There was another aspect of this, quite dangerous, again for the future. The economic success had meant an influx of immigrants, ‘guest workers’ as they were excruciatingly known — the ‘guest’ was supposed to mean that they would leave once they had made their little pile. Of these, Turks stood out, and they arrived in hundreds of thousands. Generally they were from provincial Anatolia and, often enough, the Black Sea coast; in the first generation, which had grown up in a secular republic, they worked hard enough and of course tended to live together. In France, which was far freer of small-town regulation and prissiness than Germany, such immigrants duly melted, apart from a residue, in the pot. In Germany the process of integration took generations longer and, of all strange things, the third generation of ‘guest workers’ turned out to be quite Islamic, ferrying in its brides from Anatolian villages, such that the non-integration was perpetuated. The same had happened with the millions of Polish migrants in the later nineteenth century: they had their own churches and sports clubs, were cold-shouldered by the German trade unions, and took five generations to penetrate the Hamburg football team or the Politburo of the German Democratic Republic.
West Berlin was an island within an island, strongly affected by the presence of foreign military, and heavily subsidized. The city was led by a remarkable man, Willy Brandt, who was impatient of the small-town pieties of Bonn. He drank, chased women, and told funny stories. He had also had an exceedingly creditable career — an illegitimate working-class birth in Lübeck, a self-propelled rise through the educational system, an immediate teenage detestation of the Nazis, flight to Norway where, learning the language on the boat, he became a left-wing journalist; work for an anti-Nazi resistance network that included false passports and residence in Berlin; friends all over the place. In other countries, such men and women often turned Communist, especially when Stalin started winning, but Brandt, like other left-wing Germans (and Arthur Koestler), had seen the Communists in destructive action in the last days of the Weimar Republic, when they had co-operated with the Nazis in order to destroy the Social Democrats. Brandt (like Ernst Reuter, his predecessor as mayor of Berlin, who had spent the Nazi years in Ankara as professor of Town Planning) knew his Communists, and as mayor of Berlin he faced them down (and subsequently as chancellor also faced down the extreme Left). He understood that in a democracy the political parties should co-operate to maintain the system if the system were not to collapse. That had failed to happen in the pre-Hitler republic, where, in the restaurant of the Reichstag, the lunchtime tables would have a notice, ‘Only for members of the Catholic (Centre) Party’. Rather than face cantankerous negotiations with the Free Democrats (FDP), the two main parties formed a Grand Coalition. In that way the CDU could control the conservative and Catholic Bavarians, the SPD could contain rebellious left-wing anti-capitalists, and the FDP would subdue its vanities. There was a further element. In the mid-sixties, the American involvement in Vietnam, the possibility that Germany might face a Soviet attack in isolation, brought vital matters to the fore — the future of NATO, the opportunity for a German finger on a nuclear trigger, the possibility of an Anglo-Franco-German Europe: matters that required a strong German government. The querulous Free Democrats were sidelined; so were the right of the Right and the left of the Left. The Grand Coalition emerged in 1966, with a bizarre partnership of the Nazi-resisting Brandt as foreign minister, with an oily Swabian, Kurt Georg Kiesinger (whose Nazi past was at once ‘leaked’ from East Berlin), as chancellor.
Even so, the Grand Coalition pulled in different ways — an element of social and school liberalization, but also a ‘Stability Law’ requiring savings. Whatever: the boom went on with growth again at the fabulous 7 per cent while inflation went back to a trivial level. On the whole, it was Brandt’s side of the coalition that profited: if the Left were anywhere near power, and matters improved as the various elements in the old austerity proved irksome, then the CDU, representing the old virtues, would appear nagging and irrelevant. Welfare spending, 15 per cent of the GDP in 1950, edged up in the later sixties to 18.7 per cent, and did not bring about the end of the world. Brandt’s standing rose. Meanwhile, the coalition came under strain. As the dollar weakened, pressure came from Washington for a serious revaluation of the Mark, and that threatened the profits of the exporters. On the Right, Franz Josef Strauss spoke for them; on the other side, Karl Schiller spoke for international finance (he won: there was a revaluation — 8.5 per cent — in 1969, two others following in 1971 and 1973). As the elections approached (1969) the small Free Democratic Party edged towards the Left, talking of educational reform, ‘participation’ and youth: Ralf Dahrendorf, author of a considerable analysis of Germany’s problems, emerged as a radical, and beady liberal eyes were trained on the foreign ministry. In 1969 a new (‘Little’) coalition emerged, with Brandt as chancellor and Walter Scheel (not Dahrendorf, who was sidelined to Brussels) as foreign minister. Schiller and Helmut Schmidt, both of them remarkable and memorable figures, took over the economic ministries, with functioning corporate institutions and a provision for intelligent public spending. In time, this was to cause strain, because debts built up, but Germany, quite unlike England, had a good seventies. Even a foreign policy began to emerge.
In the sixties, bright people among the Social Democrats had argued that some opening should be made towards Moscow, towards eastern European countries especially, and that the way towards change in Berlin would be through concession, not denunciation. One reason for the Russians’ behaviour over Berlin was a conviction that, isolated, it would be drained of people, and there was some truth in that: in order to keep the population up, young men who studied there were exempted from conscription, and there was much studying, accordingly, with, accordingly, a great many students, male and female, with nothing to do except make up grievances. Besides, improvements in Berlin, such as family visits, would hardly be gained through head-on collision: for that, the West was simply, locally, too weak. Even in 1963 a Social Democrat warhorse, Egon Bahr, had told a stout Protestant audience at Tutzing that there would have to be Wandel durch Annäherung, meaning that greater closeness would bring transformation (Brandt had been meant to make this speech, but, to his subsequent resentment, missed the cue). This line may have been encouraged by Moscow, with which another warhorse, Herbert Wehner, an old Comintern hand, still had his links; the speech occurred in the late-Khrushchev-period ‘thaw’, when countries bordering Germany and Austria were taking little steps of their own to make travel somewhat easier.