Newsday

"A United Germany CouldnŐt Be Trusted"

By Raoul Lionel Felder

The Tumbrils of the past clacking over the cobblestones of history make a noise sufficient to echo through the corridors of all future time -- but few hear or, at least, listen.

Three times in 70 years -- 1870, 1914, 1939 -- Germany has loosed the dogs of war. Since 1871, when Otto von Bismarck completed the consolidation of Germany, war, pillage, acquisition of territory by force and genocide have been the instruments of German national policy.

The greatest spasms of national energies have been expended on aggressive, barely provoked war. It is a history written in blood: beginning with the blood of others, and then mingled with Germany's own. Consistently, however, the cruel, basically unprovoked initiator has been Germany itself.

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The past collides with the present with a suddenness and velocity that creates a kaleidoscopic profusion, smudging the one into the other.

In so doing, it condemns civilization to repeat the past as sure and certain as the run of the morning milk train going down the track to its appointed stops.

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Feb. 1, 1990: The prime minister of East Germany, Hans Modrow, proclaims, "Germany shall again become a united fatherland for all its citizens of the German nation."

Chancellor Helmut Kohl, his West Germany counterpart, addresses the Bonn parliament in December, 1989: ". . . I am sure that unity will come if the people of Germany want it."

Similar sentiments are immediately echoed by his Christian Democratic Union Party's bumper stickers, "Wir sind ein Volk" ("We are one people").

At the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, Feb. 24, 1920, the German Workers' Party, led by young Adolf Hitler, presented its official program. The first point is, "We demand the union of all Germans, on the basis of the right of the self-determination of peoples, to form a great Germany."

On July 28, 1922, Hitler declares: "We shall possess once again a true German Reich of freedom and of honor, a real fatherland of the whole German people . . . He who has so taken to heart the meaning of our great song 'Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles,' that nothing in this world stands for him higher than this Germany. . ."

April 17, 1923, Hitler speaks: "There is thus one thing which is the first task of this movement: It desires to make the German once more national. . ."

May Day, 1935, Hitler: "And this united nation, we have need of it. . ."

April 10, 1923, Hitler: "The only possible conditions under which a German state can develop at all must therefore be the unification of all Germans in Europe. . ."

Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West German Foreign Minister, Nov. 10, 1989: "There is no socialist German nation; there is no capitalist German nation; there is only one German nation."

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Polls show public support for unification that would rival Roseanne Barr's popularity on her best day and President George Bush's on his worst. In December, 1989, 67 percent of Americans thought Germany should be reunified. Sixty-one percent of the English agreed. In France, three-time victim of German nationalism, a surprising 74 percent of the population favored reunification. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviets' 1941-45 "Great Patriotic War" notwithstanding, have hopped on the bandwagon.

From the Professor to peasant, no danger is perceived from a united Germany. Harvard Professor Charles Maier scoffs at a possible "revival of an unpleasant nationalism."

On Sunday, Kohl says that "Nobody needs to be afraid" of a united Germany.

His promise echoes promises from an earlier time: "I desire to declare . . . that we in this new Germany are filled with deep understanding for the same feelings and opinions and for the rightful claims to life of the other nations. The present generation of this new Germany . . . has suffered too deeply from the madness of our time to be able to contemplate treating others in the same way. Our boundless love for and loyalty to our own national traditions makes us respect the national claims of others and makes us desire from the bottom of our hearts to be with them in peace and friendship." So said Adolf Hitler on May 17, 1933.

"The German nation has no feeling of hatred toward England, America or France; all it wants is peace and quiet," he said on June 30, 1937.

The death toll of the Second World War, including military and civilian deaths, has conservatively been estimated at perhaps 35 million souls.

In 1928, Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Party received 2.6 percent of the total vote, winning only 12 seats in the Reichstag. The party later won more, but never gained a majority, only a plurality. On Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler became chancellor.

Today, in West Germany, the far right Republican Party, whose tenets include reunification, hostility towards Jews and foreigners and restoration of "lost" territories in Poland -- has won up to 15 percent of the vote in some state elections. It is considered possible that they could win 5 percent nationwide in the Dec. 2 West German federal parliamentary elections.

Fearing that a Republican Party bloc could develop in Parliament, Kohl has deferred to the conservative vote by refusing to pledge that West Germany has given up all territorial rights to land returned to Poland after World War II. March 17, 1936: Germany announces reoccupation of the Rhineland; Sept. 1, 1939: Germany, claiming that the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig really belong to it, invades Poland.

Feb. 5, 1990: Hundreds of young East Germans goose-step through Leipzig, screaming "Sieg Heil," "To hell with the Jews," assaulting people, smashing windows.

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Dates collide and merge with a dreary and dreadful sameness. Nov. 9, 1989: The collapse of the Berlin Wall eerily echoes the anti-Semitic destruction of Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938.

Dec. 1, 1989: Lufthansa demands that United States, Britain and France relinquish flying monopolies. March 11, 1935: Hitler reveals the existence of the Versailles-forbidden German air force.

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"Deutschland uber Alles" ("Germany Above Everything") is a remarkably revealing national anthem. Reflective of a country's consciousness of self, it is not "God Save the Queen," "America the Beautiful" or "The Star-Spangled Banner." Deutschland uber Alles, with a combined East and West population of 80 million, a prospective gross national product of 1.5 trillion Deutschmarks, is a frightening prospect. The master-race jingoistic rhetoric of prior Germanic states leads to the inexorable conclusion that there would be no reason to expect that the thought processes or protoplasm of the Fourth Reich would differ from that of the Third or that the world will not once again tremble before the unleashed Hun.

With its greater economic strength and an unprecedented acceptance by nations its predecessors never enjoyed, joined with the enormous available destructive force of perverted science, any future relived nightmare would be more terrible and protracted than any of the past and its outcome more uncertain.

If it is not a teacher, history would trivialize life and would make us one with the lemmings as we pass, generation after generation, into the abyss.