The Atlantic and Its Enemies

18. Europe: The Phoenix Flops

In the early 1950s Moscow had been frightened at the prospect of a Europe headed by a rearmed Germany, and in alliance with the United States. Stalin had tried to bully the Germans; in the early years of Khrushchev there had been fewer crude ploys, but then he too had become a bully, exploding huge experimental bombs and serving ultimatums over Berlin. The West only closed ranks, and NATO became quite sophisticated, with an intelligence network and, in some countries, even a shadowy, underground organization. But by the 1970s matters had changed. Nixon and Kissinger needed to stop the Vietnam War somehow, and had approached Moscow in May 1972 with proposals for détente. They were couched in terms of disarmament — SALT I, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks — and the American bait was a credit deal over grain shipments, easings of conditions for Soviet visits to the USA, etc. The Americans’ threat was of a deal with China, and the context was a division that had been emerging since Khrushchev’s last years: he had withdrawn help and refused Mao the secrets of the bomb, and Mao responded with a sort of offended nationalism. In 1969-70 there were Chinese-Soviet armed clashes on the river Ussuri, a disputed border, and the Chinese responded to the American opening. But it was not just the Americans who appeared. West Germany launched her own probe, known as Ostpolitik, and she was offering hard-cash concessions. Was this the opening that the Kremlin had been looking for since 1952, and the ‘Stalin Note’ offering German unification in return for neutrality or, as it was called by now, ‘Finlandization’? Germany was after all vulnerable, and official Europe had no teeth.

At the time Europe certainly seemed to the outside world to be a miracle of prosperity, without the concomitant crudities of the United States. However, she remained less than the sum of her parts. The European Community itself (to use the shorthand) was not particularly efficient: quite the contrary, it stumbled along drearily. Its institutions (and its flag) went back to the early fifties, and the Coal and Steel Community: a court, an assembly, and a High Authority to sort out the very technical technicalities of who was to produce what at which price. Jean Monnet himself had become bored with his creation, and its European outcrop was generally used as a parking place for failed politicians whose vanity needed to be salved. The first president of the Commission had been Walter Hallstein, possessed of negative charisma. Later on came heavy-lecturing worthies, the heaviest and longest-lasting a German Widmerpool, Günter Verheugen. It was all desperately uninspiring and even in some ways fraudulent. At the heart of this multinational community was Belgium, subject to the most absurdly provincial nationalisms; even Luxemburg dressed up its dialect, the Dutch equivalent of Liverpudlian, as a national language. In the 1970s, to give the Community some sort of personality and appeal, a parliament was set up, with direct elections. This was again, as with everything touched by the then French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, lifeless and even ridiculous.

A British journalist of genius, Catherine Bennett, wrote an article about it in 1991. She had unearthed a British Labour member of the European Parliament, one Glyn Ford, who claimed to be so busy that he could not make appointments. ‘Anyone wanting a little of Mr Ford’s time must wait beside the telephones dotted around the bars and hallways, bleeping him now and again, for a gap to occur between the seven simultaneous meetings which Ford says he has “all day, every day”.’ He had been an MEP since 1984 and was ‘Chair of the Committee of Inquiry into the Rise of Racism and Fascism in Europe’, ‘which’, as he explained, ‘was pretty high profile, and I was made the Parliament’s spokesman on Star Wars’. By 1986 he had produced a report with fifty recommendations, and a Solemn Declaration. The grandiose ‘hemicycle’ had its ushers, its interpreters for (then) nine languages, its electronic voting gadgets (when they joined the EU the Finns learned how to jam their pencils into the ‘yes’ button and go and have a drink), and speakers had four minutes to address a variety of topics — bananas, mud flaps, cordless telephones, gay rights, etc. Committees would meet to draw up reports that might go to the Commission, be translated, presented to the Parliament, then ‘debated. Then amended. And translated. Votes are taken on amendments. Amended, finished proposals go to the Council of Ministers which meets infrequently, in secret. If they dislike the proposals, the Ministers discard them.’ As Bill Newton-Dunn explained, it was ‘very unsatisfactory, an enormous confidence trick’. The domestic parliaments had in effect given up power to the European Community, but had not been replaced by a democratic body with any power, either. Instead, talk. There was a Women’s Committee, which felt ‘that insufficient care is paid to the fact that women have to be fitted into working life differently from men’. As Miss Bennett says, ‘a selection of thick documents, one running to 75 pages, all available in all nine languages, all to be thrown away, suggested that this indeed is the kind of thing members of the Women’s Committee say to each other in their sessions without end’. This all went together with lavish offices, in Brussels and Strasbourg, with generous travel and daily allowances, etc. ‘Tell them they’re lucky and the honest ones say, yes… Others snap, “You should see what the chauffeurs and interpreters get paid.” Or “The Italians get £70,000”… MEPs are freed, like the members of the Sealed Knot society, like the lions at Longleat, to act out their parts in a great, elaborate sham… Looking at them, listening to them, it’s hard to know what is worse: their expensive, conceited charade of a Parliament, or the prospect of it ever becoming the real thing.’

