Hamburg, Germany
German chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s speeches have always been like rock concerts. During last year’s campaign they often were rock concerts. A half-hour of Schroder 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. In contrast to the similarly centrist Clinton and Blair campaigns, the Schroder campaign was keen to hype its man’s origins in the 1960s counterculture. It was easy to get your hands on 20-year-old photos of Schroder marching at No-Nukes rallies in torn blue-jeans, a bra-less babe on each arm — his campaign would give them to you! They’d also tell you about his boozing, his love of Cuban cigars, his four wives. Particularly his fourth — Doris Kopf, the kittenish tabloid reporter half Schroder’s age who’d spent her own divorced years hanging around the art world in lower Manhattan. The biographical info was meant to contrast Schroder’s “youth” with the fogyish, trapped-in-the-Cold-War leadership of Schroder’s predecessor, Helmut Kohl.
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, Schroder was looking his age — which is three years older than Kohl was when Kohl took power in 1982. Schroder has taken on the lumpy, dumpy, harried look that seems to come with the chancellor’s job — less sex-symbol than sexagenarian. He’s losing his hair, and at the Hamburg gathering he had a cold. 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 beta t — ashen but composed.
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. Schroder 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!” [Americans out!] placards at anti-missile rallies. The Jusos, the short-haired 1999 version, huddled around snickering and hissing and rolling their eyes. On the back of the T-shirts, under the heading “The Gerhard Schroder/Tony Blair Oh-Yes-We-Understood-You-Perfectly Tour 1999,” was a list of what looked like concert venues, starting with “June 13 — Saarland.” It then continued with a list of dates and places: Brandenburg, Thuringia, North Rhine/Westphalia, Saxony. . . . These are the regional elections the SPD has lost since the early summer. The party hasn’t won any. The SPD has also lost its majority in the Bundesrat, Germany’s upper house. As Schroder 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 when the mayor of Hamburg rose to say, “Gerhard Schroder is the best horse we have in the barn,” the audience began to boo him, too.
Foreign minister Joschka Fischer, who leads the junior partner in Schroder’s governing coalition, the Greens, explains the chancellor’s position as “comparable to Bill Clinton’s in the first half of his first term.” It’s not. 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. Schroder has failed to follow any one plan long enough to win himself any credibility anywhere.
He campaigned in 1998 as a pro-business centrist, touting as his economics minister the computer entrepreneur Jost Stollman, who had called Germany’s welfare system “a prison for the average wage earner.” Once elected, Schroder 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.
But when Germany showed negative growth and rising unemployment during Schroder’s first quarter in office, Schroder pushed Lafontaine out. 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.” Puny though it is, it’s stalled in both houses. Even if it’s enacted, it won’t take effect until 2001. Now, in the wake of his electoral catastrophes, Schroder looks ready to hang Eichel out to dry.
The Hamburg gathering took place the day before Berlin’s municipal elections, on October 10. Schroder’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). The beatings will stop for the next six months, with no big regional elections scheduled until Schleswig-Holstein and (once again) North Rhine/Westphalia next spring. Schleswig-Holstein is still solid SPD territory, but the CDU’s ex-defense minister, Volker Ruhe, is given a good chance of winning. 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 Schroder lost there last summer. Opinion is hardening that if he loses there again, he will have to resign.
For all his clownish leftism, no one expected Schroder to fail quite this badly. 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. 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. Instead, when Schroder 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. 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.
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. 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).
On top of that, Germany’s longstanding middle-of-the-road consensus should have made the center at least as unassailable a governing perch as it has proved for Tony Blair in Britain. 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. Instead, the parties are breaking apart, and communism is reassembling its followers in the east. 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.” Instead, Schroder 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.
Not that the Berlin Republic doesn’t have certain new strengths. It is the biggest winner in European unification. The port of Hamburg, reconnected to eastern Europe via the Elbe, is booming. 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. 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). 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.
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. That includes Berlin — although everyone, investors and residents alike, expects the city to prosper once its infrastructure gets built. But that’s a big part of the problem. 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. They’re not dumb. They know their neighborhood — no, their society — is being reconfigured to exclude them. Some eastern Germans openly express a preference for the old regime. The young filmmaker Leander Hau beta 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.
This nostalgia is beginning to take a more overtly political form. 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. 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. 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. The PDS is becoming chic for populist intellectuals and eastern yuppies who inhabit such middle-middle-class suburbs as Hellersdorf-Marzahn. 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.
