GERMANY: UP FROM THE ASHES

TIME Correspondent Enno Robbing returned to Germany after a half-year's absence, cabled this report on what he found:

THE people of western Germany have turned a big corner. Six months ago, stagnation was still everywhere; today, from the Elbe to the Rhine, everything is in motion. Ponderous blocks of new building bulk cleanly amid the jagged skylines. In Hamburg, Frankfurt and Essen, brick red factory construction and flashy white housing projects chase the gloom of rubble grey. The ruins no longer depress, but act as a stimulant to German energy. A Hamburg shipping magnate curtly told me why: "If I don't get something done, I'll go crazy. That's sure. A war may take it all away again--maybe. But we'll take that chance."

Prosperity. German trade unions have virtually dropped the class-warfare creed. In the coal and steel industries the unions are jealous of their newly won right to share in management's decisions. Labor leaders are striding into statesmanship; they support the Schuman Plan, German rearmament. By choosing Christian Fette as chairman to succeed the late venerated Hans Boeckler, the unions have affirmed their political independence. Stern, stubby Chairman Fette, 56, will not dance when the doctrinaire Socialist Party pipes; his business is practical gains for German workers.

Under able Finance Minister Fritz Schaffer, employment is up, luxury taxes are stiffer. As economic inequality tends to diminish, a feeling of opportunity grows. On the streets, fewer Germans glare enviously at expensive automobiles; cheap Volkswagens, Opels and Fords are nearer the public's reach. Already, more Germans own cars than in 1936. In Bad Godesberg, a German mason carped at the new apartment houses for U.S. officials: "I wish we were that well off." Promptly two of his colleagues chipped in: "Don't worry. We will be."

Bonn Doing Well. All is not strawberries & cream, however. Western Germany's prosperity still rests on a bedrock of $400 million annual U.S. aid. The housing shortage is still acute, and so is the economic plight of the war victims. In a camp, just beyond Bonn itself, 50 bombed-out families live like animals. Across the land, there are well over a million people unemployed. Conspicuous consumption by the wealthy (encouraged by a tax system that allows huge exemptions for "business expenses") makes for glaring contrasts with poverty.

But these defects are no longer dominant in German thinking. "We've stopped remembering how poor we were only five years ago," said a Frankfurt clerk. "Now we look ahead."

Up and down western Germany, I found a new note in politics. To any number of political questions, people replied : "That's up to Bonn." The Bonn federal government has gained grudging acceptance, even respect. Local elections center on federal issues. Western Germany's body is beginning to respond to its brain.

Bonn, for the provisional capital it was originally intended to be, looks remarkably permanent. It quietly attracts hardworking, talented men from all over western Germany. The work of parliamentary committees and cabinet ministries has become impressively competent.

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer has moved his office out from under the stuffed animals of the Koenig Museum into the newly redecorated, million-mark Schaumburg palace. "If we want to be a power again," says Adenauer, "we have to look like one."

Guilt. Physical recovery is still far ahead of psychological recovery. Ripped loose from tradition in 1933, tossed by tyranny and war, submerged under occupation, the Germans are mentally still very much at sea.

On the tense uncertain faces, personal tragedies have graven bitter lines. Often, helpless hysteria bursts through the curtain of self-control; at other times, Germans seek emotional relief by unburdening their life stories to any listener. Whining and self-pitying creep into ordinary Conversations. The Germans are not yet a happy people. How could they be?

On the surface, the postwar Germans appear to be still busy denying Nazi sins, justifying themselves and criticizing the occupation powers. But why should the Germans be so terribly eager to minimize Naziism, unless they felt that Naziism was a black blot on their record? Why should they take so much time and effort justifying themselves, unless they knew that their reputations were ruined? German criticism of other countries is mainly defensive. When a German angrily declares that "die Amerikaner sind auch nicht besser" (the Americans are no better, either), he makes himself feel that he is not the only one who bears a burden of guilt.

Fanaticism Finished. Most Germans these days live by and for themselves. They are, in the main, unkind to each other. They lack confidence in any community and are skeptical of new sacrifices for the common interest. Thus there is little prospect that German resentments will take the form of organized violence.

The atomization of society has its good side: social mobility. Many a professional soldier has lost his Prussianized kinks after working in the Ruhr mines, many a previous failure has proved himself in the tough scramble of postwar life. Healthy distrust of outworn German codes is surging. Fanaticism for the state is finished. On this point, the Germans are explicit: "Wir sind nicht noch einmal die Dummen" (We're not going to be played for suckers again).

