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Energy and Power
 Energy and Power
Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and
Climate Change

STEPHEN G. GROSS
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gross, Stephen G., 1980– author.
Title: Energy and power : Germany in the age of oil, atoms, and climate change /
Stephen G. Gross.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023006046 (print) | LCCN 2023006047 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197667712 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197667736 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Energy policy—Germany—History—20th century. |
Renewable energy sources—Germany—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC HD 9502 . G 32 G 767 2023 (print) |
LCC HD 9502 . G 32 (ebook) | DDC 333 . 790943—dc23/eng/20230310
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006046
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006047

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197667712.001.0001

Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

To Rachel, Duncan, and Lucy
 CONTENTS

Introduction: The Paradoxes of German Energy 1

PART I THE OLD ENERGY PAR ADIGM

1. Energy Price Wars and the Battle for the Social Market Economy:
The 1950s 19
2. The Coupling Paradigm: Conceptualizing West Germany’s
First Postwar Energy Transition 46
3. Chains of Oil, 1956–​1973 71

4. The Entrepreneurial State: The Nuclear Transition of

the 1950s and 1960s 99
5. Shaking the Coupling Paradigm: The 1973 Oil Shock and Its
Aftermath 125

PART II THE NEW ENERGY PAR ADIGM

6. Green Energy and the Remaking of West German Politics

in the 1970s 155
7. Reinventing Energy Economics after the Oil Shock:
The Rise of Ecological Modernization 183
8. Energetic Hopes in the Face of Chernobyl and Climate Change:
The 1980s 211

vii
viii Contents

9. The Energy Entanglement of Germany and Russia: Natural Gas,

1970–​2000 238
10. Unleashing Green Energy in an Era of Neoliberalism:
The Energiewende 267

Coda: German Energy in the Twenty-​First Century 295

Acknowledgments 313
Archives and Abbreviations 315
Notes 317
Index 389
 Introduction
The Paradoxes of German Energy

The resource base is far more fundamental to economic development

than questions of political and social order. The old dispute of capitalism
versus socialism pales into insignificance before the life-​or-​death choice of
renewables versus non-​renewable resources.1

An Energy Miracle?
On June 1, 2004, before 3,000 delegates from over 150 countries, Germany’s
flamboyant environmental minister declared that “the age of renewables has
now begun.” Jürgen Trittin, a stalwart of the Green Party known for his acerbic
wit, was presiding over an international conference on renewable energy in his
nation’s former capital of Bonn. Reflecting on Germany’s recent achievements,
Trittin saw a model for the world. Energy efficiency and solar and wind power,
he proclaimed, were the key to fighting global warming and bringing prosperity
to the world. No more were these technologies a “niche market,” he concluded.
“They are our future.”2
Trittin had good reason for optimism. Since 1998 he had helped craft a
groundbreaking political experiment: the first coalition of the Left in a large
country that combined a Social Democratic Party with a new political force, the
Greens. Between 1998 and 2002 these former rivals passed a remarkable array
of legislation that aimed to rebuild their nation’s infrastructure on an ecological
foundation. “The end of the oil age,” so they hoped, “is in sight.”3 After 1998 this
Red-​Green government began placing solar panels on 100,000 roofs. It levied
an ecological tax on energy use. It reformed the power grid by guaranteeing
profits to anyone who produced electricity from renewables. Its development
bank aggressively financed energy efficiency enhancements in Germany’s
buildings and homes. For Hermann Scheer, Trittin’s Social Democratic partner,

Energy and Power. Stephen G. Gross, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197667712.003.0001
2 Introduction

