PERSPECTIVE ON GERMANY : A Nation’s Redemption Rebuffed : Long accused of war-lust, the people make peace their policy. They won’t go to the gulf, and so are called cowards.

Careful, the Germans are marching again! For peace, that is--and in sneakers and jeans, not jackboots and riding pants--and crazy as it seems, it’s just too much peace to take for some people.

For me, a postwar German, this stunning lesson in absurdity and twisted thinking is bewildering--and offensively funny: If we are Nazis, it’s pretty bad, but if we are war opponents, it’s downright frightening. Is the world upside down?

All of a sudden here in America, there is severe “concern” about the large German peace movement. Where newspaper commentators once smelled rising National Socialism in each and every German event, they now talk about the new German “cowards” who refuse to go to the Persian Gulf, shirking their duty to kill, something that would have made them heroes in the eyes of the world only 48 years ago. Some opinion-makers in Europe, too, express worry over “too much pacifism” and “ostrich policy,” and I say: There is a war going on and for once Germany doesn’t want to go--isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?

Wasn’t it only yesterday that the Germans were feared, mistrusted and looked upon with a generous amount of alarm because of their legendary war-lust? Jackboots marching on their way to foreign countries was a German trademark and made people all over the world tremble with fear and revulsion. Isn’t there some genetic disposition for malicious killing in the German character? some asked. What will become of their offspring; will they all be Nazis, too, and create a Fourth Reich?

It is quite a devastating legacy that I had to deal with and I have often felt suffocated by it. “Do you think the Germans have learned from their past?” I was asked in America. I wasn’t sure about the old generation. But we baby-boomers took to the streets, starting in 1968, partly to demonstrate against the Vietnam War and the German authoritarian Establishment, partly to prove to ourselves, our parents and the rest of the world that indeed you can be a German and march to a different, peaceful tune. Some marches for peace have worked well for us Germans. Less than two years ago the Berlin Wall fell because of a people who believed that dreams can come true by marching hand in hand, peacefully. The unification of Germany has confirmed that the power of peace poses fewer moral questions and nightmares than the perils of war.

When I was a teen-ager in the early 1960s, my father, a stern anti-Nazi, forced me to watch all TV documentaries on the Third Reich, for which I am grateful. Over and over again, I still see the stark, memorable black-and-white marching operas by the inimitable Wehrmacht, the SS and the Storm Troopers, a picture of perfection in horror; indelible images. I don’t know at what age I made the decision to never be part of or support anything that requires marching soldiers and slaughtering innocent people, but I know that I overdosed on uniforms and marching soldiers for the rest of my life. Coming from a long line of perpetrators, I wanted never to be a perpetrator myself.

Now there’s another war going on, but bombing raids over beautiful cities, the piercing sounds of sirens, flag-waving patriots and a powerful country gone dizzy with outbursts of nationalism of the scary kind doesn’t sit well with a German--not with the old ones and not with the younger and very young Germans. Can we be blamed? I grew up among old people whose friends and loved one died innocently in the raging firestorms over Hamburg and Dresden, the same people who allowed 6 million Jews to perish in the gas chambers. What other chance does one have after having grown up in the shadow of Nazi crimes than to become a pacifist, a peace marcher, an opponent of male bombing extravaganzas and killing orgies ordered by pompous, egomaniacal statesmen? Maybe that’s why the majority of the Germans, young and old, don’t want to fight in the gulf.

Is it so inconceivable that there are people who have a very good reason to think of war, any war, as a crime they don’t ever want to commit again? Is it asking too much to not just respect but to applaud and admire the Germans, who once taught the world horror, for doing exactly what everybody hoped they would do--before they were needed in the gulf?

I had always looked for some form of redemption for the sins of our fathers among my peers, now a generation in their early 40s, and among their offspring. Regardless of some romantic idealism, blurry visions, mixed-up ideas and righteous America-bashing, I’m happy and proud to report that they are where they ought to be: not in uniform but on the streets of Germany protesting war, greed, imperialism, dictators and the scandalous fact that some German factories sold chemical weapons components to Iraq. I don’t call that cowardice. I call that hope.