All Quiet on the German Front? Germany in the Post‐Detente Era

In: Government & opposition: an international journal of comparative politics, Band 19, Heft 4, S. 438-450

Abstract

WHEN ALL ABOUT THEM IN EASTERN EUROPE WERE LOSING their heads, the Russians could always count on the East Germans. Now nobody, least of all the Russians, seems so sure. Whether or not East Germany's leader, Erich Honecker, visits West Germany this autumn as planned, the German question is back on the political agenda of both East and West. The sharp battle-by-reprint, during the summer of 1984, in the party newspapers of East Germany and the Soviet Union over the permissible degree of contact between the East German regime and the West German government has revealed in public a remarkable rift within the Warsaw Pact over one of the most sensitive issues in post-war Soviet foreign policy: strategy towards Germany.