The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  Money also flowed eastwards for more substantial matters. The Germans soon followed the Austrian lead on Soviet energy: at Essen, the very heart of the industrial Ruhr, agreements began in February 1970. Over twenty years the USSR would supply Ruhrgas with 32 billion cubic metres of natural gas, costing (at 1970 prices) DM2.5bn and maybe, starting in 1973, for more than twice as much. The existing pipeline, which stopped in Bratislava, would go on into Bavaria. Mannesmann, the largest European maker of steel piping, was to supply the USSR with 2.4 million tons of it, and the cost would be borne by seventeen banks, headed by Deutsche Bank, repayable, through profits, over eleven years at a cost of 6.25 per cent in interest — a rate far below the inflation to come. Bonn guaranteed the deal. This was a classic method of dealing with the USSR: not genuine trade at all, but a means by which the German taxpayer subsidized his own banks and incidentally also promoted Soviet industry: a similar deal had been done even in 1931. In 1972 West-East German relations were formalized, and again there was a subsidy for the East German state; it also gained privileged access to the EEC market under West German terms, in return for making slightly less petty fuss (what the Germans called Umstandspinsel) over small matters in Berlin — a two-day wait for a visa at the border, East German numberplates having to be screwed on, in the freezing cold, as temporary replacement for West German ones. There was a great row over ratification of all of this, in 1972, and bribery had to be deployed, but the treaty went through. Brandt said, now Hitler had lost the war, and in 1971 he got a Nobel Peace Prize, from which, as happened with other men, he never quite recovered. Thereafter, vanity took hold; women and bottles succeeded each other, and his judgement went so far wrong that even he, with long and deep practice, failed to smell an obvious Communist spy in his closest entourage. The scandal eventually (in 1974) lost him office, and Helmut Schmidt took over.

  There were problems below this radiant surface, and some of the Left, especially in the universities, responded hysterically: a reflection, in the first place, of the bubble status of West Berlin, and also of the expansion of student numbers. As to these, Adenauer had been quite careful, no doubt believing that the country needed only so many ‘students’, whereas it could not have enough apprentices, respectful of their elders and learning a practical trade. Erhard and then the Great Coalition put up the number of students, from 385,000 in 1965 to 510,000 in 1975, and though the increase passed off without incident in most places, it did cause trouble. The university system in Germany was a sort of fossilized Enlightenment, and boredom reigned. Anti-Americanism became a cause; the visit of the Shah of Iran was the occasion for a riot; the police mishandled things; a martyr appeared, one Rudi Dutschke, a student, a sort of El Pasionario, and aged forty; and there were as in the United States some sages to offer high-sounding comfort. A Norwegian ‘peace researcher’ named Johan Galtung referred to ‘structural violence’, by which he meant people getting on with their lives. The old Frankfurt School, much of which had migrated to New York (the New School) now returned, including, via East Germany, one Ernst Bloch. The Frankfurt School had been set up in the twenties, and its largely Marxist professorate had tried to update Marxism, to take account of the things that Marx had simply got wrong or over which he had perhaps been misinterpreted. Especially, this meant showing that intellectual life was not just a function of the relations of production, that culture, such as music or film, might on the contrary shape the mind of a generation and thereby alter the relations of production. The Frankfurters were then led into worlds of psychology, and from there to the study of words, the tools of philosophy. Ernst Bloch was a lion, his particular interest being in the philosophy of the preposition and the demonstrative adverb; he lectured, to awestruck audiences, on ‘the not’, ‘the nevertheless’, ‘the whence’ — harmless stuff, which made its impression because there was indeed an intelligentsia all dressed up with nowhere to go.

