A Report from Europe

"The summer is over; Ihe harvestis gathered in—and we are still notsaved."

London, 1 October 1948

Returning to London from three months in central and western Europe just in time to hear this gloomy quotation uttered in the House of Commons, one concludes that it sums up the situation quite neatly.

Europe will not starve this winter. But, to put it bluntly, it is still too early to tell whether the war against Hitler has destroyed the foundations of European democracy and the ability of most of the people on the continent to live freely and decently.

To begin with the good news: this autumn for the first time since the war, Europeans can afford to joke about the weather. Up to this year winter has been awaited with resignation. Apartment dwellers with night club tans in Brussels and Paris examined and discussed the thickness of horse-chestnuts with as much anxiety as peasants in Bavaria or Tokaj. For in winter in Europe the calorie graphs shrink as fruits and vegetables—the summer supplements to rationed dietsdisappear from the markets or rise prohibitively in price. Fewer animals are slaughtered. Coal reserves dwindle and with them gas pressure and—in some countries —electricity. A heavy winter used to mean fuel rationing. It may still mean chills this year, particularly in Germany for those who haven't busied themselves in the summer gathering or scrounging firewood.

This winter there should be enough fuel and food enough to go around. There has been no drought this summer and the harvest has been good. Cereal grain crops, while still insufficient to feed Europe, are 44% higher. No drought means no pinch in water power as occurred last year in the Scandinavias. Coal production is up, and winter stockpiles—mainly of British, German, American, and Polish coal—appear adequate. Steel production has risen thanks mainly to greater labor by Ruhr workers who now get paid in money that has value. For western Europe, at any rate, the happy combination of favorable weather, Marshall aid, and a currency reform in Germany (only one of which the USSR did not try to prevent) has lessened autumn anxieties and reduced weather talk to the level of neutral, meaningless conversation where it always belonged.

That is all the good news there is: simply that Europeans will not starve or freeze en-masse this winter. But Europe is certainly not saved. Rescuing a man from starvation will not cure his chronic malnutrition or his weak heart, and no one here, not even the man-in-the-street—who knows as little just as inaccurately as the American man-in-the-street—believes that Europe is out of danger.

There were countless problems, sore spots, and social cancers in prewar Europe that wanted solving if Europeans were to live decently and freely: things like antisemitism; alcoholism; poor housing; land reform; minorities; supporting and accommodating more people than Europe was intended to hold; finding substitutes for those decayed bulwarks of social order: feudalism, religion, and laissez-faire liberalism; and, finally, discovering means of making a socialist economy compatible with democracy and freedom. None of these problems has been solved by the war. Most of them have been aggravated into more menacing sores.

But war has created its own problems which for the next 5 years must come first. It brought the problem of hanging on to life which has now been solved. There remain the priority problems of hanging on to European democracy and of hanging on to that way of life some call liberal and others bourgeois, the way of life in which people treat one another decently and with respect and toleration born of their own inner security and self-respect. There is neither time nor sufficient security for democracy in most of Europe today to tackle the long-term problems except in England, Sweden, Switzerland, and the special case of the countries of eastern Europe.

It is the two-fold goal of hanging on to democracy and decent human behavior which now monopolizes the attention of most of Europe's talented political leaders and administrators. Two of the preconditions for realizing this goal are: (1) people with sufficient inner peace and freedom from want and tensions so that they can be tolerant of others and go along with the majority sometimes when they disagree, and (2) people who are secure enough to make up their own minds and to act or to lead courageously within the orderly framework of a democratic system.

It would be difficult even as a theoretical paper-exercise to achieve these preconditions given the disorganized economic system and the war-strained personalities that exist in Europe now. But in practice European statesmen face a further limitation. They must not win the battle to set up the preconditions for democracy and human decency by using methods that will lose the war. There must be no resorting to strong men or purges or persecutions. And finally, they must accomplish their ends against the occasionally powerful and always treacherous opposition of local Communist parties who seem determined that democracy shall not work.

A brief summary of some of the important priority problems that have to be solved if democracy and decent living are to have a chance should begin with the problem of getting good people.

Americans have always tended to look at Europeans as morally lost. Only England was regarded as on our side of the pale of loose-living, waste, backwardness, and untrustworthiness that covered most of Europe.

To be frank, the ideals of decent living, personal honesty, self-respect, and obligation to one's community of neighbors have been ground down in many Europeans and ground out of others. The family and community solidarities that ordinarily provide the psychological security and discipline that enable people to develop and maintain ideals were widely uprooted by the plow of war. The economic system that ordinarily rewards hard work and sometimes even good behavior—as the family rewards it with affection or praise—is still lopsided and inflated in many countries.

