Broadcast live. Seven months after The Wall had come down, all Central Europe seemed to be jostling towards freedom, and German reunification was being talked about seriously--not, as Mr. Buckley points out, to the universal joy of Germany's neighbors: "Is there something there [in the German character] that is distinctively susceptible to the demagogy of people like Adolf Hitler, and if that is the case, are sufficient precautions being taken when we talk about German reunification?" He first addresses the man who is "probably better known in America than any German since Hitler, whose demons Mr. Kissinger's parents protested by leaving Germany with their two young sons early in the Thirties." (Actually, Mr. Kissinger points out, it wasn't so much protest as sheer self-preservation.) Is there, WFB asks, "such thing as a German national character, or is that just a recent invention?" Mr. Kissinger replies that "every people is a product of its history, of its culture. ... I think the worry I have about Germany is not Auschwitz, but a certain kind of romantic, short-sighted national policy that brings about what they're seeking to avoid." To Mr. Pfluger, "The nightmare, the Holocaust, is, in my point of view, present in German thinking and in German feeling. We--and also the young generation--we know that we still have a responsibility, not for the past, but [so] that something like that will never happen in the future." And we're off on an extremely rich discussion that goes from Hitler to the Marshall Plan, from the composition of NATO to Gorbachev's growing problems.
- Hoover ID: Program FLS108
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