Germany as a Great Power

...There is a second tendency that has come out of Kosovo, besides this erosion of historical accountability: an erosion of the sense of exactly why America remains in Europe...

...Its popularity, in tandem with the ruling coalition’s recent collapse in the new states, has led some left-wing SPD members— including Lafontaine—to urge welcoming the PDS into a new coalition defending the welfare state...

...These are real fascist parties...

...There are a lot of signs that Germans want to shuck off their anguished relationship to the past—especially their need to hang their heads in the company of other nations...

...The result was a stunning second-place finish for Haider, the largest tally for a right-wing party in Austria since the Second World War...

...Schr?der is typical of that class, in both his leadership style and his reading of German history...

...At last, Germany has gone into battle on the side of right...

...Schr?der has taken on the lumpy, dumpy, harried look that seems to come with the chancellor’s job—less sex-symbol than sexagenarian...

...Some have said that his problem is that he lacks a project— like Blair’s moral agenda, or Clinton’s moralistic one—that would give Germans something in return for relinquishing their welfare state...

...Schleswig-Holstein is still solid SPD territory, but the CDU’s ex-defense minister, Volker Ruhe, is given a good chance of winning...

...The resolutely monoglot Schr?der is said to get along quite badly with French premier Lionel Jospin...

...The most common explanation for Schr?der’s woes is that unlike Blair, who had first to reform his party before coming to power, Schr?der has to rule with an antiquated SPD...

...The Jusos, the short-haired 1999 version, huddled around snickering and hissing and rolling their eyes...

...That became clear during last summer’s big intellectual controversy, over a speech that the (hitherto) leftist philosopher Peter Sloterdijk gave at a Heidegger symposium at Elmau castle in June...

...In contrast to the similarly centrist Clinton and Blair campaigns, the Schr?der campaign was keen to hype its man’s origins in the 1960s counterculture...

...It’s even an official currency of Montenegro...

...Instead, when Schr?der and Blair released a joint policy statement last summer, largely a collection of bromides on privatization and civic morality, old-line German socialists were horrified...

...The biographical info was meant to contrast Schr?der’s “youth” with the fogyish, trapped-in-the-Cold-War leadership of Schr?der’s predecessor, Helmut Kohl...

...It’s just that he made it amply clear that he thinks the “working off of the past,” as Germans call it, is for all intents accomplished...

...Schr?der wants, like the American and British pols he has met at international conferences, to replace his rank-and-file industrial workers with chic yuppie entrepreneurs...

...It’s not...

...Munich has led explosive growth in Bavaria, which under a low-tax state government has become Germany’s California, its high-tech and banking capital...

...German political scientists describe the SPD as a “milieu” party that grew out of labor shops...

...You don’t have to believe in a Sonderweg (or “special path”) for Germany to realize that, especially with its capital in Berlin, the country has something of a Sonderlage (or “special situation...

...Schr?der would face a challenge from within the SPD at his next sign of weakness, so he moved frantically to shore up his position in the party...

...Nor did he put up much of a fuss when the project passed the Bundestag last summer...

...Bonn, the Cold War capital, despite the departure of all Germany’s government ministries except defense, has seen home prices rise and unemployment rates fall to Bavarian—or American—levels...

...That tendency came to the fore during the Kosovo conflict, which was more marked by dangerous sanctimony in Germany than it was elsewhere...

...There is no sign of anything like an appreciation of the Holocaust’s uniqueness returning to German public speech...

...And right now, that’s simply no contest...

...While the United States can be persuaded to bomb Europe, it cannot be persuaded to care about it, let alone listen to its wishes...

...He campaigned in 1998 as a pro-business centrist, Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THEWEEKLY STANDARD...

...The divergence between the United States and all European countries over the future shape of the Balkans only narrowly missed a public airing in early November, when Washington decided not to dissent publicly from a European decision to send heating aid to Serbian civilians this winter...

