A `Gastarbeiter' in Germany
Richard West
Every journalist visitor to West Germany ten or fifteen years ago wrote at least one serious article on the Gastarbeiter ('guest workers') who were pouring in at that time from Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. I contributed my share with a piece on the Italians at Volkswagen and one on the Yugoslays in Munich, who were, then as now, mixed up in emigre politics. One of the things we all remarked upon was the way that the Gastarbeiters hung about in pathetic groups at the railway stations waiting to get some news from home in the latest editions of L'Unita, Eftheleria, Borba or Cumhuriet. We all felt very sorry for them.
Since then, our own economy has sunk to a Balkan level and many British have joined the Gastarheiters; indeed I suppose I am one myself, for I went to West Germany last week in search of work from some Hamburg magazines. There were clusters of British at every railway station, waiting to get The Times or Sun.
Most Gastarbeiters also travel by train because it is cheaper than air and because they do not usually buy a car until they have finished their stint abroad. Sadly enough, many Gastarbeiters smash up their new cars on the long drive back to the Balkans, particularly on the Austrian stretch of the road, Which has the highest accident record of any Ill Europe.
The British Gastarbeiter can comfort himself with the realisation that West German railway stations and trains are incomparably cleaner, friendlier and more comfortable than those back home. Every railway station, for instance, provides a restaurant at which waiters serve good meals to the guests seated at tables with Cloths on them. Each table on the buffet car Of the train has a vase of fresh flowers and even the East German trains which you take if you want to go to Berlin, provide artificial flowers. No single company has a monopoly or the station bookstalls at which you can buy a range of good literature in a dozen languages, and if you forget to provide Yourself with some reading matter, the trains offer a West German Railway magazine, the equivalent of the British Airways journal In Flight. This magazine carries a 'Kontact-Coupon", or questionnaire, for those who wish to get married. You spend the journey answering questions such as 'Do you like pop music?", Are you honest?' or 'Do .you like children?', and German Railways provide you with bride or groom. .
Bachelor English Gastarbeiters should think very hard before getting engaged to German women, w.ho now seem to be in a mood of murderous bloodlust. On Friday last week the actress Ingrid van Bergen was sentenced to seven years for shooting dead her much younger lover who had been cheating with other women and had talked infargon-Erotik and turned her life into 'en Horrortrip'. These last facts I learnt from Die Zeit, a liberal, Guardian-esque weekly which also explained that Ingrid had 'lived like a man in male society'.
A Canadian lady I met at Aachen railway station said of the trial and sentence: 'She was menopausal. In Canada or the US she'd have only got a month'. Certainly one can feel sorry for Ingrid van Bergen but not for the three women .who on Saturday shot dead a Frankfurt banker, especially when it transpires that one of them was a family friend who called at the victim's house hold ing a bunch of roses. Whether or not these women are followers of Ulrike Meinhof, the anarchist who was found hanged in her cell last year while facing charges of murder, they have been linked with her by the German public and press. 'More and more women are going underground and taking up arms', complained Die Welt; 'they are murdering, robbing banks, planning bomb raids and kidnapping'.
While few 'Germans today think that women should stick to 'Kinder, Kiiche und Kirche' ('children, kitchen and church'), this new choice of interests surely constitutes too great a swing in the other direction. The phenomenon of these furious women has been discussed at relentless length by Germany's army of sociologists, some of whom have themselves joined the terrorist ranks; and the very publicity given to Meinhof may have contributed to her movement. All an outsider can ask is whether the terrorist female is a specifically German phenomenon. Crude antiGermans point to the utter humourlessness of these women; but the inability to laugh, however regrettable, does not necessarily lead to shooting bankers. Again it has been suggested that the. sympathy of these women with Palestinian terrorists, their 'anti-Zionism' as they would call it, is merely another form of the old Nazi Jewbaiting. Yet their mentality seems to have little in common with those who joined in the Nazi revolt, which itself had little to do with anti-semitism. Is terrorism then a form of revolt against the authoritarianism of German family life? This argument rather falls down it' one looks back to the nineteenth century when political terrorists were to be found less in Germany than in Italy, Spain and above all Russia. Indeed to grasp the mentality of Ulrike Meinhof and her kind, one could not do better than study the Russian Nihilists as described by Turgenev, Dostoievsky and Conrad. The problem is spiritual rather than sociological.
In short, I do not believe that female terrorism is just an exaggerated form of the old German aggressiveness, although the latter is still very evident. In West Berlin, where I went on from Hamburg, you notice aggressiveness most in the old womeni, who yell 'Hallo!' at you if you step off the pavement one half-second before the green light. There are few young people in Berlin but those that remain appear less violent than they were ten years ago, when riots against the police were commonplace. At the Republican Club inthose days the young middle-class revolutionaries used to stub out their cigarettes on the table cloths, to show contempt for bourgeois society, and each time, without fail, the working-class cleaners would neatly darn the holes.
The most brutal thing about West Berlin is its slang, I was told by a local resident: 'Where you say "piss off!", we say "you can slide down my hunchback" '. The Berliners threaten each other by saying 'I'll stab you with a frozen dish-rag'. I asked how Berliners described the men you see slinking into the many sex shops and blue movies. 'Lust toads' was the answer, which struck me as a marvellous way to describe a wellknown writer on sex matters and jazz, living in north-west London. The next day my informant said that the phrase should be 'lust newt', which conjured up an even more accurate portrait of a pornophile and dramaturge, sometimes seen — thin and wavering — at dramatic or literary parties.
At the weekend, two people were killed trying to cross over the wall from East Berlin, where only recently Maurice Jones, the British Communist, had been seeking political refuge. The Wall remains both spiritually and physically ugly, yet difficulties are diminishing between the two Berlins. Some westerners like certain things in the East. It is oppressive to students and radicals; oldfashioned on law and order; above all, more German. One elderly West Berliner told me last week: 'Before the war it was the east part, the Unter den Linden, where the Germans went, the Pomeranians, Saxons and so on. On this side, round the Kur-, fiirstendamm, the Gedachtniskirche, it was more international. And so it is now'.
On the train back from Berlin to Hamburg I talked with some of the East Germans in my compartment who were quick to point out the fact (which may or may not have inspired Maurice Jones's defection) that East Germany's standard of living has now overtaken England's. A man with no right ear or left index finger — many of his age are war-wounded — told me with great relish: 'You English are getting poorer day by day in comparison with the DDR (East Germany)'. His friend, also an old-timer, said how sad it was that in Britain, as in East Germany, so many young people were leaving the countryside for the towns, but he consoled himself with the thought that 'anyway, -all of us, English and Germans, will all in the end be killed by the Chinese'.
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