known as the “solar king” by his allies, this was “an economic revolution of the
most far-​reaching kind.”4 Its architects aspired to smash the power of fossil
fuel conglomerates and erect a more democratic economy. They aimed to turn
Germany into a “global leader” of green technology, where the “export markets
are huge.” And they promised to liberate the nation from the “energy conflicts”
that loomed as the world burned through its conventional petroleum.5
When Trittin addressed the renewable conference on the banks of the Rhine,
these promises seemed on the cusp of realization. Germany boasted a third of
global wind power capacity. Solar was growing even faster. By 2004 the Federal
Republic accounted for 80 percent of all solar photovoltaics in Europe. And by
2006 it was installing nearly half of all new solar panels in the world, despite
a cloudy climate that gets as much annual sunlight as Alaska. New production
techniques developed by Germany’s Mittelstand companies made them global
leaders in solar and wind technology, unleashing a revolutionary fall in the cost
of renewables and bringing carbon-​free energy into the realm of the econom-
ically possible. The country, moreover—​the third largest manufacturer in the
world after the United States and China—​had taken great strides in reducing
its energy footprint. While America, France, and Britain were all reaching a new
historical peak in the total volume of energy they consumed, Germany’s energy
use had fallen by 15 percent from its 1979 height even as its economy expanded
(see Figures I.1 and I.2).6
Against the backdrop of this success, Scheer and Trittin heralded the Red-​
Green agenda as humanity’s best chance to stop global warming. In retrospect
many agreed, lauding Germany as “the most successful large advanced economy

3.5

3.0 USA
2.5
France
2.0
Federal Republic
1.5
Great Britain
1.0

0.5

0.0
1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Figure I.1. Total primary energy consumption in the Federal Republic, 1950–​2008.
Indexed from 1950 =​1. Source: European energy data from Energy History: Joint Center for
History and Economics. https://​sites.fas.harv​ard.edu/​~histe​con/​energy​hist​ory/​; American energy
data from U.S. Energy Information Administration. www.eia.gov; GDP and price index from the
OECD. https://​data.oecd.org/​.
 Int roduc tion 3

1.6

1.4

1.2

1.0
Great Britain
0.8
France
0.6
USA
0.4
Federal Republic
0.2

0.0
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Figure I.2. Energy intensity of the Federal Republic’s economy (primary energy
consumption divided by real GDP), 1970–​2008. Indexed to 1970 =​1. Source: European
energy data from Energy History: Joint Center for History and Economics. https://​sites.fas.harv​ard.
edu/​~histe​con/​energy​hist​ory/​; American energy data from U.S. Energy Information Administration.
www.eia.gov; GDP and price index from the OECD. https://​data.oecd.org/​.

to date in developing its clean energy economy,” as a “world leader in energy ef-
ficiency,” as the nation that lit the “touchpaper” that would forever change the
state of renewable power.7
Today the Federal Republic is continuing this energy transition—​ its
Energiewende—​in the hopes of combating global warming. But this transition
was never only, or even primarily, about climate change. The promise of high-​
tech exports and skilled jobs, of a more democratic society, of a geopolitically se-
cure nation—​all of these dreams have been as much an engine of energy policy
as has the quest for a stable climate. Many of these hopes date to the 1970s,
before global warming was fully understood, or earlier still, to the 1950s. Only
by unearthing this deeper history, and looking beyond climate change, can we
understand how energy came to be the central problem of German economics
and politics in the twenty-​first century.
The path toward a greener energetic future, moreover, has been littered
with contradictions, advances, and backtracking. At nearly the same moment
that Tritten was touting his nation’s accomplishments, German companies
were embarking on a new round of investment into power plants that ran on
dirty, lignite coal. These would give Germany the notorious reputation as
home to eight of the twelve largest sources of carbon in Europe. The country
was stumbling into ever greater reliance on natural gas from a dangerous nation
that would eventually threaten peace in Europe: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The
Federal Republic, moreover, increasingly found itself at odds with the rest of
the European Union, which was struggling to build a common energy agenda.
And despite decoupling energy use from growth, by the 2010s Germany seemed
4 Introduction

poised to miss its carbon targets. Critics spoke of an “Ecocide,” the title of a dys-
topian film in which citizens of the Global South sue the Federal Republic for
endangering the right to life. In some ways, the very success of Germany’s green
vision entrenched the need for conventional fuels, at least for a time.8
The longer history behind these energy successes and failures, behind
Germany’s energy dreams and paradoxes, is the subject of this book.