...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Hamburg, Germany German chancellor Gerhard Schr?der’s speeches have always been like rock concerts...

...Among them, yuppie defense minister Rudolf Scharping had the most lean and hungry look...

...One must stress that Germany’s Social Democrats and Greens are not making any nationalistic military noises, only European ones...

...The Frankf?rter Allgemeine Zeitung worried that the Sloterdijk debate might represent the “metaphysical founding of the Berlin Republic...

...That includes Berlin—although everyone, investors and residents alike, expects the city to prosper once its infrastructure gets built...

...For all his clownish leftism, no one expected Schr?der to fail quite this badly...

...Germany has created only 900,000 jobs in services to make up for the 3 million it has lost in industry in the 1990s...

...The party hasn’t won any...

...Schr?der had been Juso president 20 years ago, when, as a budding William Kunstler, he represented a Red Army Faction collaborator in court and carried “Ammis ’raus...

...But that’s a big part of the problem...

...But by this past October, just a year later, when the Social Democrats held their Hamburg Party Day in a bleak suburban auditorium during a downpour, Schr?der was looking his age—which is three years older than Kohl was when Kohl took power in 1982...

...Once elected, Schr?der ditched Stollman’s ideas (and Stollman himself) for the policies of his party chief and finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, a hard-line Social Democrat who pushed through a demand-side tax reform...

...Ever since they sent German youth into the streets in their tens of thousands to protest the stationing of American missiles on German soil in the early 1980s, the Greens have stood as much for peace as for the environment...

...The PDS is becoming chic for populist intellectuals and eastern yuppies who inhabit such middle-middle-class suburbs as Hellersdorf-Marzahn...

...Others say that he lacks a figure like Lionel Jospin’s social affairs minister Martine Aubry, a lightning rod who could satisfy leftists in his party that they’re represented, and provide a whipping boy inside the government, against whom Schr?der could establish his credibility as a reformer...

...But the chancellor’s rivals were multiplying...

...The more you like Bonn, the stupider you are...

...The election of the first chancellor with no personal memory of World War II, along with the transfer of the country’s capital from Bonn back to Berlin earlier this year, was supposed to signal Germany’s reentry into Europe as “a normal country...

...The movement’s newspaper, the National-Zeitung, comes with (a) a blow-in card that’s a bank-transfer form for making a tax-free contribution to the DVU...

...In fact, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s recipe of protecting a welfare state while trimming its worst excesses should have worked better in Germany than anywhere else...

...Sloterdijk took this, in the context of biotechnology, to mean that people would soon become the actual authors of life...

...Bested by Schr?der in a battle to dominate the Jusos in the 1970s, and bested by Lafontaine in a battle to run the party in 1995, Scharping had recently published his own memoir— largely about how he’d singlehandedly won the Kosovo war...

...he sputtered, “and we cannot let them do it...

...This nostalgia is beginning to take a more overtly political form...

...touting as his economics minister the computer entrepreneur Jost Stollman, who had called Germany’s welfare system “a prison for the average wage earner...

...The EU has put former NATO secretary general Javier Solana in charge of formulating a common defense policy...

...The difference is that in the Kohl era, Germany would have dissented from any European plans to punch out breathing room from the United States...

...They know their neighborhood— no, their society—is being reconfigured to exclude them...

...Again: Europeans, not Germans...

...If he was impressive as he harangued a standoffish crowd of a couple thousand party regulars, it was in that way hungover Germans describe as bleich aber gefa?t—ashen but composed...

...Clinton may have infuriated the country by starting his administration with gays in the military, national health, and Lani Guinier, but his stabs at ruling from the left bought him a lot of credibility with Democratic hard-liners, who have stuck with him for the duration of his presidency...

...Particularly his fourth—Doris K?pf, the kittenish tabloid reporter half Schr?der’s age who’d spent her own divorced years hanging around the art world in lower Manhattan...

