Leading from Strength

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cultural resurgence. More than $1 billion a year, perhaps the biggest cultural subsidy in the world, is spent by state and federal authorities to finance an aesthetic amalgam of 800 museums, 1,600 art galleries, 60 opera houses, 96 orchestras and 200 legitimate theaters. West Germany has its own new wave of film makers—Rainer Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders—whose reputations as cinematographic cult figures rival those of the Truffauts and Godards who starred in France's Nouvelle Vague of the '60s. Director Volker Schlondorff won top honors at the Cannes Film Festival last month for his film version of Gunter Grass's classic, The Tin Drum.

For all its burgher prosperity and bustling stability, West Germany is not without problems. The burden of the unemployment falls mainly on the Gastarbeiter, the 3.9 million "guest workers" and their families imported over the years from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece and Portugal to do the menial jobs that West Germans disdain. As jobs have become scarcer, more than a million Gastarbeiter have been repatriated, either by inducement or expulsion; the remainder live as alienated poor in urban ghettos, cut off from the rest of society.

The Teutonic obsession with internal security has raised concern about the "Ugly German" on occasion. Throughout its largely successful campaign against the wave of terrorism by the notorious Red Army Faction, the .A federal government re frained from overreacting and jeopardizing civil liberties. During the whole period, Schmidt acted coolly and shrewdly. First of all, he had the sense not to call army troops out into the streets, which would have alarmed Germans and other Europeans alike. When he did use troops, in 1977, it was to launch the dramatic commando raid that rescued a hijacked Lufthansa airliner at Mogadishu.

In 1972, however, parliament passed a controversial "job ban" aimed at barring extremists and members of the minuscule Communist Party from all public jobs by means of a system of excessive "loyalty" checks. The law has since been modified and now exempts individuals who may have belonged to extremist organizations in the past but are no longer members. Abroad, the residual "Ugly German" image has not been dissipated by the 26 million West German tourists who annually seek the sun (vacations for industrial workers average 4½ weeks a year); as travelers, Germans often come on strong, flaunting their deutsche marks, in the old image of the American tourist.

Helmut Schmidt has said, "It will take 50 years to forget the Nazi past. " Yet West Germans have progressively tried to come to terms with it. The turning point was Brandt's act of atonement in 1970, when he knelt before a memorial in the Warsaw ghetto to victims of Hitler's Holocaust. The Nazi issue arises periodically; the election two weeks ago of Christian Democrat Karl Carstens, a former Nazi Party member, as West Germany's new President provoked protest demonstrations by left-wing groups dressed in mock Nazi uniforms. It was clearly a milestone in national adjustment when the TV series Holocaust was shown throughout the country earlier this year. The series provoked no serious protest, as might have happened in the past. Instead, for the first time, national soul searching about the Nazi period was brought out in the