ABSTRACT
“Incertitudes allemandes” — the theme has since been struck repeatedly, heavy with gloomy premonitions, in the Western democracies associated with the Federal Republic as much as in Germany itself. The suspicion with which West German foreign policy is being observed by the West feeds on the insight throughout the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, and again in the early 1980s. There is a neurotic quality to the uncertainty which causes Germans time and again to wonder whether their democracy is truly secured. The preconditions for preserving West Germany’s and Western Europe’s freedom against totalitarianism are the maintenance and strengthening of the Western community system along all dimensions. A latent national dream haunts some quarters of public opinion, waiting for dramatic changes in Russia and in the Eastern bloc as a whole which might provide a chance for liberation of the Germans confined in the German Democratic Republic.
