The Saar
SIR,1 believe that Herr Friedlaender is mistaken when he suggests that the annexation of the Saar has at any time been a French objective during or since the last world war. The old dream of Maurice Barres that France could continue to attract and transform German frontier provinces as she did Alsace is quite dead. Indeed the French would have been shocked and disgusted in 1945 at the suggestion that they were to share France with a million Germans. To have attempted to do so might well have made the Republic unworkable.
What France has consistently attempted (with the agreement of Great Britain and the United States) is to induce a million Germans to accept self-government outside any German federation in order that the immense natural predominance of German industrial power over that of her western neighbours should be reduced. This may or may not be a sound policy, but the policy is certainly conceived as a remedy to the predominance that is given to Germany by the Ruhr, and to the gross misuse of that predominance in recent years, that has cost us all SO heavily. Herr Friedlaender does not mention this motive for French action, although it cannot have escaped his attention. Any solution of the Saar problem which does not remove the cause of French policy in the Saar would scarecly be worth having since it would probably be bought at the cost of all hope of European unity.
Surely Herr Friedlaender is less than appreciative of an offer which wotild make Saarbriicken a great and significant European city, and which would place the future Washington of Western Europe on German-speaking territory. The advantages of thiS for a nation still so morally isolated as is Germany would be very great. Yet this status would never have been proposed without the initial stage of the Grandval-Hoffmann regime. If Saarbrticken ever does achieve greatness, it will owe it more to these two men than to the German nationalists.—Yours faithfully,
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