For almost ten years now Europeans in countries hit by the war have been living under conditions in which tolerance, honesty, integrity, and other ideals the western world shares did not "pay off," and actually penalized or endangered those who tried to live them. Black markets were patriotic when one's country was occupied. Years of bomb-shelter living, of hating the conqueror but never being able to do much about it, increased the strain. And in Norway, France, the Low Countries, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Italy, Greece, the Balkans, and Germany and Austria there have been long periods of scarce goods in which, temporarily at least, each man became his brother's enemy in an economic war of all against all to see who would get butter or a shirt or a piece of meat. It is not surprising that there is delinquency, weariness, neurosis, and an absence of eager beavers for democracy in Europe.

Can you understand, then, why those of us who know Europe—who saw this during the war and see it now—are ashamed of self-righteous Americans who come over here in Packards in the summer, cash dollars on the black market, and then preach loudly to Europeans about how they should mend their lazy, dissolute, morally inferior ways or complain that Europeans lack the moral backbone for democracy. It would be reassuring to imagine that were America placed under the same nine years of hell our country would emerge with the same proportion of decent, hardworking, tolerant, democracy-loving people that exists in Europe today, small as that proportion is.

However, the purpose of this is not to criticize well-meaning, if untried, American moralizers but to demonstrate that the moral foundations for a working democracy and for decent community behavior have been badly damaged in Europe and that anything that adds to the tensions of life strains these foundations even more.

One can see the difference easily. In neutral Sweden today bicycles are left about unlocked. In Norway, France, and even England, one must chain them securely. Generally speaking, in Sweden, Switzerland, , and unoccupied England there is great social solidarity (in Sweden perhaps a little too much for our taste) and more of that_willingness to sacrifice a little now for some future good which is what democracies need to pull them out of an emergency. Cooperation is markedly less in the former occupied countries. Western Germany, occupied and overpopulated with Germans from the east and DPs, is still disintegrating socially and contains all the materials for anti-semitism. Perhaps a bit about Austria will explain what I mean by this.

I stayed for a week in a small town in the Russian zone of Austria posing as a German on the street because Americans are not permitted to enter that zone. It would surprise anyone to see decent, mentally healthy people emerge from that environment. Everywhere there is hate. The Russian soldiers destroyed much of the livestock and most of the plow-horses when they came; they stole and committed the other war brutalities one hears so much about wherever Russians have been (including, one should add, the Balkans). Today they live off the land and treat the people in a Prussian manner. The economic basis for a good life does not exist; indeed there is hardly a basis for a normal life. Whole families live in two rooms; children sleep with their parents; there is an anxious pause at dinner when the food is dished out and divided up. There is hatred—but there is no way to express this hatred except on fellow townspeople or one's family; so much of it is carried inside the people and it gnarls them. They have nothing to look forward to. Some say another war would be preferable and believe it. The Russians will probably never leave, they believe. But if the Russians do leave, one can predict with absolute certainty that these long-frustrated and internally distorted people will kick out at the first available scapegoat, will follow the first Fuehrer who reviles the USSR, and will never possess the patience to prefer a slow-moving democracy that calls for sacrifice to a strong-man who flatters and pays off. That is eastern Austria today and that, for years, was occupied Europe. And there are the roots for all the "isms" one can imagine.

So much for the social environment. Economically, western Europe has a long way to go before her separate national economic systems can provide the goods and the material security that make orderly contented people. In eastern Europe, from Czechoslovakia to the Turkish border, the people under Communist "People's Republics" are working hard and recovering faster than expected. However, Czechoslovakia lags behind and work there seems long (55 hours a week with time and a quarter for extra hours is not unusual), uninspired, and, of course, compulsory. Although the government has tried to conceal it, production-per-man-hour since the February coup has dropped considerably. In Hungary the government agencies claim to be keeping up with the ambitious three-year plan, but, as in war-time Japan, the workers in some of the large nationalized plants, line up at attention for pep talks before starting the day. The black markets are almost completely gone from the Balkans and the old money-changers who are not in jail refuse to do business by significantly drawing their fingers across their throat.

Western Europe, however, having jacked up production, still faces the problems of achieving stable, deflated, and respected national currencies; of leveling off its unfavorable trade balance and making itself self-sustaining; of increasing the flow of intra-European trade so that it will be multilateral and more than pairs of countries agreeing to push off their useless and expensive luxury goods onto one another. Before the war Germany and England were the two powerful pumps of European multilateral trade, Germany selling more to Europe than she bought and England buying more than she sold. Europe cannot stand alone economically without an economically healthy Germany and the coal, iron, machine tools, and machinery Germany used to produce and trade.

Before Europe can sell enough goods outside to become self-sustaining the swollen prices of her goods must be reduced. This is increasingly important as the world turns from war shortages to a buyers' market. Consequently, reduction of unit cost of goods and higher production per man-hour for the same wage are priority problems. It is difficult to see how costs and prices can be reduced and production per man-hour raised so long as shaky and inflated national currencies remain and the trade unions continue, only sometimes at Communist promptings, to demand higher wages.

