's "economic miracle" has become a cliche. We focus here less on the country's industrial resurgence than on the society that pro- duced it-and the new society that it made possible. Success creates its own problems. Below, historian Konrad Jarausch re- calls the West's long love-hate relationship with the German people; journalist David Binder looks at the legacy of World War I1 and the evolution of the modern Federal Republic; and histo- rian David Schoenbaum analyzes West Germany's...

, con- ceived in 1949 out of the ashes and rubble of the last great war, bore the defect of being only part of the German whole, even though it claimed to represent the entire German nation.
True, the Federal Republic of Germany became a homeland for most of the 9 million Germans-East Prussians, Silesians, Pomeranians, Sudetenlanders-driven westward after their ex- pulsion from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in the wake of World War 11. Similarly, until the erection of the Berlin Wall in...

exports 23 percent of its GNP (versus 8 percent for the Ameri- cans). Its generous foreign-aid program, designed in part to keep its Third World customers happy, is the West's third biggest.
As suppliers (and consumers) of goods and services, the West Germans are ubiquitous. They build Volkswagens in Penn- sylvania, airports in the Soviet Union, nuclear power complexes in Brazil, solar installations in Kuwait, medical research labo- ratories in Egypt, desalinization facilities in Libya, Iran,...

"Germany is Hamlet!" exclaimed the German poet Ferdinand Freilig- rath in 1844.
Historian Gordon Craig, in Ger-many, 1866-1945 (Oxford, 1978, cloth; 1980, paper), chose Freilig- rath's remark as an epigraph to his survey of the "tragic story" of Ger- man history from Prince Otto von Bismarck's triumph over Austria to the fall of the Third Reich.
As Craig suggests, the same "pale cast of thought" that prevented Hamlet from avenging his father's death-the indecisiveness...

?
"Doomsday Drawing Near with Thunder and Lightning for Lawyers," warned a 17th-century London pamphleteer. Today's Americans may still distrust lawyers, but they nevertheless have come to rely more and more upon courts and the law. Every- thing from disputes between parents and children to the future of nuclear power seems eventually to come before a judge. As
A. E. Dick Howard, a specialist on constitutional law, suggests, we may be well on our way to becoming a "litigation society."...

The biggest single new fact about America's agriculture is that
U.S. farm exports are expected to reach a record 170 million tons this year-despite a world economic slowdown.
"At the rate exports are increasing," noted Lauren Soth, col- umnist and former editor of the Des Moines Register and Tribune, "the danger of over-exploitation of the land . . . is becoming im- minent. Yet exports have been the lifeblood of Americanagricul- ture and are vital to farm prosperity ."
Therein...

The success of American agriculture is a crucial factor in supplying the world's food needs. The United States exports more grain than Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa together manage to produce, and it holds about half of the world's total grain reserves. Indeed, each year American farms account for roughly half the world's exports of grain and soybeans.
Opinion polls show that the American public consistently gives more support to "combating world hunger" than to most other U.S....

AGMCULTU IN AMERICA
'The glory of the farmer," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is that in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on this primitive activity. He stands close to nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be. The first farmer was the first man."
Raising and selling crops and live- stock has become vastly more com- plicated since Emerson's day.
With sympathy and precision, Mark Kramer...

public agencies and private institutions

"Energy and the Economy."
Council on Energy Resources, University of Texas, Austin, Tex. 78712. 109 pp
America's best hope of subduing the stagflation touched off OPEC's 1973 oil price hikes is to become a net energy exporter by 1990. That may sound like wishful thinking, but a team of University of Texas scholars headed by geologist W. L. Fisher and economist Walt W. Rostow believes that it can be done.
The authors outline a plan to pro- d...

The great flowering of American modern art since 1945 has ori- gins that go back much earlier-to the years after World War I, when writers, critics, and artists argued over the cultural health of the nation. Europe beckoned, and many, including Ernest Hemingway, fled to Paris. But others remained in Manhattan to do battle in little magazines such as Soil and Broom. Was Amer- ica in the 1920s a sinkhole of crass "commercialism," or were the new industrial machines, consumer gadgets, and...

Between the year 1734, when Ayuba bought it, like Olaudah Equiano (for Suleiman, a Maryland slave, pub- �£40) Others remained slaves until lished his Memoirs,' and 1854, when death. Three were rescued from Ali Eisami's Narrative2 appeared, a slave ships by British frigates (the score of Africa's children, dispersed slave trade was abolished in the Brit- by the slave trade, many of them la- ish Empire in 1807) and resettled in boring in servitude, overcame the Sierra Leone....