Bothered in Berlin: Ralf Darendorf
No big European country finds change quite such a painful idea as Germany. Elections are fought on slogans such as "No Experiments" (Konrad Adenauer) or "Security not Risk" (Helmut Kohl). It was therefore a small miracle that in the general election of September 1998, Social Democrats and Greens managed to unseat a coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats. Previous changes of government since the second world war had either come after a period of "grand coalition" or been triggered by a midterm switch of partners by the liberal Free Democrats. Indeed, it is often said that Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der himself would have preferred the soft landing of a Social Democrat-Christian Democrat ("grand") coalition to the Red-Green coalition which the election result forced upon him. Red-Green was the first preference of only a small minority of the electorate (including a minority of Social Democrat voters), and yet it had had to bear high radical expectations as well as the symbolism of the 1968 generation finally taking charge.
With the unavoidable uncertainties associated with proportional representation and coalition politics, it is harder for an incoming German government to be as well-prepared as, say, the incoming Blair government. None the less, even by German standards Schr?der's government got off to a bad start. The Greens had to swallow more compromise than they were prepared for, especially in nuclear energy policy. Then the coalition decided to undo the small but important bits of flexibility introduced into the labour market by Kohl's last government. Legislation was quickly enacted to re-establish sick pay from the first day of absence from work, to make self-employment serving a single contractor illegal, and to abolish the so-called "630-Mark jobs" (tax-free, limited-hours jobs, used by many to supplement their household income). The latter reform pleased the unions, but large service industries such as newspaper deliveries and restaurants found themselves in trouble. As we now know, nearly 1m people lost a crucial source of income from what came to be called the "little man's (and woman's) tax haven." Tax havens for the big boys remained unaffected, of course.
Then there were personality problems. Surprisingly, perhaps, these did not primarily involve the Green ministers, although the energy minister J?rgen Trittin-who had been in Schr?der's Land government of Lower Saxony-created a few stirs. The problems lay in Schr?der's two SPD rivals: the party chairman Oskar Lafontaine, and his predecessor Rudolf Scharping. Neither wanted to be in government; both wanted to be leaders of the parliamentary party, to conduct a kind of opposition from within. In what appeared to be a clever move, Schr?der forced them both into the discipline of the cabinet, one as minister of finance and the other as defence minister.
In the short term, at least, it seemed anything but clever. On 11th March 1999, less than five months after formation of the Schr?der government, Oskar Lafontaine took one of the most astonishing decisions in modern democratic politics. He went home to Saarbr?cken, resigned as minister of finance and member of parliament, refused to explain himself-even to talk to the chancellor about his decision-and then resigned as party chairman as well. Since then, rumours have been rife that Rudolf Scharping, the minister of defence, would like to replace the apparently luckless chancellor.
this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, the great politico-cultural event of the year, had two heroes: the recently enNobeled G?nter Grass; and Oskar Lafontaine, who had at last broken his silence by producing a book, Das Herz schl?gt links. That the heart beats on the left is an old sentimentalism of the labour movement. The 6,000 copies available at the book fair were sold within hours. But when I met some two dozen leading German politicians on the day the Peace prize of the German book trade was awarded to my friend Fritz Stern, every one of them gave me the same line: "Lafontaine's book? I am not going to read it." In his own trade union, the political establishment, the former chancellor-candidate, party leader, minister-president of the Saarland and finally, federal minister of finance, has become an unperson within only a few months.
In a sense it is a pity that the political establishment will not look at the book. It is a good read-an easy read, anyway. Its main subject is, not unnaturally, Oskar Lafontaine and how he was always right. In that respect he confirms my experience that scientists in politics are a menace because they tend to believe that there is only one correct answer. They cannot live with the ambiguities of history. Lafontaine the physicist is no exception. Nevertheless it is curious that he should begin his story with a detailed description of his falling-out with Willy Brandt over German unification. Lafontaine (like Grass) did not share Brandt's belief that what belongs together will now grow together. For the rest, the personal story is one of self-justification bordering at times on self-pity. He felt "badly treated" by Helmut Kohl after Kohl's spectacular victory in the unification election of 1990. After all-and this is a fact which we must not forget-he, Lafontaine, had suffered the traumatic experience of an attempted assassination by a deranged woman at one of his campaign meetings.
