Like the student left, "Stern" was willing to break the relative post-war silence on the recent National-Socialist past. In serialisations Haffner developed his thesis that Hitler's war was a tragedy foretold in the circumstances of German unification in the nineteenth century. It was a position consistent with editorial support for the "Ostpolitik" of the new Social-Democratic Chancellor Willi Brandt. As interpreted by many conservatives this amounted to an acceptance of Germany's postwar division, and territorial losses in the east, as permanent.