GERMAN AGE-PROBLEMS
By W. H. EDWARDS
WHENEVER the reaction of public opinion, of politicians or of cross-sections of the population of Western Germany to current events baffles or amazes foreign observers, it is essential to keep the whole range of post-war problems in mind. Destruction and starvation, predominant features of the situation in 1945, 1946 and the first half of 1947, concentrated international atten- tion on facts and figures of nutrition, production, transport and trade, easily measurable and comparable in units of quantity. During these years more complicated problems, that are now pressing into the foreground, had for obvious reasons to be either temporarily ignored or pigeon-holed for future consideration.
Amongst the urgent problems of Western Germany the quantita- tive and qualitative aspects of the composition of the population are now claiming priority. The qualitative crisis can be stated in these terms: While heavy casualties in two world wars and a formalistic denazification have thinned out the ranks of virile men in the age groups between thirty and sixty, no effort is being made to train available middle-aged talents in the duties and responsibilities of political and cultural leadership. Leading spirits in influential religious movements are the only significant exception to this ban on talents " without greying temples?'
After the First World War talented men between forty and sixty abounded in the Weimar Parliament, in the Civil Service, in the professions, at the universities and in the managerial class. Rathenau, Naumann, Stresemann, Dr. Wirth and Breitscheid, to mention only a few politicians, were representative men with an acknowledged international reputation. In the economic sphere Schacht, Helfferich, Stinnes, Deutsch, Duisberg and Luther were personalities who could hold their own in any international forum. Their average age was below fifty. Today no foreigner can probably name off-hand an influential and representative German under sixty. A career like Mr. Harold Wilson's in Great Britain is in Germany an impossibility. Jakob Kaiser and the Hamburg Burgomaster Brauer are actually, although sexagenarians, the " young men " amongst leading politi- cians, while the seniors like Dr. Adenauer, Dr. Boeckler, Paul Loebe and the leader of the miners' union, August Schmidt, are well advanced in the seventies.
This predominance of very ripe- old age amongst the politicians of Western Germany would perhaps not be so paralysing if it were confined to the political arena. Unfortunately the bureaucracy, the universities and commerce and industry are also overburdened with the retarding weight of men who are too old or too tired to tackle the long-term problems of a new and revolutionised world with a creative spirit. These old men, influential in all spheres of public life and national economy, possess between them, of course, a valuable fund of tactical experience. They are very adroit in manoeuvring in difficult or delicate situations, but their skill—it is unfortunately nothing more than that—does not appeal to their reluctant followers, to the men and women between twenty-five and fifty, wlio by selfless hard work must make the most essential con- tribution towards a constructive solution of Germany's countless problems in the next decades. The lack of this appeal has created a very wide gulf between the men of forty and those above sixty. The first, who will in the near future have to apply and implement the new constitution, the Occupation Statute and the Ruhr Statute, fear that accommodating old men only seeking short-term solutions to avert unpleasant crises are virtually tying the hands of their successors who wish to solve fundamental problems in a modern co-operative and European spirit.
The generation of the middle-aged, which had little or no chance to acquire the technique of leadership between 1933 and 1945, feels frustrated by the persistence with which the elder statesmen and the elder sages are clinging to power, office and university chairs. Many exaggerated reactions of German public opinion are due to the restlessness of men in all parties who feel that they are rapidly growing older while they are being barred from assuming responsi- bility and from shaping creative solutions of long-term problems which are to a certain extent the common post-war heritage of German and other Western European nations. While the aged political and industrial leaders of Germany—including the chairmen of trade unions—show a marked prejudice in favour of all short-term and provisional solutions that can take effect within their lifetime, the younger generations are more eager to co-operate in any long- term solution in politics and economics that holds out the promise of a better and brighter Europe and world to those now at school or at the universities. They are inclined—perhaps sometimes over- hastily—to charge the " old men" in all walks of life with selling the birthright of youth to a saner future for the mirage of temporary stability. The middle-aged are frequently actuated by the shrewd suspicion that the old leaders in search of what they describe as " stability " are only anxious to reintroduce by back-doors and back- stairs the social and economic conditions of the so-called " good old times." To this attempt to recreate artificially conditions that are regarded as a contributory cause of two horrible world wars the younger generations are fundamentally opposed. Although the attitude of the younger men results in healthy friction, it also induces the elders to keep uncomfortable critics at a very safe distance from power and influence.
This frustration of the younger and middle-aged generations of Germans is intensified by the foreboding of the dangers anticipated from the quantitative aspects of the German age-problem. Before the Second World War Nazi, anti-Nazi and foreign statisticians had already come to the conclusion (at the Demographical Congresses at Paris in 1937) that the structure of the German population was
rapidly getting out of balance. From 1951 onwards the numbed of healthy wage-earners—male and female—between twenty ands fifty would rapidly diminish year by year in relation to the number of persons dependent on the earning capacity of this age-group] Excited discussions tried to fix a year between 1955 and 1961 in which each ablerbodied person in Germany would have to work or produce for at least two dependants who were either too young or too old to earn their own living. (In Great Britain about twenty- three million work for twenty-seven million dependants.) The heavy loss of male man-power during the Second World War, the pre- ponderance of old people and children amongst the refugees from the Sudetenland and the parts of Germany to the east of the Oder and the effect of the war on the birth-rate during the years of conflict have accentuated and accelerated the impending crisis in the com- position of the population. The fear of this inevitable development strongly influences the current reaction to dismantling, the trebling of unemployment during the last eight months—unemployment has now passed the million mark—the problems of the Ruhr Statute and the ownership of the coal-mines and steel-plants. The very slow redistribution of the land and the much too tardy economic an-I social integration of the refugees should not be underestimated in this context. There is strong ground for the demand Place aux jeunes.
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