Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

On 16 March 1978 came a strange episode. One of the wheezes with which the Christian Democrats kept on and on in office was to get their own dissident allies faced down by the threat of a Communist alliance — not of course a formal one, but an arrangement by which the Communists would just abstain, much as had happened with de Gaulle in 1968. One Giulio Andreotti could act as a front for these schemes. However, he was something of a puppet prime minister, and Aldo Moro, prime minister twice previously, was the long-term fixer behind the scenes. On his way to the parliament, his car was ambushed, his guards being killed, and Moro was bundled away in the middle of Rome. He was hidden for two months, issuing appeals, and the government did not give way to demands for the release of prisoners. The Communists in fact supported the government and there was even a general strike against the terrorists; but Moro’s corpse was found in a car boot in the middle of the city on 9 May. Thereafter the Red Brigade killings went on — 29 in 1978, 22 in 1979, 30 in 1980. For Moscow, Italy was therefore a soft target.

But it was Germany that offered the greatest target of all. Were not the Germans, already formidably rich, now becoming a Great Power again, and, at that, in charge of Europe? However, Germany had changed.

It was common to talk of 1945 as Stunde Null , but the Germany that had emerged by 1960 did have long historical roots. What was now emerging, and in politics generally dull to the point of genius, was the ‘third Germany’, a world of petty duchies and prince-bishoprics that had been smothered in the imperial ventures of Prussia and Austria. An Englishman who knew Germany well was Geoffrey Barraclough. His Origins of Modern Germany (1952) was a classic: he started it with a quotation from Nicholas of Cusa, to the effect that Germany’s divisions would mean domination by foreigners. The divisions went back to the Golden Bull (1356) which allowed Electoral princes, with their own capitals and coinages, to run quite free. The Church played a disintegrative role after the Investiture Contest in the late eleventh century and this also sucked Germany into Italian affairs. Later on, German history was written round the Thirty Years War, and the wreckage thereby caused; and that Catholic-Protestant war carried on in other forms far into the twentieth century. Was Germany to be united by Protestant Prussia, with her disproportionately sized army and mainly small-squireen nobility, or by Catholic Austria, with her great reach into the Balkans, her role as defender of Europe against the Turks, her fairy-tale aristocracy and her imperial rule over Slavs and Magyars? That battle had produced Bismarck, the Prussian maker of united Germany in 1871; it had also produced Hitler, who was Austrian and a believer in the unity of all Germans, regardless of religion, and therefore including Austrians. It was notoriously a formula for the end of the world: a superbly talented nation, daemonically driven. By 1943 representatives of almost every country in the world were queuing up to declare war, and in 1945, when Hitler celebrated his final birthday on 20 April, a small, bedraggled cohort of diplomats was left to totter through the rubble of central Berlin, with the wounded groaning in the lobbies of the Kaiserhof and Adlon hotels, to present their top-hatted congratulations to Adolf Hitler, raving, far below, in his bunker, as to how treachery had prevailed, that it had all been the fault of the Jews. There was a Croat; there was an Irishman; there was a Slovak; there was a Japanese. Their names were meticulously recorded in the Visitors’ Book, while the Russians occupied the old Reichsbank building on the Werdersche Ufer, a hundred yards down the road. Greater Germany ended in the blackest farce of the entire history of the world, its final scene, with Hitler’s fate, of all things, the only inefficient cremation in the history of the Third Reich.

Since 1947 there had been another Germany, and again it was an extraordinary success story. This time it was a Germany minus Prussia and Austria. It was a return to the old Holy Roman Empire, to a Germany where true civilization existed on a very local level, that of the prince-bishopric. And here there was another British historian, Tim Blanning, to do it justice. He was Barraclough’s natural successor, again asking much the same question as to what, in Germany, had gone wrong. It was a measure of the importance for England of Germany, and Germany for England, that British historians were head and shoulders better than any other foreigners when it came to looking at what went wrong. Germany in the British mirror remains an essential question. Since 1815 Germans had been asking why they were not English. After 1950, the question should have been the other way about: why was it preferable to be German? After 1980 the question changed again, and intelligent Germans asked why they had not produced a Margaret Thatcher, just as, in 1900, they asked why they had not produced a Gladstone. But in 1960 Germany was in the ascendant. ‘Neo-Nazism’ would then be shouted from the world’s rooftops. It was vastly overdone: there was never any danger of a Hitler rehabilitation: how could there be? In any case the constitution had sensible provisions for its own defence. It was true that the generation of 1933 preferred to pass over the recent past in silence. It had had to be prodded into recognition of the horrors of the era, and some monsters — though the case of Austria was worse — were allowed to live out prosperous lives undisturbed by justice. But the remarkable thing about the new Germany was the lack of any nationalist revanchism: Nazism slunk back to the saloon-bar-bore level at which it had started.

The German formula appeared to be succeeding along liberal-democratic lines. At Bad Godesberg in 1959 the Social Democrats had solemnly ceased to be a Marxist party, had promised to co-operate with enlightened capitalism (their chief leader, Willy Brandt, knew Scandinavia very well). In any case, this went along with the programme adopted by the trade union paymasters of the party. The institutions allowing trade unions a considerable say in large industry had also made them ‘responsible’ in a way that made British observers gasp with disbelief: no silly strikes, no ridiculous wage demands or inter-craft rivalries. The schools practised literacy; towns were well-organized; you could put your savings in the currency, knowing that inflation would not eat them up. And then the economy was highly successful, producing well-engineered exports that went round the world. Besides, the Germans were doing a great deal to make up for their recent past. They had done what they could to compensate the Jews, with a billion Marks paid from 1959 to 1964, and altogether DM56bn up to 1984. All of this occurred in a context that any German even of twenty knew very well: millions and millions of Germans had suffered and died in 1945-6. There were of course refugee leagues, and sometimes they made problems in political life. But it was an extraordinary comment that they did not endlessly dwell upon their grievances, got on with life, and set up museums and academic institutes where their history could be remembered. Other diasporas with grievances, especially those in the United States, never let go of them, distorted them to the point of caricature, and did damage.

The ‘miracle’ had meant a formula, that of the Ordoliberalen for whom National Socialism had indeed meant socialism. Alfred Müller-Arack had come up with the untranslatable Sozialmarktwirtschaft: private economic effort, legal protection against unfair competition or monopolies, protection for small business, and safety-net welfare that would look after people genuinely in need. These ideas were not entirely new; they had their rather tortured origins in the nineteenth century, when Catholics were looking for an accommodation with liberalism (itself at the time mainly Protestant and Jewish). However, the very word was ambiguous: ‘need’ was an elastic word. As prosperity grew, Chancellor Adenauer had read it to mean generous pensions, and these were to become a millstone round Germans’ necks later on. Housing received subsidies for renting by people of low income — a sensible enough system, provided that the incomes were genuinely low, and provided again that inflation was kept under control. The ‘miracle’ system came under a further strain, caused by its own successful application. The Mark reflected Germany’s success, and there was pressure on her government to support the weakening dollar (with a small revaluation in 1961). A country without a debt then borrowed, slightly. There were protests, but they were drowned by the noise of boom.