...On top of that, Germany’s longstanding middle-oftheroad consensus should have made the center at least as unassailable a governing perch as it has proved for Tony Blair in Britain...

...It was a typically German political mess...

...And that is not the only thing leaching votes from the major parties: There are also a number of right-wing parties...

...Foreign minister Fischer, once among Germany’s most anti-American politicians, says, “Europe must work in tandem with the United States...

...But it means: The ball’s in your court...

...The only hint of rock ’n’ roll came on the T-shirts worn by a dozen representatives of the Young Socialists (Jusos), the nationwide organization of militants-in-training...

...They’d also tell you about his boozing, his love of Cuban cigars, his four wives...

...If you want to avoid decoupling, you need to stay here...

...Germany borders on nine countries, more than any other European nation...

...Schr?der has failed to follow any one plan long enough to win himself any credibility anywhere...

...During last year’s campaign they often were rock concerts...

...In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the fascist National party was sitting in the legislatures of 9 of 11 states...

...He belittled Habermas as one of “the traumatized children of the postwar,” and bade such traumas goodbye...

...In neighboring Austria in August, the socialist premier Viktor Klima, facing a tight race against J?rg Haider’s hard-right Austrian Freedom party, set up a Clintonstyle “war room” that focused on getting out a “Stop Haider” message...

...It was easy to get your hands on 20-year-old photos of Schr?der marching at No-Nukes rallies in torn blue-jeans, a bra-less babe on each arm—his campaign would give them to you...

...The impression it leaves is that Europeans are looking for a pretext for a modest decoupling without the appearance of continental unilateralism...

...They would have to take responsibility for the people they meant to create in test tubes, since that kind of reproduction was the wave of the future, and decide which human types they wanted to save and which to kill off...

...That party will ensure that no money will be left for children...

...Fischer’s own Green party may turn out to be the biggest German casualty of Kosovo...

...That sounds cooperative...

...It was doubly ridiculous given the German schooling and apprentice system, under which even union workers often don’t enter the work force until their late twenties: which, in turn, in this age of rising life expectancy, means something like 30 years of work to support 85 years of life...

...What’s more, it should have been both easy and popular to attack some of the more obviously stifling trappings of the old economy—like laws forcing stores to close at sundown (making shopping after work impossible), or the ban on advertising money-back guarantees...

...Many urge turning the Western European Union, heretofore a tiny consulting body for defense issues, into a real military alliance...

...Anti-fascism is almost a state religion in the western states, and one would have thought anti-communism a hard-learned conviction in the eastern ones...

...He had just spent a half-year establishing himself as a person who could be trusted on the economy, but now he threw it all out the window...

...Just because Schr?der doesn’t remember the war doesn’t mean he was untouched by it...

...And he had a long memory...

...This gloomy development may help Schr?der to focus the attention of his voters, however cynically, on a centrist program...

...But it does not accord with what German defense thinkers are saying...

...Instead, the parties are breaking apart, and communism is reassembling its followers in the east...

...The Hamburg gathering took place the day before Berlin’s municipal elections, on October 10...

...even the Franco-German relationship is passing through a period of neglect, after having been jealously fostered by Helmut Schmidt and Val?ry Giscard d’Estaing, then Helmut Kohl and Fran?ois Mitterrand...

...Puny though it is, it’s stalled in both houses...

...The port of Hamburg, reconnected to eastern Europe via the Elbe, is booming...

...The growing economies of central Europe seem destined to draw much of their investment capital from, and invest in the stock markets of, either Berlin or Moscow...

...Nor is Germany unique in bristling at how little say Europe had in the prosecution of a war on its own soil...

...Still, it’s unlikely his stoking fears of the right will alter the loyalties of many rightwing voters...

...The SPD has also lost its majority in the Bundesrat, Germany’s upper house...

...Foreign minister Joschka Fischer, who leads the junior partner in Schr?der’s governing coalition, the Greens, explains the chancellor’s position as “comparable to Bill Clinton’s in the first half of his first term...

