A 'Take' On the German Perspective

[Annie]

http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/why_old_europe_.html

WHY “OLD EUROPE” STINGS
(This is an opinion piece from our friend DL in Heidelberg regarding anti-Americanism in Germany)

Germans revere Saint Florian as the patron saint of firefighters and offer a prayer to him that goes “Holy Saint Florian, spare my house and burn my neighbor's.” This prayer is an accurate description of Chancellor’s Schroeder’s foreign policy and is held by most Germans as a valid approach to the war on terror.

But the German desire to avoid unpleasantness at the cost of its neighbors does little to explain why the German media have been knotted in a relentless spasm of anti-Americanism. In the days following the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, German politicians solemnly announced “We are all New Yorkers.”

In the weeks following the attacks, however, Germans media elites gave voice to the sentiments of the Arab street, not as Arab opinion, but as their own. Television and print media provided a platform to every German fashion designer, actor, and professional party personality who sagely identified America’s pro-Israeli policies as the root cause of terrorism. More troubling, they smilingly opined that the U.S. finally got a dose of its own medicine on its own territory. Schadenfreude at its worst, Germans were happy their house was spared while America’s burned. And this a full year before German media used Iraq to unveil the depth of its animosity toward the U.S.

For that we have Chancellor Schroeder to thank. As the German politician whose legacy will be the permanent poisoning of German-American relations, he used anti-Americanism to rescue a re-election that was in jeopardy. He announced it was the policy of his government to stop the U.S. from removing Saddam. Although the ploy narrowly won him re-election, it placed him squarely at odds with reality. He was committed to finding a way to stop a super power from pursuing its national security imperative.

Nothing Germany could do in the UN, NATO, or the other multilateral organizations founded to maintain the status quo would prevent Saddam’s ouster. This presented German media elites with a dilemma. They might have to acknowledge Germany no longer had the ability to influence international affairs. It had lost its place at the center of the geo-strategic world with the end of the Cold War. It had lost its status as an economic super power after German unification. A shrinking population, collapsing welfare state, strangling tax burden, and Weimar Republic levels of unemployment were undeniable symptoms of fifty years of wrong choices. But rather than admit what every observer outside of Germany understands, the government and a willing media peddled an alternate version of reality. Everything was America’s fault.

Germans are no longer keen to point out that their sentiments are just anti-Bush, not anti-American. The steady diet of television documentaries and news articles over alleged American wrong doing from World War II to Iraq is a sign of a new German attitude. German media use every opportunity to remind the country there is a global scapegoat for the future while proclaiming moral equivalence for its past. The German media have spoken - GM is responsible for the decline of Opel - Dresden was the same as the holocaust. And Chancellor Schroeder remains silent.