Faceless Crisis

The U.S. State Department quietly prepared a momentous conference. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Britain's Ernest Bevin and France's Robert Schuman prepared for a meeting in Washington next week to discuss Western policy in Germany.

It was high time. The plan to create a democratic West German state had bogged down in a hopeless mess of confusion among the Western powers. The economic revival of Bizonia that followed currency reform (TIME, June 28) had no counterpart in the political field. The constitutional convention at Bonn was in deadlock. Cynicism and the old unwholesome, distorted German nationalism were spreading. More & more West German leaders were flirting with the idea of a deal with Russia.

TIME'S Berlin Bureau Chief Emmet Hughes spent the past month touring Western Germany to size up the nature of the crisis the Washington conference must try to meet. His report:

The Gingerbread Jewel Box. "I cannot tell, I cannot decide," a Western official in Cologne told me, "whether this Germany has two faces--or no face at all."

He summed up all the doubts, fears and confusions which hang like a heavy fog over Germany. The nation which produced Goethe and Goebbels, great cultural triumphs and human incinerators, has always produced eerie contrasts. Today, these contrasts seem to have taken physical shape. The face of Germany is hideously scarred--and yet, almost every where, one sees another face which is sleek and smooth.

In Nuernberg, which Germans used to call their Schatzkuestlein (little jewel box), one looks down at night from the great 11th Century castle on the sparkling lights below which seem to stud a living, healthy city. But in the light of day, the city is a ruin, rendered only more monstrous by the neat little gingerbread houses which poke impertinently above the debris.

Up north, in the Ruhr, driving along the Rhine at twilight, one sees the sky greyed with smoke from hundreds of factory chimneys. But just as one begins to marvel at the normal pace of the Ruhr's industrial life, one passes a great broken Rhine bridge whose gashed ends point aimlessly into the sky.

Duesseldorf, the Ruhr's money and fashion capital, is drab and desolate. But by night, scrap dealers and black marketeers crowd into such slick cellar restaurants as the Goldene Treppe (Golden Staircase), where they dine on smoked salmon and duck at $12 a meal, and into such cafes as the Allotria (Tomfoolery), where they jitterbug to Bel Mir Bist Du Schoen with heavily rouged hostesses known in Germany as Animierdamen--"animation ladies."

The Glittering Smile. Said one American, contemplating these subterranean revels: "You might almost think the Germans are going underground again, leaving the ruins above ground to mock their conquerors." But there are other types of underground Germans--the thousands of homeless in Duesseldorf and every Ruhr city, who live in herds in stifling air-raid bunkers. The fits to which these cave dwellers are frequently subject have been nicknamed Bunkerkholler (bunker frenzy).

When the blowup comes, the screaming victim tries to claw his way up the walls, or beats bloody knuckles against them.

By the North Sea, Hamburg seems to wear the glittering smile of West Germany's new prosperity. The buildings are scrubbed; the rubble-cleared streets are thronged with businessmen bustling along on fashionable white-soled shoes (the soles are resourcefully cut from old Luftwaffe tires). But not forgotten is the event which Hamburg's people simply call "the catastrophe"--the week of concentrated Allied bombing, in the summer of 1943, which left the city with nearly as many dead as were killed in Britain by bombs and rockets during the entire war. Hamburg's great port is virtually paralyzed and many of Hamburg's sea captains have become trolley car conductors. Nearly 30,000 seamen drift from one odd job to another. Even the tough waterfront has lost its rowdy vitality. In the dark alleys, these nights, the stillness is broken now & then by the shuffling gait of a homeless seaman or the importuning of a hard-working streetwalker, dragging a drunken, crippled U-boat veteran who staggers along on his crutches.

The Other Face. Economically, West Germany has made great progress. The desperate food shortages of a year ago are gone; there is little hunger anywhere. Before the currency reform, West German production lagged at 51% of 1936; in nine months it has spurted up to 80%, surpassing the target set by ERP. Coal production is setting new postwar records.

Despite these achievements, only the most unreasoning optimist could ignore the other face of West Germany's economy. West Germany still imports more than twice as much as it exports.

Most Laender governments are nearly broke. One million among West Germany's 45,000,000 are unemployed. Typically, one-third of the new unemployed are in the building trades--precisely where Germans should be at their hardest work, providing roofs for the millions of homeless in cellars and bunkers. West Germany's living standard is rising; but at the same time, the gap between the wealthy few and the great mass of workers is widening ever faster.

The greatest danger facing Western Germany, however, is not want. It is not represented by the jarring contrast between the smooth face and the scarred. It is expressed in the fact that, politically speaking, Germany has no face at all. One may look in vain for it in any small town --a town, for example, like Remagen.

Here, four years ago, the 9th Armored Division of the U.S. First Army crossed the Rhine. The U.S. Army left few marks on Remagen. It left the name "Texas Roy," splashed in green paint across a wall by the Rhine, and a tiny "USA" scratched into the cement of an apartment building. It left the bodies of several American soldiers, which were recovered from beneath the collapsed Ludendorff bridge a few weeks ago. I could not find anything else the U.S. had left behind. Certainly it did not leave democracy.

