Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [67]
“East Germans are the Greeks of Germany,” I say.
“Be careful,” she says.
From Düsseldorf we drive to Leipzig, and from Leipzig we hop a train to Hamburg to find the mud wrestling. Along the way she humors me by parsing her native tongue for signs of anality. “Kackwurst is the term for feces,” she says grudgingly. “It literally means shit sausage. And it’s horrible. When I see sausages I can’t think of anything else.” She thinks a moment. “Bescheissen: someone shit on you. Klugscheisser: an intelligence shitter.
“If you have a lot of money,” she continues, “you are said to shit money: Geldscheisser.” She rips a handful of other examples off the top of her head, a little shocked by how fertile is this line of thinking, before she says, “And if you find yourself in a bad situation, you say, ‘Die Kacke ist am dampfen the shit is steaming.’” She stops and appears to realize she is encouraging a theory of German national character.
“It’s just in the words,” she says.
“Sure it is.”
“It doesn’t mean it applies.”
Outside of Hamburg we stopped for lunch at a farm owned by a man named Wilhelm Nölling, a German economist now in his seventies but with the kick and bite of a much younger man. He has the chiseled features and silver hair of a patrician but the vocal cords of a bleacher bum. “The Greeks want us to pay their lunch!” he bellows, as he gives me a tour of his private goat pen. “That is why they are rioting in the streets! Baaa!” Back when the idea of the euro was being bandied about, Nölling had been a governor of the Bundesbank. From the moment the discussion turned serious he has railed against the euro. He’d written one mournful pamphlet called “Good-bye to the Deutsche Mark?” and another, more declarative pamphlet called “The Euro: A Journey to Hell.” Together with three other prominent German economists and financial leaders he’d filed a lawsuit, still wending its way through the German courts, challenging the euro on constitutional grounds. Just before the deutsche mark got scrapped, Nölling had argued to the Bundesbank that they should just keep all the notes. “I said, ‘Don’t shred it!” he now says with great gusto, leaping out of an armchair in the living room of his farmhouse. “I said, ‘Pile it all up, put it in a room, in case we need it later!’”
He finds himself stuck: he knows that he is engaged in an exercise futile and pointless. “Can you turn this back?” he says. “We know we can’t turn this back. If they say, ‘Okay, we were wrong, you were right,’ what do you do? That is the hundred-thousand-million-dollar question.” He thinks he knows what should be done but doesn’t think Germans are capable of doing it. The idea he and his fellow dissident German economists have cooked up is to split the European Union in two for financial purposes. One euro, a kind of second-string currency, would be issued for, and used by, the deadbeat countries—Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and so on. The first-string euro would be used by “the homogenous countries, the ones you can rely on.” He lists these reliable countries: Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, and (he hesitates for a second over this) France.
“Are you sure the French belong?”
“We discussed this,” he says seriously. They decided that for social reasons you couldn’t really exclude the French. It was just too awkward.
As he presided over the Maastricht treaty, which created the euro, the French prime minister François Mitterrand is rumored to have said privately that yoking Germany to the rest of Europe in this way was sure to lead to imbalances, and the imbalances were certain to lead to some