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bors in Western Europe. The choice they made after the war, under
the fresh impression of Hitler's horrors and of beginning Soviet occu–
pation-an option by a Westward trek of millions, including con–
siderable numbers of German soldiers wishing to be captured by the
Western armies rather than by the Russians, long before there was
any choice by votes - was an option for the long maligned Western
humanity in general and not just for the American way oflife in par–
ticular. Since then, countless everyday ties have developed with the
people of both Western Europe and the United States - and for all
the East European tourism of the last ten years, the friendships
formed there have always been balanced by the strangeness of the
institutions of the Soviet bloc, visible to the naked eye - even with
poor political education.
There remains the specter, conjured up by some writers in the
West, of a rebirth of German nationalism in neutralist guise. A few
German books have been written about the crisis ofGerman national
identity, and a few intellectuals have suggested neutrality as a road
to the reunification of Germany. Their echo with the West German
public, including the bulk of the peace movement, has been in–
finitesimal. West Germans of all social strata and all political
tendencies, not excepting the peace movement, have long under–
stood that the East German state has become the cornerstone of the
Soviets' European empire, and that they would never dream of per–
mitting the German Democratic Republic to leave the Soviet bloc in
order to buy the neutrality of West Germany in exchange: there has
literally not been a single hint to Bonn of such a deal, official or
unofficial, since 1955.
It
was because the West Germans had under–
stood this that they came to support the Ostpolitik of the Socialist–
liberal coalition as a second best. As there could not be a return to a
single national state, there should be at least more human, cultural,
and economic contacts between the two Germanys as a means to pre–
serve the sense of a single nation. On the whole, this has been very
successful despite some ups and downs- and the West Germans are
satisfied with it.
Of course, the fear of a revival of German nationalism with the
concept of a political and cultural position between East and West is
based on the memory of Germany's political and cultural role in the
nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century - roughly from
the Napoleonic wars to the rise and fall of Hitler. It is true that Ger-
