William Glenn Gray

Interesting and well-sourced history of the various challenges experienced by officials in the Federal Republic of Germany as they developed strategies and tactics to try to maintain the relative isolation of the German Democratic Republic in the arena of international diplomacy during the 1950s and 1960s. Particular and repeated reference is made to the developing, non-aligned states that tended to exhibit some element of leadership in the community of governments that clearly adhered to neither "side" in the Cold War (at least at some points), including Yugoslavia, Egypt, Syria, India, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. As a reader, one gathers that leaders in Bonn faced constant assessments of the trade-offs between an assertive policy characterized by having clear consequences for actions that crossed certain (sometimes changing) lines and an attitude of tolerance and positive diplomacy. At any rate, the conclusion seems correct that the activities of the Bonn government (as well as the relative weakness of the SED government in Berlin/Pankow) did keep East Germany in relative isolation for several decades in the early Cold War.… (meer)