Above, Below & Everywhere

On the banks of the River Nile, at a spot not far from the Sudan, crews of lean German engineers last week unloaded their heavy earth-moving equipment, unfurled their geological maps, and began plotting the most daring construction job undertaken in Egypt since the Pharaohs built the Pyramids. Carved in the sandstone cliff above the Germans' camp are the 3,300-year-old monuments of Abu Simbel -- two cavernous temples and ten mammoth statues built by Ramses II. The job: to cut these relics out of the cliff side and lift them, piece by piece, to be assembled on a higher location, where the waters will not reach them when the High Dam is completed in 1970 at Aswan, 180 miles downstream.

International Army. The German engineers work for Hochtief, a hustling Essen-headquartered construction firm that is West Germany's largest. They are only the vanguard of what will be an international army of engineers drawn from Italian, Swedish, French and Egyptian construction companies. The job, whose feasibility was first worked out by the Swedes, will take seven years and cost $25 million; the expense has been largely met by contributions from the U.S., Kuwait and UNESCO. The overall boss of the international effort is 89-year-old Hochtief, whose name literally means "above below"--a reference to the firm's construction activities both above and below ground.

Hochtief seems to spell success in any language. War-torn Germany was a rebuilder's dream, and Hochtief's sales rose sixteenfold from 1945 to 1962.

But that era is over, and Germany's construction boom has slowed down: the industry contented itself with only a 3% increase in business last year. Hochtief grew twice as fast as that by rapidly expanding its foreign enterprises, raised its sales to $150 million last year. Says Wilhelm Hartmann, 55, who is in charge of foreign business and is expected to take over the firm next year: "We must continue to break our geographical boundaries." Hartmann looks to Asia, Africa and South America as places where future projects will be big enough to interest Hochtief. Besides the temple job at Abu Simbel, Hochtief has eight other major foreign projects on hand, ranging from a harbor in India to power plants in Buenos Aires. In the postwar period, the firm has completed $200 million worth of foreign construction, including India's first big steel plant, an imperial palace near Teheran and Athens' new Hilton hotel.

Self-Interested Aid. Hochtief now does nearly 25% of its business abroad --and Hartmann sees no reason why it should not do more. German firms, he feels, have a special advantage in sensitive new nations, because Germany has not been a colonial power since World War I. German firms also benefit from the self-interested way in which Bonn hands out foreign aid. Hochtief got a leg up for the big Abu Simbel project by winning a smaller, but highly important contract to move an ancient temple at Kalabsha that was also threatened with flooding from the Aswan dam. Hochtief won that contract last year after Bonn lent the Egyptians $1,500,000--on the condition that a German firm would get the job.

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