Frau Karin Loef, the city government's handy woman who has been aide to nine Remagen mayors since the war, told me: "Democracy, well it is rather like a fairy tale to most people here."

Of all the nine postwar mayors, the only one who seemed to have had any political principle was Herr Hilpert, a Communist. "He resigned when the Communist Party couldn't even get enough votes to elect a councilman," explained

Frau Loef. "We wanted him to stay, but he said it would be undemocratic. The Socialists asked him to join them and continue as mayor, but he said a man couldn't change his politics like his shirts. Now he is an engine-fitter in Cologne. We were all sorry to see him go."

"Count Me Out." Two words--echoed from Bavaria's mountains to the flat shores of the North Sea--today are as peculiarly characteristic of Germany as "Heil Hitler" was a decade ago. They are "ohm mich [count me out]." Into that phrase have been distilled all the apathy, skepticism and confusion of West Germany's political mind. Will there be another war? A tattered former P.W. roaming in Duesseldorf answers: "Naturally--but this time ohne mich." A typesetter in Nuernberg, perfunctorily lettering impassioned editorials: "I suppose some people have to play the political game--but ohne mich." The boatman on the ferry crossing the Rhine at Walsum, holding up his leathery fingers: "These were burned once. There may be another fire, but when they build it--ohne mich."

The Ruhr miners have always stood high among Germany's best-organized, most articulate workers. In the old Krupp mine of Saelzer-Amalie, in Essen, I spoke to the burly, smiling foreman of the repair shop. Shouting over hydraulic hammers and screeching cranes, I asked if he cared whether his mine were owned by Krupp, German Democrats, Americans or Russians. "We only want work and wages," he answered. Then he added with that childish, fantastic German pride: "We work hard--only last Saturday one of my men dropped dead from the strain." I persisted: Did it make no difference whether he worked for war or peace? This registered. "Jawohl," he exclaimed, and pointed through the doorway to the mounds of rusted iron and bombed walls. "War did that. Of course, war makes a difference." I tried again; then you must care for whom you work? "Yes," he said, "we work for our families."

Psycho-Banality. The frank indifference of these men (and of the great mass of Germans) seems almost desirable compared with the slovenly platitudes with which so many others try to disguise their ignorance. The political platitude has become almost a national German disease. In the same Essen mine, the Christian Democratic representative on the workers' council told me, in the tone of a boy reciting his catechism: "We are striving to build democracy on a Christian basis in the trade unions." When I asked him what this meant, he looked as flustered as if I had asked about the relationship of Saturn to the sun. In a cabaret later, I saw a skit about Germany consulting a doctor. One apt diagnosis: the patient was suffering from "psycho-banality."

It would be easy to dismiss German shallowness and apathy as the symptoms of an incurably warped national mind. It would also 'be wrong. Circumstances--many of our own making--have helped bring Germany to its present state. I have listened to politicians, miners, educators and taxi drivers who all know this. Putting their words together, any thoughtful German might sum it up like this:

"It is all a little confusing. Three years ago, if an American heard me mutter something critical about Russia, he would class me as a Nazi trying to start another war. Today, if I don't repeat loudly enough what I said three years ago, the same American may well suspect me of being a Communist follower ... I know the people here show little intelligent interest in the future, but this is a lot to expect from 30,000 workers in Essen waiting to learn if their factories are going to be dismantled, for Hamburg sailors who know Germany is still forbidden to build anything but a fishing trawler--or for a whole people living on the likeliest first battleground of the next war."

A Stammer. In a gentle old city on the Rhine where Beethoven was born, Germany's bewildered frustrations are focused more sharply than in any other place. At Bonn, for the past seven months, German politicians have tried to write the constitution of a free, stable Western German state. The job was supposed to have been finished last fall. Today, it is closer to failure than ever. For this, the blame can be placed neither on Communist agitators nor on German confusion, but on confusion in the West's own mind.

Western policy has been an incoherent stammer. In the economic field, the U.S. and Britain clash on the issue of dismantling German industry. The British want a lower German industrial capacity than the U.S. does. On the political scene, the British want a strong centralized government. The French, who want a loose federation of nearly sovereign states, have objected even to such agencies as a federal patent office. On the centralization issues the U.S. is haplessly trying to steer a middle course.

The Germans, and most Americans, place the chief blame for the Bonn deadlock on the French. One high U.S. official told me: "The French have one policy in

Germany which can be summarized in one word--stall." A German Socialist leader: "When General Clay makes a decision, he cannot merely ask himself is it right, but 'How can I get the French to say yes?' " French obstruction, however, does not absolve the U.S. from the guilt of its own indecision. In dealing with German democrats, they are not sure whether to punish them as Germans or exalt them as democrats.

