Do Germans think Americans are killers?

This past weekend was the second quarterly US-German Relations blog carnival organized by the Atlantic Review in cooperation with other blogs.

One of the blogs featured in the March carnival is the American Future blog, specifically this post by Dr. Demarche:  Why Aren't We in This Together? 03/24/06. He illustrates his main point by the following personal anecdote from the summer of 2004, when he attended a "German-American Volksfest" in Berlin:

After an early evening of good beer and a close approximation of bar-b-que ribs my friend and I, accompanied by several Americans and Germans who work with him, headed for the U-bahn (subway) to go downtown in search of more beer and food. On the train we were approached by a somewhat tipsy German fellow who mentioned, in impeccable American accented English, that he had seen us at the fair. He went on to say that the fair was not the same with the U.S. troops no longer in Berlin - followed almost casually by a quip that he was sorry to see his friends leave Berlin and to go on to massacre people all over the world. Why, he wondered, had the American people become such killers? We were all too stunned to really answer, so he asked again - where had we learned that this was the way to solve problems? After a beat or two had passed one of the Germans with us answered in a sad tone of voice "perhaps they learned it from us." There ensued a brief argument in German too fast for me to follow, and we exited the train soon after. Later what bothered me the most was not that this unknown German had a low opinion of us, but that my friend's colleague appeared to agree with the sentiment that we have become a too violent player on the world stage.

I'm not sure we can draw very broad conclusions from the passing political thoughts of a drunk in the U-Bahn. But Dr. Demarche makes it clear he's using the story to illustrate what he perceives as a broader German  attitude  toward  Americans. And his perception is consistent with polling data.

Why would ordinary Germans think the US has become "a too violent player on the world stage"? There are several plausible reasons. The biggest single one is that the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003, a country that had not attacked the US and was not a threat to the US, let alone an imminent threat. Based on the German experience of two world wars, and on the outcome of the Nuremburg Trials in which German war criminals were convicted of planning and waging "aggressive war", Germans across the political spectrum take a very dim view of wars of aggression. The whole European Union project is also aimed at eliminating the highly destructive wars that Europe experienced for centuries. (The official term today in international law for what was called "aggressive war" at Nuremburg is "preventive war".)

Germans did not want their soldiers participating in an unnecessary, unjustified war. As a recent controversy showed, they didn't even want their spies participating in the war. And when they look at American troops bogged down in an Iraq that's clearly in civil war, a civil war that may very well spread into a regional war involving Germany's NATO ally and EU candidate Turkey, and, yes, and lot of them think Bush's America is "a too violent player on the world stage".

In fact, most American now agree in the case of Iraq. Public support of Bush's Iraq War policies is now pretty much down to white fundamentalist Christians, especially in the South.

Even most soldiers serving in Iraq agree that the war was unnecessary. In that sense, it's not stretching to say that they also think the US is "a too violent player on the world stage", at least on the Iraqi part of that stage.

It's not difficult to see why ordinary Germans would think so, as well. As far as Iraq goes, the answer to the question Dr. Demarche poses in the title of his post, "Why aren't we in this together?", a better question would be, "Why are the Americans still in this mess?" Or, "When will they get out?"

(Cross-posted at The Blue Voice)