Germany Unbound
Roger Cohen is once again reflecting Germany. After 20 years post fall of the wall.
Lots of good points. Some confusion. The core of the summarized confusions is the emotional identity of this newly emerging country in progress. The nucleus of a fresh self understanding -in alignment to global developments is fragile still.
Cohen says:
"Most Germans favor a withdrawal from Afghanistan, a popular urge the new center-right coalition of the C.D.U. and Free Democratic Party will resist. Germans don't believe the defense of their country starts in the Hindu Kush. They're enjoying the unbearable lightness of being surrounded by allies."
No, they are not enjoying it. it simply is a new experience in history. And a new form of global engagement, perspectivic understanding of stratfied realites is still to be learned. With all responsibilites and opportunties.
Cohen says:
"Indeed, I heard more intellectual excitement over Russia and the broadening German-Russian relationship than over Obama's America. "
Thats simply not true. However Russia is in geopoltical neighborhood. And America intensively communicating with China. Once again geostrategic facts and connectivity is to be taken into account. And while lots of Germans were highly interesed in the Obama elections far less Americans are interested whats going on here in Germany.
Coherent change in all continents and cultures requires massive readiness for learning and unlearning stereotypes. Plus in depth understanding of the tectonic vertical constellations in the cultures.
Analysis of the past seldom is sufficient here. The ability to discover perspectives, new dimensions and the complexity of first, second and third person reality is essential. For top journalists on both sides of the Atllantic too.
Germany Unbound
By ROGER COHEN
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
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