Spreading the Wealth

In the warmth of spring, the Mercedes, BMWs and Opels streaming along the Autobahnen have to dodge ever more midget cars of workers, piled high with blanket rolls and suitcases, headed for weekend campsites along the Rhine. The West German Hausfrau roams through gleaming supermarkets to choose such exotic imports as avocado pears and Chinese litchi nuts, along with the regular order of Wurst. Her leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned offspring, the Americanized German youth, seeks his fun in ice cream shops or "Jazz Bar'' record stores, or atop his own noisy motorbike.

Fourteen years after the war, his nation restored to world councils, his society surprisingly stable and democratic, the German no longer lives just to work; he works to live--and to forget the grim existence before 1948, the year West Germany's struggling economy was remodeled and started on the road to today's success. After this Economic Year One, Germans spent their money in distinct waves. First came the food wave. A year or two later. Germans went on a clothing spree. As the hunger for these basic things was satisfied, demand focused on household goods, then on motorcycles and cars, later on travel. Today 'Germans are back on a food buying spree, this time an Edel-fresswelle, or high-class-food wave. The best South American coffees (at $2.50 per Ib.) are now as much a commonplace as washing machines and refrigerators.

Wages Up. In the boom's early years, profits went mainly into the pockets of owners and managers, or back into expansion. Labor docilely withheld wage demands while industry rebuilt, and heeded the argument that costs had to be kept low to compete in international markets. Now workers and salaried white collar people are sharing in the benefits of the economic "miracle." Since 1948, wages have more than doubled, but they still average only $27 per week. The traditional 48-hr, work week is gone: Germans work 45 hours, are heading toward 40. To supplement family incomes, wives often work (one-third of Germany's labor force are women), as do children past 16. If salaries sound low, there are also the vital "fringe benefits" provided by the federal government. Steered by the "social free market" philosophy of Economic Minister Ludwig Erhard, the government pumps 40% of its budget revenues into social uses. Every German worker and his family get government-subsidized medical care. State old-age pensions are now so high that trade unions are dropping their own pension plans.

Among other items of prosperity: P:One-third of all German families now own their own homes.

P:Stock ownership is being systematically spread. Recently, nearly 1,000,000 individual Germans earning under $3,800 a year signed up for shares in a public sale of the state-owned Preussag mining and oil company. The government expects to sell more "People's Shares'" in a half dozen other major firms it owns, including Volkswagen. In private industry, more than 30% of the employees of the big DEMAG engineering firm own stock in their company.

P: 3,200,000 Germans are car owners, and 20% of new buyers are hourly wage workers who, ten years ago, could not afford or get anything bigger than a motorbike.

The Travel Itch. With fatter wallets, worker and boss alike share the travel mania that has swept Germany. For executives, doctors have provided an excuse: "Manager's Disease," defined as nervous jitters, high blood pressure and other signs of overwork. Spas advertise cures for Managerkrankheit: "The modern way to spend vacations . . . adds years to your life.'' Most Germans need no excuse. This year more than 5,000.000 will surge across Germany's borders, fanning out through southern Europe or taking one of the thousands of cheap, air-charter tours to Majorca, Sicily or Morocco, traveling in organized groups (sometimes to the horror of local populations). Other millions will drive to Bavarian alpine foothills, carrying their own tents and air mattresses.

At home the prosperous Germans spend heavily on sports, movies, gliding clubs. There are some 200 legitimate theaters and 39 opera houses running ten months in the year, and all are heavily supported. Critics complain that preoccupation with material things has delayed revival of the artistic spirit of the stage and music, which Hitler destroyed years ago; a majority of the productions on the stages of Berlin. Hamburg and Munich this season are foreign imports, such as Look Back in Anger and Tea and Sympathy, and postwar creativity in music and art is thin. An artist complains: "There is nothing to rebel against. Anything you do is all right."

Germans generally are too busy making money--and enjoying it--to concern themselves long with such aesthetic failings. For most it is enough that, politically and socially, their nation has proved as stable as any in Western Europe in the past ten years. Germany's neighbors have watched nervously for outbursts of political extremism, but the German voting public has increasingly thrown its strength to the two main parties. Lacking a discontented proletariat, the big Socialist opposition seldom tries to engage Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats on economic grounds, prefers to make issues over foreign policy instead. There is little sign of militarist feeling; the new army is so hard up for recruits it must advertise vocational and technical training to compete with better-paying civilian employers.

As for West Germany's economic future, meaty Ludwig Erhard. brilliant planner of Germany's boom, surveyed the scene last week and forecast sunny weather ahead. The minor ripples of last year's recession have faded; March's production index was 5% over February, 6% above a year ago. Said Erhard: "An excellent long-range view."

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