  A section of that Left then took up the cause of terrorism, the ‘Red Army Faction’, a strangely Germanic phenomenon, the example of which spread to Italy with the Red Brigades. Dostoyevsky in Demons had written about such people a century before. Nechaev, spreading terror, had his ideology — essentially, ‘the more, the worse’. There was a hatred of the smug world all around, a belief that random terror against it was both deserved and beneficial. Nechaev had a charisma that allowed him even to hypnotize prison guards into letting him escape, and subsequent terrorists owed similar escapes to a bourgeois tolerance in which Dostoyevsky saw the origins of the whole business. Andreas Baader looked not unlike Che Guevara, and he could ensnare young women of moralizing parental background, surprisingly often daughters of Lutheran pastors. Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin were the chief entrapped souls, but there was a network beyond, and it turned out to include men who subsequently rose a generation later to become even foreign (Joschka Fischer) and interior (Otto Schily) ministers. In 1967 251 people were killed in, by mistake, Brussels. In 1968 two Frankfurt department stores went up in flames. This problem went on and on in the Brandt-Scheel period, and to begin with the German response was very weak-kneed: in part because of a fear, not unjustified, that the world would shriek ‘Nazi’ if it was too harsh, and in part because the federal system got in the way of interstate policing. It emerged in 1990 that the East German Stasi had been involved in training, in sending people to the Middle East. Baader himself was arrested in 1972, and there was a lull. In 1974 one of the prisoners starved himself to death; next day the president of the Berlin supreme court was killed in his home. Early in 1975 the head of the CDU in Berlin was kidnapped, and exchanged for terrorist prisoners. In April the Stockholm embassy was blown up, one person killed. The half-dozen released prisoners went to the Yemen, taking as hostage a friend of Brandt’s; in December 1975 they occupied a Geneva hotel to intimidate OPEC; in June 1976 they hijacked an Air France aircraft bound for Israel, and took hostage the Jews on board. At last, in 1976, amendments were introduced into the criminal code, and judges were even allowed to exclude defence lawyers if they were thought to be obstructive; these lawyers’ own communications with prisoners were subjected to controls (to prevent the smuggling of weapons). Baader and others were eventually sentenced to life, in a specially built prison near Stuttgart. Reprisals followed. The head of the Deutsche Bank was kidnapped, and in September 1976 a very prominent industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, was seized, with three of his associates. The Schleyer kidnappers demanded the release of Baader and his fellow convicts, and a Lufthansa plane was hijacked to Somalia for the same purpose. However, by now the State was responding with greater forcefulness. The plane was freed in an efficient operation, and Baader committed suicide, together with his fellow-convicts. Schleyer was then found, garrotted with piano wire. After that, matters settled down, although, here and there, the kidnaps and killings went on, right up to the time of unification and beyond.

  It was a strange interlude, and there was much head-shaking in the German manner as to its significance. If ever there was a major country in Europe that had prospered, had done all of the recommended things, it was Germany. Perhaps there were indeed unhappy and resentful currents under the surface, a feeling that the country was only capable of reaching the top range of mediocrity; certainly, the cultural changes that occurred around this time implied considerable contempt for fifties smugness; there was, quite suddenly, a relentless and self-satisfied harping on the Nazi past, and Wieland Wagner, very much a product of it, to the point of running a concentration camp in Bayreuth for incarcerated rocket scientists, produced an anti-capitalist Ring. But there seems to have been a much more profound vote of cultural no-confidence around this time, perhaps the German women’s vote of no-confidence in the Constitution: in the later 1960s the surplus of births over deaths vanished. The country was heading for a full-scale demographic crisis, and West Berlin had the lowest birth rate in the entire world, including even Communist countries such as Hungary. The problem became so serious that a French commentator, Pierre
Chaunu, reckoned in 1980 that within fifty years there would be no more Germans: it was ‘Mandeville’s bees gone mad’, individualism to the point at which there would be no individuals left.

  West Germany was saved from herself by East Germany. Here was a warning as to what might happen if the Atlantic link were ever really sundered. Brezhnev might visit Bonn (1978) and talk of our ‘common European home’, but, as Margaret Thatcher later remarked, homes are built with walls, and the Berlin Wall was one too many. The ‘German Democratic Republic’ was an embarrassment. It remained a place where the inhabitants had to be contained by a wall, and a very ugly one at that, complete with minefields and yapping hounds on dog-runs, in case they all decided to move out, as they had done before 1961, when the wall was built. You just needed to travel one or two stops in the underground system, the U-Bahn, and you were in a different world: a brilliant and funny writer (East Germans were much funnier than West Germans), Stefan Wolle, describes ‘the specific smell of the DDR, the composition of which will never properly be analysed’ and ‘the unmistakable harsh, lecturing tone of voice of salesgirls, waiters and People’s Policemen’, the grey plastic telephones, ‘Sibylle’ wall cupboards, the Metallkombinat Zeulenrode, flowered carpets, sagging net curtains. Berlin was dominated, through the Party, by Saxons, who counted as the fifth occupying power (historically, Saxony is an interesting case — somewhat as with Scotland, a country that never quite took off, was industrial, and supplied far more than its due share of enlightenment and civilization; had Britain ever become Communist, the Scots would also have been well to the fore). The Party leadership specialized in self-incense, with liturgical formulae, and the general aim was Geschichte als Ereignislosigkeit, history as the happening of nothing. Ideology became, says Wolle, the opiate of the leadership.

