German Politics and Society

In this open issue of German Politics and Society we are pleased to present

a number of contributions that address major aspects of current

debates in Germany. In our lead article, Helga Haftendorn sheds

light on the critical foreign policy triangle of Bonn, Paris, and Washington.

Always essential to the well being of each of these three

countries during the postwar period (indeed, an absolute cornerstone

to the flourishing of liberal democracies of the West), this triangular

relationship is about to experience major shifts in the years to

come. With the French openly challenging the Americans on all

fronts of public life—political, strategic, economic, cultural, even

moral—diplomacy will certainly become a good deal more complicated

for the new German government, as it tries to walk this

increasingly strained tightrope between Washington and Paris.

German foreign policy operates in a strategic triangle, the corner points of which are Bonn, Paris, and Washington. This constellation dates to the end of World War II. Since that time, German foreign policy has been influenced by this strategic triangle, which provides for

political opportunities as well as for significant risks. It relies on the interdependence of German-American, German-French, and French-American relations.

In 1992, at a conference about the 1938 Reichskristallnacht pogrom,

the mayor of Weimar told this anecdote:

Three weeks ago, I was in Paris. I visited the international architecture

exhibition and afterwards went to a small fish restaurant. Nearly all

the places had been taken, [so] tables were joined, and additional

chairs added. I came to sit next to a man more than seventy years of

age, and told him in broken French that I’m from Weimar. He said, “I

know it; I was imprisoned in Buchenwald.”

A Texas wag once remarked, “Oilmen are like cats. You can’t tell from the sound of them whether they’re fighting or making love.” German industrial relations are not much different. In the heat of collective bargaining, the Federal Republic’s “social partners” (that is, trade unions and employers’ associations) frequently exchange vitriolic barbs in public, while simultaneously engaging in pragmatic, professional negotiations behind closed doors.

In 1999, Germans celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Federal Republic. Unlike the fiftieth anniversary of other events in the recent national past—the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938, and the unconditional surrender in 1945—this is not an awkward occasion for the country’s elites. On the contrary, the Federal Republic is indisputably Germany’s most successful state, and its record of stability and prosperity compares favorably with that of two prominent neighbors, France and Italy. This anniversary gives us pause to pose the basic questions about West Germany. How was it possible to construct an enduring democracy for a population that, exceptions notwithstanding, had enthusiastically supported Hitler and waged world war to the bitter end?

Robert L. Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An Insider’s Account of U.S. Policy in Europe, 1989-1992 (Washington, D.C. and Baltimore: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)

Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and The End of East Germany (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997)

Peter E. Quint, The Imperfect Union: Constitutional Structures of German Unification (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997)

Sara Lennox

Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century edited by Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey

Frank Biess

Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies by Jeffrey Herf

Erik Willenz

Embattled Selves: An Investigation into the Nature of Identity through Oral Histories of Holocaust Survivors by Kenneth Jacobson

Wade Jacoby

The Grand Experiment: Debating Shock Therapy, Transition Theory, and the East German Experience by Andreas Pickel and Helmut Wiesenthal

Henry Krisch

Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State by Eric D. Weitz

Jan Plamper

Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison edited by Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin