/Alison Smale – New York Times

Alison Smale – New York Times

During decades of observing Germans and Americans, I have often wondered what might have happened if, as was almost the case, the early settlers in the United States had adopted not English but German as their mother tongue.

Would the Americans be the most ‘’pingerliche’’ people on earth, or have their same traditional attachment to individual freedom? Might they, heaven forfend, have adopted Fussball as their national sport? Would a Germany bound at least in linguistic kinship with such a mighty country beyond its own continent have felt the need, in the 19th and early 20th century, to test its united strength against European neighbors?

This is all idle speculation, of course. But perhaps the digital age and its inhabitants, the digital natives, who can ‘’downloaden’’ almost anything, are producing a new blend of key German and American attitudes to life: a mix of the methodical earnestness that characterizes many Germans with the easy energy and never-look-back attitude that mark so many American endeavors.

When I first received the request to write about Germans and Americans, I intended humor to be the hallmark of the piece. But events on both sides of the Atlantic forced me into more serious reflection.

Looking back, we can see that the German-American endeavor to work together began in earnest at perhaps the unlikeliest point of shared German-American history – in the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 and the rebuilding of west Germany in the years that followed.

At their ‘’Stunde Null,’’ or Zero Hour, Germans were receptive to the ideas and manners brought by the American soldiers who not only spearheaded the trials of surviving Nazi leaders, but brought new movies and music, and lent or gave industrious Germans hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild their economy – and their military.

As a result, many in Germany’s elite now have had difficulty absorbing the anger or at least disappointment at the discovery that their friend and teacher, the United States, did not shrink from spying on the Chancellor’s cell phone or collecting the electronic data of millions of other Germans.

Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel perhaps put it best last fall at his party’s congress in Leipzig. The NSA affair, he noted, ‘’is much more than one of those run-of-the-mill spy scandals that crop up every few years.

‘’The United States of America, the country which Germans have so much to thank for, which freed us from Hitler, which with the Marshall Plan made possible prosperity and our climb out of the devastation of World War II, then afterwards protected us for decades with the Allied forces – these very United States of America are now in the process of endangering the most important foundation of our transatlantic partnership. This fundament was, for decades, a shared concept of values in which individual freedom and and the protection of privacy stood above everything else. In this value system, the state has to produce pretty good reasons to be allowed to limit personal freedom. If necessary, it has to justify this publicly and put it before the courts.

‘’That was the very core of the transatlantic community of values and the biggest difference with the East bloc, in which everything was exactly the opposite, where the state could do anything and personal freedom extended only as far as it did collide with the state.

‘’Exactly this community of values is being destroyed if intelligence services can suddenly eavesdrop on everything and on top of that involve private enterprises with gigantic data collection points.’’

Since Mr. Gabriel uttered those words, so tinged with bitter regret, Germans have endured a second shock to their value system in the form of Russia’s land grab of Crimea, which has upended notions of stability and security across Europe. Nowhere more so than in Germany, which has spent centuries trading and warring with Russia, and most recently invested decades of goodwill and hard cash, in part as atonement for World War II, but also out of genuine admiration and pragmatic hope.

So Germans and Americans, disgruntled as they may be, have very quickly been thrown back together again, at least in strategic terms, and quite clearly see eye-to-eye.  Chancellor Angela Merkel kept open the channels of communication with Moscow, but did not hide her annoyance at Vladimir Putin. Moreover, while accepting that German business needs to maintain its Russian contacts, she took a clearly frosty approach when the boss of Siemens, Joe Kaeser, not only visited Moscow but went to see Mr. Putin – a German speaker who knows what it means when the head of a big international company that has been doing business in Russia for 160 years comes to pay court, and did not hesitate to drive home that point.

U.S. Ambassador John Emerson – the first American envoy summoned to the German foreign ministry in living memory when the Merkel cell phone scandal erupted – presciently referred back to the Cold War when speaking to German business leaders in early February about restoring trust.

‘’We resolved the crises of the Cold War,’’ he said then. ‘’We certainly should be able to untangle today’s dilemmas. Back then, the problems were measured in megatons. In today’s digital world, it is megabytes.’’ He added that friends may disappoint one another, but usually resolve differences. ‘’We will get through this,’’ said the envoy from California, ‘’because we must get through this.’’

