Misplaced Fears

After the Berlin Wall fell and the two Germanys began grappling awkwardly with reunification, a joke made the rounds: "It's like the Beatles getting together again—let's just hope they don't go on another world tour!" British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand blanched at the prospect of a strutting German colossus. But in hindsight, their fears turn out to have been wholly misplaced. Far from going on a global tour, the united Germany has been playing mainly to local audiences. The cliché in the 1960s, when West Germany experienced its postwar economic miracle, was that the country was an economic giant and a political dwarf. Twenty years after the toppling of the wall, not much has changed. (Article continued below...)

The melding of the two countries created a nation of almost 90 million inhabitants, by far the biggest in the European Union and the world's second-largest exporter after China. But reunification was far more troubling and complex than one might have imagined: West Germany's takeover of the dilapidated East German state was like a python eating a sick poodle. The result was agonizing indigestion, which encouraged hibernation, not histrionics.

Unity made Germany more and not less introspective. The old German Democratic Republic was the ultimate nanny state. I still remember meeting my East German relatives for the first time a few weeks after the wall had fallen. Uncle Wolfgang, a successful electrician, was terrified of the freedoms that had just been foisted on him and his family. "What's going to happen to us now?" he muttered. In his address to the nation shortly after taking office, East Germany's last communist prime minister, a reformer named Hans Modrow, stated solemnly: "Comrades, do not worry, your allotments are safe!"

Those who assumed that a united Germany would return to its domineering reflexes failed to understand that the country's experience with regional fragmentation was longer and far happier than its brush with assertive nationalism. The country had been united only in 1871 under the Iron Chancellor, Bismarck. Since then it had spent 10 years fighting—and losing—two world wars and more than four decades divided. After 1945 the victorious Allies carved Germany into four sectors of occupation. The small, picturesque town of Bonn became the capital of the three Western sectors. The smoldering ruins of East Berlin became the capital of the Soviet sector of occupation. Everything was designed to fragment and downsize any future nationalist ambitions.

West Germany had a federal structure in which the Länder, or states, which made up the Bund, or union, wielded considerable powers of taxation, transport, and education. Even German broadcasting was split up into regional sectors to prevent a centralized message machine from rising out of the ashes of Goebbels's propaganda monster. My father, who worked for Southwest German Broadcasting, once explained to me why German anchormen never used teleprompters: "It makes them seem all-knowing, superhuman, as if they can learn all that stuff by heart and look straight into your eyes. We don't want to deceive the audience."

While many East Germans felt comfortable being nannied by the Communist Party, many West Germans felt cozy in the Gemütlichkeit of a federal state, where regional identity mattered and where the European Union was welcomed, not reviled, as a straitjacket. Helmut Kohl, the first chancellor of a united Germany and its principal architect, once enthused to me that the EU would guarantee that Germany could never step out of line again. Can you imagine a French or British head of government ever saying such a thing?

Parochialism is a byproduct of Germany's history—enshrined in the federal Constitution and embedded in the nation's DNA. Over time that position is going to become less and less tenable; it will be interesting to see, for example, how attitudes change if and when Barack Obama announces the next buildup of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and twists German arms to follow suit. But for now, Germany is very comfortable in the shadows. In 2006 Germany hosted the World Cup. The national team made it to the semifinals and then lost against Italy. The country was disappointed but not distraught. My mother put it like this: "It was such a wonderful World Cup. Germany really showed its best side." But, she told her disbelieving son, "actually I am glad we didn't get to the final and win. Had we come first it may have been too much for the world to stomach!"