Putting Energy in European History

Why do we use the energy we do? How do we shift from one energy system
to another? How do our choices about energy shape society and politics, and
the other way around? In our era of global warming, these questions have taken
on an urgency once reserved for issues of war and peace. Today carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere is creeping toward a level the Earth has not experienced for
several million years. As a consequence, the world is warming at an astonishing
pace. In 2015 the Paris Climate Accords aspired to hold temperature increases to
1.5 degrees Celsius. Three years later the International Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) all but accepted that humanity would smash through this limit by 2030.
Even if we do not, we watch wildfires burn through California and Southern
Europe and hurricanes rip through the Atlantic bringing once-​in-​a-​century
storms every few years. The “climate catastrophe,” as West Germans named this
future in the 1980s, is upon us.9
Perhaps the most wicked aspect of this problem is that carbon emitted
anywhere—​Germany, the United States, China—​flows into the same atmos-
phere, such that those suffering the greatest impact from warming are not those
who emitted this carbon in the first place. Global warming embodies the perni-
cious logic of a new sort of modernity, where the risks of industrialization tran-
scend space as well as time, making it inordinately difficult to hold accountable
those who are responsible.10
The prime source of human atmospheric carbon is the world’s fossil energy
system. Today a mind-​boggling network of coal mines and oil fields, offshore
rigs, fracking wells, pipelines, compressor stations, tankers, and power plants
prepares nearly 160,000 terawatt hours (TWh) of energy each year to make a
lifestyle of iPhones and automobiles possible. In 1950 the world consumed a
small fraction of the energy it does today. Transforming this energy into usable
form has been accomplished through one of the most stupendous outlays of
capital in human history. Each year investors spend nearly two trillion dollars
upgrading the “second crust” of the earth that is our energy system.11
In one sense, the cost seems worth it. This energy leverages human ingenuity,
providing a panoply of goods and experiences that were unimaginable to our
 Int roduc tion 5

grandparents. Energy is the ability to do work, and one can translate its power
from one form to another. A “cup of gasoline,” for instance, has the same energy
as fifty people “pulling a Fiat for 2 hours.” With the energy from our fossil fuel
system, it is as though each person today has nearly 90 people working for them
around the clock, providing light, motion, and heat. But these averages obscure
vast differences across space and culture: an average American consumes 80,000
kilowatt hours a year, a German 44,000, a citizen of the Democratic Republic of
Congo just 489.12
This fossil energy, however, is wrecking the natural foundations of our so-
ciety. It has been for decades. Our hydrocarbon supply chain is characterized by
immense waste. Only a miniscule fraction of the energy embodied in a lump of
coal or a barrel of oil is actually used to cool milk in the fridge or move people
in cars: over 97 percent is lost through the multilayered process of extracting,
transforming, and distributing the energy that comes from fossil fuels. With this
immense waste, burning fossil fuels has accounted for over two-​thirds of all the
carbon humanity has put into the air. And the pace is accelerating: since the first
IPCC report in 1990, humanity has burned more carbon than in all previous
recorded history.13
Understanding why so much of the world has adopted an economy rooted
in oil, coal, and natural gas is more urgent than ever. To identify the causes be-
hind our fossil system and the actors who “lit this fire” of global warming, we
must look to the specific choices made by particular groups, classes, businesses,
governments, political parties, and experts.14 For one of the paradoxes of global
warming is the incredible sway of unintended consequences. Many, if not most,
of the decisions that placed humanity on a trajectory of global warming were
made before climate was even politicized, and for reasons that had little to do
with carbon and everything to do with jobs, power, geopolitics, or profits.
In fact, energy is everywhere in history, shaping our understanding of why
industrialization began in a cold, damp corner of Europe or how the United
States came to exercise a unique sort of global power in the twentieth century.
Yet too often energy remains a side note in the narratives that have shaped our
understanding of the contemporary world. The short twentieth century made
famous by Eric Hobsbawm, which began with World War I and the Russian
Revolution and ended with the collapse of Communism in 1989, is defined
through politics and ideas; its central experience the “religious wars” fought
between capitalism and socialism. The most influential narratives of twentieth-​
century Europe revolve around the “ideological struggle for Europe’s future,”
and how liberal democracy emerged changed from its contest with fascism
and communism.15 Above all, it is the shadow cast by the violence of World
War II and the Holocaust that orients the masterworks of twentieth-​century
Europe.16
6 Introduction

