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One inheritance of the past that sociologists and pundits detect is a surprisingly strong undercurrent of dark insecurity that runs beneath the gleaming material surface. It is evident in the mood of uneasiness among students. It is regularly reflected in a brooding quality that characterizes Germany's new plays, novels and poetry. In many subtle ways, it affects the citizen at large. Says Richard Lowenthal, professor emeritus at Berlin's Free University: "The citizens of West Germany live more securely than at any time since 1914, but they do not feel secure." However, the uncertainty produces a beneficial impulse: to refresh the democratic institutions constantly because they are never quite taken for granted. But it also shows that the Germans will not soon, if ever, get rid of the Angst that has inhabited the Teutonic soul since the Lutheran Reformation.
No one better personifies the confidence, and complexes, at work in today's German society than Helmut Schmidt. "He has all the positive and negative German qualities, and this I explains his enormous popularity," says one Bonn bureaucrat. I "We are thrifty. Cleanliness and I order are still our most valued virI tues. We tend to organize everything. Our industriousness is both admired and deplored by foreigners. And we are arrogant. The whole German mentality can be seen through Helmut Schmidt." Adds University of Cologne Sociologist Erwin Scheuch wryly: "Schmidt is an above-average average German."
His popularity, which regularly runs far ahead of his own Social Democratic Party, is also due to his broad political placement. Schmidt is an internationalist, a liberal on most social issues, and a strict economic conservative when it comes to guarding against inflation— even if that means curbing welfare spending. As he put it during a recent visit to London to meet Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: "I am not a socialist, I am a democrat." In light of his sound-money, free-market policies, many politicians have observed that he might seem more at home in West Germany's conservative Christian Democratic Union than in his own S.D.P. In fact, a number of key C.D.U. parliamentarians murmur privately that they dearly wish they had him as leader of their party.
Schmidt is a magnetic speaker and skilled television performer. Characteristically, most West German politicians tend to shout down at their audience, as though thunder were persuasive, and to gesticulate like bandleaders. Schmidt carefully modulates his resonant baritone voice and paces the words in his crisp North German accent. His rigid grip on he lectern seems to convey a firm hold on he tiller of the ship of state. As he moves into a crescendo, he is apt to whip off his glasses with a flourish, as though to meet each spectator eyeball to eyeball. Franz Josef Strauss, 63, the burly leader of Bavaria's ultraconservative Christian Social Union, calls Schmidt "the Federal Actor." Helmut Kohl, 49, the hapless C.D.U. chairman who was deposed last week as his party's candidate for Chancellor in the 1980 elections in favor of the more dynamic Ernst Albrecht, 48, grumbles sarcastically: "If I were half as beautiful as beautiful Helmut, I would have an easier time in politics."
To Germans who admire his