And that is not the only thing leaching votes from the major parties: There are also a number of right-wing parties. It’s important not to over-state the actual political strength of Germany’s hard right, which is nil. 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. United behind one leader, the right could reach into high single digits, roughly the level the PDS hovered at just five years ago. And these are not global-economy skeptics, a la Pat Buchanan or Switzerland’s Christoph Blocher, who merely have some odd affiliations and odder enthusiasms. These are real fascist parties. 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 DVU is the personal creation of Gerhard Frey, a Munich-based direct mail and publishing mogul. 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; (b) headlines that incite anti-immigrant paranoia (“Gypsy Influx Without End?”); and (c) page after page of allegations that everything we think we know about German atrocities during World War II is diametrically wrong. One article traces “English air-war plans from the time of the Weimar Republic.” Another alleges that the German massacres at Oradour in France were undertaken for good reason. (“Oradour: How It Really Was: Covered-up Crimes of the Maquisards.”) There’s even an ad for Dr. Klaus Sojka’s “Photos that Lie: Photoswindle against Germany” (with an introduction by David Irving). Germany is not in the worst shape it’s been vis-a-vis the postwar right. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the fascist National party was sitting in the legislatures of 9 of 11 states. Today, the fragmented extremists hold only their handful of local seats.
Nonetheless, Germany’s recent immunity to political extremism appears to be breaking down. 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.
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. 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). Sloterdijk took this, in the context of biotechnology, to mean that people would soon become the actual authors of life. 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. When Jurgen 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. He belittled Habermas as one of “the traumatized children of the postwar,” and bade such traumas goodbye. In an open letter to Habermas, he wrote: “The era of overly normal sons of National Socialist fathers is coming, naturally, to a close.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung worried that the Sloterdijk debate might represent the “metaphysical founding of the Berlin Republic.”
This gloomy development may help Schroder to focus the attention of his voters, however cynically, on a centrist program. At the Hamburg Party Day, Schroder took a page out of Bill Clinton’s play-book, 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. “That party will ensure that no money will be left for children!” he sputtered, “and we cannot let them do it!” Still, it’s unlikely his stoking fears of the right will alter the loyalties of many right-wing voters. In neighboring Austria in August, the socialist premier Viktor Klima, facing a tight race against Jorg Haider’s hard-right Austrian Freedom party, set up a Clinton-style “war room” that focused on getting out a “Stop Haider” message. 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.
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. 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. (Particularly since the days when Helmut Kohl used to alter his speaking schedule to make sure he could catch Dallas.) Such solipsism goes beyond anti-Americanism; even the Franco-German relationship is passing through a period of neglect, after having been jealously fostered by Helmut Schmidt and Valery Giscard d’Estaing, then Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand. The resolutely monoglot Schroder is said to get along quite badly with French premier Lionel Jospin. 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 Schroder opposed. It’s not that Schroder’s opposition was full-throated. Nor did he put up much of a fuss when the project passed the Bundestag last summer. 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.
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. And yet the opposite was the case: There was a saying in Bonn during the narrow 338-320 vote over moving the capital: Je Bonner, desto dummer. (The more you like Bonn, the stupider you are.) The move to Berlin was championed most eagerly by the leadership class. Schroder is typical of that class, in both his leadership style and his reading of German history.
Just because Schroder doesn’t remember the war doesn’t mean he was untouched by it. His father was killed fighting for the Wehrmacht in Romania days after he was born. 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.” On the other hand, a Kohl-generation German would not have said, as Schroder did for a trade union publication last summer, that Germany should take its place as a “great power” (Gro beta macht) in Europe.
Seen from one angle, the chancellor’s statement is less a hegemonic claim than a statement of fact. 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”). Germany borders on nine countries, more than any other European nation. 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. And right now, that’s simply no contest. 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. It’s even an official currency of Montenegro. Germany seems destined to dominate east-central Europe much as America does the world: benignly, and by sheer market penetration.
But Schroder’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. That tendency came to the fore during the Kosovo conflict, which was more marked by dangerous sanctimony in Germany than it was elsewhere. 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. But Schroder, Fischer, and defense minister Rudolf Scharping joined the battle with gusto. “At last, Germany has gone into battle on the side of right!” shouted Schroder at Hamburg Party Day — forgetting that Germany has always thought it was going into battle on the side of right.
In discussions of Kosovo, the line between ordinary (albeit tragic) human rights abuses and the humanity-altering enormity of the Holocaust was trampled over by German politicians until it disappeared. 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. 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.” German politicians still speak constantly about Kosovo. It remains a live issue. There is no sign of anything like an appreciation of the Holocaust’s uniqueness returning to German public speech.
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. German politicians complain obsessively that the United States was never “engaged” in Kosovo, that it followed its habitual cycle of ignore-ignore-ignore-destroy. While the United States can be persuaded to bomb Europe, it cannot be persuaded to care about it, let alone listen to its wishes. 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.
