Word: german
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Rising over the convivial babel of West German beer halls, the tune is pure Tin Pan Alley. But Sailor Freddy Quinn's plunking baritone puts something purely Teutonic into the German lyrics ("Brennend heisser Wüstensand, fern, so fern das Heimatland-Burning hot desert sand, far, so far, the homeland"). That well-forgotten U.S. ballad, Memories Are Made of This, beats out of the German jukeboxes as Heimweh (homesickness), and the manufactured nostalgia seems violently contagious. In three years, Freddy's Heimweh has sold more than 2,000,000 copies. It is the alltime European pop-record...
When Heimweh first appeared, a Munich disk jockey labeled it the "most horrible Schnulze [sentimental trash] of the year" and broke the record over his microphone. But the song caught on quickly, largely because many other German singers working the Wanderlust beat have never been farther from home than the casino at Travemünde. Freddy managed to sing as if he really knew what it meant to be a lonely traveler...
West Germany's steel industry rose from the ashes to surpass its prewar record in steel production, has raised its capacity to 29.3 million tons yearly. Led by the huge combines of Alfried Krupp and August Thyssen-Hutte, the German industry is flexing its muscles, reconcentrating once more to make itself more efficient, aggressively seeking out new markets from India to South America. In Great Britain, heavily bombed in the war, the steel industry is now among the world's most modern. Britain's biggest steel company is United Steel Companies Ltd., whose chairman, Sir Walter Benton...
...Compared with U.S. steel wage costs (including fringe benefits) of $3.22 an hour in 1957 (the latest year for which foreign comparisons are available), the Japanese steelworker cost his employer 46? an hour, the French worker 96?, the Italian worker 81?, the British worker 90?, the West German worker $1.01. Once, the U.S. could have made up the difference through its technical superiority, but that advantage is being rapidly whittled away by technical advances abroad...
...markets abroad are shrinking is that the steelmakers, like many other U.S. manufacturers, are not aggressive enough in selling. U.S. steel companies offer few credit plans, insist on payment in dollars, are often uninterested in working out deals with soft currencies. "When a Brazilian writes a letter to a German and an American steel firm," admits a U.S. steelman, "he gets back a letter from the American firm-and a salesman from the German firm." Says a Belgian steelman: "For countries like us, exporting is a matter of living, but the U.S. incentive for export is much smaller, because...