This reflected one of the great developments of the seventies, the rise of the ‘soft professions’. Deeper down, it also showed the increasing powerlessness of parliamentary bodies in general as bureaucracy and technology made semi-secretive committees and lobbies more powerful. The soft professionals, demanding a European policy for gays or women and the like, were expensively used to hide the shift of real power. Besides, the experience of any multilingual parliament was not encouraging, and Margaret Thatcher in a later speech made mock of such bodies as the Austrian before the First World War, where proceedings became chaotic and even budgets could be produced only by decree. The secretiveness of the Council and the Commission, the sheer loftiness of their civil servants, and the extraordinarily slipshod ways with money were notorious. In the seventies matters were made worse because the machinery worked almost ridiculously slowly. Creating a unified market was supposed to mean the ironing out of endless small differences. The bureaucracy was not in itself very considerable and did not amount to more than that of an English local government. However, it did involve far more people, in the separate countries, as they went through the European laws and had to apply them. The ways of these bureaucrats were, to outside eyes, very strange, and involved a degree of petty bullying noticed in every country. As an Italian said, it was an age of bureaucratic micro-persecution: no smacking of naughty children (a French father was imprisoned in Edinburgh) and increasingly no smoking. Europe became unpopular in England because shopkeepers could be arraigned if they went on marking goods in the old weights and measures, rather than in the metric system. There were stories as to the harmonization of condom sizes, the Italians claiming that they needed three millimetres more than the Germans, who took offence.

At a more serious level, in the 1970s various governments applied regulations on health, safety and the like in order to prevent imports: the Germans kept out foreign beers, for instance, because of their alleged impurities. The French insisted on certain classes of imports’ being trundled along highways and byways for a six-month-long inspection, paid for by the importer, in Poitiers (which, on the strength of the income, wrecked its medieval centre with a corrugated-iron Salle Omnisports and the usual gruesome concrete). One answer to this might have been a common currency. The Europeans wondered if they could not find common ground for a dollar of their own. They were more dependent upon trade than the Americans, who could coin it in from the dollar’s privileged position, and trade inevitably suffered if traders did not know what they were getting for their trade. However, from this to a European common currency was a long way, and there were detours through the Common Agricultural Policy: was the cathedral of subsidies and export-primes and import rebates and value-added tax to be translated into Marks or francs or dollars and at what rate? A Pierre Werner, of Luxemburg, commissioned in 1970 to examine these matters, came up with a central fiscal authority, though not a bank or a currency except, after a period of co-operation, in 1980. Then there was some agreement, not as it turned out lasting, that the dollar would fluctuate within agreed limits, the ‘Smithsonian bands’. The pound joined this, and its behaviour — a wriggling of the graphed values in the lower percentages — gave the whole scheme its name, ‘the snake’.

To keep the weaker currencies from going below the floor, there was a European Monetary Co-operation Fund, meaning that the German taxpayer would pay in order for German traders to have an artificially low currency. However, the weaker currencies were weakened by the oil shock, and the collapse in dollars meant that no-one wanted them, either. The Mark strengthened against the pound and against the franc as well, such that France dropped out of ‘the snake’ in 1974 and again in 1976, so that governments could go on pumping out paper money that would allegedly stop unemployment. It did, 25 per cent of the French working directly for their government, and though the French did not on paper abandon free trade, they (and the Italians) put so many informal obstacles in its way that protectionism appeared to be returning, and the effect on the arithmetic of the Common Agricultural Policy, already weird, was understood, Helmut Schmidt complained, only by one man, who could not then clearly explain it. In October 1976 there was a realignment of currencies at Frankfurt, but this suffered because the various countries had different import priorities, and there was no general agreement as to how the inflationary problem was to be dealt with. At this level, Europe was part miniature protection racket, part pulpit and entirely irritating.

