Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Here was another illusion, though a forgivable one, shared by almost anyone in the educated classes. If in 1973 you moved to Europe, you could see that things worked. France had picked herself up, had world-class concerns, and was almost twice as well-off as Britain. Northern Italy was heading in that direction. Especially, the legend of miracle-Germany lived on. The pound sank and sank against the Mark — it had started at twelve, and was coming down to two — and if you came back to Heathrow airport from Cologne or Munich, you either sat in a traffic jam for two hours, getting into London, or you took the underground railway for an hour or so, trundling through endless Actons, whereas in Munich you reached the centre of town from the airport in a quarter of an hour, because someone had taken the point that traffic from airports was not the same as traffic from suburbia. The Americans had never really understood why Great Britain had kept herself apart from Europe, and pressed strongly for her joining it: Henry Kissinger characteristically remarking that it was tiresome to have to make six telephone calls instead of just one, to a counterpart in Brussels. With a cross-party arrangement, British governments duly joined, and, with some media management and some mendacious language, their decision was confirmed by referendum in 1975. Their negotiating position was weak, they were in a hurry, and they were easily outmanoeuvred by the French. Concessions, later regarded as absurd, were made. The country paid more than its fair share of the European budget, and accepted provisions as regards agriculture that proved expensive and corrupt. One positive thing did emerge: the European Court, to which British law was now subject, decreed that trade unions did not have the right to enforce membership (‘the closed shop’), and that, in time, was to counter the protection racket ways that had been developing. But, in the short term, ‘Europe’ did not turn out to be the answer, because Europe herself was losing steam.

Germany looked, in informed British eyes, miraculous. In November 1972 the SPD-FDP coalition won handsomely, and although the Left did make a spirited effort to take over important places, it was always defeated by factors without a British counterpart: the liberals of the FDP controlled essential ministries, with foreign affairs and finance, while the trade unions, quite happily part of ‘the system’, did not get in the way of sensible management of the oil crisis. The Bundesbank defied governments’ attempts to spend money that they did not have, whereas the Bank of England blew hard into asset-bubbles. The Left might make a great deal of noise; Brandt, increasingly and rather sentimentally tolerant of these things, isolated himself, and somehow grew down. Bismarck used to say, On revient toujours à son premier amour , and Brandt’s own weakness, as he grew older, drank more, and showed off to the women, was for the Left of his youth, a split-off from the Communist Party which was quite close, during the Spanish Civil War (in which Brandt had been present), to the POUM, the anarchist element in Barcelona that Stalin had had put down. He became, in a word, vain and silly. His memoirs are very revealing, and they almost typify Graham Greene’s comment, that you live until you are thirty and then remember. In Brandt’s case the memoirs are full of life until about 1955 and then the machine takes over the ghost: his version of Ostpolitik is hardly more than toponymy. His judgement clearly went, and in his closest entourage he was tolerating a clammy East German spy, Günter Guillaume, who, eventually found out, caused Brandt to resign when the FDP foreign minister, the machine-man Hans-Dietrich Genscher, revealed this. Helmut Schmidt, the power in the party, dismissed the Left as ‘half-baked students’ who confused the crisis in their own brains with a general crisis; and he went ahead with an interesting strategy. There would be Ostpolitik. Germany would recognize the post-war borders, and maintain proper relations with Poland especially. Given that, in the previous generation, millions of Germans had been driven out, a great many of them dying on the way, this required much dignity and sense, whereas in comparable situations elsewhere — the Armenians, the Greek Cypriots, or for that matter the Palestinians — self-pity, distorted history and cries for vengeance went on and on (and on). But there would be no sentimental nonsense as to how Left would understand Left; Germany remained firmly in and with NATO, and, when he had to explain why Marks were spent in defence of the staggering dollar, Schmidt was forthright: they defend us, therefore we support their currency. More generally, Schmidt had a strategic sense that good relations with Moscow would in the end mean that a deal could be done there, wiping out East Germany. So it proved. Helmut Schmidt, who smoked heroically on television, aged ninety, and said of Herbert von Karajan that his life had been all discipline (‘loathsome’), was one of the later twentieth century’s none-too-many interesting political figures.

Schmidt took over in 1974, and Germany managed the oil shock quite successfully. Motoring on Sundays was banned; traffic in cities was subjected to controls. To this day, the traffic mess of a British town would be unthinkable in a Germany where elementary enlightenment in such matters — a limit to the number of buses, and a prohibition of deliveries by vans and lorries after 8 a.m. is normal — comes as a matter of course; it is also true that, in spending public money to offset the effects of industrial crisis on old industrial cities, the West Germans were again very successful. Essen, heartland of the old Ruhr, suffered from the competition in iron and steel from up-and-coming countries such as Korea. So did Sheffield. Sheffield, like other northern English cities, was then swamped in ugly, badly planned concrete, with hardly any effect upon employment, and none at all upon prosperity. Essen was simply more intelligently managed, because local government, trade unions and employers knew something and could co-operate for the greater good. Perhaps the essential element was the federal system: if one of the big states embarked on a mistaken strategy, it would have to compete with alternatives practised elsewhere. This happened over education. Left-wing local governments offered an equivalent of the comprehensive schools that were pushed through uniformly in Great Britain, and, at that, schools which kept open all day, in such a way that housewives could work. These Gesamtschulen were, as in England, not only, on the whole, unsuccessful, but in some cases scandalously so. Parents then migrated to another state that had managed these affairs differently. One result was that the balance of prosperity shifted south, into Bavaria and Baden. Another result, some years later, was that the Gesamtschulen improved their ways. Again the question came up, why was England not Germany, rather than the other way about?

However, Europe was not going to be the answer to England’s problems. Whatever its prosperity, there was a sense that, somehow, its creativity was going. It could repeat past glories, and the Bayreuth of Wieland Wagner splendidly did so. But where were the great films of yesteryear, where the interesting architecture, and where, increasingly, the young generation? Overlaying it all, there was a cultural malaise, as the Germany of the ‘miracle’ generation bored its children, and still more its grandchildren; the universities were to suffer over this. Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, the German Orwell, moved over the border to Denmark, and just despised his native land: he notes, for instance, that at some time in the later eighties Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s New Year Address, on television, was got wrong: they played the previous year’s address, and no-one noticed. Enzensberger was bored, but was bored by the wrong things. He noted, quite rightly, that television was the opiate of the masses, that people would just look at a row of dots on the screen as if it mattered, that there were seventy people writing doctoral theses on one poet. But he was the product of a world that hated its grandparents, and shook its head at its parents. Of course, it was true that families mattered, but did there have to be a law by which a wife could not take a job until she had performed her housewifely duties? That made sense, but only if the tax system supported fathers, and the sheer costs meant that the State taxed, and did so in defiance of its own rules. Problems were coming up in this, and though the coalition government did try to modernize, it did so superficially. The intelligentsia were bored. Bayreuth put on strange interpretations of Wagner, and Horst-Eberhard Richter produced a ‘Physicians for Peace’ movement, recording that ‘we men must learn to overcome the militant image of masculinity’. Heavy, charmless, sentimental German Protestants hawked their consciences round the world, and chicken-muscled women in shorts were to be seen in the vicinity of the old Teutonia-Haus in the old Istanbul street of steps, looking patronizing right and left, and regarded with wonder by the locals: why were north European women so unappetizing? And yet Germany was the admirable European country, if you judged these things from the viewpoint of an England in which nothing worked. In the early 1980s England was going to produce an extraordinary counter-attack.