RICHARD LOWENTHAL
187
East-West relations. The success was most remarkable in the easing
of contact between the people of Western and Eastern Germany–
there have been millions of West German visits to the East year after
year - and in the normalization of the situation of West Berlin and
its inhabitants. But there were, of course, less spectacular economic
advantages as well. Yet the governments of the Federal Republic
never forgot that in the nature of the East-West conflict as a struggle
not only between power blocs, but between political systems based
on radically different principles, detente could not be a means to end
the conflict, but only to control and mitigate its forms, and that
defense must remain its necessary complement. As stated in the Har–
mel report adopted by the NATO Council in 1967, during the dec–
ade following the signing of the Moscow treaty, West German arms
expenditure rose by thirty percent in real terms - while American
arms expenditure did not.
I have mentioned this figure in order to show that the Western
governments were aware of the continuing nature of the East-West
conflict. Yet it is a hard fact that the generation growing up in the
Federal Republic in the same decade was not effectively informed of
the roots of this conflict and its vital importance for their lives - not
in the schools, not in many of the universities or adult education in–
stitutions, and not sufficiently in the mass media. None of those in–
stitutions are administered by the federal government; the schools
are under the state governments, and most of the others are wholly
or at least partly autonomous. The beginning of the era of detente
coincided both with a number of dilettantish educational reforms
that weakened the need for historical knowledge and diluted the cur–
riculum of democratic institutions. Also, large numbers of former
activists of the students' revolt of the late sixties with strong "Marx–
ist" leanings began to teach, and quite a few of them found their
places in the electronic media. Interestingly enough, those would-be
propagandists generally did
not
succeed in imbuing their pupils with
their former revolutionary ideas- the situation
h c~d
changed too
much since the sixties. But they failed to convey to them an under–
standing of the institutions of democracy and often educated them in
a spirit of total negativism and cynicism: while hardly any of the
pupils became pro-Soviet, far too few acquired a spirit of democratic
citizenship.
It
was natural that to young people educated in such an
atmosphere, the East-West conflict appeared as a meaningless ri-
