Documents on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany 1982

Sep 12, 2013

Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1982
Edition commissioned by the Federal Foreign Office, edited by the Institute of Contemporary History Munich – Berlin

General editor: Horst Möller, Co-editors: Gregor Schöllgen and Andreas Wirsching.
Editorial staff: Michael Ploetz, Tim Szatkowski and Judith Michel.
Editorial director: Ilse Dorothee Pautsch.
Munich 2013, 2 vols, 2000 pages, ISBN 978-3-486-71876-8.

The end of the Schmidt/Genscher government in autumn 1982 marked a domestic political break, but not a foreign policy caesura. Some crises had already reached their peak, such as the Falkland and Lebanon Wars. Other problems remained: the inconclusive search for headway at the INF negotiations in Geneva (“a walk in the woods”) which seemed to make an escalation of the nuclear arms race more likely, the crisis in Poland and the European/American tensions regarding economic relations between West and East. As shown in the 363 documents released here for the first time, the new Kohl/Genscher Government stayed the course in the field of foreign policy in the face of manifold crises.