The Halo Effect.

Among Germans, no argument against war in Iraq seems complete without recalling the nation's own trauma in World War II. "Anyone like I, who experienced the bombing of the virtually defenseless city of Dresden, will be convinced forever that there can be no legitimate reason for [war on Iraq]," says east German peace activist Wolfgang Ullmann. Indeed, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder speaks for most Germans when he says that war on Iraq is wrong because "we Germans have learned our lesson."

That Germans are more reluctant to go to war today than they were in the last century is surely a good thing. But are the 86 percent who want to avoid fighting in Iraq at all costs drawing the right lesson from history? A small but increasingly vocal band of intellectuals thinks not. In an open letter published last month in the Berlin daily Die Welt, about 100 writers, editors and prominent thinkers wrote that Germany's peace movement is driven not by honest opposition to war but a "naive longing for political innocence."

At the root of the divide is a conflict about the true meaning of the past. Germany's peaceniks are guided by the lesson of 1945: their country's destruction was the price they paid for waging war. But their critics recall the lesson of 1938, when the Western powers caved in to Adolf Hitler in an attempt to "preserve" the peace. A little war then might have gone a long way, saving tens of millions of lives, says Michael Wolffsohn, a historian at Bundeswehr University in Munich who signed the letter. The result of the standoff is a kind of moral fundamentalism that kills any chance at enlightened debate. "Germans are trapped by their history," says Wolffsohn.

That history keeps returning to haunt them. Just as the debate over Iraq was heating up last fall, a powerful new book on the British- American air campaign against German civilian targets during World War II surged up the best-seller list. This winter also marked the 60th anniversary of the German surrender at Stalingrad. In German postwar iconography, the 800,000 soldiers who died during ...