority by itself. But these CDU objections were, in part, tactical. Ostensibly the CDU—party of reaction—fled a closer embrace, while the SPD—party of socialism—pursued.

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Continuity in German Nationalism

In this century, no rational mind will form a considered judgment of grave German questions except against the background of the Nazi experience. Nor will deliberate judgment be satisfied without some reflection also on longer German continuities. The Nazi monstrosity was not a random occurrence, which could as easily have come in several other countries, and worked its same course with any other set of actors. (This evil was not as banal as that.) The Nazi experience bears witness to the character of a particular society. Moreover, within limits set by society and superior, many German individuals exercised choice and responsibility also in the Nazi era: human society is never so totalitarian as to exclude that.⁵

Today, however, unless we are to allow the evil of German nationalism to put out the light of the mind, we must give heavy weight to the tact that a majority of all Germans now alive were not even born when Hitler came to power. The shortcomings and misdeeds of one time do not, in themselves, work an eternal corruption to all Germans. We do not yield to Nazi irrationalism but hold to the reasoned view of the prophet Ezekiel:

What mean ye, that ye use this proverb . . . saying, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge?” . . . The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son. . . . Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die . . . and not that he should return from his ways, and live?

But the ways were long. And has he returned from them?

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One searches for distinctive elements in the German nationalism of the past century. I find few. It is perhaps only the compound that is unique in an important way. Then the distinguishing stamp is much older than National Socialism. In the 1870’s and 1880’s, Ernest Lavisse, a great student of Germany, described a society nativist in ideology, anti-Semitic, authoritarian, and militarist.⁶ Of the prevalent anti-Semitism, he writes: there is in it “a hate which has the feel of the Middle Ages.” He is most offended by the demeaning docility. “The deference in the relations of inferior to superior, the obsequiousness of manners, the humbleness, the degraded attitudes and forms of expression are a subject of astonishment to the foreigner.” And he concludes (in 1887): “War is certain, for imperial Germany comes from war and goes toward war.”

Modern German efforts to achieve predominance in Europe, through conquest, did indeed not begin with Hitler. The Imperial Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm had these ambitions.⁷ It too was steeped in the ethic of conquest and appropriation—though not of genocide. In the summer of 1914, the civil and military authorities of Germany pressed their Austro-Hungarian partner to be militant and demanding, not fearing war, for which Berlin pronounced itself ready. (Berlin hoped, however, as in 1939, for British abstention.) German government objectives were to fight as long as might be necessary to establish in Europe an Imperium Germanicum of unquestioned primacy. This Germany was to constitute the first of four world powers, together with the USA, Britain, and a Rump Russia (Restrussland) . These objectives were widely shared in German popular, political, business, and intellectual circles, right down to the collapse of November 1918. The General Commission of German Trade Unions will do as their spokesman:

Our enemies may as well abandon their hope that Germany will be defeated in this struggle; before that happens, they themselves will bleed to death and sink into the dust. Germany will emerge from this world war as the strongest nation.

But Imperial Germany did not deny other peoples—Jews, or Slavs, or gypsies—a common humanity. That Germany even primped itself on its services as a bearer of higher culture to the East.

The Hitler generation added something. In 1941, the new Germany proposed to establish in the East not a higher culture but a higher race. To clear the ground, the German administration planned: to kill “all racial and ideological enemies” so that, in Field Marshal von Manstein’s words, “the Jewish-Bolshevik system [would] be wiped out once and for all”; to dump other masses east of the Urals; and to administer occupied Russia so that, “Thereby tens of millions of men will undoubtedly starve to death. . . .” Many tens of thousands of Germans, above the level of discretion of the common soldier, served these objectives in the East. And they served not only by necessity but in idealism and national devotion.

The Nazi objective of killing people was largely successful, though its military-political goals were not accomplished. In the present territory of the USSR alone, wartime deaths and the reduction of births together brought about the loss of some 40 million lives in 1941—45. (This does not include German military deaths, which totaled 4.4 million on all fronts during 1939—45.) Imagination was deadened—and even more perhaps among those who inflicted than among those who suffered. Neither the Germans of that time nor of the present seem to have been able to grasp the continuity of hatred and fear which resulted from World War II. These genocides were not games—once over, readily forgotten.

Twenty years after the destruction of the Nazi armies, it would, I suspect, be quite incorrect to attribute to more than a small minority of Germans a special feeling of involvement or guilt in the Nazi experience. A German cultural editor, whose book is announced to have sold over 300,000 copies in Germany, reflects this process of getting away from it all. He writes (in 1964):

In the years between 1933 and 1945, I personally did not meet a single fanatic Jew-hater. Later, yes, and not only in Germany. Granted, I did not move in higher party circles, but I have been assured that it was no different there.⁸

O comforting assurance! As cultural interchange with the Soviet Union is broadened, we may expect to hear from Russian cultural figures, who lived in their case through 1933—1953 and also did not then meet “a single fanatic Jew-hater.” Later, yes, and not only in the USSR.

