Why German-American relations are so poor

From the excellent Atlantic Review blog comes this link to several heavyweight articles published by Germany's Council on Foreign Relations exploring aspects of Germany's foreign policy.

After some seven years of Schroeder chosing alignment with France and outright hostility to the US, new Chancellor Merkel is moving closer to a traditional Altlanticist foreign policy. However, Schroeder did such a good job of poisoning the well that the US and Germany need to make concerted efforts to find common ground beyond the obvious security risk Iran presents.

From German Self-Definition Against the US:

The article begins with this explanation of French anti-Americanism:

[...] It is discerningly said of the French that they will never be able to forgive the Americans for having liberated them. The very memory of the American triumph reminds France of the disgrace of having sunk to its knees almost without a fight against the Nazi conqueror. In the final analysis, however, the saying is so apt also because it expresses the neurotic family rivalry between the French and the American parvenu. France and the United States are considered the fundamental models of Western democracy, their common roots being the Enlightenment and revolution. But France, which long saw itself as civilization’s yardstick for all the world, finds it difficult to cope with the fact that the United States has clearly come out on top. France’s systematic anti-Americanism is thus essentially cultural. Little
brother has long since grown into an overwhelmingly big brother overseas with whom France finds itself competing not only for geopolitical influence and sales markets but also for recognition as the embodiment of the genuinely Western way of life and the ideal of true democratic society.

For France as a former world and colonial power, the postwar era and the concomitant ascendance of the United States to the rank of superpower are primarily linked to the decline of French importance in world politics. French ill will toward America may therefore be exaggerated and irrational, but it is relatively easy to explain. [...]

And ends with a similar explanation of German anti-Americanism, which stems from Germany's need to excuse its past history:

From that perspective, America appears to be the most formidable obstacle to the requisite rectification of the past. As proud as the Germans justifiably are of the structure of their well-functioning and very stable democracy, it still grates that this achievement would not have been possible without the use of external force and the presence of a re-educator and supervisor.

This gnawing, subliminal wound to the democratic sense of self explains the bitterness with which the debate on Allied guilt is occurring in many places. For example, it is striking with what frenzy historian JörgFriedrich repeatedly scourges the Western Allied bombardments of German cities as war crimes and acts of mass destruction, even though his point is hardly new.

This angry talk in an open, undefined space is precisely what makes the aggressiveness of its indictment so unusual. It is especially notable in view of the wide popular response it has elicited, as registered by the astronomical sales figures for Friedrich’s book, Der Brand [The Fire]. The German public evidently has a strong need to revisit the air war – without, however, bringing it before a judicial institution. The purpose of the exercise is inward instead. In the future, we want to be able to feel different, namely, morally equal, when looking at our calamitous history.

In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung not long ago, historian Joachim Fest saw a “political,” but no moral, difference between the selective murder of civilian populations, as at Oradour-sur-Glane in France, and the bombing of Dresden. Yet the reason that the Allies unleashed their air war begins to become clear only when one takes a look at everything that happened before Dresden. To be sure,there was Germany’s bombardment of Coventry and Rotterdam, but those acts were certainly not the chief reason behind the unscrupulousness demonstrated by the Allies in defeating Nazism. Nor was it Auschwitz, of which there was little or no mention at that time. The disinhibition of the Allies when it came to choosing their ways and means is explicable only if one realizes that Hitler’s war was no “normal” war, even when its unimaginably high death toll is discounted. His war was one of extermination and enslavement, an attack on the very bedrock of European and Western civilization as it had come to see itself over the course of at least two thousand years. [...]

Its American authorship has become embarrassing to German democracy. The hidden agenda of its now headlong recalibration of policy on dealing with the past is thus to reframe the story of Europe’s liberation and minimize the US’s role in it. [...]

The Germans have unmistakably buried the dream of world power once and for all. But deep within the recent German discourse on the search for identity, there seems to be a secret wish to witness the failure of the power that made it all the way to the top in Germany’s stead.

Presumably then, this explains much of Europe's hypercriticism of the US. Let's hope they get over this bit of weirdness soon. More to the point, they should worry about keeping up with the rest of the world lest they slip into the "who cares what they think" status now occupied by third tier nations.

The article is well worth reading as it also examines the political rationale behind Schroeder's abrupt abandonment of the strong trans-Atlantic ties between the US and Germany.