Germany and America. Is it rejection or seduction?

Both anti-Americanism and the opposite have deep roots in Germany

IF MICHAEL MOORE bumped into an average German on the street, the encounter might be rather strained: the film-maker's grungy appearance could well be taken as one more piece of evidence of America's incorrigible ugliness.

But looks aren't everything: like most Europeans, the Germans love the way Mr Moore is exposing the defects, real and imagined, of his own country. His books top best-seller lists; and his documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11”, which opened in Germany on July 28th, has won plaudits from some very unlikely quarters. Even the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a staunchly conservative daily, has hailed him as “an expert at revealing inconsistencies between appearances and reality”.

So what - in reality - is happening to what used to be the most fundamental of transatlantic friendships? Can the citizens of a republic that was largely moulded, in its modern form, by American judges, generals and administrators be turning irreversibly against their old mentors? Or is the current estrangement just a phase, based on antipathy to American policy rather to America as such?

To say that Germans don't like George W. Bush is an understatement. Not since the time of Ronald Reagan - routinely dismissed in the mainstream media as a “trigger-happy cowboy” or worse - has it been so fashionable to deride America's leadership. Many Germans say they dislike the style as much as the content: the quasi-religious rhetoric now coming out of the White House makes them cringe.

Opinion polls point to a startling deterioration in America's image. The words Germans associate most with Americans, according to a survey by the Allensbach Institute, are “inconsiderate” (54% of interviewees - up from 28% in 1991), “violent” (54% against 33%) and “arrogant” (66% against 38%). According to another survey, 54% of Germans now see see France, not America, as their country's “best friend”. The United States only scores 15%.

Karsten Voigt, a veteran Social Democrat who co-ordinates German-American co-operation for the centre-left government, insists that the current mood is just a transitory one, prompted by specific disagreements with a specific administration. That implies that things can, and probably will, get better. But Joséf Joffe, another strong German advocate of transatlantic ties, believes that anti-Americanism goes deeper. As co-editor of the intellectual weekly, Die Zeit, he reckons that for more than almost two centuries the impulse to knock Uncle Sam has existed among Germans of many different political hues.

As far back as the Romantic period of the early 19th century, there were complaints about American materialism. During the Weimar era, immediately after the first world war, it was the political right that used to denounce America as a steam-roller of modernity, threatening to flatten out the idiosyncrasies of German culture. That in turn made it slightly easier for Hitler to demonise the Americans as eternal foes. After 1945, that critique was turned on its head: America was carelessly denounced as “fascist” by some parts of the West German left, and by the propaganda of communist East Germany. More fundamentally, Mr Joffe believes, Germans resented America because, despite themselves, they found it very attractive. “America is the big seducer, and of course, hated by the seduced,” he argues.

None of this implies that Germany is doomed to be anti-American forever. What it does mean is that whenever political events tilt the German mood in an anti-American direction, there is lots of raw material in the collective psyche that is ready for America-bashers to use.

Just as Germans feel quite a deep anti-American impulse, they also have a strong streak of the opposite sentiment - that very streak which is “seduced” by American dynamism and flexibility. In many of their tastes, Germans may well be the most American-oriented of all European nations. They love American music and films (not just Bush-bashing ones); and the United States remains the most popular destination for German tourists and academics. Even among German leftists and Greens, there has been much borrowing of ideas and styles from across the Atlantic. What, then, is prompting Germans to show their anti-American side and suppress the instincts that pull them in the other direction? Resentment of America's war in Iraq is one obvious answer. Another school of conventional wisdom notes that in a post-cold war world, Germans no longer feel obliged to suppress their doubts about American policy for the sake of solidarity against the Soviet threat. But there is a third, less obvious factor which is strongly felt now but may not last for ever.

As Mr Joffe and others have pointed out, many Germans are going through a phase of resentment over the pressure they feel to abandon the welfare state and accept amerikanische Verhaltnisse - “American conditions”, in which the economy would be totally market-driven.

If that is the main thing turning Germans against America, there may be some light at the end of the tunnel. Resentment, and the search for scapegoats, is bound to be at its keenest in the early stages of economic reform, as the most difficult decisions are tackled. Once the painful structural changes now underway show signs of success, Germans may be more relaxed about their big, transatlantic brothers.

Both anti-Americanism and the opposite have deep roots in Germany.

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