The Angry Adolescent of Europe
Caldwell, Christopher
The Angry Adolescent of Europe Irresponsibility as the German way. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Berlin German chancellor Gerhard Schroder has been getting help from the heavens lately. On the last...
...On the sunlit stage in Rostock, Schroder insisted that health care "shouldn't be only for those who are born with a silver spoon in their mouths...
...By the time he appeared, the barriers were mobbed by clapping people and sunlight was streaming into the main square...
...Tax revenues are through the floor...
...The first was a complaint that President Bush had not dealt with Germany in Augenhohe—on an equal basis...
...attitude, which betrays either disingenuousness or ignorance of her own country's history...
...The worries that, after reunification, the west would crush the new eastern states into some kind of conformism has turned out to be 180 degrees wrong...
...Schröder's anti-Americanism was foredoomed to get out of control...
...And indeed, the place is as pretty as any coastal city in Holland...
...Däubler's Hitler incident was not a he-said/she-said matter that may involve only an appearance of impropriety...
...What makes it clearest that Schroder's position involves nationalism rather than Europeanism is that it has panicked France, and sent French politicians of all parties into a rage...
...The peace protesters of the 1980s, desperate to avoid coming to terms with the wreckage of their efforts, see themselves as vindicated, as do the new, young peace activists, who have only now discovered the emotions of peace rhetoric...
...So Schroder's mother made ends meet by laboring as a menial in British military installations...
...This is a favorite tactic...
...Indeed, had the election been limited to the western states, Schroder's coalition would have been thrown out of office...
...Speaking of the flood damage in eastern Germany, he suddenly grew solemn and hectoring, and insisted that the bill for it be paid right now...
...and third, the present ugliness...
...The writing was on the wall for Schroder...
...It is possible that Germany is undergoing a deep cultural change, and also beginning a slow economic spiral down to a standard of living below that of its neighbors...
...It seemed to work...
...He insisted that the government-sponsored temps get the prevailing (exorbitant) union wage, which would, of course, make them just as unhirable as private sector temps are now...
...Its young people seem motivated by consumerism alone, and are disinclined to form families...
...All year long, Schroder had been running behind his challenger, Bavarian governor Edmund Stoiber of the Christian Social Union (CSU), local sister party to the national Christian Democratic Union (CDU...
...One can also wonder about its role in the world...
...Voters took him at his word...
...operation, and 4 percent saying "Yes" to any kind of operation...
...She refused outright to share any evidence until she got assurances it would not be used in a case that could lead to Moussaoui's execution...
...Banging contemporary Germans on the head with their grandparents' crimes is unlikely to turn the country into a more moderate, more tolerant place...
...Germans are losing their awkwardness about mentioning the Nazi era...
...Its population is collapsing, and its welfare state may collapse along with it...
...Its retirement system, which kicks in at an unofficial age of 57 or 58, is reaching the point of actuarial absurdity...
...But in Kosovo, Schroder and Fischer had shattered Germans' reservations about armed intervention...
...What made this bizarre, and almost certainly metaphorical, is that Schroder is not known to believe in paying for anything right now...
...And good if they do, but why does everyone assume that these problems will eventually be solved...
...At the same time Schroder and his ministers were calling for "unambiguous" information about Iraq's chemical weapons program, Bild (the tabloid that had employed Schroder's wife) ran an article crediting Germany's intelligence services as the source of information that Baghdad had developed new, long-range missile capability...
...Back then, Schroder bullied the government-dependent Norddeutsche Landesbank into ponying up a billion dollars in aid, prompting accusations that he had bought the chancellor's office with tax money...
...His defense minister Peter Struck, for instance, launched a "Soldiers for Schroder" organization over the summer—a straightforward violation of German laws prohibiting politicization of the country's military...
...But with reunification and the moving of the capital to Berlin, Germany has lurched back into Central Europe...
...Formerly a model of fiscal discipline, Germany may soon get a "blue letter" from the European Union, warning it that its budget deficits have overshot the 3 percent upper limit (agreed to by E.U...
...This is what he had done as governor of Lower Saxony when, in 1998, the local Preussag steelworks threatened to lay off thousands of workers and move its plant abroad on the eve of Schroder's run for chancellor...
...Businesses were moving in, but the state environmental laws were among the country's toughest...
...No matter who is chancellor," he said, "this winter, there is not going to be a single soldier of the Bundeswehr in Iraq...