...Another alleges that the German massacres at Oradour in France were undertaken for good reason...

...Indeed, so zealously have German politicians invoked the parallel that it sometimes seems, for Germans at least, as if fostering historical amnesia was the whole point of the Kosovo operation...

...Particularly since the days when Helmut Kohl used to alter his speaking schedule to make sure he could catch Dallas...

...Alluding to rumors that he sought the chancellorship— rumors he himself had started—Scharping made a disingenuous bid for power: “How stupid do you think I am,” he complained, “if you think that after twenty-five years in the SPD I’d look at the Defense Ministry as the road to the chancellor’s spot...

...His father was killed fighting for the Wehrmacht in Romania days after he was born...

...Klaus Sojka’s “Photos that Lie: Photoswindle against Germany” (with an introduction by David Irving...

...Americans out!] placards at anti-missile rallies...

...and no discrimination (i.e., according European Union NATO members greater protection than non-EU NATO members...

...Other countries are beginning to question the measly arms procurement and the downsized armies that have left Europe beholden to a faraway country that doesn’t (they feel) understand Europe’s interests...

...If I wanted to be chancellor, I’d be better off talking about the gap between rich and poor, between the strong and the weak, between east and west, and the social order in the job market...

...But that’s partly because it is split in three parts, each too fractious to break the 5 percent minimum for taking seats in the Bundestag...

...Now that Fischer has shown himself to be one of the more bellicose members of the German government, a long-standing intra-party feud between Fischer’s pragmatic “Realos” and the more utopian “Spontis,” led by environment minister J?rgen Trittin, is breaking into the open...

...Nonetheless, Germany’s recent immunity to political extremism appears to be breaking down...

...It’s not that Schr?der’s opposition was full-throated...

...A half-hour of Schr?der boilerplate—about how “fresh wind” from “the New Middle” would carry “the New Germany” into “the upswing”—would be sandwiched into a sunny Saturday afternoon of blues guitarists and danceable rock combos...

...It is the biggest winner in European unification...

...no duplication (i.e., building NATO-style weapons that would allow Europe to dispense with NATO...

...He used his new finance minister, Hans Eichel, to hold the line on spending and press a 30.5-billion DM ($20 billion) “savings package...

...Germany under Schr?der is ready to share a typically European (or typically French) dissatisfaction with the Atlantic alliance— another sign that it feels it has lifted the historical weight of World War II to its own satisfaction...

...The continent is now abjectly dependent on U.S...

...Seen from one angle, the chancellor’s statement is less a hegemonic claim than a statement of fact...

...Germany is not in the worst shape it’s been vis-?-vis the postwar right...

...It’s the economy and the state as well, both of which are grinding slowly down...

...Sources familiar with the thinking of the last two chancellors are absolutely unequivocal on the matter: Neither Helmut Schmidt nor Helmut Kohl would have backed the American-led war over Kosovo...

...And when the aide who’d set the paper up—Bodo Hombach, guru of the German “Third Way”—came under investigation for laundering money through Canadian real estate, the project was wholly discredited...

...This was ridiculous because it more than undid the exceedingly modest pension reform that Schr?der was trying to pass as part of his savings plan...

...The early retirements, you see, would open up jobs for younger workers...

...The former Communists—once the Socialist Unity party, now the party of Democratic Socialism or PDS—still get only 1 percent of the vote in the old Bundesrepublik...

...When J?rgen Habermas, for years a kind of philosophical guru of Germany’s soft-left consensus, attacked Sloterdijk in Die Zeit for running dangerously close to Nazi eugenics, Sloterdijk simply upped the ante...

...Schr?der’s party was expected to get clobbered again—and did, losing to the Christian Democrats and nearly falling to third place behind the newly revived party of Democratic Socialism (the former East German Communist party...

...You can replace those jobs with service jobs, but no western country has succeeded in replacing them with more heavy industrial employment, as Germany has tried—and failed—to do...

