Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

In the sixties everything worked well, and even superbly. The great firms — Mannesmann for instance — flourished on a worldwide scale and where the symbol of the fifties had been the Volkswagen, that of the sixties was the BMW. These firms were surrounded by a network of small and medium-sized family enterprises, which did not have counterparts elsewhere (at any rate not in England) and these specialized in a long-term relationship that included banks. These firms co-operated in the local chambers of commerce, and organized apprenticeships; the trade unions did not insist on such apprentices having much the same rate of pay as a skilled man, as happened in an England where young men increasingly did not do anything useful, and where much of big industry was soon to collapse. The chambers of commerce even made themselves useful in the foreign service, because they had their own commercial links and could promote exports with some degree of knowledge. That again was in contrast to British experience. Chambers of commerce were not well-organized, and to encourage exporting the Foreign Office assumed that it must have a role: not a wise measure, as matters turned out, because the diplomats were taken away from their proper functions and did not have their heart in the new ones. Various other factors came to Germany’s aid. There was still a flight from the land, of willing and able peasants; NATO took care of defence, increasingly also of its costs; research and development money in Germany went to the civilian concerns, whereas in England much of it went into military hardware; and then again, while Bretton Woods flourished, the Mark was both strong and undervalued. Exports therefore boomed, boomed and boomed.

When Ludwig Erhard succeeded Adenauer, he showed a timeless verity, that good finance ministers make bad heads of government. He was impatient with platitudes about ‘Europe’, as he was a firm Atlantic free-trader; but on the other hand he mistrusted the Americans over Vietnam, and wanted some control over the nuclear trigger. In internal affairs he also lost ground, finding the powerful Bavarian wing of the party difficult to control because, like so many skilled financiers, he could not understand social conservatism and Catholic moralizing. He was finally overthrown because of a small but significant affair. There was a somewhat larger deficit in 1965, and a mild inflation, to do no doubt with the revaluation. The Bundesbank combated this with a rise in interest rates (to 5 per cent) and opposed Erhard’s plans for social spending. Erhard lost ground in an election (1965) and was then manoeuvred out in 1966.

The Christian Democratic Union had lost its overall majority, had to find a coalition ally, and hit upon the small third party, the Free Democrats. They lacked the trade union or clerical battalions, but on the other hand were formidably educated, and had regional bases here and there, especially in the Protestant parts of the south. They were themselves divided, in the manner of parties lacking a mass base, and though most of them were certainly free-marketeering, they regarded Catholics as slippery; many of them might also agree with the Social Democrats as to ‘progress’ in general. Germany was still an extraordinarily conservative country in matters moral. In much of the country, there was nothing between the mortuary Sunday and the Reeperbahn . Neighbours denounced each other if they did not obey ordinances about clearing the snow; landlords could be prosecuted if they allowed an unmarried couple to stay; rigid shop-hours made the towns lifeless at night, and the capital, Bonn, was a place of the skulls. The school system was built upon a supposition, enshrined in the constitution, that women would stay at home and look after the children: the school day ended at lunchtime, partly because as the children grew up they were expected to work on the farm or in the shop (compulsory education had been ‘sold’ with this concession a century before). Schools were also segregated between the academic and the non-academic or ‘vocational’ and the universities were hereditarily middle class (and themselves stuffily run). The Adenauer government even prosecuted a well-known periodical, the Hamburg Spiegel , for criticizing the defence ministry, thereby giving Spiegel a reputation for authoritative but dissident free-thinking that it has never quite lost. The most absurd of such episodes was the row made over the publication by a Hamburg historian, Fritz Fischer, of a book claiming, with vast evidence, that Germany had brought about and deliberately prolonged the First World War for imperialist purposes. There was jumping up and down, his passport was withdrawn, and Fischer was turned into a hero. Here there were grounds for complaint, even contemptuous complaint.

There was another aspect of this, quite dangerous, again for the future. The economic success had meant an influx of immigrants, ‘guest workers’ as they were excruciatingly known — the ‘guest’ was supposed to mean that they would leave once they had made their little pile. Of these, Turks stood out, and they arrived in hundreds of thousands. Generally they were from provincial Anatolia and, often enough, the Black Sea coast; in the first generation, which had grown up in a secular republic, they worked hard enough and of course tended to live together. In France, which was far freer of small-town regulation and prissiness than Germany, such immigrants duly melted, apart from a residue, in the pot. In Germany the process of integration took generations longer and, of all strange things, the third generation of ‘guest workers’ turned out to be quite Islamic, ferrying in its brides from Anatolian villages, such that the non-integration was perpetuated. The same had happened with the millions of Polish migrants in the later nineteenth century: they had their own churches and sports clubs, were cold-shouldered by the German trade unions, and took five generations to penetrate the Hamburg football team or the Politburo of the German Democratic Republic.

West Berlin was an island within an island, strongly affected by the presence of foreign military, and heavily subsidized. The city was led by a remarkable man, Willy Brandt, who was impatient of the small-town pieties of Bonn. He drank, chased women, and told funny stories. He had also had an exceedingly creditable career — an illegitimate working-class birth in Lübeck, a self-propelled rise through the educational system, an immediate teenage detestation of the Nazis, flight to Norway where, learning the language on the boat, he became a left-wing journalist; work for an anti-Nazi resistance network that included false passports and residence in Berlin; friends all over the place. In other countries, such men and women often turned Communist, especially when Stalin started winning, but Brandt, like other left-wing Germans (and Arthur Koestler), had seen the Communists in destructive action in the last days of the Weimar Republic, when they had co-operated with the Nazis in order to destroy the Social Democrats. Brandt (like Ernst Reuter, his predecessor as mayor of Berlin, who had spent the Nazi years in Ankara as professor of Town Planning) knew his Communists, and as mayor of Berlin he faced them down (and subsequently as chancellor also faced down the extreme Left). He understood that in a democracy the political parties should co-operate to maintain the system if the system were not to collapse. That had failed to happen in the pre-Hitler republic, where, in the restaurant of the Reichstag, the lunchtime tables would have a notice, ‘Only for members of the Catholic (Centre) Party’. Rather than face cantankerous negotiations with the Free Democrats (FDP), the two main parties formed a Grand Coalition. In that way the CDU could control the conservative and Catholic Bavarians, the SPD could contain rebellious left-wing anti-capitalists, and the FDP would subdue its vanities. There was a further element. In the mid-sixties, the American involvement in Vietnam, the possibility that Germany might face a Soviet attack in isolation, brought vital matters to the fore — the future of NATO, the opportunity for a German finger on a nuclear trigger, the possibility of an Anglo-Franco-German Europe: matters that required a strong German government. The querulous Free Democrats were sidelined; so were the right of the Right and the left of the Left. The Grand Coalition emerged in 1966, with a bizarre partnership of the Nazi-resisting Brandt as foreign minister, with an oily Swabian, Kurt Georg Kiesinger (whose Nazi past was at once ‘leaked’ from East Berlin), as chancellor.