West Germany

INEVITABLY, all other issues in West Germany are dominated by the prospects for the Federal election which takes place the middle of this month, the fifth since the German Federal Republic came into being. The general expectation is that there will be a neck-and-neck race between the two principal parties, the Christian Democrats, led by Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, and the Social Democrats under Willy Brandt, mayor of West Berlin. Only once before was a Federal election really close between these two parties. That was in 1949. Since then the Christian Democrats have been steadily mopping up the support of nonaligned conservatives and liberals and absorbing some of the smaller parties of the right.

The only counter available to the Social Democrats has been to become increasingly moderate and “non-Marxist" and extend their appeal to the prosperous middle classes. Their success in doing this is the chief reason for the waning of Christian Democratic dominance. West German politics are now in a more fluid state than at any other time since the Federal Republic came into being.

Political pundits expect the Christian Democrats to poll 44 or 45 percent of the votes, and the Social Democrats 41 or 42 percent. Now for the first time the Free Democratic Party, led by Erich Mende, will be able, as coalition partner, to put either principal party into office. For one salient reason the Free Democrats have always offered their support to the Christian Democrats, save when the latter have had an absolute majority of scats in the Bundestag. This is because the financial support of a few large corporations and of a great many small but thriving firms would be withdrawn if the Free Democrats coalesced with the Social Democrats.

The Free Democrats would drop completely out of the political reckoning if they lost this financial backing. They have ceased to be a genuinely liberal party. Their “old liberal” followers, most of them either in Württemberg or in the great north German cities of Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen, are now elderly people. Rather surprisingly, Bavaria has become the last stronghold of this “old liberal” wing of the party. For the rest, the Free Democrats have attracted only a shifting segment of uncommitted right-wingers. There are fewer true liberals in their ranks today than in those of the Christian and Social Democrats.

Party look-alikes

The decline of the Free Democrats has led to increasing talk of the feasibility of a Big Coalition between the Christian and Social Democrats. Defeated in four successive elections, the Social Democrats are hungry for a share of power. Now that they have dropped their demand to nationalize the steel and engineering industries, there is virtually no major domestic issue which divides them from the Christian Democrats. West Germany already has a fully functioning apparatus of the welfare state. Its social services are about the best run in Europe. The principle of “fair shares for all” has been boosted by profitsharing schemes of big industrial undertakings and by the reservation of stock for the small investor in previously state-owned, now “denationalized” firms. In foreign affairs, the two main parties have few differences apart from a slight Social Democratic bias in favor of the Anglo-Americans and the Atlantic alliance and against dependence on the dictates of General de Gaulle.

A Big Coalition, it has been argued, would enable a new government to speak with a convincing voice on the question of German reunification and to institute policies leading toward that goal which a government based on a small majority in the Bundestag would not risk. In the Christian Democratic Party there are plenty of people who agree with this view, even if they do not openly propound it, among them Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder, former Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss, and — probably — Chancellor Erhard.

Yet West German democracy is not just a matter of personalities, and the bulk of the Christian Democratic Party will want to continue to retain the firstfruits of power, which have all the more attraction because they have been enjoyed for the past sixteen years. It is therefore a reasonably safe bet that this fall will see another Christian Democrat — Free Democrat coalition installed in Bonn and led by the still indispensable Erhard —“Mr. Prosperity” to millions of his countrymen, a man of moderation and thickly padded charm.

Yet although the West German voters — so matter-of-fact, so well aware of which side their bread is buttered on, with a floating vote of well under 10 percent — are unlikely to want a change, there may be several interesting developments within the present government coalition. The first is the further decline of the Free Democratic Party.

