Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [56]
A WEEK EARLIER, in Berlin, I had gone to see Germany’s deputy minister of finance, a forty-four-year-old career government official named Jörg Asmussen. The Germans now are in possession of the only Finance Ministry in the big-time developed world whose leaders don’t need to worry whether their economy will collapse the moment investors stop buying their bonds. As unemployment in Greece climbs to the highest on record (16.2 percent, at last count), it falls in Germany to twenty-year lows (6.9 percent). Germany appears to have experienced a financial crisis without economic consequences. They’d donned head condoms in the presence of their bankers, and avoided being splattered by their mud. As a result, for the past year or so the financial markets have been trying and failing to get a read on the German people: they can obviously afford to pay off the debts of their fellow Europeans, but will they actually do it? Are they now Europeans, or are they still Germans? Any utterance or gesture by any German official anywhere near this decision for the past eighteen months has been a market-moving headline, and there have been plenty of them, most of them echoing German public opinion, and expressing incomprehension and outrage that other people can behave so irresponsibly. Asmussen is one of the Germans now being obsessively watched. Along with his boss, Wolfgang Schäuble, he’s one of two German officials present in every conversation between the German government and the deadbeats.
The Finance Ministry, built in the mid-1930s, is a monument to both the Nazis’ ambition and their taste. A faceless butte, it is so big that if you circle it in the wrong direction it can take you twenty minutes to find the front door. I circle it in the wrong direction, then sweat and huff to make up for lost time, all the while wondering if provincial Nazis in from the sticks had the same experience, wandering outside these forbidding stone walls trying to figure out how to get in. At length I find a familiar-looking courtyard: the only difference between its appearance now and in famous old photographs is that Hitler is no longer marching in and out of the entryway, and the statue of the eagle perched atop the swastika has been removed. “It was built for Göring’s Air Ministry,” says the waiting Finance Ministry public relations man, who is, oddly enough, French. “You can tell from the cheerful architecture.” He explains that the building is so big because Hermann Göring wanted to be able to land planes on its roof.
I have arrived about three minutes late, but the German deputy minister of finance runs a full five minutes later, which, I will learn, is viewed by Germans almost as a felony. He apologizes a great deal more than he needs to for the delay. He wears the slender framed spectacles of a German film director, and is extremely fit and bald, but by choice rather than circumstance. Extremely fit white men who shave their heads are making a statement, in my experience of them. “I don’t need body fat and I don’t need hair,” they seem to be saying, while also implying that anyone who does is a wuss. The deputy finance minister even laughs just as all extremely fit men with shaved heads should laugh, if they want to remain in character. Instead of opening his mouth to allow the air to pass, he purses his lips and snorts the sound out through his nose. He may need laughter as much as other men, but he needs less air to laugh with. His desk is a template of self-discipline. Alive with implied activity—legal pads, Post-it notes, manila folders—every single object on it is perfectly aligned with all the others and with the edges of the desk. Every angle is precisely ninety degrees. But the most striking optional décor is a big white sign on the wall beside the desk. It’s in