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23. 05. 10. - 04:00

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23. 05. 10. - 04:00

Don't feel sorry for the Germans

GERMANS are longing for a return to the days of the mighty deutschmark as the euro totters on the precipice and threatens to drag the whole EU project under with it.

The Greek “punishment” for bringing the EU to the brink of collapse is the biggest cheque in history, more than £650billion, of which Germany will end up paying the lion’s share.

Chancellor Angela Merkel told her countrymen that such pain was necessary, that only by preserving the euro at all costs could the European Union be saved. Now Germans feel sorry for themselves and want others to feel their pain. They are about to bite the bullet of hard times: kindergartens will be closing, the swimming pools running dry, the sun lounger-grabbing holidays abroad swapped for chilly weekends by the Baltic Sea.

Yet we should not feel sorry for them, only pity that so many were taken in by so few for so long. Unlike Britain they lost the building block of post-war success: their national currency. Now it is fast becoming a countrywide obsession to weep about and long for its return as the financial storm clouds gather.

More than half of all Germans say they want the mark back as their anger grows about the size of the Greek bailout, a sentiment in tandem with apathy for the EU project underwritten as it has been since 1945 by guilt about the Second World War. Yet for many of them it never went away. In homes across the country the Germans are feeling consoled by counting out the six-and-a-half billion marks in notes and seven billion marks in coins that they still hold.

Those are Bundesbank figures and there could be more of them. They are comfort blankets, reminders of a time and a place when Weimar, inflation, Hitler, was and ruin stained the nation. They provide solace once more as the “European project” crumbles around the hated euro. “It shouldn’t be that surprising,” wrote a commentator on the Deutsche Welle German TV website. “Germans were never that thrilled about the new money anyway. They had a deep emotional connection to their deutschmark.
   
It was a strong, stable currency. It meant Germany would never return to the hyperinflation of the Weimar years. It led the country through a post-war economic miracle and political rehabilitation. It was a familiar, reliable friend.” Yet ever since 1945, initially choked by remorse about the Second World War and later euphoric at the vision of economic conquest of the continent they once tried to dominate with storm troopers, Germans have blindly backed the flawed European project in every decade since the Treaty of Rome came into effect.

They voted in the elites who wanted lunch in Brussels, courts in Luxembourg, a centralised bank in the Fatherland and taxpayer-funded summits in every one of the 27 nations now grouped under the fraying flag of the EU. They voted for the Right, the Left and the green parties who promised a happy-clappy, no-more-war and milk-and-honey future for all in a United States of Europe.

They voted for the fat-cat politicians to lord it in Belgium on £100-aday expenses for just turning up, on layer upon layers of extra bureaucracy, extra taxes and ever increasing interference in the lives of ordinary people just like themselves.

They voted it all in because they believed the guff that united they were strong and that they would always be in the driving seat. Now they are still strong– Europe’s largest economy, the world’s second-largest export nation, the biggest savers on the continent – but are bleating because the bill has een delivered and they must pay it. But having been bankrupted twice by the world wars Germany unleashed in the last century Germans ror of the debt and inflation that come with the staggering amount of deficit they now carry.

Stalking the psyche of all in this land of technocratic marvels, autobahns, medical brilliance, shipbuilding, car-making and engineering are the memories of catastrophe when their money was worth less than the paper it was printed on. Those nightmarish fears look like becoming reality as Greece spoiled the dream by gaining entrance to the club under false pretences. The next worry is Spain, Portugal, Ireland  and Italy will produce a begging bowl. The patience of a hard-working,

‘They blindlybacked the flawed European project’ 39 hard-taxed nation like Germany is beginning to wear thin and I can report that in over a decade as a oreign correspondent in Berlin I have seen a pride in this project shrink to modest satisfaction then apathy and now anger.

In ways large and small, Germans are voicing their disgust at the bailout to Greece and by extensionthe EU colossus that dictates their lives. Earlier this month they voted out Merkel’s party from power in a key regional state election that now robs her coalition of a majority in parliament. The press claims 86 per cent of Germans are against bailing out Greece and a quartet of  dis tinguished economics professorshave a lawsuit pending, stating that the Athens aid package breaches the EU’s own rules. In the bars and clubs where thedissatisfi ed once moaned about the Teuro (a play on the German word teuer meaning expensive and euro) the y now refer to the euro as “the zombie”, something sinister, otherworldly, loathsome.

“The feeling is that the European experiment is dead and is being kept artifi cially alive on a lifesupport system of taxpayer-funded bail-outs,” said a caller to Bavarian Radio the day after Merkel was booed in parliament as she linked the EU and its coinage together in one sentence. NOW Germans, who work long hours, save like mad, shun debt – most live in rented accommodation – are livid that their prosperity is itself being mortgaged to pay the debts of a people entirely unlike them. Already taxed to the hilt they were told last week by Merkel that the tax cuts she promised in her election campaign last year are now off the agenda, they have to pay for Greece and the future of the euro.

“I don’t know if she thinks we will all thank her for taking more money off us,” said Volker Schneider, a Berlin double-glazing salesman. “We are ruled by elites who operate for elites. It doesn’t matter to them if we gripe that they get sub sidised dining in Brussels or extra pensions or fi rst-class travel. We are powerless.

“They have erected this citadel and we are outside it. There won’t be a revolution but they will fi nd the level of anger among the people when the polls come around next time. I see a rise in nationalist parties that don’t want anything to do with the EU and saving waifs and strays and I will be voting for them.”

Several years ago I remember the anger when Germany decided it wouldn’t put the EU constitution to a referendum, referendums having been banned because the Nazis used them to fix votes back when they ran the shop. That outrage pales in comparison to the visceral, gut anger that Germans now feel about Greece and its spendthrift ways – and the EU. But what did they expect? It was the Germans who kept up the pace of recruitment for more and more nations to join the club. It was they who landed their people with a constitution it didn’t want but didn’t give them a referendum to vote on it, knowing it would be rejected. It is they who drew up the impractical rules governing fiscal behaviour that the Greeks have now driven a truck through. So what did they expect? A continent of people who are as obedient as themselves? This week British stock markets fell because Germany once again took the lead in an attempt at regulation without consulting anyone. The arrogance of power has not left them, it is just being misused in different ways.

Perhaps we shouldn’t blame them for trying hard to make this flawed scheme work. Helmut Kohl, the giant of European politics who led Germany from 1982 to 1998, was one of the main builders of the EU.

He wrote in his autobiography Memories of being a young man walking through the broken, desolate landscape of his home city in 1945 and pledging to himself:  “Never again.” But thanks to him and successors his countrymen are walking through the broken, desolate landscape of a Europe facing financial ruin. Feel sorry for them? After all, like the wars that preceded this folly, they started it.

German Herald

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