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Germany Reborn

BERLIN — Sixty years ago, the war-torn republic of West Germany signed a new constitution into law; 40 years later, Berliners assaulted a graffiti-covered wall with chisels and mallets. It was a wall that foreigners had built, and that history's two most formidable armies guarded nose to nose.

I don't think that any city on earth bares the scars of the 20th century quite like Berlin. Jut one block from the Brandenburg gate — in which the Soviets hung red banners in 1963 so that the visiting Jack Kennedy couldn't look across to the East — rests the haunting Holocaust memorial. It's a grid of 2,711 concrete slabs, each the length and width of a coffin, that reminds one of waves at sea, rising and falling in height just as the ground beneath them crests and troughs as well, creating a rhythm of eerily rising tombs of altogether immeasurable height. They're the graves of incalculable depth.

There's also the Kaiser Wilhelm church, severely bombed in 1943 but still standing in its semi-destroyed state, its spire hallow and halved in height.

But perhaps most importantly, more than any of the monuments or museums, the German psyche remains scathed. There seems to be a collective fear of what the German race itself is capable of — that whatever drove the horrors their grandfathers unleashed might be lurking inside them, too. Young Germans — I've heard many from the nation recount — are taught to criticize, distrust and perhaps even loathe their nation in a way seen nowhere else on earth.

Now, two generations removed from the war, slowly an element of pride has crept its way back into this society. The 2006 World Cup in Germany brought out innumerable red, yellow and black flags, a fraction of which have remained in a quite visible show of nationalism. They still don't rival Old Glory's presence in the States, but compared to neighbor France and Britain farther to the west, their frequency is surprising.

The eminent former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer — who famously wore tennis shoes to a swearing-in ceremony earlier in his career — has been quoted as saying that Germany is "always facing the danger of nationalism."

"The totalitarian tradition is a European tradition, not an Anglo-Saxon or American tradition," he has proclaimed.

But German successes, particularly in the economic realm, have made the decline of German self-deprecation all but inevitable.

As the German weekly Der Spiegel claimed in its celebratory fervor last weekend: "After Germany was thoroughly devastated in World War II, an economic phoenix rose from the ashes."

Nonetheless, not all spheres have changed so dramatically. I found a good number of German youth at festivities here that dispute the need for Germany to ever train or host an armed force; in their minds, the nation has no place in military conflict. Only 14 percent of Germans would be willing to die for the motherland, a recent study by the Identity Foundation in Düsseldorf concluded.

One can't help but wonder what the nation might accomplish once it fully overcomes the remaining symptoms of its passed plague. Can the nation do for peacekeeping and the spread of democratic values what it has for mechanical innovation and the broader global economy?

Indeed, probably nowhere else in history has a nation — its entire population previously bombarded with propaganda about the pitfalls and failures of democracy — so quickly, peaceably and seamlessly adopted the system.

The former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was held in British POW camps as the war drew to a close, has discussed the political arguments that took life in the closing days of the war; he found himself feuding with other prisoners, staying awake late into the night to debate what order of political organization should be built in the Reich's wake. Before Hitler even fell, a new Germany was being imagined.

In 1970, Chancellor Willy Brandt went to the Warsaw Ghetto to pay honor to the 50,000 Jews murdered there. In the rain, he bowed his head and then fell to his knees.

Germany has atoned as much as the world can ever expect. What now can it achieve in the 21st century, as its Generation Y finally sheds the century passed and the nation grapples — along with the rest of the globe — with the economic collapse?

Brian Till, one of the nation's youngest syndicated columnists, is a research fellow for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington. He can be contacted at till@newamerica.net. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.