Home thoughts from Germany
Richard West
As our train came to the West German frontier, I noticed that everyone in the second-class coach appeared to be citizens of the poor states of Europe—Turks, Greeks, Italians and English—drawn here by greed for the mighty and stable Mark. A Turk was telling another migrant worker that he had just spent three days in England but would not wish to work there as it was dirty and poor : 'London was bad but Leicester was even worse.' There was an atmosphere of anxiety as the passport officer came into the compartment, the man who could bar entry into the richest country in Europe. He was most suspicious of my passPort, saying (incorrectly) that one of the dates had been falsified, but he was in a good mood and allowed the matter to pass. When the train stopped on the other side of the corridor, two hot-eyed Arabs had asked With a show of extreme nervousness for the name of the town and when [said Aachen, they answered,'Is that in Germany ? Are you Sure? Has the control ended ? Will the police come back again?' They were probably harmless migrant workers whose papers were out of order but on the off-chance that they were planning to blow up or hijack the train, I thought that [might as well get off at Aachen which seemed as good a place as any to look at West Germany in the week before the election.
As always happens on coming from England to Germany. I was surprised by the handsome architecture and still more surprised on hearing that Aachen during the war had been 90 per cent destroyed, mostly by allied artillery in September 1944. The People of Aachen have rebuilt or restored the ancient city centre with just the same thoroughness that is bestowed in English towns like Northampton on knocking them clown. A town like Aachen is visual proof of honest and sensible local government.
A new surprise came when I went into a Care, although it was half an hour before I realised what it was that I found so different from England. Almost everyone in the room Was fairly old, about sixty-five on an average, but they were all very well-dressed and they Were eating, drinking and smoking apparently to their hearts' content. In England the old cannot afford new clothes and when they gO to a pub or café they sit for a long time 2ver one cup of coffee or glass of beer. 4Moking, which once was an old people's Pastime, is now practised much more by the Y°, ung. The reason for this is obvious. The °Id man opposite me, an electrician still at w.ork said that his wife had retired on a pension of £50 a week and, if he died first, would !et an additional pension amounting to 60 l'er cent of his wages. Now, even if English old age pensioners were to be given the £30 a week promised by Jack Jones recently, the benefit of the increase would soon disappear because of the increased inflation caused by printing more money to pay the pension.
There is slight inflation in Germany, most of it due to the rise in cost of fuel, but in real terms prices are actually coming down ; for instance the price of an English holiday falls at the speed of the pound. There is substantial unemployment but Germans, unlike the English, understand that this causes little real suffering and is far less dangerous than inflation. The German folk memory cannot forget the 1920s when savings were wiped out by inflation and the terror it caused brought Hitler to power just as, in recent years, it has brought other dictators to power in Chile, Uruguay and Brazil. Although Callaghan this week appears at last to have faced the danger, neither he nor the Opposition dares to use serious remedies such as shutting down lame-duck industries and sacking tens or scores of thousands of civil servants.
Only ten or fifteen years ago, English politicians and journalists tended to jeer at German thriftiness and terror of inflation. This was attributed, if I remember rightly, to anal retentive neurosis caused by the wrong kind of potty training; quack psychiatrists read great significance into newspaper cartoons that portrayed the economy as that legendary cow that shits gold bricks. I do not know whether the Aachen pensioners suffer from anal retentive neurosis but they looked to me happier than their English equivalents.
Even the German dissidents have little to grumble about, from an English viewpoint. At a Social Democrat rally in Aachen, I was approached by a young man, a member of something called the Communist League, who said that landlords were prejudiced against students like him, and how he could not afford a flat without his wife's salary as a schoolteacher. My feelings of sympathy were much reduced when this young man revealed that his wife, aged twenty-two, earns about £2000 more a year than I do.
A German diplomat, in Aachen on holiday, wanted to know what the English thought of the recent elections in Sweden and whether we hoped that the Germans as well would vote out their socialist government. It was difficult to explain the feeling that while both sides in Sweden and Germany seemed fit to govern the two countries, neither major party in England seems even to grasp the problem. Socialism has little to do with it. The socialists in both Sweden and Germany kept down inflation; in England, public spending, the principal cause of inflation, was higher during the Heath regime than during the Wilson regimes before and after it. The Bank of England has proved willing to squander more than £100 million of the tax-payers' money to shore up the Slater Walker group, the symbol, perhaps the inspiration, of Edward Heath's 'grab for growth'. Indeed recent Chancellors of the Exchequer have relied on loans to keep up a pose of national solvency in rather the same way that Jim Slater appears to have run his company.
Whichever side wins next Sunday's general election is likely to keep Aachen pensioners in cakes, ale and cigarettes. Both Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl are shown by opinion polls to be widely respected even by those who vote against them. The Liberals (FDP), whose leader is Foreign Minister in the Schmidt government, are serious politicians, in contrast to our Liberals who, thanks to the infiltration of their ranks by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality have become not so much a third party as a third sex.
The two major parties in Britain and Germany have certain peculiar differences from each other. For instance in Germany the Catholic vote goes overwhelmingly to the right while in England, because of the Irish descent of most Catholics, it goes to the Labour Party. (The followers of Monsignor Lefebvre, who wants a return to the Tridentine Mass, are gaining strength in West Germany. While I cannot agree with a recent Spectator Notebook item that Mgr Lefebvre shows tendencies towards 'fascism', I agree with those Germans who thought it unfortunate that the first big rally of his supporters last week should have been held in a Munich beer cellar.) The West German socialists, unlike so many Labour men, are virtually free from suspicion of crookedness either in local government or in private business. Indeed it is the arch right-winger Franz Josef Strauss who once more in this election campaign, has had to rebut imputations against his probity, in this case concerning the purchase of Starfighter planes from the Lockheed company. This raucous, bullying man—a kind of Reginald Maudling who scowls rather than smiles—would be deputy Chancellor in a right-wing government and has boasted of how he would run the show with Kohl as a mere figurehead.
The magazine Spiegel revealed last week that Strauss had close ties with the top men in the former Greek military junta that came to power in 1967. The Spiegel, which has been feuding with Strauss for years, published a list of those West German journalists to whom the Junta had given 'presents', on top of their salaries, for articles considered favourable. I was intrigued to see that the present for each article, even to those in minor provincial newspapers, was DM 1000 (about L250). It would be fascinating to know how much the Colonels paid English journalists; just out of idle interest, I need hardly say.
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