Focus On The New Germany : Regional Outlook : Old Fears Await the Coming of One Germany

By TYLER MARSHALL

Oct. 2, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ALKMAAR, Netherlands —

“ . . . We remember the unending suffering that has been brought on people in the name of Germans. We remember all the victims of war and tyranny. We unite with the will that all this never again be allowed to happen.”

-- West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher speaking in Parliament during the Sept. 20 unification debate.

The teen-age faces were as bright and hopeful as the morning outside, yet the words of those who spoke were hedged with doubt.

Two generations removed from the weight of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation of their country, the Dutch students discussing German unity had no fear that a united, democratic Germany might somehow resume its military aggression.

Instead, the concern was more subtle. It was there, but ill-focused.

“I don’t see the Germans as enemies, and I don’t think there is going to be another war,” said Minke de Vroomen, 19, before pausing to add, “But now that Germany is becoming one, it’s a little worrying.”

The words--”a little worrying”--capture the main thread of a remarkably broad mix of emotions that flow through Europe on the eve of a new era--an era where an anxious Continent once again hitches its fate to a powerful, fully sovereign Germany.

From the enfant terrible of the French Establishment, Alain Minc, who argues in favor of arming a united Germany with nuclear weapons, to the anguished voices of the German left, who insist that history and Auschwitz cry out against unity of any kind, the Continent braces itself to receive the new nation about to be born.

No one disputes that the new Germany is far different from the nation that twice this century took the world to war.

Germany today is prosperous, confident and, above all, democratic. The awareness of both past misdeeds and future responsibilities is enshrined in the preamble to the unification treaty and has become a litany in public speeches.

The conditions surrounding the new Germany’s arrival also give reason for hope. The nation has no outstanding territorial disputes, it has unilaterally renounced nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and has begun a self-proposed, self-imposed military manpower cut of 40% to 370,000.

It begins life in a peaceful, optimistic Europe, firmly anchored in the Atlantic Alliance and the European Community, and richer than ever before in the Western values of rationalism, pragmatism and egalitarianism.

“Forty years have brought enormous change,” said former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt during an interview. “Democracy is deeply rooted in the German Parliament. It’s not just lip service. They have understood and taken to heart how a democracy works.”

But if such ideal conditions prevail, why do doubts about Germany persist?

Why does Newsweek publish stories under the headlines “Can Germany Be Contained?” and (from a German contributor) “We Can Be Trusted”?

Why does British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher describe German unification as “something we’ll have to cope with,” and why does one of her Cabinet ministers openly accuse Germany of trying to dominate Europe?

Why did the collapse of the Berlin Wall last November prompt a European Commission member in Brussels to launch into an anti-German tirade during an off-the-record meeting with a group of reporters, or inspire a Dutch comedian to suggest that his government might do well to buy the wall and erect it along the Dutch-German frontier?

Size alone explains part of it.

From this small Dutch administrative town 25 miles north of Amsterdam, a united Germany that is more than half again the population of France or Britain is Europe’s acknowledged economic powerhouse, and, at birth, is the world’s No. 1 trading nation (ahead of the United States and Japan), seems somehow frighteningly large.

“We know we are completely dependent on Germany,” said Ilja Roobeek, an 18-year-old Dutch student.

History, too, lingers.

The fact that Norway this year finally relented and allowed German military forces to be part of annual Western alliance maneuvers for the first time since the war; that officials of European Community nations have given up guilt-tripping their German colleagues as a way to leverage more money, and that a recent sampling of French opinion found that if a daughter were to marry a non-Frenchman, the overwhelming majority of families would prefer a German son-in-law--all this reflects the healing process.

Yet the wound itself remains.

“Memories (of the Nazi occupation) are still there,” said Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mette Owre, explaining the public resistance to the participation of German forces in northern Norway maneuvers earlier this year. “Emotions are weaker now, but it is still hard.”

There is, however, an additional dimension to Europe’s wariness: an uneasy suspicion that, for all their postwar success and commitment to the future, the Germans remain an unpredictable people, capable of being blown off course with frightening speed.

