Fall 2024

At first glance, Germany appears, economically, to be quite unusually successful. Despite the budgetary and financial crises affecting the other nations of the European Union, the German unemployment rate is declining. It has a positive export balance, and its own …

Jeffrey C. Isaac’s review of Frances Stoner Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War (“Rethinking the Cultural Cold War,” Summer 2002) argues, in effect, that the end justifies the means. The end was the cause of liberal anticommunism. The means was the …

This book traces the development of the German left since 1945, concentrating on what was West Germany. The main difficulty of democratic socialism in Germany, the authors argue, is the success of a welfarist version of capitalist democracy in the …

Willy Brandt grew up in the northern German city of Luebeck, immortalized in his fellow townsman Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Brandt’s Luebeck was much different, the Luebeck of the turbulence of the Weimar Republic and the coming of Nazism, of the …

“Have you ever been abroad?” I asked the taxi driver in Budapest. “No,” he replied, “only in Vienna.” The answer was not, apparently, intended as a joke. It reflected something essential in the new East European atmosphere: the recrudescence of …