Shifting Perceptions of Friends

Helmut Schmidt on America, the Soviet Union and Germany

It is an unprepossessing bungalow-style house unfashionably close to Hamburg's busy airport. Art books and records line the living-room walls, and a fire blazes in the hearth. A collection of Russian icons lines the stairway to the second floor. As his wife Loki sat quietly at a table near by, cataloguing flower seeds, Helmut Schmidt alternately munched cookies from a plate in front of him and inhaled snuff from a plastic box. Departing from his usual procedure, the West German Chancellor had agreed to be interviewed at home instead of in his Bonn office. He was relaxed, but his mood was somber. Excerpts from the two-hour conversation with Bonn Bureau Chief Roland Flamini:

Q. Are the U.S. and West Germany on a philosophical collision course over policy toward Eastern Europe?

A. I think that is an exaggeration. Different approaches do exist, but I have no doubt that they are reconcilable. I cannot detect a shift in European attitudes. What I do detect is a shift in American attitudes, a shift in American psychology, and I fully understand that. America has suffered a number of setbacks in both foreign and domestic policy. Take Watergate; take the fact that since Eisenhower no American President has been able to serve two full terms; take the Viet Nam War. You didn't increase your defense efforts, for instance, in the first two-thirds of the '70s as much as we in Western Europe did. The greatest negative step, in my view, was the abolition of the draft. We have not done that.

Ronald Reagan is the fourth American President with whom I am collaborating, and altogether I have never changed my constant belief in the reliability of the U.S. as a nation. We have believed in your continuity more than you yourselves have believed in it.

Q. But it is the Americans who seem to be calling into question the reliability of their European allies.

A. It is not the U.S. It is a segment of public and published opinion. If you look at the polls in the U.S., it is quite a different picture, and if you look at the polls in Western Europe, especially in West Germany, you find an unequaled and unchanged commitment to friendship with the U.S. and to the alliance. On the other hand, you also find that it does not mean that we think the social and economic and domestic order of the U.S. necessarily has to serve as a model for ourselves. It does not, it has not, and it will not.

Q. If the polls show that a majority of West Germans are not only pro-American but also pro-alliance, is something changing in the West German perception of the U.S.?