West Germany: The Reactionary Democracy

Abstract

Germany evokes both admiration and anxiety; admiration, because of her rapid change from ruins to renewed great power status; anxiety, because her division into two states, each part of one major military alliance, presents a permanent threat of global conflict. This situation, of more than ten years' standing (1949 saw the creation of both German states), is not very conducive to any dispassionate analysis of the facts, indeed, to any objective study of one or the other Germany. New and Manichaean general explanations have replaced the old, pseudo historical theories based on an allegedly intuitive knowledge of "the German soul," so that each bloc now has its good and its evil Germany. To one camp, the Bonn Republic is an exemplary democracy, while to the other it is but a conspiracy of revenge-seekers ready to pay any price to reconquer territories lost because of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. East Germany, to her apologists, represents German democracy par excellence, while to her detractors, she is simply a Soviet protectorate.