At bottom, the Germans seem to seek a chance to work off the weight of guilt. The Germans naturally want to feel again that they belong, somewhere. But they will not blindly buy another "new order."

This state of mind produces no easily definable political pattern. It is rather meaningless to talk of "democracy" in western Germany: the Germans at this point are neither particularly "prodemocratic" nor "anti-democratic."

"Nationalism" is an equally irrelevant term. Since their destruction and partition in 1945, the "Reich" and the "nation" have simply not been realities to the Germans. The very meager successes of the noisy "nationalist" parties signify more protest against existing economic inadequacies than passion for a political ideal.

The Leaders. Durable, level-headed Konrad Adenauer is undoubtedly the best available Chancellor for the Germans. To a people weary of bombast, Adenauer makes calm speeches; to a people fearful of the state, he gives unobtrusive administration. His chief stock in trade is still his shrewd knack for compromise. Rather than have the workers grow restive, Adenauer, the conservative Christian-Democrat, has given trade unions more responsibility than they ever had in Germany. In order to keep former soldiers from deserting to the radical Right, Adenauer the antimilitarist courteously receives influential former generals.

In dealing with the Allies, Adenauer & Co. have adopted tactics that seem unusual for Germans: politeness and waiting. When confronted with an Allied order they dislike, they often ask courteously for time to think it over.

Socialist leader Kurt Schumacher, Adenauer's implacable political foe, has a more dramatic vision than the Chancellor. Schumacher better understands Communist aims and tactics. His Utopian goal is a "big Europe," a continent free from the Atlantic to the Soviet border; he considers the "little Europe" envisaged by projects like the Schuman Plan a trap on the road to his larger objective. This all-or-nothing attitude makes the Socialist boss a hard man for the West's statesmen to deal with. It also cuts down Schumacher's popularity in western Germany.

Rearmament. On foreign policy, the Adenauer-Schumacher feud cleaves the Bundestag. Many German and Allied officials hope, probably in vain, for a "great coalition" of conservatives and Socialists so that German rearmament can be launched by bipartisan decision. German opposition to rearmament has decreased greatly in the last six months. There has been what the Germans call "Zeit zum umdenken"--time to think it over. General Eisenhower's declaration that the German soldier never lost his honor soothed much injured pride. Oddly enough, Neo-Nazi Ernst Remer (TIME, May 21) has also been helpful. A German veteran explained how: "When that scum Remer started lambasting rearmament, we soldiers figured rearmament must be the right thing." Two other factors: rising prosperity gives the Germans a feeling they have something to defend; and Allied successes in Korea suggest that joining the West is not joining the hopeless side.

Adenauer has wisely entrusted his embryonic defense ministry to a sober, militarism-proof trade-unionist, Theodor Blank. Blank's top experts, Generals Adolf Heusinger and Hans Speidel, have anti-Nazi records, though they also had brilliant military careers.

New German Danger? The increased readiness to rearm will go for nothing unless the Germans get Gleichberechtigung (equality of rights), i.e., removal of the last discriminatory restrictions on western Germany. Specifically, this would mean the abolition of the Allied nursemaid, the High Commission. Many Americans here feel sure that the U.S. could just as well exercise economic controls through the E.G.A., political controls through an ambassador, military controls through Ike Eisenhower.

What is needed is a whopping gesture, something on the order of the proposed Japanese treaty, saying in effect: "O.K., boys. The war is over and we are ready to be friends again, pledged to defend each other." German leaders are not going to rearm a "second-class people," and Germans are not going to fight as "second-class soldiers." The French give the impression that they still want to avoid both a German army and German equality. Britain, while rigorously rearming at home, has gone slow on Germany, apparently in deference to its anti-U.S. left-wing Socialist sentiment. U.S. officials have been waiting for everybody else to make up their minds.

In recent weeks, there have been signs of progress. U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy came back from Washington with speed-up orders. Britain officially ended the state of war with Germany, and the U.S. and other countries are following suit. All the arguments for delay fall flat before the fact that, on the basis of NATO plans, Western Europe cannot be made defensible without the Germans.

The "German danger" today is not that the Germans will dominate or desert the West. The danger is rather that the Germans will not be put into position to do their proper share for the West.

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