Germany

ATLANTIC

September 1948

on the World today

GERMANY, three years ago considered a kind of laboratory problem in re-education and control which her four conquerors would solve by mutual agreement, is today the crucial area of conflict between East and West. If the Western powers can hold Berlin, they have a chance to revive Western Germany’s industry, make the European Recovery Program a success, attract Eastern countries away from the Soviet orbit, and finally unify Europe on Western terms.

At Potsdam in July, 1945, Germany’s conquerors divided her into five parts: four zones of occupation and Berlin. They agreed that all five should be governed according to common economic and political principles. Today, for all practical purposes. Germany is divided into three parts: East, West, and Berlin. Three sections of the same country have never been more different.

The Zone des Schweigens (Zone of Silence), as a prominent German newspaper has called the Soviet area of occupation, is a wasteland of bleak farms, shattered industry, 17 million ashen-faced, desperate German inhabitants, and at least 300,000 unpredictable Soviet troops and all-powerful Soviet officials. The flat grain fields of Mecklenburg, the rolling green hills of Thuringia, Brandenburg’s sand and pines, Saxony with its textile and machinetool industry, and Saxony-Anhalt’s brown coal mines, metallurgical plants, and chemical factories virtually comprise a colony annexed by Russia.

Once a rich agricultural area providing 3700 calories per person per day, the Soviet Zone now allots its inhabitants a daily average of 1400 calories. War damage, the lack of fertilizers or their export to Russia, Soviet-ordered land reform which broke up the best farms into small and inefficient units, and the relentless requisitioning of grain, sugar, and livestock by the Soviets account for the difference. In order to prevent real starvation, the Soviets were forced this spring to ship back some 20,000 of the hundreds of thousands of tons of grain they had taken out.

Famous industrial plants of the Soviet Zone are empty halls, whose torn-up floors and twisted girders bear witness to the careless fury of Russian dismantling. Fifty per cent of the zone’s industrial capacity went eastward in the summer of 1945; perhaps 5 per cent of it arrived in Russia in usable condition. Since then, dismantling has been more careful, and the Soviets have deported 30,000 German technicians and their families along with the factories. Part of the Meissen porcelain works is producing in Tiflis; Zeiss lenses and cameras are being made near Moscow and Leningrad.

Thirty per cent of the remaining industry consists of Soviet state corporations, working only for Russia. The rest, whether expropriated and turned into German public property, or in the tenuous grip of the few private owners still tolerated, must send 80 to 90 per cent of its output eastward.

Too strong to die

The ravaged economy is producing less every day, but Russian drains remain fairly constant. Only the primitive inefficiency and suspicion of the Soviets can explain why they have wrecked an area which could have been exploited to far greater Russian advantage by sound management.

The Germans living under this regime are pathetic and listless figures, “too strong to die and too weak to live,” as they put it. An all-pervading Soviet secret police and a no less eager network of German Communist agents shadows every step, notes every word. Several hundred thousand people, caught in a careless remark or denounced as “capitalist agents,” “reactionaries,” or “Anglo-American spies,” have gone to Soviet concentration camps, set up on the very sites of the notorious Nazi ones. Two hundred thousand men and women have been sent to forced labor in the Soviet Union, and 25,000 into the uranium mines in southern Saxony where Russia digs the ore for her atom bomb experiments.

The brown Nazi dictatorship has been replaced by the red Soviet one. Communist propaganda flaunts the same feverish nationalism as Goebbels did, and uses much of the same language. No German was surprised when it was revealed, a few weeks ago, that a series of violent anti-American articles published in the Taegliche Rundschau, the Germanlanguage paper printed by the Russians, was a complete plagiarism of a Nazi pamphlet published in 1942.

Having failed to win the people with Communist nationalism, the Soviets have now founded a party for former Nazis, in order to turn their sentiments to Russian ends. However, the basic feeling of the Germans in the Soviet Zone is and will remain a passionate hatred of Russia, expressing itself in fierce but helpless German nationalism, utterly opposed to anything coming from the East.

