88
PARTISAN REVIEW
The Federal Republic happily concentrated on its new affluence;
and while the German Democratic Republic clung to its official ide–
ology of reunification ("Germans at one table! "), its citizens prac–
ticed the art of escaping by all means toward the West. Those were
the days of Konrad Adenauer, a faithful Catholic born in Cologne,
where the Napoleonic experience had left numerous cultural
traces-unlike in Prussia, where the memory was alive that the city
had once been a spiritual center of Europe. Russia's plains,
Adenauer once half-jokingly remarked, begin east of the city of
Braunschweig. His politics, complete anrl "unconditional" integra–
tion of the Federal Republic in the Western economic and defensive
alliance, bear testimony to his geographical and "tribal" whim . East
of Braunschweig lies "Mitteldeutschland," Central Germany.
National aspirations did not go down well with the voters in the
fifties and sixties, as the SPD, which had trusted in a national urge
for reunification, learned the hard way. The idea of the German
nation led a more or less theatrical existence , being exploited to gar–
ner the votes of twelve million refugees from the East.
East Germany's unrelenting repression in the fifties and sixties,
backed by the Red Army, appalled and embittered many West
Germans who assumed that this specific form of socialism was possi–
ble only in Prussia. The new East German army slipped into the old
uniforms of the Wehrmacht. While West Germans satisfied their
emotional political needs in a genuine and partly successful quest for
(West) European unity, East Germany evolved into a state run by
petit bourgeois
for
petit bourgeois.
It was able to build a fairly functional
economy against all
realsozialistische
odds. So, after three decades of
socialism, East Germany developed a somewhat forced, albeit real,
national pride and self-esteem, symbolized by its athletes at the
Olympic Games: the girls slightly bearded, the men sheer monu–
ments to the miracle of chemistry-victorious, nonetheless.
The East German nationalism is official, its paraphernalia tra–
ditional and outmoded-goose step included. To what degree it pen–
etrates the hearts and minds of the people is hard to say. Yet there is
no doubt that self-esteem and a certain pride, if not patriotism, have
taken hold of the East Germans. They are no longer
Bruder und
Schwestern,
brothers and sisters, to use a shelved phrase of West
German national
«
togetherness. "
And West Germany? About two years ago, pollsters and politi–
cal scientists discovered a feebly articulated, yet demographically