The shadow of the Third Reich may have faded, but when events in Europe turn tricky, the same question invariably percolates to the surface: Can we count on the Germans?

“We Germans remain an endangered people,” said Schmidt in the final chapter of his recently published book, “Germany and Her Neighbors.” “Not because of any external threat; there’s no fear of that at present. But because of our tendency to nervousness, overreaction and arrogance. These tendencies have often led us astray in the past.”

Schmidt elaborated on this German volatility not with an anecdote from an earlier age, but by citing an example 30 years into Germany’s postwar democratic experience: the explosive growth and subsequent rapid decline of a peace movement whose strength threatened to overturn the decision to station U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles in West Germany during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“It just flared up,” he said. “It misled people outside of Germany. They thought we’d be too weak to carry that decision out. It misled (former Soviet leader Leonid I.) Brezhnev and (former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A.) Gromyko. Doubt also grew in the West that they could rely on the Germans.”

From his 13th-floor office overlooking Brussels, Germany’s senior European Community representative, European Commission Vice President Martin Bangemann, addressed the same point.

“It is true that there’s a great deal of emotion and nervousness in German society, much of it reinforced by the media,” he said. “But this doesn’t make us more dangerous (to others). It makes us weaker. We are much more dangerous to ourselves than others.”

While the Germans are certainly not the only people in Europe with such cultural traits, their collective power and geographical position set them apart.

A united Germany, for example, shares its borders with nine other countries. Only China and the Soviet Union have more neighbors.

While Europeans can view instability in, say, Greece, Portugal or Denmark with a certain detachment, mood swings in Germany make them jumpy.

“If we are successful, they are afraid we will become too successful; if we are unhappy, they are afraid we’ll become too unhappy,” said Schmidt. “Due to its geographical position in the middle of Europe and the fact it’s a country of 80 million people, Germany is always going to give some concern to its neighbors.”

The German propensity for volatility precedes the tragedies of this century.

French social observer Alexis de Tocqueville, after dissecting the Americans in the 1830s, went on to single out France’s eastern neighbor, noting in a letter to a friend that “alone in Europe, the Germans possess the particular talent of becoming obsessed with what they take as abstract truths without considering their practical consequences.”

A century later, in the ashes of the Third Reich, the respected early postwar German scholar Friedrich Meinecke made a similar, rueful assessment that German temperament had always contained “a stormy inclination to rise up suddenly from the limitations of the reality that surrounded it. . . . “

As a new Germany embarks on the daunting challenge of rebuilding its eastern half, outsiders fret over how its democracy will resist such inclinations as it moves into the troubled, uncharted waters that seem certain to accompany the early years of unification.

Where compassion, flexibility, patience and innovation are needed now as never before in absorbing an emotionally shattered East German population, many see a culture overly seasoned with bureaucratic rigidity, preoccupied by the need for order and marked by an insensitivity that frequently spills over into arrogance.

“I don’t believe in the fated nature of people; it is a form of racism to accept this idea of determination of a people,” said Simone Veil, who survived Auschwitz to become one of France’s most prominent and influential postwar political figures. “On the other hand, the caricatures often conform to reality. For the Germans, this is discipline, respect for authority and efficiency.”

In the years of Western Europe’s postwar recovery, these strengths first propelled West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, then enabled the country to remain the Continent’s strongest economy.

West Germans may lament an erosion in their own work ethic and complain that East Germans are lazy, but the fact remains that West Germans maintain one of the world’s highest industrial productivity rates, and statistics show that the East German worker outperformed his counterparts in all the former Communist Bloc nations.

Indeed, the director of the respected Allensbach Institute, Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, cited the unusual relationship to work as one of the common elements bonding the two Germanys.

Amid the growing disorder of his own surroundings, a Soviet foreign affairs adviser and Germany expert, Vyacheslav Dashichev, sat in his modest Moscow office, rejected the notion of national character, but then almost wistfully reeled off a string of adjectives he associated with Germans--”knowledgeable, diligent, hard-working, disciplined, conscientious, responsible, punctual.”

