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Old Myths and New Realities About Germany
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17686 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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6 / 1990 |
1,889 Words |
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Franz M. Oppnheimer
Franz M. Oppenheimer is an international financial lawyer who
writes frequently to Germany and France. |
Marcel Proust believed that "one reads the newspapers as one loves, blindfolded." But reading what the newspapers have been reporting about Germany lately, one must conclude that it is not the readers of the newspapers but their reporters, columnists, and editorial writers who are blindfolded. The media had all led us to expect that the recent elections in East Germany would be won by the Social Democrats, who, like their system party in the Federal Republic of Germany, opposed rapid unification. Indeed, the West German Social Democrats, after much waffling, decided in their party convention in Berlin, as recently as last December (how long ago it seems!), that, at the outset, given the membership of the two parts of Germany in opposing military alliances, there could be only a federation of two sovereign states, with unification coming eventually after their gradual demilitarization.
Given this vague and ambivalent endorsement of German unity by the Social Democrats, one needed to be blindfolded, indeed, to expect them to win the East German elections. For the Social Democrats' scruples, like those of the liberal media in the United States and, alas, some of West Germany's allies, were based on the premise that the German Democratic Republic was a legitimate entity - a sovereign state under international law. In fact, however, the GDR has no legitimacy whatsoever. It was nothing but the Soviet-occupied part of Germany, dressed up by the Soviets as a sovereign state - not (as was repeated in the media) as a result of World War II, but as the result of a unilateral act by Stalin, four years after the end of the war, that violated postwar agreements among the four allied powers. Nor was there any historical reason for frontiers of Soviet-occupied Germany. They were as arbitrarily imposed on the inhabitants as was the totalitarian Marxist-Leninist regime that enslaved and terrorized all.
While those elementary truths were ignored by U.S. media, they were a part of every German's understanding of his life and times. Perhaps that understanding would be less deeply rooted if our media had been right in their repeated assertion that, after all, Germany had been a unified nation-state for only some 78 years. That assertion overlooks the Holy Roman Empire of German Nationality (962-1806) as well as the deep longing of Germans for national unity every since that empire dissolved into a multitude pf sovereign kingdoms, principalities, grand duchies, and duchies.
The result of the East German elections on March 18 reflected these realities: The Social Democratic Party, having been predicted the landslide victor by the
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