Franz-Josef Strauss is attempting a major comeback, following his departure from office more than a year ago as a result of involvement in violent personal controversy with the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. Strauss, it will be remembered, ordered the arrest of a Spiegel correspondent while the latter was holidaying in Spain, subsequently denied the fact, but was finally forced to admit it. His feud with Der Spiegel had begun two years before that. His resignation from the Defense Ministry left him free to build up his immense following in Bavaria. The Bavarian, Christian Social wing of the party will probably emerge stronger than ever before, thanks to his intense energy and power of leadership. His position in the Christian Democratic Party will be correspondingly strengthened.

Strauss wants the job of Minister for All-German Affairs, but he wants, too, to give greater scope to that somewhat lackluster office. This he would do by making it a “Ministry for All-German and European Affairs,” a sort of second, but in some ways more important. Foreign Ministry. In this way Strauss could become the most important cabinet minister, next to the Chancellor, without risking a confrontation with Gerhard Schroeder.

Strauss would, moreover, give added purpose to his ministry by instituting what he calls a policy of “Europeanizing the German question.” The reunification of Germany would be seen as a first step in the uniting of Europe as a whole and not just the “rump Europe” of the Common Market Six. EastWest relations would be improved by contact between the West Germans and the Poles, Czechs, and other satellite states of Central Europe. Disarmament would be pursued as a logical aim for both the Western alliance and the Soviet bloc.

Up from Bavaria

Strauss believes that the time has come for his return to Federal as opposed to purely Bavarian politics. He is barely fifty years old and bursting with vitality and ideas. But his tendency to make enemies as well as mistakes may block the path to the chancellorship which he envisages for himself. The same may not be true of his principal rival among the younger members of the Christian Democratic Party, Rainer Barzel, the leader of the party on the floor of the Bundestag.

Barzel is only forty years old. Born in East Prussia, he has interested himself especially in the problems of Berlin and German reunification. He believes that FrancoGerman friendship must be the basis of German foreign policy, that the Common Market Six constitutes the most enduring political factor in Europe, and that a European Political Community should be created as soon as possible.

Barzel is the inheritor of the policies of Konrad Adenauer, who saw in the steady building up of the strength of the Western alliance the surest means of securing the eventual solution of the German problem and the only effective safeguard for Western Europe. Barzel will probably remain for a time in his present post, and his next goal may be the chairmanship of the Christian Democratic Party when Adenauer retires. His power and his reputation should grow.

A third development in Christian Democratic Party politics is the probable dropping, after the election, of the Minister of Transport, Hans-Christoph Seebohm. This may not sound significant, but Seebohm has been a cabinet minister for the past sixteen years. He organized the dissolution of the right-wing German Party and brought most of its members into the Christian Democratic fold.

Most important of all, he is the leading spokesman of the German refugees from Eastern Europe, and his wild speeches are one of the main obstacles to a better understanding between West Germany on the one side and Poland and Czechoslovakia on the other. If Seebohm goes, “refugee politics” may end too — with beneficial consequences for Europe as a whole. The Czech Sudetenland and the Polish provinces cast of the Oder-Neisse Line have ceased forever to be German. The tacit recognition of this fact will clear the air in Central Europe.

There has, indeed, been increasing interest in West Germany in the possibility of improving relations with Poland and Czechoslovakia in the first place and with other Communist satellite states afterward. Earlier this year Fritz Erler, the Social Democrats’ chief spokesman on foreign affairs, suggested publicly that West Germany should negotiate with Poland on the question of the eastern frontiers. He was supported by Eugen Gerstenmaier, the Christian Democratic president of the Bundestag. But with an election in the offing and one in every eight voters a refugee from beyond the Oder-Neisse Line, the Federal government sharply rejected this proposal. The government restated its view that Germany’s frontiers can be determined only when a German peace treaty is signed.

Conditional recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line may come up for discussion again after the Federal election. In the meantime, there have been efforts to improve relations with Poland, in particular through the medium of trade. The steel firms of Krupp and Rheinstahl have been negotiating with the Polish government for long-term agreements providing for technical cooperation, joint sales in third markets, and international sales of industrial plant produced under joint Polish-German projects.