...The French, as evidenced by Jacques Chirac’s November condemnation of a “unipolar” (American) defense order, are much further along in their wishes for a European military that, if not fully independent of the United States, can at least act independently...

...The beatings will stop for the next six months, with no big regional elections scheduled until SchleswigHolstein and (once again) North Rhine/Westphalia next spring...

...On the back of the T-shirts, under the heading “The Gerhard Schr?der/Tony Blair Oh-Yes-We-Understood-You-Perfectly Tour 1999,” was a list of what looked like concert venues, starting with “June 13—Saarland...

...Today, the fragmented extremists hold only their handful of local seats...

...At the Hamburg Party Day, Schr?der took a page out of Bill Clinton’s playbook, screaming at the top of his lungs to paint the CDU as extremists who would squander all the money he had earmarked for Germany’s needy...

...Since the day Schr?der came to power, IG Metall, the largest union in Germany, had been making the ridiculous and dangerous demand that the age at which its members can retire with full benefits should fall to 60...

...With Schr?der in trouble and Lafontaine discredited, Scharping began to see political daylight for the first time since he was drubbed running for chancellor against Kohl in 1994...

...His speech, which leaked out only piecemeal until he published it in September, concerned an opaque passage in the “Letter on Humanism,” where Heidegger refers to humans as the “shepherds of Sein” (Being...

...Instead, Schr?der is raising worries that the “Berlin Republic” will be significantly different from the “Bonn Republic” that had scored such successes in putting other western countries at ease...

...But Schr?der, Fischer, and defense minister Rudolf Scharping joined the battle with gusto...

...shouted Schr?der at Hamburg Party Day—forgetting that Germany has always thought it was going into battle on the side of right...

...By the time Schr?der got the as-bad-as-expected news from Berlin voters, the knives were out for him in his party...

...But when Germany showed negative growth and rising unemployment during Schr?der’s first quarter in office, Schr?der pushed Lafontaine out...

...It remains a live issue...

...As Schr?der sat impassively at the head table, his fellow socialists strode past him one by one to expatiate on his failures, like doctors diagnosing a backsliding patient, or farmers discussing a beast of burden...

...And these are not global-economy skeptics, ? la Pat Buchanan or Switzerland’s Christoph Blocher, who merely have some odd affiliations and odder enthusiasms...

...Scharping’s ambitions and the Berlin elections put the writing on the wall...

...In an open letter to Habermas, he wrote: “The era of overly normal sons of National Socialist fathers is coming, naturally, to a close...

...That’s why it’s not just Schr?der’s party that’s unready for him...

...b) headlines that incite anti-immigrant paranoia (“Gypsy Influx Without End...

...It’s important not to overstate the actual political strength of Germany’s hard right, which is nil...

...Whether it’s due to a spike in good taste or to a lack of curiosity about what other countries are thinking, the percentage of those watching American TV series has gone down precipitously...

...C-17 and Hercules C-130 cargo planes for transporting mat?riel...

...But the PDS is becoming the second party in much of the east, where it routinely gets upwards of 20 percent—as much as 35 percent in East Berlin...

...Once he caved in, everything went but the propensity for euphemism...

...In discussions of Kosovo, the line between ordinary (albeit tragic) human rights abuses and the humanityaltering enormity of the Holocaust was trampled over by German politicians until it disappeared...

...Not that the Berlin Republic doesn’t have certain new strengths...

...Two days later, in a story that is almost literally unbelievable outside of Germany, he caved in to IG Metall...

...On the one hand, we can grant that he knows what he’s talking about when he says, as he did during the campaign, “We must never return to German nationalism, for it leads only to desolation, destruction, and death...

...The deutsche mark is an alternative currency in all of the Eastern European states, and is the actual currency in much of the Balkans, too...

...There’s even an ad for Dr...