  After the Wall went up there was an initial period of repression, with nearly 20,000 political punishments (as against 5,000 in the first half of 1961). Groups of ‘Free German Youth’ went round roofs, pointing aerials away from West Germany or even sawing them off, to block television (Aktion Blitz), but then an attempt was made at a consumer society to match that of West Berlin — little cars, washing machines, colour television and the rest. In the mid-sixties the working week was shortened (five days, nine hours) and the cult of Walter Ulbricht was reduced (Honecker taking over in May 1971 as first secretary of the central committee of the SED). The Alexander-Platz Funkturm (radio tower) started in October 1969, and in 1968 there was an educational reform supposed to bring modernity (in Leipzig the thirteenth-century Gothic university church was knocked down for the benefit of a gimcrack university building). In the mid-sixties there had even been talk of economic reform, with factory autonomy, a ‘New Economic System of Planning and Management’ (NÖSPL). The period was known as the Systemzeit on account of the supposed spread of computers and a new emphasis in education on mathematics. East Berlin became a sort of parody copy of the West, Chicago rather than Moscow being the model. But as Stefan Wolle writes, without a proper service sector the imitation could not be managed: the regime could not provide for the levels of prosperity managed in the West. It staggered into a brief consideration of reform at the time of the ‘Prague Spring’ but then staged an ideological witch-hunt, rewarded careerists and informers, and stopped the reforms it had briefly considered. There was even, in the hard winter of 1969-70, an economic crisis such as western Europe had not seen since 1947. A hard freeze began early in the November, there were headlines as to the ‘self-sacrificial struggle of the miners in the lignite works’. Potatoes ran short, and Nasser sent some from Egypt, but in the canteens there was only macaroni to be had, and domestic fuel consisted of coal dust. The energy crisis was such that East Berlin’s electricity hardly sufficed for more than the floodlights of the Wall, and trains were generally hours late in arriving.

  Under Communism, you could never be entirely sure if such things were not somehow being stage-managed in order to discredit the existing leadership of the Party, and in due course there was a change. It occurred in the context of the West Germans’ own Ostpolitik, and of course from the Soviet viewpoint it was easier to deal with some sort of flexible East German leader as distinct from Walter Ulbricht, an old Comintern man who had emerged from the Weimar Communist Party. In a meeting of the Politburo from which many members were absent ‘ill’ or ‘on leave’, and with many ‘candidate’ members present in a non-voting capacity, Willi Stoph presented a report highly critical of Ulbricht — badly prepared automatization of output, useless prestige buildings (hideous hotels and high-speed motorways through town centres, with no traffic). It all led to a humiliation for Ulbricht, when Neues Deutschland gave only a brief mention of his speech (which was not published) and some Politburo members formally wrote to Brezhnev to complain that Ulbricht was still thinking in a pan-German way, that there was a danger of upheavals in the manner of Poland in the later 1960s. In the interstices of the Soviet 24th Congress there was a decision to push Ulbricht aside (in April 1971). He died in 1973, still in theory the head of state, in a grand house in Wandlitz. His death occurred during a sporting festival, and he was made to write a letter saying that the Youth Celebrations’ organizers ‘should not allow their good humour to be affected by his unfortunately timed death’. His reward was that no flags were flown at half-mast. But with Ulbricht, the old DDR died as well: what remained was a hulk, disposable of by Moscow whenever circumstances suited.

