Recentralizing Europe

In 1958, at the Yale Club in New York City, the West German statesman Karl Theodor von Guttenberg took me aside after his lecture. Von Guttenberg was no leftist—he was of the CSU, Adenauer’s coalition partner. Yet he told me that the Americans should be warned not to take West Germany for granted. If Washington makes the Germans feel they are second-rate allies, he said, they might start to think once again of a rapprochement with the East. Yes, with the Soviet Union.

Von Guttenberg did not have to explain. I came from “the East.” I knew the mutual attraction/repulsion between traditional Germany and traditional Russia. And so it came as no surprise to me that one of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s first actions, when his Socialists came to power in Bonn in 1969, was to initiate Ostpolitik. Twenty years later, CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl—under the prodding of his Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher—is responding cautiously to Mikhail Gorbachev’s blandishments concerning a “common European home.”

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Thomas Molnar

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In 1958, at the Yale Club in New York City, the West German statesman Karl Theodor von Guttenberg took me aside after his lecture. Von Guttenberg was no leftist—he was of the CSU, Adenauer’s coalition partner. Yet he told me that the Americans should be warned not to take West Germany for granted. If Washington makes the Germans feel they are second-rate allies, he said, they might start to think once again of a rapprochement with the East. Yes, with the Soviet Union.

Von Guttenberg did not have to explain. I came from “the East.” I knew the mutual attraction/repulsion between traditional Germany and traditional Russia. And so it came as no surprise to me that one of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s first actions, when his Socialists came to power in Bonn in 1969, was to initiate Ostpolitik. Twenty years later, CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl—under the prodding of his Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher—is responding cautiously to Mikhail Gorbachev’s blandishments concerning a “common European home.”