They're being broken
May 23rd 2002 | BERLIN
From The Economist print edition
Despite feelings of past guilt, Germans are getting less coy about nationalism
FOR half a century, Germans have been obsessed with their war-time guilt. So much of what they do or say is still interpreted, by themselves as well as by others, through the prism of the Holocaust. It is the cornerstone of their identity. But since Germany's reunification, and more particularly since Gerhard Schr�der became chancellor, a new generation of Germans that feels no personal blame for Nazi crimes has become less willing to be held hostage to the past. They want to stand up for their national rights like other Europeans, answer back when unjustly castigated, and express national pride.
That means old taboos are being gradually broken. But sometimes, even for more robust German stomachs, this process of �normalisation� goes too far too fast: witness two recent incidents of national breast-beating, one over the ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslavakia after the second world war, the other to do with German-Jewish relations.
�Whenever Israel is discussed in Germany,� Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, commented last week, �the fundamental debate about German identity is never far behind. Can we criticise Israel? The very question raises suspicion.� So J�rgen M�llemann, deputy leader of the Free Democrats, Germany's small liberal party, recently learned to his cost. Compared with criticism elsewhere in Europe of Israel's recent conduct, adverse comment in Germany has been mild. Many Germans were thus shocked when Mr M�llemann, an ex-paratrooper who heads the German-Arab Society, said that if his country were occupied, �I too would resist, indeed violently, not just in my own country but also in the aggressor's.�
Paul Spiegel, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, angrily accused Mr M�llemann of fostering �a dangerous anti-Semitic tradition, which in the land of the murderers evidently still exists.� Matters got worse when Jamal Karsli, a Syrian-born applicant to join Mr M�llemann's liberal group in North Rhine-Westphalia, denounced the Israeli army for using �Nazi methods� and complained about the �influence of the Zionist lobby� in the world's media. An alarmed Mr Fischer accused the Free Democrats of becoming a �repository for anti-Semitic views�, while Mr Schr�der charged them with �Haiderisation�, a reference to Austria's anti-immigration populist, J�rg Haider.
In fact, the Free Democrats are one of Germany's most tolerant, open-minded and pro-Israeli of parties. Since the world war, they have provided most of the foreign ministers who have embodied Germany's belief in a Jewish state's inviolable right to exist. Just this month, at a party congress, they reaffirmed that view. Many of Germany's Jews belong to the party.
As good liberals, the Free Democrats have always upheld the right to free speech. But many of Mr M�llemann's colleagues feel he has now gone too far, not only in his indelicate criticism of Israel but also in his attack on Michel Friedmann, an abrasive television chat-show host and deputy leader of the Jewish Council, whom he accused of contributing to the spread of anti-Semitism with his �intolerant and spiteful style�.
But it was Edmund Stoiber, Bavaria's prime minister and the conservatives' challenger for the chancellorship in September, who really stoked things up this week by hinting that the Czechs should not join the EU until they had repealed the Benes decrees named after the post-war Czech president who sanctioned the Sudeten Germans' expulsion.
Mr Stoiber has long championed the Sudeten Germans' cause. Many of them, including his wife, are now Bavarian. Otto Schily, Germany's interior minister, scolds Mr Stoiber for �rabble-rousing talk that smacks of dangerous nationalism�. Yet, with his own eye on the Sudeten vote, Mr Schily too has now called for the Benes decrees' repeal, though not as a precondition for the Czechs' EU membership. It is the first time a German government minister has gone so far. Another taboo broken.