These narratives understandably focus on the ideas and social structures

that spawned war and genocide, alongside the paradox that these catastrophes
occurred as Europeans were experiencing the most radical material changes
since the dawn of agriculture. Energy belongs to both sides of the coin, the cat-
astrophic and the uplifting. Yet it hardly appears in stories that privilege poli-
tics, ideas, or diplomacy. Some histories note how “ridiculously cheap” energy
underpinned the golden years of growth after 1945. Energy briefly rears its head
again to explain the rise of ecological movements in the 1960s and 1970s. It
makes a final appearance with the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. That Europe
changed its approach to fossil fuels after this pivotal decade “speaks for itself.”
But does it?17
Energy carries more heft in histories of twentieth-​century Germany, but only
recently. In 2003 two preeminent scholars could interpret this nation’s “shat-
tered” past without mentioning energy at all.18 Even more than for Europe,
postwar history for Germany is “a history of attempts to come to terms with the
‘German catastrophe,’ ” that is, the Third Reich, and to understand how National
Socialism and the Holocaust were followed by the rise of a liberal democracy in
the Western half of the country.19 The prime questions of postwar Germany all
stem from this effort to fit the two halves of the twentieth century together: How
did the Federal Republic forge democracy after the Third Reich? How did it
achieve an Economic Miracle after world war? How did it come to terms with
its Nazi past? How did Germans navigate the division of their once powerful
nation?20
Now new challenges associated with globalization, neoliberalism, and
ecology are leading historians to refocus their gaze away from mid-​century and
look for the origins of the twenty-​first century in the trauma of the 1970s, which
witnessed everything from the decline of heavy industry to domestic terrorism,
oil shocks, and the collapse of monetary systems.21
As the 1970s have gained prominence, so too has energy. One goal of this
book is thus to integrate energy into the arc of postwar history.22 European
historians can no longer treat energy as mere background. We must shine a
spotlight onto what has become the most pressing question of our time: how
the consumption of massive amounts of energy has become naturalized, and
with it the accompanying volumes of carbon emissions that are changing our
environment. Historians must identify those actors who caused the emer-
gence of high-​energy society, understand the rationale behind their actions,
and explain why some individuals, organizations, and states revolted against
this system. But historians must also explore how the consumption of energy
is entangled with landmark developments that define the conventional nar-
rative of modern Europe, like the rise and fall of governments, the success
or failure of ideologies like neoliberalism, the spread of new cultural mores,
 Int roduc tion 7

or the ebb and flow of geopolitical frictions connected to the Cold War and
decolonization.
Indeed, energy’s place in history is far from self-​explanatory, and it can open
an entirely new perspective on the prime topics of the twentieth century. The end
of World War II marked a watershed by dividing Germany and reconfiguring its
political system. But in the sphere of energy and consumer life, the greater trans-
formation occurred in the decade after 1958, as the nation became a high-​energy
society that ran on petroleum and electricity. Cheap energy may have fueled the
Economic Miracle, but why was energy inexpensive in the first place? What so-
cial, political, and geopolitical work went into making it so? West Germany’s so-
cial market economy looks much different once one appreciates how regimented
the flow of energy was. After 1949 Germany may have been a divided power in
the heart of Europe. But equally important is understanding its place in a global
hydrocarbon network that was in a profound state of flux. The Federal Republic
is also known for supporting the integration of Europe. But energy often put
it at loggerheads with its allies and with the European Community, revealing a
deeply nationalist orientation at key moments in history. Energy even lends a
new perspective on how West Germans grappled with their terrible past. For as
a new generation in the 1960s and 1970s began questioning their parents’ par-
ticipation in the Nazis’ crimes, many also turned to questions of ecology, energy,
and nuclear power to criticize the continuity of the Federal Republic with the
Third Reich, calling for a decentralized, more democratic form of governance.