  19. The Kremlin Consolations

  The troubles of the Atlantic West were compounded by foreign affairs. Moscow seemed to have in many ways the demand hand, with Americans and Germans coming back and forth, to offer this and that, in return for insubstantial concessions. Seen from Moscow, the later seventies were not a bad time; they ended with a classic piece of triumphalism, the Olympic Games of 1980, for which Moscow was cleaned up, acquiring some more huge buildings in the process — a hotel complex called ‘International One’ and ‘International Two’, otherwise known as the ‘Hammer Horror’, constructed for world trade exhibition purposes at the behest of the aged and, now, iguana-like go-between, Armand Hammer. Undesirables were cleared out of town, and the centre became a sort of Forbidden City. To the sky-scraper foreign ministry, the clients and satellites came and went; and there was a new, expanded Soviet navy going round the world, its crews coming back to port, gleefully bringing cheap jeans and ballpoint pens, at home in short supply. The chief preoccupation was China, no doubt, but she was in no splendid condition; Mao died in 1976, leaving a battle for succession in a country that had experienced a grotesque version of the War Communism that had nearly destroyed Russia in 1919. True, there was a Chinese-American understanding of sorts, but America was also in no happy state. President Carter, grinning and maladroit, did not inspire respect. Europe was also not a threat — very far from it. The main NATO element, Great Britain, was in steep decline; the Germans had run to Moscow, signed away thousands of millions in return for a few old-age pensioners’ trips to West Berlin, and the promise that the West Germans could pay some more millions to buy out political prisoners. Besides, matters in the West began to worsen again. The ‘stagflation’ period ended raggedly in 1975, and two years of relative stability followed. But then in 1978 things went sour again, with another twofold increase in oil prices, and another bout of inflation. England was in especially bad shape, and even appeared to be near collapse; another important NATO country, Turkey, was on the edge of civil war; Italy was in disrepair, her governments needing Communist support; and the Shah of Iran fled in January 1979, having been overthrown by a sort of bazaar-Islam revolution that Communists regarded with glee, not imagining that it would destroy them as well. When oil prices doubled, within a few weeks, the USSR profited.

  It was true that the USSR was not itself in brilliant health, but its leaders were comparing the Moscow of 1975 with the Moscow they had known in Stalin’s time, and there was no likeness. Later on, the years between Khrushchev and Brezhnev were called ‘the per
iod of stagnation’, but the term is not entirely accurate: some parts of the system worked well enough, and the men who succeeded Khrushchev had had quite enough of reform schemes that went awry. His fall was arranged by men of much cautiousness who were already not young; Leonid Brezhnev had seen the Second World War, had been a minor lion in the occupation of Hungary, and was not far off sixty. The others were much the same. Khrushchev had terrified them with the Cuban gamble, and they had been much dismayed at the internal turmoil associated with his campaign against Stalinism: intellectuals such as Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn had broken free and there had even been an ugly riot-cum-strike or two in the south. Khrushchev’s schemes to divide the Party between industrial and agrarian wings had been particularly convulsive, and he was overthrown in 1964, when he was seventy, for gambling. After the usual year or two of obscure manoeuvrings, Leonid Brezhnev emerged as successor, and his overall line was simple: ‘Reform, reform: people ought to work better, that’s the problem.’ He was right; the whole system was, as an East German critic said, a permanent Bummelstreik, what the French called a grève de zèle, the only English equivalent of which is ‘bloody-mindedness’. Brezhnev stopped the assaults on Stalin, and even installed a small work on the Kremlin Wall in commemoration of him. Khrushchev’s reforms were reversed, and a re-reform, given the name of Brezhnev’s (for a time) head of government associate, Kosygin, restored the powers of the central ministries, twenty-seven of them by 1975, with two dozen ‘main administrations’ covering assorted products. Khrushchev’s regional economic councils were scrapped, because there was a danger that these councils would be taken over by some republican — in effect nationalist — coterie. The authority of Gosplan — the State Planning Committee — was reinforced. Of course, the centralization of things meant preposterous inefficiencies and delays. The Rosa Luxemburg knitwear factory in Kiev complained that it had to report on the fulfilment of fifteen different indicators, and authorization from above was needed even for small sums of money. An idea of the Kosygin reforms was for pretend firms to be set up, giving out a bonus to managers, as distinct from ‘main administrations’, but of course this led to abuse, hence demands for more central control, hence larger monopolies.