The many passages attacking directly or indirectly Gerhard Schr?der are more embarrassing than convincing. Lafontaine's main thesis is that he was the loser in a great struggle about the direction of social democracy. This is described by Lafontaine in Manichean terms. The enemy has one name: neo-liberal. Neo-liberals are trying to destroy the world which gave little people security. They introduce notions like "flexibility" and "shareholder value." But they are wrong. "To be free one needs secure employment," eine feste Arbeit, neither part-time nor limited-term nor involving mobility. "It is not deregulation that is the need of the hour but regulation." Behind the neo-liberal threat there are, of course, the sinister forces of the US, of the Federal Reserve and, also, of the US-dominated Bretton Woods institutions.
This is pretty wooden stuff and Lafontaine's alternative is predictable enough. It is the "caring state" which creates traditional employment and maintains a tight net of social security. (One remembers that throughout his time as minister-president, the Saarland was largely dependent on financial assistance from other L?nder and the centre.) Lafontaine praises France and the policies of the "Parti Socialiste"-which figures throughout with its French name. He even supports Jack Lang's battle against American films. And he thinks that his position will prevail in the end, for "it is impossible to exorcise social democracy from the people."
Needless to say, the "Schr?der-Blair paper" finds little favour with Lafontaine (although he tries to be kinder to Tony Giddens). The paper which few have read, but which has become a symbol of division within the SPD, "was prepared behind my back." He had instead prepared a paper with Lionel Jospin. "A socialist Premier in the Matignon and a German Social Democrat in the chancellor's office seemed to many members of the Parti Socialiste to be the best precondition to move the social Europe forward." Instead, Schr?der-Blair recommends "British conditions" which Lafontaine describes-with the help of an article in the Handelsblatt newspaper-in dire terms: long hospital waiting lists, badly paid doctors and nurses, lethargic teachers in overcrowded classrooms, a desolate system of privatised public transport, the fiasco of the passport office. "Are we to use this model for creating the 'modern Germany'?"
Add to all this a vicious attack on Nato's war in Kosovo, and a fearsome brew emerges. It will find many takers. Nothing is more characteristic of today's Germany than the near-ubiquitous criticism of "wild capitalism." Never mind that such capitalism does not exist there, thanks to the corporatist structures and high taxation which allows even those who fall by the wayside a decent life. Most of the unemployed in Germany get higher benefits than the wages of many of the low-paid in Britain. German business mergers (of which there are still relatively few) are usually accompanied by an immediate pledge that there will be no redundancies. Profits of the top companies-and the corresponding salaries of executives-seem modest compared to Britain and the US. Indeed, so unwild is German capitalism that even its leaders regard the profit levels of the Anglo-American world as indecent, and a legitimate object of new taxation. Wild capitalism, for Germans, means that ordinary people can now take a fully-paid "rest cure" (four weeks in a spa) only once every four years, no longer every three.
lafontaine's political programme is confined to one demand: no change please, we're Germans. The most striking feature of his book is the almost total absence of any analysis of global changes and the German position in them. Even the word "globalisation" seems to him part of a neo-liberal conspiracy to frighten people. He is the ideologist pure and simple, the socialist with no trace of Marx but a great deal of Hegel. His opponent and b?te noire Schr?der, on the other hand, has a little Marx (through the filter of the Frankfurt School in 1968), but no Hegel at all. He epitomises the pragmatist-so much so that people are still confused about what he really wants. When I heard him recently at a private occasion, he gave a forceful and convincing exposition of his government's budget plans. He was also eager to defend himself against the accusation that budget saving was all he intended. But since he has none of Tony Blair's missionary zeal or Helmut Schmidt's panoramic world-view, somehow the defence fell flat.
Lafontaine was replaced as minister of finance by a victim of the unpopularity of the Schr?der government: Hans Eichel, the man who lost the Land election in Hesse in February 1999. Eichel had been an inconspicuous minister-president, but after the flamboyant Lafontaine he symbolised solidity, reliability and thrift. Thrift, however, was bound to mean cuts in public expenditure.
