The Year of the Parked Car
From SARAH GAINHAM
IT has been a year of consolidation in both East and West Germany. Both have enjoyed a prosperity unknown since the war began to go wrong; and it has been accepted with still half- unbelieving pleasure and relief. In West Germany, the underlying feeling of 'Can this possibly last?' is giving wayto taking both personal possessions and national wealth for granted. They have known poverty and the contempt of strangers, so the acquiring of solid wealth as a bolster for self- esteem is a major preoccupation for the Germans. Persons buy objects, for use or for prestige, and often for both. The State buys an international reputation; though a certain reluctance to co- operate in anonymous long-term credits to poor countries is still there—World Bank loans, unlike the loans to favoured Arab countries, have no quick returns in interest or prestige or popularity.
Privately, it is not uncommon for families to deny themselves every luxury for years to buy a small car they can hardly afford to use; the intense pride and pleasure of seeing their car standing before the block of flats with all the other cars is much greater than the joys of motoring on roads which thousands of new drivers make a night- mare. It is easy for the rich to despise such pleasures, but for people who left Silesia in 1944 on foot in the savage winter weather, shedding their few miserable possessions piece by piece as weight, distance, and the fear of pursuit took toll, there is magic in a modern flat, new furniture, new carpets, television, a car. The two dominant feelings in West Germany and, to a lesser extent, in the DDR, are a happy enjoyment of well-being and a pro- found longing that nothing should upset it.
This is not to say that poverty has disappeared from the country. The poor, the sick and the old are worse off than they are in Britain. There is a painful feeling at times that in the general im- provement the weak and poor are ignored with an almost obsessive desire not to think of unpleasant things. Particularly the 'old' refugees, the Polish and Russian DPs, some now in the third genera- tion, exist in the shadows of indifference and a vague, guilty hostility.
In the outer, official, world the picture of the year is dominated by the stern cunning and for- midable figure of old man Adenauer, who runs West Germany single-brained if not single- handed. The intrigues in the spring and sum- mer around the succession of the Presidency are almost forgotten, though people are very much aware of lesser stature in the new President, and regretful of the loss of President Heuss, who represented the decency and dignity people want in their national symbols. If there is a lasting result of that undignified tug-of-war it is a slight but dangerous creaking in the timbers of a State still provisional, empirical. A society which so recently lost all faith in itself and in institutions cannot afford to have its new. symbols tarnished. Presi- dent Heuss made one place in the State above politics, the churches, social strata, and above corruption; Chancellor Adenauer did his best throughout the summer to bring political huck- stering into it.
There is no doubt, despite everything that can be said against him, that Chancellor Adenauer has
c concept of the Lawful State at heart, though s ideas have little resemblance to our own almost [archic notions of freedom. But the old Chancel- is a lifelong administrator and politician, and the interests of efficiency he has often used men id methods with bad reputations. To further his )1itical ends he did not hesitate to lay cynical Inds on an office which has hardly had time to atter the tradition which protects high office om all but the worst scandals.
There is much corruption here, as in all fast- owing societies. It is bad enough that members the Government should be accused of criminal 'els, the taking of bribes, of having been present mass-murders during the war. It is worse that cy should be kept in office if such things can 'en be surmised about them. In older States like ritain and France there may be a general con-
■ iracy of silence about such things; here in this ide-open country the press has no self-censorship Id everything is known, however damaging. All tese things, and most of all the haggling over the -esidency, tear ragged holes in the fragile new bric of public life.
This was the year in which the dreamlike chotomy of German political thinking about Le East was shocked awake. For years every- le talked reunification; but all practical efforts .e directed towards the elimination of those !eply interested in it. One-fifth of the Federal
population once had its home the other side of the Oder-Neisse line. Berlin is islanded in a hostile sea and its protectors have become, in the course of a few years, startlingly inferior in a military sense to their opponents. Nobody can. produce a plan with any conceivable practical chance of altering these facts or getting round them. Until the last few months it was not possible even to mention them .openly. Lip-service is still paid to 'self- determination,' whatever that may mean, to the 'right to a homeland,' to the German-ness of Silesia and Prussia. The children of those expelled from the East are issued with `expellee' papers and the press is daily supplied with passionate rhetoric about the lost territories. The fact remains that Federal Germany is built on the acceptance of her present frontiers and on the work-power of millions whose homes were, up to fifteen years ago, outside those frontiers.
The visit of President Eisenhower, much more than the old threat to Berlin, forced the split minds to face facts. Very slowly, feeling his way, and seeming to take a step backwards for every one forwards, the Chancellor tries to educate Federal Germany in his own hard knowledge of political facts. The statements by General de Gaulle on the subject of the Oder-Neisse, and of Mr. Nehru about the puzzling nature of reunification, even an editorial note in this journal, raise such con- trived storms of controversy that one sometimes feels that Adenauer is glad that foreigners should say for him what he dare not say himself.
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