Root Canal at Dinner

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Sometimes you go to something and you wish you hadn't. Sometimes, like last night, you go to something and wish you had gone in for a root canal instead. It gives new meaning to the old Heinrich Boell short story, Der Politische Zahnarzt ("The Political Dentist"); in that story, Boell complains about how Germans always have to start every encounter with foreigners by arguing Hitler's historical uniqueness, pulling a rhetorical tooth that causes many foreigners to want to relativize Nazi crimes (a quaint concern in light of today's full-blown relativization that has towns like Nuremberg and Dresden observing both their destruction and their "liberation" by allied forces).

A diplomatic gadfly invited us to see the curiosities of his home town and then have dinner at his house. My staff assured me that the trip to the little village in the foothills of the German alps would be worth it, so we accepted. As soon as he stepped out of the house to greet us, though, the favorable impression created by the fact that he was flying the American flag alongside the German flag was erased: a fat little guy in a three-piece suit comes bustling out to greet us, a porcine smile on his smug little face. Over a welcoming cup of tea, he finds two pretexts to tell us that "I am no friend of Mr. Bush," with that conpiratorial smirk that Germans use these days because they assume that anyone intelligent enough to have found his way to Germany will surely agree with them that George Bush has no right to call himself President of the United States.

Then we are off to visit the local curiousities: a monastery, Benediktbeuren, that is actually quite impressive, and a power plant that is in fact the highlight of the day. Benediktbeuren is a historic site, so it does not need to be described here in great detail: founded during Charlemagne's attempt to unite Europe and continuously occupied by Benedictine monks until it was expropriated during Napoleon's attempt to unite Europe, it was given to the Sistercian Monks of Don Bosco as Germany embarked on its attempt to unite Europe. Its paintings, frescoes, chapels and churches are a series of testimonials to the Benedictines' sense of themselves as the highest achievement of Christian civilization and therefore as Christendom's annointed teachers. It is also the source of the songs that form the core of Carl Orff's opera Carmina Burana (Latin for "Songs from Benediktbeuren"), although the monks have disowned it: it was not written there, only discovered there among the monks' library, a book they no doubt acquired as settlement of a debt, and Orff selected the bawdier of the songs, ignoring the holy songs. The power plant is a testimonial to German engineering: built as the First Attempt at German Global Domination (often referred to as the First World War) was winding down, its turbines still hum away, drawing energy from the difference in elevation of two neighboring lakes, having diverted three rivers and altered the ecosystem of the entire region.

The pain begins over dinner. Barely has our host's mother produced the first course -- she is not introduced and not allowed to leave the kitchen, we are served by a young girl who is also not introduced -- but the Bush Administration comes up again. We are informed by our porky host that the only reason there has been a problem between the United States and Germany in recent years is because the Bush Administration failed to understand Europe, because Bush and his people haven't traveled and don't know the world. He is a bit taken aback when I gently push it back in his face: in fact, the problem arose because Germany failed to understand the United States. The Bush Administration is full of people who understand Europe well: Powell, Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld. The Schroeder Government, on the other hand, is full of people who do not know the United States, or who are ideologically hostile to it. That the German public refused to accept George Bush as President because of the contested outcome of our election in 2000, I tell him, shows a surprising contempt for American democracy. That the German public had so little patience for the American reaction to September 11 -- a violent, angry reaction, to be sure, but one that pales in comparison to the German reaction to the torching of the Reichstag in 1933, to take just one example -- shows a contempt for the American people that is surprising given how we redeemed Germany after the Second World War (which I call the Second Attempt at German Global Domination, although I didn't tell him that). Finally, I said, Americans were surprised to see Germans taking the side of dictatorship in Iraq, just as we find it perplexing that Germany gives such feeble support to the most successful democracy in the Middle East -- namely, Israel -- and that Germany does not seem to take more seriously the security concerns of the democracy of Taiwan.

Oh, he objects, that is this black-and-white thinking that you Americans always do. Surely it is possible to disagree with the United States without being accused of supporting its opponents.

Of course, I tell him. There are always at least three options: support, disagreement, and opposition. However, the fact is that Germany worked actively to prevent the United States from achieving its objectives in the Iraq issue, attempting pro-actively to build a political coalition whose purpose was to block the U.S. from taking a step that we believed was crucial to our national security.

But you were wrong about that, he says. Iraq was not a threat to you: they were not involved in September 11 and they had no weapons of mass destruction.

With respect, I reply, it is important to distinguish carefully among these issues. After all, we would not want to think in black-and-white categories. To concede that Iraq did not have stocks of chemical and bioligical weapons on the eve of the war is not to say that Iraq under Saddam did not pose a threat to its neighbors and to regional security. On the contrary, the members of the UN Security Council over a twelve year period -- because of the way the Council is composed, we are talking here about some 50 member nations -- agreed that Saddam's Iraq was a regional and global threat. By the same token, to say that Iraq was not connected to September 11 is not to say that Iraq under Saddam was not part of the terrorism equation in the Middle East. On the contrary, Saddam's support for rejectionist Palestinian groups was a well-known factor in fanning those flames for twenty years. The fact is, I say, that the US has undertaken a very careful and comprehensive analysis of the terrorism problem, and we have concluded that it is far larger than Afghanistan, the Taleban and Al Qaeda. We are developing a global strategy for fighting it, one that will have economic, political, cultural, law enforcement and military aspects and may well require changes to established institutions like NATO, the UN and the Vienna and Geneva Conventions. We have understood that Germany does not share this analysis and wishes to confine its role in the global strategy to a few aspects: financing, law enforcement action against cells, and Afghanistan. But we respectfully believe a global and comprehensive response is needed and we will pursue one.

Well, he says, anytime you make decisions like that you have to be ready to live with the consequences.

Couldn't agree with you more, I reply. We did not lightly take a course that we knew Germany disagreed with, and I assume Germany did not lightly take a course that it knew the United States disagreed with. That pair of decisions put an end to the postwar German-American partnership. We are in the process of developing a new agenda that we hope will open the possibility of a new relationship.

A real relationship is not going to be possible, he says, until after the Bush Administration.

Well, I reply (trying very hard to keep my tone neutral and respectful), a great deal is going to happen in the coming four years, and we will not withdraw from the world and we will not stop trying to solve international problems in collaboration with like-minded partners. The more objectives we achieve without Germany's support, or even against active resistance from Germany, the harder it will be to build a new relationship in the future.

He is ready to move on now, and shifts the subject to other things. We talk about immigration, the changing face of the United States; we talk about how stuck German politics is, and the rise of the right -- which he insists does not pose a threat to German democracy or any other of Europe's great democracies, with the possible exception of Italy, which he scoffs at -- and we talk about milk prices and agricultural subsidies.

And then, mercifully, the evening is over and we are able to take our leave. Having had many such rhetorical root canals in the past year, I can say that this conversation is almost exactly like every other one you have with Germans these days. They are offended that we did not listen to them, increasingly uneasy at the prospect that we might turn out to have been right, and worried that it might turn out that we in fact do not need them to achieve our objectives. Germany's nightmare for the past two centuries, after all, has been a world in which the United States is simultaneously predominant, respected and even admired.

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