Word: german
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Parties of the extreme left or right hold little attraction for the great majority of West German voters, who remember all too well Germany's disastrous plunge into Nazi extremism in the 1930s. As a bulwark against political radicalism, the West German Constitution bans all parties that espouse principles inconsistent with a free and democratic society. Despite these psychological and legal barriers, parties of both the far left and far right were once again troublesomely active last week in West Germany...
Tear-Gas Attack. On the far right, the four-year-old National Democratic Party suffered its first setback at the polls when rightist candidates collected only 5.2% of the vote in local elections in the big West German state of Lower Saxony, which borders on East Germany. Until now, the National Democrats have been winning a higher percentage of the vote in each succeeding election, gaining 9.8% in last April's state elections in Baden-Württemberg...
...first appearance on the hustings in Bonn. Shouting "Get the Nazis out of here," the students drowned out Von Thadden's speech and chased him from the podium with tear gas. But despite the setback in Lower Saxony, most forecasts predict that in next year's West German general elections, the National Democrats will win at least 40 of the Bundestag's 496 seats...
...left, the Communists, who were outlawed by the West German Supreme Court in 1956, have come back out in the open. They skirted the constitutional prohibition by pledging to abide by democratic precepts. Even so, their reception in West Germany was hardly cordial. Nightriders pumped seven slugs into the party's new headquarters in Bonn, hitting no one. The leaders of the Grand Coalition could only be dismayed at the timing of the Communists' reappearance...
Clever Timing. In the days before the Czechoslovak crisis, Foreign Minister Willy Brandt held that West Germany should allow the Communists to operate as a legal party if it expected his new Ostpolitik to achieve its goal: establishing normal relations with the East bloc. But at that time, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht stonewalled Brandt's plan by ordering West German Reds to stay underground. Ulbricht feared that the West German diplomatic initiatives would isolate his unpopular satrapy; therefore he wanted to be able to denounce Bonn throughout Eastern Europe by pointing out the Federal Republic's "persecution...