Yes or No

The packed little hall in the Saar mining town of Illingen crackled with excitement. Behind the stage, huge and threatening, a black eagle glared down from a red banner with the three initials of the new Saar Democratic Party (DPS) slashed white across its breast. Party Chieftain Heinrich Schneider, a stocky, sad-eyed lawyer of 48, bounded onto the platform to speak. The crowd of coal miners--yellow-haired youngsters and grizzled, Russian-front veterans--stiffened in anticipation, ready to jump frenziedly at his every hoarse shout.

"We are Germans!" cried Schneider, an oldtime Nazi who worked for Goebbels' propaganda ministry in World War II. "When we vote on the 23rd, we will be the first Germans to show that Germans want to be reunified!" The miners rose, cheered, and burst first into Deutschland Uber Alles and then into Deutsch 1st die Saar (The Saar Is German), a song unheard since Hitler's fall.

For three months such pro-German rallies have exploded almost nightly in the French-controlled, German-speaking industrial border basin of the Saar. They are a prelude to decision: next week the Saar's 960,000 citizens will freely vote, ja or nein, whether to accept the statute which French and German statesmen finally agreed on last year as the best means of taking a 1,000-year-old quarrel out of politics until a final World War II peace treaty is sealed. Should the Saarlanders vote ja, their borderland, which has changed hands four times in the last three European wars, would be "Europeanized," i.e., granted political autonomy under the new seven-nation Western European Union, and continued in its postwar economic union with France. A commissioner, probably British, would oversee the Saar on behalf of WEU, but an elected Landtag of Saarlanders would continue to run Saar affairs. The Saar's 13 million tons of coal and most of its 3,000,000 tons of steel a year would remain French-controlled, giving France about equal balance with the Ruhr-rich West Germans in the European Coal and Steel Community.

The Instincts of the Past. But it was likely that this long-sighted plan to Europeanize the Saar would not be realized. Whipping up the old nationalist instincts among the German-speaking Saarlanders, ex-Nazi Schneider had pulled together three new pro-German parties into a "Homeland Front"--skipping over the fact that it was the government of the homeland that was earnestly backing the Europeanization of the Saar. By the force of his devotion to the ideal of European unity, above and beyond the desires of nationalism, Konrad Adenauer had been able to check West Germany's yearning to own the Saar, but he had not been able to arrest the Saar's own case of Germanic nationalism. Under Schneider's lashing, personal attacks, the European status had become dangerously linked with the uncertain fortunes of its chief proponent, Saar Premier Johannes ("Joho") Hoffmann and his pro-French Christian People's Party. The pro-Germans made up a word for his supporters--Speckfranzosen, i.e., literally, bacon-Frenchmen; loosely, pro-French for material interests. They jeered at the portly Joho as a longtime French puppet, and threw stones and stink bombs to break up his meetings. Whenever he appeared, crowds were on hand to beset him. When he addressed Brebach steelworkers last week, hecklers crowded outside the hall and yelled "Pfui!" when he left.

Last week Konrad Adenauer and France's Premier Edgar Faure took off, in the midst of all their other perplexities, to meet in Luxembourg for an eight-hour session on how to save the Saar statute. Adenauer tried to get Faure to put off the referendum and pressure Joho into calling a Landtag election so that Saarlanders might vent their hostility on Hoffman without making the Saar statute an innocent victim of his unpopularity. But Paris and Bonn had explicitly agreed not to intervene in the Saar's decisionmaking, and so the two leaders agreed only to put out a vague statement saying that they still believed in "Europe."

The Meaning of No. If the Saarlanders should vote nein, the French say that the Saar would simply remain French-controlled territory as before, its riches funneled into the French economy. But the Saar nationalists, should they win, could not be expected to retire into the corners and stay quiet. The French recall what happened after Hitler won the Saar from them in another referendum 20 years ago. "German nationalism is looking for its first success in the Saar," wrote Marcel Edmond Naegelen, onetime French governor of Algeria, in Le Republican Lorrain of Metz (the formerly German capital of Lorraine). "If Germany succeeds, she won't stop there, and she will want to succeed elsewhere in the West." At any rate, onlookers waited uncomfortably for a vote that is crucial to the future not only of the 900-square-mile Saar, but of far bigger things: Franco-German amity and European unity.

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