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But there is such a thing as remembering too much—and wrong. In the years immediately after World War I, a great German scholar searched for the roots of the distinctively German strand in Western ideas; he found these roots in the counter-revolutionary Romantic and historicist reaction of German minds to the experience of the great French Revolution.⁹ After World War II, scholars similarly searched for a long continuity of distinctive “German ideology” as the intellectual background of National Socialism; this time they found it in the Volkish (populist, nativist) ideas which came to the fore in Germany after 1850.¹⁰ And indeed, German Volkish thought did accumulate a great pile of rubbish: a doctrine of landscape and soil determining a national Spirit; esteem for this warm group Spirit, not cold individual mind; allegiance to rootedness or nativism in landscape and Spirit; identification of the carriers of a Spirit with a race, and especially the best—the German; a comprehensive imagery of traditional hierarchy, discipline, and self-sacrifice; and more in the same vein. We may accept the contention of George L. Mosse: “German Volkish thought showed a depth of feeling and a dynamic that was not equalled elsewhere.” We may also indulge the judgment that Volkish thought was more acceptable socially in Germany, for nearly a century, than similar ideas in other countries. But we cannot attribute uniqueness to German Volkish ideas, at any time. And it is not possible for an informed person to believe that complexes of ideas similar to the Volkish have played a larger social and political role in Germany during 1945—65 than, for example, in the USA or the USSR (or in the nativism of Africans or Chinese).

An American who knows something of the history of nativism in the USA will not readily yield the palm even to German Volkish doctrine: it is a mere exercise of scholarship to find in the American record a parallel expression to every idea in the “German ideology”—and the American expressions (for instance on landscape, soil, and national spirit) are often earlier. An American who also remembers the history of Negro slavery to 1864, who takes a sober view of the limits of emancipation in the century that followed, will not attribute to Germans a continuing monopoly on racial oppression. It was in the USA, not in Germany, that in the spring of 1964 the nativist-racist campaign of Governor Wallace achieved, in the largest party of the country, a preferential vote of 43 per cent, 30 per cent, and 34 per cent in the three contests of Maryland, Indiana, and Wisconsin. (Would not a similar development in Germany have produced a demand for preventive international quarantine?) It was a President of the United States who permitted himself, on May 2, 1965, in what one may hope was only a momentary lapse of judgment, to quote approvingly an expression of nationalism worthy of Kaiser Bill: “. . . the fairest vision on which these eyes ever looked was the flag of my country in a foreign land.” And it is not in Germany, but in the USSR, that anti-Semitism has received active government support since 1945—openly and drastically in the time of Stalin, more covertly and with some inhibition in the times of Khrushchev and his successors.

A quarter-century ago, Western eyes saw two demonic nationalisms—a German and a Japanese. Was nationalism then less deeply rooted in Japan than in Germany? In 1946, an outstanding Japanese student of politics—while quoting Hegel and citing Hitler and Rosenberg—still claimed that the “ultra” of “ultra-nationalism” should be reserved for the Japanese variety.¹¹ (In Japan alone, he argued, did polity assert authority over spirit: there morality was identified with power: there hierarchical position determined every act, depriving the individual of significant decision and responsibility.) Yet, in these two decades, the Japanese have become the great abstentionists. With enthusiasm, they have put away the things of national world power. Avid to do international business, they accept only minimal world responsibilities. Moreover, as Japan has only minor irredentist claims (and these against both the USA and the USSR), no one has found it advantageous to accuse the Japanese of pre-eminent evil in nursing smoldering fires of nationalism. How, in contrast, Moscow makes play of the continuity of German nationalist aggressiveness! “West-Germany—NATO Spearhead In Europe”; “Bonn’s Atomic Ambitions”; “Washington-Bonn Alliance Against Peace.”

There is such a thing as over-fixation on the half-century which ended in 1945. The nationalisms the world has most to fear now are not Japanese or German. They are perhaps American, Russian, and Chinese. These latter have determination and teeth, as well as large capacities of self-deception.

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From Occupation to Partition

We give the road from occupation to partition five markers. June 1945: the allies promulgate their supreme authority over one Germany. June 1948: two hostile societies confront one another, and Stalin challenges the West in Berlin. March 1952: Stalin advances a comprehensive proposal for unification, which is brushed aside, in the West, as mere spoiling tactics. November 1958: Khrushchev launches a campaign to shift the European balance, by reversing Stalin’s defeat over Berlin. August 1961: the drive to transform the status of all Berlin is abandoned, and instead a wall is built to hold the fleeing residents of the East.

But if we seek understanding of the world politics of these decades, we must not invest German developments with a consistent initiating role. At most, Germany was a leading front from June 1948 through May 1949, and again from November 1958 through August 1961. Then, too, in the second period, Khrushchev was active in Europe, I suspect, partly in reflex to his failure in Asia. Since 1961 again, Germany is not a leading stage. All Europe is a sideshow. The active contest is in East Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

From June 1945, France alone stood firm against German unity. She then contended for five steps of dismemberment: separation of the left bank of the Rhine; annexation to France of the Saar; international government of the Ruhr; avoidance of central administrative agencies; encouragement of particularist German states. Charles de Gaulle’s was the great French voice for German dismemberment, and Léon Blum’s socialists were his only consistent opponents. But even after de Gaulle withdrew (January 1946), and after the Communists were expelled (May 1947), France fought a dogged retreat. The turning point came only in March and April 1948, when the defensive alliance of Western European Union was formed and the U.S. Senate ratified the Marshall Plan. Then France was constrained to abandon dismemberment and to associate herself with building a single Western government in part of Germany.