Added Paul Percie du Sert, commercial director of France’s Renault Corp., “The principal quality of the Germans is their sense of organization. We have learned a lot from our contact with them.”

This curious German yearning for order and implicit acceptance of the rules needed to enforce it may have been diluted by 40 years of freewheeling democracy, but these traits still strike outsiders as unusually strong.

How else can one explain the well-dressed Berlin woman standing stoically in a downpour at a traffic light, waiting patiently for green, even though there are no cars in sight? Or the shout of reproach at the foreigner who dares consider his options and cross on red? Or the intolerant scream from a cyclist in Berlin as he passes a Polish shopper, laden with freshly purchased goods, who has inadvertently strayed into the bicycle lane?

In modern Germany, a fine-tuned, seemingly infinite set of petty laws still set the rhythm of life within carefully erected bureaucratic boundaries.

The government decides when a person can cut his lawn, beat a carpet, when he can begin clearing his sidewalk of snow and when he must finish. It even intrudes in such intimate personal choices as the naming of a newborn child.

A Frankfurt couple several years ago were blocked by a court from naming their newborn after Schroeder, a character in the “Peanuts” cartoon strip, because the name was not on a government-approved list.

“Names help create a certain order,” explained a local government bureaucrat at the time. “If a name is on a list and nobody knows if it’s a man or woman, then difficulties can arise.”

After obtaining the required government--yes, government--permission to hook up a telephone answering machine, customers get a two-page written statement from the telephone authorities laying out exactly what is and what is not permitted on the recorded message. (The words “automatic answering machine,” for example, must be used, while a closing statement is also required (although the wording “thank you,” while officially recommended, is optional).

Germans also seem to feel a special need for enforcement.

An American who inadvertently parked in a West Berlin apartment house driveway recently found that residents had not only called the police but had also surrounded the vehicle to prevent any premature escape by the offender.

Following a lengthy discussion about the similarities between the Dutch and the Germans, Henk van Dijk, a historian at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, noted one glaring difference: Unlike the Dutch, he said, the Germans lack any inherent mistrust of state authority.

The close link between individual and state is steeped in Prussian tradition, he explained, and was a jumping-off point for German philosophers such as Friedrich Hegel in developing the idea that the whole of a state is greater than the sum of its individuals.

“The state has always taken care of people; they expect it,” noted Ralf Dahrendorf, German-born warden of Oxford University’s St. Antony’s College and a respected social scientist. “Germany is the exact opposite of the United States, which began as a very different society where it was hard to find a government at all.”

While the undertone of intolerance and inflexibility inherent in such order is something that worries both Germans and outsiders as the country confronts its new challenges, there is a widespread conviction that the exposure to Western values, and the high degree of Germany’s economic, social and political integration among Western nations, collectively provide an important damping effect on the German national mood.

“I can see all the ‘buts,’ but you need to take the long view, I am confident about Germany’s future,” said Dahrendorf. “If there is ever a country that has really changed, it is West Germany.”

Others agree.

“The people in Germany today are totally different that the people I witnessed here as a young man,” noted Ernst Cramer, the 77-year-old deputy supervisory board chairman of Germany’s Axel Springer publishing empire, a Jew who survived Buchenwald. “Younger people are outward-looking, exposed to all sorts of ideas, and react to events in the same way as someone in London, Paris or Los Angeles. After the last war, we’ve created an internationally minded society.”

Commented Juergen Kocka, a historian at Berlin’s Free University: “The question now is what unity means. Will it modify or relativize this deep break (from the past)? After all, we are getting 16 million who have had six decades of dictatorship without a democratic role model.

“West Germany had become a ‘post- Sonderweg’ Germany,” he added, using the word that has come to denote Germany’s “special way,” the political path that has led it to such tragedy in the past. “Now we are getting a new mix. There is a certain uncertainty, but I’m optimistic.”

For outside observers, the future level of anxiety about the Germans is expected to turn largely on two key issues:

* How Germany’s highly prosperous western half revives and integrates an outmoded East German economy and absorbs an additional 16 million souls who have no collective democratic experience.

