Then there was Soviet energy, which an expanding West Germany could do with: here, the Austrians, in 1967, were the stalking horse, offering credit terms in exchange for access to Soviet oil and natural gas. But the most important element was the change in the German atmosphere, as the post-war generation grew up and read its Spiegel or Zeit: a certain feeling of guilt spread as to what had been done in Germany’s name to the countries to the east, whether Poland or Czechoslovakia. Had the time not come to revise the rigid fifties policy of recognizing neither them nor the eastern borders that had been fixed in 1945? Once Brandt had managed to dispose of his entanglements with the tiresome Kiesinger, policies of openness towards the East became a prime cause of the new SDP-FDP (‘Little’) Coalition. To be in favour of Ostpolitik was to be radical chic, as the Germans understood it: away from the smug stuffiness of the fifties. On one level, this was just common sense: it was absurd not to recognize reality on the ground, and to withhold diplomatic recognition from countries that recognized East Germany. But there was also an idea, not proven wrong in the outcome, that a soft approach would cause a fatal softening on the other side. The problem was a more general one, that so many Germans had suffered, had remade their lives, wanted unification, and detested the in any case very unlovely German Democratic Republic. The older generation, many of them born in old Prussia east of the river Elbe, had difficulty in swallowing the borders of Potsdam, in 1945, on the rivers Oder and Western Neisse.
Brandt’s memoirs, fascinating up to this point, now turn into wooden language and chronology. Feelers went out to Moscow, obviously the heart of the matter, and at least by implication there was a considerable bargain: recognition of East Germany, at least de facto, in return for access to Soviet energy and some easing of conditions for West Berlin. The process took time, not least because the East German leadership, little Ulbricht in particular, knew their Moscow and knew that they could easily go the way of the Greek and Spanish Communists, sacrificed pawns in the greater game of Soviet foreign policy, itself now beset by fears of China. Early in 1970 Egon Bahr went to Moscow; a surreptitious link for communications was opened, with a KGB man, in a villa in Dahlem, in a prosperous part of West Berlin; a non-aggression treaty was drawn up in August. A face-saving letter, drawn up by the Christian Democrat leader, was attached, reserving Germany’s right to unification; subsequently the Constitutional Court and the Christian Democrats were able to assert improvements for the ordinary existence of East Germans that Brandt and Bahr had omitted to insist upon. But the substance was recognition of East Germany, in treaties of 1971-2, preceded by a visit of one Willi Stoph, the SED chairman, to Kassel, in which he made a grotesque claim for ‘reparations’, and a much publicized return journey by Brandt, in March 1970, to Erfurt, by train (there were tiresome formalities against a journey by aircraft via Berlin), during which he was lionized. In December 1970 there was a treaty with Poland, and in the course of a visit to Warsaw Brandt embarrassed his hosts by kneeling at the monument to the Jewish ghetto and the uprising of 1943: by this stage the Polish Communists were making some use of anti-semitism, and Brandt’s spontaneous gesture took them aback. Borders were now recognized, though the treaty with Czechoslovakia, for tiresome formal reasons, took somewhat longer. One counterpart, as with Romania around the same time, was that ‘ethnic Germans’ who had stayed behind in 1945 were allowed to depart: money changed hands for this.
Money also flowed eastwards for more substantial matters. The Germans soon followed the Austrian lead on Soviet energy: at Essen, the very heart of the industrial Ruhr, agreements began in February 1970. Over twenty years the USSR would supply Ruhrgas with 32 billion cubic metres of natural gas, costing (at 1970 prices) DM2.5bn and maybe, starting in 1973, for more than twice as much. The existing pipeline, which stopped in Bratislava, would go on into Bavaria. Mannesmann, the largest European maker of steel piping, was to supply the USSR with 2.4 million tons of it, and the cost would be borne by seventeen banks, headed by Deutsche Bank, repayable, through profits, over eleven years at a cost of 6.25 per cent in interest — a rate far below the inflation to come. Bonn guaranteed the deal. This was a classic method of dealing with the USSR: not genuine trade at all, but a means by which the German taxpayer subsidized his own banks and incidentally also promoted Soviet industry: a similar deal had been done even in 1931. In 1972 West-East German relations were formalized, and again there was a subsidy for the East German state; it also gained privileged access to the EEC market under West German terms, in return for making slightly less petty fuss (what the Germans called Umstandspinsel) over small matters in Berlin — a two-day wait for a visa at the border, East German numberplates having to be screwed on, in the freezing cold, as temporary replacement for West German ones. There was a great row over ratification of all of this, in 1972, and bribery had to be deployed, but the treaty went through. Brandt said, now Hitler had lost the war, and in 1971 he got a Nobel Peace Prize, from which, as happened with other men, he never quite recovered. Thereafter, vanity took hold; women and bottles succeeded each other, and his judgement went so far wrong that even he, with long and deep practice, failed to smell an obvious Communist spy in his closest entourage. The scandal eventually (in 1974) lost him office, and Helmut Schmidt took over.
There were problems below this radiant surface, and some of the Left, especially in the universities, responded hysterically: a reflection, in the first place, of the bubble status of West Berlin, and also of the expansion of student numbers. As to these, Adenauer had been quite careful, no doubt believing that the country needed only so many ‘students’, whereas it could not have enough apprentices, respectful of their elders and learning a practical trade. Erhard and then the Great Coalition put up the number of students, from 385,000 in 1965 to 510,000 in 1975, and though the increase passed off without incident in most places, it did cause trouble. The university system in Germany was a sort of fossilized Enlightenment, and boredom reigned. Anti-Americanism became a cause; the visit of the Shah of Iran was the occasion for a riot; the police mishandled things; a martyr appeared, one Rudi Dutschke, a student, a sort of El Pasionario, and aged forty; and there were as in the United States some sages to offer high-sounding comfort. A Norwegian ‘peace researcher’ named Johan Galtung referred to ‘structural violence’, by which he meant people getting on with their lives. The old Frankfurt School, much of which had migrated to New York (the New School) now returned, including, via East Germany, one Ernst Bloch. The Frankfurt School had been set up in the twenties, and its largely Marxist professorate had tried to update Marxism, to take account of the things that Marx had simply got wrong or over which he had perhaps been misinterpreted. Especially, this meant showing that intellectual life was not just a function of the relations of production, that culture, such as music or film, might on the contrary shape the mind of a generation and thereby alter the relations of production. The Frankfurters were then led into worlds of psychology, and from there to the study of words, the tools of philosophy. Ernst Bloch was a lion, his particular interest being in the philosophy of the preposition and the demonstrative adverb; he lectured, to awestruck audiences, on ‘the not’, ‘the nevertheless’, ‘the whence’ — harmless stuff, which made its impression because there was indeed an intelligentsia all dressed up with nowhere to go.