‘Europe’ had initially been an American idea, and a very good one at that. However, with the decline of American power and prestige at the time of the Vietnam War, there was also trouble with the European creation. Part of this was a straightforward outcome of geopolitics: if the USA were going to be sucked into Far Eastern adventures, Europe would have to do something for her own security vis-à-vis Russia. Part of the story was, however, financial. In the later sixties, the dollar empire was weakening; in the early seventies it fell apart. These troubles had their effects in western Europe, and the seventies were far from being the happy time that the sixties had been. France was marking time; but Italy fell into trouble. Her history had been for a very long time in counterpoint with German: Guelfs and Ghibellines, Romans and Goths: in one view, healthy barbarians coming to put life into effete southern stock, and in another, naïve buffoons coming in to be seduced and robbed, or maybe used as mercenaries (the Papal Guard to this day have uniforms of the old Swiss Landsknechte who fought the sixteenth-century wars). Since the war, there had been an interesting Italian descant on German history as well: a miracle, with undercurrents of gloom. Here, too, was terrorism, worse than in Germany; here, too, was head-shaking, and a failure of population growth; and for the Left — Germanic Ghibellines for the greater part — the seventies turned into ‘the years of lead’. The arch-Ghibelline Paul Ginsborg litanizes: public finance fell into vast disorder, deficit growing; public industry had to be shored up; in 1971 a state institution was established to bail out even private industries, this then becoming ‘an albatross’. There was welfare, but without taxes to match, and pensions represented the largest loss. Housing laws were sabotaged. The bureaucracy was a nightmare. There was another side of this, that the unofficial economy did rather well, as a new Italy, hairdressers and small artisans working away while big industry languished, was emerging, and the black economy amounted to about a quarter of the country’s takings. This distorted perceptions. If governments attempted serious reform, there followed a tired choreography: capital flight, deficit, IMF, devaluation (in 1976 against the dollar, 25 per cent), deflation, factory closure and even, originally, a return to the land. In 1980 there was a disastrous earthquake around Naples. Of $40bn sent in relief, half was stolen, and $4bn went into bribes for politicians. Sicily had many roofless and unfinished buildings, put up with public subsidy and not finished by the private owner who would have had to pay tax. The context was a strange political system: the Christian Democrats were in charge all the way through, but they consisted of rival factions and their allies varied. An old political tactic had to be used. In 1975 the Communists were running out of steam, and were being taken over by other enthusiasms — feminism raised its head — and they were anyway much engaged purely in matters of administration since all of the cities except for Bari and Palermo were in the hands of left-wing coalitions. Left-wing infantilism of a sinister nature then took over. ‘Red Brigades’ developed, from October 1970. In May 1974 a bomb in Brescia killed eight, and another, in a Bologna train, twelve. The killing went on, amid accusations from the Left that they amounted to a provocation, and the police were slow and inept. By 1976 terrorism had started again, with an asinine hard-drugs-fuelled occupation of Rome university and battles for control of the microphones, while women slogged it out with each other, the trade union leader was shouted down, and French representatives orated in an absurd echo of the Catalan internationalist in Éducation sentimentale. In 1976-7 the Red Brigades killed eight and wounded Indro Montanelli, a great figure of Italian journalism, in the legs. All of this softened the Communists, who co-operated secretly with the Christian Democrats.

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.

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.

Even so, the Grand Coalition pulled in different ways — an element of social and school liberalization, but also a ‘Stability Law’ requiring savings. Whatever: the boom went on with growth again at the fabulous 7 per cent while inflation went back to a trivial level. On the whole, it was Brandt’s side of the coalition that profited: if the Left were anywhere near power, and matters improved as the various elements in the old austerity proved irksome, then the CDU, representing the old virtues, would appear nagging and irrelevant. Welfare spending, 15 per cent of the GDP in 1950, edged up in the later sixties to 18.7 per cent, and did not bring about the end of the world. Brandt’s standing rose. Meanwhile, the coalition came under strain. As the dollar weakened, pressure came from Washington for a serious revaluation of the Mark, and that threatened the profits of the exporters. On the Right, Franz Josef Strauss spoke for them; on the other side, Karl Schiller spoke for international finance (he won: there was a revaluation — 8.5 per cent — in 1969, two others following in 1971 and 1973). As the elections approached (1969) the small Free Democratic Party edged towards the Left, talking of educational reform, ‘participation’ and youth: Ralf Dahrendorf, author of a considerable analysis of Germany’s problems, emerged as a radical, and beady liberal eyes were trained on the foreign ministry. In 1969 a new (‘Little’) coalition emerged, with Brandt as chancellor and Walter Scheel (not Dahrendorf, who was sidelined to Brussels) as foreign minister. Schiller and Helmut Schmidt, both of them remarkable and memorable figures, took over the economic ministries, with functioning corporate institutions and a provision for intelligent public spending. In time, this was to cause strain, because debts built up, but Germany, quite unlike England, had a good seventies. Even a foreign policy began to emerge.

