Roger Cohen: Germany Unbound
[Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting Foreign Editor on September 11, 2001, and Foreign Editor six months later. In 2009 he was named a columnist of The New York Times.]
BERLIN — After two decades, a unified Germany is coming into focus, like some lumbering creature emerging from the mist. Its election result no longer merits a Page 1 story in The New York Times, but it’s still the European behemoth. And it’s not the Germany we knew.
When I moved to Germany in 1998 there was great excitement over the birth of the “Berlin Republic” and the end of the “Bonn Republic.” The capital was moving back to the Prussian plains after a half-century interlude in the unthreatening Rhineland. Bonn had been a retreat from history. Now, as some ministries moved into refurbished former Third Reich buildings, a united Germany came face to face with its specters.
The Berlin Republic — the phrase never quite stuck although Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s center-left coalition liked it — was full of feverish inquiry. Berlin itself was a vast building site of empty spaces that begged the question: What new Germany will fill them?
In that city taking form, a subterranean Germany surfaced from decades of self-imposed silence to ask if it could be proud, if it could speak of its millions of World War II dead, if it had done penance enough for the Holocaust, if it had attained “normality,” if its Auschwitz-forged sentence was forever to be an economic giant and a political midget.
Returning to a Berlin now bereft of such probing interrogation to witness Angela Merkel’s cruise to victory at the head of her Christian Democratic Union (C.D.U.), and the collapse of the Social Democrats (S.P.D.), I could see that phase was over. The Berlin Republic is now the German Republic. Get used to it.
This Germany is more nationalistic, more evenly poised between Washington and Moscow, cool to the point of disinterest about the European Union, self-absorbed and self-satisfied, dutiful but unenthused about the NATO alliance.
None of this should suggest that Germany will turn its back on the United States, the E.U. or NATO, the three cornerstones of its post-war success story. But they will not have the emotional hold they had.
Indeed, I heard more intellectual excitement over Russia and the broadening German-Russian relationship than over Obama’s America. Germany is Russia’s largest trading partner. Russia is Germany’s 10th largest. A kind of moral complicity — two large nations that made big historical mistakes — binds them...
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BERLIN — After two decades, a unified Germany is coming into focus, like some lumbering creature emerging from the mist. Its election result no longer merits a Page 1 story in The New York Times, but it’s still the European behemoth. And it’s not the Germany we knew.
When I moved to Germany in 1998 there was great excitement over the birth of the “Berlin Republic” and the end of the “Bonn Republic.” The capital was moving back to the Prussian plains after a half-century interlude in the unthreatening Rhineland. Bonn had been a retreat from history. Now, as some ministries moved into refurbished former Third Reich buildings, a united Germany came face to face with its specters.
The Berlin Republic — the phrase never quite stuck although Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s center-left coalition liked it — was full of feverish inquiry. Berlin itself was a vast building site of empty spaces that begged the question: What new Germany will fill them?
In that city taking form, a subterranean Germany surfaced from decades of self-imposed silence to ask if it could be proud, if it could speak of its millions of World War II dead, if it had done penance enough for the Holocaust, if it had attained “normality,” if its Auschwitz-forged sentence was forever to be an economic giant and a political midget.
Returning to a Berlin now bereft of such probing interrogation to witness Angela Merkel’s cruise to victory at the head of her Christian Democratic Union (C.D.U.), and the collapse of the Social Democrats (S.P.D.), I could see that phase was over. The Berlin Republic is now the German Republic. Get used to it.
This Germany is more nationalistic, more evenly poised between Washington and Moscow, cool to the point of disinterest about the European Union, self-absorbed and self-satisfied, dutiful but unenthused about the NATO alliance.
None of this should suggest that Germany will turn its back on the United States, the E.U. or NATO, the three cornerstones of its post-war success story. But they will not have the emotional hold they had.
Indeed, I heard more intellectual excitement over Russia and the broadening German-Russian relationship than over Obama’s America. Germany is Russia’s largest trading partner. Russia is Germany’s 10th largest. A kind of moral complicity — two large nations that made big historical mistakes — binds them...