In some very real respects, Germany in spring 2005 is hard to recognize as the model of caution and coherence built in the Bonn Republic in the years after Hitler's defeat.

 

It is not just that a postwar notion of German economic leadership or exemplarity has nearly vanished with notations like these: an 11.8 percent unemployment rate, 0.7 percent growth, last week's Mercedes Car Group's worst-ever quarterly losses, or a new Bertelsmann Foundation study that ranks Germany 21st and dead last in Europe as a place to do business.

 

Sixty years to the week after Nazi Germany's capitulation, the change isn't wholly measured either by polls that now show good relations with Russia more valued by the Germans than those with the United States, or 80 percent saying Germany was "liberated" rather than defeated on May 8, 1945, or another 60 or 70 percent agreeing with an active demonization of capitalism currently offered up by the Social Democratic Party in its attempts to return to political health.

 

The quick-to-theorize might shoot for establishing an ominous link between the signals of anti-Americanism, anticapitalistism, and antimodernism being exploited in Germany nowadays.

 

That's the basis for a good polemic, but likely an over-systemization of more than a few troubling signs.

 

The real deal is extraordinary enough on its own.

 

The real deal is Gerhard Schröder taking a populist approach that involves telling the Germans, against the evidence, that under his leadership they are ever more important and admired, and that as a result the country can disregard its old guidelines, formulas for success and watchwords of modesty.

 

To leap over the obviousness of a decade of stagnation and the demise of Germany's comfortable postwar certainties, his method pairs America and capitalist excess as punching bags. You could call it Schröderism.

 

In economic terms, Germany is floundering without any believable scenario for an upturn. Since Schröder runs the risk of losing the Social Democratic bastion of North Rhine- Westphalia after 39 years in power in regional elections on May 22 (the last meaningful ones before putting his own job on the line in 2006), he has authorized a kind of left-reactionary rhetoric that, at its lowest, literally reduces the party's explanation of Germany's slide to a plague of insect-like capitalists eating through the country's fields and workrooms.

 

The goal is to hold the party's loyalists in line.

 

The Social Democrats paint themselves as the single bulwark against the "American conditions" that lurk behind freer hiring laws, lower corporate taxes, and limits on support for the professionally jobless. So what if this tactic contradicts the content of Schröder's earlier halting attempts to bring a measure of reform to the German economy.

 

Alongside is a foreign policy that pivots on a) Schröder's determination to persuade the European Union to lift its ban on exporting arms to China over the United States and Japan's warnings that this would upend Asia's strategic balance; b) an exceptional and invariable indulgence for Vladimir Putin's Russia whatever happens to democracy there; and c) a chancellery-led campaign to get Germany a permanent seat with veto power on the UN Security Council while Schröder shoots for a third term.

 

The Security Council seat is the essence of Schröder's populistic play, a win-win scenario, casting the chancellor as historic victor, or, if that fails, symbol of a Germany victimized by an American refusal to allow it to take its rightful place among the globe's ultimate decision-makers. (The Bush administration endorses a seat for Japan while saying it has no standpoint yet on the Schröder candidacy.)

 

All of this, and not just through American imperial eyes, can be seen as a break in the more than half century of considerations and policies that made Germany a calculable element on the international scene.

 

Impressive groups of the chancellor's Social Democratic and Green allies, saying that the United States' issues with Schröder's China arms stance are absolutely legitimate, have unsuccessfully called on him to abandon his push to lift the embargo. Last week, Hans Ulrich Klose, a leading Social Democrat, warned there were "problematic consequences for Germany" in the fact that the "chancellor's consideration for Russia is clearly greater than his consideration for America."

 

Schröder's tactic involves making America a factor in every possible debate. When members of Parliament from his own coalition pointed to China's human rights failings as a reason to keep the arms embargo, he replied, "We shouldn't forget that, against our will, the death sentence is present in other societies." (Which in particular? Peru?) Talking last week about Europe's constitutional referendums, he insisted that here and there, outside Europe, "speculation" was rife against their success.

 

Not wildly subtle stuff, and parts of the German press have been catching on.

 

Nico Fried of the Süddeutsche Zeitung said Schröder's ability to instrumentalize German anti-Americanism, his single political plus-point after opposing the Iraq war, was being pushed to the hilt because "Schröder's America is always the America he needs at the moment."

 

For Eckhard Lohse of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Schröder's China and Russia cards "not only take America's disapproval into account, they're part of the planning." And Dieter Schröder, writing in the Berliner Zeitung, spoke of the new "contempt in Berlin" for the old axioms of Germany's balanced postwar role, and compared the chancellor's overstatement of the country's power with America's judgment of its current weakness.

 

I asked about the life expectancy of Schröderism - the chancellor's developing meld of self-overevaluation, anticapitalist talk, and what looks like a very willful positioning of German foreign policy in an America-antagonistic mode - during a visit here to the man who comes these days as close to the status of sage as Berlin politics allow.

 

Wolfgang Schäuble, a senior Christian Democrat, said, "People here don't like Bush, and Schröder tries to run for election against him every day of the year. But Schröder's picture of horror that is America just doesn't stand up for the moment since the Americans have made some good decisions in a number of areas. Schröder's been hurt on China and he's gone over the line on Putin. That kind of thing may have reached its limit."

 

Perhaps. Germany's chancellor in spring 2005 is a man who opposed German reunification, creation of the euro, and responding to Soviet missiles targeted on Germany with the deployment of America's cruise and Pershing missiles. Running against an upstart Schröder in 1998 after 16 years as chancellor, Helmut Kohl said his opponent never once had been on the right side of history.