Marc Fisher writes in Slate on Gerhard's Generation, Why the rift between the United States and Germany is for real
I don't quite buy it. Fisher's main thesis is that the rift in US/German relations is exemplified by Justice Minister Daeubler-Gmelin's comparison of Bush to Hitler and that
the gaffe was an expression of a fundamental change in German politics, driven by a generational shiftHe goes on to say that
Daeubler-Gmelin said what many Germans believeand closes with
Daeubler-Gmelin will vanish into history's dustbin but the chancellor won re-election. And Hitler helped.
Certainly there are tensions between Schroeder and Bush. Clearly Germany and the US have distinct national interests. Yes, Germany is largely a pacifist society. But I'm not completely sold on Fisher's theory of a major new rift. I make the following observations to put the situation in perspective.
First, the Red/Green coalition's share of the vote actually went down since the last federal election in 1998.
I haven't found statistics that relate to a generational trend, but there is definitely a regional trend going on. Schroeder won in the former East Germany, but Stoiber and the center-right won in the former West Germany (48.5% to 47.6%) and also won a majority of the parliamentary seats in the West. On the other hand Schroeder won in the West in 1998 (49.6% - 44.0%) [source: Tagesschau TV news]. So in a sense our old friends from Western Germany swung toward the party that was most friendly towards us.
If the spirit of Hitler had a significant role in this campaign it probably manifested itself more in Moellemann's appeal to anti-Semitism than anything else. This tactic was roundly denounced and probably cost the FDP enough votes to throw the whole election. At least that's what one leading Christian Democrat has said.
Finally, here's another piece of anecdotal evidence against a major rift: this email that a reader from Germany sent me a couple of days before the election. Yes, he speaks only for himself, but he still speaks for more Germans than Marc Fisher does.
In a nutshell, the outcome of the election doesn't suggest to me (as an outside observer who at least reads the German media), that we're seeing a major new rift. What I think we are seeing is two ambivalent electorates, one on each side of the Atlantic, and the clash of two personalities, each of whom got lucky and managed to prevail in an election that was really a draw.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at September 25, 2002 07:36 AMInteresting comment about the West's swing to the CDU. I might also add that Schroeder benefitted from the poor showing of the PDS in the East. Apparently many East Germans were willing to ditch their beloved socialist party in order to support a more powerful, mainstream party, whose anti-American tinged campaign no doubt appealed to prejudices left over from the Cold War.
Americans tend not to realize that didn't disappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It continued in the minds of many in the East who are still nostalgic for the old order and hyper-critical of America.
Posted by: Dan G. on September 25, 2002 05:42 AMOops, the first sentence of the second paraghraph should read: "...communism didn't disappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall". I might add: any more than Nazism or Nazi-influenced prejudices disappeared after the fall of Hitler. Several younger Germans have told me that their grandparents are anti-semites, and that anti-Jewish feeling is common among Germans of that generation.
Posted by: Dan G. on September 25, 2002 05:49 AM