In recent months, public debate has increasingly focused on one particular issue in this context: pensions. Eichel suggested, as a stopgap, that for two years pension increases should be linked not to increases in real wages but to inflation. The temporary measure produced a cacophony-mainly from those who reminded the chancellor of his campaign promise not to touch pensions, but less noisily, although not less importantly, from those who want the decoupling to be permanent. After all, because Lafontaine's world of normal employment is gradually disappearing, why should the remaining "normal" workers pay for the pension increases of an entire older generation? More ominously, because Germany has decided it can afford to maintain a large number of unemployed people on state benefits, the remaining employed are in a strong position to see their wages rise and rise-should this market power really be passed on to all pensioners?
The truth is that the famous "contract between generations," which underlies the pay-as-you-go pension system, has to be renegotiated. The precursor of the European Central Bank, the Monetary Institute, as well as the Bundesbank, have both said so. The obvious argument is about cost, and the future. The contract between generations is increasingly perverse. It uses the power of today's 50-and 60-year-olds to push today's 10- and 20-year-olds into the trap of ever-deeper public debt-in other words, ever higher taxation. It mortgages the future just as neglect of the environment does. Some Green members of the Bundestag have noticed this and are now demanding the permanent decoupling of pensions and real wages. Just conceivably, the contract between generations will turn into a conflict between generations, with the Social Democrats representing the older and the Greens the younger groups-together with elements from the CDU, whose apparent revival is to some extent based on younger voters. Can we be surprised at the first whispers of interest in a "black-green" (CDU-Green party) coalition?
For the moment, however, the dominant mood of Germany remains fear of change. People seek protection. Fortunately there is no J?rg Haider of the Austrian FP? or even a Christoph Blocher of the Swiss SVP on the scene; otherwise protection could easily be coupled with xenophobia. For the time being, protection means social protection. Outside a few corners of the business elite there is little enthusiasm for the new information economy. Surely Germany must have its share of the global class which makes such effective use of the new opportunities, but they are not much in evidence in public, let alone political debate. Perhaps they have all left the country for more futuristic pastures.
Where will the frightened country go? A great deal depends on Chancellor Schr?der. He can forget about his "former finance minister" (as he now chooses to describe Lafontaine, without ever mentioning his name). G?nter Grass spoke for many other SPD members who admired Lafontaine, but could not forgive the manner of his departure, when he told him to run off to his young family, and enjoy his good food and wine and "Tuscan" lifestyle. Schr?der need not worry either about the other rival in his cabinet, Rudolf Scharping. He need not even be too concerned about the turn in his electoral fortunes so far, (although the next big Land election, in March next year in the SPD stronghold of North Rhine Westphalia, is seen by some as make or break).
This insouciance about Schr?der's chances may sound surprising. Two facts explain it. One is that in the Land elections this year the CDU has not actually gained many votes; the SPD has lost for the most part not to other parties, but to non-voters. Turnout has increasingly become the key factor in European elections, (and judging from the last European parliament elections, it may yet become an important feature in Britain). Thus there seems to be no real alternative in the German voters' minds. The other simple fact is that the main charge against Schr?der is that he is pursuing the policies of the right, of the opposition CDU. And some Land leaders of the CDU in east and west Germany have already indicated that they will find it hard to vote down budget-cutting legislation in the Federal Council (except in so far as it imposes new burdens on the L?nder).
So Schr?der can recover. (Remember how they all laughed at Helmut Kohl during his first two years as chancellor in the early 1980s?) Threats to Schr?der might come from within his own party, but that is unlikely. They can also come through the collapse of the Greens as a party, although that would merely make Schr?der's dream of a grand coalition more probable. Most plausibly, they can come from his own reluctance to define a clear policy perspective for Germany's future.
In this context it is hard to deny that as a recipe for Germany the Schr?der-Blair paper was a grave mistake. In Britain it hardly created a stir because it was merely a description of what is happening. In Germany, on the other hand, it was understood to mean that an entirely different economic and political culture had to be adopted. In a country where even incremental change is perceived as a threat, total change can only generate total resistance. The authors of the paper simply did not understand the profound differences between what has come to be called Anglo-Saxon and Rhenish capitalism. (I also like Jonathan Gershuny's contrast of the wild west and the nice north.) More than that, they did not appreciate that different capitalisms may be equally viable. After all, Italy has roughly the same per capita GDP as Britain, despite profound differences in economic and political culture. Germany's GDP is of course higher than those, despite the fact that it often opts for public rather than private wealth and thus for higher rather than lower taxation.
