RESENTMENTS.(Brief Article)

Remember Germany four years ago? The Social Democrats were back. Gerhard Schroder had just been elected Chancellor. And the pundits were smiling, because Schroder seemed like such a plastic pastiche of a character, a bellwether of the liberal something-for-everyone-market Zeitgeist. He didn't talk about the kinds of things German Chancellors were supposed to talk about. The soul of Germany wasn't on his agenda. In fact, it was unclear that he had an agenda, given that he'd talked his way around every difficult campaign question. Clintonblair, the press called him--at least until he began to sound like his own man, or, rather, his version of Germany's man. Apart from his failure to tackle, or even try to tackle, Germany's crashing economy--his long goodbye from Helmut Kohl--he pieced together a pretty interesting administration. He put a suit and tie on the peaceable Green deputy Joschka Fischer and named him foreign minister, and Fischer turned into the crown prince of the Red-Green coalition, the face, and voice, of a new German presence in the real world--a "normal" presence, as Fischer called it. (The first German soldiers to be deployed abroad since the Second World War went off to the Balkans as peacekeeping forces, on Fischer's insistence.) He saw the Jacobin lurking in Otto Schily, a man who was still best known as the chief defense lawyer in the first of the Baader-Meinhof trials. He named Schily interior minister, and Schily gave him a no-nonsense, no-apologies, law-and-order ministry in the wake of the Al Qaeda attacks. The only ministers to cause the Chancellor much grief or embarrassment were the ones he hadn't wanted--the ones he'd owed to the factions of what was, even then, his very slim majority. He took them on, and, when the time was ripe, sent them packing or forced them to pack themselves. The last to go will be Herta Daubler-Gmelin, the justice minister who, only days before last week's election, alluded to George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler in the space of a few short sentences.

There's no doubt in Germany that the election was a three-way contest between two German politicians and one American President. But the people who saw Schroder as somehow transformed by his opposition to what he called Bush's "adventure" in Iraq couldn't have been following him very closely over the past four years. Schroder discovered the soul of Germany early on, and played it. He knew the resentments. The fact that Germans responded so compassionately to the tragedy of September 11th--"a quarter of a million Berliners gathered at the Brandenburg Gate in a show of solidarity with the victims," the German novelist Peter Schneider wrote in an apt reminder in the Times last week--doesn't alter the reality that in Germany, as in much of Europe, there is a great deal of resentment of the United States, and of its messianic high-handedness. "Schadenfreude" may be a German word, but it is not exclusively a German feeling. Some Germans explain the resentment by saying that for them history is "over." They mean that, for better or worse, they are now like other Europeans, and have the right to criticize Ariel Sharon without being accused of hating Jews, or George Bush without being accused of hating Americans. But it would be foolish to assume that "normalcy" has conquered all the myths of German exceptionalism. Not even Schroder assumes this. You don't need to be a ...