Joe Klein's European Listening Tour
Joe Klein is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is traveling in Europe for the London Guardian, where a version of this article first appeared.
Today's itinerary: Berlin, Germany
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StumbleUponYouth first. Dinner with three young entrepreneurs, aged 31, 32, and 36, at a lovely Italian cafe in Charlottenburg. Each is wearing a suit and tie. Alex, handsome and voluble, is taking over the family office-furniture and interior-design business. He cuts to the chase. "The labor laws are impossible. We have 18 employees; this month, we'll add two more. But I just fired a woman who's been with us for six years. She made several big mistakes, but that wasn't really the problem. She just wasn't committed to the company. She does what she is told to do and nothing more. Look, we're on our way, we're ready to grow—ready to rock and roll—and we just can't afford to have anyone on the team who isn't totally committed. So now I have to go to court in four weeks to defend my right to fire her." (Ask any businessperson, and you will be told that small but difficult decisions such as this are often the difference between success and failure; ask any European social democrat, and you will be told that honoring the employee's "right" to a job is a price that business must pay to operate in a just society.)
Trosten, 36, runs a company that manages commercial office buildings. He is the rarest of entrepreneurs, a native of East Germany, and he has the most employees of anyone at the table: 60—30 in Berlin and 30 in Frankfurt. He has a story about regulations. Every company in the real-estate business has to get a letter from the state certifying that it pays taxes and hires no illegal immigrants. This is reasonable enough, but there is more: Every time Trosten's company does business with an outside contractor, it has to receive a copy of that company's certification letter. If it doesn't receive the copy, it is required to pay 15 percent of the bill to the state. "I have 200 suppliers," he said. "My accountant has to spend 10 percent of her time on this one law. Every transaction has to have copies of the appropriate certification."
There is much talk of silly regulations. Roland Berger had told me a regulatory joke: "Do you know why so few German companies start in garages like Hewlett-Packard did? Because it's illegal. There's a law that says every office must have a window—and another law that says garages are not allowed to have windows."
I've also heard businessmen say that if Bill Gates had been born German, he'd be middle-management at Siemens. "That's not true! That's not true!" said Frank, a self-employed management consultant. "You have to have a university degree to be middle-management at Siemens. Gates is a college dropout. They wouldn't allow him to be middle-management at Siemens."
When I ask them about politics, the entrepreneurs sigh and say that they'll vote for the nominally conservative Christian Democratic Union. "I wanted to vote Yellow [for the Free Democrats]," Alex said, "but I can't now because of Möllemann."
"We can't encourage even the appearance of anti-Semitism," said Frank.
Two days later, I had a cup of coffee with a high-ranking Free Democrat who asked to remain nameless. "What a nightmare!" he said, after I told him about the entrepreneurs. The Free Democrats, he explained, had the reputation of being the older, stingier partners of the Christian Democrats during the 16-year reign of Helmut Kohl; the party was dying of senility—it remains the oldest of the four main parties. But a decision was made in 1998 to recharge the batteries. The new party leader, Guido Westerwelle, is only 40; a glitzy advertising campaign has begun. (Example: a group of Indian men in turbans, working at computers, and the words: "They Think Germany Is a Developing Country.") The style, as much as the neolibertarian content—economic and personal freedom—appealed to young people. The Free Democrats doubled their strength in the polls from 6 percent to 12 percent. "We're hoping for 18 percent," said he who would be nameless. "That way we have the power. We are part of any coalition. We are headed that way, at least I hope we still are."
This talk of "power" was very un-German, and the FDP's very use of language is probably part of its appeal. "The culture is very strict about humility," said Frank, the young management consultant. "In school, if you said anything so mild as, 'This is my aim in life, this is what I want to achieve,' people would have thought that you were crazy and unsuitable."
Alex, the office-furniture salesman, laughed and said, "That's right." He took a deep breath, puffed himself up, and let fly, "But I want to have a really big company!"
If the most recklessly self-promotional of Germans can get only guilty pleasure from stating his life's goals, one wonders how Germany as a nation will ever be able to freely express its point of view on the international stage; in fact, foreign policy and security issues were raised so infrequently as to be virtually absent in any of my conversations with German officials.
"We learned in school that we were responsible for the past," said Frank. "Literally responsible. If you ever said, 'Hey, I'm just 15, I'm not responsible for anything,' you'd have some serious trouble on your hands. I think that's part of why we're so nervous about asserting ourselves."
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Notes From the Fray Editor:
As Klein's listening tour wraps up, he has come in for much more grumpiness for traveling around Europe "on someone else's dime." Still, Faustus's post on the ICC started a nice little debate between Bracque and j thatcher here. And the post by Cato the Censor began an interesting argument about diversity, conservatism and what used to be called "The American Progress."
Notes From the Fray:
One thing that occurred to me while reading about the differences between the US and Europe is our conservative movement here. Our conservatives seem to have more ideas than nationalism. Our conservatives also seem to be much more vital, and have opinions and prescriptions on a whole range of problems.
Although I am not a conservative, I can appreciate the importance that strain of thought has had upon the US. I think that we were trapped in our own version of anomie during the Carter administration. For reasons that are not at all clear to me, the conservatives seem to have gone into hiding in the 1960's, and didn't really re-emerge until the late 1970's. While I don't think that Reagan really did anything of note as President, I do credit him with re-vitalizing the conservative movement. The conservative revival, which seems to have crested and is now beginning to wane, will in turn have rejuvenated the liberals, who were in great need of rejuvenating.
-- Cato the Censor
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(7/5)