A Rattle of Bones

Not to bury the German Caesar but to dispraise each other, Russia and the Western Powers prepared to meet again. Would the four-power Conference of Foreign Ministers write a peace treaty for Germany when they met next week in London? The odds against it were set by one knowledgeable observer at 100 to 1. The chances of a peace treaty with Austria were better: the odds against it were only 10 to 1.

The deputies of the Foreign Ministers last week chewed a tired cud of procedural issues. Their sessions were placid enough, and utterly unproductive. The biggest question before them was whether the Austrian treaty could be put ahead of the German. The bland and affable Russian delegate, A. A. Smirnov, said no.

Perhaps the Kremlin believed that the U.S. hope of an Austrian treaty would lead George Marshall on through weeks of stalemate on Germany. If so, the Russians were wrong. Clearly, Marshall did not intend to sit through another version of last winter's Moscow Conference, which accomplished nothing but the propagation of international ill will. Britain's Ernest Bevin was of like mind. He said last week: "No one can accuse me of being impatient . . . but there comes an end." If the conference does not reach agreement, "I am not going to be a party to keeping the world in chaos."

He meant that if Russia would not agree to a peace treaty, the U.S. and Britain would go ahead with the political as well as the economic organization of their Bizonal area. They would probably not make a separate peace with Germany; but they would make a Germany. Since the western segment of that country is far stronger than the eastern, the U.S. and Britain could expect the almost unanimous German feeling for national unity to pull eastern Germany toward the West as a sun pulls a smaller planet.

The Apple Tree. This Germany over which Russia and the West struggled was still, even in defeat, the key to world politics and economics. Every step in the development of the Marshall Plan made it increasingly clear that a stable Europe could not be organized without revived German production. The Communist grand strategy was plainly focused on eventual domination of Germany, which would almost certainly carry with it the domination of Europe. Thus the Germans were (theoretically) in an enviable position. Theory, however, was not filling many bellies in Germany last week.

The year's first snow fell into white robes for the Alps, grey slush for Munich streets. In Marburg an optimistic apple tree bloomed. In the whole land, the tree was perhaps the most optimistic note.

An 18-year-old girl, arrested for an attempted abortion, said she had been wandering around Germany for two years; she had been one of the 10,000,000 Germans who fled the eastern lands now occupied by Poland, Russia and Czechoslovakia. "How would I be able to care for the child?" she asked; "I sleep every night in a railroad station." A 17-year-old Munich boy killed his mother because she would not give him money for the movies; for two weeks he slept beside the corpse. A Berlin entrepreneur rented coffins for burials at 40 marks for five hours.

The vintners of the Palatinate sought (as they do every year) a name to distinguish the 1947 vintage. What to call this year of hunger, hate, uncertainty, and growing fear? The vintners discarded Kalorienspritzer (calory splasher) and Zonenschleicher (zonal sneaker). They chose Knochenrappler, which means "rattler of bones." The children of Germany knew well what the vintners meant; thousands of German kids, searching for food, rattled bones in garbage cans. If they found an egg, however stale, it was precious. And if the egg could be cooked in an old war helmet (see cut), that was a symbol of the menacing German future as well as of the guilty German past.

The Singing. The Germans hated all the occupiers and wished they would leave --but they did not hate them all equally. The downy-cheeked American boys who whistled at the fraueleins were a nuisance; but the Russians were a terror. To mark the difference in the way they felt, the Munich police gave a party last week to say a somewhat fearful farewell to U.S. Brigadier General Walter J. Muller. Forty cops sang The Beautiful Blue Danube for him. Many Germans fear that the U.S. will forget the Danube, the Rhine and the Oder--especially the Oder, where the Russians are. They believe that the Russians at the London Conference will propose that all four powers pull out. Much as the Germans would like that, on its face, they know that if the U.S. withdraws, it withdraws across an ocean; if Russia withdraws, it merely backs up behind the Polish border.

Germans of all zones know that the Russians have made eastern Germany a police state. It is efficiently organized for production and about $900 million worth of what it produces in a year goes to Russia. In the western zones, the Germans are consuming about $900 million a year more than they produce. The difference is largely paid by the U.S. taxpayer.

And the Gold. In the U.S. and British zones, democracy has a fingernail hold, and production is rising. Ruhr coal-- precious as black gold for all of Europe--increased last week to 274,000 tons a day, a postwar high.*

The Russians are afraid of Ruhr coal production, not because they fear Germany, but because Ruhr coal can revive Europe, which the Communists want to keep in want and disorder (see FOREIGN NEWS). What the Kremlin would like most out of the London Conference would be to hang on to eastern Germany politically and still get a veto over the administration of the Ruhr. The U.S. and Britain are not likely to fall for that. So, for a while after the London Conference, there will probably be two Germanys, one working for European stability, one working for Russia. After a while, the four powers may write a treaty, as a sort of coffin for the bones of Germany. They will not, however, need to buy the coffin. They can rent it temporarily, like the coffins in Berlin. Unless the Russians accept, as they probably will not, the year-old U.S. offer of a control treaty over Germany, the bones of contention in Central Europe will remain uncoffined and unquiet.

*Ruhr miners hoped to reach a daily output of 300,000 tons before Dec. 4, St. Barbara's Day. A 3rd Century virgin martyr, Saint Barbara was beheaded by her father; as he was returning home from the martyrdom, a bolt of lightning struck him dead. Because of this fulminatory visitation, Saint Barbara is regarded as the patron saint of miners, artillerymen and others who use explosives.

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