Germany: In Unity, a Past Threat : Power: The world has lived at peace with a silent Germany for 45 years. The new test is living with a confident, strong, vocal Germany.

The exorcists have finally removed the specter that Karl Marx said would haunt the chancelleries of Europe: Communism no longer keeps statesmen tossing in their beds late at night. But they still aren’t sleeping soundly--a new set of spirits rattles chains in the basement. Night after night the ghosts stalk through Europe bringing nightmarish visions of Germany past, Germany present and Germany to come.

It isn’t all Germany’s fault that reunification gives its neighbors insomnia. A united Germany is so powerful an idea that it threatens the balance of power in Europe merely by existing. A prosperous Germany--as in the years 1871 to 1914--threatens the economic and political interests of its neighbors by economic dynamism and growth; an impoverished Germany, as in the Weimar Republic years between world wars, keeps Europe in turmoil.

Everyone understands that the long-term solution to the “German question” involves integration of a united Germany into a united and prosperous European--ultimately global--economy. Unfortunately, this is something world statesmen have never managed to achieve. The Soviet Union--and the United States--fudged the issue after 1945, making reunion impossible on terms the Germans were prepared to accept. Now the world must try once again for the right answer to the German question and, as German politicians and all parties have made clear, this time Germany’s wishes will be impossible to ignore.

The West thought peace was made with Germany in the 1960s, but it was fooling itself. We made peace with rump steak, not the real thing. The Germany we have known since the war has not been itself; it was not only small, it was humble.

We have had half a century of German silence. A silence built on policy, because Germany feared to antagonize the victors; a silence of preoccupation, because Germans were too busy rebuilding the ruins of their nation to interest themselves in foreign affairs; last and most profound, a silence made of shame. Total defeat was bad enough, but for the nation to have surrendered itself so abjectly to Adolf Hitler was humiliating beyond words.

It has been 50 years since Hitler started his war, 45 years since he shot himself under the ruins of Berlin. German teen-agers called up for service in the last days of the Reich are now in their 60s; surviving war criminals and Nazi officials are in their 80s and 90s, tottering toward the grave--and to whatever tribunal lies beyond it. There, we may hope, they will meet the justice so many evaded on earth.

But for the generation of Germans who came of age since the war, another prospect is opening. The 1990s will be their decade: probably the years in which Germany reunifies, certainly the years of reborn German pride. We are entering the Ich decade, the German counterpart of the Me Decade, to be marked by the end of the German silence and the beginning of German self-assertion. Free from all personal responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis, sustained by the economic miracle of Germany’s recovery, made confident by the establishment of the strongest German democracy since the days of the Teutons, the Germans are back. And ready to lead.

The world will change in the German decade ahead of us. The German language will become, once again, important in business and scholarship. German leaders, intellectuals, economists and historians will again raise their voices. Berlin will be a great world city again, the metropolis where East and West meet, a center of all that is new and disturbing in the arts.

But other features of this new world will be more unsettling for other countries. Germany will voice doubts about the leadership of others with increasing frequency, asserting its own international interests with less hesitation as the decade goes on.

The French seem to spend the most time worrying about the Ich Decade, but the United States is also likely to have trouble with the new Germany. The recovery of Japan has been a severe blow to U.S. pride; as Germany moves to take its natural place in the world, we’re going to feel even more miffed. At the extreme, Germany could push the United States out of Europe, into inglorious isolation in the Western Hemisphere. But even short of that, the new Germany will be less willing to follow a U.S. lead.

Although Japan’s recovery has driven many Americans into frenzies of envy and rage, Japan is easy to deal with. Japan likes and respects us; Germany has always been more critical of U.S. leadership, ideas and political system.

To hear Germans tell it, George Bush is a cipher, Ronald Reagan was a clown, Jimmy Carter a disaster and Gerald R. Ford a ghastly accident. During the years that the U.S. political system produced one leader after another whom Germans held in contempt, our economy lost supremacy and we became the world’s largest debtor. This is not a record the Germans see much need to respect and they are going to be speaking their minds more often and more clearly. We will often not like what they say, but we owe them so much money and depend so much on the German Central Bank that we shall have to listen attentively.

Whether Germany will conduct itself deftly enough, and others summon the necessary magnanimity to welcome Germany back to its rightful place among the leading nations, will be the next great questions. For countries like France and Poland, a unified Germany--even a nice one--is a bad dream come true. Americans, flushed with triumph in the Cold War, will have to acknowledge new limits on their global role. For people everywhere, still numbed by Hitler’s barbarism--and by the corollary horror that Nazi thugs were supported by most Germans of that generation--the prospect of a louder German voice remains, at best, a little terrifying.

The world made peace with a divided and defeated Germany in the 1950s and ‘60s. In the 1990s we contemplate the more exacting task of making peace with a united and increasingly self-confident Germany: richer, stronger, more advanced than ever--and still at the center of Europe.