The West German Trade Mission in Warsaw has been discussing plans for utilizing Poland’s surplus labor in other joint undertakings in which West Germany would supply capital and know-how and would be repaid by a share in export sales. Meanwhile, the West German government has been angling to establish a similar trade mission in Prague. But its efforts have been blocked by the Czech government’s insistence that Bonn must first declare the 1938 Munich Agreement, which resulted in the cession of the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, to be null and void. Trade missions, have, however, been set up in Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria.

Ulbricht’s war of nerves

One setback to West Germany’s relations with Communist Europe was the visit to East Berlin of President Tito of Yugoslavia. This took place in June and was made the occasion for a powerful propaganda barrage by the ruler of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht. The latter was delighted with Tito’s effusive recognition of East German statehood, a gesture which was probably primarily intended to please the Soviet Union and to help pave the way to improve Russo-Yugoslav relations. These have been strained since Tito’s “break” with Moscow, only two years after the war.

Ulbricht was admittedly left with some awkward explaining to do, since Tito has conventionally been denounced in East Germany as the “tool” and “lackey” of American “imperialism.”

The Tito visit may have been one factor which helped to encourage Ulbricht to launch yet another war of nerves on West Berlin. In mid-June East German helicopters repeatedly violated West German airspace, both over Berlin and at Helmstedt, at the western end of the Berlin autobahn. Understandably touchy where Berlin is concerned, the West German government inquired of its Western allies whether it might be possible to force down intruding helicopters by sending up larger American helicopters to fly directly above them. This would set up a slipstream, depriving the East German machine of air to “bite on” and so making it lose height.

At the same time, and as another part of his war of nerves, Ulbricht decided to raise by about 20 percent the charges on barges plying between West Germany and Berlin. He accompanied this step by announcing that relations between the two German states should be “normalized” by signing “the long overdue peace treaty” between Bonn and East Berlin. He threatened an increase of about 10 percent in the tariffs for goods carried by train to West Berlin and said that eventual discussion of this subject would have to be on a high level, appropriate in negotiations between two sovereign states.

The West Germans have no intention of admitting that East Germany is a sovereign state, and the reason is not hard to find. In a recent computation by a West Berlin study group the following facts were noted about the East German regime.

Since 1949 it has imprisoned more than 75,000 people for alleged political crimes. Its repressive measures have forced 2,845.000 people to seek refuge in West Berlin or West Germany, including 23,000 members of the armed forces and People’s Police. It has handed 45,000 people over to Soviet justice, resulting in the award of some 250 life sentences by Soviet tribunals and other sentences totaling millions of years imprisonment in all, and it has allowed 31,000 people to be deported to the Soviet Union. It collaborated with the Russians in imprisoning more than 180,000 people in concentration camps, of whom roughly half have died. Understandably, the West Germans regard the Ulbricht regime not merely as unacceptable but as criminal.

One strident voice, however, has been raised in West Germany in favor of acceptance of the East German state as a reality. Speaking to Bonn University students in June, Rudolf Augstein, the publisher of Der Spiegel, said that the division of Germany was a fact and that Germany could never be reunited as long as American and Russian soldiers remained on German soil. The only feasible path to unity was that of recognition of the East German regime, supplemented by West German economic help to its less prosperous neighbor. An “equalization” of living conditions in the two German states would enable some sort of confederation between them.

This economic equalization remains a long way off. East Germany is, indeed, making steady economic progress. The shops have more to sell than at any other time since the war. Firms are being encouraged to explore markets with less reference to centralized authority, and “profits” has ceased to be a bad capitalist word. The reduction of centralized planning is in step with what is happening everywhere in the Soviet bloc at present.

But East German economic progress cannot match that of West Germany — the only one of the Common Market Six which can point to a record of uninterrupted success. This year West German industry has been able to afford wage increases of between 10 and 12 percent. Production costs have risen by only 2.5 percent, and the cost of living by under 2 percent in the last year. Private savings are a billion marks higher than a year ago.