In the sixties, bright people among the Social Democrats had argued that some opening should be made towards Moscow, towards eastern European countries especially, and that the way towards change in Berlin would be through concession, not denunciation. One reason for the Russians’ behaviour over Berlin was a conviction that, isolated, it would be drained of people, and there was some truth in that: in order to keep the population up, young men who studied there were exempted from conscription, and there was much studying, accordingly, with, accordingly, a great many students, male and female, with nothing to do except make up grievances. Besides, improvements in Berlin, such as family visits, would hardly be gained through head-on collision: for that, the West was simply, locally, too weak. Even in 1963 a Social Democrat warhorse, Egon Bahr, had told a stout Protestant audience at Tutzing that there would have to be Wandel durch Annäherung, meaning that greater closeness would bring transformation (Brandt had been meant to make this speech, but, to his subsequent resentment, missed the cue). This line may have been encouraged by Moscow, with which another warhorse, Herbert Wehner, an old Comintern hand, still had his links; the speech occurred in the late-Khrushchev-period ‘thaw’, when countries bordering Germany and Austria were taking little steps of their own to make travel somewhat easier.

Then there was Soviet energy, which an expanding West Germany could do with: here, the Austrians, in 1967, were the stalking horse, offering credit terms in exchange for access to Soviet oil and natural gas. But the most important element was the change in the German atmosphere, as the post-war generation grew up and read its Spiegel or Zeit: a certain feeling of guilt spread as to what had been done in Germany’s name to the countries to the east, whether Poland or Czechoslovakia. Had the time not come to revise the rigid fifties policy of recognizing neither them nor the eastern borders that had been fixed in 1945? Once Brandt had managed to dispose of his entanglements with the tiresome Kiesinger, policies of openness towards the East became a prime cause of the new SDP-FDP (‘Little’) Coalition. To be in favour of Ostpolitik was to be radical chic, as the Germans understood it: away from the smug stuffiness of the fifties. On one level, this was just common sense: it was absurd not to recognize reality on the ground, and to withhold diplomatic recognition from countries that recognized East Germany. But there was also an idea, not proven wrong in the outcome, that a soft approach would cause a fatal softening on the other side. The problem was a more general one, that so many Germans had suffered, had remade their lives, wanted unification, and detested the in any case very unlovely German Democratic Republic. The older generation, many of them born in old Prussia east of the river Elbe, had difficulty in swallowing the borders of Potsdam, in 1945, on the rivers Oder and Western Neisse.

Brandt’s memoirs, fascinating up to this point, now turn into wooden language and chronology. Feelers went out to Moscow, obviously the heart of the matter, and at least by implication there was a considerable bargain: recognition of East Germany, at least de facto, in return for access to Soviet energy and some easing of conditions for West Berlin. The process took time, not least because the East German leadership, little Ulbricht in particular, knew their Moscow and knew that they could easily go the way of the Greek and Spanish Communists, sacrificed pawns in the greater game of Soviet foreign policy, itself now beset by fears of China. Early in 1970 Egon Bahr went to Moscow; a surreptitious link for communications was opened, with a KGB man, in a villa in Dahlem, in a prosperous part of West Berlin; a non-aggression treaty was drawn up in August. A face-saving letter, drawn up by the Christian Democrat leader, was attached, reserving Germany’s right to unification; subsequently the Constitutional Court and the Christian Democrats were able to assert improvements for the ordinary existence of East Germans that Brandt and Bahr had omitted to insist upon. But the substance was recognition of East Germany, in treaties of 1971-2, preceded by a visit of one Willi Stoph, the SED chairman, to Kassel, in which he made a grotesque claim for ‘reparations’, and a much publicized return journey by Brandt, in March 1970, to Erfurt, by train (there were tiresome formalities against a journey by aircraft via Berlin), during which he was lionized. In December 1970 there was a treaty with Poland, and in the course of a visit to Warsaw Brandt embarrassed his hosts by kneeling at the monument to the Jewish ghetto and the uprising of 1943: by this stage the Polish Communists were making some use of anti-semitism, and Brandt’s spontaneous gesture took them aback. Borders were now recognized, though the treaty with Czechoslovakia, for tiresome formal reasons, took somewhat longer. One counterpart, as with Romania around the same time, was that ‘ethnic Germans’ who had stayed behind in 1945 were allowed to depart: money changed hands for this.

