For all the discontinuities of West German policy since 1949,
one can but admire the grand continuity in which all chancellors
from Adenauer to Kohl, all foreign ministers, all federal
governments over forty years, now this way, now that, now in the
West, now in the East, pursued the cause of German liberation.
Historians will argue whether Adenauer's integration into the
West or Brandt's Ostpolitik contributed more to the success of
the past year. There is much to be said for the claim that the
East Central European year of wonders, 1989, was a late triumph
of Adenauer's "magnet theory"—the idea that the attraction of a
free and prosperous West Germany embedded in a free and
prosperous Western Europe would sooner or later draw the unfree
and impoverished East Germany irresistibly toward it. But could
the magnet have exerted its full attractive force if the
blocking Iron Curtain had not first been drawn back by the
Ostpolitik, which Willy Brandt launched in the late 1960s? And
it was not Bonn's Western but ra