This is not a plea for no change, but it is a plea for change with the grain-and for more mutual understanding among Europeans for the diversity of capitalisms and even of modernisations among them. Perhaps what Chancellor Schr?der should do is to praise aspects of the German model quite openly. Enterprises which measure their success by turnover rather than profit may be more sustainable sources of national wealth in the long run. A thriving public domain is a better prescription for justice than limited attempts at redistribution. But these and other virtues can be sustained only if they are adapted to new circumstances. The old welfare state has become unsustainable, what it needs is not dismantling but transforming; and it is by no means impossible to design a social state for Germany which gives more room for enterprise without depriving anyone of necessities.
(Similarly, it would be straightforward enough to devise an invigorated form of federalism, giving some real meaning to that concept. Germany is now characterised by a kind of pseudo-federalism-everything from wages through welfare payments to cultural policy is determined at the centre. This is bad economics and it is also bad politics, fostering an absence of accountability and responsibility. No one really knows who is in charge. The trouble is that, because most national politicians come up through Land politics, there is no significant figure willing to take up the cause of renewing federalism.)
The first and most basic requirement for successful modernisation is a change in attitudes. It used to be said that morosit? is a vice of the French public; today it seems to have migrated to Germany, and especially to east Germany (where, incidentally, the SPD now has almost no political organisation at all). One of Tony Blair's achievements is that he has consistently managed to present change in a global environment as an opportunity. Even if the language of modernisation can sound a little hollow after a while, it suggests that things will get better if we make an effort ourselves. Tony Giddens's approach-which I call "globalisation plus"-is relevant here: yes, there are inescapable demands of the global marketplace, but we can add something extra-an element of social inclusion and cohesion, above all. In German public life there is almost no one-Ulrich Beck, the inventor of the "risk society," being one exception-who takes a similar view and impresses it on the public. The CDU minister-president Kurt Biedenkopf has tried. The people of Saxony have accepted his unorthodox views by giving him majorities of more than 50 per cent in three successive elections. If Schr?der could find similar language to present a case for hope, initiative and solidarity, his chances of winning Germany's general election in 2002 would be no worse than those of New Labour in Britain.
The New Uncles: Anne McElvoy
My friend? teenage son Georg was six years old when the Berlin wall fell. He had just become a Young Pioneer, with a fetish for having his little necktie ironed to perfection. The following spring, the Pioneers (to which most east German children belonged before graduating to the Free German Youth movement) stopped singing their songs in praise of ?eddy?Th?lmann, the leader of the pre-war Communist Party of Germany, murdered in Buchenwald in 1944. No one told the Pioneer branches to close down. They just did. It was that sort of time? time to pack up state socialism and go home. In the last session of Georg? group, the tearful leader, charged with the task of explaining the collapse of a state and an entire ideology to bewildered six-year-olds, could only say that the uncles who ran things had got things wrong and new uncles were going to take over and make things better.
The political and cultural Abwicklung or ?inding up?of the German Democratic Republic was under way. The new Germany was coming, bringing to a moribund society fresh ways of working, thinking and living. The writer Stefan Heym captured the mood with his bon mot that East Germany would soon be no more than a ?ootnote in world history.?On the election trail in early 1990, Helmut Kohl promised that the east would soon brim with ?lourishing landscapes.?The west seemed to be marching eastwards with unstoppable confidence. Economists predicted that within ten to 15 years, the transfer of expertise and funds to the ?ew federal L?nder?would result in them catching up and overtaking the productivity of western Germany.
Ten years on, the average growth rate in the old east still languishes at less than 2 per cent. This part of Germany has 17.2 per cent unemployment?early three times that of the west. The east will rely on western fiscal transfers for at least another ten years.
Georg? earliest memories are of a disappeared society. Baby pictures show him fat and contented in a sturdy old-fashioned pram?o new-fangled, lightweight buggies for the east? Mother Courages. His lullabies were the gently ironic folk-songs of Gerhard Sch?ne: a singer unknown in the west; a sell-out at every concert in the east. Georg? mother Katharina worked for Interflug, the East German airline, and there are pictures of him in the cr?che, sitting in a potty-trained row of militarised rigidity. A (western) researcher, Christian Pfeiffer, claims that the resultant trauma is responsible for making east Germans more authoritarian and less enthusiastic about democracy.
