Gulf War Is a Divisive Factor for the Newly United Germans : Politics: Some say not enough was done to help the allies. Others say it took more courage to refuse to enter the conflict.

For the Germans, last October’s unification seemed as much the start of a new era as the end of the country’s long division. This was to be a time of hope in which a rich, enlightened Germany would recoup its full sovereignty, finally lay to rest a guilt-laden past and lead Europe toward its own peaceful reconciliation.

Then came the Gulf War.

Instead of settling into the role as the main architect of a new Europe, an ill-prepared German political leadership has found itself preoccupied with a wrenching debate over the nation’s reaction to the war.

It is a tortured discussion that has centered on the country’s insufficient support for its allies who fought against Iraq and a rejection by many Germans of the idea of war itself. For Germans, the debate is filled with depressingly familiar themes of moral rights and wrongs. It is loaded with such words as “shame” and “guilt.” It is often sparse in its subtlety.

“The Germans are cowards,” declared Ortwin Lowak, a member of Parliament for the Christian Social Union and a junior member of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s three-party coalition.

“They are hiding behind the constitution,” he added, referring to the ambiguous wording that successive governments have interpreted as forbidding the deployment of German military forces outside the Western alliance region.

Lowak argued that the interpretation is purposely narrow, probably invalid and politically short-sighted. “We have to learn from history, but this doesn’t mean that German soldiers shouldn’t be committed to stop an aggressor such as (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein,” he said. “We’re losing our reputation as a reliable partner.”

Other Germans, with equal emotion, saw the issue differently.

They saw Germany’s reluctance to be drawn into the Gulf War as proof that the country has learned a pivotal lesson of history: to reject militarism. These voices note that the allies who criticized Germany for failing to provide military help are the same nations that formally approved the 1949 constitution that prevents Germany from deploying military forces.

Those sensitive to German history also quickly reject calls for a quick amendment that would permit deployment and end the ambiguity and the country’s painful isolation from its allies.

The feelings of German guilt at not joining the Gulf War remain weaker than the lingering guilt of permitting earlier, swift constitutional changes under political pressure--changes that enabled Adolf Hitler to take power in 1933.

“For Germans, especially, the lesson is you don’t play with the constitution or change it easily,” commented Ruediger von Wechmar, former West German ambassador to the United Nations and now a member of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. “The change should come but not under the pressure of this war.”

Public opinion polls showed that most Germans supported the Gulf War and the allies, with younger people about evenly split on the issue. But many here also believe that it would have been fundamentally wrong and politically damaging for the first major act of a freshly united Germany to reassert itself as a military power.

“After what has happened this century, consider the reaction in countries like France, the Netherlands or Belgium, if Germany’s first act as a sovereign country was to re-establish itself as a military power,” said Rita Suessmuth, president of the Bundestag, the German parliament.

Gerd Bastian--a retired major general in the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, and a leading figure in the powerful German peace movement of the early 1980s--observed that this country behaved “courageously by refusing to take part” in the Gulf War.

“It takes far more courage to resist these pressures than to go along with everyone to the sound of polite applause,” Bastian said. “The Germans have done enough with weapons this century. Our job as a nation should be to provide humanitarian help for those affected and to help rebuild Kuwait and Iraq.”

The nation’s media have also taken up the debate.

“Are the Germans shirkers?” asked the leading news weekly, Der Spiegel, on its cover early last month. In another magazine cover story, Munich-based Bunte Illustrierte asked, “Should I be ashamed to be German?” It then devoted much of its article to an interview with a prominent historian who described his countrymen as muddled-thinking, spoiled cowards, paralyzed by the fear of conflict because they want to be loved by everyone.

Hans-Peter Schwarz, a political scientist from Bonn’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, complained that Germans seem to have swung from one extreme to the other--from a total obsession for power to the complete rejection of it. “We must learn to hitch ourselves to reasonable international actions,” he said.

