Re-reading "continuity and change"

Abstract

On the eve of the ?cultural revolution? that is associated with the year 1968, nine authors submitted their chapters on Germany to Henry Kissin ger. He had organized meetings at Harvard, the final outcome of which would be an anthology on the Federal Republic. At the time of the mee tings, Henry Kissinger had been a quiet colleague within the Institute for International Affairs, living down a controversial reputation as an adviser to the late John F. Kennedy. He had been a proponent of the notion of a limited nuclear war, and this was at that time and for a long time to come not popular in intellectual circles. But Henry Kissinger was on his way back as part of the entourage of the then presidential-hopeful Rockefeller. As the manuscripts were acquiring a thin coat of dust, Henry Kissinger advanced to the position of a special adviser on foreign policy and defense to Richard Nixon?the first step on his way to historical fame as the ?Met ternich? of the United States, and the architect of the Camp Davies agree ments. The anthology was never published. It would have indeed been inop portune if not outright embarassing had Henry Kissinger's name been associated with some of the views in the anthology. The public might have taken the editorship of a now active politician as a stamp of approval for all that the two covers of the book were to include. Thus, Alfred Grosser in his chapter ?The Paradox of Foreign Policy? credited Marxism with fa cilitating Western Germany's European identification. Karl Kaiser in ?Germany at the Crossroads Problems of a Policy on Reunification? advocated a stance that was later the core of Willy Brandt's ?Neue Ost politik?. Understandably as it may have been, the burial of the manus cripts by tacit neglect was nevertheless a pity. I still consider Klaus Ep stein's ?The Cultural Situation?, using the broad understanding of Culture that we associate with the term ?Kulturleben?, the best treatment of the topic?and one in which the political significance of developments there was characterized. And Wolfgang F. Stolper's and Karl W. Roskamp's ana lysis of economic policy in post-war Western Germany convincingly de monstrated the gap between a coherent theory on Sundays and a pragmatic practice during workdays.