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In a search for West Germany's cultural antecedents, the young have seized upon the very artists and writers whom the Nazis denigrated. Young Germans are drawn to the Abstract Expressionists of the '20s, to the architects of the Bauhaus school, and to such diverse writers as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of West Germany's social change is that it is coming about with a minimum of tension and disruption. A quarter of a century of peace and prosperity, combined with an absence of nationalistic frenzy, has had a beneficial effect. For West Germans, moderation is the watchword. The National Democrats, West Germany's only organized far-right extremists, gained less than 3% of the vote in November's state elections. The Communists fared even worse. The main danger to Brandt's government does not come from extremists but from moderates who feel that he is neglecting domestic concerns in favor of foreign policy; a nagging inflation, for example, sent prices up 4% last year, which is too high for the thrifty Germans.
ENNOBLING VISION.
Nonetheless, Brandt's Ost-poHtik has an important impact on West Germany's process of finding itself.
Explains Theo Sommer, the deputy editor of the Hamburg weekly, Die Zeit:
"By pursuing reconciliation with the East, West Germany is not only coming to terms with the Russians, the Poles and the others, but is also coming to terms with its past, its present and its future. Until now, Germany has represented itself as an amputated country waiting for the retrieval of its lost provinces. The Moscow and Warsaw treaties have changed all that. We are no longer an irredentist one-half of one nation. We are now more naturally than before the whole of a state, which is on German soil next to another German state."
In a historical sense, Brandt regards his mission as an expansion of the work that was begun by Konrad Adenauer, who made West Germany a fully accepted member of the Western community. Adenauer's rigidity toward the East was necessary during the tense confrontation in the late 1940s and '50s, but his policies became increasingly outmoded after the U.S. and other Western nations, notably Charles de Gaulle's France, began to seek eased relations with the Soviets. Brandt has set himself a broader goal. "For centuries Germany was a bridge between East and West," says Brandt. "We are striving to build anew the shattered bridge, better, sturdier, and more reliable." It is an ennobling vision for a country whose pivotal geographic position and economic might have prompted it to play off East and West against each other—to the incalculable suffering of mankind.
Brandt's diplomacy may, of course, prove not only unworkable but also dangerous. So far, however, as the theme for a young decade, it offers immense promise for the peaceful future of Europe. For a German statesman, that is a remarkable achievement. It is also a measure of how long a road the Germans have traveled in the quarter of a century since 1945, when their defeated country lay in noisome rubble, and since that day in 1871 when, at Versailles, modern Germany was born amid boasts of glory and hopes of greatness.