Over to Volkswagens

The last time the Saar "went home" to Germany, after a plebiscite in 1935, scarlet swastika banners waved, brownshirts yelled "Heil Hitler," and the Fuhrer's guttural shouts rasped from street-corner loudspeakers. No such vaunts and threats disturbed the sooty serenity of the Saar last week when the famed coal and steel region on the French border was restored a second time to the German economy.

Now that France and Germany are so interlocked by trade agreements and political alliance, the Saar and the other "lost provinces" have ceased to be war-making issues. Politically, the Saar was reunited with West Germany in 1957. and in the further flowering of European friendship it was inevitable that economic integration, scheduled for 1960, should be advanced to an earlier date. For weeks the talk in the Saar's beerhalls has been of Der Tag X--the day the customs barriers between the Saar and Germany would be pulled down and moved west to the Saar's French frontier. In anticipation of the day when the mark replaced the franc, Volkswagen dealers alone booked 7,000 advance orders. Also heavy were orders for German TV, radio and appliances, which are priced 30% to 40% lower than French models.

In agreeing to pull out, the French had characteristically bargained for substantial concessions. Their nearby Lorraine steel plants will get 90 million tons of high-grade Saar coal at cost over the next two decades. The Moselle River is being dredged so that Lorraine steel exports, floating to sea on the Moselle and the Rhine, can compete more advantageously with German steel. And the French reserved the right to export more than $260 million worth of goods duty-free into the Saar each year.

As Der Tag X neared, there was a sudden realization by the Saarlanders that they would lose many of the social benefits they had enjoyed under the French welfare state. Though it could be argued that lower German prices would help compensate them, some wage earners muttered that their much-prized German nationality may cost them as much as 20% of their pay after taxes. Such complaints led some West German newspapers, in commenting on the "Little Reunification" with the Saar, to ask soberly whether 17 million East Germans might one day be similarly reluctant to give up Communist welfare privileges for a free economy with higher living standards but lacking some state social security benefits. The difference is that the Saar is merely exchanging French rule for German rule, whereas East Germans would be switching from totalitarianism to something of great price: freedom.

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