In no area, however, does the power of the 68ers' pre-eminence in the media express itself more forcefully than in its ability to promote that generation's own moral credentials. The now-graying 68ers ceaselessly advertise themselves in German media culture products as the avant-garde generation that advanced democracy in Germany and finally forced the nation to face up to its Nazi past. This myth, which has been imported by much of the American academy and media, has no basis whatsoever in fact. There is irony, too, in the fact that the 68ers singled out conservative newspaper publisher Axel Springer for their wrath and, indeed, terrorist attacks. Springer, well before 1968, had probably done more vicarious penance for Germany's mass slaughter of the Jews than any other individual. "Expropriate Springer!", they chanted; yet it was Springer who made his journalists sign a list of "essentials" committing them to reconciliation between Germans and Jews, and it was Springer who poured a fortune into Israel.

Gerd Koenen, once one of the movement's top theorists, acknowledges the shallowness of the 68ers' reckoning with German history. When Palestinian terrorists murdered the Israeli team during the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Ulrike Meinhof remarked that Israel was now shedding "crocodile tears" while "it burns its sportsmen just as the Nazis burned the Jews-fuel for the imperialist policies of extermination."⁵ Meinhof, co-leader of the terrorist gang that was the most lethal brood of the 1968 vintage, went on to call Defense Minister Moshe Dayan "Israel's Himmler." Being "blessed by her late birth", to paraphrase Helmut Kohl, she felt at liberty to concoct this toxic cocktail of words mixing anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism and unabashed anti-Semitism.

To my generation of Germans-those too young to have been implicated in Nazi crimes but old enough to have witnessed Germany's destruction, disgrace and then the monumental feat of its reconstruction-the 68ers' claim of being the first to have redeemed their country is preposterous. When they were still in elementary school (or in diapers), we learned from our teachers and pastors, and from reading the papers, what had happened in Auschwitz. We challenged our parents' generation even as we appreciated their pain. We knew the Trümmerfrauen who cleared rubble while their husbands or brothers were still in pow camps or, more likely, distant war graves; we knew them not just from photographs but because they were our grandmothers, mothers, aunts and neighbors. It was our generation of pre-68ers, too, that first went to Coventry to help rebuild a cathedral bombed by Göring's Luftwaffe, that first flocked to Israel to work on kibbutzim, that financed the first chunks of restitution payments made to Israel and victims of the Nazi regime worldwide-all while the soon-to-be 68ers enjoyed a cozy adolescence.

But none of this matters anymore. The media message is unrelenting: the 68ers are the heroes, and all their forbears, like the Adenauer era against which they "arose", are dull, compromised and fettered by their own historical "complexes." One of those complexes is their quaint respect for the United States of America.

Anti-Americanism

Contemporary German anti-Americanism can only be understood in the light of the 68er experience, for the reigning 68ers have a peculiarly inverted love-hate relationship with America. Neither they nor the country are anti-American in a typical way; when pollsters ask more or less straightforward questions about the United States, nearly three-quarters of all Germans claim to be pro-American. But what exactly do they mean by that? It depends who is being asked.

This early anti-Americanism of the 68ers struck us elders as a form of infantile petulance: "Love me because I am naughty." But it was really less and more than that; at any rate, it was not ordinary anti-Americanism by any means. Koenen describes the 68ers' attitudes toward America as an internal paradox: anti-Americans swinging to British and American pop music like "Street Fightin' Man", "Route 66" and "Hotel California." At the inception of their revolutionary epoch, they used American jargon, dressed like American hippies and chanted "Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi Minh" as if they were marching through Berkeley, waving the vc flag and smoking pot like their American contemporaries. They literally endeavored, incompetently, to imitate American protestors. What was the slogan of the Black Power movement? "Burn, baby, burn." What did Andreas Baader, Meinhof's partner in terror, scream in garbled English after burning down a Frankfurt department store, allegedly to avenge the Vietcong? "Burn, warehouse, burn." (Baader, a confused man in more ways than one, mistook Lagerhalle for Warenhaus, "warehouse" for "department store.")