...His labor minister Walter Riester pretended to agree with IG Metall that early retirement would “create jobs” and maybe even work as a “solution to unemployment...

...The newest and most dynamic of the right-wing factions, the German People’s Union (DVU), is a collection of historical revisionists who have sizable delegations in two state parliaments— Saxony Anhalt and Brandenburg (the region that makes up the Berlin suburbs...

...The book’s huge popularity made clear that it is Lafontaine’s welfarestatist ideas, not Schr?der’s Third Way, that command a majority in the SPD...

...His newest mortal enemy, Lafontaine, had just published a long-awaited memoir (The Heart Beats Left), which had gossipy detail on Lafontaine’s falling out with the chancellor...

...United behind one leader, the right could reach into high single digits, roughly the level the PDS hovered at just five years ago...

...On the other hand, a Kohl-generation German would not have said, as Schr?der did for a trade union publication last summer, that Germany should take its place as a “great power” (Gro?macht) in Europe...

...That accords with Madeleine Albright’s insistence that any independent European force avoid the “three Ds”: no decoupling (i.e., creating a military force independent of NATO...

...Some eastern Germans openly express a preference for the old regime...

...As for decoupling: “Europe needs the United States as a pacifier,” says a high-ranking German military officer who demands anonymity...

...That is, a wealth tax of the sort that even France’s socialists are determined to scrap as too damaging to their economy...

...Opinion is hardening that if he loses there again, he will have to resign...

...It then continued with a list of dates and places: Brandenburg, Thuringia, North Rhine/Westphalia, Saxony...

...Lafontaine was always too independent for such a role...

...But Germany never had the Thatcherite or Reaganite reforms that are the precondition for yuppie ascendancy...

...You may never have heard of Sloterdijk, but in a country that still accords celebrity status to public philosophers, he is one of the best-known...

...And it was dangerous because under German law, the minister of labor is required to declare IG Metall’s negotiations binding on all other unions, under an “obligatory usage treaty...

...The move to Berlin was championed most eagerly by the leadership class...

...As long as he was standing firm against the union, Schr?der had tried to finesse the issue: “We’re not arguing over principle,” he would say, “but the thing just isn’t financeable...

...Germany—with its government-sponsored wage agreements reaching $40 an hour and its cradle-to-grave health and social programs— had more room to cut without causing voters to suffer in any serious way...

...But it also draws from losers and revanchists, and with no district in Berlin under 13 percent unemployment, there are a lot of those to draw from...

...That, in turn, has led to increasing complaints, all over Europe, that the Pentagon won’t share its know-how and won’t open up its own defense procurement to foreign contractors...

...Within hours of the Sunday elections Schr?der endorsed a “wealth tax” of the sort called for by the Jusos (those socialists who’d never held a job...

...One article traces “English air-war plans from the time of the Weimar Republic...

...As such, Schr?der’s program is aimed at a class and a German mindset that don’t yet exist...

...This is the same thinking French economists have pursued under the Jospin government, in trying to set up a maximum 35-hour workweek...

...German politicians complain obsessively that the United States was never “engaged” in Kosovo, that it followed its habitual cycle of ignore-ignore-ignore-destroy...

...Even as resolute an Atlanticist as former president Richard von Weizs?cker recently gave an interview to Die Zeit in which he urged creation of a Europe-only Rapid Reaction Force...

...Germany seems destined to dominate east-central Europe much as America does the world: benignly, and by sheer market penetration...

...One might have expected that the ruling classes of Germany would have been wary of moving the capital from Bonn, and that the nationalist rabble would have pushed it...

...But Schr?der’s great-power rhetoric struck many Germans as boorish, particularly since there’s an impatience in certain quarters to reclaim European power status right now...

...And yet the opposite was the case: There was a saying in Bonn during the narrow 338320 vote over moving the capital: Je Bonner, desto dummer...

...These are the regional elections the SPD has lost since the early summer...

...He’s losing his hair, and at the Hamburg gathering he had a cold...

