An Eclipse of Princes

Friday, Apr. 26, 1963

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When Britain's Prince Philip and his daughter. Princess Anne, 12, clambered out of their raspberry-pink royal plane at Frankfurt last week, there were no top hatted officials to welcome them or respectful crowds cheering "Es lebe hock!" After greeting their waiting cousins, Prince Ludwig and Princess Margaret von Hessen, Philip and Anne got quickly into the rakish Alvis sports coupe, which had been flown ahead of the royal party from London. Then they headed down the Autobahn to Darmstadt, where they stayed at the Von null palatial 18th century Schloss Wolfsgarten.

The British visitors' four-day stay made little stir in West Germany as a whole, but their presence worked like champagne on the aristocracy's battered morale. In a society where most bluebloods feel that they are displaced personages (there hasn't been a Kaiser since 1918), the Romantik of a royal visit is rare indeed.

Thanks to the nation's miraculous eco nomic boom. West Germans today are more concerned with paychecks than with princely comings and goings. But the country's economic and social transformation has failed notably to produce a unified, national Fuhrungsschicht (leadership layer) in place of the old aristocratic ruling caste. The result is a confused and confusing society in which, says Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, there is not one class of Prominenz but "a multitude of competing groups." The "pyramids of power" include the church, the military, local government and such venerable universities as Tubingen, Gottingen and Heidelberg, where a Herr Professor commands undiminished respect from the community at large.

Salon from Ford? By far the most powerful—and conspicuous—elite in present-day Germany is, of course, the Geld-aristokratie, the new industrial plutocracy whose yellow Mercedeses and Chris-Craft cruisers have largely replaced the Iron Cross and the dueling scar as status symbols. The new upper crust is personified by such tycoons as Rudolf August Oetker, who parlayed a baking powder business into a 100-company empire; Hans Giinther Sohl, who as boss of Thyssen since war's end has turned a family ironworks into West Germany's biggest steelmaker; and Munich's Rudolf Miinemann, one of the nation's biggest and boldest financiers. Yet, for all its wealth, says Sociologist Dahrendorf, the Geldaristokratie "is searching above itself in the social hierarchy for its behavioral standards. But the space above it is empty." This, he suggests, accounts for the joyless, frantic materialism that characterizes much of postwar German life—"the medieval choir stall in the dining room, the conspicuous consumption, the complete lack of taste in art and literature." Complains one sophisticated young princess: "If the Ford Foundation really wants to do something for Germany, it should endow a salon in Bonn. Just a little salon. The old society is dead now."