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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER 2, 1983
Federal Republic anchored in the western alliance and the main
European pillar on which transatlantic friendship rests••••
The Americans [ are not being cas� in the role of protectors, but
of occupiers. And the guilt-free generation, no longer burdened
with the responsibility of fighting and losing a war, is begin
ning to resent the American presence.
Its search for German
roots and identity invariably collides with what is seen as the
Americanization of German society--the obsessive materialism,
the daily bombardment of the German language with English expres
sions, the whole postwar rebuilding of the Federal Republic in
the American image.
German interests are thus seen mainly in distinction to those of
the United States. And the contrast is made with East Germany.
Despite its political servility to Moscow, visitors find with
surprise it has remained more traditionally German, more Central
European, in both sentiment and way of life.
Few people, even left-wingers, want their country to become like
East Germany. But the dream of reunification--quietly dropped
from the political vocabulary during the years of detente when it
was seen as a stumbling block to closer relations with the East-
has been revived, if changed. Now it is a dream as much of the
left as it was of the right, only this time the left believes it
is West Germany that must also change political direction, not
just East Germany.
The argument thus moves towards neutralism--a distancing from
NATO in order to give West Germany room to steer an independent
policy, if possible deepening the dialogue with the Soviet Union.
Such a development has of course long been a prime Soviet aim,
and the Soviets are astute at using both sticks and carrots to
entice West Germany to look East. But many Germans themselves
recognize this as a familiar role in their history--more famil
iar, perhaps, than looking across the Atlantic--and one that is
already beginning to bring results in contacts at all levels be
tween East and West Germany....
The Bonn government, if it wants to restore any consensus in the
increasingly polarized debate on security, German interests and
the Atlantic alliance, will have to listen to the many voices
speaking through the peace movement. That movement is already
thinking about the next stage: the campaign to get the missiles
taken away again, and with them perhaps some of the other weapons
that foreign armies keep on German soil in both East and West.
Karl Kaiser, an SPD party intellectual and lonely defender of the tradi
tional Schmidt line, has warned that· the Social Democrats' new tack has
aroused "consternation and apprehension" abroad and has reawakened "the
specter of German unreliability" in international affairs. This is partic
ularly true in France, which is almost neurotically sensitive to symptoms
of neutralism in West Germany. Typical of the French sensitivity is the
article "The 'German Question' Returns," in the October 31, 1983 NEWSWEEK,
written by Pierre Lellouche, director of studies at the Institut Francais
des Relations Internationales.