Word: ostpolitik
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...segregated unease of Western and Eastern Europe comes together where the victorious Allies met in 1945: Germany. In the 1970s, the age of East-West détente, West Germany tried to build bridges to the East with its Ostpolitik, a reaching out to East Germany and the rest of the bloc through increased economic, diplomatic and personal ties. For their part, the 17 million East Germans took solace from an economy that, while it lagged far behind West Germany's, provided them with a standard of living higher than that of the Soviets...
...year. Brandt, who left Germany for Norway in 1933 and helped resistance leaders in the fruitless attempts to overthrow Hitler, gave a human face to a national long tainted by Nazism. Calling for ?a fatherland of love and justice? and pursuing the doctrine of detente with the Soviet bloc - Ostpolitik - Brandt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971. Three years later he was brought down, as other leaders have been, by a spy scandal and a sex scandal. (Oddly, he didn?t fabricate a war on a weak and unthreatening country. That tactic doesn?t get you impeached...
...Michael Blakemore?s direction gives the piece a racing pulse, as if to underline that this is a comedy of duplicity. As Frayn?s classic farce ?Noises Off? showed the performance of a play on stage, then from backstage, ?Democracy? reveals the public face of Brandt?s Ostpolitik and the inner scheming of Guillaume and the other top staffers, who are loyal but scarcely more likable. The you-break-my-neck-I?ll-break-yours pace stirs suspicions that the play is more bustling than profound. I prefer Alan Bennett?s two one-acters, ?An Englishman Abroad? (about Brit superspy...
...drew on the experience of Bruce van Voorst, who has covered Germany off and on since 1965, and who took over in May as our Bonn bureau chief. Van Voorst considers himself a lucky man: "My timing has always been good. I was in Germany when Willy Brandt set Ostpolitik in motion -- leading to German unification; in South America when Allende fell; with Kissinger during his shuttle diplomacy...
...success of Brandt's Ostpolitik contrasted with disarray in domestic politics. The last straw was the 1974 arrest of a close aide, Gunter Guillaume, on charges of spying for East Germany. Brandt resigned under pressure, a decision he later regretted. "I blame myself for not banging my fist on the table and demanding a stop to all the nonsense," he wrote in his 1989 memoirs...