Yet for all the American can-do approach, something has changed, perhaps irrevocably, between Americans and their most exemplary pupil.  Reunited Germany, while still reluctant to take the lead in anything but exporting its well-made machines, senses that it should change its approach to world affairs. The speech by President Joachim Gauck at the Munich security conference in January marked perhaps the first time that a German leader has said that his country cannot duck responsibility by, essentially, hiding behind the Nazi past.

Whether Germans will heed the call is unclear – and indeed the Crimea crisis subjected them to an unusually early test. Mr. Gauck’s appeal for a more active stance was echoed in Munich by both the foreign and defense ministers – representing the Social Democrat and Christian Democrat parts of the ‘’grand coalition’’ government. The one voice missing was that of Ms. Merkel.

True to cautious form, she held back from opining on foreign policy. And then along came the next crisis – Crimea — for her to manage. Policy forged itself, swiftly veering towards America.

Can she bring Germans along? Norbert Ro(umlaut)ttgen, the Christian Democrat chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Bundestag, openly frets that Germans have become complacent, wishing only to be left in peace to enjoy their prosperity, preferring to inhabit what he calls a ‘’giant Switzerland’’ rather than shoulder a diplomatic, military or economic burden.

That attitude is a marked contrast to the American approach. While Europeans – and others – often lunge between criticizing the United States for imposing its will or accusing Washington of too little involvement in affairs beyond American shores, Americans usually rally behind their leaders’ call.

On Crimea, President Obama has mixed a robust response – sanctions on individuals, with the threat of worse to come if necessary, dispatch of AWACS surveillance planes and F-16 fighter jets to NATO members like Poland and Romania – with crystal clarity that neither America, nor its allies, intend to go to war over Ukraine, or to recapture Crimea.

That matches Ms. Merkel’s blend of principle and pragmatism. But Germans are not entirely convinced. The ‘’Russia understanders,’’ as they have been labeled, are, in the view of veteran Atlanticist Josef Joffe of Die Zeit, a ‘’patchwork family’’ ranging from veteran leftist apologists for Moscow to hard-headed realists and those who believe that Mr. Putin can be calmed through ‘’understanding’’ his motives.

Journalists and politicians who have wondered publicly whether Germans are too content in their coziness or actively appease the Russian ‘’bear’’ are amazed at the reaction. Perhaps the criticism flooding their in-boxes is somehow orchestrated, but as at least one commentator has told me, ‘’I am really asking what is going on in this country.’’

Perhaps, after all, that language is playing its part – a seeming bedrock of order masking the natural disorder of human affairs.

One of the most striking tableaux of the change in German-American relations that I have witnessed since arriving back in Germany as a correspondent last summer was the closing of the storied Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg.

The occasion was marked by a modest military ceremony, but for Germans of a certain age – those who could remember those arriving GIs after the war, those who recalled this as the chilling headquarters of the Cold War, or those who grew up with division and admired the American support of West Germany – it was a watershed. And it is not clear, the mayor of Heidelberg mused in conversation, that younger generations will feel the bond that is now palpably weakening.

One famous American visitor to Heidelberg, with its fairy-tale castle and dramatic setting, was Mark Twain. Famously, too, he tackled and philosophized over the German language, that seemingly rock-hard construct that he found so often becomes quicksand. Perhaps there is no better example of the difficulties that might have been solved two centuries ago had those American pioneers chosen the German, not the English, language – and no more apt description of what Americans and Germans think they have found in one another, only to discover fresh differences.

For, as Mark Twain saw German in his famous essay, ‘’there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, ‘’Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions.’’ He runs his eye down, and finds there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it.’’

With so little firm linguistic ground, lamented the American writer, how can the two nations understand each other? ‘’There are 10 parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech,’’ welded together in compounds Mr. Twain likens to ‘’alphabetical progressions,’’ such as ‘’Dilettantenaufdringlichkeiten,’’ or Stadtverornetenversammlungen’’ which he says are proud entries in ‘’my museum’’ of the German language.

How can one absorb such musings, he ponders, when they are ’’built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary’’?