FOR THE THIRD time in as many days we cross the border without being able to see it, and spend twenty minutes trying to work out if we are in East or West Germany. Charlotte was born and raised in the East German city of Leipzig, but she is no less uncertain than I am about which former country we are in. “You just would not know anymore unless you are told,” she says. “They have to put up a sign to mark it.” A landscape once scarred by trenches and barbed wire and minefields exhibits not so much as a ripple. On the outside, at least, it’s perfectly clean. Somewhere near this former border we pull off the road into a gas station. It has three pumps in a narrow channel without space to maneuver or to pass. The three drivers filling their gas tanks need to do it together, and move along together, for if any one driver dawdles, everyone else must wait. No driver dawdles. The German drivers service their cars with the efficiency of a pit crew. Precisely because the arrangement is so archaic, Charlotte guesses we must still be in West Germany. “You would never find this kind of gas station in East Germany,” she says. “Everything in East Germany is new.” She also claims she can guess at sight whether a person, and especially a man, is from the east or the west. “West Germans are much prouder. They stand straight. East Germans are more likely to slouch. West Germans think East Germans are lazy.”
“East Germans are the Greeks of Germany,” I say.
“Be careful,” she says.
From Düsseldorf we drive to Leipzig, and from Leipzig we hop a train to Hamburg to find the mud wrestling. Along the way she humors me by parsing her native tongue for signs of anality. “Kackwurst is the term for feces,” she says grudgingly. “It literally means shit sausage. And it’s horrible. When I see sausages I can’t think of anything else.” She thinks a moment. “Bescheissen: someone shit on you. Klugscheisser: an intelligence shitter.
“If you have a lot of money,” she continues, “you are said to shit money: Geldscheisser.” She rips a handful of other examples off the top of her head, a little shocked by how fertile is this line of thinking, before she says, “And if you find yourself in a bad situation, you say, ‘Die Kacke ist am dampfen the shit is steaming.’” She stops and appears to realize she is encouraging a theory of German national character.
“It’s just in the words,” she says.
“Sure it is.”
“It doesn’t mean it applies.”
Outside of Hamburg we stopped for lunch at a farm owned by a man named Wilhelm Nölling, a German economist now in his seventies but with the kick and bite of a much younger man. He has the chiseled features and silver hair of a patrician but the vocal cords of a bleacher bum. “The Greeks want us to pay their lunch!” he bellows, as he gives me a tour of his private goat pen. “That is why they are rioting in the streets! Baaa!” Back when the idea of the euro was being bandied about, Nölling had been a governor of the Bundesbank. From the moment the discussion turned serious he has railed against the euro. He’d written one mournful pamphlet called “Good-bye to the Deutsche Mark?” and another, more declarative pamphlet called “The Euro: A Journey to Hell.” Together with three other prominent German economists and financial leaders he’d filed a lawsuit, still wending its way through the German courts, challenging the euro on constitutional grounds. Just before the deutsche mark got scrapped, Nölling had argued to the Bundesbank that they should just keep all the notes. “I said, ‘Don’t shred it!” he now says with great gusto, leaping out of an armchair in the living room of his farmhouse. “I said, ‘Pile it all up, put it in a room, in case we need it later!’”
He finds himself stuck: he knows that he is engaged in an exercise futile and pointless. “Can you turn this back?” he says. “We know we can’t turn this back. If they say, ‘Okay, we were wrong, you were right,’ what do you do? That is the hundred-thousand-million-dollar question.” He thinks he knows what should be done but doesn’t think Germans are capable of doing it. The idea he and his fellow dissident German economists have cooked up is to split the European Union in two for financial purposes. One euro, a kind of second-string currency, would be issued for, and used by, the deadbeat countries—Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and so on. The first-string euro would be used by “the homogenous countries, the ones you can rely on.” He lists these reliable countries: Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, and (he hesitates for a second over this) France.
“Are you sure the French belong?”
“We discussed this,” he says seriously. They decided that for social reasons you couldn’t really exclude the French. It was just too awkward.
As he presided over the Maastricht treaty, which created the euro, the French prime minister François Mitterrand is rumored to have said privately that yoking Germany to the rest of Europe in this way was sure to lead to imbalances, and the imbalances were certain to lead to some crisis, but by the time the crisis struck he’d be dead and gone—and others would sort it out. Even if Mitterrand didn’t say exactly that, it’s the sort of thing he should have said, as he surely thought it. At the time it was obvious to a lot of people, and not only Bundesbank governors, that these countries did not belong together.
But then how did people who seem as intelligent and successful and honest and well organized as the Germans allow themselves to be drawn into such a mess? In their financial affairs they’d ticked all the little boxes to ensure that the contents of the bigger box were not rotten, and yet ignored the overpowering stench wafting from the big box. Nölling felt the problem had its roots in German national character. “We entered Maastricht because they had these rules,” he says, as we move off to his kitchen and plates heaped with the white asparagus Germans take such pride in growing. “We were talked into this under false pretenses. Germans are, by and large, gullible people. They trust and believe. They like to trust. They like to believe.”
If the deputy finance minister has a sign on his wall reminding him to see the point of view of others, here is perhaps why. Others do not behave as Germans do: others lie. In this financial world of deceit Germans are natives on a protected island who have not been inoculated against the virus carried by visitors. The same instincts that allowed them to trust Wall Street bond salesmen also allowed them to trust the French, when they promised there would be no bailouts, and the Greeks, when they swore that their budget was balanced. That is one theory. Another is that they trusted so easily because they didn’t care enough about the cost of being wrong, as it came with certain benefits. For the Germans the euro isn’t just a currency. It’s a device for flushing away the past. It’s another Holocaust Memorial. The Greeks may have German public opinion polls running against them, but deeper forces run in their favor.