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The drying scrawls of ink on parchment attested that Germany was a world power once more—for good or evil.
Only seven years after its total defeat, its penance was ended, the penance which its conquerors had vowed to impose for half a century. Germany—the richest, most populous, most important two-thirds of it—had climbed from defeat through vassalage to partnership with its Western conquerors. Its "contract" with the Western allies provided a peace more generous than even the most hopeful German could have imagined in the graveyard days of 1945. Its European Defense compact with the Western neighbors so recently overrun by German Panzers gave West Germans the right to have Panzers again—and the soldiers, rifles and munitions to go with them.
Already the defeated are living and eating better than many of the victors. West Germany's great industry, miraculously reclaimed from the rubble of surrender, competes seriously with the industry of the winners. Its Deutsche mark is sounder than France's franc, its economy (though not its moral position) less precarious in many ways than Britain's. By the act of affixing signatures last week to the peace contract and European Defense treaties, the Western democracies accepted the re-emergence of West Germany as a first-class European power. With this acceptance went the knowledge that soon the Federal Republic of Germany will be more than that—it will likely become the greatest power on the Continent outside Russia.
Without a Name. By the usual standards of human feeling, West Germany's 48 million people should have been elated over their change of fortune. But in what passes for German civilization in A.D. 1952, usual standards do not apply. In the week that brought it freedom and partnership with the Western democracies, West Germany was afflicted with a fever of doubts, fears, misgivings and unsatisfied yearnings. It was a complex state of mind that defied diagnosis and eluded a label. It was not simply "neutralism" or "nationalism" or "contrariness" or the cynical fatalism of ohne mich (count me out), but a combination of many things. Professed horror of a new war. Fear that West Germany is saying goodbye to a third of its land and 18 million brothers encased in Russia's East zone (not to mention the equally large chunk of Germany gobbled by Communist Poland). Understandable reluctance to take up arms that might some day be used against Germans in the East. The desire for a return of all that was German beyond the Elbe. The vision of a neutral, unified Germany situated like an annealing cartilage between the raw joints of East and West. The calculations of power politics. A brooding sense of guilt in some; a bland lack of it in others. A survival of the "Master Race" madness that twice in less than 30 years has threatened the world and in the end brought a stupefied, battered but unrepentant Germany to its knees.