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PARTISAN REVIEW
and more effective to organize demonstrations and rock concerts in
favor of disarmament.
But the most troubling aspect of the controversy over NATO is
the reemergence of the German question. And what is new in the
current German discussion of national identity is that it comes from
the Left as well as the Right. A young radical journalist, Wolfgang
Pohrt, created a stir last year by pointing to the nationalist themes
present in the peace movement.
Der Spiegel,
which is a Left
publication, devoted a series to the world ending in nuclear
holocaust, while the weekly magazine
Der Stern
published a map of
all
American military installations and projected sites for the NATO
missiles . Even conservative politicians feel compelled to talk about
German reunification , while the Greens and the SPD Left openly
talk about "occupation" by the Americans. As in the past,
anti-Americanism serves to deflect anticapitalist sentiment into
nationalist directions. To be sure, antinuclear sentiment in West
Germany is in some ways the same as that in the rest of Europe and
in the United States . But we cannot ignore its peculiarly German
forms .
The young Left, whose understanding of the Nazi past is
heavily influenced by a Marxist analysis of German capitalism, is
afflicted with the urge to compare the incomparable.
It
is not
unusual to find references in recent journalism to Vietnam-or
Nicaragua or Palestine-as today's Auschwitz. (One magazine went
so far as to juxtapose photographs of the Nazis rounding up the Jews
of the Warsaw ghetto with photos of Israeli soldiers in Lebanon.) In
addition, the romanticizing of Third-World revolutions is much
greater in West Germany (East Germany gives military training to
the PLO), where they still seem to offer an alternative to advanced
industrial society, than anywhere else in Western Europe. The
persistence of the ideas and institutions born in the 1960s in the West
German counterculture must be seen to be believed . In the atmos–
phere around major universities, the idea, for example, that the
United States is in any sense a protector of West Germany would be
the subject of ridicule, and the silence of the supposedly
"antiauthoritarian" movement during the suppression of Solidarity
was sobering.
But the discussion of the German question and a view of the
Federal Republic as a mediator between East and West is not limited
to the Greens or the counterculture. The most vociferous opponent