It is ironic that in this period of vigorous economic growth the Federal capital of Bonn is worrying about its own near-bankruptcy. The city has an estimated deficit this year of $750,000, or rather more than 3 percent of its total budget. It has also had to postpone various building projects, reduce its investments, and cut municipal staffs. Its town clerk has asked the Federal government to contribute $4.5 million a year for Bonn to be able to carry out necessary development plans. And the point has been put to the Federal government that it is high time to cease referring to Bonn as the “provincial” capital of West Germany. The division of Germany is beginning to look too permanent for that.

The American presence

The huge American commitment in West Germany and Berlin has been amply justified in the light of recent developments. Two major strains have been placed on American-German relations, and thanks to the groundwork carried out in explaining American policies to the Germans and demonstrating American friendship in practical ways, these major strains have been successfully surmounted so far. They are, first, the anti-American bias which General de Gaulle has displayed and his effort to involve the West Germans in his policy of getting the Americans out of Europe, and second, the concern and practical disillusionment caused by the war in Vietnam and its effect on thinking in a West Germany which is in the front line of the East-West confrontation in Central Europe.

These two major strains have affected quite different shades of political opinion in West Germany. There is a Gaullist wing of the Christian Democratic Party, which has become increasingly vocal in the last two years. One of its leading spokesmen, the Freiherr zu Guttenberg, has just demanded that the United States should pledge itself to break off relations with any country which has relations with the East German Republic. Konrad Adenauer, who has become thoroughly Gaullist in his semiretirement, has said that the United States is becoming increasingly isolationist as far as Europe is concerned, and that this may tempt the Russians to extend their power in Europe.

On the other hand, the war in Vietnam has had an inhibiting effect on the exponents of a more flexible foreign policy in Europe and of efforts to exploit peaceful coexistence in order to make progress toward a solution of the German question. These exponents include Foreign Minister Schroeder, Willy Brandt, and to some extent, Chancellor Erhard. These men realize that Poles, Czechs, and other Central Europeans have been rendered less ready for détente as a result of the Vietnam war. There has been as a result some criticism of American policy in Southeast Asia in the West German press, although this criticism has been mainly guarded and balanced.

Three factors have helped to maintain a fair view of the American image in face of these major strains. The first is the role of the U.S. armed forces, 250,000 strong and constituting, along with the Bundeswehr, the two main props of the Western alliance in Germany. West Germans are plainly aware of the importance of American military alliance. Little interest has been shown in General de Gaulle’s ideas of a European force de frappe, and there is increasing pressure lor the creation of an Atlantic Nuclear Force, under American leadership.

The second factor is the massive American diplomatic commitment in West Germany. There are 113 on the executive staff in the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, 69 in the U.S. Mission in Berlin, and a further 167 in six consulates. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn is well led by George McGhee, whose industriousness and good humor are useful qualities in an era where representatives as forceful as General Lucius Clay or John McCloy are no longer needed. American diplomacy in Germany has moved from the plane of mentor to that of elder brother. One flaw is the continuation of a built-in American community in Bonn with too little contact with the Germans. This is certainly not the case with the consulates, though, and two particularly active and intelligent consuls general represent the United States in Hamburg and Düsseldorf.

The third positive factor is the maintenance of a major cultural effort in West Germany. There are four Amerikahäuser, with large libraries and busy cultural programs of films, lectures, and seminars. There are nine additional Binational Centers carrying out the same sort of work, and eight U.S. libraries. American grants totaling over one and a half million dollars a year enable student exchanges of roughly 650 in both directions between the United States and Germany. The American way of life is familiar to millions of Germans and is usefully propagated by Mr. McGhee and his staff in their readiness to give addresses and lectures and to join in discussion groups.

All in all, the American image is surviving successfully during what is a difficult period of AmericanGerman relations.