Money also flowed eastwards for more substantial matters. The Germans soon followed the Austrian lead on Soviet energy: at Essen, the very heart of the industrial Ruhr, agreements began in February 1970. Over twenty years the USSR would supply Ruhrgas with 32 billion cubic metres of natural gas, costing (at 1970 prices) DM2.5bn and maybe, starting in 1973, for more than twice as much. The existing pipeline, which stopped in Bratislava, would go on into Bavaria. Mannesmann, the largest European maker of steel piping, was to supply the USSR with 2.4 million tons of it, and the cost would be borne by seventeen banks, headed by Deutsche Bank, repayable, through profits, over eleven years at a cost of 6.25 per cent in interest — a rate far below the inflation to come. Bonn guaranteed the deal. This was a classic method of dealing with the USSR: not genuine trade at all, but a means by which the German taxpayer subsidized his own banks and incidentally also promoted Soviet industry: a similar deal had been done even in 1931. In 1972 West-East German relations were formalized, and again there was a subsidy for the East German state; it also gained privileged access to the EEC market under West German terms, in return for making slightly less petty fuss (what the Germans called Umstandspinsel) over small matters in Berlin — a two-day wait for a visa at the border, East German numberplates having to be screwed on, in the freezing cold, as temporary replacement for West German ones. There was a great row over ratification of all of this, in 1972, and bribery had to be deployed, but the treaty went through. Brandt said, now Hitler had lost the war, and in 1971 he got a Nobel Peace Prize, from which, as happened with other men, he never quite recovered. Thereafter, vanity took hold; women and bottles succeeded each other, and his judgement went so far wrong that even he, with long and deep practice, failed to smell an obvious Communist spy in his closest entourage. The scandal eventually (in 1974) lost him office, and Helmut Schmidt took over.

There were problems below this radiant surface, and some of the Left, especially in the universities, responded hysterically: a reflection, in the first place, of the bubble status of West Berlin, and also of the expansion of student numbers. As to these, Adenauer had been quite careful, no doubt believing that the country needed only so many ‘students’, whereas it could not have enough apprentices, respectful of their elders and learning a practical trade. Erhard and then the Great Coalition put up the number of students, from 385,000 in 1965 to 510,000 in 1975, and though the increase passed off without incident in most places, it did cause trouble. The university system in Germany was a sort of fossilized Enlightenment, and boredom reigned. Anti-Americanism became a cause; the visit of the Shah of Iran was the occasion for a riot; the police mishandled things; a martyr appeared, one Rudi Dutschke, a student, a sort of El Pasionario, and aged forty; and there were as in the United States some sages to offer high-sounding comfort. A Norwegian ‘peace researcher’ named Johan Galtung referred to ‘structural violence’, by which he meant people getting on with their lives. The old Frankfurt School, much of which had migrated to New York (the New School) now returned, including, via East Germany, one Ernst Bloch. The Frankfurt School had been set up in the twenties, and its largely Marxist professorate had tried to update Marxism, to take account of the things that Marx had simply got wrong or over which he had perhaps been misinterpreted. Especially, this meant showing that intellectual life was not just a function of the relations of production, that culture, such as music or film, might on the contrary shape the mind of a generation and thereby alter the relations of production. The Frankfurters were then led into worlds of psychology, and from there to the study of words, the tools of philosophy. Ernst Bloch was a lion, his particular interest being in the philosophy of the preposition and the demonstrative adverb; he lectured, to awestruck audiences, on ‘the not’, ‘the nevertheless’, ‘the whence’ — harmless stuff, which made its impression because there was indeed an intelligentsia all dressed up with nowhere to go.

