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The case is impressive. For a nation without any meaningful democratic traditions, the Federal Republic's institutions are working surprisingly well—in large measure, the legacy of Konrad Adenauer's remarkable 14-year chancellorship. Politics in Bonn are contentious, abrasive and unpredictable. According to one of the opinion polls with which the Germans constantly take their own pulse, ten years ago some 30% of German voters thought power should reside in one man at the top; today only 18% still have such authoritarian longings. West Germany's press and television are strong, free, and outspokenly critical. Hardly anyone advocates extremist solutions for anything. The army bears little resemblance to its goose-stepping ancestor. It is a citizen force, and most of its members are self-conscious in what are often derided as bus-conductor uniforms; indeed, most German bus conductors look more like soldiers than the soldiers.
While not claiming that it can make amends to Nazism's victims, West Germany has paid $1 billion in reparations to Israel as the symbolic representative of world Jewry. With only 30,000 Jews now living in West Germany, anti-Semitism is not an issue. But its propagation is formally outlawed—perhaps not the most democratic way of coping with it—and people go to jail for passing anti-Semitic material.
The vast majority of Germans wanted to let the statute of limitations against further trials of Nazi war criminals expire this spring and the whole business be done with. Franz Josef Strauss, the erratic ex-Defense Minister who is trying hard for a comeback, sneered that if the trials were to continue, "war criminals" on the Russian side should be tried too. But Chancellor Erhard and the Bundestag extended the statute. In a moving speech on the site of the Belsen concentration camp, President Heinrich Lübke recalled that many non-Jewish Germans were executed or imprisoned for opposing the Nazi regime. "Their number is many times larger than the number of hangmen. Their death and suffering make us part of the international solidarity of all men and women who fight and die for freedom, and they unite our people to the 6,000,000 Jews who were murdered."
All too often, such words and the spirit behind them are ignored or taken for granted by the world, while the old caricature traits of the Germans are seized on as instant proof that "they haven't changed"—tourist arrogance, preoccupation with titles, heavy humor, gross appetites. There are, in fact, more serious atavistic qualities to be found in German life: authoritarianism in the courts and schools, a tendency to function in groups, a passion for obedience. In his book This Germany, Journalist Rudolf Walter Leonhardt doubts that the past could repeat itself or "that Germans may go insane in the same way twice," but he fears that his countrymen still have a hankering to find scapegoats and suppress dissent. The most controversial current book is titled Training for Disobedience in Germany, by Sociologist Ulrich Sonnemann, who calls for "a humanization of the German attitude." To achieve a new identity, he says, the German must learn "disobedience" and join in a revolution "against institutionalized souls."
The Old Mystery