The Atlantic and Its Enemies

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 Muller-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.

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