BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

two Germanies and the four World War II allies: the U.S., Britain, France and Soviet Union. 3
Even though Kohl, once reelected, smoothed over fears of territorial ambition by calling for a
quick settlement of the border question, the immediacy of West Germany’s economic dominance
conjured up premonitions of a German commercial hegemony in Europe, particularly Eastern
Europe, which would jeopardize the political and economic integration of the European
Community. 4
Similar misgivings resonated in historians’ prognostications of a German turn toward
isolationism, a new economic nationalism with ominous political overtones, or the possibility of
a Soviet-friendly Ostpolitik abetted by simmering disenchantment with U.S. policies and the
apparently popular appeal of neutrality. 5 Additionally, intellectual currents in West Germany
3 “Anything to Fear?” Time (26 March 1990): 32-34. Not surprisingly, Poland was the
only country surveyed showing a majority opposed to a single Germany. The fact that the
Federal Republic had previously recognized under a 1970 treaty the inviolability of Poland’s
borders, specifically the Oder-Neisse line separating East Germany from formerly Prussian
Silesia, underscores the seriousness of Kohl’s foreign policy gaffe. On this earlier treaty as a
prelude to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik see Gordon A. Craig, The Germans (New York:
Putnam’s Sons, 1982) 58.
4 Surprised not to find a “bastion of chauvinism” amid the more than 600,000 Silesian
ethnic Germans, Peter Schneider, in “Is Anyone German Here?” New York Times Magazine (15
April 1990): 63, attributed the source of nationalist agitation, and Kohl’s electioneering motive,
to West Germany’s still influential right-wing hard-liners. Nelan, “Anything to Fear?” 41-42,
reported in 1990 that West Germany alone accounted for approximately one-fifth of the EC’s
population and gross domestic product and 31% of its exports.
5 Gordon A. Craig, “A New, New Reich?” New York Review of Books 33 (18 January
1990): 30-33, cited a chapter entitled “Uncertain Democracy” in David Marsh’s The Germans:
Rich, Bothered and Divided, published as The Germans: A People at the Crossroads (New York:
St. Martin’s, 1990), which begins with pessimistic epigraphs from Thomas Mann, historian Ralf
Dahrendorf and ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Craig also summarized the gloomy isolation
argument in Anne-Marie Le Gloannec’s, La Nation Orpheline: Les Allemagnes en Europe (Paris:
Calmann-Lévy, 1989), a somewhat more optimistic view of economic nationalism put forward in
Harold James’s A German Identity, 1770-1990 (New York: Routledge, 1989), and West German
differences with U.S. policies regarding nuclear strategy, economic issues and relations with East
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