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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER 9, 1983
PAGE 9
eration despite new cold-war chills and a bitter debate over
nuclear missiles.
More important, the East German documents,
along with the West German credit, show greater efforts .QY both
countries to insulate their relationship from superpower
struggles••..
In some ways the two Germanys have never been closer. Trade has
more than tripled in the past 10 years, and East German imports
from West Germany grew by 33% in the first half of this year.
Youth exchanges, just started last year, are expanding.
Political contacts are also quietly broadening, and the two sides
are discussing closer relations between their two parliaments.
But perhaps most significant, both Germanys appear to speak more
now about German interest and act less as mouthpieces for their
respective superpowers. Clearly, East Germany is still much more
under the Soviet thumb than is West Germany under that of the
U.s. But both governments seem to have realized increasingly
during this year of nuclear-arms debates that they share not only
� language and� heritage but also� precarious geographic and
strategic position in the middle of the superpower duel..••
For the first time since the 1960s, We;t German official policy
is being spiced with talk of German reunification, something even
its most fervent supporters know isn't possible anytime soon.
"The division of Germany will be overcome only when we overcome
the division of Europe,
11
remarks the official at the Ministry
for Intra-German Relations.
"But we can't remain silent and
allow the German people to lose sight of the goal."•.. [on his
visit to Moscow Chancellor Kohl] asked Soviet leader Yuri
Andropov how he would like it if a fence ran through the center of
Moscow. Mr. Andropov didn't reply.•.•
East German leaders, by contrast, never discuss reunification
openly. They are interested in exacting maximum economic advan
tage while making minimum political concessions•••• These small
steps, however, underlie grander West German ambitions. As Mr.
Strauss recently told the news magazine STERN, changes in the
German situation "won't come any more through wars and revolu
tions as in past centuries, but rather through evolution."
Curiously, reunification is one aim shared by West Germany's
government and its peace movement.... "There is� very strong
patriotic, national flavor to the West German peace movement
which sets it apart from others," remarks Alfred Mechtersheimer,
a leading ideological force in the movement.
A siren song of propaganda from the East, notes TIME, in
edition, hammers home the theme to West German youth:
reunification--on our terms."
its October 24
"You can have
There are obviously strong differences [ within Europe's peace
movements ] from country to country. More than elsewhere, a deep
malaise haunts the young people of West Germany. Although they
feel remote from World War II, they face daily reminders of Nazi
war guilt in the national press and in their parents' shame.