During the Cold War some blamed America for putting Germany at the center of ‘its’ conflict with the Soviet Union and exposing the country to risk. Many conservatives, particularly in the Catholic South, attributed the rise of Hitler to the ‘secularizing’ influence of the West and argued that Germany should steer a ‘middle way’ between the triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’. And West Germany’s growing prominence on the eastern edge of the Western alliance subliminally recalled Nazi Germany’s self-assigned role as Europe’s cultural bulwark facing down the Asiatic
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