GERMANY A Bonn diary MALCOLM RUTHERFORD
The devaluation of the French franc ought to have been the best thing that has happened to the Christian Democrats since the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. The question is whether the party has the energy left to take advantage of it. Chancellor Kie- singer returned from Washington on Satur- day looking just like the ageing Mr Mac- millan on an off-day, a man whom he so much resembles. The party is unnerved by the opinion polls, some of which (including the latest, published by the magazine Stern on Monday) have given the lead to the Social Democrats, irritated (always a bad sign) by the treatment it is getting from the press and television, and above all angered at the continuing popularity of Professor Schiller, a man the Christian Democrats have no one of sufficient calibre to put up against.
Professor Schiller has not abandoned his personal campaign to justify his stand for a revaluation of the mark. He is arguing now that the French devaluation is not a substitute, but an incentive, to German action. Surprisingly, he seems to be getting through. The Christian Democrats may well have made the mistake of talking down to the electorate. Herr Strauss remains on holi- day in Cannes. Before that he was in hos- pital, and he has been effectively out of the way for many weeks past. Has he decided, as some suggest, that his party has already lost, and that his own best chance will come from a spell in opposition, for which of course Herr Kiesinger can be made the scapegoat?
At the big National Democrat (extreme nationalist) rally in Diisseldorf last Satur- day the counter-demonstrators clearly out- numbered the party's supporters. I wonder if, in all their righteousness, some of the NDP.S most vocal opponents realise how far they are in fact making the party's campaign. It has reached the point where the party leader, Herr von Thadden, scarcely needs to speak about policy at all. He merely lists the contradictions in what the big parties have said about him, claims that the party is persecuted and misunder- stood and that any violence is deliberately started by the left.
It is just the opportunity he needs and he does it well. Never himself a member of the Nazi party, he has already been in the Bundestag as a representative of one of the smaller parties. When it dissolved even the Social Democrats recognised his electoral charms and made approaches to him. Under the arclights he is dramatically handsome and has an immaculate sense of timing which makes his jokes seem far better than they really are. He carries his manliness to the point of smoking old-fashioned un- tipped Player's Navy Cut cigarettes. Off stage (if he ever is off stage) one wonders what he can possibly talk about to the thugs who seem to surround him.
Official scariness about the movement goes so far that my bag was searched three times by the police, presumably for weapons, before I was allowed to enter Saturday's meeting. Everybody over- reacts. Chancellor Kiesinger tried to correct this in an interview a few days ago when he said that the real danger of any successes
by the taPD was the effect on opinion abroad, and added: 'but we in Germany know that it is not neo-nazi.' The result was even more publicity and more material for von Thadden's diverting speeches.
Stern's publication of the latest opinion poll on Monday, the result of an unofficial leak (whose accuracy was subsequently con- firmed by the agency responsible) was in defiance of the convention by which the publication of polls is now supposed to be banned until after the elections at the end of September. There is an incomprehensible tendency to see this convention as a healthy, even democratic development. It seems the opposite. Usually the German elector votes for a party but in fact gets a coalition, which may or not be the one he wants. In this situation polls are surely essential so that the voter can have a clearer idea of the real effect his vote may have. Banning them is to some extent like asking him to vote in the dark—but it is in fact welcomed because so many people persist in the prejudice that the polls are dishonest and inaccurate, despite their generally excel- lent record.
This week sees the eighth anniversary of the building of the Berlin wall. The new western approach to the Russians to have talks over the city has led to some fantastic suggestions, notably that the Russians and East Germans together may somehow be induced to tear it down. It seems unlikely. The wall has in many ways quite literally made East Germany. It was put up, East German officials will tell you, to stop the brain (and currency) drain. Accepting the euphemism, it has been undoubtedly successful. East Germany has become a thriving industrial state with by far the highest standard of living in the communist world and in some advanced industrial products internationally competitive. It is even beginning to make progress in its campaign for world-wide recognition. Despite this, many of its best people want to leave; some, despite the formidable obstacles, still succeed. To tear down the wall would be to undermine completely one of the very few communist economic achievements in eastern Europe.
Speculation about the imminent departure of Herr Ulbricht seems equally far-fetched.
I can recall no case of a top Communist leader who has voluntarily stepped down. (Che Guevara is an irrelevant exception.) Even if he wanted to do so. he probably wouldn't for fear that nobody would be- lieve he wasn't pushed. It is possible that there is pressure among his underlings to remove him, but such pressure would re- quire Soviet support. The last time the Russians acquiesced in this kind of thing was in the case of President Novotny in Czechoslovakia, which they might not neces- sarily regard as the happiest of precedents.
I have rarely been more taken to task by my German colleagues than for reporting in my last diary that in Bonn and Bad Godesberg there are no doorstep deliveries of milk. Apparently in some of the smarter areas there arc. Which hardly excuses, how- ever, the local eggs. However gently you immerse them, most of them crack on their first contact with water: not only crack slightly but crack so completely that nearly every intended boiled egg becomes a mix- ture of watery scrambled and poached. But aware of the dangers of the sweeping state- ment I am having some eggs specially brought from England to try them. It may after all be the fault of the local water or even of the local power supply.
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