It is the German Communists, of course, who are happiest over the West's fumbling at Bonn. The self-assured dark eyes of West Germany's Communist Boss Max Reimann sparkled merrily as he told me: "Is it my fault if the policy of the Western powers is eine Dummheit--stupidity?" When I suggested ironically that perhaps the Western powers were committing blunders only to return a favor for Soviet stupidity in Berlin, he smiled broadly: "It may be so, but I don't think we'll have to wait long to see who has done a favor for whom."

Reimann's smile is not merely a smirking front. He has plenty to smile about.

The Marriage Brokers. Through the political fog that hangs over Germany the dim outlines of a political ghost can be seen--the ghost of a dark, homely man named Karl Radek. It was Radek, Soviet Russian agent in Germany after World War I, who pointed out that nationalism could become the vehicle of Communism in a synthesis which he called "national Bolshevism." It was Radek who explained to the Comintern executive committee that the nationalism of the German "masses" did not necessarily prevent them from turning to Communism. A great many forces in West Germany are conspiring to bring the ghost of Karl Radek and national Bolshevism back to life.*

The Communists have captured the great propaganda citadel of "a united Germany"--while the West has been frantically building what is called even officially "a state fragment." West Germans don't want Communism, but they do want a united Germany. The Communists say they can deliver that. Some German conservatives listen to them. From the Soviet zone, these weeks, comes a steady stream of political marriage brokers promising, like Christian Democrat Leader Otto Nuschke, "to bring the Russian zone as a splendid dowry in marriage with West Germany."

The chief advocates of such a match met on a recent Saturday at a tea party at Godesberg, just down the trolley line from Bonn. The host was Christian Democrat Leader (and Bonn Delegate) Andreas Hermes, who later stated his views: "We Germans have been maneuvered apart . . . We can no longer watch silently and passively developments that would lead to further splitting of Germany." The guest of honor was 76-year-old, grey-haired former (1933-34) German ambassador to Moscow, Rudolf Nadolny, otherwise (and accurately) known as Germany's "Pink eminence."

The Godesberg tea party has its counterpart all over West Germany. Loudest advocate of a deal with the Russians is burly, demagogic August Hausleiter, a leading Bavarian Christian Democrat, who has just founded Germany's newest political movement, the nationalist "German Union." Hausleiter and his friends call for a "neutralization" of Germany between East and West, evacuation of all occupation armies and a 50-year trade pact with Soviet Russia. No taint of Communist sympathy motivates Hausleiter & friends; they are German nationalists who believe that they can make Germany strong by making a deal with Russia. They put the smile on Max Reimann's face. They are bringing Karl Radek to tea.

The Time for Decision. The most trenchant analysis of what is happening I heard from a one-armed, one-legged man who is leader of Germany's Social Democratic Party. Kurt Schumacher is Germany's toughest, most impassioned anti-Communist fighter. Says he: "Ever since Bismarck, resurgent nationalism in Germany has sooner or later looked toward

Russia. Today national Bolshevism is on the move again. The conservative parties dream the same old dream of playing with fire. The Soviet underground is active too --telling this general and that expropriated industrialist: 'Your time will come, you can work with us.' Maybe that is why you will find some Christian Democrats, but no Socialists, at tea parties like the one at Godesberg. A fine way to behave for those people who just finished mourning the loss of Mindszenty!"

What can we of the West do to check the danger? We must finally make up our minds what kind of face we want to see on tomorrow's Germany. We must decide whether our distrust of Germany is so great that we want her to be simply our colony, or whether we want to try to build a free and stable country. It is impossible to do both. If we want the former, we should not talk of democracy, we should not encourage political parties, we should see that the Germans won't produce more and live better than the rest of Europe. And we should never have gone to Bonn. But if we want to see Germany a free and stable country, we must take the risk of giving Germany's democrats--such as they are--a reasonably strong government that can command some respect and get things done. To move in that direction the Bonn Assembly must succeed; it must establish a West German state presently integrated with Western Europe and looking toward reunion with Eastern Germany in a Europe--East and West--that is free.

Kurt Schumacher's deputy at Bonn, burly Carlo Schmid, probably the ablest political leader in West Germany, told me: "Whether any of us likes it or not, one thing is true in Europe today--its future depends on the workers of Germany. Russia cannot win them yet--but the West can lose them ... If they should ever desert the West and slide into Bolshevism, then you need no longer worry about what France's workers will do. Then you can have all the Atlantic pacts you can write. Stalin will need no Molotov or Vishinsky, no Cominform, not a single tank. Bolshevism will be everywhere."

This estimate smells of blackmail--but it also bears the bitter flavor of unpleasant truth. The West has a little time to decide whether Schmid's estimate is correct. But it does not have very long.

* In 1937 Radek went on trial in Moscow as a Trotskyite and traitor against the Soviet Union. He was accused of trying to make a deal with the Nazi Germans to bring about a "new revolution" in Russia. Explaining the failure of his plot in court, Radek made the memorable statement: "We had plenty of professors, but no good murderers." He was sentenced to ten years in jail. His whereabouts since 1947, when he was theoretically released, are unknown. But his policy of "national Bolshevism," in various guises, has become Communist s.o.p. It was not the first or last time that Joseph Stalin had learned from his victims.

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