Germany and the West

On its surface, William S. Schlamm’s Germany and the East West Crisis: The Decisive Challenge to American Policy (McKay, $3.95) is a book about the key position of Germany in the Cold War. As information, the volume is an indispensable compendium of social facts. Mr. Schlamm, a sensitive traveler, takes us on a guided tour of the West German “economic miracle,” with stops (by night) at theater, cinema, “literary cabaret” and radio studio, and with appropriate interludes spent on investigation of such things as the problem of juvenile delinquency, the constitution of the West German press, the political character of Der Alte Adenauer, and the sudden emergence of pragmatism as the working philosophy of a nation that was once incurably doctrinaire.

But all of this, as it happens, is the surface. Mr. Schlamm’s real subject is the plight of Western Man, which is only incidentally exhibited by the equivocal position of the people of the West German Republic in a world where the Cold War rages not only for the possession of Berlin but for the soul of the individual himself. The Germans, as Mr. Schlamm says, must be won for the West—and to win them permanently we must enable the free Germans somehow to repossess their whole country up to the Polish border. But to gain the Germans as fighting allies in the center of Europe we must first convince them that we believe in ourselves. Which, of course, is precisely what we do not do.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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On its surface, William S. Schlamm’s Germany and the East West Crisis: The Decisive Challenge to American Policy (McKay, $3.95) is a book about the key position of Germany in the Cold War. As information, the volume is an indispensable compendium of social facts. Mr. Schlamm, a sensitive traveler, takes us on a guided tour of the West German “economic miracle,” with stops (by night) at theater, cinema, “literary cabaret” and radio studio, and with appropriate interludes spent on investigation of such things as the problem of juvenile delinquency, the constitution of the West German press, the political character of Der Alte Adenauer, and the sudden emergence of pragmatism as the working philosophy of a nation that was once incurably doctrinaire.

But all of this, as it happens, is the surface. Mr. Schlamm’s real subject is the plight of Western Man, which is only incidentally exhibited by the equivocal position of the people of the West German Republic in a world where the Cold War rages not only for the possession of Berlin but for the soul of the individual himself. The Germans, as Mr. Schlamm says, must be won for the West—and to win them permanently we must enable the free Germans somehow to repossess their whole country up to the Polish border. But to gain the Germans as fighting allies in the center of Europe we must first convince them that we believe in ourselves. Which, of course, is precisely what we do not do.