Heart or Stomach?

A gang of toughs burst into the home of 70-year-old George Geiger, a pro-German member of the Saarbrikken City Council, one night last week, and demanded to know whether he was in possession of "illegal pamphlets." When Geiger protested the invasion, he and his family were shoved about; two hours later, the old man died of a heart attack.

George Geiger's death in the tiny (1,000 sq. mi.) coal-rich Saar basin, the No. 1 trouble spot in Western Europe, set the Rhine River foaming with ancient controversy. On the German shore. Vice Chancellor Franz Bluecher flatly accused the Saar's French bosses of "political murder." From the French bank came shouts of rage. "The Germans are up to their old tricks of 1938, when they accused the Poles of similar atrocities," snapped an unforgiving Quai d'Orsay staffer.

Such passion, common to both sides since Charlemagne's time, has been hotting up for weeks--ever since the Saar's French Puppet-Premier Johannes ("Jo-ho") Hoffmann announced that elections will be held next Sunday. Superficially, the vote will decide whether Joho Hoffmann's Christian People's Party or the Social Democrats will dominate the Saar Landtag for the next few years; actually, it will demonstrate whether the 968,000 Saarlanders want to stay with France, under a virtual protectorate, or prefer to rejoin the fatherland from which they gladly separated in the graveyard days of 1947. Those in favor of Germany are at a legal disadvantage: only candidates known to approve the Francophile government will be allowed on the ballot. But German propagandists, dramatizing themselves as the "repressed German underground," are infiltrating Saarbruecken, urging the German-speaking Saarlanders to protest the French "police state" by casting blank ballots. They got a welcome assist from the German Bundestag in Bonn, which cheered through a resolution declaring the Saar election illegal.

France's case for hanging on to the Saar:

P: The Nazis ruined France, so France has a right to the Saar as compensation.

P: With the Saar, which produces 25% of its steel and 28% of its coal, France can almost match Germany in heavy industry; therefore, France & Germany can get together in the Schuman Plan on just about equal terms. Without the Saar, French industry would be hopelessly overmatched.

P: France buys more from the Saar than from any place except the U.S.; the Saar is France's third best customer.

What's more, say the French, most Saarlanders have never been so well off. Their standard of living is higher than that in Germany or France.

The German case is simpler. Gist: the Saar is German, speaks German, feels German and long was German. The Germans can point to the Saarbruecken salesman who complained: "French shoes just don't fit German feet," to the shopkeeper who put up a sign after five years of selling France's matchless Burgundies: "At last, the good wines of Germany are back again." Nub of the German argument: let the Saar decide for itself, and it will rush to rejoin the fatherland.

Most Saarlanders probably agree. Yet each in his way is a schizophrenic. "Our hearts belong to Germany," said one Saarlander,"but our stomachs feel for France."

In Sunday's elections, the hearts will be disfranchised. But if more than 30% of the ballots are handed in unmarked, the Germans will probably claim it as a bona fide proof that the Saar wants to be put back into Germany. Either way, the quarrel over the tiny Saar has all but broken down the bridges across the Rhine painfully built since the war to bind France and West Germany together.

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