Downsizing German Politics: Gerhard Schroder, Man from the Plains

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Not long after Gerhard Schröder became the Social Democratic candidate for the German chancellorship early this year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl attacked his political judgment in a little-reported speech. Schröder, Kohl said, was above all a man who had made a remarkable career of consistently standing on the wrong side of German history. Schröder's instinct for the quick political hit had brought him far, Kohl charged, but when it came to the big decisions that marked the last 25 years, Kohl's opponent had gotten every one wrong.

Schröder had eagerly opposed deployment of American nuclear missiles in Western Europe to counter the Soviet Union's last great attempt to split the Atlantic alliance. He voted against the treaty enabling German reunification. And he proposed last year to postpone indefinitely European Monetary Union and its common currency, the euro, before they officially came to life in May. Accounts of Kohl's speech did not refer to the Persian Gulf War, but the chancellor could have also mentioned that Schröder, as minister-president of the state of Lower Saxony, had tried to rally support against it.

After that attack, the accusations of Schröder's impoverished historical instinct were subordinated as a Kohl campaign theme. This abandoned attempt to put Schröder's political campaign in a long-term context captures the haplessness of the Christian Democrats as they moved toward national elections on September 27. Kohl's argument stuck roughly to the facts, but not many people in Germany appeared to care. This disinterest mirrored the mood of a country ready to thank Kohl for 16 years of measured and correct decisions on cosmic matters and move on. When a visitor to his Hanover office asked him to respond to Kohl's charge about his inability to get on the right side of history, Schröder seemed irritated, saying that if Kohl wanted to make character a campaign issue, he himself did not. When his guest replied that the question was more a matter of basic political orientation than character, Schröder recalibrated and started over with the shy smile, all self-effacement and complicity, that has made him such an effective television performer. "I think the time is over in Europe when it was mainly a question of occupying the strategic heights . . . The strategic heights are occupied. I'm responsible for the lower levels where the work needs to be done."

INHERIT THE WIND