A Wide Generation Gap : Postwar W. Germans Seek a New Path for the Nation

The young German, bedecked with peace symbols and an anti-nuclear scarf, glared at the elderly man who had just labeled his political views a threat to the country’s freedom.

“What did you ever do for freedom?” the youth shouted, his voice rising. “Your generation gave Germany Nazism. You can’t talk to me about freedom.”

The exchange reflects one of the most painful wounds of West Germany’s disjointed, unhappy past--a generation gap that is easily the widest in the industrialized world.

A recent study by the Allensbach Institute of generational attitudes in the United States and the 10 European Community countries disclosed what most Germans already knew: In their moral, religious and political attitudes, West Germans have less in common with their parents than the children of any other nation polled.

Values Tossed Overboard

Considering that three times in this century, Germans have tossed their basic values overboard along with the political systems that promoted them, the depth of this divide is hardly surprising.

Still, its implications are considerable.

With few deeply rooted values, the potential for radical social change is greater in West Germany than in other Western countries, while the stabilizing effects of an older generation’s moral authority are weaker.

Attitudes swing more quickly, with younger West Germans less willing to accept basic precepts handed down by their elders.

Greens Party an Indicator

The alternative Greens party, with its platform of ecology, nuclear disarmament and political neutrality, is also as much an indicator of generational attitudes as an expression of radical thought.

Its following is more sharply defined by age difference that any parliamentary party in Europe; it draws roughly two-thirds of its strength from those under 30.

Younger West Germans are more preoccupied about the threat of war and less willing to accept that threat than those who actually experienced World War II.

Far more than their elders, they question the necessity of about 3,000 U.S. nuclear warheads on their soil.

“I’m proud to be born a German and happy to be living at a time when Germans have it better than they ever did,” said Dagmar Opoczynski, a young Frankfurt trade union official. “But if I’m going to be blown up in a nuclear war tomorrow, how does the affluence help?”

Links Not So Obvious

The links between East-West confrontation, Western military strength and West Germany’s own freedom--connections taken for granted by older Germans--are not so obvious to the young.

When former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1982 cautioned anti-nuclear protesters that the country must show loyalty and perseverance to the Atlantic Alliance, his young party colleague Oskar Lafontaine dismissed Schmidt as a man espousing secondary virtues with which one could also run a concentration camp.

Lafontaine, at 42, was recently elected premier of the West German state of Saarland. He advocates German withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Increased questioning of the need for high defense spending reflects radically different perceptions held by younger and older West Germans about the United States and the Soviet Union.

To the nearly two-thirds of West Germany’s citizens with no personal memory of the 1948 Berlin Airlift or to the one-third born after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, their parents’ view of Moscow as a pariah seems overdrawn.

Vietnam, Central America

At the same time, Vietnam, the nuclear missile debate of the early 1980s and U.S. policies toward Central America have all cut into an almost adulatory image West Germans once held of the United States.

But the shift in attitudes also stems from a dearth of communications for many years between generations, either formally in the schools or at home.

A recent television program dealing with the meaning of the May 8 anniversary of the Nazi capitulation to the Allies disclosed that even for teen-agers born of parents who were themselves infants at war’s end, the Third Reich and the events surrounding it were rarely, if ever, discussed at home.

A Bonn secretary noted how her husband repeatedly parried requests for explanations of the Holocaust and the Nazi era from their 14-year-old daughter by saying “Not now, later.”

“But ‘later’ never comes,” the secretary said.

Ironically, some attitudes have persisted that many believed would die the fastest.

Ties to East Germany

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that emotional ties with Communist East Germany would gradually fade with an older generation, a sense of common destiny and belonging with their East German cousins has developed among younger West Germans that is, if anything, stronger than in the past.

“When I am in East Germany, the feeling of being part of a whole is very strong,” said 42-year-old Social Democrat Guenter Verheugen.

Today, socialists, conservatives and Greens differ on many fundamental issues but share the common desire for strengthening ties with East Germany.

While physical reunification remains remote, younger West Germans have begun redefining the “German question” so that it focuses now on how to build humanitarian contacts with the East rather than a united country.

“The ‘German question’ remains open so long as the Brandenburg Gate remains closed,” said Heinrich Luemmer, a conservative West Berlin politician, referring to the ornate portal just a few yards behind the Berlin Wall.

Other Forms of Unity

Verheugen added, “I don’t want a divided Germany, but unity can be understood as something other than legal.”

Other views also tend to define the new generation of West German political leaders.

A series of interviews conducted across a broad cross section of West German society, but predominantly with those under age 50, gives the following picture of the country’s younger leaders, regardless of party affiliation: They exude more confidence than their predecessors and resist the contention that West Germany remains a “special case”--and they are undoubtedly the generation of decision-makers best attuned internationally in the history of a people who have always considered themselves outsiders.

When Social Democrat Parliament member Karsten Voigt, 44, was asked what differentiated his generation from that of Willy Brandt, 71, and Helmut Schmidt, 66, he spoke of this international orientation.

“We have grown up together with our European colleagues, seen them in private life and vacationed with them,” Voigt said. “We have learned, they have learned.”

For a Germany that yearns for legitimacy and acceptance, this is extremely important.

Desire for Acceptance

Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who likes to project himself as West Germany’s chancellor of a post-war generation (he was 15 at war’s end), is the most vocal exponent of an international stance. His idea that President Reagan lay a wreath at a German war cemetery reflects the desire for full acceptance of a new Germany.

Yet despite the success of their democracy, younger West Germans appear resigned that the stain of Nazism will not fade in their lifetime.

“We were’t personally guilty, but we are all tainted with it because we belong to this people,” said Friedbert Pflueger, an executive member of the Christian Democrats’ youth wing. “We will be confronted with this, probably for many years, when traveling abroad.”

But there are those who believe that the tumultuous protests two years ago against the deployment of U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles provided proof that the country’s democratic future was secure.

Those who worried aloud whether the young democracy could survive such pressures were proven wrong. The protest, although emotional, was predominantly peaceful, and its leaders accepted defeat without incident.

“The young people who have protested against nuclear armaments have made it clear to me that we really do have a new Germany,” said Nobel laureate and author Heinrich Boell in a radio interview last week. “I no longer fear the streets.”