West Germany: The New Nationalism

Until recently, West Germany was largely content to let the U.S. and other NATO allies call the tune on East-West policy. Of late a militant, assertive new spirit has risen east of the Rhine. It is, in a sense, a new nationalism— not the unsavory kind associated with jackboots and lebensraum but a more civilized version reflecting the muscle and emotion of a strong, reborn nation.

The new nationalism is based in part on a nagging suspicion that West Germany will be the loser in a cold-war settlement between the U.S. and Moscow; the fear is of a deal with Moscow that would reduce West Berlin's ties to West Germany, and permanently recognize Red rule in East Germany. With this in mind, so stalwart a supporter of the West as former Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano (now Christian Democratic leader in Parliament) recently reminded the Allies sharply that "it is intolerable to offer additional concessions. The aim of talks must be to convince the Soviet Union that the German people have an ineradicable right to self-determination."

In West Germany's rising chorus of protesting voices, none is more vehement than that of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer himself. These days, he makes no secret of his deep dissatisfaction with Western leadership. Der Alte urged the U.S., through visiting Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to limit the scope of this month's 18-nation disarmament talks in Geneva; he fears East and West will start bargaining over Germany if the discussion of disarmament bogs down. If a deal emerged, it could mean some form of East-West "disengagement," which might well permanently prevent the Germans from getting nuclear weapons, or even the long-range rockets capable of carrying them.

To the Fourth Power. Impetus for Adenauer's arguments is provided by aggressive Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, who demands that NATO become a ''fourth atomic power''; this obviously would make West Germany an atomic power as well, for despite NATO's control over them, nuclear warheads would be in the hands of the Bundeswehr. Most of the American nuclear weapons on the Continent are already on West German soil but under strict U.S. control.

Washington was angered last week by a blistering attack on U.S. defense policy written by Colonel Gerd Schmückle, Strauss's press secretary. Wrote Schmückle in the conservative weekly Christ und Welt: "There are still people in the West who talk of conventional warfare, pauses, rollbacks, escalation and the like . . . Since both sides have atomic weapons, the idea of a conventional war in Europe is military alchemy. " Schmückle's conclusion : Western troops, including West Germans, should be prepared to fight it out with superbombs.