Word: two
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Back in Underclothes. Prices are high: businessmen keep asking high prices for their goods, in an attempt to get the capital which they cannot borrow. A plain laborer earning no marks a month spends most of his wages on food; a cheap suit will cost him two months' pay, shoes more than a week's. "Stuttering," as the Germans call installment-plan buying, is in high vogue. Crack the stutterers: "Any honest man has debts today...
West Germany is desperately short of housing (it needs an estimated 8,000,000 two-room apartments). More than a third of the West Germans live in close, degrading quarters, whole families cramped into fetid, single rooms, the sick and infirm bedded beside the children. Nerves wear thin, minds grow bitter in the stifling intimacy of want. Among the demoralized, cheap vice grows weedlike and ugly. In bomb-battered Essen, one of the first businesses to recover was the red-light district: harlots' row was rebuilt while the rest of the city lay in rubble...
...subtle press attacks, sometimes by carefully planted parliamentary questions about their conduct of office. The Bundestag elected him Chancellor by only a one-vote majority, but that did not worry Adenauer. In his 13-man cabinet, eight Christian Democrat ministers (of the remaining five, three are Free Democrats, two are members of the German Party) always assure him of a working majority. When he is asked if he can get cabinet approval of a particular measure, he is apt to say bluntly: "Don't worry. I am at least 70% of that cabinet...
...ablest men in Adenauer's own party is Ludwig Erhard, Minister of Economics, who in the past two years has helped guide West Germany back to a relatively free economy. Generally considered a man to watch is 48-year-old Karl Arnold, president of Bonn's Bundesrat (Upper House), a hard-hitting Catholic trade-union leader who frequently acts as spokesman for the workers in his native Ruhr. No friend of Adenauer's, whom he considers too conservative, Arnold may some day be his rival for party leadership...
...two men on whom Adenauer really relies for advice have no official rank. One is Robert Pferdmenges, partner in the Cologne banking firm of Salomon Oppenheim & Co., and, unlike many a Ruhr magnate, no Nazi supporter; he acts as Adenauer's economic counsel. The other is boyish-looking, 45-year-old Herbert Blankenhorn, a former German diplomat who served in the prewar German embassy in Washington; his task is to smooth Adenauer's relations with the Allies...