The Germans are always late, wrote Thomas Mann, and the results of Germany's elections this past September surely count as evidence. Most of what used to be called Western Europe during the Cold War has turned its back on the left-wing, high-tax crypto-utopianism that has long stifled its economic development and warped its political culture. But by re-electing Gerhard Schröder's "red-green" coalition, German voters have precluded a long overdue modernization of their economy and society. They may also have saddled themselves with the reigning political elite for another eight years-such is suggested by the pattern of postwar German politics-and the inability of this elite to generate positive change risks leaving the door open for all sorts of demons and derelict ideas to fill a widening vacuum.

What was truly odd about the election campaign was that the leaders of an economy and a society that are widely acknowledged to be stuck in a rut were barely able to discuss any of the serious issues afflicting the country. (The loser, the Christian Democratic Union's standard-bearer, Edmund Stoiber, tried to raise the problems of a rigid labor market and educational decline-just two of at least two dozen such issues-but he did not do so well at it.) This suggests that all of the superficial explanations we have heard to explain the results are not really adequate to the task.

Such explanations are by no means in short supply. Yes, it is true that this election was more media-driven than previous campaigns, and that Schröder is rugged and handsome while Stoiber is gray and somewhat wooden. Yes, many Germans believed that a social-democratic party more disposed to the welfare state ethic was a cushier choice for troubled economic times. Yes, the spd's relative strength in urban areas and among younger voters was magnified slightly by demographic changes. Yes, east Germans provided the margin of the red-green victory, both because of the government's efficient response to the summer floods and because the formerly communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) experienced a natural falling off of popularity a dozen years after reunification. Yes, too, Schröder's anti-Bush, antiwar tactics worked at the margin in a close vote, particularly in the east. Some of these theories, perhaps all of them, may be true, yet none of them gets to the meaning of this election for German political culture and Germany's future.

Three other themes that live at a deeper causal level, however, may unearth this meaning. The first of these concerns the pacifist sentiment rooted in Germany's modern history. The second concerns the effect of the 1968 student rebellion and the Left's "Long March through the institutions." The third has to do with a peculiar German susceptibility to utopian fancy, which has bedeviled the country's politics for centuries. It is with these themes, and how they played into the September election, that this essay is concerned.

Haunting Memories

Some Americans find it difficult to grasp the collective nightmare of World War II, the searing memory of its devastation and shame, that still haunts Germans. A significant segment of Germany's 82 million citizens-and here I include myself-is still traumatized by childhood experiences in air-raid shelters: by the blast of blockbuster bombs detonating around them; by basement walls cracking open, allowing waves of fire and smoke to roll into cellars full of women and children. I remember my family taking an aunt's ring finger to its grave because this was the only identifiable part of her body found in the rubble of her Leipzig apartment building. I recall going to school every morning after a bombardment-if indeed the school building was still standing-and learning during roll call that Heinz, Ernst, Helmut or Rudi was dead, killed at age seven or eight. I still have memories of the famine after the war, when we were allowed a mere 700 calories a day in the Soviet zone of occupation, and, worse, the shame that gripped us when we learned of the genocide that our government had committed in our name. It was a shame that made many of us pretend to be something else when we first hitchhiked abroad in the 1950s or 1960s-Luxembourgers, Dutch, Alsatians or Swiss, for example.

These memories, passed on to subsequent generations, have become a fixture of the German national soul. They explain our discomfort with our history-not only the recent Nazi past, but also more benign periods that preceded it. Walk through Germany's towns and villages and you see at every step unsightly architectural testimonies to this phenomenon. Once beautiful apartment blocks built after the Franco-Prussian War now resemble grim casernes because the state paid their owners to hack away at the stucco to make them look "modern." Many medieval town centers that had survived the air war were razed and replaced by soulless concrete structures. Farmers plastered over the Tudor-style exterior walls of their homes to make them look "contemporary." By destroying witnesses to their history and turning "progressive", postwar Germans had hoped, in effect, to get rid of Hitler. As it turned out, we got rid of much of our history while Hitler's shadow nevertheless remained.

Germany, then, is still not a "normal" country like France. In a sense, it resembles Hans im Schnokeloch, the caricature of its Alsatian cousin west of the Rhine. Schnokeloch is a hole in the ground in which Hans hides from mosquitoes. Occasionally he sticks his head out, spots the advancing beasts-meaning German or French forces-and quickly ducks again. Germany has become one large Alsace. The mere mention of an American-led war against Iraq sent us down into our hole, and while this cannot explain in any simple or direct way recent German behavior at the polls, it shows how easy it is for a populist of Schröder's stripe to exploit the country's trauma for selfish purposes.