Foreign minister Fischer, once among Germany’s most anti-American politicians, says, “Europe must work in tandem with the United States.” 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); no duplication (i.e., building NATO-style weapons that would allow Europe to dispense with NATO); and no discrimination (i.e., according European Union NATO members greater protection than non-EU NATO members). But it does not accord with what German defense thinkers are saying. Many urge turning the Western European Union, heretofore a tiny consulting body for defense issues, into a real military alliance. The EU has put former NATO secretary general Javier Solana in charge of formulating a common defense policy.
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. The continent is now abjectly dependent on U.S. C-17 and Hercules C-130 cargo planes for transporting materiel. Even as resolute an Atlanticist as former president Richard von Weizsacker recently gave an interview to Die Zeit in which he urged creation of a Europe-only Rapid Reaction Force. “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. As for decoupling: “Europe needs the United States as a pacifier,” says a high-ranking German military officer who demands anonymity. “If you want to avoid decoupling, you need to stay here.” That sounds cooperative. But it means: The ball’s in your court. The impression it leaves is that Europeans are looking for a pretext for a modest decoupling without the appearance of continental unilateralism.
Again: Europeans, not Germans. One must stress that Germany’s Social Democrats and Greens are not making any nationalistic military noises, only European ones. Nor is Germany unique in bristling at how little say Europe had in the prosecution of a war on its own soil. 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. 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. 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.
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. Germany under Schroder 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.
Fischer’s own Green party may turn out to be the biggest German casualty of Kosovo. 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. 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 Jurgen Trittin, is breaking into the open. 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?”
By the time Schroder got the as-bad-as-expected news from Berlin voters, the knives were out for him in his party. 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. The book’s huge popularity made clear that it is Lafontaine’s welfare-statist ideas, not Schroder’s Third Way, that command a majority in the SPD. So Schroder’s faction met Lafontaine’s book as an act of treason.
But the chancellor’s rivals were multiplying. Among them, yuppie defense minister Rudolf Scharping had the most lean and hungry look. And he had a long memory. Bested by Schroder 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. With Schroder 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. 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? 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.” In other words, Scharping was inviting Germans to compare his own defense policy (a resounding success, he thought) with Schroder’s domestic policy (an outright flop).
Scharping’s ambitions and the Berlin elections put the writing on the wall. Schroder 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. 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. Within hours of the Sunday elections Schroder endorsed a “wealth tax” of the sort called for by the Jusos (those socialists who’d never held a job). That is, a wealth tax of the sort that even France’s socialists are determined to scrap as too damaging to their economy.
Two days later, in a story that is almost literally unbelievable outside of Germany, he caved in to IG Metall. Since the day Schroder 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. This was ridiculous because it more than undid the exceedingly modest pension reform that Schroder was trying to pass as part of his savings plan. 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. 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.”
As long as he was standing firm against the union, Schroder had tried to finesse the issue: “We’re not arguing over principle,” he would say, “but the thing just isn’t financeable.” Once he caved in, everything went but the propensity for euphemism. 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 early retirements, you see, would open up jobs for younger workers.) This is the same thinking French economists have pursued under the Jospin government, in trying to set up a maximum 35-hour workweek. Unfortunately, many of the people at IG Metall are already only working 32-hour weeks. It was a typically German political mess.
Schroder is in an untenable position. 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. 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 Schroder could establish his credibility as a reformer. (Lafontaine was always too independent for such a role.) The most common explanation for Schroder’s woes is that unlike Blair, who had first to reform his party before coming to power, Schroder has to rule with an antiquated SPD. 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.
The difference is that Schroder’s party is dying. German political scientists describe the SPD as a “milieu” party that grew out of labor shops. In the information age, heavy industrial employment just . . . goes, and with it goes the SPD’s voting base. 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. Germany has created only 900,000 jobs in services to make up for the 3 million it has lost in industry in the 1990s.
It’s this erosion that Schroder’s politics of the New Middle is meant to address. Schroder 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. But Germany never had the Thatcherite or Reaganite reforms that are the precondition for yuppie ascendancy. As such, Schroder’s program is aimed at a class and a German mindset that don’t yet exist. That’s why it’s not just Schroder’s party that’s unready for him. It’s the economy and the state as well, both of which are grinding slowly down. If Germany dawdles further on reform, this grinding down will soon make Europe’s largest nation an unstable and contentious place.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Part of the reporting for this article was done on a week-long visit sponsored by the Robert Bosch Foundation and Atlantik-Brucke.
