Perils of 'The German Way': What do these recent outbursts mean?

The problem with the recent German criticism of President Bush was not Chancellor Schroeder's willingness to voice unease with the purported American "adventure" in Iraq. Germany is a sovereign nation and can and must do as it sees fit. It has a perfect right to express its forebodings, forcefully. Moreover, no one-here or there-has ever envisioned concrete German help in freeing Iraq from Saddam Hussein.

So the chancellor's ploy was gratuitously rhetorical rather than substantive or of any import to our military efforts in the Gulf. The absence of a canteen or a handful of obsolete tanks is no great loss. That a self-righteous European socialist government trades with, rather than opposes, a Middle Eastern madman with weapons of mass destruction in a post-September 11 world is by now to be expected, rather than shocking.

Instead, American angst has derived from a variety of other considerations. First, the flurry of German anti-Americanism was not confined to Gerhard Schroeder. Fellow Socialist Ludwig Stiegler suggested that our president was akin to Julius Caesar-the firebrand who destroyed centuries of republican government and sought to lay the foundations of Roman imperial rule.

Herta Daubler-Gmelin, the minister of justice, trumped that, declaring, "Bush wants to divert attention from his domestic problems. It's a classic tactic. It's one that Hitler also used." Americans, it seems- who once rid Germany of Hitler, with very little help from the Germans themselves-are now to be properly slandered by Germans for being Hitler-like.

Even that surprising venom was not confined to Socialists in power, trolling for votes in economically depressed times by appealing to nationalism and the fears of a purportedly pacifist populace. Jurgen Mollemann of the Free Democrats spoke of the "intolerant, spiteful style" of some prominent Jews. His remarks echoed the anti-Semitism already voiced by former defense minister Rudolf Scharping when he complained that Mr. Bush was trying to please "a powerful, perhaps overly powerful, Jewish lobby."

Americans were especially perplexed about such choices of vocabulary. If even Socialists and leftists are reverting to the nomenclature of a half-century past, has the specter of German nationalism and belligerence really vanished? Consider some of the rhetoric. Schroeder promised that Germans would not simply "click their heels." He talked of the "German way" (deutscher Weg), stressing that Germany was a "modern" country where decisions will "be made in Berlin-and only in Berlin." A Mel Brooks movie could not have offered a better caricature of repressed nostalgia for the 1930s.

A cynic would see the new German belligerence as particularly opportunistic, coming as it does only after the Soviet threat has gone, after the dream of unification has been achieved, after Berlin has emerged as the capital of a new, "modern" Germany. The still more jaded might see in contemporary German socialism, pacifism, and relativism shades of a weak and decadent Weimar-with the attendant extreme reaction to it looming on the horizon. We sadly are accustomed to residual anti-Semitism in Germany, but when ex-officials there complain of the power of American Jewish constituencies in New York and Miami, the awful subtext is, of course, that there is no such problem now in Germany, because . . .