Berliners, like the American standing in front of the British embassy in Washington on the morning after, echo the sentiments of the mayor of Paris: "We are all Londoners now." Almost no one here thinks the terrorists are out to create a better world. In Die Welt, a conservative Berlin paper, Roger Koppel expresses a common perception that Islamist terrorists pursue total destruction to all "deniers of Allah's truths, who are not fit to live." The Suddeutsche Zeitung, a liberal newspaper in Munich, says the London attacks created an opportunity for the G-8 nations to speak up, finally, in "a unified voice on anti-terror policy."
Germans admire the British stiff upper lip and the "cool" of Britannia. They don't expect Britain to withdraw troops from Iraq, to fold like a paper fan as the Spanish did when they were victims of a terrorist attack in Madrid. They recall, with a certain rue, British toughness in the Blitz.
Whether the London attacks will pull the Germans and the British closer together in common cause is not so clear, however. The British have long memories, and Germans are still stereotyped and satirized in the popular culture as sinister Nazi officers. British children study the Third Reich extensively -- more extensively than German children -- but they don't learn much of what has taken place in Germany over the 60 years since the end of World War II.
"If you want to learn how the Prussian goose-step works, you have to watch British TV, because in Germany nobody knows how to perform it," Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, told a London audience not long ago. He scolded them for an obsession with Hitler and the Holocaust. Shortly after that, the German government brought 20 teachers of history from Britain to let them see the changes up close.
The teachers admired the beautiful glass dome on the Reichstag, designed by British architect Norman Foster, who describes his work as an optimistic symbol for Germany's future: "As night falls and the glass bubble of the cupola glows, the building becomes a beacon, signaling the strength and vigor of the German democratic process." Goose-stepping Germans are dead. Jihad is the new terror stalking the West with all the grim determination of the Nazi menace before it.