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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 24, 1984
security he provided. "Some older people wouldn't mind a small
Hitler--just a small one--to restore order," said Max Kolbe, an
agriculture student in Munich, referring to unemployment, pro
tests and strikes that trouble West Germany's surface calm.•••
Recent polls suggest West German concern has shifted from secu
rity to other issues. � third of their rich forests are dying or
dead, a reason why the left-leaning environmentalist party--the
Greens--won a surprising 8.2 percent of votes in European Parlia
ment elections.
One survey found 10 out of 93 couples interviewed felt career and
material goods were more important than having children. With a
birth rate of minus 0.2, the world's lowest, the number of
Germans in the
West
could drop from 56.9 million
to
38.3 million
in less than 50 years, a government study said.
In the August 19 LOS ANGELES TIMES, William Pfaff puts the division and pos
sible future reunification of Germany in the larger context of a divided
Europe.
Any·ching remotely resembling German unification remains unac
ceptable to the Soviet Union. The partition of Germany is for
Moscow, . the achievement justifying the World War�-
The sharp
est anxiety continues to be felt in Moscow at anything that hints
at a German rejection of the "results of the war." This is inter
preted as "revanchism."...
Germany's division cannot be rectified without reopening the
question of Europe's own division, of the postwar balance of pow
er in Europe and of the relations of the superpowers not only
with Germany and the rest of Europe, but with one another. The
Cold War, after all, began in Germany, over the control of German
power.
These are the issues that certainly will eventually be reopened.
The resolute ignoring of them in Western capitals, and in Western
political
circles,
may
well prove to be a serious error.
The key to German reunification resides in Moscow. Christopher Layne (LOS
ANGELES TIMES, August 14) stresses that it will take a younger generation
of Soviet leaders--not those personally identified with the horrors of
World War II--to consider playing the "trump card" of reunification.
Geopolitical and domestic factors give Moscow an obvious German
card.... Of course, Moscow's trump card is reunification; the
present Soviet leaders are probably too rigid to consider the
German card, but their successors may be more flexible••••
For West Germany the road to Berlin leads through Moscow, and if
Bonn concludes that its allies are thwarting reunification it may
act on the logic of its geopolitical circumstances and seek reu
nification--possibly on Soviet terms. This is not imminent, but
it is certainly possible if no progress is made on the German
Question in coming years. The deepening desire for reunification
and the increasing estrangement from the United States felt by
growing numbers of West Germans suggest that our paramount chal-