Old Options and the Postwar System

What has happened to the German Problem since 1945? For both Germans and their neighbors, many of the traditional problems have seemed resolved. Abroad, no neighbors have been menaced by German aggression. At home, each part of Germany has undergone a political mutation. The German Federal Republic has become steadfastly liberal, the German Democratic Republic militantly communist. Neither postwar German remnant has faced the Reich's problem of isolation – its incapacity to fit within a regional or world political-economic order. Instead, both postwar German states have been integrated into the bipolar world of superpower systems. Indeed, both states are the creations of that bipolar system. How much continuity is there, then, between the German Problem of the past and the German situation since 1945?

One difference is obvious. Today, instead of one German state, as in Hitler's time, there are two – three with Austria. This forced separation has seemed so drastic and untenable that, for many analysts, Germany's principal problem has become its reunification. No solution, however, has seemed plausible. For no matter how unnatural it may have appeared initially, Germany's dismemberment was the logical outcome of partitioning Europe into Eastern and Western spheres. The Cold War between the superpowers quickly froze the temporary military demarcations into rigid political-economic boundaries. And Germany's neighbors blessed its division. Indeed, although partition was clearly imposed upon them, the Germans themselves were not altogether unwilling collaborators, even at the outset. In the West, Adenauer's regime established a liberal capitalist welfare state according to the ideals of his Christian Democratic Party.