West Germany Today
Schoenbaum, David
West Germany Today by DAVID SCHOENBAUM Iterance's clocks run differently, someone observed a decade ago. The same comment, it seems, can now be made of West Germany's thermometers. While much of...
...It was the beginning of the end...
...They opted for union with the Christian Democrats...
...But the apparent unanimity of victory failed to conceal fundamental differences about what direction the new government should take...
...While much of the world between the Atlantic and the Urals—and beyond both—warms itself in this winter's unseasonable cordiality, and the familiar ice blocks of the postwar scene melt gently away, the Federal Republic feels mostly chills...
...The fire next time, perhaps...
...But it would almost certainly murder the Free Democratic party and could conceivably leave up to twenty per cent of the electorate unrepresented in legislative bodies...
...Awaiting Chancellor Erhard on his return to the reins of office were critical problems: squabbles with the French, misunderstandings with the United States, frictions within his coalition, and divisions within his own party...
...As the Bundesbank's austerity measures recently began to take hold, the ratio of available jobs per applicant fell from seven to one to three to one—scarcely cause for panic but some cause for thought...
...For a world only scarcely recovered from the Third Reich —the most-recent round of German provincial frustration—it is, to be sure, a particularly unlovely one...
...Potentially, it will be the National Democrats who call the opposition tune...
...To what extent can the Federal Republic's tangled finances be straightened out without concessions to both partners' substantial and mutually exclusive clienteles ¦—for example, the Socialist Party's vulnerable mine and steel workers, and the Christian Democratic Union's restless farmers and small businessmen...
...Two weeks later, however, the Social Democratic (SPD) state of Hesse had elected eight National Democrats to its Landtag, its state legislature...
...Though more and more dubious, these assumptions survived Adenauer's departure as the basis of policy...
...A submarine sank...
...The collapse of the Erhard government appeared among items on the anniversary of a local glove factory, a golden wedding anniversary, and the winter schedule of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad...
...Where things had for some time gone right, they now went wrong...
...National conservative" is how the NPD (the National Democrats' party) characterizes itself...
...About this at least, in an age of nuclear weapons and in a country the size of Oregon with a population equal to that of the entire United States west of the Mississippi, there could be no serious question...
...For the first decade and more of its existence, the Federal Republic could assume the identity of European with American interests, the non-identity of American with Soviet interests...
...The third premise was economic recovery...
...Former Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, chairman of the Bavarian Christian Socialist Union, with four ministers in the government, functioned, in effect, as leader of the opposition of the coalition, even though he headed an affiliate of the Christian Democrats...
...It would be premature to forecast an early end...
...It was suddenly noted that the credit market was in ruins and the cost of living—by German standards—was rising alarmingly...
...The probable winner would be Strauss' resolutely Gaullist, indiscriminately anti-Communist, corrupt, and provincial Christian Social Union, itself safe from any electoral reform and in the government already...
...Yet the present crisis goes back at least to 1961, the year of the erection of the Berlin Wall and of former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's first significant electoral setback...
...The New York Times' C. L. Sulzberger, seemingly unshaken by Alabama's reflexive affection for a George-Lurleen Wallace team and Georgia's for a Lester Mad-dox for governor, noted with particular horror that smalltown Germans in Franconia had displayed a remarkable weakness for the National Democrats...
...Its leadership indescribable and its program non-existent, National Democrats appeared from nowhere as an accumulation of simple protest: They are against bare bosoms, war crimes trials, foreign investment, foreign labor, foreign aid, rising costs, falling incomes, higher taxes, bureaucratic complexity, intellectual sophistication—in short, against the Twentieth Century...
...and British troops, money to soften the blows of European integration for hundreds of thousands of small businessmen and marginal farmers, and money to subsidize the evermore-uneconomic operation of West Germany's coal mines...
...The end, in October, was triggered appropriately by a tax issue...
...But at least it was reassuring that the prices quoted made it clear that the advertiser was not yet thinking of a fire sale...
