Abstract

German Foreign Policy

Germany is today as prosperous as most of the victors and more prosperous than some, for example, England. The author flew recently from the Lithuanian border to Berlin reading, very inappropriately, the "Fall of the Russian Empire," but receiving, from rich fields, clean, well-appointed cities, roads, and railway stations, impressions of the rise of the German Republic. In the capital, the evidence of German economic resurgence was everywhere, new buildings, better clothes, fewer bookshops, more autos, obvious "Americanization" on the Kurfürstendamm and elsewhere. During the author's fourteen-month absence Germany had made easily noticeable strides forward, despite reparations, Rhineland occupation, a mounting foreign debt, etcetera. This is far from a paradise, there are unemployed who starve, war invalids who suffer; there are strikes and causes for strikes, there is a serious adverse foreign trade balance, there are many, many unsolved problems. Yet Germany has attained more than the "relative stabilization" which the Communists niggardly concede her.