398 GRANICE
It's nothing but the minds of men,
That keeps the World apart from Heaven.To scorn a laurel wreath is surely noble.
Human contentment surpasses all fame.
The garlanded heard becomes a skull
Whose withered garland the earth will reclaim.
As a storm-tossed leaf from the treetop flies,
So Caesar fell, one day of gloom.
Alexander of Macedon, a dust-pile, lies;
And Frederick is stretched in his narrow tomb.
Puny now is the great World-Stormer.
Fire and worms, consumed his corporeal wreck.
All came to an end, like a thunder-clap in summer,
Whilst the satraps partitioned his Reich.^46Throughout the Cold War, the issue of frontier revision was never raised. Nor
did it emerge after 1989 when the Soviet Bloc collapsed. Indeed, great efforts
were made to avoid the sort of territorial disputes which had disfigured East-
Central Europe in the inter-war period. Independent Poland accepted the fron-
tiers of the People's Republic without demur. Even the Oder-Neisse Line was
not allowed to become a bone of contention. Instituted by the Interallied
Potsdam Agreement in 1945, the Polish-German frontier on the lower Oder and
the western Neisse had been recognized by the DDR in 1950 and accepted de
facto by West Germany in 1970. But it had never been the subject of a binding
international agreement. And it was a potential source of trouble. Fortunately,
with US assistance, the matter was solved in 1991 once and for all. Washington
declined to recognise the merger of the former DDR into the Federal Republic
of Germany until Bonn had formally dropped all theoretical claims to lands
beyond the Oder and Neisse. In this way, Poland was relieved of its anxieties.
Remarkably, it entered the twenty-first century with no frontier disputes what-
soever.