The debate has even split Germany’s left, with leading figures such as Wolf Biermann and Hans Magnus Enzenberger effectively endorsing the war against Iraq.

Revelations that German companies were heavily involved in helping Iraq produce chemical and biological weapons--which were thought to be a threat to the Israelis as well as Germany’s military allies--only added to the national sense of dismay and deepened the feelings of guilt.

As Bastian observed, “For Germans, the feelings of guilt are very strong.”

German dignitaries visiting Israel also were subject to a wave of insults. In Tel Aviv, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher was greeted by a protest sign that said: “Germans killed my parents, now they help Saddam.” Commented the German illustrated magazine Stern, “Old and new guilt, combined in one sign.”

As the debate about Germany’s role in the Gulf conflict continued, many believe that President Richard von Weizsaecker best captured the country’s mood when he said, “The nation feels itself confused and lost.”

Some Germans, such as Bundestag President Suessmuth, saw some good in the war debate (“As a nation, it has made us think about what values we really stand for,” she said). But often bitter discussions percolate through every level of German society.

Consider:

* After more than 20 hours of sometimes heated debate, trade union leaders at the Airbus Industrie facility in Bremen late last month voted 14 to 9 to block overtime needed to produce vital spare parts for the Anglo-German-Italian Tornado multipurpose plane, which was flown by both the Italian air force and the British Royal Air Force in Gulf combat. A majority of the 3,500-strong work force vehemently disagreed with the decision.

“It wasn’t an easy choice,” said the union’s chairman, Uwe Neuhaus, who admitted that repairing the schism in the work force would be even harder. “It wasn’t a statement against war--it was a statement against this war. The shop floor would have voted the other way.”

* In January, the month the Gulf War began, the number of German draftees and reservists claiming conscientious objector status quadrupled to more than 22,000, even though no German forces were committed to the region.

* Groups of German youths, who opted to complete their national service obligation by working in civilian hospitals instead of serving as soldiers, threatened to refuse treatment to any potential overflow of allied wounded from U.S. military hospitals in Germany.

“We told those doing the planning that if (allied casualties) arrived, they shouldn’t count on our help,” said Matthias Kittmann, spokesman for a Frankfurt-based conscientious objectors’ organization. “We haven’t refused military service just to be transplanted and deployed as civil-military handymen.”

A group of permanent employees at a Nuremberg hospital also told state officials that they would not treat wounded GIs, a move that brought demands from the political right for their immediate dismissal.

* Many participants in the large peace movement said they marched because German history taught them they must act against what they believe is wrong; in this case, war of any kind.

But the anti-American and anti-Israeli overtones to the protests upset both those Germans who believed their country should have done more to support the war and those who marched and now believe their plea for peace was totally misunderstood.

“I’ve always been ashamed of what Germany has done to the Jewish people,” a German woman sobbed to a British Broadcasting Corp. reporter covering a large anti-war rally in Bonn in January. “I can’t say how horrible it is that now the impression in the world is that we are not on the side of Israel . . . because the majority stands right behind Israel and the American people and the whole world.”

The left-leaning Greens--a key force in peace demonstrations, which traces its anti-American sentiments to the struggle against U.S. Pershing 2 nuclear missile deployment in West Germany in the early 1980s--recently added to Germany’s troubles with Israel. Shortly after arriving in Tel Aviv, a senior party spokesman labeled the Scud rocket attacks on that city as “the logical consequence of Israel’s policy toward the Arab states.”

He quickly resigned.

“The situation with Israel is very difficult,” said Suessmuth, who headed a German parliamentary delegation that visited Israel in February. “The years 1945 and 1991 are suddenly linked.”

Germany tried to compensate for the dearth of military and material support with financial assistance, including $10 billion to the United States and $670 million, plus batteries of Patriot missiles, to Israel.

Many also worry that the country may suffer politically for what some of its key allies interpret as little more than German faintheartedness.