Gerhard Schröder insists that he was never really part of the "movement" because it was "too theoretical" for him. He nonetheless made common cause with the extreme left-wing faction of the Young Socialists in order to be elected the leader of the spd's youth movement. Once he had attained that position, he turned against his hardcore Marxist allies. Yet Schröder was no mere opportunist. He is representative of the postmodern wing of the 68er movement, the valueless "Me" faction, which is a product of a very peculiar process of cross-fertilization of Euro-American ideas. In this case it concerns existentialism. The notion that existence is always particular and individual-always my existence, your existence, his existence-was introduced into the United States by European refugees before World War II. It was then vulgarized and repackaged by American mass culture into a "me first" worldview and then exported back to Europe, where it became systematized. An anecdote from Schröder's biography illustrates this famously. One day he stood outside the chancellery in Bonn, rattling at its steel fence and exclaiming, Ich will hier 'rein ("I want to get in here"). In other words, no particular political vision but raw egotism motivated his reach for the top job: He just wanted to be chancellor.

But one man's career does not a movement's impact make. Before we can appreciate how the 68er phenomenon helped determine the outcome of the recent German election, we must look at its impact on Germany's educational institutions, its media and consequent cultural self-image, and its attitudes toward the United States.

Education

It was Herbert Marcuse (1898- 1979), the German-American social philosopher, who borrowed and adapted the Long March metaphor from the Maoists. Marcuse's Marxist-Freudian analyses of 20th-century Western society, which he deemed unfree and repressive, helped to inspire the student rebellion in Europe and America. He did not support the rebels' street violence under the clarion call, "Macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht" ("Destroy what is destroying you"), but he did advocate "resistance to the point of subversion." His idea of the Long March was to patiently infiltrate the institutions of society-the parties, the churches, the unions, the media and especially the educational system, all of which he urged students to radicalize.

In 1972, the leaders of what was then called the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition did exactly that-with frightening efficiency. Except for fringe groups, the rebels moved gradually from the street to respectable offices, parsonages and especially the schools, where they succeeded perhaps more thoroughly than in any other area. Wolfram Weimer, editor-in-chief of Die Welt, has described how this happened:

They came in purple Latzhosen [workman's overalls that were then in fashion among left-wingers] . . . moved the tables together in the classrooms for group discussions, introduced Duzen [teachers and students addressing each other in the informal Du, rather than the formal Sie] and took leave of achievement. Suddenly, debating problems took precedence over learning, Brecht banished Goethe, the critique of capitalism replaced Kant. Geography mutated to Third-World-Workshops, Religion was reduced to run-of-the mill ethical reflections.²

The kleines rotes Schülerbuch ("little red students' book") made the rounds urging the young to stop learning, lest their knowledge be exploited later by "the system." They were also discouraged from attending sports classes because their fit bodies would only be subjugated. In varying degrees, the universities were collectivized and stripped of their traditions. Graduation ceremonies and academic robes were abolished, true to the 68er slogan, "Muff von tausend Jahren unter den Talaren": the thousand year-old stale odor under these robes had to be aired. Graduates were told, without a scintilla of pomp or circumstance, when and where to pick up their diplomas. That is, if students graduated at all. "Im wievielten Semester protestierst Du?" (How many semesters have you been protesting?), people used to quip. (A few years ago, the record holder, a Berliner, had been enrolled for 58 semesters.)

Some universities were worse than others, of course. The worst was in the city-state of Bremen, where students demanded full equality with instructors and insisted on collective, rather than individual, examinations. Twenty would produce one joint thesis. It became so bad that local industries refused to employ Bremen graduates and law firms in other states would not take interns from that university because they lacked both knowledge and the will to work.

The high schools deteriorated, as well. In much of the country, the venerable Gymnasium vanished. Once the pillar of Germany's globally admired education system, it was now deemed elitist and replaced by egalitarian comprehensive schools that no longer challenged students. So steep was the decline that for a long time French universities would not recognize the Abitur (exit exam) of many German states as the equivalent of France's baccalauréat.

With the fullness of time, the 68ers' Long March through the schools has created nothing less than a national disaster in education-the Bildungsnotstand as it is known in Germany. A recent oecd survey of the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in the 32 principal industrialized countries bore devastating news for Germany. The study, called Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA 2000, ranked Germany near the top of the bottom third, well below Britain, France and the United States. In "reading competence", German teens came in 22nd. Ten percent were unable to understand a text, 13 percent could read a text but not evaluate it; 40 percent did not read for the joy of it. In mathematics and science the Germans took 21st place. One quarter did so badly in mathematics that the examiners concluded that they could not make it even in vocational careers.

This sad story of educational decline and fall has earned Germany much Schadenfreude. But Germany's neighbors would do well not to rejoice; they had better start worrying. The economic powerhouse of Europe overrun by ignoramuses spells more potential trouble for the continent than a haughty nation full of know-it-alls. Rightly, German industry is sounding the alarm; and its search for "offshore" production facilities is evidence of its assessment of German education. Yet a majority of the German electorate still seems unaware of the peril; otherwise, it would not have voted for the parties responsible for this misery, for it is chiefly in the traditionally socialist-governed states that the school systems are most rotten. States run by the Christian Democrats have fared better: Bavaria and neighboring Baden-Württemberg; and remarkably, Saxony in the former East Germany scored best in the pisa survey.

Media

It was not long, too, before the miseducated 68ers made their way into, and seized much of, Germany's media. Since the early 1970s, they have from that perch become vigorous culture-brokers and image-makers, running public radio and television and glossy magazines such as Der Stern and Der Spiegel-all of them with a sharp left-wing bias. Of course, they are to some extent balanced by newspapers such as the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the publications of the Axel Springer group, the news magazine Focus, and many excellent regional dailies. But these cannot fully offset the constant barrage of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-traditional innuendoes, sniggers and assertions to which the German television viewers have been subjected for decades-especially by talk shows, to which the viewing public seems addicted. As a result, U.S. visitors to this traditionally pro-American country often experience sudden and unaccounted hostility. Thus did three immigration officers at a German airport recently inform an astonished U.S. national with a German family name how much they disapproved of his choice of citizenship.³

The 68er influence in the media had a direct bearing on the election results. If Schröder's anti-Bush campaign resonated with German voters, it was doubtless due in part to media coverage and discussion of September 11 and the war on terrorism. From the start, much of German radio and television described air operations over Afghanistan not as a surgical intervention but as Vergeltungsschläge, acts of reprisal, or even Flächenbom-bardements, carpet bombing, terms evoking World War II memories. Rudolf Augstein, founder and publisher of Der Spiegel, told his readers:

The Americans have bombed a starving country to the ground. Their plans to combat terrorism are adventurous. Germany must rethink its relationship with the United States.⁴

Germany evidently followed Augstein's advice, which included a reminder of Harry Truman's "war crime", as he termed it: the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The most influential German media images are, like the Chancellor's existentialism, products of the aforementioned process of Euro-American cross-fertilization. After the war, the German press patterned itself closely after American journalism, which separated news reporting from opinion. But in the 1960s, when American publications switched to a more subjective "new journalism", their German counterparts quickly followed suit. One recent example of how American "new journalism" has influenced European public opinion was a full-page New York Times feature about George W. Bush's alleged underperformance in college. The European media imported this story and systematized it; ever since, virtually all Europeans who fancy themselves thoughtful believe that Bush is just plain stupid, and a reckless cowboy to boot-which is exactly how Der Spiegel often caricatures him.

Essay Types: Essay