Ho-Hum Campaign Hides Vital West German Struggle

West Germany will go to the polls Sunday in an election that has already been decided. The coalition government, led by Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl, is considered certain to gain a second four-year term. But behind the statistics of a ho-hum campaign is a struggle for the nation to come of age.

Two events dramatize the point. First, the dollar has been plummeting against the deutsche mark. Indeed, the dollar is worth only half as much in Germany as it was two years ago. This is part of a last-ditch American effort to try to cut unprecedented trade deficits without having to grapple with raising taxes or cutting spending--that is, accepting real cuts in the U.S. standard of living.

Washington is thus pressuring Bonn to expand its economy to absorb more U.S. goods. The Germans are resisting the pressure, giving only an inch at a time, while tut-tutting that American manufacturers aren’t in a good position to sell more here and warning that U.S. protectionism will be vigorously met in kind.

The Bundesbank, West Germany’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve, has agreed to lower the rate at which it lends money--already one of the world’s lowest. But there is undisguised contempt for America’s failure to cut its outrageous deficits. By contrast, the West German economy is bursting with vitality that is based, the good burghers here smugly declare, on old-fashioned hard work, savings and investment. From his position atop a stock of foreign-exchange reserves second only to Japan’s, the head of the Bundesbank, Karl Otto Pohl, has characterized U.S. efforts to talk down the dollar as simply “not reasonable.”

Meanwhile, West Germany is facing a terrorist crisis deriving from the recent airport arrest of a Palestinian, Mohammed Ali Hamadi. He is alleged to have taken part in the June, 1985, hijacking of TWA Flight 847 to Beirut in which a U.S. Navy frogman was murdered. The deal that resulted in the release of the remaining passengers and crew members after 17 days is seen as the beginning of American compromises with terrorism that culminated in the Iran- contras affair.

In apparent retaliation, Lebanese terrorists have seized two West German businessmen, thus placing the Kohl government in a bind. If it agrees to extradite Hamadi to the United States, the kidnaped Germans may be killed. As a result, he is likely first to be put on trial in Germany, on weapons charges, while efforts continue to secure the hostages’ release. As clamor mounts in the United States, however, there are suspicions here that the Reagan Administration is trying to reduce its domestic embarrassment over failed anti-terrorist policies by publicly demanding stiffened West German resolve.

Neither of these incidents, in itself, constitutes a basic change in U.S.-West German relations. And in his election rallies Kohl recalls, to his loyalists’ applause, the importance of America in preserving the security of West Germany. But the mood is clearly changing. In brief, West Germans are no longer prepared to almost automatically follow the U.S. lead, especially when they are becoming skeptical about the quality of the American leadership.

The Iran-contras affair hardly figures in this assessment. Far more important was the Reykjavik superpower summit meeting last October, when West German and other European leaders believed that Ronald Reagan had taken leave of his senses. Today there is satisfaction here that West Germany and other European allies were able to pull Reagan back from the precipice of rash arms-reduction agreements, but concern continues about what the United States might do next.

As the election campaign winds down, coalition leaders are playing down possible disagreement with Washington over strategic policy. They note, for example, that the Strategic Defense Initiative is still in the research phase and is thus not a source of intra-allied friction. But it is taken for granted in the Bonn government that the United States would not dare proceed to deploy strategic defenses without discussion and agreement with both the allies and the Soviet Union. And the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, the current target of SDI supporters in Washington, is considered in West Germany to be an immutable part of the East-West catechism.

West German skepticism about U.S. leadership is matched by a renewed search for national identity and major efforts to remove the stigma of the Nazi past. Chancellor Kohl speaks of saluting the flag and standing up when the national anthem is played, recent innovations in one West German state, as peculiarities only because they were not done. And the division of Germany, although still officially recognized, is increasingly represented as unnatural.

The growing desire in West Germany to be treated as a normal and equal country is inevitable and, in a democracy, a healthy development. But it has not yet brought with it a sense of broader responsibility. West German reluctance to play a full role in managing the global economy or to take part in nuclear-weapons decisions is matched by unwillingness to take seriously security threats in the Persian Gulf area, or to provide major economic aid to vulnerable Middle Eastern states.

Relief in Washington that the Christian Democrats will prevail over the anti-nuclear Social Democrats is thus little cause for comfort. U.S.-West German relations are beginning a sea-change of which America is hardly aware, much less prepared.