Where Germany has never been before

National Interest, The, Summer, 1999 by Josef Joffe

In the fall of 1998, the career of Helmut Kohl, Germany's apparent chancellor-in-perpetuity, was terminated after sixteen years in power. Only Prince Bismarck, with nineteen years at the helm of the Second Reich, had ruled Germany longer. The defeat of the sixty-eight year-old chancellor ended not just a political cycle of extraordinary length. October 27, 1998, the day Gerhard Schroder was sworn in as the Federal Republic's seventh chancellor, marked the end of an era in German history.

Born in 1930, Helmut Kohl was the last chancellor who had actually experienced World War II, the surrender of the Third Reich, and the rebirth of West Germany under the loaded guns of the occupiers. While his successor Schroder was in grade school, Kohl witnessed the secular equivalent of transubstantiation: when victors turned into allies, when the most hated people on earth were granted a place in the community of Western nations. To this day, Kohl fondly recalls how his first dark suit, the one he wore on the night of his prom, had come out of an American CARE package - as had his wife-to-be Hannelore's gown. Unlike Schroder and his cohorts, Kohl was already an adult during the darkest days of the Cold War between the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 and the Berlin Wall of 1961.

Today, Germany's foreign and defense policy is run by a trio of men born between 1944 and 1948 who have been formed by very different memories. Gerhard Schroder, the oldest, was seventeen when American and Soviet tanks faced each other across the freshly built Wall near the Brandenburg Gate in 1961. Rudolf Scharping, the defense minister, was fourteen. And Josef ("Joschka") Fischer, the foreign minister, was thirteen. But the dividing line between the Kohl and Schroder generations is not just a matter of biology.

In the early 1970s, Gerhard Schroder was head of the Jungsozialisten in Hannover, the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Compared to the "Jusos", the American Students for a Democratic Society seemed like a well-kempt bunch of Ayn Rand acolytes. Later, as national Juso chairman, the young "Marxist", as he called himself, would pooh-pooh classic Social Democratic attempts to reform capitalism, demanding instead the "abolition of our current economic system." During the same period, Fischer, the trio's youngest, was teaching urban combat tactics to his comrades from the Revolutionarer Kampf ("Revolutionary Struggle") in the Frankfurt woods. The targets of their rock attacks were the "pigs" and, occasionally, the institutions of "American imperialism" in Frankfurt. Rudolf Scharping, Germany's current defense minister and also a former Juso leader, was almost expelled from the Social Democratic Party for distributing flyers badmouthing the Bundeswehr, the Federal Armed Forces.

All three came of political age in the heady Sixties when they imbibed pretty much the same ideological brew in the "anti-imperialist struggle" against the Vietnam War: anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism and "anti-anticommunism", plus what the French call tiers-mondisme (especially of the "anti-Zionist" variety) and contempt for "bourgeois" political virtues such as moderation, compromise and pluralism. They grew up in a political milieu where it was licit to express at least hedged sympathy for those like the Red Army Faction who would push the "revolutionary struggle" all the way to arson, abduction and armed terror.

From Youth to Middle Age So where is that trio now? Is ideology really destiny? Of course not. Indeed, nothing can be more heartening to worried Germany watchers than the wondrous transformation of Schroder and colleagues as they moved into middle age and the middle of the road. Phenomenologically at least, the mutation was nothing if not spectacular. Schroder, the former Juso radical, now sports Hermes ties, and the only thing remotely "red" about him is his pricey Cuban Cohiba cigars. Since moving to the head of the Foreign Office, Fischer has been wearing only gray three-piece suits; when sworn in as ecology minister in his home state of Hesse in 1985, he was still sporting jeans and white Nike running shoes for a little epater les bourgeois. Sending his Bundeswehr boys off to their staging areas in Macedonia in early 1999, Scharping looked as if he had worn army fatigues all his adult life. Yet after high school, he served only for a few months. While his cohorts were putting in their obligatory eighteen months, Scharping managed to get out of the barracks and into the university.

The Bundeswehr makes for the crudest irony of them all. At the beginning of the air campaign against Serbia in March 1999, it was the Red-and-Green Schroder-Fischer government that sent German strike aircraft into combat for the first time since World War II. Half a century after Adolf Hitler had taken his armies to the gates of Moscow and Cairo, it was a coalition of leftists and pacifists that dispatched German combat troops to the Balkan theater. Only four years earlier, Helmut Kohl, the pro-Western conservative, had established as holy writ that "the Bundeswehr shall not tread where the Wehrmacht has conquered."(1) All gone and forgotten now - discarded by leaders whose parties in the past had gone to the brink of insurrection over such matters.