National Comeback

Approximately once a year the New York Herald Tribune bestirs its European correspondents to produce a most notable, significant report. Little more than a year ago famed correspondent Arthur Ruhl reported ably on Russia (TIME, Oct. 5, 1925) ; and last week the Herald Tribune's Berlin newsgatherer, John Elliott, took the measure of commercial Germany with a miscellaneous but imposing array of facts:

P: Teuton beer bibbers are steadily drinking back to normalcy. In 1913 Germans drank an average of 102 quarts of beer each per year, in 1923 only 47 quarts, nowadays 76 quarts.

P: Still more impressive is the comeback of German shipping. War losses and a disastrous peace cut the German mercantile tonnage from over 5,000,000 tons to 320,000 in 1919. Today the Germans have bought back so many confiscated ships and built so many new ones that their tonnage has surged up above 3,000,000. Next year the North German Lloyd expects to wrest the transatlantic speed record from the British Mauretania, famed "fastest liner in the world," with two superspeed new German ships of 46,000 tons, the Bremen and the Europa.

P: Last fall the Woolworth interests opened their first "5 & 10" store in Berlin, an innovation which has caught rapidly, as has the recently introduced U. S. installment plan.

P: Since 1925 very many German industrialists have been "Americanizing" their plants, notably inspired by a potent volume, Das Amerikanische Wirtschaftswunder. The author, famed economist Professor Julius Hirsch, declares: "When we learned that these despised Americans brought into being in a twinkling of an eye an army of two million men equipped with the best War supplies and transported it overseas without suffering any loss from our U-boats, and when we further learned that these same Americans, in spite of their high wages, manufactured automobiles--and other things besides automobiles--so cheaply that they beat our own manufacturers in our own country in spite of high tariff defenses, it was only natural and inevitable that we looked to 'Americanization' as the panacea and the salvation anchor in our economic distress."

P: Actually the German industrialists have named "Americanization" the working of two principles applied with great vigor during the past year: 1) "Rationalization," a high-sounding term for weeding out superfluous employes; 2) "Trustification," the major tendency in German industry which has now evolved some 3,000 functioning trusts.

P: German "trustification" covers absolutely the four major industries: coal, steel, chemicals and textiles--the name of the chemical trust running to 58 letters: Die Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (for short called the "I. G.")

P: Super-trustification, or the formation of international cartels, now locks the whole European bone and glue industry in step with Germany--no mean feat--and Germans have pioneered the Franco-German-Belgio-Luxembourg-Saar steel cartel, etc.

P: Meanwhile the highest wage of any German manual worker is 55 marks ($14) a week, and skilled textile workers get only 30 marks ($7.50) weekly.

P: The British Coal Strike proved an absolute bonanza to German industry, and many of the British markets captured then (TIME, May 10 to Nov. 29) are still held. Recently the Frankfurter Zeitung exulted: "The coal strike was the stirrup and now our industry is firmly in the saddle."

P: Finally Germans look with kindling imaginations to their great future in the air. Die Deutsche Luft Hansa, the state-subsidized air trust, flew its 120 planes almost four million miles last year, with some 60,000 passengers. Berlin is already linked by air to London, Paris, Moscow and the Scandinavian capitals. Next summer the German air net will be flung southward, to Madrid, Vienna and (cooperating with the new Italian Aero Lloyd) to Rome. Herr Hermann Mayenberger, operating expert of the Colon Co., Hispano-Zeppelin firm, announces definitely that in the spring of 1928 Zeppelins now building at Friedrichshafen will be flying on a four-and-one-half-day schedule between Seville and Buenos Aires, a transatlantic run now made by the fastest steamers in 20 days.