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On the evidence of the past two or three decades, which is all the evidence % needed on most other political questions, such anxieties seem almost irrational. Germany was mostly united back in 1949, when the U.S., British and French zones of military occupation -- 70% of Germany's 1945 territory and 72% of the nation's population -- were merged to form the Federal Republic, with its headquarters in Bonn. Economically, the figures are even more impressive: the East German economy that now has been joined to that of West Germany forms only one-tenth of the combined total. During those past 40 years, the world witnessed cruel wars in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Nicaragua, but the mostly united Germans caused no trouble to anyone.
Yet even their recent peacefulness can apparently be held against them. "The Federal Republic is unique among the great powers in ((that)) it came to life without a drop of blood being shed in its birth," Arthur Miller wrote in the New York Times. "No German soldier can say, 'I fought for democracy' . . . What Germans lack now is the consecration by blood of their democratic state . . ." But whose blood should the Germans have shed in their "consecration," and what would Miller say if any German were foolish enough to offer such a gory theory of "democratic faith"?
Part of this self-induced anxiety about German unification derives from the widespread but questionable theory that different nations have different national characters, that the Germans, because of their history or their upbringing or whatever, are both aggressive and docile, robot-like people who love order and discipline, work and war. Like the stereotypes of the snobbish English or the immoral French or the crass Americans, such caricatures are generally created by one's enemies, often in times of war. "There is such a thing as national character, but it changes," says William Manchester, a Wesleyan University adjunct professor of history and author of The Arms of Krupp. "And the German national character has changed. The Germans are united by language, by culture. And young Germany -- which is most of Germany today -- is also united by a horror of the Second and Third Reichs."
The real origin of the suspicions about Germany's future is, of course, its dark past, namely the crimes committed during the twelve-year reign of Adolf Hitler. Hitler, after all, did not commit those crimes by himself; other Germans piloted the bombers over Warsaw, and other Germans operated the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Though the majority of today's Germans were not even born when those crimes were committed, the nation remains tainted by the Nazi legacy that endures in the world's memory.