Schmidt took over in 1974, and Germany managed the oil shock quite successfully. Motoring on Sundays was banned; traffic in cities was subjected to controls. To this day, the traffic mess of a British town would be unthinkable in a Germany where elementary enlightenment in such matters — a limit to the number of buses, and a prohibition of deliveries by vans and lorries after 8 a.m. is normal — comes as a matter of course; it is also true that, in spending public money to offset the effects of industrial crisis on old industrial cities, the West Germans were again very successful. Essen, heartland of the old Ruhr, suffered from the competition in iron and steel from up-and-coming countries such as Korea. So did Sheffield. Sheffield, like other northern English cities, was then swamped in ugly, badly planned concrete, with hardly any effect upon employment, and none at all upon prosperity. Essen was simply more intelligently managed, because local government, trade unions and employers knew something and could co-operate for the greater good. Perhaps the essential element was the federal system: if one of the big states embarked on a mistaken strategy, it would have to compete with alternatives practised elsewhere. This happened over education. Left-wing local governments offered an equivalent of the comprehensive schools that were pushed through uniformly in Great Britain, and, at that, schools which kept open all day, in such a way that housewives could work. These Gesamtschulen were, as in England, not only, on the whole, unsuccessful, but in some cases scandalously so. Parents then migrated to another state that had managed these affairs differently. One result was that the balance of prosperity shifted south, into Bavaria and Baden. Another result, some years later, was that the Gesamtschulen improved their ways. Again the question came up, why was England not Germany, rather than the other way about?
However, Europe was not going to be the answer to England’s problems. Whatever its prosperity, there was a sense that, somehow, its creativity was going. It could repeat past glories, and the Bayreuth of Wieland Wagner splendidly did so. But where were the great films of yesteryear, where the interesting architecture, and where, increasingly, the young generation? Overlaying it all, there was a cultural malaise, as the Germany of the ‘miracle’ generation bored its children, and still more its grandchildren; the universities were to suffer over this. Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, the German Orwell, moved over the border to Denmark, and just despised his native land: he notes, for instance, that at some time in the later eighties Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s New Year Address, on television, was got wrong: they played the previous year’s address, and no-one noticed. Enzensberger was bored, but was bored by the wrong things. He noted, quite rightly, that television was the opiate of the masses, that people would just look at a row of dots on the screen as if it mattered, that there were seventy people writing doctoral theses on one poet. But he was the product of a world that hated its grandparents, and shook its head at its parents. Of course, it was true that families mattered, but did there have to be a law by which a wife could not take a job until she had performed her housewifely duties? That made sense, but only if the tax system supported fathers, and the sheer costs meant that the State taxed, and did so in defiance of its own rules. Problems were coming up in this, and though the coalition government did try to modernize, it did so superficially. The intelligentsia were bored. Bayreuth put on strange interpretations of Wagner, and Horst-Eberhard Richter produced a ‘Physicians for Peace’ movement, recording that ‘we men must learn to overcome the militant image of masculinity’. Heavy, charmless, sentimental German Protestants hawked their consciences round the world, and chicken-muscled women in shorts were to be seen in the vicinity of the old Teutonia-Haus in the old Istanbul street of steps, looking patronizing right and left, and regarded with wonder by the locals: why were north European women so unappetizing? And yet Germany was the admirable European country, if you judged these things from the viewpoint of an England in which nothing worked. In the early 1980s England was going to produce an extraordinary counter-attack.
There was more. Helmut Schmidt had a sense of strategy, that Germany could be a model for East and West alike, and the country could take a lead in Europe. Here, he encountered France. The decline of the dollar maybe made some opening for an alternative world currency, the euro. However, there were severe difficulties. True, there was a successful economic community, but the economies were quite different, and England especially, where property had a preponderant part, and there were worldwide interests, did not fit.
French and German budgets were very different: in France deficits were second nature, whereas in Germany the Bundesbank had its rules and could operate independently, to encourage saving. The Common Agricultural Policy took up almost all of the European budget (a uniform fraction of the value added tax, itself varying from place to place) and if the franc went down against the Mark then there were problems as regards adjustment of the sums to be paid to farmers in the way of subsidies. In the end, a European common currency could just mean Germans paying Frenchmen to do nothing, and the British were as usual in the middle as regards the dollar. Even Helmut Schmidt shook his head at the complications.
The Germans went doggedly on, trying to find some formula for sensible foreign exchange. This really boiled down to some scheme by which the German taxpayer would pay for it, and in 1979 the French graciously agreed: a European Monetary System was founded, authorizing governments to draw unlimited credit to defend their currencies. Schmidt called this ‘part of a broader strategy for political self-determination in Europe’, and then had a battle with the Bundesbank, which would have in effect to create inflation in Germany in order to pay for irresponsible finance in France and Italy. The decreed rates, originally variable only by small percentages, had in the event to be widened, and there were also controls on capital movements — all of this a breach of the free-trade rules. In the early 1980s France even had a preposterous rerun of the Popular Front, and controls on ‘capital’ meant, for a time, that travellers could not take cash abroad. The bourgeoisie then re-enacted the suitcase-to-Switzerland part of the French historical scenario. Early in 1983 this farce was stopped, and two Frenchmen of guile, Jacques Delors, and his Treasury secretary, Michel Camdessus, were able to point to the high unemployment, the high inflation and the general bankruptcy of state concerns as evidence that ‘Europe’, rather than the go-it-alone Popular Front line, was the answer.