In their own minds, the 68ers weren't anti-American at all. Rather, they were pro-anti-American Americans. In other words, the Americans the 68ers admired were self-hating Americans, whom they saw as the ultra-Atlantic counterpart of self-hating Germans. This is perfectly logical when one thinks it through. The 68ers were raised with extremely ambiguous, if not plainly negative, conceptions of German nationalism and all the symbols associated with it. Little wonder, then, that they were alienated from the postwar German state, which, however demur and responsible it was, could not help but press German interests. It follows that the protector and mentor of this state, namely the political establishment in the United States, was a candidate for alienation by association. Finally, to complete the psychological circle, the enemies of that establishment-anti-U.S. Americans-had to be the friends of the 68ers. And since they could not love themselves-they, too, were Germans, after all-the American counterculture was, in effect, the last model standing.

Thus did the German 68ers strive to earn brownie points with U.S. progressives. (They have continued to do so ever since-at least until September 11, 2001, when other outsiders established altogether new parameters of anti-Americanism.) Koenen shows how the 68ers perversely flexed their muscles by showing off their "moral negative capital", meaning the good fortune of having been born after Germany's descent into infamy. Armed with "militant innocence", they became the vanguard in the global struggle against alleged "U.S. imperialism" in Nicaragua and southern Africa. They told the world: We were so bad, but look how wonderfully, radically good we are now. And for a long time, it worked. Alongside befuddled U.S. mainline clerics and social science professors on sabbatical, they hacked sugar cane in "oppressed" nations.

Germany's 68ers, some of them anyway, got at least a dim sense that things changed last September 11. Much of the U.S. political counterculture that they admired and imitated turned cautiously patriotic in the face of a clear and present danger, not to speak of an atrocity. But the German 68ers found it very hard to shirk off a lifetime of adulation and vicarious heroism. They probably believed right until the German election on September 22 that their pro-anti-American Americanism still made sense, and would continue to work in German politics. Maybe they were right. Only a few weeks before Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin compared Bush with Hitler, an American churchman did the same at a conference on the war on terrorism sponsored by the World Council of Churches in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The difference was that, unlike perhaps two years ago, that churchman is now viewed as a crackpot in the United States, whereas Däubler-Gmelin, a senior official of an important ally, was merely ruled impolitic, "out of order", so to speak, rather than out of line.

Protestant Deformation and Chiliast Fantasy

It is not too much to say, then, that a red thread connects Germany's educational emergency, its media culture, the self-image of its leadership class and the knee-jerk anti-Bush sentiment to which Schröder appealed in his recent campaign. But the thread does not end there; it leads also to another bastion of social authority in any society: its religious institutions.

The 68ers' Long March has thoroughly altered Germany's Protestant territorial churches, to which 26.6 million Germans belong, compared with 26.8 million Catholics. Chiefly as a result of the left-wing drift of their church leadership, German Protestants, once in the majority, have now become a minority group.

Nowhere is Protestantism's decline more noticeable than in Hamburg, once a bastion of staunch Lutheranism and now the model of ecclesiological postmodernity. For the last ten years, Maria Jepsen, the first female bishop in world Lutheranism, has headed the Hamburg church. Her tenure has been marked by a two-page interview placed above an advertisement for sadomasochistic paraphernalia in a magazine for homosexuals, and by her preface to a tome entitled, Göttlich lesbisch ("Divinely Lesbian"). Until recently, the staff of one prominent downtown church would take bets as to how long it would take their bishop, who is married, to get her favorite topic, homosexuality, into her sermons. (The loser had to buy a round of champagne.) At one point too, Jepsen, a self-described "soft feminist", suggested replacing the cross as the Christian symbol in Lutheran churches with a crèche because this would be much "nicer." Not surprisingly, during Jepsen's first ten years in office, the Hamburg church shrank faster than any other in Germany. It lost a full third of its membership and is now down to 587,000, a minority in a city in which almost everybody used to be Lutheran after World War II. Even so, the synod of her region has just re-elected her to another ten-year term.

Essay Types: Essay