Books, Arts & Manners: Ostpolitik Revisited

In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, by Timothy Garton Ash (Random House, 680 pp., $25)

DURING the late 1970s and early 1980s, I followed with bewilderment the antics of German politicians, particularly those of the Left, when they came to Eastern Europe. Instead of denouncing our tyrannical rulers, they often denounced us, the ruled, for opposing them. They showered Communist regimes with preferential credits, while refusing even to talk to their powerless subjects. I resented them for advocating “peace,” by which they meant the status quo. This “peace” which kept them in prosperity and freedom and us in poverty and oppression. Being young and naive at the time, I attributed such attitudes to a mixture of fear of Soviet power and general Western degeneracy. Timothy Garton Ash adds a more humdrum cause: national self-interest.

RS

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Radek Sikorski

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In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, by Timothy Garton Ash (Random House, 680 pp., $25)

DURING the late 1970s and early 1980s, I followed with bewilderment the antics of German politicians, particularly those of the Left, when they came to Eastern Europe. Instead of denouncing our tyrannical rulers, they often denounced us, the ruled, for opposing them. They showered Communist regimes with preferential credits, while refusing even to talk to their powerless subjects. I resented them for advocating “peace,” by which they meant the status quo. This “peace” which kept them in prosperity and freedom and us in poverty and oppression. Being young and naive at the time, I attributed such attitudes to a mixture of fear of Soviet power and general Western degeneracy. Timothy Garton Ash adds a more humdrum cause: national self-interest.