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West Germany's agriculture, for example, still plods along in its 19th century pattern. Virtually all German farmers live on government-protected prices. Exposed to Common Market competition—price levels are still being negotiated—they would soon go under. Experts believe that as many as 1,000,000 German farmers (out of some 3,200,000 in a total population of 55 million) will have to abandon the land. This is bad news to C.D.U. political professionals who have begun to think about the 1965 elections. As a necessary sop to the farmers and as a disappointment to his ideological supporters, Politician Erhard is currently soft-pedaling his free-market ideals as far as agriculture is concerned and promises that grain prices will stay artificially high.
Another economic area that needs Erhard's attention is the nation's social services. Hardly anywhere in the Western world is the worker and the lowerincome white-collar employee so pampered as in West Germany. Erhard would like to reduce the benefits, which dangerously increase the cost of labor. But his party's left wing is so strongly in favor of the elaborate structure built by Konrad Adenauer that Erhard probably has no chance to use his knife in this field.
Reunification of divided Germany is the haunting problem that towers over everything else. Erhard knows that there is no chance of achieving it in the foreseeable future, short of going to war with Russia or surrendering West Germany to Communism, but as a matter of faith and principle he feels, like most of his fellow Germans, that this fact must not be acknowledged as permanent. The hopelessness of changing it is probably largely responsible for the lack of a national purpose that many sense in West Germany today.
Broken Symbols. The country has yet to develop a real pride of nationhood to lift it finally above what Theologian Helmut Thielicke calls the "paralyzing complexes" about the past. With the world's curses at Hitler still ringing in Germany's ears, says Thielicke, "we still do not feel free to use a word like Vaterland uninhibitedly for fear of being misunderstood. And because we have a complex about it, many of us are even embarrassed by our national anthem — Deutschland uber Alles, though its original meaning was simply a child's declaration of love for his mother: 'You are the most beautiful land of all, with your castles, rivers and forests.'" Germans who have broken their relationships with their symbols, he adds, have also broken the relationship with the cause the symbols stand for—the nation.
Many foreigners, wary of Germany's past nationalism, are satisfied with this state of affairs. Yet there is something vaguely disturbing about a Germany without ideals. Youth is developing a longing for something to be enthusiastic about. When he was rector of Tubingen University, Thielicke recalls, students wanted to hold torchlight parades "as people did in the old days," but did not quite know for what purpose. "They come to their rector and ask: 'Can't you tell us an idea that we can rally round and that