Untitled

Press, 19 October 1978, Page 1

Written

by

OLIVER

of “The Press,”

and prepared before the journalists’ strike began on October 9.

The first and most enduring impression of Germany is how wealthy it is. Second and third impressions are how many people there are in the area available, and how monotonous most of the residential buildings are. Its wealth enables Germany to invite numerous journalists from around the world every year to go there and look at matters of interest in their specialist fields. It costs the nation about $2500 a person per week. The industry of the Geri mans is proverbial. It is I perhaps this which has I given rise to the less-de-served reputation for efficiency. If the Germans appear efficient it is because of their industry, and not for any separate quality. Twice during the fortnight study tour the luggage of one of the , group of four in which 1 , travelled was mislaid or j misdirected by Lufthansa. | ■ All the time, effort, and I money poured into urban 1 landscaping and beau- ! tification could not ensure that the grass on public I lawns was kept mown. In Munich, particularly, walking across a lawn was to walk ankle-deep. ' or deeper, in uncut grass. But the parks were large and beautifully laid out. Germany does not . present a very happy side 1 to the newly-arrived visitor. Almost the first faces visible at Frankfurt Airport, the main arrival i point, are the unsmiling mugshots of members of I the Baader-Meinhof Gang : staring down from a postI er. There were armed guards, with pistols and automatic weapons, everywhere at the airports, and I even outside our hotel in Berlin, where the United ' States swimming team I was staying. A New Zealander tends to notice machine guns, perhaps more than residents of other countries, because they are thin on the ground here. But Gerrnany has aquired a quite undeserved reputation for extreme radicalism. Only Berlin, Bremen, and Frankfurt are considered

at all radical among the universities, and the overwhelming majority of Germans are incredibly law abiding. The discipline on the oads, of pedestrians crossing the roads, of people standins in queues, is astonishing to a visitor ,m even a relatively disciplined country like New Zealand. An Italian in our party was dumbfounded. He told graphic tales of the other extreme, of the lack of discipline in Naples. This descipline is what makes the residential areas of Germany so boring to look at. AU those buildings, painted in the same very limited range of colours — greys, browns, and greens — all with the same thin row of trees (usually poplars) planted in front to screen them. Really, one should be grateful for the trees rath-

er than critical. Countless millions of trees have been planted in Germany to camouflage industrial buildings. The problem of sweeping leaves in the autumn must be awesome. Eventually, the traveller realises that a line of trees might camouflage 100, 10,000, or a million people; instead of a camouflage they became an advertisement. There are strict laws governing building, but these laws say nothing about colours. The restricted range of colours is the decision of millions of individual Germans to live in conformity with each other. It is the despair of the landscape planners and achitects. The greys, browns, and greens are the product of social pressure, not of restrictive laws. Germans are very proud of the rebuilding they have done since the devastation of 1939-45 — and well they might be. Thirty years and billions of Deutschmarks later, the centres of the big cities I visited, such as Koln, Berlin, and Munich, still carry the scars of the bombing. Some sites have been left as memorials to the destruction. But renovation of their cities has been low on their list of priorities. First, they re-established their industry and provided for housing; then they built educational and health facilities; and only now are they beginning to beautify their country. Now there is a strange jumble of beauty and efficiency. In the charming old town of Wuppertal, the huge Bayer chemical firm has a waste disposal unit, carefully hidden so as not to diminish the landscape. A 450-year-old castle is the headquarters for the coal mining operation which has created

the world's largest artificial hole — six kilometres long by four kilometres wide by 300 metres deep. Where renovation has been the result is extraordinary. In the industrial centres on the Ruhr, such as Essen, the air is now clean, but Bonn, the capital, is enveloped by a blue-grey murky haze. Waste disposal is a tremendous problem; in the .Ruhr region alone there were 1.9 M old cars to be disposed of last year. The Germans react to all this in a variety of ways. One of the more bizarre, for a New Zealander, is to escape to a caravan in the countryside for the weekend. These caravans sit on permanent sites and their owners take up residence every weekend, wet or fine. Some of the sites are pleasant tourist spots, but so great is the demand that many just have to go where they can. Beside the polluted, brown, unpleasant Ruhr River is a large caravan park, w’hose main view is over water the inhabitants dare not touch. Germans are very outdoor people. It is nothing for 10,000 people to visit one nature reserve on a fine Saturday afternoon — which is very worrying for the authorities trying to protect the area’s natural qualities, A third of the very restricted area of West Berlin is in parks and lakes. In Munich, another aspect of recreation is clearly visible. There is one beerhall with seating for 4000 people, with bands blaring and everyone shouting. Plastic steins

holding a litre of beer are now provided — as everyone steals them and it is cheaper than glass, and everyone has to bash their steins together with every mouthful. The Inhabitants of Munich seemed to do a lot of very serious drinking. Because everyone lives in apartment buildings, a fine week-end will bring families and individuals into the parks in their throngs. There they map out their little space and spend their afternoon out of touch with the group right next to them — reading, sleeping, sunbathing, talking, or playing. It was like watching a chess board with a piece on every square and all playing a different game. There are museums everywhere, well patronised, but a shorttyte of military museums in the cities I visited. Then there was the strange sight of Koln airport, where the passenger terminals were built as two clearly-de-fined Stars of David. I lacked the nerve to ask why. But, underlying everything, Germany gave the impression of affluence. The roads, buildings, parks, landscape, number of cars, appearance of the people, shops (and prices); all had an aura of wealth. Germans tended to shrug their shoulders at this. They were proud of it, but they took it for granted. They were happy to be living in a golden age; they had worked hard enough and suffered enough for it. But some were painfully aware that gold is the colour of autumn ■ . .