“When two Russians fight,” so the joke goes, “they tear each other’s clothes off and then shake hands. When two Germans fight, they kill each other, but there won’t be a button missing.” The German’s bourgeois development came late—the Russian’s never—and his private property sense is as overdeveloped as a child’s. But the Thirty Years’ War of 1914–45 has proletarianized this man of private property, especially the bourgeoisie. In the inflation of 1945–48, as in 1919–23 (when, however, the retailers with stocks survived), the farmer not only held his own but traded food for whatever he wanted, and there were “Persian rugs in pigsties.” Then the currency reform, on both occasions, hit the farmer, and his downward course began to follow that of the bourgeoisie.
The higher bourgeois were the first and the hardest and the most persistently proletarianized. They may not know it yet; Herr Doctor Schmidt or Herr Lawyer Schmidt or Herr Professor Schmidt or Herr Architect Schmidt or Herr Engineer Schmidt still has his professional title, and his title is property, as it is nowhere else in the Western world. But he has no real property, no tangible stake left in the social order. He has nothing to sell but his labor. Marx is talking to him.
A university department head in Kronenberg had no hot water and no central heat in his four-room apartment, with a household of four adults and two children. Eight years and more after the war his family still gladly accepted gifts of used clothing, the crumbs of charity. I see him now, sifting his pipe dottle, looking for unburned flakes; I see his wife using tea leaves a second time, a third time, a fourth time. In a year in Kronenberg I encountered only one owner of a private automobile, and not one refrigerator. Eggs were sold by the unit; who had money to invest in a dozen at a time, or a place to keep them fresh?
In our older boy’s class, the sixth grade, in a school in our bourgeois, nonindustrial, county-seat town in a fertile valley, 10 per cent of the children were, eight years after the war, going to school without breakfast; the next 10 per cent had unspread bread; the next 10 per cent, bread with a nonfat spread; and only the top 30 per cent had any kind of milk or milk-substitute drink under their belts. Our younger boy, in the first grade, brought his new friend Bienet home with him and gave him a banana. Bienet ate the banana—and the skin.
And all this was in “recovery” Germany, West Germany, where the living standard had always been higher than it was in the East and was now, of course, very much higher. And in a small town surrounded by woods, in this “recovery” Germany, only kitchens were heated in winter for want of a few cents for kindling. My Nazi friend, young Schwenke, recommended to me a cigarette-rolling machine with a cloth, rather than a plastic, roller; I asked him why he himself used the machine with the plastic roller; it was because it cost two and a half cents less than the other.
Of course there were mink coats in Düsseldorf, the Rouge-et-Noir (as the Germans call it) was packed day and night at Baden-Baden, and there were block-long Mercedes limousines in Berlin. But, when the limousines had gone by, one might see the men, young men, middle-aged men, old men, going through the garbage cans (as if there were anything edible to be found in a German garbage can!). Nowhere was the assertion challenged that the spread between wealth and poverty in West Germany was much greater than it had been under the Nazis.
“Production is 150 per cent of prewar.” But what is important is what is produced and where it goes. What was being produced in “recovery” Germany was not domestic consumer goods; machine tools are hard on the teeth. The soaring West German economy was an artifact, a political, cold-war, pump-priming operation like the soaring (if not so high) East German economy. To pile up the gold and dollar balance, tax concessions (paid ultimately by Michel, the standard chump of German comedy) were given exporters. Some of the units of the I.G. Farben chemical combine, broken up after the war, were bigger than ever; one typewriter manufacturer was exporting to one hundred and thirty-nine countries.
“Production is 150 per cent of prewar.” But of Volkswagen’s twenty thousand employees (including executives), only 2 per cent could afford to drive the cars they were making. In “150 per cent” 1953, the West German industrial wage was less than one-fourth of the American, the standard of living 15 per cent below that of armaments-saddled France, the per capita consumption of meat (which was unrationed) lower than austerity England’s (which was rationed). The “150 per cent” was not going to the fifty million West Germans.
Since the end of the war, Germany, the only nation in Europe which did not enjoy the sovereign privilege of spending one-third to one-half its national budget on a military establishment, had constructed six times as many new housing units as “victorious” France; but it was still short four million units, and housing was still rationed to a maximum of one person per room. Unemployment figures, notoriously unreliable, ranged from a likely two million to an unlikely one million. There were no exact figures distinguishing part-time employment from employment and no exact figures on the ten million “expellees.”
There were some simple distinctions which one might make—could not help making—by walking across the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. In Communist East Berlin no worker was free—or unemployed; in Capitalist West Berlin one of every four workers was unemployed—but free. In Kronenberg, which had no heavy industry, unemployment of the normal working force (swelled by the “expellees“) was 20 per cent in 1953, and an unemployed white-collar worker, with a family of four in one room, got a dole totaling $31.74 a month. He paid one-fourth our money price for rent, half our money price for food, and as much as we pay for all manufactured articles (including fuel and clothing). Our ten-cent bar of soap cost twenty-four cents in West Germany.
