Maurice,
<With the high unemployment in Germany, are there any moves or suggestions to "Put them in uniform"?>
I haven't seen indications that violent extremism is on the rise. Yes, there's always a core of Nazis and of anarchists and communists but they have always been there.
<Young, male Germans seem not to be thrilled by immigrants and the overall political situation.>
The majority of the immigrants are Turkish, and they in turn have been in Germany in the second or even third generation. The ones who were born in Germany have two mother languages and mix with German youth. For every fist fight between a German and Turkish guy you can probably find ten German-Turkish love affairs.
<Is East Germany more or less fully reabsorbed and culturally acclimatized?>
East Germany continues to have major economic problems, beyond 20% unemployment. Partially it is "solved" by a migration of young people to the West. Strange pictures of ghost towns where sometimes blocks of buildings have to be demolished because nobody is living in them any more!
<Nervously waiting for Germany to once again do their thing.>
I am sorry to report that Germany is no longer what it used to be. The "roaring 20ies", the Germany of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Fritz Lang, Kurt Tucholsky, Marlene Dietrich is gone. Fortunately there is no Hitler either. Those posters who had the fantasies of France/Germany potentially pre-empting Bush's pre-emption have no idea of the extremely limited capabilities of today's German army. Any decent third-world dictator like Saddam would probably beat the Bundeswehr. So there's nothing to fear militarily from any German activities. The role of the anti-war protests is equally overestimated. In the 80ies there were rallies of half a million people against deployment of short-range nuclear missiles. This weekend a mere 20,000 were protesting Rumsfeld during his Munich visit - that's nothing. Basically there's a lot of indifference, no sense of urgency towards Iraq and terrorism. I ordered Unclewest's "How I prepared my family to survive a terrorist attack" booklet soon after he published it. I tried to talk with a number of people about it - nobody is interested.
jj@cassandra.de |