So here we are, 82 million people on a Wyoming-sized plot of land, peering anxiously across ten open borders and pretending that we live by ourselves, fighting our nightmares out of consciousness through our near manic pursuit of the post-historical, of the modern. And Germany is nothing if not modern. We have "gay pride parades" like the Americans, bourgeois teens pimp-walking around town in grunge garments like ghetto kids in the United States, and we outdo any American social engineer in sheer folly. We have been known, for example, to send juvenile felons on "therapeutic" adventure trips to New Zealand, accompanied by a social worker, at taxpayers' expense. Like the Americans, too, we bastardize our language with politically-correct neologisms; we call this Dummdeutsch ("dumb German"). We no longer say "Guten Morgen", but "Hi, Brigitte, wow", not knowing what this signifies; it just sounded good last night on television. Our feminists can out-snarl their American counterparts, as well, and we have guitar-strumming pastors blessing same-sex unions and experimenting liturgically with heavy metal clamor in the vain hope of filling their empty churches.

Yet these superficial attributes of modern cosmopolitanism notwithstanding, Germany is parochial. It is because its parochialism is so deep, in fact, that its expressions of cosmopolitan modernism are so over-the-top. Few of its most modern, progressive leaders speak a foreign language competently; the current chancellor certainly doesn't, and so it is fitting that during his successful election campaign he stressed a new-a modern-German Sonderweg, a new autonomous national path. He did this even though Germany is utterly dependent on foreign trade, especially with the United States, which he so crassly offended. And most of those around him helping to govern Germany thought all this not the least bit odd.

The 68ers' Long March

Those who now run this not-yet-normal Germany are mostly "graduates" of a student protest movement that, to hear their own chroniclers describe it, rebelled against the stuffiness and authoritarianism of the Adenauer years. Actually, most other Germans remember this era as a pleasant one, filled with optimism and opportunity. They remember it that way because it was filled with optimism and opportunity, but also because, unlike those born after 1939, say, they could remember a pre-1945 reality with which to compare it.

The real reasons for the alienation of the German generation of 1968-the 68ers as they are called-has less to do with anything stuffy about the Adenauer era and more to do with what it has in common with youth revolts in other affluent liberal democratic cultures after World War II (though this is not the place to rehearse the literature). Germany is not unique among the non-U.S. cases in that its anti-Vietnam War sentiment was imported and wore very second-handed.¹ It is unique, however, in that the German youth revolt played into a culture in which adult authority figures possessed scant moral capital. It is not that many men and women of the Adenauer-era elite did not deserve to claim such capital; they chose not to claim it, however, for it did not match their contrition and genuine sense of humility as leaders among the nations. Therefore, while in other Western societies authority and tradition pushed back against the excesses of youthful alienation, in Germany student rebels were able to seize virtually an entire culture as if walking through an open door. The consequences of their subsequent Long March through the institutions have gone far to define the country ever since.

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.

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.

In a way, Ms. Jepsen is a caricature of the postmodern German church, whose pronouncements are often indistinguishable from those of the Social Democrats and the Greens. Despite figures like Jepsen, Germany still produces brilliant theologians; names such as Wolfhart Pannenberg, Eberhard Jüngel and Michael Welker come to mind. And there are still faithful pastors and powerful preachers whose churches usually make up the few that are still well attended on Sundays. Nevertheless, the decline of much of German Protestantism to an anthropocentric, politically-correct shadow of its former self not only mirrors the decline of other institutions since the Long March commenced, it also parallels the diminution of America's mainline churches-and for good reason. Religion is yet another field where Germany and the United States constantly re-infect each other with wayward theologoumena, albeit sometimes via long detours. The mad genius of Friedrich Nietzsche furnishes a case in point.

Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead" took almost a century to root itself in American theology, well after the Germans had discarded it. But thanks to the American knack for reducing lofty concepts to user-friendly formulae, this concept, too, was repackaged for global--and, of course, German--consumption. "When I attended Princeton Seminary in the early 1970s, the topic in homiletics was, 'What do you now preach on Easter Sunday?"', the Rev. Fred R. Anderson, senior pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, told me. What indeed, if God was dead and therefore could not have raised Christ from the dead? The Germans then picked this up in an odd way. Not that a whole new "God is dead" school emerged; rather, much of the German church since the Long March has resolved the "What do you now preach on Easter Sunday?" issue by proclaiming the social gospel, which is essentially an import from the United States. Horst-Klaus Hofmann, a German lay theologian who founded a highly successful mini stry that "deprogrammed" tens of thousands of post-1968 student radicals, attributes his church's "blindness in the left eye", especially the refusal to see the inhumanity of Communist regimes, to a similar and much older deficiency in American religion. "We have copied Sherwood Eddy", explained Hofmann. (Before World War II, the theologian Eddy [1873-1963] organized guided tours to the Soviet Union to show Christians from the United States how "progressive" this socialist nation was.) "He overlooked the slaughter of the kulaks", says Hofmann: "Similarly, we have had many church leaders schmoozing with the Communists after 1968."

