Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 23, 1990 TAG: 9003222547
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SAMUEL P. PAYNE JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Almost all the people who voted for Hitler or served the Nazi cause in any other way are now dead. The vast majority of Germans living today were small children or not even born when World War II ended. To assert that they must be the same kind of people as their ancestors means treating "national character" as if it were a genetic characteristic like blond hair or blue eyes: something that parents pass on to their children involuntarily and regardless of circumstance.
National character is not a genetic characteristic. Assuming there is such a thing, it does change over time, sometimes quite radically. The nature and behavior of governments change even more and more rapidly. Before Germany was unified, France was the great imperial and military power in Europe and more than once threatened the independence of other countries. Napoleon came as close to conquering Europe as Hitler did. As late as 1856, the great French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "The Frenchman can turn his hand to anything, but he excels in war alone . . . the French are at once the most brilliant and the most dangerous of all European nations." Nevertheless, nobody today worries about the French finding another Napoleon and setting out to conquer Europe again. If France has changed, why can't Germany?
Germany, both West and East, has in fact changed radically. First of all, the ability of even a united Germany to threaten other countries would be much less than it was before 1945. The West German and the East German armed forces together have fewer troops than the armed forces of France and the United Kingdom. They have one-seventh of the manpower of the Soviet Union's armed forces. Neither Germany has nuclear weapons, and international treaties prohibit either country from acquiring them. France, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union all have nuclear arsenals.
A united Germany would have the strongest economy in Western Europe. On the other hand, its gross national product would be substantially less than Japan's and probably less than the Soviet Union's. Furthermore, West Germany already has had the strongest economy in Western Europe for more than 30 years. All those years, successive West German governments have exercised their economic power responsibly and with reasonable regard for the interests of others. West German economic strength has been much more a boon than a threat to its neighbors. It's hard to see why a united Germany's economic behavior or impact would be much different.
The West German political system is radically different from Nazi or Imperial Germany's. It is a stable liberal democracy which has lasted now for more than 40 years: longer than the reigns of Hitler and Wilhelm II combined. The people of East Germany have been living under a communist dictatorship for many years, but they never really accepted it. In the last few months, they have shown a strong commitment to liberal democracy and considerable courage in their struggle against the dictatorship forced on them by the Soviets. It's heartening to see Germans storming the headquarters of their regime's secret police. Bringing East Germans into the West German political system would not threaten its democratic character at all.
The German people themselves have changed. They are aware of the crimes their ancestors committed and have decisively repudiated those crimes and the ideologies that led to them. Forty percent of the West German viewing audience saw the TV film "Holocaust." World War II and the Holocaust are taught in the West German schools, not as thoroughly as some would like but enough to make a very definite impression on German young people.
Post-war opinion polls have consistently shown West Germans to have less national pride than the people of any other major democracy. In a 1982 Gallup poll 80 percent of the Americans, but only 21 percent of the West Germans, said they were very proud of their country. This is not entirely healthy or just; the Germans are entitled to take pride in their cultural heritage and in what they have made of themselves since 1945. However, these polls do reveal a people quite different from the power-hungry, domination-loving menaces Davis conjurs up.
Finally, Davis suggests that the United States and its European allies had always opposed the reunification of Germany until Helmut Kohl bullied them into reversing their policy. This is not true. For more than 40 years the United States government has supported the reunification of Germany. In the 1954 Paris agreements the United States, France and the United Kingdom pledged themselves to seek the "achievement through peaceful means of a fully free and unified Germany." Perhaps those governments made that promise thinking Germany might never be reunified, but they did make the promise. The time has come now to keep it, to accept Germany back into the world community as a fully free and unified country.
by CNB