A section of that Left then took up the cause of terrorism, the ‘Red Army Faction’, a strangely Germanic phenomenon, the example of which spread to Italy with the Red Brigades. Dostoyevsky in Demons had written about such people a century before. Nechaev, spreading terror, had his ideology — essentially, ‘the more, the worse’. There was a hatred of the smug world all around, a belief that random terror against it was both deserved and beneficial. Nechaev had a charisma that allowed him even to hypnotize prison guards into letting him escape, and subsequent terrorists owed similar escapes to a bourgeois tolerance in which Dostoyevsky saw the origins of the whole business. Andreas Baader looked not unlike Che Guevara, and he could ensnare young women of moralizing parental background, surprisingly often daughters of Lutheran pastors. Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin were the chief entrapped souls, but there was a network beyond, and it turned out to include men who subsequently rose a generation later to become even foreign (Joschka Fischer) and interior (Otto Schily) ministers. In 1967 251 people were killed in, by mistake, Brussels. In 1968 two Frankfurt department stores went up in flames. This problem went on and on in the Brandt-Scheel period, and to begin with the German response was very weak-kneed: in part because of a fear, not unjustified, that the world would shriek ‘Nazi’ if it was too harsh, and in part because the federal system got in the way of interstate policing. It emerged in 1990 that the East German Stasi had been involved in training, in sending people to the Middle East. Baader himself was arrested in 1972, and there was a lull. In 1974 one of the prisoners starved himself to death; next day the president of the Berlin supreme court was killed in his home. Early in 1975 the head of the CDU in Berlin was kidnapped, and exchanged for terrorist prisoners. In April the Stockholm embassy was blown up, one person killed. The half-dozen released prisoners went to the Yemen, taking as hostage a friend of Brandt’s; in December 1975 they occupied a Geneva hotel to intimidate OPEC; in June 1976 they hijacked an Air France aircraft bound for Israel, and took hostage the Jews on board. At last, in 1976, amendments were introduced into the criminal code, and judges were even allowed to exclude defence lawyers if they were thought to be obstructive; these lawyers’ own communications with prisoners were subjected to controls (to prevent the smuggling of weapons). Baader and others were eventually sentenced to life, in a specially built prison near Stuttgart. Reprisals followed. The head of the Deutsche Bank was kidnapped, and in September 1976 a very prominent industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, was seized, with three of his associates. The Schleyer kidnappers demanded the release of Baader and his fellow convicts, and a Lufthansa plane was hijacked to Somalia for the same purpose. However, by now the State was responding with greater forcefulness. The plane was freed in an efficient operation, and Baader committed suicide, together with his fellow-convicts. Schleyer was then found, garrotted with piano wire. After that, matters settled down, although, here and there, the kidnaps and killings went on, right up to the time of unification and beyond.

It was a strange interlude, and there was much head-shaking in the German manner as to its significance. If ever there was a major country in Europe that had prospered, had done all of the recommended things, it was Germany. Perhaps there were indeed unhappy and resentful currents under the surface, a feeling that the country was only capable of reaching the top range of mediocrity; certainly, the cultural changes that occurred around this time implied considerable contempt for fifties smugness; there was, quite suddenly, a relentless and self-satisfied harping on the Nazi past, and Wieland Wagner, very much a product of it, to the point of running a concentration camp in Bayreuth for incarcerated rocket scientists, produced an anti-capitalist Ring. But there seems to have been a much more profound vote of cultural no-confidence around this time, perhaps the German women’s vote of no-confidence in the Constitution: in the later 1960s the surplus of births over deaths vanished. The country was heading for a full-scale demographic crisis, and West Berlin had the lowest birth rate in the entire world, including even Communist countries such as Hungary. The problem became so serious that a French commentator, Pierre Chaunu, reckoned in 1980 that within fifty years there would be no more Germans: it was ‘Mandeville’s bees gone mad’, individualism to the point at which there would be no individuals left.