Workers would take less if money would buy more, but unfortunately the way to make money worth more is to make it scarce. Over here this means draining off surplus buying power by high taxes or a capital levy. In Europe's shaky democracies few political leaders are public spirited enough to risk political suicide by asking the threadbare population to take further cuts. It has been done in England, but only fairly recently on a large scale, and England, as noted above, is exceptional.

Europe's chances for economic recovery and her political and social stability are now endangered by another war crisis. Economically the effect will be to divert productive capacity to munitions at a time when many countries still cannot spare productive capacity for badly needed schools or homes.

Europe has been literally pulled apart by the power struggle between the USSR and the western democracies—so much so that one must inquire what one's friends mean when they use the term "Europe." It is difficult to convey the effect that the war tension and the division of Europe has produced in people. They do not go around wailing about the coming war. Like consciousness of death, however, the awareness that a war is coming and that they are living on the continent that will be the battlefield seems to cover everything people do and think and say with a thin, colorless film of despair.

Except among communists, left-wing socialists, and a small proportion of independents, there is almost universal fear and distrust of the USSR in western Europe. Even those socialists who are trying to construct a "third force" show signs since the Marshall Plan and the February coup in Czechoslovakia of spending much time convincing themselves of their favorite generalization, namely, that a choice between the USSR and the USA is a choice between two equivalent evils.

Nor is it only in western Europe that the USSR is feared. The recent events in Yugoslavia have shocked many Balkan communists out of the delusion that that particularly strong brand of nationalism that prevails in the Balkans is compatible with Cominform—i.e., Russian—Communism. There is considerable resentment in both Czechoslovakia and Hungary about the heavy-handed economic imperialism of the USSR. As in Nazi Germany, stories and jokes are whispered pointing up these discontents. That wheat goes to Russia while Hungarians must content themselves with brown bread is a common complaint. And Czechs complain guardedly that the USSR forces them to sell machinery cheaply and buy Russian materials at artificially high prices, after which a "Made in the USSR" label is put on the machinery which is resold at a high price by Russia.

Those who hoped the war would bring Europe a chance for freedom will find the Balkans depressing, although perhaps less so if they were acquainted with the unequal land distribution and the classic dictatorships and secret police there before the war. However, when it comes to suppression and secret police the People's Democracies have gone the pre-war regimes one better just as they have gone them one better in social welfare plans. One talks freely about politics only after introductions by a trusted friend or, alternatively, after at least a half-hour of conversational "feeling out." There is evidence of fear and unfreedom but there is also evidence of real economic progress and, in Hungary, of a good deal of working class enthusiasm. In both countries a hostile word or act against the government or the USSR means heavy sanctions: loss of job, night arrests, imprisonment, and, in severe cases, death. One is sometimes disappointed by the ease with which this unfreedom is borne. It is distressing, for example, to ask to see the head of the sociology department of Charles University in Prague and be told by students at that ancient haven of academic freedom that the department has been eliminated and the professors purged.

In a way it is also distressing to see the large numbers of people in central Europe who have joined the Communist party not because they believe in Communism but because of "expedience"just as Germans today explain their prewar membership in the Nazi party. On the other hand, the one thing a trip to central Europe will do for anyone is to demonstrate that it is an error to imagine that everyone in those countries is a fanatic party proletarian. The people there have had too much familiarity with the old liberal way of life to become either zealots or robots overnight. With new education and the new propaganda covering 100% of the youth it is unreal to hope that the coming generation will learn much either about the liberal way of life or the truths about western Europe or America. But some of the present generation knows.

A Czech communist who had joined out of expediency told me on a train approaching Pilsen—where over three years earlier I had celebrated VE Day—"As they cover us more and more completely with darkness, and as you hear more and more about our party demonstrations and parades and anti-American speeches, remember when you go back that there are a lot of people like me who remember what it was like here before the war, who know what it is like in the west; who like Americans or have American relatives, but who cannot resist and who cannot speak because 'they' will have control over everything but the innermost part of the very stoutest soul."

EDWIN A. BOCK '43, who opens the Aiumni Magazine's series of foreign reports in this issue, shown during his visit to Vienna this summer.

WITH THIS LETTER from Edwin A. Bock '43, who is now studying at the London School of Economics, the ALUMNI MAGAZINE opens a series of on-the-spot reports from Dartmouth men all over the world. Former editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth, Bock served with the Army in Europe during the war and then was sent to Japan where he later became a civilian aide at Mac Arthur's headquarters. He has been studying in London since 1946 and has been all over Europe at one time or another. The letter printed here is based largely on three months of study and travel this summer in Austria, the Balkans and Czechoslovakia.