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Neither British nor American statesmen initially foresaw a separate West Germany. Their ideas were negative: they wished to de-Nazify, demilitarize, perhaps de-industrialize (so removing the instruments for doing evil again). They imagined that, once these bad things were removed, the good in Germany would, one day, come forward by its own strength. Vaguely, they identified this good with a democratic society. No doubt, the British saw democracy as more compatible with nationalization, and the Americans saw it more associated with private business. But neither the British nor American authorities insisted determinedly on more socialism or capitalism for Germany. Kurt Schumacher had announced for the SPD, at the beginning of the occupation, “Die deutsche Demokratie kann nur sozialistisch sein oder sie wird gar nicht sein” [“German democracy can only be socialist, or it will not be at all”]. No one in the West barred his way. At the beginning, the Americans even appointed Socialists (SPD) and Communists (KPD), by preference, to key positions in occupation administration: they were regarded as the safest anti-Nazis. It was only late in 1947 that American political propaganda in Germany was given a new emphasis “in the direction of the dangers of Communism.” But even later, Schumacher had every opportunity to shape West Germany in a socialist direction. It was when the SPD got only 29.2 per cent of the vote in the first parliamentary elections of August 1949 (and later only 28.8 per cent in 1953 and 31.8 per cent in 1957) that the socialist dream was shattered. Adenauer’s CDU Sammelbecken (catch-all) was more attractive. A conventional Western society prevailed, because German preferences were decisive.

In the East also, policy did not aim at partition. True, the Russians gave their German comrades a birthday present of one partition; before the Nullpunkt (zero day), they tore away from the Germany of 1937 some 43,000 square miles, leaving only 41,633 square miles for the Eastern zone (including East Berlin). Nevertheless, the German Communists (KPD) set out determinedly to create an Anti-Fascist Bloc or Fatherland Front in their zone. They were ordered not to work for Communism alone. They were to join with other elements—middle class, Liberal, Socialist, and Center. In no governing body should Communists be more than one third: that would suffice for control, as the army and police would be theirs. (But it was the Russians who, until 1950, handled concentration camps and political prisons in the Eastern zone.) With such a politics of bloc or front, it was hoped, the KPD would win its way to control first in the Eastern zone and later in all Germany.

Haste proved an obstacle. The ugly face of People’s Democracy was shown while there was still opportunity to reject it. Already in June 1945, the Russians delivered all Eastern-zone trade union organization into the hands of their comrades and fellow-travelers; the trade unionists of the other zones saw and would have none of this. In September 1945, the Russians began land reform; by April 1946, about one-third of all land had been seized, without compensation. In October 1945, the Russians began nationalization of industry; by the end of 1946, about 60 per cent had been nationalized. The Russian authorities also took over some two-hundred large enterprises, and put them to working directly for Soviet account.

This erection of a People’s Democracy elicited support only from a militant minority. The Russians were stunned by the free test of Communist popularity in Austria, on November 25, 1945: the Communists got only 5.4 per cent of the vote. After that, terror and imprisonment became a general weapon in the Eastern zone. Finding that the Socialists drew more popular support than the Communists, the Russians forced the SPD leaders of their zone to merge with the KPD into one Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED). But free Socialists rejected the union by overwhelming majorities. In the free election of October 1946, in “Red” Berlin, the SED got only 20 per cent. This is a maximum index of SED support then in Germany. The resistance of the West to Stalin’s effort to blockade Berlin was immensely popular among Germans. The experience of this blockade laid the basis for a West German state in accord with German national sentiment, and left behind an unpopular, imposed East German rump. In sum, the USSR paved the way to partition by first creating a People’s Democracy in its own zone and then failing to impose a like society on the rest of Germany.

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On March 10, 1952, Stalin made the most serious offer regarding German unification, in verbal content, that has ever been advanced by the USSR.¹² since the May 1949 lifting of the Berlin blockade, three weighty things had happened. In May 1950, Robert Schuman had invited Germany, along with all other countries of western Europe, to join France in establishing a European Coal and Steel Community, deliberately conceived as a step toward a European political community. In June 1950, responding to the attack in Korea, President Truman had reversed much of U.S. policy regarding “the general area of China” and initiated the largest of armament programs. From July to September 1950, a variety of steps were taken to prepare, if need be, for a European military confrontation with the USSR. A year later, the Occupying Powers and the West German government began detailed discussions of a Contractual Agreement under which the occupation regime would terminate simultaneously with German integration into a European Defense Community. It was against this background that Stalin offered unification—subject to three conditions. The three may be named Neutrality, Renunciation, and Trust.

Neutrality: West Germany and the united Germany would be prohibited from entering any political coalition or military alliance which the Soviet government conceived to be directed against the USSR. Renunciation: West Germany must now unconditionally accept the Oder-Neisse frontier (as East Germany had already done). Trust: West Germans must agree to have unification worked out by a four-power commission, in which the USSR would have a veto.