...Schroder's use of Iraq to humble America had the side-effect of breaking up Europe's common defense policy...
...Even as their incomes have doubled in relation to westerners' since the fall of the wall, they feel they've been wronged, dissed, screwed...
...The SPD parliamentary leader Ludwig Stiegler compared George W. Bush to Julius Caesar and U.S...
...The anti-American messages with which Schroder wooed his newly Central European country may subside, and there may be a period of calm ahead for the German-American alliance...
...Germany's defection from the Western alliance was of little military importance...
...If unilateralism was such a problem, why was he insisting that all Germany's decisions be made in Berlin...
...Why, in fact, had Schroder risked a no-confidence vote in order to send German troops to Afghanistan...
...Germany still has the highest nominal taxes in Europe, Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Given the Schroder-Chirac rift over Iraq, this was not going to happen...
...the anti-globalist international left hailed him as a conquering hero...
...as he dispatched the Wehrmacht across Europe, Hitler was the most beloved leader in German history...
...His environmentalist coalition partners in the Green party were also set to capitalize, since three-quarters of Germans believed the floods were due to global climate change...
...He launched an all-out political attack on the United States, calling into question an alliance that has defined Germany to the world for the last 54 years...
...The country's health system is overgenerous and overburdened...
...Then he rushed back to Berlin to put on hold a business tax cut (which he had never much liked anyway) in order to fund a 150-billion euro East German rebuilding program through the year 2019...
...From the United States, Schroder's actions may appear to be a "European" thing: Jealous of American unity and decisiveness, which they cannot imitate, Europeans have sought to impose their own bickering disunity—their any-crank-has-a-veto sys-tem—on us...
...There are people like her, and there are people like Adolf Hitler...
...By the end of the campaign, there was nothing left of Hartz's recommendations that Schroder would claim for his own—except, of course, the promise to cut the jobless rate...
...ambassador Dan Coats to Pyotr Abrassimow, the arrogant and ruthless Soviet ambassador to East Germany in the years before the Berlin Wall fell...
...In Daubler's mind, some people are repositories of 100-percent goodness and others of 100-percent badness...
...But it is Schroder who feels this need to move on more passionately than any other German politician, even if he tends to express it only in cryptic metaphors...
...And he didn't...
...At a time when the average German busboy can get the gist of Seinfeld on television, he speaks no English at all...
...It's almost as if Schroder and his allies are dredging the German past up so that they can beat other countries over the head with it...
...Daubler complicated matters further by first denying she'd made the comparison at all, then calling the editors of the Schwabische Tagblatt to tell them, "I didn't compare the persons Hitler and Bush, only their methods...
...Here she opened a window into the moral world of the German left...
...He didn't want to follow the example of French prime-ministerial loser Lionel Jospin, and get left behind by a hardline wing of his party that is being radicalized by questions of globalization...
...A good case can be made that constant looking backwards has deprived Germany of both optimism and dynamism...
...World War II and the Holocaust thus become a source of expertise, and even haughtiness: The United States doesn't think it's acting like a fascistic country, but that's only because it doesn't know any better...
...Taken as a whole, Schroder's position was held together by no logic...
...The jobless tally stood at 4 million then, and Schroder told crowds that if he couldn't get it under 3.5 million he wouldn't deserve to be reelected...
...Financing for the government's trillion-dollar investment in prettying up places like Rostock now looks precarious, and the improvements like Potemkin ones...
...He flew to Saxony and spent days with the flooded-out inhabitants...
...Watching Gerhard Schroder strut behind a rostrum or joke in a television studio, one is pulled up short to remember that the "brash young chancellor" is 59—an age when the solid majority of his countrymen are collecting pensions...
...The idea was to advertise his empathy for the former East German lands by showing off Rostock's expensively restored town square...
...It is a national coalition of those for whom the battles over German history have been definitively worked out...
...But why assume that Schroder's distrust of America—and the West?—is a temporary rather than a heartfelt thing...
...But competence had the upper hand...
...In a clear-sighted editorial, Thomas Schmid of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that Schroder surely knows the awful impulses he is stoking: Schröder has gained himself a dark alliance: "National conservatives" (who have long been disappointed in the Christian Democrats) will approve, as will many citizens in eastern Germany, where the GDR regime's anti-Western and anti-democratic propaganda have not been without lasting influence...
...The working-out of Germany's guilt in World War II is something that has never interested him—he believes, with reason, that he has already paid dearly for World War II himself...