We wondered then what Georg would think of East Germany when he grew up. ?ardly at all,?his father predicted. ?ees us all today.
With the exception of a pendant from Lokomotiv Leipzig, his favoured football team, nothing in the muddle of his bedroom would identify him as living in the former east. But when we begin to talk, the degree of identification with a society he can remember only from the balloons at May Day parades, the Pioneer singalongs and smell of kindergarten cabbage, is striking. ?n the GDR,?he says earnestly, ?o one was unemployed or sleeping on the street, not like today. People helped each other a lot more?ent each other things when they were short. You won? catch people doing that now.?He still thinks of himself and his Leipzig schoolfriends as Ossis; and judges Wessis to be ?ore superficial: all talk.?He concedes that the east was totalitarian and that the choices on offer to individuals were much more limited. Sure, it would have been frustrating to live there. But it is obvious that the country he knows only from hearsay has a never-never land quality for him. It doesn? come from his parents, who were both heartily glad to see the back of the ?orkers?and peasants?state.?Katharina says: ?ll those images of mass cheerful solidarity, which we knew were so fake then, suddenly have this magical appeal again now that East Germany is history. I expected it from older people and the middle aged who can? re-adjust so easily. But when you get this east-was-great stuff coming back from Georg and his schoolfriends, it makes you wonder what has gone wrong.?Ten years on, the gap is still very wide indeed. The persistence of a separate east German identity and a political and cultural ?DR revival?is now undeniable. In his last drama, Zement, the east German dramatist Heiner M?ller foresaw the phenomenon: ?pen up the windows,?one character declares, ?ou can hear half the town crying out for yesterday.?Opinion polls find that east Germans remain sceptical about the benefits of democracy and grudging about the boon of free-market economics, despite being recipients of the biggest-ever transfer of funds within a state?ver 150 billion Deutschmarks each year. Easterners complain of patronising attitudes on the part of western elites and of their recent past being treated without understanding or insight. A certain self-pity informs the cult of Ostalgie, and to many Wessis these attitudes look like rank ingratitude. Here was a society not only released from a dictatorship without violence, but which unlike its central European neighbours, had a kindly big brother to pick up the pieces, invest heavily in the creaking infrastructure, and stabilise democracy.
For the first five years after the wall fell, politicians were reluctant to concede that there was a serious lack of bonding between the two parts of Germany. Their speeches talked dutifully about the joys of unity but neither western nor eastern mentalities budged. The strains which manifested themselves in the many post-unification jokes (Ossi to Wessi: ?e are one people.?Wessi to Ossi: ?o are we.? were dismissed as a last kick of the old eastern elites against the triumph of capitalism. But the re-entry of the former Communist Party (now the Party of Democratic Socialism, PDS) into the Bundestag in 1994, on the back of more than a third of the vote in east Berlin put paid to the hope that the east? psephological swan-song would be brief.
The east now has consistently different voting trends in elections and these are redefining the shape of national German politics. The Red-Green coalition was made by the protest votes of the east?estern voters alone would have produced a grand coalition of Christian and Social Democrats. The turn against Helmut Kohl was sharpest in the blighted parts of the old GDR?hich in 1990 had hailed him as their saviour?nd its voters remain more volatile than their western counterparts. Today, the reaction against Schr?der? coalition has been similarly savage in local elections in the same places. Unimpeded by traditional loyalties, the east? voters take their revenge for perceived disappointments mercilessly.
The net gainers continue to be the PDS, who have overtaken the Social Democrats (SPD) in Thuringia and Saxony. They hold 42 per cent of the vote in east Berlin and share power with the SPD officially in Mecklenburg-Pommerania and unofficially in Saxony-Anhalt. The German politician who seems to have learnt most from the Blairite tactics of pilfering from any useful stock of ideas is not Schr?der but the sprightly PDS leader Gregor Gysi. He is the man who ran an election broadcast based on the cult Berlin film Run Lola Run, showing an androgynous power-frau with attitude hurtling the wrong way up and down escalators, at the same time as commanding the loyalty of old Stasi men and party loyalists who would have considered the real-life Lolas of east Germany to be ?ystem-hostile elements.?