German men were coming down in money value as German materials went up; a shoemaker would work half an hour making repairs which did not require leather or rubber, and the bill would be twelve cents, but when he worked ten minutes putting on a pair of half-soles and heels, the bill was $2.50. The German people (not to be confused with German export and German industry) had not been rehabilitated. And they had not been rehabilitated by American aid. True, “they” had received three billion dollars in aid; true, too, they (without the quotation marks) had paid ten billion dollars in Occupation costs. And the aid, whatever forms it had taken and whichever persons it had reached, was, under the Marshall Plan and its successors, $28 per person in Germany, while it was $63 per person in England and $65 in France.
Whatever rehabilitation there was in Germany—the spectacular reconstruction not of the destroyed cities but in them—was the result of the back-breaking toil of seventy million German Michels. Tante Käthe, our housekeeper, was one of these Michels. “Work and save, Michel.” Tante Käthe worked and saved. Twice she worked, and each time she saved close to $2,000, and each time, after 1918 and 1945, her $2,000 was inflated away. Tante Käthe, who reads and writes only the old German script, doesn’t read or write much. She doesn’t even know (any more than the shoemaker, whose materials are worth more than he is) that Marx is talking to her.
The German’s acute property sense and his acute security sense have been at war within him during this whole second Thirty Years’ War of 1914–45. The security sense is winning. The development of German anticapitalism was, at the turn of the century, phenomenal. In the first Reichstag, in 1871, the Social Democratic Party had two seats; in 1903, eighty-one; and before the first World War, with one hundred and ten seats, they were the strongest party in the country. In 1932 the anticapitalist forces held two-thirds of the Reichstag seats—the Left Center, the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the Nazis (the last receiving private support from German capital).
The dispossession of the German, especially of the middle class and most especially of the upper middle class, has been going on since the middle of the first World War, relentlessly, in “good” times and in “bad,” moving toward completion. The propertyless Bürger does not cast his lot with the proletariat; but sooner or later his lot casts him. He lives (and, if he is old enough, dies) in his memories of die goldene Zeit, the golden time of the first Kaiserreich; but the grandchildren—it may be even the children—of this man have, without personal memory to sustain their illusions, lost them. When the situation has been bad enough long enough, there seems to be a neurotic incongruity, with only one entrance door for three families, in maintaining the hereditary doorplate with the family name engraved on it. So the grandson—or the son—takes it down. Marx is talking to him.
Marx doesn’t care if, in this outbreak or that, or in this or that locality, he calls himself a Nazi, a Fascist, a Communist, a Nationalist, or an Odd Fellow. Marx is talking to the naked condition of his existence, not to the insignia in his lapel. “One hundred and fifty per cent of prewar” is the mumbo jumbo of dead financiers. Nothing costs money like war, whoever wins or loses. Nothing mass-produces proletarians like war, whoever wins or loses. Whoever wins or loses, Marx is talking to the man whose house and savings are gone, who has nothing to sell but his labor. Let the dead financiers talk of “150 per cent of prewar”; Marx knows that England and France, whose productive capacity, far from being destroyed, was scarcely touched, never recovered from the first World War. In the midst of the broken stones, the twisted steel, the burned-out shop, and the flooded mine stands the new proletarian: the German.
Remember—the Germans were rich once, by European standards, and now they are poor; so, subjectively, they are much worse off now than those who were always poor. They are approaching the point—no one knows where it is—where they will know that they are what they already are: proletarians. Between 1945 and 1955 it was costing Michel only $155,000,000 a month to maintain the military forces that occupied his country; the minute he got his own military forces, that is, his “defense contribution” to “European defense,” it would cost him $215,000,000 a month, just as a starter.
Michel hates Communism—under that name. But Hitler communized him, under National Socialism, and he never knew it. If this process of coming down in the world—not of being down but of coming down—continues, Michel will embrace some new, as yet unconceived “anti-Communism.” But it will be Communism, just as National Socialism was, but more advanced in so far as materials, rising in value as men’s value falls, are increasingly available only in collective form. And there is no reason, when the hatred of 1941–45 dies away, why this Communism (called, perhaps, “anti-Communism”) should not be Russian, or Russian-German, a third Rapallo of the have-nots, who, like all have-nots, dream of being have-alls. There is, of course, the chance (on which Churchill bet and lost once) that the parties to the third Rapallo may destroy one another; but this chance is ever the rich man’s dream.
Bourgeois pride, the title, the doorplate, the bow the higher Beamte receives from the lower, stand between Germany and Russia, but the pride, the title, the doorplate, and the bow are coming down. What the Germans did in Russia in the late war—and what the Russians did in Germany afterward—stands between them, too. The slogans of anti-Communism, pounded into the Germans by the Nazi Government and later by the American Occupation, these, too, will live for a while. But Frederick the Great and Bismarck, looking eastward, will outlive both the Nazis and the American Occupation. “Everyone knows,” said the realistic Walter Lippmann late in 1954, “that the pull within Germany toward such a deal”—between West Germany and the Soviet Union—“is bound to be very strong, and to become all the stronger as Germany acquires great military power in her own right. The Russians,” he went on, “hold big assets for a deal with the Germans: unification, withdrawal of the Army of Occupation, rectification of the frontiers, resettlement of the expelled refugees, trade, and great political influence in the destiny of Europe.” The realist might have been even more realistic and added that Marx is talking to more Germans today than in 1914—or in 1939.