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Henry Ashby Turner, Jr.
Yale University Press
1987
288 pp.
$17.95
A succinct, fair-minded account of the evolution of the two German states. A basic, comprehensive text, valuable for an understanding of a central and changing aspect of European politics.
Germans always knew that their foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, had been a leftist activist in the 1960s and 1970s. More controversial were recent disclosures that he had once assaulted a police officer and may have had links to terrorists. Fischer's evolution is the tale of a generation that changed Germany -- and then itself.
In 1990, East Germany's ex-communists appeared to be in the political dustbin. Today, they are serious rivals of Germany's mainstream parties in the country's eastern states. The surprising rise of the Party of Democratic Socialism is a story of how a controversial political force took its own path toward normalization.
The aims of German foreign policy are three and inseparable: to preserve peace, to defend the freedom of the country and to restore German unity by peaceful means. None of them should be pursued at the cost of neglecting either of the others.
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