...Defended by their allies, accepted by their neighbors, and living better than ever, West Germans have inclined increasingly to forget—or ignore—the price they were paying...
...Kiesinger, whose fellow-traveling Nazi past had apparently not offended the Israeli ambassador, Asher ben Nathan, his official guest as recently as January, 1966, had been the Christian Democrats' foreign policy spokesman until 1958 in the era when foreign policy had made no problems for the Christian Democrats...
...He was remembered for good oratorical style, a conciliatory temperament, and fragile nerves...
...Increasingly conspicuous, Bonn's problems at last caught the world's attention in November...
...Union with the Free Democrats would have meant a potential consensus in foreign affairs—particularly with reference to East Germany and Eastern Europe...
...For this reason, my quiet and attractive three-room apartment in the southern part of the city will soon be available...
...But most of it begins with the argument of the lesser evil...
...While the Free Democrats inclined to West German initiatives in Eastern Europe, even concessions to East Germany, Erhard's own divided Christian Democratic party equivocated uneasily between its traditional Atlantic loyalties and Gaullist seduction—although in both cases minus the prospect of an East European honeymoon...
...But it remains to be seen whether or not the respective strong men can avoid mutual cancellation...
...And there is likely to be a lot to oppose...
...As seventeen million countrymen disappeared behind East Germany's impenetrable fields of mines and barbed wire, as finally 2.2 million West Berliners were surrounded by a wall to hold back East Germans on the other side, West Germans continued to look resolutely westward...
...To what extent can the Social Democratic Party's eastward leanings be reconciled with its partners' inclinations towards the West—and which west, Paris or Washington...
...Like the majority of his last cabinet, they were taken over into the Erhard administration...
...The Free Democrats fled the sinking ship...
...Commanding generals of the Bundeswehr staged a theatrical resignation...
...He was equally effective in dealings with allies, neutrals (particularly those astute enough to threaten recognition of East Germany), recalcitrant voters, and—a special case—Israelis...
...In Bonn today—itself as recently as 1815 an outpost of the Hapsburg empire—the old joke is not without relevance...
...And like Adenauer before him, he was returned at the head of a coalition with the East-European-oriented Free Democrats...
...The Christian Democratic Union and its close affiliate, the Christian Social Union, swam for their lives...
...But he was also for improved relations with Washington...
...Fueled by the Marshall plan but indigenously German, the boom advanced its creators within a decade and a half to the position of the world's third industrial power and its second greatest trader...
...The initiative, however, was in the hands of the Social Democrats...
...Prospects of reunification of West and East Germany were poorer than ever...
...It would have meant the first Socialist share in government since 1930...
...Frustration was inevitable, however, at the point where the original premises of West German existence lost their questionable validity...
...Above all, in July, 1966, the loyal middle-class Catholics of the Rhineland decided to vote for the Social Democratic Party opposition...
...For the first time since 1961, a West German government enjoys a substantial parliamentary majority...
...F-104G jet fighters, bought at $250,000 each, began to plummet from the skies like hailstones...
...A limited reform, raising the present five per cent of the vote required for a party to receive parliamentary representation, might well stave off the National Democrats...
...Stealing the Free Democrats' traditional patriotic, anticlerical thunder, the Nationalists exploited the FDP's complicity in the disintegrating Erhard government to conquer the traditional preserves of the Free Democrats in two West German areas...
...But as late as October 27, 1966, a representative mid-western newspaper was casual enough to note Bonn's chronic plight only on page eighteen...
...More of the same can be expected this year in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony...
...We'll give them some money" was among the most successful of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's recipes...
...In the vote for his succession, his parliamentary group turned back a strong bid by Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder, Bonn's foremost "At-lanticist," in favor of Kurt Georg Kiesinger, minister president (governor) of Baden-Wuerttemberg...
...More important for the surviving parties, it could also set off a round of competitive demagogy in pursuit of the frustrated twenty per cent—and on the latter's terms...
...It was the votes of Strauss' Francophile Christian Social Union that made the difference...
...Rent, furniture purchase, arrangements, and down payment were stipulated...
