Volume 36, Number 21 · January 18, 1990
A New, New Reich?
By Gordon A. Craig
A History of West Germany Volume 1: From Shadow to Substance, 1945–1963; Volume 2: Democracy and Its Discontents, 1963–1988
by Dennis L. Bark, by David R. Gress
Basil Blackwell, Vol. 2, 567 pp., $34.95 each volume
The Federal Republic of Germany at Forty
edited by Peter H. Merkl
New York University Press, 505 pp., $20.00 (paper)
Germany, America, Europe: Forty Years of German Foreign Policy
by Wolfram F. Hanrieder
Yale University Press, 509 pp., $29.95
Die Erinnerungen
by Franz Josef Strauss
Siedler Verlag, 575 pp., DM58
Men and Powers: A Political Retrospective
by Helmut Schmidt, translated by Ruth Hein
Random House
La Nation orpheline: Les Allemagnes en Europe
by Anne-Marie Le Gloannec
Calmann-Lévy, 308 pp., 130.00F
The Germans: Rich, Bothered and Divided the fall)
by David Marsh
Century (a revised edition will be published by St. Martin's Press in, 364 pp., £16.95
A German Identity, 1770–1990
by Harold James
Routledge, 240 pp., $25.00
At the end of October, an international colloquium of scholars gathered at Harvard University to commemorate the fortieth birthday of the German Federal Republic and found themselves, as they read accounts of the demonstrations in Leipzig and the mounting tide of East Germans fleeing to the West, contemplating the possibility that there might not be a forty-first.[1] The novelist Peter Schneider, the author of Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper), put the prospective dilemma in its starkest terms. 'If the GDR comes to the door and says 'You've been saying you loved me for forty years. Here I am! Take me!' how can anyone forbid the union?' The conferees laughed uneasily and talked of the necessity of giving European unity precedence over that of Germany, but no one was very clear about how that might be managed.
Review, 5848 words
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