World: WEST GERMANY: OUTCASTS AT THE HELM

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anxiety," as they refer to it. But today, two-thirds of the men and half of the women among West Germany's 61 million people are under 40 and had little or nothing to do with the war. If many of them are "Hitler's children," born during his rule, the Führer would surely disown them. They are painfully aware of their country's Nazi past; two years ago, a public opinion poll showed that 60% of those between the ages of 16 and 29 would rather live in another country.

A similar poll conducted today might show that many more would be willing to stay at home and work at changing the country. To be sure, there are free love communes in West Berlin, pot-smokers and hippies in most large cities, but the mood of the young is, by and large, activist. Significantly, Nobel prizewinning Novelist Hermann Hesse no longer exerts a strong pull on young West Germans. To them, Hesse's romantic mystique of the outsider and his preoccupation with passive Oriental philosophies has about it what British Critic D. J. Enright calls "the smell of metaphysical Lederhosen." Hesse's appeal is largely to those racked by uncertainty and disillusion, which explains his vogue on U.S. campuses and, in the early postwar period, among Germany's youth.

Opinion surveys show that the majority of students are willing to accept the existence of East Germany as a separate state and to write off the territory beyond the Oder-Neisse line. German students have a deep revulsion to any thing that reminds them of Hitler—and that sometimes includes their own parents. At the same time, students who only a few years ago looked to the U.S. as a model are now somewhat disenchanted, largely because of the Viet Nam war and U.S. racial disturbances. German students are also strongly antimilitaristic, a fact that will probably prompt the Socialists to cut the tour of duty for draftees from 18 months to 15; at present, 200,000 German youths between 19 and 24 are conscripted each year.

Old habits do not vanish overnight, however, and discipline is still next to godliness in the eyes of many Germans. According to one well-known barb, Germans obey the law because it's against the law not to do so. Yet there are signs that even in Germany, discipline is giving way to what Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, who also happens to be the Free Democrats' leading thinker, calls "the individual search for happiness by people freed of the fetters of tradition and thrown into the affluent society." Writes Dahrendorf in Society and Democracy in Germany:

"Discipline, orderliness, subservience, cleanliness, industriousness, precision, and all the other virtues ascribed by many to the Germans as an echo of past splendor have already given way to a much less rigid set of values, among which economic success, a high income, the holiday trip, and the new car play a much larger part than the virtues of the past. Younger people especially display little of the much praised and much scorned respect for authority, and less of the disciplined virtues that for their fathers were allegedly sacred. A world of highly individual values has emerged, which puts the experienced happiness of the individual in first place and increasingly lets the so-called whole slip from sight."

The Newest Wave

At the same time, more and more Germans seem willing