West Germany: Alt Lang Syne

By bus, automobile and special trains, 250,000 Germans originally from Silesia poured into Cologne last week. Jamming open-air restaurants and Bierstuben, they swapped stories with old friends over Rhenish beer and schnapps beneath banners proclaiming “For Silesia.” The occasion was the regular reunion of Germans expelled from Communist Poland after World War II. During a mammoth rally at fairgrounds on the banks of the Rhine, the gemütlich scene suddenly turned into a riot; stirred up by a rabble-rousing politician, the crowd nearly mobbed a German TV reporter who had suggested that Poland is doing well by the territories seized from Germany after World War II. In German politics, it is an article of faith that these territories must one day be liberated and that the Germans driven from the area will be able to go home.

But this belief, while steadfastly maintained in public, is becoming increasingly hollow. Far more realistic than last week’s mob scene was a rare joint appearance by Christian Democrat Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Berlin’s Socialist Mayor Willy Brandt, both of whom pleaded for reconciliation with Poland. The emotions that can still be stirred up by talk about the “lost homelands” in the East sometimes obscure a major political and social development in West Germany: the remarkably successful integration into the nation’s life of 13 million refugees, one-quarter of the population.

Happy Miracle. When their trek to freedom began 18 years ago, few thought that quick resettlement was possible. In one of the worst forced migrations of modern times, 9,400,000 ethnic Germans were abruptly expelled from Communist Europe, snowed up in West Germany in tattered covered wagons and with empty rucksacks. After the Iron Curtain snapped shut, 3,600,000 more Germans made their way West and heightened the crisis. The new arrivals were penniless, homeless and embittered. In the immediate postwar days, West Germans themselves were not much better off. The fierce competition between natives and “aliens” for jobs or even a roof created an explosive climate of mutual recrimination. It seemed as if the shaky new democracy, digging out of the wreckage of Hitler’s Reich, could scarcely survive the human avalanche.

Germany’s “economic miracle” drastically changed the picture. As the pace of recovery quickened, thousands of the largely agricultural immigrants were retrained for industrial jobs, and became indispensable to the labor-short German economy. Sharing the credit for the tougher political miracle of resettlement are the Federal Republic’s two major political parties. Competing actively for the “refugee vote,” Christian Democrats and Socialists backed a unique 50% tax on all property that West Germans had managed to save through the war, in order to compensate refugees who had lost their possessions. A special Equalization of Burdens Bank granted thousands of low-credit business loans. Since virtually all were homeless, the East Germans were the chief beneficiaries of 6,500,000 new housing units built since the war.

Revealing Sign. Inevitably, there have been disappointments. About 10% of the refugees still live in substandard housing, including 700 Silesian and Sudeten Germans whose flowerpots and television antennas eerily sprout from the reconverted barracks at Dachau. Many still feel that they are worse off now than they were in their old homes. Only one out of six farmers tills his own land; when he does, it is on a much smaller plot than he owned in the East.

But most refugees have good jobs, and some who arrived penniless now own thriving businesses. Thousands have married West Germans and raised families. Major indicator that the onetime aliens now consider themselves real West Germans is the collapse of the Refugee Party, which once had 27 seats in the Bundestag. It has had no national voice since 1957; last month in Lower Saxony, where refugees comprise about 25% of the population, it polled a scant 3.7% of the vote during state elections. Says Hans Koplitz, a Sudeten German who now owns a prosperous laundry and dry-cleaning establishment in Munich: “At most, we pay lip service to the idea of returning to our homelands.”