...Trittin’s people complain that Fischer’s Realos will do anything—absolutely anything— to stay in the ruling coalition: You could suggest dropping nuclear waste on Biafran villages, one Green remarked, and they’d say, “How much do you need...

...Foreign minister Fischer explained his departure from a lifelong pacifism by saying, “I’ve learned not only to say ‘No more wars,’ but also ‘No more Auschwitz.’” And, “The bombs are necessary to stop the ‘Serbian SS.’” Defense minister Scharping added that Serbia is “a look into the ugly face of the German past, of mass murder, selection, and concentration camps...

...They’re not dumb...

...and (c) page after page of allegations that everything we think we know about German atrocities during World War II is diametrically wrong...

...In other words, Scharping was inviting Germans to compare his own defense policy (a resounding success, he thought) with Schr?der’s domestic policy (an outright flop...

...German politicians still speak constantly about Kosovo...

...The young filmmaker Leander Hau?mann’s Sonnenallee—a coming-of-age comedy about 1970s East Berlin that resembles a Happy Days in which the secret police replaces the Fonz—has been playing in the east to theaters packed with laughing nostalgics...

...North Rhine/Westphalia— home, with its gigantic cities of Dortmund and Cologne, to almost a quarter of the German population— was the SPD’s very backbone until Schr?der lost there last summer...

...Scharping’s number-one preoccupation at present is purely a matter of duplication: getting Europe’s defense ministers to agree on a standard transport plane, probably the Airbus A400M...

...But that can’t be the problem, either, because Clinton has succeeded wonderfully in governing with a Democratic party that, in 1992 at least, was stuck in its old ways...

...Part of the reporting for this article was done on a week-long visit sponsored by the Robert Bosch Foundation and Atlantik-Br?cke...

...Oradour: How It Really Was: Covered-up Crimes of the Maquisards...

...But the only deregulation that has occurred either came during the Kohl administration (finally allowing companies to compensate their executives with stock options, for example) or has been forced on Germany by European integration (like energy deregulation, which has cut electricity bills by up to 70 percent over the last decade...

...And when the mayor of Hamburg rose to say, “Gerhard Schr?der is the best horse we have in the barn,” the audience began to boo him, too...

...Now, in the wake of his electoral catastrophes, Schr?der looks ready to hang Eichel out to dry...

...If Germany dawdles further on reform, this grinding down will soon make Europe’s largest nation an unstable and contentious place...

...Complete dependence on American decision-making is just something we can no longer afford,” he said, particularly in light of Kosovo and the “irresponsible, brutal unilateralism” demonstrated by the Senate’s rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty...

...Even if it’s enacted, it won’t take effect until 2001...

...The DVU is the personal creation of Gerhard Frey, a Munich-based direct mail and publishing mogul...

...The difference is that Schr?der’s party is dying...

...Unfortunately, many of the people at IG Metall are already only working 32-hour weeks...

...Then there’s the matter of the Holocaust memorial planned for the very center of Berlin, a project of the greatest importance to Kohl, which Schr?der opposed...

...On the gentrifying streets of Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, speculative sushi bars and art galleries and Italian sunglasses boutiques line blocks that are still inhabited by men with rotten teeth and 1970s Soviet Bloc zipper jackets...

...In the information age, heavy industrial employment just . . . goes, and with it goes the SPD’s voting base...

...Schr?der is in an untenable position...

...Such solipsism goes beyond antiAmericanism...

...It’s this erosion that Schr?der’s politics of the New Middle is meant to address...

...Bavaria’s 5 percent jobless rate is a clear sign that business-friendly tax policies can buy immunity from the German curse of structural unemployment (still well into double digits nationally...

...So Schr?der’s faction met Lafontaine’s book as an act of treason...

...But although the government has pumped a trillion marks worth of aid into the former East Germany since the wall came down, all the cities in the eastern part of the country are shrinking, economically and demographically...