Germany’s Lessons for Energy Transitions

Energy belongs to the history of twentieth-​century Europe and Germany now
more than ever since historians’ “vanishing point” is shifting, and with it the
questions we ask.23 Like the 1970s, the turn of the millennium has become a
new focal point of research. For by then, at the very latest, the global commu-
nity knew with utter clarity that it was headed toward a carbon catastrophe. “If
no effective countermeasures are taken,” so Germany’s parliamentary inquiry
into climate change announced in the 1990s, “then we must expect dramatic
consequences for all regions of the world.”24 Put differently, it was clear the world
needed a transition away from fossil fuels. But nearly everywhere, political and
corporate leaders were failing miserably to make headway.
Why was this transition stalled? And how have energy transitions
happened throughout history? Herein lays the second goal of the book: to
see what Germany’s postwar experience can teach us about the nature of en-
ergy transitions: why they occur, how they are experienced, and how they are
connected to other types of change. Understanding past transitions, one hopes,
8 Introduction

can offer landmarks for appreciating the sorts of actors, processes, or arguments
that influence energy outcomes, guide our expectations for what is feasible, sug-
gest the range of challenges and opposing forces that lay ahead, and not least,
reveal how energy is entangled with so many other spheres of life. A new corpus
of energy histories has tackled these questions, illustrating how historians have
much to contribute to the fight against global warming.25
Yet the conventional understanding remains dominated by other disciplines
that explain transitions through changes in technology and prices. That petro-
leum became the prime global fuel after 1945 has everything to do with effi-
ciency and little to do with politics or social formations, we are told. As Bruce
Usher puts it, “basic economic principles, primarily cost, are the main drivers
of energy transitions. Cost is key.”26 Marxian scholars have pushed against this
price-​is-​king paradigm by portraying transitions as class conflicts in which the
cost of energy hardly matters. Instead, new energy arrangements triumph when
they enable those with capital to better control labor. Britain’s industrial revo-
lution to coal-​fired steam engines occurred, in this rendering, “in spite of the
persistently superior cheapness of water,” or put differently, because steam over-
came “the barriers to procurement not of energy, but of labour.”27
Both views have merit, but both err in elevating a single dimension of
transitions: price versus social conflict. Cost and efficiency certainly matter.
Energy shifts, however, are far more complex than this. Prices and markets
are themselves embedded in cultural practices, social institutions, political
arrangements, and geopolitical constellations. The price of a commodity, es-
pecially something as laden with power as energy, is determined as much by
struggles between interest groups, political actors, and experts as it is by supply
and demand.28
To integrate these two views we must cast a wider net, one that captures
changes in technology and prices while paying attention to how these shape,
and are in turn shaped by, social and political conflicts.
Postwar Germany offers fertile ground for this. With its succession of en-
ergy upheavals, the history of the Federal Republic of Germany can illuminate
why transitions succeed or fail, and how such shifts are tied to changes in other
spheres. The country’s experience illustrates how three types of forces make
energy transitions happen. First, the market for energy—​or rather, the diverse
markets for different energies—​profoundly influence whether consumers and
producers adopt a new fuel. Can a new energy or technology provide the same
or even better services at a lower price than existing ones? But many forces shape
prices, including states and competing social actors.29 Throughout history, and
particularly in postwar Germany, the price of energy has been a political football
manipulated by a range of actors. To understand why transitions unfold, one
must look beyond markets to states and the social actors who shape markets.
 Int roduc tion 9