...Schroder is a hard-drinking, cigar-sucking playboy who brags about never reading books, and has had four wives, most recently the kittenish tabloid reporter Doris Kopf...
...She differed with him only on matters of high principle...
...Every poll taken since 1993 has ranked unemployment as the country's number-one problem—and it has proved too much for Schroder to handle, soaring this year to a record high of 4.3 million (in a shrinking workforce...
...Stoiber is a Catholic with a big family, a tranquil home life, and a mind like a steel trap...
...It is difficult to say how much of this populist envy has found its way into Schroder's policy towards the United States...
...member countries at Germany's—a bygone Germany's—insistence...
...Most notorious, at the horribly mismanaged Deutsche Telekom, shares sank 90 percent while the board of directors' salaries rose 90 percent and a Schroder industrial protege, CEO Ron Sommer, received a gargantuan buyout...
...A disaster that happens in this generation," he said, "should be handled by this generation...
...Saddam, Klose warned, would never leave without a "threat scenario" of the sort the Americans were developing...
...Schröder was able to campaign on the plan, even as he undercut it...
...Angelika Beer, a defense adviser to the Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer, said, "Pretty much the only thing we can offer [in an Iraq war] is AWACS surveillance, and Schroder hasn't mentioned that...
...And Stoiber feared this pacifism enough to follow meekly behind Schroder, even saying in his desperate last days that he would "definitely not" allow the United States to use bases in Germany for any unilateral attack...
...Should Germany's economic problems prove insoluble, should relations sour with its European neighbors, the United States has now been established as Germany's scapegoat of first resort...
...One big Berlin chain of shoe shops now has a sign outside its stores reading: Budapester Schuhe...
...for the purposes of ducking out of the fight to defend the free world against a tyrant, they're disabled, because formerly Nazi...
...But this time the strategy flopped—all that money was lost when the company went bankrupt months later...
...Schröder called MobilCom "a healthy enterprise at its core...
...Britain's Guardian ran a North Korean-style tribute headlined "Ordinary Joe has voters eating from his hand," and on election night, all the Arabic-language stations available on my hotel TV led with celebrations of Schroder's victory...
...In fact, Schroder is wallowing in the very worldview that Europe is being constructed to prevent...
...Whatever pacifist impulses it may have drawn on, it was primarily an expression of German nationalism...
...But it wasn't, and the bailout disadvantaged dozens of other high-tech companies in Germany and elsewhere, in a way that Europe's increasingly punctilious competition authorities would never approve...
...The election was turning into a battle between "competence" and "personality"—a battle, strangely enough, that both sides welcomed...
...His campaign slogan this time around was: Fur ein modernes Deutschland...
...The agency had systematically exaggerated the number of Germans it had been able to find jobs for...
...With justice, he complained that getting a call from Washington two hours before to say "We're going in" does not constitute "consultation...
...It showed solidarity," said Schroder's campaign manager Matthias Machnig...
...The French view was that Schroder was asking French taxpayers to subsidize the German unemployment system...
...Schroder's move, that is, was not guaranteed to work for mass consumption...
...and it has been pummeled by the dot-com collapse— despite not having benefited from the dot-com boom...
...Schroder was the man who would put an end to both his party's socialist cant and his country's scourge of chronic, double-digit unemployment...
...warning the president that America could not hold itself aloof from the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change...
...But that would be wrong...
...sanction, as the occasion of Germany's first participation in a military attack since World War II...
...A particularly big one, MobilCom, with 5,500 employees, threatened to go under two weeks before the election...
...Schroder's instinct was to spend 400 million euros of government money to bail the company out...
...Literally a minute after the polls closed on Sunday, he announced that she would "under no circumstances" serve in his next cabinet...
...operation against Iraq—and the answer was "Yes" for 61 percent...
...Chirac even views Bush's U.N...
...With her close ties to Germany's Protestant church, Daubler opposed cloning and most gene research, while Schroder has promoted a less regulated biotech industry that he hopes will turn Germany into the Silicon Valley of gene technology...
...They're not "normal" at all...
...But after a couple of hours' talking with local politicians, he went back on vacation...
...And then, four days before the election, Schroder's justice minister Herta Daubler-Gmelin compared Bush to Adolf Hitler...
...For the purposes of moral preening, they're neutrals, because pacifist...
