What Merkel Would Mean for German Atlanticism
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Looking out across the marshes from Norfolk, where I am on vacation, Germany is only just across the North Sea. Place names here in the region still known as East Anglia are reminders of how England was settled by the Anglo-Saxons a millennium and a half ago. Of the major European nations, the Germans – especially those from the northwest of the country – still have the most striking affinity with the English.
This summer my teenage daughter Edith spent three weeks staying with a family from Hamburg; despite speaking virtually no German, she had no trouble fitting in. Indeed, she was struck by how similar to London everything seemed in Hamburg, apart from the family’s weekend cottage, straight out of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”
There is, of course, the war. When I asked Edith’s host why the elegant district where they lived had survived the firestorm that destroyed Hamburg in 1943, he politely explained that “Bomber” Harris of the Royal Air Force had targeted not only docks and factories but also the workers’ quarter, leaving the apartments where the Nazi officials lived largely unscathed. The aim, apparently, was to foment opposition to the Nazi elite. If so, it failed. Outside these houses there are now tiny metal plaques among the paving stones, commemorating the largely Jewish residents who had perished in the Holocaust. Their apartments had been taken by the Nazis, some of whom must still be living there.
In German “die Vergangenheit,” the past, has become a euphemism for the Third Reich – a past that stubbornly refuses to recede. At a diplomatic lunch in London last week, the guest of honor was a politician from East Germany, who was there to talk about the state of research into the former communist regime. But his first words were revealing: “As you know, we Germans lost the war.” He went on to express surprise that a famous wartime photograph of Churchill brandishing a “Tommy” submachine gun was on display at the Cabinet War Rooms, now the Churchill Museum. We were invited to imagine the scandal if a German statesman had been shown in such a pose.
I knew what to expect next: a long discussion about why the British press was still harping on about the war. (Untactful to point out who had first mentioned the subject.) Why, he wanted to know, must every story about Germany – from sport and economics to papal elections – be a reminder of the Nazis? And why did British schools never teach anything about postwar German history?
As it happened, that very evening the BBC devoted 90 minutes of prime-time TV to a documentary called “After the War,” entirely devoted to Germany. I am often critical of the BBC, but this was really excellent. The main narrative told how the Americans and British kept millions of Germans from freezing or starving to death, revived the economy, created a functioning democracy, free press, legal system, etc. But there were also firsthand accounts of the rape of German women and abuse of prisoners by the Allies. Would such a balanced account be shown in Germany in the present atmosphere? Any reminder of how much the German people owed to their postwar Anglo-American military governors would be seen as propaganda for the occupation of Iraq.
Germany has a federal election next month. Already Chancellor Schroeder has played the anti-American card, by pledging that he will have nothing to do with a preventive war against an Iranian regime that is determined to acquire nuclear weapons. Mr. Schroeder gives President Bush no credit for soft-pedaling the issue to give the Europeans the best possible chance to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program. Evidently the chancellor thinks Bush-bashing plays well for him: It neutralizes the appeal of a new rival party on the left and splits his Christian Democrat opponents on the right, whose leader, Angela Merkel, has quietly cultivated the administrations in Washington and London.
So this election will decide, among other things, whether the Germans are now able to treat their Anglo-American allies dispassionately. The election of 2002, which Mr. Schroeder won by campaigning against the Iraq war, was the first to break with the postwar Atlanticist tradition. We are about to find out whether 2002 was an aberration or a precedent. A crucial test will be the showing of the new party, which calls itself simply the Left. It is supposed to be an uneasy coalition of former East German communists and dissident Social Democrats, but its populist rhetoric appeals to neo-Nazis, too. If the Left wins more than 10% of the vote, it may well hold the balance of power. And we already know that Mr. Schroeder will say or do almost anything to cling to office.
This election isn’t really about Iraq or Iran, about which most Europeans care little. Two generations after Hitler’s war, the Germans are at last emerging from his shadow. The victors, and even most of the victims, of that war have long been ready to forgive, if not to forget. But are the Germans ready to stop resenting them? Are they content to let their Anglo-American cousins spread to the Muslim world the same freedom and democracy that most of them have enjoyed for 60 years? Or will they use their votes to empower the demagogues, just as their forebears did in the Weimar Republic?