No Western government took Stalin’s offer for anything more than a propaganda effort to delay and disorient. And no major West German party came forward resolutely in its favor. None wished to trust Stalin. None would advocate unconditional renunciation. None—not even Schumacher’s SPD—would speak for an obligatory neutrality. (Schumacher would not be bound neutral; he wished only freedom to deal equally with East and West.) Stalin’s offer consequently foundered in pettifogging notes and counter-notes. While the paper was flowing back and forth, the USSR gave an earnest of good will. On May 28, 1952, a forbidden zone three miles wide was established along the frontier of the two Germanies. Any person entering the zone was shot.

Regarding German reunification, the ascendancy of Khrushchev brought no substantial change in the policies laid down in Stalin’s time. But now there was a much greater forthrightness of statement. In 1956, Khrushchev is reported to have told a group of French visitors that he was not minded to exchange the certainty of a Communist province of 17 million East Germans for the remote probability of a neutral, united state of 70 million Germans. On February 3, 1957, Ulbricht felt free to say publicly that the SED’s conditions for unification were the transformation of West German society into a reasonably close facsimile of East Germany. And, in a later speech to an East German audience (March 7, 1959), Khrushchev was even more forthright:

. . . can the peoples of the world exist, if the two German states are not unified? They can, and they can exist quite well. Can the Germans live without reunification? They can, and they can even live quite well. . . . Why not reunify Germany by abolishing capitalism in West Germany and establishing a working class regime there? . . . This is unrealistic at the present time. But it is even more unrealistic to nurture illusions regarding the liquidation of socialist achievements in the German Democratic Republic. . . .

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On February 28, 1958, the USSR delivered a formal note to the USA, in which the Soviet Union ostensibly disinterested itself in the problem of the Germanies:

. . . the question of the unification of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal German Republic into one state, wholly relating to the competence of these two German states, cannot be the subject of consideration at a forthcoming conference at the summit.

Yet in November 1958 the USSR launched a major push to which the status of East Germany was central.¹³ Retrospectively, that push, which went on for three years (November 27, 1958 to August 13, 1961), may even be regarded as the center-piece in Khrushchev’s entire career in general European diplomacy. The setting is critical. Fifteen months after the successful testing of a Soviet ICBM. Thirteen months after the Sputnik. In the midst of great Soviet economic successes—successes the USSR has not matched since then. After Maoist incitement: “The East wind prevails over the West wind.” And immediately after Khrushchev’s failure to support China in the Taiwan straits.

Khrushchev then violently shifted the center of world attention to Berlin. On November 27, the USSR delivered a bomb of a note, couched in language such as Europe had not heard since Hitler’s time. And thereafter, during three years, the USSR gradually unrolled three interrelated objectives, for which Berlin and East Germany were the focus:

1. To disorient the Western alliance—by expelling the protecting Western powers from Berlin, cutting the people of West Berlin off from West Germany, and generally demonstrating that the USSR had power to alter the existing European system;
2. To compel recognition of East Germany—as a state like any other, surrounding Berlin and possessing full sovereign rights to control access and passage;
3. To stop the flight of persons and sentiments from East Germany—by closing the way for emigrants and barring access, for East German residents, to a view of a Western society.

The USSR made a display of insisting even on the first and greatest of these objectives. Khrushchev pronounced all Western rights in Berlin “null and void.” He gave the Western powers first six months to get out, then six months to start negotiating—then forgot the six months. His note still echoes:

. . . the Three Western Powers are ruling the roost in West Berlin, turning it into a kind of state within a state and using it as a center from which to pursue subversive activity. . . . It is obvious that the Soviet Union . . . cannot tolerate such a situation any longer. . . . In case this proposal is not acceptable . . . there will no longer remain any topic for negotiations between the former occupying powers on the Berlin question. But only madmen can go to the length of unleashing another world war over the preservation of privileges of occupiers in West Berlin. If such madmen should really appear, there is no doubt that strait jackets can be found for them. . . .

But it was precisely by what he stigmatized as the determinations of madmen that Khrushchev was defeated. The whole NATO group of powers resolved (formally on December 16, 1958) that they would fight rather than be forced to terminate the special link of West Berlin to the Western world. Against this resolution, Khrushchev’s first and greatest objective foundered.

He could have been far more successful in securing recognition for East Germany. The USA and Britain were indulgent of the idea of recognizing the East German regime—perhaps as the “agent” of the USSR, but even, I believe, as itself treaty-bound to guarantee access and passage. Khrushchev, however, apparently could not make up his mind to settle for the lesser victory of East German recognition. Repeatedly he reverted to his maximum bluster: agree to get out of Berlin, or the USSR will sign a treaty with East Germany and unilaterally declare you out. As late as August 7, 1961, Khrushchev stated that he could not forgo making a treaty with East Germany, ending all Western rights in Berlin, because the Western powers would see in this forgoing the collapse of his whole European position. They

. . . would regard this as a strategic breakthrough and would at once broaden the range of their demands. They would demand liquidation of the socialist system in the German Democratic Republic; try to annex the lands restored to Poland and Czechoslovakia under the Potsdam Agreement; and finally, attempt the abolition of the socialist system in all countries of the socialist camp.