...Political scientists used to say that the CDU and CSU had a "structural majority" in Germany...
...Most incendiary was his invocation of a Bismarckian deutscher Weg, a "German way"—presumably a better way—in foreign policy...
...For political purposes, all of Germany's problems disappeared beneath discussions of Iraq, but that didn't make them go away...
...Stoiber tarred the chancellor as der Genope der Bosse ("the bosses' pal"), and the name stuck...
...We're the fascist experts...
...Then came the flood...
...Schröder's first term was like that...
...In its place was a howling and envy-laced populism that sought to blame declining services on the people who still had jobs...
...That's the real danger that confronts us...
...Like Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, he addressed the nation...
...Forty thousand German businesses are expected to go bankrupt this year, far and away a record...
...Poor Edmund Stoiber vainly stressed this...
...A good case can also be made for declaring an end to Germany's legal liability for its sins...
...We shouldn't lay it on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren...
...A favorite Schroder theme throughout his four years in office has been that Germany must once more become "a normal country...
...Granted, the pacifism is there: In a December 1990 poll, just after reunification, two-thirds of Germans said their big, new country should have a foreign policy like Switzerland's...
...He said that "the existential questions of German foreign policy will be decided in Berlin—and only in Berlin...
...He opposed the Kohl-approved Holocaust memorial that is now being built in the center of Berlin...
...The most arresting thing in the quote is not its comparison of Hitler and Bush, which reflects only her own ideological extremism...
...So Schroder's only hope was that France could be browbeaten into having its high-tech industry throw good money after bad...
...The tortured examinations of conscience that marked West Germany in the decades after the war, those soul-searching reflections of "working through the past," were genuine, and they grew a country of honor and decency out of a moral disaster...
...For years, the Franco-German relation-ship—and hence the European Union—was built on an informal agreement: absolute equality in European institutions and a right to consultation on anything the other partner did...
...And with the eyes of his newly patriotic countrymen upon him, Schroder embarked on the gamble that would win him the election...
...Hitler, of course, had worked out his war aims by the time he wrote Mein Kampf, a decade before he came to power...
...It has also inherited some of the region's problems...
...the East is wide open, and it is to the swing voters of the former Soviet bloc that successful politicians now address themselves...
...By mid-July, half of Schroder's 1998 voters said they would hesitate to vote for him again...
...He did the same thing with the Philipp Holzmann building company three years ago, stalling a shutdown with a federal cash infusion...
...Its high points were a government-run temp agency and incentives (read: subsidies) for small business to make new hires...
...This, indeed, will be the most important legacy of the Kosovo conflict...
...Its economy shows no signs of entrepreneur-ship and innovation...
...We know that from our own history since Adolf Nazi" [sic...
...The magazine presented it as the chancellor's economic Wunderwaffe—no one knew quite how it would work, but it was supposed to cut unemployment in half by 2005...
...He tried to exploit an anti-Americanism he assumed was latent in German public opinion...
...It was a reminder that the jobless rate in this bleak region of warehouses and crab-grass is still near 20 percent, and that Rostock, like all other small cities in the east, continues to hemorrhage population...
...Schröder's attack on America was pieced together out of several talking points...
...Where it was not latent, he sought to create it...
...Last winter and early spring, Schroder sought to scapegoat foreign bureaucrats in Brussels for his economic problems...
...Hans-Ulrich Klose, a fellow socialist who chairs the Bundestag's foreign policy committee, warned that Saddam was a genuine menace...
...Däubler had been having quite a lot of fun with the Americans that week...
...It was somehow not in the heart...
...Not only did Schroder suddenly rise rapidly in the polls...
...And whatever his domestic failures, he had none that were perceived as such by his adoring subjects...
...One poll had 50 percent saying "No" to any invasion, 45 percent saying "Yes" to a U.N...
...Social Democratic Party [SPD] experts quickly noted that, since these were NATO bases, Germany did not have that right...
...But Schroder and his allies have been seeking to get over the past in ways that are disingenuous and obsessive...
...Däubler had been one of the few high-ranking socialists to support Schroder back in the early 1990s, when he was a small fry battling for preeminence against party heavyweights...
...Schroder likes the position of being Europe's hard guy against the United States: On his first visit to Washington after the election of President Bush, he delivered a harsh letter from the E.U...
...Viewed in this light, Schroder's freelancing divides Europe, leaving the continent weaker, not stronger, against American influence...
