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As the two leaders meet, they find themselves in quite different political positions. Schmidt enjoys a popular support at home that is probably more solid than that of any other major Western leader. His approval rating is often as high as 70% in the polls, which he watches as closely as any other modern politician. Carter has not scored that well since his election. In terms of international prestige and influence, West Germany is certainly a nation on the way up. Many West Germans believe their country's ascendancy is due partly to a conscious decision by Schmidt to take up the slack of what he has perceived as weak U.S. leadership that has diminished global confidence in the Carter Administration.
The emergence of West Germany as a self-confident power has been a natural evolution—the product of an enlightened policy by the Western Allies after World War II that reinforced Teutonic diligence and determination. In 1945 Hitler's thousand-year Reich lay in ruins. Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf were reduced to jagged piles of debris. The Allies' "carpet" bombing had blighted the industrial heartland of the Ruhr Valley and the transportation facilities of the whole country. It was a country with millions of homeless refugees, without leadership, and with a heritage that had to be rebuilt from scratch.
Having already sent millions of dollars' worth of goods as stopgap relief, in 1948 the U.S. embarked on the Marshall Plan and over the next four years systematically distributed some $12 billion in economic aid to Western Europe—including West Germany. That rescue program, perhaps the most costly humanitarian effort in history, fueled the industrial revival of the country, made Americans highly respected in Germany at the time, and is still vivid in the memory of a grateful older generation.
Risen from the wasteland, and painfully adjusting to its collective guilt about the Hitler era, the Federal Republic for years remained reluctant to assert itself. Adhering scrupulously to the democratic rules and confines of their postwar constitution, West Germany's 61 million people busily created the most stable big society in Western Europe. The limitations on rearmament obviously helped the Germans, as it did the Japanese, to concentrate resources and energies on export industry instead of defense.
Yet even within the prescribed quotas for military manpower and non-nuclear weaponry, West Germany also built a standing army of 489,000—the largest, best-equipped and most disciplined in Western Europe and second only to the U.S. and Turkey in the NATO alliance. That military machine faces an enduring dilemma: it has to be strong enough for the defense of Central Europe, but never so strong as to provoke the Soviet Union's obsessive fear of a renascent, militaristic West Germany. "We must be cautious," says Defense Minister Hans Apel. "Neither in Eastern nor Western Europe can we create the impression that we are longing for a special military position. On the other hand, we are