...Meanwhile, Britain threatened to bring home its Army of the Rhine...
...The postwar era is over," Erhard announced in a "state of the union" speech in the Bundestag...
...His long absence from Bonn counted as one of his most attractive features...
...The situation is hopeless but not serious," Austrian wits were once fond of saying...
...Strauss, Schroeder, Brandt, and Weh-ner have all made clear enough what they stand for, although it is hard to find a common denominator...
...For the Free Democrats (FDP), who command a fluctuating ten to fifteen per cent of the national vote, the National Democrats' gains were clear evidence of the disease in West Germany's politics, particularly in Bavaria where the National Democrats did the Free Democrats out of their representation altogether...
...The skeptical among the West Germans, small businessmen and marginal farmers, called to pay the price of European unification, could be bought...
...But we are not prepared to fight about it...
...Under the circumstances much can be said for Kiesinger's "grand coalition...
...It also would have meant an effective majority of only six, with a number of the marginal members ailing and several more conservative than Bismarck, in the midst of what budget forecasts and the rising NPD or "Neo-Nazi" vote suggested was a possible national emergency...
...Majority voting, Anglo-American style, would virtually guarantee to turn the Social Democrats into a purely urban party...
...It is only an additional irony that the Soviet Union sells more furs to West Germany than to any other customer...
...It appeared shortly after the November Landtag elections...
...Germany's peculiar postwar existence has been based on three premises, all of them increasingly questionable...
...Election reform is the fashionable subject of the day...
...What Kie-singer himself stands for, beyond the survival of his government, is an open question...
...We are not satisfied with the division of Germany," West Germans declared...
...The first was the cold war that transformed a former enemy into a favored partner and ultimately brought West Germany, nominally sovereign, into NATO...
...Neo-Nazi" is the term used, among others, by the Federal Republic's Ministry of the Interior...
...The "mini-opposition" afforded by the fifty deputies of the Free Democrats is a group too small even to convene a parliamentary investigating committee, and it is involved in a fight for its life with the NPD...
...Rather than a new departure, his reelection in 1965 was an exercise in nostalgia...
...A creation of the cold war, the Federal Republic is only now experiencing the winter of its discontent...
...The second was the postwar dream of European integration that made a postwar Germany of fifty-three million inhabitants—and not of seventy million—a partner useful and acceptable, for the first time in generations, to its neighbors...
...Man for man, the new government might well be the strongest the Federal Republic has seen to date...
...The crisis has continued since...
...But the obstacles to reform of the present proportional system are formidable...
...Passive as ever, Erhard was resigned to the outcome...
...Washington pressured the Germans about weapons purchases...
...They faced two possibilities...
...Symptomatic of the current German mood was a recent classified advertisement in Munich's Abendzeitung, a kind of Bavarian New York Post...
...The returns in Hesse and Bavaria give me immediate occasion to emigrate overseas," the advertiser announced...
...Bonn was finally on page one...
...It would almost certainly turn the Christian Democrats, Germany's most successful experiment in social-political cooperation, into a party of rural Catholics...
...West Germany's disease, however, lies elsewhere...
...Above all, the differences among the parties and the factions within them involved money—money to support West Germany's expansive welfare programs, money to pay support costs for U.S...
...The balance of payments turned sour...
...They could join the Christian Democrats, the party they had failed to defeat since the Federal Republic was created in 1949, or overturn it with the aid of the Free Democrats...
...Yet he himself was a walking denial...
...The Chancellor's wholehearted engagement in the North Rhine-Westphalian Landtag election was spelled out in the Chancellor's defeat...
...He stood for improved relations with Paris, he announced in a preliminary statement...
...For the other parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with its Bavarian affiliate, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), with more than eighty per cent of the national vote among them, the National Democrats' gains are a portent...
...Before the end of that same month, indomitably-conservative Bavaria had chosen fifteen National Democrats...
...Eighty square meters, balcony, telephone, etc...
Vol. 31 • February 1967 • No. 2