West Germany was saved from herself by East Germany. Here was a warning as to what might happen if the Atlantic link were ever really sundered. Brezhnev might visit Bonn (1978) and talk of our ‘common European home’, but, as Margaret Thatcher later remarked, homes are built with walls, and the Berlin Wall was one too many. The ‘German Democratic Republic’ was an embarrassment. It remained a place where the inhabitants had to be contained by a wall, and a very ugly one at that, complete with minefields and yapping hounds on dog-runs, in case they all decided to move out, as they had done before 1961, when the wall was built. You just needed to travel one or two stops in the underground system, the U-Bahn, and you were in a different world: a brilliant and funny writer (East Germans were much funnier than West Germans), Stefan Wolle, describes ‘the specific smell of the DDR, the composition of which will never properly be analysed’ and ‘the unmistakable harsh, lecturing tone of voice of salesgirls, waiters and People’s Policemen’, the grey plastic telephones, ‘Sibylle’ wall cupboards, the Metallkombinat Zeulenrode, flowered carpets, sagging net curtains. Berlin was dominated, through the Party, by Saxons, who counted as the fifth occupying power (historically, Saxony is an interesting case — somewhat as with Scotland, a country that never quite took off, was industrial, and supplied far more than its due share of enlightenment and civilization; had Britain ever become Communist, the Scots would also have been well to the fore). The Party leadership specialized in self-incense, with liturgical formulae, and the general aim was Geschichte als Ereignislosigkeit, history as the happening of nothing. Ideology became, says Wolle, the opiate of the leadership.

After the Wall went up there was an initial period of repression, with nearly 20,000 political punishments (as against 5,000 in the first half of 1961). Groups of ‘Free German Youth’ went round roofs, pointing aerials away from West Germany or even sawing them off, to block television (Aktion Blitz), but then an attempt was made at a consumer society to match that of West Berlin — little cars, washing machines, colour television and the rest. In the mid-sixties the working week was shortened (five days, nine hours) and the cult of Walter Ulbricht was reduced (Honecker taking over in May 1971 as first secretary of the central committee of the SED). The Alexander-Platz Funkturm (radio tower) started in October 1969, and in 1968 there was an educational reform supposed to bring modernity (in Leipzig the thirteenth-century Gothic university church was knocked down for the benefit of a gimcrack university building). In the mid-sixties there had even been talk of economic reform, with factory autonomy, a ‘New Economic System of Planning and Management’ (NÖSPL). The period was known as the Systemzeit on account of the supposed spread of computers and a new emphasis in education on mathematics. East Berlin became a sort of parody copy of the West, Chicago rather than Moscow being the model. But as Stefan Wolle writes, without a proper service sector the imitation could not be managed: the regime could not provide for the levels of prosperity managed in the West. It staggered into a brief consideration of reform at the time of the ‘Prague Spring’ but then staged an ideological witch-hunt, rewarded careerists and informers, and stopped the reforms it had briefly considered. There was even, in the hard winter of 1969-70, an economic crisis such as western Europe had not seen since 1947. A hard freeze began early in the November, there were headlines as to the ‘self-sacrificial struggle of the miners in the lignite works’. Potatoes ran short, and Nasser sent some from Egypt, but in the canteens there was only macaroni to be had, and domestic fuel consisted of coal dust. The energy crisis was such that East Berlin’s electricity hardly sufficed for more than the floodlights of the Wall, and trains were generally hours late in arriving.

Under Communism, you could never be entirely sure if such things were not somehow being stage-managed in order to discredit the existing leadership of the Party, and in due course there was a change. It occurred in the context of the West Germans’ own Ostpolitik, and of course from the Soviet viewpoint it was easier to deal with some sort of flexible East German leader as distinct from Walter Ulbricht, an old Comintern man who had emerged from the Weimar Communist Party. In a meeting of the Politburo from which many members were absent ‘ill’ or ‘on leave’, and with many ‘candidate’ members present in a non-voting capacity, Willi Stoph presented a report highly critical of Ulbricht — badly prepared automatization of output, useless prestige buildings (hideous hotels and high-speed motorways through town centres, with no traffic). It all led to a humiliation for Ulbricht, when Neues Deutschland gave only a brief mention of his speech (which was not published) and some Politburo members formally wrote to Brezhnev to complain that Ulbricht was still thinking in a pan-German way, that there was a danger of upheavals in the manner of Poland in the later 1960s. In the interstices of the Soviet 24th Congress there was a decision to push Ulbricht aside (in April 1971). He died in 1973, still in theory the head of state, in a grand house in Wandlitz. His death occurred during a sporting festival, and he was made to write a letter saying that the Youth Celebrations’ organizers ‘should not allow their good humour to be affected by his unfortunately timed death’. His reward was that no flags were flown at half-mast. But with Ulbricht, the old DDR died as well: what remained was a hulk, disposable of by Moscow whenever circumstances suited.