Hope for Western Germany

East of the Iron Curtain, Germany is starving and stagnant. West of it she is recovering, unevenly but surely. After the recent currency reform, the shopwindows suddenly filled with hoarded goods, and the American cigarette, that barometer of the black market, dropped from 4 marks to 40 pfennigs, almost the legal price. A steady flow of 300,000 tons of Anglo-American food imports per month and Marshall Plan aid of more than a billion dollars promise further improvement to the people of Western Germany.

The basic food ration has been low, but enormous black-market sales from farms have kept the city dwellers in health and made the peasants rich. “Every cow is bedded down on an Oriental rug,” the Germans say. So extensive and so indispensable did the black market become that thousands of Germans felt they could not afford to work. Now they must, because currency reform has made money scarce, and they seem glad of it. The new currency, known as deutsche marks, has gained their confidence and raised their hopes for orderly economic conditions.

If the inhuman severity of the Soviets has been repaid by impotent, violent enmity, the astounding generosity of the West has been rewarded by a mounting tide of carping criticism. The ample German stomach is an insatiable god; the food that England and America offer up to him is never enough, unsatisfactory in type, and besides “it all comes from Germany anyway.” Stubborn rumor that German industrial competition is to be eliminated persists in the face of billion-dollar aid.

General Lucius D. Clay, who has been so intent on getting this aid for Germany that high American officials charge him with “localitis,” is called “antiGerman” and his energetic staff are dismissed as “a bunch of Jewish refugees.”

German coal and steel

The cries of opposition from right and left have risen to a new crescendo in protest against the internationalization of the Ruhr, agreed on at London. The target of agitation is the miner, and the appeal to him is this: if Germany cannot have full control of her coal and steel, or if Moscow cannot have a generous slice of it, then let there be no production. Countering this propaganda, CARE package incentive schemes for miners have driven coal production up (but not high enough for real recovery) and Communist influence down (but not low enough for genuine security). Steel production is only about a third of the 10 million tons that the Germans will be allowed to produce.

After the terrific bombing raids on the Ruhr, mills and mines need capital and equipment, and their workers need houses. Besides physical restoration, the Ruhr must have psychological peace. Owners of both steel plants and coal mines have been expropriated by the British, so that today neither labor nor management has a real incentive to produce. Socialization of Ruhr industry would go a long way toward taking the wind out of Communist sails, breaking the power of the German nationalist clique, and making responsible citizens out of the alternately indifferent or rebellious workers.

Apart from the Ruhr, Bavaria is preoccupied with Catholicism and hatred of Northern Germany, Hamburg sorrows after the shipping trade it has lost to Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein bemoans the two million refugees it has had to accommodate, and the French Zone lives to itself under expert exploitation by the French Military Government.

No doubt, this psychological particularism was in large part responsible for the reluctance of the Western Germans to form the government that the Western powers are willing to grant them. “Unity of Germany” is a powerful slogan, but unimaginative self-centeredness an equally strong reality.

The Socialists in Berlin

Is there any indication that Germany may one day become democratic? As under the Kaiser or the Weimar Republic, the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) constitutes the only solid democratic force in the country.

In the elections of October, 1946, the party that the Soviets wanted to eliminate polled almost half of the vote and has been gaining in strength ever since. Step for step, the SDP has defended Berlin against Communist terror by its vigorous and public protests, and has stiffened the Berliner’s spine by passionate praise of liberty. SDP functionaries have been kidnaped by the Soviets, beaten by mobs of German Communists, and threatened or dismissed from jobs by both. The party has never compromised, and neither has Berlin.

Certainly the Socialists have not carried the fight alone. Christian Democrats and Liberal Democrats, their bitter opponents in the West, are united with them in an antiCommunist front in the city government. No less credit goes to millions of Berliners for showing an almost baffling equanimity and astonishing stubbornness in the face of the Soviet blockade.

Life in Berlin has a frontier quality to it. It has its seamy side — corruption on the black market, vice and opportunism to a shocking degree. All this is overshadowed, however, by wide social mobility, deep friendships, comradely effort, a challenging atmosphere, intense and exhausting work, a breathless pace, and the ever present sense of participation in a vital, crucial effort. Berlin life draws no boundaries of age or nationality — only the one between East and West. To the Berliners, well, Berlin is still Berlin. Physically, the city is a wreck, but in spirit it is alive and well. Berlin today is the political, as Western Germany is the economic, key to the control of Europe.