...It took a while for even Schroder's allies to see what he was doing...
...second, when Schroder cold-cocked President Jacques Chirac at the E.U.'s Nice summit in 2000, asking (by virtue of the unified Germany's larger population) for surplus representation on European bodies...
...Schröder has never been comfortable with the terms of the postwar alliance that bound Germany's fate to the other Western powers...
...It is the easterners who provided the target audience for Schroder's anti-American message...
...His own government predicts a growth rate under 1 percent this year, and non-government prognosticators call that estimate too rosy...
...Schroder was suddenly "relevant" again...
...Germans tend to be optimistic about solving these problems...
...Yet Daubler believes that we should be more repelled by some kind of evil essence in Hitler than by anything he did...
...One bizarre flight of oratory in his Rostock speech puzzled many who heard it...
...When it overran its banks after days of heavy rain in midsummer, it destroyed tens of billions of euros worth of new buildings, along with vast tracts of farmland...
...The Saturday before, her American counterpart John Ashcroft had traveled to Denmark to ask for German assistance in the case of two al Qaeda operatives, the Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui (who had gone to Germany to meet with plot organizers) and the Yemenite Ramsi bin al-Shibh (who had lived in Germany as hijacker Mohamed Atta's roommate...
...Foreign policy experts were trying to fit Schroder's move into a general German foreign policy strategy and couldn't...
...Hence the CDU's popular bumper sticker: "Three ex-wives can't be wrong...
...The country's potential contribution to an attack on Iraq consists of AWACS planes, a handful of medical units, and exactly six tanks, now stationed in Kuwait, that can monitor biological and chemical weapons...
...When he entered office in 1998, he was hailed as Germany's answer to Tony Blair and Bill Clinton...
...Never denazified, historically frozen by decades of Soviet occupation, the east is something of a museum of German character...
...Schroder avoided this sanction by withholding crucial federal budget statistics until after the elections...
...But pounding rainstorms were predicted for the whole day, driving indoors all but a few hundred hardcore party members and several beer-can-clutching malcontents, in their color-coordinated East European soccer-drunk sweat suits, who had come to howl about how little they liked being unemployed...
...As a young member of parliament in the early 1980s, he preferred relations with Moscow to relations with Washington...
...The Schroder view was that French capitalists should fulfill their Schutzpflicht, their duty to protect workers...
...If America was now such a menace to world peace, why had Schroder pledged his "unconditional solidarity" to the United States in the days after September 11...
...The real point of this demarche was (to take a page from Ms...
...We do...
...In dealing with the past, the Schroder government is trying to claim the best of both worlds...
...It was to a boss that Schroder finally turned to get himself out of the unemployment pickle...
...Stoiber could not make hay out of any of these bailouts, since he himself had been involved in the most spectacular such flop of recent years: the bankruptcy of the Kirch media empire, whose pie-in-the-sky expansion plans fell apart after the company had received 1.9 billion euros in unsecured loans from the Bavarian state...
...How could he blame Cheney's August 28 speech for sparking German reluctance when Schroder had given his own "deutscher Weg" speech on August 5? And who had asked Germany to participate in an Iraq operation anyway...
...A subsidiary of the French government-owned France Telecom, MobilCom (in a story that will be familiar to Americans) paid way too much for rights in Germany's spectrum auction, and lost its shirt...
...Post-1999, Germans are actually conflicted about war in general, and about Iraq in particular...
...His father, whose picture sits on his desk in the chancellery, was killed fighting with the Wehrmacht in Romania when Schroder was three days old...
...In spring elections in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt, Schroder's party had lost half its votes, and this was the national trend...
...Daubler read Ashcroft the riot act...
...But he did accuse Schroder of wheeling and dealing with CEOs while small business (where 70 percent of German jobs are created) suffers...
...Another poll asked simply whether Germany should take part in a U.N...
...Into the bargain, Hartz came up with an ambitious employment plan that he and Schroder leaked to the newsmagazine Der Spiegel in late June...
...Easterners feel the very opposite of historical guilt...
...There is almost word-for-word consensus about what she said to the trade union activists who were present at the conclave where she said it...
...On the last Saturday of the tightest election campaign in the history of democratic Germany, Schroder chose the Baltic port of Rostock as the backdrop for his closing speech...
...The Elbe river runs through the most expensively restored landmarks and infrastructure in the former East Germany...
...as Jochen Thiese, a journalist for Deutschland Radio, notes: "We Germans wait until the last second before moving...