* How strong a united Germany’s commitment remains both to the dream of an economic and political union among the 12-nation European Community and to its three pivotal European bilateral relationships with France, Poland and the Soviet Union.

European worries about the depth of this commitment were initially eased by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s forceful reaffirmation of faith in the idea of European unity twice in the months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s oft-stated goal of building a “European Germany rather than a German Europe.”

However, recent developments have brought questions.

Both the tone and content of Kohl’s refusal to go along with French President Francois Mitterrand’s request at a Franco-German summit last month in Munich to pin down the timing of European economic and monetary union, coupled with recent cautionary comments by Federal Bundesbank President Karl Otto Poehl on the same issue, have brought tugs of doubt in Brussels, but so far no panic.

“The general feeling is the German commitment is still there,” said Stanley Crossick, a respected, Brussels-based political consultant.

The Munich performance reflects both a personal chill between Kohl and Mitterrand and the tough French adjustment that unification has meant for a Franco-German relationship that is central to the drive for greater European integration.

Germany’s ties with both the Soviet Union and Poland, on the other hand, seem rich in potential, and there are signs that economic necessity may help overcome the suspicions of the past. It was a senior Soviet official who recently proposed that Germany should be the sixth permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.

Last month’s Soviet-German friendship treaty left relations between Europe’s two largest nations better than at any time in memory, while Warsaw still struggles to overcome a visceral nervousness that has come with unity.

Writing in the Solidarity Weekly recently, writer Jan Rylukowski urged Poles to break “the psychological barriers” against cooperation with Germany, arguing that Poland’s links to Western Europe begin with the Germans.

For many, however, it is the problems of East Germany that represent the real test of the health and spirit of the newly united country.

West Germans, who have built their prosperity on hard work and well-proven conservative policies, must for the first time venture into the economic unknown to do something no one has ever done: rebuild a Communist economy.

East Germany’s downward spiral threatens to throw as many as 4 million out of work--a full quarter of the population--sap the morale of the entire region and spawn a discontent that could test the stability and fabric of German democracy to new limits.

There are those who fear that if East Germans, who already feel that the political left has failed them, suddenly see themselves equally let down by a democratic free-market system, they might seek refuge in the extreme right.

West Germans find themselves tested in other ways, such as in the delicate task of knitting together two German peoples who at times seem to have more traits that separate them than they have in common.

In what is more of a West German takeover of the east than a genuine merger, the spirit of unification could be influenced by the westerners’ ability to restrain a victor’s mentality so visible in many of their initial contacts with the east.

The way in which many West Germans have pursued property claims in the east or the offhand remark by Dionys Jobst, chairman of the West German Parliament’s transportation commission, that all East German drivers need to go back to driving school are only two such examples.

So far, the West German public seems preoccupied with the costs, not the potential benefits, of unity.

Respected West German newspaper columnist Herbert Kremp recently described his countrymen’s equivocal commitment to rescue their East German cousins from economic collapse as akin to passengers on a luxury liner who, when forced to stop for a capsized ship, “lean over the rail to take part in rescuing the survivors, but at the same time admonish the captain not to get so close that he brings his own ship in danger and that, above all, he quickly continues the cruise.”

This sense of detachment may be depressing for those in search of a greater national spirit and generosity, but it is cited by many as a positive sign--one more bit of proof that the romantic lure of a German Sonderweg is weak, if not altogether dead.

West Germany’s democracy certainly has a good track record.

With six chancellors in 41 years, it has been a model of stability.

Highly controversial decisions have been accepted and absorbed, creating a political continuity that has been so successful that much of it is now largely taken for granted.

For example, Schmidt, the chancellor whose thinking led to the Pershing missile deployment in the early 1980s, voted against German rearmament in 1955. The party led for many years by Foreign Minister Genscher, arguably Germany’s most visible Europeanist, voted against German entry to the European Community in 1958, while Chancellor Kohl’s Christian Democrats vehemently opposed West Germany’s rapprochement with Eastern Europe in the early 1970s, a rapprochement he now proudly claims as the basis for Germany’s new relationship with the east.

