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Germany. Well, now they have one."
Since Brandt launched his Ostpolitik (policy looking to the East) in 1970, West Germany has become more closely involved with the U.S.S.R. Says Countess Marion Donhoff, publisher of the liberal Hamburg weekly Die Zeit: "We once again assumed our traditional place in the center of Europe. As a result, Bonn must to a certain extent take into account the reactions of the East."
Last week, only two days before Brezhnev's arrival in Bonn, a West German company signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that cleared the way for the largest East-West trade contract ever concluded: the construction of a $10 billion pipeline to deliver Siberian natural gas to Western Europe. The U.S. had tried, but to no avail, to convince the West Germans that becoming dependent on the Soviets for fuel would make the country too vulnerable to political pressures.
West Germany's problems are demographic as well as geographic. There are 11.5 million people (nearly 19% of the population) between the ages of 13 and 25, and more than a million will turn 17 some time this year. Once they would have been assured a comfortable future, but the country's economy is now faltering, and unemployment could reach 2 million by the end of the year. The frustration of young West Germans with their country's problems somehow finds expression in mass resentment against the Reagan Administration. In September thousands of West Germans marched through West Berlin to protest a visit by Secretary of State Haig, who personified for them U.S. nuclear policy.
The talk of war plays upon the fears of the young. "They feel like passengers in a car racing toward an abyss," says Horst Eberhard Richter, a professor of psychosomatics at the University of Giessen. "They have a desire to grab the wheel."
In contrast to the largely Communist-led peace movements in France and Italy, West German pacifism is not closely identified with any political party. Says a Western diplomat in Bonn: "The majority of West German pacifists do not respond to political pressure. They are acting out of conviction. With them, it's religion."
Literally. The Lutheran Church has thrown its considerable weight behind the antimissile protest and so, in a more muted fashion, has the Roman Catholic Church. Protests sponsored by churches have played a major role in arousing public opinion. Earlier this month, the Evangelical Synod, which is the governing body of the Lutheran Church, approved a "peace memorandum" that was tougher on the U.S. than on the Soviet Union.
That attitude has profoundly irritated Schmidt. "You can't make it so easy for yourselves," he told churchmen during a television dels bate. "You cannot say, when someone else builds up missiles and armaments directed against your town and other towns, 'I will hold back and God will look after me.' "
The peace movement in Britain also is growing at a remarkable pace. On Oct. 24, a crowd of more than 175,000 gathered in London's Hyde Park to call for the government not only to ban U.S. nuclear weapons but to give up its own, both ideas stoutly resisted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's