German Identity, Long Dormant, Reasserts Itself

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The shift is evident on the airwaves, where German songs are staging a comeback against the dominance of American pop, and in best sellers about Goethe and Schiller or in discovering Germany by foot, by car and by train from the Bavarian Alps to the old Hanseatic ports on the Baltic Sea.

In Parliament, politicians have debated ending conscription, threatening the post-Nazi ideal of an army of ordinary citizens, as German soldiers fight in Afghanistan. Despite fears of rising income inequality, Germany’s economic engine is humming and unemployment has fallen significantly in the former East Germany.

And Chancellor Angela Merkel has led a bloc of countries fending off President Obama’s calls for stimulus spending to combat the economic crisis, certain that the world should follow Germany’s example of austerity.

The change has not been universally welcomed, even in Germany. It has led to unusual scenes, such as antinationalist German leftists twice tearing down a more than 50-foot German flag that Lebanese immigrants had draped down the front of a building in the Berlin neighborhood of Neukölln this summer during the World Cup, when a soccer team full of immigrants’ children captivated the country.

There are fears of emerging (or resurgent) chauvinism, seen recently in broadsides against Muslims by Thilo Sarrazin, who is stepping down from the board of the German central bank, after publishing a divisive best seller saying that Muslim immigrants are draining the social-welfare state and reproducing faster than ethnic Germans.

Germans, most of whose salaries and standard of living have not improved as the economy has strengthened, are more disenchanted than ever with the financial demands of the European Union. Questions about Germany’s commitment to the bloc found renewed urgency during the Greek debt crisis, which had threatened the stability of the euro, but signs had emerged well before that.

The resistance to new demands partly reflects the transformation Germany has undergone in recent years. The country fused a dynamic economy in the West with a bankrupt one in the East. Germans were forced to realize that foreign guest workers were never going home — one-fifth of its residents are now immigrants or of immigrant background. The return of the capital to Berlin and the construction of a national Holocaust memorial stirred the nation’s darkest memories.

“It’s not like the 1930s, where the jackboots are going to be stomping into other countries,” said William M. Drozdiak, the president of the American Council on Germany. “But having moved the capital from Bonn back to Berlin, there has been a profound psychological change, shifting the center of gravity to the east, with Germany thinking more like a Central European power.”

Germans were not eager to give up their beloved Deutsche mark at the time. Their reluctance has only grown as Germany has been called on to help bail out Greece and perhaps other European countries that have mismanaged their fiscal affairs. While European partners see Germany as a powerhouse of productivity with enviable, competitive export companies, the debate over the future here centers on an aging, shrinking population and the rising deficits that a smaller, older population will have to pay off.

When France’s economic minister suggested earlier this year that Germany could try to promote consumer spending to support its struggling neighbors, her German counterpart shot back that countries that had lived “beyond their means” should not “point the finger.” Another leading conservative politician declared that “jealousy cannot be a factor in politics between European neighbors.”

The number of people on the welfare program known as Hartz IV has remained stubbornly stuck at around 6.7 million people out of a population of 82 million. New jobs are lower paying and less secure. A study released in July found that the number of low-wage workers in Germany rose consistently from 1998 to 2008, to 6.6 million from 4.3 million. The number of temporary workers, just over 100,000 at the beginning of 1990, peaked at over 800,000 before the financial crisis.

German taxpayers already had to bear the burden of reunification, with the country spending by some estimates $2 trillion to rebuild East Germany. The fruits of that nation-building at home are increasingly visible, not just in the renovated splendors of historic cities like Leipzig and Dresden, but in the long moribund job market. From a high of 20.8 percent in February 2005, unemployment in the former East Germany fell to 11.5 percent by August 2010.

Before 1989, Tino Petsch was a disc jockey in Karl-Marx-Stadt, creating light shows for his performances on his domestically produced KC 85/3 personal computer. Today the city has returned to its historic name of Chemnitz, and Mr. Petsch, 43, is the chief executive of his own high-tech company there, 3D-Micromac, producing work stations for laser-micromachining.

“I see as many differences between North and South as I do between East and West,” said Mr. Petsch, who finds discussions of reunification 20 years after the fact passé. Germany enjoys a stellar reputation among businessmen in growing markets like India, China or Brazil, which prize “made in Germany” and Beethoven but do not share Europe’s memories of the war. “When I’m overseas, I hear all the time that we should take more pride in our nation,” he said.

Despite the uproar over integration, the country celebrated as one over its soccer team’s surprise success this past summer. The players’ ethnic backgrounds spanned from Brazil to Poland to Tunisia, including the young German star Mesut Özil, whose family comes from Turkey, Germany’s largest source of immigrants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/world/europe/11germany.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1