Polonaise
From SARAH GAINHAM
BONN
aNE of the most obvious and painful in- stances of the failure of the `old' foreign policy of the Federal Republic—the Dulles- Adenauer policy enirod ed in the Hallstein Doc- trine that any State It:cognising the Soviet Zone regime (DDR) should not be granted recog- nition by Federal Germany—is Poland. There is a definite movement now visible here to pro- pose a possible new Eastern European policy.
A major reason for the Hallstein policy— apart from the dreary old cold war—has been
internal politics here . . around twelve million citizens originally from central and 'Eastern Germany; that is, from the Soviet Zone and the Oder-Neisse Territories and East Prussia and Czechoslovakia. It is easy to condemn Adenauer now for allowing his policy to be personally influenced by this consideration, but it is some- times forgotten that these people were once a potential danger as well as a vast economic problem. In the last three years or so—it is very difficult to set time limits to such movements of public opinion—the active and organised movements devoted to the expelled Germans have almost entirely collapsed in the popular sense. The professional politicians and agitators who run the once-mass organisations remain. and make almost as much noise as they ever did. but their popular basis has melted with the almost total absorption of then members in West German life. They now have not a single repre- sentative of their movements in the Bundestag. The twin and interwoven reasons for this are that the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945-46 was total, so that there is no body of German cousins--possibly ill-treated ones--left behind to keep emotions alive from inside the ancient homelands; and the expansion of the West German economy was fed to a dis- proportionate extent by the vigour and need of these citizens who found themselves with nothing, so that it is to a very real extent their achievement at least as much as that of the `old' West German population.
It is by no means only the FDP, or even mainly the FDP who want a change of eastern policy. The groups exist in all the three major parties, the Christian Democrat twins, the FOP and the SPD, and like the debate on the Com- mon Market in Britain the pattern goes through the whole web of political life and has wide differences of shadowing. It is quite different from the attitudes of the neo-romantically in- clined 'easterners,' of whom the most notorious example is the former refugee Minister Ober- laender, and who have a strong leaning—a hate- love leaning---towards Russia which could turn into a Rapallo policy if they had real influence and if the Russians wished for such a policy. These people have little influence openly in public affairs, though they have cliques of sup- porters in various Ministries that do a good deal of intriguing. It was this group largely that originated the Hallstein Doctrine, the one and only exception to which has been Russia herself. This group would always have liked a different attitude to Russia, while ignoring or
actively disliking marginal countries such as Poland and Yugoslavia—indeed, in German politics it has always been this group that wanted to rid Europe of Poland altogether. It is a false- romantic power-policy.
The groups doing the new thinking base their ideas on more practical and empirical ground. They are in the main anti-Russian, or anti- Soviet, though this does not mean an emotional hatred, but a recognition of the facts of life which now divide Europe. They are also nearly all strongly anti-Nazi. The argument runs some- what thus: if there were better relations with Poland and Yugoslavia. tanning out gradually to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, trade with Eastern Europe would increase' and with it Western influence. The position of Russia vis-a- vis her satellites would be weakened.. the position of the DDR as a bludgeon in Russian hands against possible West German revenge dreams would be increasingly pointless by being less necessary to the satellites—though not to Russia. This in a matter of a few years must improve the lot of East Germans and eventually liberalise the regime there and improve the position of West Berlin without any overt or hostile action.
Poland is the central figure in the new think- ing. The Poles themselves considered these ideas from their own standpoint for some years as a roundabout way to a commercial and industrial form of the military disengagement that goes by the name of the Rapacki Plan. Naturally, the Poles are only interested in real and formal diplo- matic relations, not in poor relations. That means the implicit, if not stated, recognition of the Oder-Neisse frontier. The interests, partly industrial, which support this new thinking in Germany are prepared to accept the still real political risk this course would mean in the Federal Republic. People, for instance, whose ancestors lived since the tenth century in the entirely German city of Danzig would be moved by deep and irrational folk-memories that should not be underestimated and that cannot be properly weighed, for nobody knows how strong they are, not even the people that feel them. A good deal would depend on how the matter was put to them; it could be looked upon as the only long-term hope of a peaceful return, which in spirit many older people still cling to, though in practice very few would take advan- tage of, perhaps. Or it could, as the easterners and the refugee politicians have always repre- sented any sign of it, appear to he the loss of all hope..
The most notable active mover towards this policy has been Berthold Beitz, the general manager of the Krupp concern, and though his interest was chiefly that of freer and expanding trade, it was not only that. In any case, this is an example of what would.be good for Krupp would be good for the country—both countries. Reitz is a man not only of brilliant talents, but of great character, who was in Poland during the war and made himself noticeable to the Poles by his rejection of the Nazi theory of Polish racial inferiority and by the humanity of his behaviour. His popularity with the regime then in Germany can be judged by the fact that a man of his talents ended the war as a sergeant, though before his call-up he had been managing the Ukrainian-Polish oilfields for the Germans. Herr Heitz was discreetly encouraged in his in- formal efforts to make friends between Germany and Poland by Chancellor Adenauer; he was shipwrecked by the 'easterners' in the Foreign Office and the Chancellery alter he and Vladislav Gomulka and the Polish Prime Minister Josef Cyrankiewicz had gone as far as they could together and were waiting for a definite word from Bonn. Whether this was due to the in- trigues of the 'easterners' or ■%hether Chancellor Adenauer had only been playing at making friends with the Poles in order to pacify his American critics is not known. The object of the new thinkers is to get the subject out in the open so that new efforts can be made and not torpedoed in secret.
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