Kohl forged unification with the determination of a true statesman. But he displayed his limitations in mishandling the aftermath. His single greatest mistake was not the over-generous terms of economic union, but the failure to encourage the development of a new democratic political class in the east. The western parties, wedded to consensus politics and rooted in stabilities of sleepy Bonn, wasted little effort in trying to reach a deeper understanding of the east.
West Germany was familiar with the east only as a rag-bag of negative images: leather-jacketed Stasi men; drug-fuelled athletes; old men in fedora hats at May Day parades; and phutting Trabants. It underestimated the persistence of specifically east German sensitivities. History bequeathed another problem, too. A political generation grew up in the west convinced that the Federal Republic had failed properly to confront the legacy of the Third Reich and had allowed too much injustice to go unpunished. It was determined not to make the same mistake in dealing with the aftermath of another dictatorship.
The Stasi files were opened to facilitate a bold reckoning with the daily workings of dictatorship. Many leading eastern figures, like the transitional head of state Lothar de Maizi?re, fell prey, in the aftermath of unification, to an interpretation of the records which emphasised their collusion with the authorities?n his case as a human rights lawyer?hile ignoring the mitigating motives for doing so.
Similar pressure was applied to Manfred Stolpe, the SPD president of Brandenburg, who had been the lay head of the Protestant Church in the GDR. On close scrutiny, Stolpe? record for willing cooperation looked more dubious than de Maizi?re?. Unlike de Maizi?re, however, he decided to fight his corner, turning his own defence into a critical assault on Bonn? use of Stasi records to drive easterners out of public office. The mood in the east turned in Stolpe? favour: today, he is one of its most popular politicians. The use of the Stasi files against such figures was seen by many east Germans as a reason not to venture into public life at all. Even among the under-30s this reluctance persists.
Belatedly Kohl saw the danger of a unified Germany being run entirely by westerners and began to promote the kind of people he deemed appropriate. The most prominent faces from the east in unified German politics under his leadership were Angela Merkel and Claudia Nolte, two women from Christian backgrounds, socially conservative and anti-abortion. It would have been hard to find two women less representative of the east? broader sensibilities.
Nor can the new SPD ascendancy offer much useful therapy to the east? damaged self-esteem. Schr?der and his inner circle have not found a language to bridge the misunderstandings and resentments between the two Germanies. ?chr?der is totally incurious about our lives before 1989,?says one disillusioned party worker in the SPD? Saxony headquarters, where they are still absorbing the shock of being beaten into third place by the PDS in the recent state elections. ?ll that stuff about the third way sounds terrible to eastern ears?ike another experiment. What people want is unambiguous solutions to some grave problems.?Outside the ranks of the ideologically committed, few east Germans mourned the passing of the communist regime. But they did and still do resent the west? too ready deduction that the lives they lived before were without value, and that 1989 was a Year Zero. Even worse is the implicit comparison, casually made by westerners, between the GDR and the Third Reich. The exhibition ?ise and Fall of the Modern in Weimar,?the centrepiece of the town? status as 1999 European City of Culture, became a bitter point of controversy after the exhibition? organisers?esterners?howed Nazi art alongside art from the former East Germany. The exhibition had to be re-hung to placate eastern critics.
western societies are accustomed to regarding themselves as at ease with the dynamic pace of capitalism: experts at coping with flux. In truth, we are stubbornly fixed in our own certainties. The eastern bloc was a mirror into which we could look to reassure ourselves that our way of life was the fairest of them all. In the mainstream German media, the estrangement between east and west is portrayed overwhelmingly as a result of eastern attachment to the past. But westerners, too, are attached to the past state socialism have become entrepreneurs?grown elbows?as the Germans say. Where once I used to visit flats with worn carpets and comforting musty smells, I track friends down now to homes with beech-wood floors and flat-screen televisions. Where I used to buy bits of cheap computer equipment for friends to help upgrade?eath-Robinson style?heir Robotron machines, I now listen to my engineer friend Matthias telling me that my old machine is ?rom the ark?and we must spend a day shopping to upgrade me before I fall too far behind in the cyber-race.
As if to reassure myself that they are still the same people that they were before 1989, I find myself getting up in the night in a spare room somewhere in Erfurt, to sift through the novels on the bookshelves. There is reassurance in the form of the first edition of Ch
