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German industry has responded with a dedicated drive for new markets that extends to the smallest details. One big West German steel company happily complied with a Turkish nabob's request to redesign a rock garden in his backyard, as a result won a $1,000,000 contract to modernize a cement plant. Krupp engineers snapped up the job of erecting a statue of King Rameses in one of Cairo's main squares for Nasser's government, aware that the small contract would be excellent publicity for the firm. Germans are Hans-on-the-spot with parts and servicing, often neglected by U.S. and other firms. When German salesmen went to Mexico City after the war, they took with them spare parts for machinery that the Mexicans had bought in 1900. From Katmandu to Kansas City, German salesmen never stop in their search for new markets, new opportunities. While the Englishman from Sheffield is knocking off for a gin on the terrace of a hotel in Nairobi or New Delhi, the German from Essen is in his room pecking out orders on a typewriter. Last year he and his countrymen pecked out a record $7.5 billion in exports.
Kings of the Ruhrgebiet. Thousands of small-and middle-sized industrialists have contributed to West Germany's economic revival—the cutlery makers of Solingen, the locksmiths of Velbert, the china makers of Bavaria. But the vast might of Germany's economic resurgence is wielded by the kings of the Ruhrgebiet, the 2,000-square-mile, teardrop-shaped patch of land along the Ruhr River that shelters Europe's tightest concentration of industry. Many of the Ruhrgebiet's cities have tripled in size since the war. Though it occupies only 2% of the West German area, the Ruhrgebiet employs 10% of the nation's labor force, has almost a third of the industrial plants, produces 90% of the hard coal. From behind the rolling green hills that border the Ruhr River thrust the stark, black smokestacks of such industrial giants as Mannesmann, Germany's biggest industrial complex and the world's largest steel-tube producer; DEMAG, which has produced furnaces that turn out 3,700,000 tons of steel a year all over the world; and Klockner, which once sold the nails from its war-ruined factories to feed its workers, now produces 2,000,000 tons of steel and 5,300,000 tons of coal yearly.
Of all the kings of the Ruhrgebiet, the heads of the 146-year-old House of Krupp have long been the most prominent and most powerful. Kaiser Wilhelm I called the company a "national institution." It was courted by Bismarck, the Kaisers and Hitler. Though its role in arms-making has linked it before the world with the evils of German militarism, it built its empire largely on such products as locomotives and industrial machinery. Krupp still uses as its trademark a pattern of three superimposed wheels.