Lebensraum with a View

At a pub near Shannon Airport, a newly landed Irish-American couple listened to the rich, incomprehensible patois of the regulars at the bar. "Just listen, Harry," breathed the wife. "They're talking Gaelic!" Actually, they were talking German. What the U.S. tourists did not realize was that the "natives" were squireens from West Germany who, like scores of their compatriots, have been eagerly buying up cut-rate Irish real estate.

In search of Lebensraum with a view, affluent West Germans in the past few years have swarmed across Europe on the biggest Iand-buying spree in their history. Germans have become Europe's heaviest buyers of vacation homes in virtually every bracket, ranging from a department store tycoon's $1,000,000 pleasure dome on Cap d'Antibes to $1,500 cottages on the Mediterranean that are advertised as "your own castle in Spain." Though the stock market and their economy have leveled off, West German entrepreneurs are going ahead with plans to build new homes and hotels from the Atlantic to the Adriatic, yielding to the mystic lure of the sun that impelled the Goths across the Alps for centuries, and that inspired Goethe to ask yearningly Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen bluehn? (Do you know the land where the lemons bloom?).

Vienna in Switzerland. The most populous paradise for sun-starved Germans is the 200-mile strip of Spanish coastline along the Costa Brava and the Costa del Sol, where they have invested more than $55 million in the past two years. Italy is still popular with Germans from Konrad Adenauer down; on the French Riviera, real estate men say they are the best customers of all for three-room apartments priced at $60,000 up. But many well-heeled Germans have fled to more pastoral retreats such as Switzerland, where the government reported last week that they had bought 50% of all real estate sold since January 1961. Swiss retreats have long been favored by such Top Germans as Steel Baron Heinrich von Thyssen, whose Lugano villa houses an art collection that has become a big tourist attraction. But many of the country's plushest pads now belong to West Germany's top movie stars, including Curt Juergens and Caterina Valente. After Nadja Tiller settled into a handsome hillside villa in Ticino, Actress Romy Schneider picked up a palatial lakeside chateau; not to be outdone, Romy's father bought a local cafe, installed a bevy of blonde waitresses and operated it for a while as a "Viennese dance hall."

Some of the shrewdest German buyers are flocking to the "Irish Riviera," as they call Eire's eastern counties, where farm land is almost one-fourth the price of comparable terrain in high-priced Germany. However, prices usually soar at the drop of a guttural. After failing to sell 67 rocky acres for $1,000 in 1959, a County Cork farmer recently unloaded 15 of them for $8,000. High prices and scarce land have also brought prosperity to con men. Last week on the Spanish coast, where in some places land has doubled in price to $25 per square yard in one year, one of several convicted German swindlers was sentenced to jail for selling compatriots choice homesites on the ocean floor.

Beauty in Bavaria. One reason for the exodus, explains a German realty salesman, is that "Hitler and the war isolated us from the world." Says he: "Living abroad gives us a liberating feeling of belonging again." In fact, Germans abroad fraternize little with foreigners, prefer as a rule to segregate themselves in Teuton-villes that, except for sea air and plentiful help, could be summer suburbs of Stuttgart. Many buy land abroad in order to dispose of "black capital," as they call unreported income. Others frankly seek out areas that German real estate ads describe as "far from any crisis zone." One house hunter in County Galway wanted to know the prevailing wind. Told that it comes from the southwest, he beamed: "Good. It crosses 3,000 miles of sea. No atomic dust." However, most middle-income Germans reason that owning a resort cottage is simply a good investment; on their own vacations, they can save hotel bills, and later can usually rent their houses at a profit.

The ironic sequel to West Germans' hopes of "belonging to the world" is that GERMANS GO HOME signs have sprouted in Europe, largely as a result of a few ruthless speculators who boost prices, and the selfish Germans who despoil the scenery with barbed wire and Verboten signs. In Ireland, where onetime SS Hero Otto Skorzeny now raises prizewinning lambs, the clergy has even tried to persuade farmers that it is "patriotic" not to sell their land. One indignant priest, who had twice been chased off a German-owned beach, complained from the pulpit: "Has the day really come when an Irishman can't go for a swim in his own sea?" In tiny Ticino, Switzerland's only Italian-speaking canton, worried citizens formed a militantly anti-German outfit called D.D.T. (for Difesa del Ticino). But despite a new law screening all foreign real estate purchases, the Germans now outnumber the Swiss in many areas. "The average Swiss," sighs one official, "can no longer afford to buy his own home."

German developers are scouting emptier Eldorados as far afield as Lebanon and Iran. However, some experts think the boom is already losing steam. One portent is that some of the most fashionable Germans are rediscovering West Germany. Areas such as the Black Forest and Bavaria, they report, are not only beautiful and easy to reach, but have one unique advantage over almost any other vacation spots in Europe: few Germans go there.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.