Flaunting such chimeras, Khrushchev only six days later gave up even the intermediate objective of securing recognition for East Germany. He settled for staunching its blood flow. He was off to Cuba. A period of European history had closed.

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The Continuing Deadlock

After August 1961, East and West do not confront one another in Europe as contending territorial claimants. The active contest has moved to other places. Capable Western minds have indeed written, even as late as 1963:

Europe remains the center of world tension. It is in Europe that the two Great Powers are locked in the most unyielding confrontation. . . . It is in Europe that their wish to avoid war is most likely to be threatened. . . . ¹⁴

In my judgment, the above statement heaps error on error. In Europe, the gladiators are frozen.

Relatedly, the idea of a political community of Western Europe has lost ground. The drives toward community were four: to defend from Communism; to constrain German nationalism; to provide a larger economy; to build a political house for a democratic society which felt constricted in the historic nationalisms and weak in the presence of the USA and USSR. Today, these drives have lost strength: Communism is less feared; Germany is less feared; some economic integration has proven feasible with little political integration; de Gaulle does not feel constricted. In frustration, the large purpose of a dignified, independent, supra-national Europe has grown anemic. For a little Western Europe—abstentionist in world politics, unorganized politically, and preferring not to pay the price of its own defense—an unequal NATO, tightly restricted in fact to the defense of Western Europe, also makes the most attractive of military arrangements. No independent West European defense establishment would begin to yield the same value for money.

West Germany fits comfortably into the house of NATO-Europe. Not all the blandishments of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson have convinced its political leaders that the Federal Republic should now assume the role of a major power, with a share of general responsibility in the great world. With difficulty, the West German government, heavy with $7.5 billion of foreign exchange reserves, has been induced to participate in grants and loans to less-developed countries. (This aid averaged under $475 million net in 1960—64, inclusive of about $70 million annually of Israel reparations.) Finance, then, grudgingly yes; politics, however, firmly no: West German leaders have sedulously abstained from any world political responsibility beyond NATO. Indeed, even NATO tends to be regarded in the Federal Republic as neither more nor less than an alliance for Germany—to defend West German territory, to preserve the link with West Berlin, and to bring about German unification. For unification itself, there is, for West German governments, a simple formula, substantially unvarying since 1952: the East German regime, with its 17¼ million people, is to submit itself to being legislated out of existence, by a free vote of all Germans, including the 59 million population of the West!

But if West Germany’s foreign policy is parochial, East Germany’s is self-centered to the verge of imbecility. As the regime’s right to exist is denied, the affirmation of that right has become the one concern. In the months immediately after the building of the Berlin wall, Ulbricht went around plaintively calling upon the USSR to conclude the promised treaty which would expel the Western powers from Berlin. In time, these plaints lapsed. From the middle of 1962, East German society began to acquire a caged stability. Confidence grew, and the propaganda line became more strident. If West Germany desired unification, it must recognize the Democratic Republic, reform itself in the direction of People’s Democracy, and then request negotiations for a confederal union. But even this line reflected only an intermediate stage in the development of Eastern confidence. As prosperity and stability increased, even the pretense of interest in unification was reserved for formal occasions. In December 1964, the officialdom of East Germany felt strong enough to say frankly, to a distinguished American reporter,¹⁵ that their pronouncements regarding unification were never more than maneuvers.

In the view of the East German Government, reunification or even confederation with West Germany in the forseeable future is a pipedream. . . . They [East German officials] feel strong enough to concede that their expressions of interest in German unification over the last decade were a pretense and, at best, a tactic for survival.

In the German miasma, every view gains some adherents. One skepticism holds that German national sentiment does not now include the desire for a political uniting of the two big Germanies. A single country, a single government—these would be an embarrassment. The East is too Socialist, Protestant, and Prussian to be attractive to the sybaritic West. Besides, the Easterners would demand all the good housing! The West is too capitalist, corrupt, and self-seeking to be attractive to the Spartan East. Besides the Westerners would grab all the good jobs! This skepticism commands that minimum of evidence requisite to deceive clever people who incline toward the particular deception. Political unification, no doubt, has its opponents, indifferents, and unbelievers. But in 1965 as earlier, so far as I can ascertain, the great majority of Germans would prefer unification to partition.

A more vulgar denial holds that the Germans already have all the unification they desire. Do they not engage in “interzonal” trade? Do not Western capitalists already make much money by doing business with Communists? This denial is nonsense. Trade is least of the values at issue. And inter-zonal trade is small. West Germany in 1964 exchanged a total of $544,000,000 of merchandise with the 17¼ million neighboring people of East Germany. In the same year, her trade with the 12 million people of the neighboring Netherlands was $3,024,000,000. German inter-zonal trade is not large; it is quite uneconomically small.

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Many paths to unification have been suggested since the Berlin wall was built. I distinguish four: joint action; demilitarization; neutrality; seduction of Eastern Europe.

