Germany – the new mini-superpower

"NATO and EU integration was the model," says John Kornblum, a former US ambassador to Germany who is now a corporate lawyer in Berlin. "The model is now disappearing and that makes people nervous. We are at the end of a postwar European romance about Europe. Germany doesn't want to pay for the romance anymore."

Germany's new global strategy seeks markets and relations in every direction – from Brazil and China to Vietnam and India. France no longer exercises its capacity to "run Europe" but has become a kind of shadow partner of Berlin. Even the city of Berlin, with its bohemian nightclubs and vibrant arts community, has become a hip urban center – what some here consider the new Paris of Europe.

Germany makes no secret that it desires greater stability between Berlin, Poland, and Moscow. A new amity along the old Weimar corridor would signify a breathtaking change.

"The German-Polish and German-Russian policy planning staffs are in high gear," says a Scandinavian diplomat in Berlin. "It isn't just icing on the cake. It is a new cake. Germany is absolutely changing. It is breaking taboos. It is not going back to a cold-war identity."

THREE HOURS SOUTH of Berlin, tucked in an industrial park off a major highway near Dresden, lies the new headquarters of Roth & Rau, a solar technology exporter. It exemplifies what's driving the New Germany.

Three physicists from the Chemnitz University of Technology started the firm in the late 1990s after tiring of waiting for their former East bloc school to restructure. So they broke out. In 2000 they put together 40 workers and $3 million in sales. Today the firm employs 1,100 and does nearly $300 million in sales, mostly to Asia. Their glass-paneled headquarters, sitting on a hill with a vista of rolling terrain, looks like a modern Oz, something out of Silicon Valley rather than the former rusty East.

Typically, and crucially, what the Roth & Rau physicists found was a niche. They don't make solar panels. They went far narrower: They've refined the coating requisite for the silicon wafers in solar panels, and developed it into a conductive film that gets 16 percent more electricity out of the transaction between sun and panel. Chinese firms are enamored of the process (a delegation was on the factory floor as I toured operations), and Roth & Rau spiked exports to the Middle Kingdom by 75 percent last year.

The company's approach to business, and the world, helps explain Germany's rise as a 21st-century economic power. It isn't so much that Roth & Rau are dealing in an industry of tomorrow, though that doesn't hurt. It's the way the firm is doing it.

Overall, Germany spent $120 billion a year in the 1990s to unify the country and rebuild its infrastructure, training its sights on the global marketplace. That helped it pull away from the rest of the EU. Forty percent of Germany's exports now go to the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). The closest EU competitor ships less than 10 percent. German machine-tool exports alone spiked 128 percent between 2009 and 2010. The unemployment rate in Germany hit an 18-year low last fall – 7.5 percent.

The top exports of the new German economy are cars, chemicals, and machine tools. The Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, for instance, is openly setting out to beat Toyota.

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