Dilemma in Germany

Mosse, George L.

Dilemma in Germany Germany Divided: The Lecacy of the Nazi Era, by Terence Prittie. Little, Brown. 381 pp. $6. Reviewed by George L. Mosse Has the old German "restlessness" been dissipated by a...

...All his features are clearly delineated, particularly his rigidity and authoritarianism...
...History may not repeat itself, but in the midst of postwar German prosperity we cannot be sure...
...This requires Prittie to accept the rearmament of West Germany as a necessary response to an East German rearmament...
...Yet the Macmillan plan of thinning out military strength in central Europe, which he favors, points in a quite similar direction...
...Yet, further on, we are told that the Chancellor's rigidity destroyed hopes for German unification (and a solution to the German question) when unification could have been had on mutually acceptable terms in 1954...
...Was this a service to the West or to Germany...
...The chapter on Adenauer is placed next to the chapter on neoNazism...
...Khrushchev's espousal is only a "facade" masking a desire for world conquest...
...Moreover, Adenauer's rigidity was based on a view of the Communist East which Prittie also shares...
...There is much that is good about Prittie's book: the very dilemma it portrays indicates the complexities of a German problem made even more difficult by a conviction in the West that Communism aims at the conquest of all Europe by fair means or foul...
...he cannot advance a solution...
...Perhaps this is coincidence, or it may be a desire to underline the fact that the Chancellor took four former Nazis into his cabinet...
...Lunatic fringe groups, small and cohesive at first, did become the norm of German political life during the great depression...
...His emphasis on the rightist groups in Germany is important reading...
...he answers his own question in the negative...
...Prittie's book attempts to destroy the myth that all is well in West Germany, while it unhesitatingly accepts the very worst that can be said about the Communist East...
...One might remember what the industrialist, Hugo Stinnes, told the head of a patriotic organizatiton before World War I: "Give me three or four years of peace and I will quietly secure German dominance in Europe...
...Reviewed by George L. Mosse Has the old German "restlessness" been dissipated by a short decade of good living...
...His analysis is illustrated by a pithy and summary review of the news stories emerging from postwar Germany, a method which makes for smooth and interesting reading...
...Moreover, Prittie seems to fear a concentration of economic power in the hands of the Ruhr industrialists...
...This dilemma is quite explicit in the book, and it is a measure of its honest approach...
...It is to this important question that Terence Prittie addresses himself in this book...
...Respectable allies, for Prittie, mean allies in the West rather than in the East...
...Since Prittie rejects any kind of socialism, he has no solution either for this continuing problem, except a hope that the Krupps have reformed...
...The Social Democrats lack Adenauer's authoritarianism and that emphasis on electoral politics which makes him seek the support of the right—while the former President, with his honesty and simple Swabian manners, became a truly constructive force in the developing German democracy...
...In this book Germans are accused of ignoring realities in their demand for lost eastern territories, but it is the Adenauer government, committed to a free and civilized world, which has supported these demands for the sake of domestic political expediency...
...For Prittie, Germany, with its restlessness and undigested past, remains an insoluble dilemma in the heart of Europe, and we, he believes, had better hope that her prosperity is maintained at all costs, even that of economic domination...
...This could, once again, lead to the economic domination of Europe...
...The portrait of Chanceller Adenauer best exemplifies the dilemma of this book...
...This would seem the only conclusion to be drawn from this book, unless, of course, Prittie's inflexible view of the Communist East could be modified...
...He ends with a vague hope that a new idealism will develop out of German freedom...
...These failings are overshadowed by the fact that he finally found respectable allies for Germany, which previous statesmen had failed to achieve...
...Much space is devoted to the failure with which Germany digested the lessons of the past (in 1953 an American survey found -that forty-four per cent of the population saw more good than bad in National Socialism), and to the rightist groups which have had a continuing appeal in Germany...
...Unless there is room for negotiation with the Soviet Union or East Germany (and Prittie thinks there is not), Germany divided will continue to be filled with a potential "restlessness" which one day might pose a threat of its own for the West...
...Prittie's hatred of the East, indeed of socialism, enables him only to illuminate the German dilemma...
...Adenauer has been a good German, working towards a civilized and free world...
...Coexistence is discounted...
...On the one hand, Adenauer fights for freedom and civilization, on the other he seems unable to cope with neoNazism at home...
...Prittie is led by his argument to accuse the German neutralists of playing the old opportunist game of attempting to ally Germany with the East...
...If Prittie had given the Social Democrats some of their due, if he had not underplayed the figure of former President Theodore Heuss, he might have been able to accomplish more...

Vol. 25 • March 1961 • No. 3


 
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