A great former American Secretary of State—surely first in accomplishment among those who have held this office in the present century—has made himself the spokesman for the path of “joint action.”¹⁶ He finds:

The central issue in Europe today . . . is the future and fate of Central Europe, at the heart of which lies the question of the reunification of Germany.

His recommended mode of dealing with this central issue, several times repeated, is “joint action”:

German reunification can be achieved only if this goal is accepted as in the common interest of Europe and North America to be jointly pursued, and if Europe and North America accept it as policy, and not only as a profession of faith, and if all, including Germans, make the effort which it entails.

Very clear. But what are the joint actors to do? They are not to wage war. Joint action “. . . does not mean . . . the liberation of the occupied and dominated areas by the use of military force.” The joint actors are, first, to strengthen their conventional military forces and, second, to knit together their institutions of money and trade. And after that? Still, “Not that desirable policy is to engage in a war of liberation.” Strong and rich and united, the West is apparently to face the enemy down! I do not find that the former Secretary advances any further suggestion. And if we do not believe that the enemy can simply be faced down, we will not see how following his proposal would bring reunification one day nearer.

Demilitarization or disarmament of Germany is a hardy perennial. Today it is difficult even to imagine in consequential detail. In 1955, when the USSR recognized the Federal Republic after its admission to the West European Union and NATO, the Soviet Union gave up all serious interest in this path. Germans and their allies had made the decisive turnings by 1948. Today, some twenty-seven NATO divisions, a majority non-German, stand in West Germany. Some twenty Soviet divisions are in East Germany. A bilateral, controlled demilitarization could result only from a total transformation of world politics. A unilateral demilitarization would be a doubtful step in the direction of unification. (If the East will not simply be faced down by Western “joint action,” it is even less disposed to bestow prizes on Western fragmentation.) Isolated German demilitarization would also now, in my judgment, be a highly dubious contribution to world peace. The elimination of West German terrain would make Western defenses so thin that the chance of containing any European clash, by conventional-war response, would approach zero. Washington would then be more likely to yield to the NATO members who demand an ICBM response to the first European collision. How would the world then be better off?

For an aggressive nuclear attack on the USSR, Germany is unimportant. But for a conventional defense of the West, Germany is quite important. Would not a thoughtful USSR command, anxious to avoid total war, prefer a NATO with Germany to a NATO without this territorial depth? West Germany is not a considerable military power. In manpower, Germans are only 7.5 per cent of NATO forces, some 430,000 men—fewer than France, Italy, or Turkey. In defense expenditure, the Germans supply only 7.1 per cent, some $5 billion—less than the United Kingdom. (No serious person in the USSR believes that a considerable military power is sustained on a budget of $5 billion.) Moreover, no major German political party has been willing, at any time since 1945, to accept the advice of those foreign sages who are confident Germans would achieve more if demilitarized and trusting. Are the Germans then to be coerced? By whom?

Neutrality, or better non-alignment, is an alternative that some Germans have taken seriously. Kurt Schumacher and his SPD colleagues would have gone along with an unaligned policy in the earliest days. But here is a great paradox, where understanding is denied to tired minds by conventional names. For practical purposes, West Germany is now already neutral or unaligned in world politics. Germany does not take any part in turning back a Chinese attack on India. Germany does not participate in blocking the way of the USSR in Cuba. Germany is not involved in resisting Sukarno in Malaysia. In the great world, Germany abstains—and does business. The only activity for which the Federal Republic is aligned, as a practical matter, is the defense of Germany itself.

Today, except for 28,000 territorials, all German forces—land, sea, and air—are committed to NATO, that is to a joint command where unilateral German decision is impossible. Would it be a better world if Germany were quite unaligned and commanded its own forces? Would the German military establishment then be contained within a budget of $5 billion? Or is it not more probable that Germany would then feel impelled, by its isolation from both East and West, to use for military purposes something more like the U.S. defense share of Gross National Product in 1953 (about 13.5 per cent), with a resulting defense expenditure in the range of $15 billion? Who would be the gainer?

A Germany both non-aligned and disarmed would, of course, be quite satisfactory to many non-Germans. But no considerable number of Germans have ever been willing to embrace this alternative. Germans have indeed believed that non-alignment and disarmament might lead to unification, but only unification in a People’s Democracy. Partition was, however, preferred to Communism. And the conviction that alignment with the West was the right policy was solidified by Stalin’s Berlin blockade of 1948—49 and Khrushchev’s Berlin campaign of 1958—61. If reunification depends on the rejection, by those Germans who have choice, of the present alignment with the West—an alignment in fact limited to the defense of Germany—reunification has no prospect.

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All else failing, seduction of the lesser Communist states has recently become the accredited path to German unification.¹⁷ When the closer history of this path can be written, it will, I suspect, be found that its first pioneers were German industrialists. Desiring—like every reasonable man of business—to sell, they saw markets in Eastern Europe. But, when selling in these markets, they were subjected to wounding criticism at home. Were they not doing business with Communism? Perhaps even taking blood money? Oh happy day when these industrialists discovered—or some bright young man discovered for them—that, on the contrary, they were performing a patriotic service! They were building economic (and cultural) ties with Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, etc. etc. These countries, it was found, were enjoying national renaissance and throwing off the bad integral Communism of the past. They were dancing the twist, or almost. And once these good national Communists came to appreciate what fine people the West Germans also are, they would isolate that fellow Ulbricht like a pariah dog! East Germany would be seen to be anti-national. All would turn their backs on it. German unification would then be attained with the support of all sincere Eastern nationalists.

This beguiling path has become associated with the name of Foreign Minister Schroder. In its pursuit, the Federal Republic seems to be preparing to modify its doctrine (the so-called Hallstein doctrine) of not recognizing diplomatically any government which recognizes Eastern Germany. One departure from this rule is old. The USSR accorded East Germany full diplomatic recognition on September 20, 1954. It was only in the following year that the USSR moved to give equal recognition to West Germany. And Adenauer was not at all of a mind, in 1955, to refuse to exchange recognitions with the USSR merely because the Russians recognized their own creature. The Soviet Union was therefore made the one exception to Hallstein prohibitions. But now—if not in 1965, then in 1966—the exceptions are apparently to be multiplied. All members of the Warsaw Pact had recognized East Germany and welcomed her into the Pact on May 14, 1955. That was before the Hallstein doctrine was enunciated. These sinners of the primitive era are now found blameless West Germany makes ready, therefore, to exchange ambassadors with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and even Albania, all of whom found East Germany good already in 1955. But the Federal Republic would still withhold an ambassador from Yugoslavia, which got around to recognizing Ulbricht only in 1957. Who sins later, sins worse.

What a Zhivkov in Sofia, a Ceausescu in Bucharest, or even a Novotny in Prague makes of this German opera can be imagined. How gracious of the visitors from Bonn and Düsseldorf to use this flattering language! But what can they be up to? He himself is just such a fellow as that Walter Ulbricht, though running a less prosperous business. No getting him to view Ulbricht as a pariah dog! When Ulbricht says, in May 1965, that unification can only follow liberation (Befreiung) of West Germany, he, too, responds to an old theme: he has followed it from Greece to Vietnam. Even Kadar, Gomulka, and Tito govern only moderately more popular regimes. None dares permit a free voice and a free vote. How amusing to be now so sought alter by these Westerners! And a sharp-minded West German editor also finds the show puzzling.¹⁸ He does not see why Krupp should build factories for Gomulka and not for Ulbricht, or why the Federal Republic should sponsor an exhibition in Budapest but not in Leipzig. Willy Brandt, too, dissociates himself (April 10, 1965) horn parallel illusions:

We must not deceive ourselves that better contacts across the Berlin wall have anything to do with the reunification of Germany. They have a humane purpose in themselves.

Perhaps one distinction should be granted. The path of Eastern seduction is the kindliest of the vanities on which reliance has been placed for German unification.

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Prospects and Judgments

Today, in Europe, two sets of societies confront one another, in rejection. Each knows it can have only marginal influence on the internal evolution of the other. Neither now believes it should attempt to conquer and reshape the other. Both seek episodically to throw the accent on a common humanity, through widening personal acquaintance, cultural exchange, and trade. Yet their disregard goes to the roots of public life. They deny one another’s legitimacy as honorable systems of conducting the public affairs of civilized men. And these denials do not reflect lack of acquaintance or misunderstanding.

Unification of Germany under a democratic political system, with competing parties and civil liberties, would be a major victory for the Western set of European societies. A united and democratic Germany would break the grip on government of the Eastern zone’s Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. Probably that party would undergo drastic transformation. Not improbably, comrade Ulbricht and his close collaborators, who now occupy the high seats of power, would find it more comfortable to retire to a resort on the Black Sea. The next highest echelon of the New Class of the East—bureaucrats, professors, military officers, editors, established artists, industry directors—would also find itself challenged and disturbed. Why should these German Communists—high and second high—consent to such things?

In Eastern Germany, after unification, collective agriculture would certainly nearly disappear, and much nationalized industry would probably become private again. It is to be hoped that, where the desire existed, many genuine competitive producers’ cooperatives might arise, but the organizational form of nationalized monopoly would surely become the exception rather than the rule. The institutions distinctively copied from Russian Communism would be abandoned, and one must suppose this abandonment would be advertised all over the world. Why should Russian Communists agree to such publicized discomfiture?

Eastern Germany is today the most industrialized country of the Communist bloc, with the foremost position in intra-bloc supply of machinery. Within the bloc, it is second in trading importance only to the USSR, supplying about $2½ billion of merchandise and buying a like amount. Eastern Germany also has the most advanced agriculture of the bloc, and generally the highest average standard of skill and productivity. Toward the West, its territory is now the forward military zone, on which stand some twenty Soviet divisions. What can be offered the USSR which would be the reasonable counter-value, in its calculus, for relinquishing the special relationship of the Communist bloc to this German province?

It is easy enough to design a formula which appeals to a non-German as a sensible basis for a settlement. Mine would have two conditions. First, an irrevocable contract for free emigration between the two Germanies. Second, an agreement to afford the people of East Germany a free vote, under United Nations supervision, within a year, on merger in a single Germany or continuance as a separate country. The Western states would then agree to extend diplomatic recognition to East Germany if the vote went for continuance, and to withdraw their recognitions should the conditions be violated.