States, the second force, have powerful reasons for desiring one energy over
another, which range from geopolitics to jobs and ecology. States set the legal
framework that determines how energies are distributed. States often favor
particular fuels through instruments like taxation, import restrictions, land-​
use rights, or monopoly privileges. States have even acted as entrepreneurs by
investing in particular technologies and creating new energy markets where
none existed before. State policies, in other words, can transform a new energy
from a minor commodity into a full-​fledged system. But states themselves are
complex entities riven by divisions. In a democracy like the Federal Republic,
political parties channel these conflicts, and thus exploring parties and their
factions is necessary for understanding how transitions unfold.
Third, social actors outside the state also influence the rise and fall of energy
systems, including corporations, unions, experts, and grassroots movements.
Firms, above all the multinational oil conglomerates that spanned the globe,
shaped policy by fielding operations outside the jurisdiction of any one state. But
other social forces influenced the policy landscape as well, through lobbying and
protest, by changing the terms of debate, and by mobilizing new stakeholders. In
postwar Germany every energy transition was profoundly accelerated, slowed,
or stalled by social actors.
Energy transitions, put simply, are not the result of an invisible hand, of
technological enhancements to the “performance” of an energy, or of an in-
herent “quest” for greater efficiency.30 Rather, they are actively made by the in-
teraction of markets, states, and social groups. But to understand why energy
transitions succeed or fail, and how they transform other spheres of life, we must
add a second axis, that of mobilization. Germany’s experience illustrates how
transitions require a mixture of four factors to succeed: policy linkages, political
coalitions, compelling ideas about the future, and crises.
When transitions unfolded in Germany they did so, first, because advocates
of the rising energy clearly linked their agenda to other priorities. Oil, nuclear
power, energy efficiency, natural gas, and renewables all advanced because their
proponents skillfully connected these to other goals that were dear to Germany’s
political elite and public.
Second, energy transitions succeeded when their advocates forged coalitions
with other groups. All of West Germany’s transitions became conduits through
which political parties and social actors could build alliances to pursue agendas
that were much broader than questions of what energy to consume. Third, ideas
about the future have propelled or held back new energy systems. Those actors
who could define the problem facing society or tell compelling stories about
what the future would hold if their desired energy were adopted proved the
most successful in building coalitions and advancing their cause. These future
ideas came in many different guises: stories about a technological gap with rival
10 Introduction

nations; predictions about the demise of democracy; forecasts about the limits
of fossil fuels. But whatever their form, these future narratives shaped Germany’s
transitions because they were often the glue holding coalitions together and
strengthening linkages.
Crises, lastly, drove new energies forward, and German energy history is im-
possible to understand without them. Like ideas, crises came in many forms,
from moments of stupendous oversupply or shortages to human disasters. But
in every instance, they helped break down older ideas, coalitions, and linkages
and create the space for new ones to form.
Energy transitions, put differently, are profoundly historical processes that
cannot be reduced to a single cause. They are defined by contingency, the possi-
bility of alternative pathways, and human choice. They happen in time, in which
outside events and decisions intervene, often in quite unexpected ways, to re-
orient the way societies produce and consume energy. They are embedded in a
welter of micro and macro developments. And they are deeply contested affairs,
shaped by the collision of interest groups and political actors advocating one
form of energy over another.

German Divergence
This book shows how the Federal Republic walked a different energy path than
other large, industrial countries like the United States, Britain, and France. Yet that
very difference can help us understand patterns common to energy transitions.
The story that follows is a mixture of peculiarities and general developments,
with Germany’s energetic road both an inspiration and a warning.
As in other countries, policy in the Federal Republic was informed by two
distinct energy paradigms. The first, older paradigm held that energy must be
cheap and abundant for growth, and that these goals were best achieved through
markets. But gradually a new energy paradigm arose to question this, suggesting
that societies could achieve welfare without consuming ever more energy; that
energy prices should be forcefully guided by the state; and that the very concept
of growth must be reimagined.
The history of German energy is the history of the struggle between these two
paradigms. The idiosyncratic thread in Germany’s story are those decisions that
led the new paradigm, during crucial moments, to overcome the older one, in
contrast to the United States, Britain, and France. Strikingly, the new paradigm
strengthened just when neoliberalism as a philosophy of governance advanced
around the world and decried the very policies that might kickstart a green tran-
sition. Even as climate change was creating an urgent need for decisive state ac-
tion, faith in the efficiency of free prices, skepticism of government action, and
 Int roduc tion 11

