ABSTRACT
The prospect of deploying new American missiles of intermediate ranges on German soil — in accordance with the double-track decision of 1979 — constituted a crisis for the West German polity. Deployment stirred up thoughts of national destiny, and West Germans lived through what Freud called “the return of the repressed.” In 1983, the German question reappeared — in all its intractable complexity. Inspired by America and driven by necessity, the post-war Germans created miracles of their own. Tacit renunciation of reunification inspired other forms of preserving “the substance of the nation,” and Ostpolitik gave the Federal Republic of Germany the chance and context to improve German-German relations. “A reunited, neutralized Germany” — that has been a recurrent dream of some Germans — and a nightmare for Germany’s neighbors. The conference grappled with questions concerning the Peace Movement, the appearance of the Greens in German politics, and the leftward drift of the SPD.