Surviving the student revolution of the 1960s, the terrorist campaigns of the 1970s and the peace movement in the early 1980s all reinforced Germany’s democratic process, adding to its sense of self-confidence.

Despite all this, the twinge of doubt remains.

“Only a fool would not be concerned,” Springer executive Cramer told an American acquaintance who asked how Jews should react to German unity. “But I don’t believe you have to worry.”

A strong proponent of Germany unity, French political figure Veil paused when asked the ultimate question: Is the monster that was Germany dead?

“I hope so,” she replied. “I hope so.”

Reunification: The Talk of Europe

ALAIN MINC, 41 French businesman-author, maverick in the French ruling class

“Germany will not become the Germany of old. That’s not the problem. Germany is a model democratic country. Germany doesn’t have to worry about its security in the West, where it is not threatened, but the new Germany will be obligated, but the new Germany will be obligated to have very good relations with Russia in order to ensure its security. This is an important point. Tell me, in 10 years who will be the master of the Kremlin? Is it always going to be a reasonable person like Gorbachev? That’s why I think we should give Germany nuclear weapons. I regret that Germany doesn’t have nuclear weapons. It’s crazy. I don’t fear Germany.... My family is a Polish Jewish family. My parents came here in 1931, and all of their family back home perished in the Holocaust.”

NICHOLAS RIDLEY, 61 Ex-British Cabinet minister, fired for these remarks in a magazine interview:

“(European monetary Union) is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe. It has to be thwarted. This rushed takeover by the Germans on the worst possible basis, with the French behaving like poodles to the Germans, is absolutely intolerable.... The detuschemark is always going to be the strongest currency because of their habits... You don’t understand the British people if you don’t understand this point about them.... They can be dared; they can be moved. But being bossed around by a German -- it would cause absolute mayhem in this country, and rightly, I think.”

EMIEL DEN BOER, 17 High School student from the Dutch city of Alkmaar

“Germany will be too big as a single power, although I don’t think there will be a war. My grandparents were in the resistance, and my mother has memories of that. When she sees Germans, she still feels uncomfortable, and I think some of that has rubbed off on me. It is difficult to describe, but the feeling is definitely there. It is an uneasy feeling to watch Germany today. German fascism grew out of poverty and chaos, and that’s East Germany today. That’s where the skinheads are now -- in East Berlin. We must never forget what happened to people so systematically.”

MARTIN BANGEMANN, 55 A West German and vice president of European Commission, Brussels

“I understand the feelings, especially those of our smaller neighbors who’ve had bad experiences with Germany in the course of their history. There’s always uncertainty at turning points, and feelings about the future are determined much more by the memories of the past than by some clear vision of what will happen. But the future also depends on our neighbors. It is possible to have a united Europe that gives a much more stable political framework to overcome some national weakness. Even if the emotional situation in Germany might lead to a certain instability -- then it’s much better to handle this inside (an integrated) Europe than outside. What’s the answer if it is not Europe? What else can give the assurances they seek?

VACHSLAV DASHICHEV, 65 Head of foreign relations department, Institute of World Socialist Systems, Moscow: has advised Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Germany.

“People in France, Britain, the Netherlands and Poland fear first and foremost that Germany will use its economic strength to restore its domination. The remedy is the European (unity) framework; that will reduce the dangers to a minimum. I’ve studied German history. They have tried twice to dominate Europe. Twice they’ve failed. The second time ended in a national catastrophe. I think in the consciousness of the people, these failures have left them wiser in the conviction that they try a third time to go this way, it can promise only a failure far greater than in World War I of World War II. This time it can lead to the annihilation of a nation.

Focus On The New Germany

A comparative look at four Germanys--from the Third Reich through today’s divided nations to tomorrow’s unified state.

Area:

Third Reich: 182,254 sq. mi.

W. Germany: 95,975 sq. mi.

E. Germany: 41,768 sq. mi.

Unified Germany: 137,743 sq. mi.

Population:

Third Reich: 65.4 million

W. Germany: 62.3 million

E. Germany: 16.4 million

Unified Germany: 78.7 million