Some Soul Massage For die Formierte Gesellschaft

Progress is a comfortable disease, E. E. Cummings once wrote. Even so, Americans and West Germans have al ways suffered, while enjoying progressively greater comforts, from the conviction that they should utilize their material prosperity for higher ends. To meet the demand, Lyndon Johnson prescribed the Great Society. Last week Ludwig Erhard called for the Teutonic equivalent: die formierte Gesellschaft --literally, the formed, well-ordered or harmonious society.

Erhard has used the phrase before. For weeks before the September election, he lectured campaign audiences on it, giving cabaret performers a field day for jokes about the "chloroformed" and "uniformed" society. Others unkindly compared it to the Nazis' Volks-gemeinschaft (people's community), or to the treacly togetherness of Moral Re-Armament. Ludwig Erhard had something quite different in mind, and he spelled it out a bit more fully in last week's two-hour inaugural address to the newly elected Bundestag. The new society, said he, "is not created by one action, but unfolds through a process." It is already in formation, being the next stage of evolution beyond the "social market economy" created by Erhard's liberal postwar economic policies. Thanks to the success of these policies, "German society has lost the character of a class society," and has become "a society of achievement" instead. The challenge is how to utilize this new alignment.

Single Fund. Erhard's greatest complaint against the present governmental structure is that it is "threatened by all too many attempts to give special interests undue weight." "Special interests," to the federal chancellor, means not only unions, employers, farmers and refugee organizations but also individual cities and states (Lander). To assist in the creation of a harmonious society, he urged the creation of a single "German communal fund," to be financed jointly by tax receipts of state and federal governments equal to 1% of the gross national product.

This projected annual income of some $1 billion to $1.5 billion would be used for "the realization of community tasks," for example, the modernization of hospitals and the educational system, which has traditionally been the province of the individual Lander. Other likely areas of expenditure: scientific research, studies of air and water pollution, creation of parks, and planning for backward economic areas. Another advantage, from Economist Erhard's point of view: the German communal fund would coordinate federal and state spending for maximum anticyclical effect on economic booms and busts.

The Chancellor's ambitious plans for the formierte Gesellschaft face formidable obstacles. Under the German constitution, such fiscal reform would have to be approved by the Lander, then gain a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag. Erhard is the first to admit that his ambitious proposals cannot--and should not--be imposed on the nation by fiat. Instead, he contemplates the use of simple public exhortation to civic responsibility--the Seelenmassage (soul massage) that he has used for years to win over West Germans to his programs for social betterment through economic reforms.

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