BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

economic power is no menace to the world.” 1 Miller’s warning sounds hauntingly reminiscent of
German author Thomas Mann’s post-World War II diatribe on undemocratic, anti-
Enlightenment, demonic Germans, ever willing to strike a Faustian bargain for world power at
the expense of liberty. Unlike Mann, however, Miller recognized the importance of discarding
old stereotypes and suspicions in hopes of accentuating the positive. 2
Such timeworn post-Holocaust worries about German anti-western sentiments and
Machtpolitik failed to dissuade the appreciable majorities world-wide who favored reunification,
but even optimistic articles noted apprehensions among Germany’s European neighbors, not to
mention Britain, Israel and the superpowers. In Time magazine’s March twenty-eighth cover
story, entitled “The Germans: Should the world be worried?” Bruce W. Nelan reported that “fear
of Germany, in abeyance for more than 40 years while the country was divided in a bipolar
world, is on the rise,” backing up this statement with wary and unenthusiastic quotations from
such notables as former French Prime Minister Michael Debré, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard
Shevardnadze, and Israeli Prime Minister Ytzhak Shamir. More to the point, West German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s “politically motivated equivocation” regarding the status of
Germany’s post-war border with Poland provoked Polish demands, supported by Britain and
France, for a voice in the so-called “two-plus-four” reunification talks taking place between the
1 Arthur Miller, “Uneasy About the Germans,” New York Times Magazine (6 May 1990):
77, 84. Otto Friedrich, in “Germany: Toward Unity,” Time (6 July 1990): 68, questions what
Miller would say if “any German were foolish enough to offer such a gory theory of ‘democratic
faith’.”
2 See Thomas Mann, Germany and the Germans, text of an address delivered in the
Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress May 29, 1945 (Washington: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1945), 5, 11, 15-16.
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