Despite Cultural Affinity, Relationship Is Changing : Germany No Longer U.S. Little Brother

Karl-Otto Kroll leaned against the bunkhouse door, looked out past the log cabin toward the autobahn and pondered the question.

What is it about the American Wild West, he had been asked, that makes it so attractive to people here?

“I guess it has something to do with freedom,” he said after a pause, and his friend Peter, staring out from under a 10-gallon hat, nodded in agreement.

Kroll is a co-founder of the “Prairie Friends,” one of more than 100 Western clubs in Germany. As a lover of American culture, he admits to being an extreme case; he sleeps in a Creek Indian bed and spends his weekends at the club’s plot of land just off the Cologne-Aachen autobahn.

There are about 4,000 active members of such clubs in West Germany, and they reflect Germany’s fascination with America, which goes back to the last century. Karl May, a kind of German Zane Grey, made the Wild West come alive for Germans in those days, and his books are still best-sellers.

In the years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, in 1945, American aid, ideas and military presence all made their mark, helping to shape a fledgling democracy in search of a role model. Its wealth, its freedom, its energy and, above everything else, its buoyant optimism--all made the United States the envy of the new Germany.

Today the West Germans have attained the wealth, the freedom and the energy they so admired. Only the optimism has escaped them.

West Germans are reared on Sesame Street. As youngsters, they learn to dance to American rock music. As adults, they get their news from Der Spiegel, a news weekly that was patterned on Time magazine. German air force pilots are trained in Texas, and a Hamburg band called “Truck Stop” has been in the forefront of a trend toward country music.

Even the anti-Americanism that flourishes among younger West Germans is often expressed in the tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience perfected by Martin Luther King Jr. Before their 1983 anti-nuclear protest campaign, hordes of West Germans went to training camps to learn how to be carried off peaceably by police. What violence did occur during the campaign was the exception.

Gordon Craig, the Stanford University historian whose book, “The Germans,” is regarded as the definitive national portrait, has noted: “When I first came here, almost half a century ago, I found myself fascinated by Germany, for it had a sharply different culture from my own. Now, I come and I feel it might as well be my own.”

Yet for all the cultural affinity, change is occurring in both countries, and this is certain to complicate what has been a model political relationship.

The basic factors in this change can be seen in the controversy that erupted over President Reagan’s visit to the German war cemetery at Bitburg. Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his advisers had believed that time and West Germany’s progress as a democracy had healed the wounds of World War II. However, public reaction in the United States, and from Jewish organizations everywhere, proved this belief to be wrong.

Now, even though Reagan kept his commitment to make the visit, there is disappointment and disillusionment with the American attitude.

“They (the Americans) think they can use economic rivalries to work up a Pearl Harbor mood in the Pacific and at the same time treat their most loyal European ally as a vassal,” commented the normally reserved Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung during the Bitburg cemetery uproar.

Subtle but Important

The changes in the U.S.-German relationship are subtle, but they are important, too, because they carry the earmarks of permanence. The West Germany that relied so completely on the United States in the early years, for moral, economic and security needs, has given way to a West Germany gradually gaining in confidence, bolstered by years of affluence, freedom and detente.

Certainly the image of the United States as the protector of West German freedom remains, as does admiration for the American way of life. However, the previous, unquestioned adoration of almost all things American has been clouded in recent years by a counter-image--of an America pressuring Bonn to make decisions that many West Germans think are against their basic interests.

To what extent West German attitudes have changed can be seen in the contrast between the way people viewed Reagan’s visit and that of President John F. Kennedy 22 years ago. Reagan was welcomed by most and protested by some; Kennedy was smothered in adulation.

Many of the men now assuming influential political posts here cut their teeth on American Care packages, but their vision of the United States was tarnished by the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Michael Stuermer, a historian at Erlangen University and an adviser to Chancellor Kohl, sees Vietnam as a watershed in U.S.-West German relations.

“It is as if the father had sinned,” he said recently.

And the generation of West Germans now in their 20s has come of age politically at a time of friction in the relationship with Washington.

One source of this friction is the debate over stationing advanced American missiles in Europe. Other factors, including Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, East-West trade, technology transfer and Central America, also contribute to the strained relationship.

Older Germans Upset

It is significant that those most upset by the level of U.S. hostility to the President’s visit to Bitburg were older West Germans, those like parliamentarian Alois Mertes, who best understood the American contribution to his own country’s democratic success. Younger Germans exhibited less disillusionment because they never felt the same close affinity with the United States.

Increasingly, it is integrated Europe, rather than the United States, that furnishes the model for West Germans. And most important, Germans want to be seen and respected as equals in a relationship that has been dominated by the United States.

Karsten Voigt, 44, a Social Democratic member of Parliament and his party’s spokesman on security matters, said not long ago: “We used to do what the U.S. wanted. There is now a whole list of differences, and the list is going to grow longer, not shorter.”

Another Social Democratic member of Parliament, Guenter Verheugen, commented: “We don’t want to break our economic and cultural links, but we believe we need political emancipation from the U.S. The role of the U.S. as our mentor is no longer accepted.”

Conservative politicians tend to play down the differences in what is otherwise a healthy relationship, but they too argue from the strength of West German performance.

Ties With Berlin

Volker Ruehe, the deputy floor leader in Parliament for the Christian Democrats, expressed resentment that commentators in the United States and other Western countries have reacted suspiciously to Kohl’s attempts to improve ties with East Germany.

“Nobody has the right to mistrust a Germany that has proved itself such a reliable partner,” Ruehe said in an interview.

The mood in Washington toward West Germany, a country that once occupied the central ground of U.S. foreign policy, has also altered. Gone are the men like John McCloy, who was U.S. high commissioner in Germany, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose strong personal bonds helped nurture democracy in the ruins of Nazi Germany and to bring the new state into the Atlantic Alliance.

In the decades between the Kennedy and Reagan visits, the Vietnam War and the emergence of China and economic power in the Pacific have pushed Europe--and with it West Germany--from the center of U.S. foreign policy considerations.

U.S. trade with Japan is now roughly equal to U.S. trade with the entire European Economic Community--$56.6 billion last year, against $56.8 billion, according to preliminary U.S. figures--and in key industrial areas, microelectronics, for example, it is the Pacific rather than Europe that is pushing the Americans.

Equate U.S., Soviets

Another important factor influencing U.S.-German relations is the altered image of the Soviet Union, especially among West Germans who were reared in the 1970s spirit of detente. They do not think of the Soviet Union as the country that dropped the Iron Curtain across Germany and tried to strangle West Berlin with a blockade in the late 1940s, then crushed independence movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Among young people on the left, there is a growing tendency to equate the Soviet Union and the United States as countries with policies that are not in the best interests of their country.

The Reagan Administration’s hard line toward Moscow runs counter to the desires of many Germans for increased contacts with the East.

Antje Vollmer, who was co-leader in Parliament last year for the small radical party called the Greens, said: “I once believed the Soviets were worse because of their awful (political) system and Afghanistan (where the Soviet army has been fighting a rebel movement since 1979). But since Reagan, I see the U.S. as the more aggressive and dangerously unpredictable.”

To be sure, Vollmer’s party represents less than 10% of West German voters, yet public opinion polls show that it attracts a third of all voters under 30.

Barring a major East-West confrontation in Europe, U.S.-West German relations are likely to settle down at a level that is less close and less intensive.

“The basic democratic values we borrowed from you are now part of our own identity,” said Voigt, the Social Democratic legislator. “We now share common values but have differing interests. Very close relations can also lead to frustrations. But that is only natural.”