In a way, Ms. Jepsen is a caricature of the postmodern German church, whose pronouncements are often indistinguishable from those of the Social Democrats and the Greens. Despite figures like Jepsen, Germany still produces brilliant theologians; names such as Wolfhart Pannenberg, Eberhard Jüngel and Michael Welker come to mind. And there are still faithful pastors and powerful preachers whose churches usually make up the few that are still well attended on Sundays. Nevertheless, the decline of much of German Protestantism to an anthropocentric, politically-correct shadow of its former self not only mirrors the decline of other institutions since the Long March commenced, it also parallels the diminution of America's mainline churches-and for good reason. Religion is yet another field where Germany and the United States constantly re-infect each other with wayward theologoumena, albeit sometimes via long detours. The mad genius of Friedrich Nietzsche furnishes a case in point.

Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead" took almost a century to root itself in American theology, well after the Germans had discarded it. But thanks to the American knack for reducing lofty concepts to user-friendly formulae, this concept, too, was repackaged for global--and, of course, German--consumption. "When I attended Princeton Seminary in the early 1970s, the topic in homiletics was, 'What do you now preach on Easter Sunday?"', the Rev. Fred R. Anderson, senior pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, told me. What indeed, if God was dead and therefore could not have raised Christ from the dead? The Germans then picked this up in an odd way. Not that a whole new "God is dead" school emerged; rather, much of the German church since the Long March has resolved the "What do you now preach on Easter Sunday?" issue by proclaiming the social gospel, which is essentially an import from the United States. Horst-Klaus Hofmann, a German lay theologian who founded a highly successful mini stry that "deprogrammed" tens of thousands of post-1968 student radicals, attributes his church's "blindness in the left eye", especially the refusal to see the inhumanity of Communist regimes, to a similar and much older deficiency in American religion. "We have copied Sherwood Eddy", explained Hofmann. (Before World War II, the theologian Eddy [1873-1963] organized guided tours to the Soviet Union to show Christians from the United States how "progressive" this socialist nation was.) "He overlooked the slaughter of the kulaks", says Hofmann: "Similarly, we have had many church leaders schmoozing with the Communists after 1968."

This discussion of Protestantism deformed in Germany brings us to and links us with an older mode of German utopianism, which has sometimes expressed itself in religious, sometimes in philosophical terms. Germans are still in search of the ideal and final "It"--the answer to "life, the universe and everything", as the late Douglas Adams comically put it--and God help us all if we find one.

A susceptibility to utopian fallacies is, of course, not an exclusively German trait. However, no other Western nation has been more torn between two irreconcilable worldviews--the rational and the millenarian--than this one. The conflict goes at least as far back as the clash between the 16th-century reformers Martin Luther and Thomas Muntzer. Its roots are theological. It pits Luther's rational approach against chiliast dreams espoused by both the violent social reformer Muntzer and the otherworldly and pacifist Anabaptists. Luther, who dismissed both types as Schwarmer, or enthusiasts, saw natural reason as the empress of all things" in the secular realm, a gift from God to enable man to find his way around this world. Reason tells us that it is not for man to accelerate the eschaton, the return of Christ and the beginning of his millennium. The chiliast, on the other hand--the term is rooted in the Greek word chilioi, meaning one thousand--expects the union of the promised millennium with the here and now . In theological parlance, the chiliast endeavors to immanentize the eschaton.

The chiliast's means may be violent, which is why Karl Mannheim saw a "structural link" between 16th-century chiliasm and social revolution.⁶ Or they may be anti-violent, in the form of a radical drive for peace that requires an unconditional withdrawal from the world. Muntzer was a violent chiliast who believed he was doing God's work. His modern heirs, the Communists and the National Socialists, were godless but acknowledged their debt to him. Friedrich Engels paid homage to Muntzer's visions.⁷ So did Alfred Rosenberg, Nazism's principal ideologue, in his vile work, Mythus des 20. Fahrbunderts.⁸ Latter-day left-wingers in both East and West Germany did the same; in the 1970s, several Protestant kindergartens in West Germany were named after Muntzer.

As a delayed consequence of the 68ers' Long March, today's Germany is once again in danger of slipping into a chiliast mode, albeit one of the non-violent variety. It is understandable that after the longest period of peace and prosperity in their entire history, the Germans prefer to cling to their blessed status for just a little while longer. Yet their current utopian Schwarmerei is particularly bizarre; after all, a paradise whose inmates are chiefly preoccupied with wondering where to spend their next six-week vacation must by definition be very strange.

"NOT IDEAS but the murkier depths of the soul" motivated Muntzer's movement, Mannheim wrote. The same goes for soft chiliasm. Many Germans today simply cannot reconcile their amazing good fortune--peace, prosperity, democracy, reunification and Europafication, too--with the extremely low national self-esteem to which they have been educated and inured. God seems to have blessed them despite themselves, but half a century after the Gotterdammerung most cannot summon the words with which to give thanks, because anything like the admission of a real belief in God departed with the Nuremberg judges. No wonder their depths are murky.

Schroder catered to these murky depths and won. By directing his country to a perilous Sonderweg, however, he has reopened the portfolio of Germany's past, and clouded its future. Is that future to be one of a softly smothering European Union--one that will transcend the national idea and finally link Germany with the rest of normal humanity--or will the modern German chiliasts find their "It"? Sonderweg, indeed.

1 By the by, that there were sociologically similar movements outside the United States, in countries whose armies were not fighting in Vietnam, proves that the war cannot by itself explain the youth "revolt" in the United States, but that is a subject for a different essay.

2 Weimer, "Die Fruchte der Siebziger", Die Welt, June 6, 2002.

3 Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, "Wie man den Frieden verkauft oder Die Diffamierung Amerikas", Frankfurter Aligemeine Zeitung, October 4, 2002.

4 Augstein, "Abenteurer und Strategen", Spiegel (online), November 19, 2001.

5 Koenen, Das rote fabrzehnt, Unsere kleine Kulturrevolution (Cologne: Kiepemhauer und Witsch 2001).

6 Karl Mannheim, Ideologie and Utopie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), p. 184.

7 Freidrich Engels, The German Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 46.

8 Discussed in Joachim Pest, Der zerstorte Traum, Vom Ende des utopischen Zeitalters (Frankfurt: Siedler, 1991), p. 63.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and sociology of religion from Boston University, is UPI's religion correspondent.