...Daubler-Gmelin) to distract Germans from domestic difficulties by refocusing attention abroad...
...If an okay from the United Nations was of the essence, then why had Schroder chosen NATO's Kosovo operation, which had no U.N...
...He discarded this strategy only because it didn't work...
...But seven minutes before Schroder was due to climb onstage, the rain stopped and the clouds parted...
...Stoiber promised to cut taxes nationwide and to do for Germany what he had done for his home state...
...Germans were almost unanimous in saying that Schroder was the guy they'd rather drink a beer with...
...But for all Daubler's loyalty, her rantings provided a trove of material for weeks' worth of psychoanalysis of the German temperament, and Schroder was not in the mood for that...
...They feel historical entitlement...
...Something was changing in the German population, as well: 200 million euros in individual donations poured in to help the flood victims...
...Perhaps it is—but even if it is, something has changed...
...Unfortunately, West Germany is a country that no longer exists...
...The campaign was nationalist from the start...
...The Stalinist government of East Germany taught its citizens that they were the victims of fascism...
...Ask yourself what other leader of an advanced Western country would speak of an aspiration to be modern, and it becomes clear that what "modern" means is free of hang-ups over World War II, in the same way that some people (not very admirable ones, to be sure) use "mature" as a synonym for "without guilt...
...Germany may not be conscious of what a sacrifice George Bush made in asking the United Nations to okay an Iraq threat, but France is...
...Stoiber flew to Saxony, too...
...His crony Peter Hartz, a director of Volkswagen, which is the largest business in Schroder's Lower Saxony, had been deputized last winter to lead a commission investigating a scandal in Germany's national employment agency...
...But there are going to be 4.3 million unemployed in Germany...
...It was then that Schroder showed he is the German Bill Clinton—at least in his mastery of leadership theatrics...
...Stoiber had combined his region's Catholic conservatism with tax breaks for business in a kind of right-wing socialism that came to be called the "laptops-and-lederhosen" model...
...Both Schroder and his advisers began to get drunk with their new role...
...The locking of the country's politics into atonement for World War II, necessary though it was for many decades, deserves some of the blame for the adolescent, consumerist, hedonistic, pornographic society that Germany has turned into...
...speech as a giant diplomatic achievement for Europe, since he and Tony Blair had urged it...
...It was, in retrospect, a dangerous thing to install such a person at the head of a democratic justice system...
...In French eyes, Germany has broken this deal three times: First (and probably unavoidably), when Helmut Kohl proposed German unity without seeking President Mitterrand's permission...
...It is Daubler's Opa war kein Nazi...
...Useful though it might have been to Alfonse D'Amato's reelection efforts, sending out some American lawyer born in 1974 to seek Holocaust-era damages so steep that they threaten the job of a German machine worker born in 1977 leaves Germans with the feeling that atonement is impossible in other countries' eyes, and is therefore pointless...
...Most people would say that Hitler's methods were the worst thing about him...
...Immigration was limited in Bavaria, but anti-immigrant violence was lower than elsewhere in Germany...
...It was meant to mobilize his base...
...Daubler said: "Bush wants to divert attention from his domestic political troubles...
...He attacked the idea of a Hire-und-Fire-Gesellschaft, which is the new German word for "labor market," and to which the Hartz report makes a grudging accommodation...
...And as the elections drew near, he and his campaign blamed the speech of Vice President Cheney on August 28, which justified preemptive action against Saddam Hussein, for having provoked him to respond...
...We had been reunified for a while, but only officially...
...Education, meanwhile, "shouldn't depend on how much money is in Mummy and Daddy's wallet...
...Just before he retired from the Bundestag in early September, former chancellor Helmut Kohl was overheard in the cafeteria describing the socialist Wolfgang Thierse as "the worst Bundestag president since Goring...
...Qualitat mit Tradition seit 1939...
...It underestimates the boldness of Schroder to say merely that Germany is a country of pacifists who can be moved by any Machiavellian...
...Most important, the unemployment rate in Bavaria—5 percent—was at or below American levels...
...This meant that, barring any dramatic irregularities, conservatives won elections...
...The states of the old West Germany turn out to be relatively frozen in their political allegiances...
...To the extent that they were doomed to spend their lives under communism while their Western cousins lived it up, this turned out to be true, in a sense...
Vol. 8 • October 2002 • No. 4