This discussion of Protestantism deformed in Germany brings us to and links us with an older mode of German utopianism, which has sometimes expressed itself in religious, sometimes in philosophical terms. Germans are still in search of the ideal and final "It"--the answer to "life, the universe and everything", as the late Douglas Adams comically put it--and God help us all if we find one.

A susceptibility to utopian fallacies is, of course, not an exclusively German trait. However, no other Western nation has been more torn between two irreconcilable worldviews--the rational and the millenarian--than this one. The conflict goes at least as far back as the clash between the 16th-century reformers Martin Luther and Thomas Muntzer. Its roots are theological. It pits Luther's rational approach against chiliast dreams espoused by both the violent social reformer Muntzer and the otherworldly and pacifist Anabaptists. Luther, who dismissed both types as Schwarmer, or enthusiasts, saw natural reason as the empress of all things" in the secular realm, a gift from God to enable man to find his way around this world. Reason tells us that it is not for man to accelerate the eschaton, the return of Christ and the beginning of his millennium. The chiliast, on the other hand--the term is rooted in the Greek word chilioi, meaning one thousand--expects the union of the promised millennium with the here and now . In theological parlance, the chiliast endeavors to immanentize the eschaton.

The chiliast's means may be violent, which is why Karl Mannheim saw a "structural link" between 16th-century chiliasm and social revolution.⁶ Or they may be anti-violent, in the form of a radical drive for peace that requires an unconditional withdrawal from the world. Muntzer was a violent chiliast who believed he was doing God's work. His modern heirs, the Communists and the National Socialists, were godless but acknowledged their debt to him. Friedrich Engels paid homage to Muntzer's visions.⁷ So did Alfred Rosenberg, Nazism's principal ideologue, in his vile work, Mythus des 20. Fahrbunderts.⁸ Latter-day left-wingers in both East and West Germany did the same; in the 1970s, several Protestant kindergartens in West Germany were named after Muntzer.

As a delayed consequence of the 68ers' Long March, today's Germany is once again in danger of slipping into a chiliast mode, albeit one of the non-violent variety. It is understandable that after the longest period of peace and prosperity in their entire history, the Germans prefer to cling to their blessed status for just a little while longer. Yet their current utopian Schwarmerei is particularly bizarre; after all, a paradise whose inmates are chiefly preoccupied with wondering where to spend their next six-week vacation must by definition be very strange.

"NOT IDEAS but the murkier depths of the soul" motivated Muntzer's movement, Mannheim wrote. The same goes for soft chiliasm. Many Germans today simply cannot reconcile their amazing good fortune--peace, prosperity, democracy, reunification and Europafication, too--with the extremely low national self-esteem to which they have been educated and inured. God seems to have blessed them despite themselves, but half a century after the Gotterdammerung most cannot summon the words with which to give thanks, because anything like the admission of a real belief in God departed with the Nuremberg judges. No wonder their depths are murky.

Schroder catered to these murky depths and won. By directing his country to a perilous Sonderweg, however, he has reopened the portfolio of Germany's past, and clouded its future. Is that future to be one of a softly smothering European Union--one that will transcend the national idea and finally link Germany with the rest of normal humanity--or will the modern German chiliasts find their "It"? Sonderweg, indeed.

1 By the by, that there were sociologically similar movements outside the United States, in countries whose armies were not fighting in Vietnam, proves that the war cannot by itself explain the youth "revolt" in the United States, but that is a subject for a different essay.

2 Weimer, "Die Fruchte der Siebziger", Die Welt, June 6, 2002.

3 Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, "Wie man den Frieden verkauft oder Die Diffamierung Amerikas", Frankfurter Aligemeine Zeitung, October 4, 2002.

4 Augstein, "Abenteurer und Strategen", Spiegel (online), November 19, 2001.

5 Koenen, Das rote fabrzehnt, Unsere kleine Kulturrevolution (Cologne: Kiepemhauer und Witsch 2001).

6 Karl Mannheim, Ideologie and Utopie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), p. 184.

7 Freidrich Engels, The German Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 46.

8 Discussed in Joachim Pest, Der zerstorte Traum, Vom Ende des utopischen Zeitalters (Frankfurt: Siedler, 1991), p. 63.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and sociology of religion from Boston University, is UPI's religion correspondent.