But I have no reason to believe that these two conditions would be accepted by the East. And I doubt that they would be accepted by Western Germany. The political leaders of the Federal Republic have lacked the civil courage to tell their people that the lands east of the Oder-Neisse are gone. I doubt that they would have the greater courage to adhere to an agreement which might eventuate in their having to accord formal recognition to a separate East German state.

In that short range of time—five to ten years—to which most political (as distinguished from cultural or educational) activity must be directed, we must anticipate that the political systems of Eastern and Western Europe will remain profoundly different and, to some degree, competitive as models. We must anticipate also, I believe, that the political leadership of East Germany will remain uninterested in unification, while the political leadership of West Germany will continue to be uncompromising concerning the fundamentals of union. Under these circumstances, any short-term program for peaceful unification of Germany seems mere Quatsch—twaddle, nonsense.

Today, a union of the two big Germanies would have more than 76 million people. It would be a country second in Europe only to the Soviet Union. While still only a third of the USSR in population, it would have roughly half the USSR’s total income. It would be approximately half again larger than Britain or France, in population and income.

Is there realistic prospect that, in the next years, any non-German state—USSR, USA, Britain, France—will place high in the cycle of its own desires the establishment of a unified Germany, first in power among strictly European states and second only to the great Eurasian power of the USSR? In my judgment, no.

Is the creation of a greater German political unity then an objective which a reasonable citizen of the world should think bad? No, on balance, I think not. But one cannot forget the dangers, or disregard the feelings of others that there are dangers.

May we expect states interested in German good will to continue to convey their sympathy for German national sentiment by espousing the cause of German unification? Of course.

Is unification of Germany then today high on the agenda of a responsible world politics? No, of course not.

¹ All numbered footnotes appear at the end of this article, on p. 38

² Some 125 years ago, Tocqueville defended his own Gallic foreign-policy bombast by these domestic considerations Mill responded with a thoughtful reproof, and added, “Vous savez que j'aime la France, mats j'avoue qu'il en est assez d'une seule en Europe” [“You know I love France, but I must confess that I find one of them enough in Europe”]. See especially letters 304 and 388 in the great edition of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XIII, Toronto, 1963.

³ After World War II, when Sweden wished to join UNRRA, a sharp-tongued representative of the U.S. Treasury suggested that her contribution might appropriately beset at one-half Sweden's profit from wartime trade with Nazi Germany. The Swedes were angry: not for them the suggestion that abstention is also a collaboration

⁴ Sec The 1965 Eastern Europe Agricultural Situation, by U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, March 1965, especially Table 31.

⁵ A learned and thoughtful essay on this theme is The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany, by Guenther Roth, Bedminster, 1963. The transformation into a conservative welfare party after World War II is described by Douglas Chalmers in The Social Democratic Party of Germany, Yale University Press, 1964.

⁶ We should not forget that several hundred thousand Germans, other than Jews, went to prison or concentration camp, for political offenses, during the Nazi era. The number reported as confined in April 1939 was over 300,000.

⁷ Essays initially published from 1871 and collected in Essais Sur L'Allemagne Impériale, Paris, 1887.

⁸ A sound perspective has been assisted recently by some German scholars, first by Ludwig Dehio in Deutschland und die Weltpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1955, and later by Fritz Fischer in a work of great importance, Griff Nach Der Weltmacht 1914/1918, Dusseldorf, 2nd ed., 1962.

⁹ Rudolf Walter Lconhardt, This Germany, New York Graphic Society, 1964. Quotation from page 147

¹⁰ Ernst Trocltsch, “The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics,” delivered October 1922, reprinted by Ernest Barker in Natural Law and the Theory of Society, vol. I, Cambridge, 1934.

¹¹ A thoughtful treatment is The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, by George L Mosse, Grosset & Dunlap, 1964.

¹² “Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism,” by Masao Maruyama (May 1946), reprinted in Modern Japanese Politics, London, 1963.

¹³ A broad picture is given by Wilhelm Cornides, Die Weltmachte und Deutschland . . . 1945—55, Tubingen, 1957, especially pp. 250—69.

¹⁴ A balanced sketch of the whole question is James H. Wolfe, Indivisible Germany. Illusion or Reality?, The Hague, 1963 On Berlin alone, the most informative treatment is by Jean Edward Smith. The Defense of Berlin, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963

¹⁵ Alastair Buchan and Philip Windsor, Arms and Stability in Europe, London, 1963. Quotation from pages 6 to 7.

¹⁶ Mr. Max Frankel, N. Y. Times, story datelined Berlin, December 9, 1964. See also the same author's brilliant immature of East Germany, entitled “You Can't Go Home to Weissenfels” in N.Y Times, January 10, 1965.

¹⁷ Dean Acheson, Germany in the New Europe, an address delivered in Bonn, on October 18, 1963.

¹⁸ A sympathetic account of this policy of “isolating” East Germany and cultivating the other states of Eastern Europe is presented by Professor Z. K. Brzezinski in Encounter of April 1965.