a desire to insulate markets and private capital from democratic politics, voters,
and parties spread through powerful global institutions, from the US Treasury
to the European Commission and the World Trade Organization. That a newly
reunified Germany bucked the global trend toward market fundamentalism to
pursue a state-​guided drive into renewables stands out as a puzzle.31
Germany’s idiosyncratic energy trajectory grew partly from the distinctive
circumstances it faced after World War II. Whereas the United States pioneered
high-​energy society in the early twentieth century, powering growth with its
rich endowment of all fossil fuels, Germany had preciously little hydrocarbons
in its own territory. Nor, after their failed bid for continental hegemony under
the Nazis, did Germans own any of the multinational companies that held com-
manding stakes in the great oil fields of the Middle East, in contrast to Americans,
British, and French. The Federal Republic came to depend on foreign-​owned
hydrocarbons, and this would make the possibility of a new, greener energy
system seem attractive and viable earlier in Germany than elsewhere.
But more importantly, Germany’s unique path grew from specific decisions
made after 1945. Both the United States and Britain responded to the economic
malaise of the 1970s with market fundamentalism and the construction of a
“neoliberal order.” Under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both great
powers shifted energy ever more into the hands of the market, their leaders
believing that deregulation, low taxes, privatization, and market pricing would
revive growth and enrich key stakeholders, while also managing challenges of
energy scarcity and environmental damage. Even the European Union, through
its Commission in Brussels, began gravitating toward neoliberal ideas as it tried
to reinvigorate growth through energy market reform. France, meanwhile,
followed a dirigiste policy that prioritized nuclear power for reasons of national
prestige, which eventually made it an alternative model for combating global
warming.32
Germany, by contrast, chose a different energetic route from that of the
United States, Britain, or France, a route that historians often explain by pointing
to the country’s powerful environmental movement. What Paul Nolte has called
Germany’s Green Sonderweg—​or special path—​is embodied in the rise of an in-
fluential Green Party far earlier than in these other nations.33 The product of an
anti-​nuclear grassroots movement in the 1970s, the Green Party broke into na-
tional Parliament in 1983 and altered West Germany’s political culture. This nar-
rative explains Germany’s energy pathway as the product of outsiders—​citizens’
initiatives, left-​wing student groups, renewable enthusiasts—​who hoped not
only to reform the energy system, but to transform West German political cul-
ture by building a small-​scale, more democratic, and decentralized society. In the
words of Craig Morris and Arne Jungjohann, “Germany’s push for renewables
stems from the people, not the government.”34
12 Introduction

This story, however, shades into triumphalism and disregards the energy
problems that this movement from below itself created. Equally important, it
overlooks a broader political economy in the Federal Republic whose internal
dynamic generated powerful reasons—​often reasons quite different from those
of the Green Party—​for favoring a transition off fossil fuels or nuclear power.
This Green Sonderweg narrative juxtaposes its protagonists against a techno-
cratic, closed-​door style of governance hell-​bent on consuming ever more en-
ergy at the expense of both the demos and the environment. But by rendering
a monolithic image of the establishment against which the Green Party reacted,
it overlooks elements of change that came from political and economic insiders,
above all from the reform wing of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), unions,
some domestic companies, and mainstream experts.
Rather, Germany’s distinctive approach to energy emerged from a synthesis
of outsiders and insiders, who saw the benefit of working through market devices
to shape energy consumption and production, but who accepted that energy
markets were inherently political. This was corporatism in matters of energy,
which brought various and often competing stakeholders together during inflec-
tion points and crises to negotiate the energetic future of the nation. Instead
of trying to “encase markets” and protect them from politics, as neoliberals did
elsewhere, German policymakers embraced the fact that social actors and pol-
itics should determine the basic orientation of the energy system.35 But in con-
trast to dirigiste systems, as in France, the Federal Republic deployed market
mechanisms that it guided with a strong hand.

The Story in Brief

The anti-​nuclear movement and the Green Party are only part of the story behind
Germany’s distinctive energy policy, which actually begins much earlier and was
profoundly shaped by the country’s turbulent energy history. In fact, since 1945
the Federal Republic has experienced some of the sharpest energy transitions
of any industrial economy: no less than five of them. The first was the rise of oil,
a pan-​European phenomenon but one in which no country participated more
powerfully than West Germany, once the hard coal capital of the continent. Next
came nuclear power: a transition in which West Germany was also superlative in
many respects. Starting its atomic program after the United States, France, and
Britain, the country caught up through an incredible effort by state officials and
scientific experts. Then in the 1970s reformers reacted against the breakneck
speed of nuclear development and the 1973 oil shock to launch the country’s
third transition, to energy efficiency. At the same time, the Federal Republic be-
came entangled with the Soviet Union in building a vast new infrastructure that
 Int roduc tion 13

propelled the rise of natural gas throughout Central Europe in a fourth transi-
tion that came to fruition in the 1990s. Finally, after 1989 the newly reunified
Germany embarked on a transition to renewable power in an effort not only to
tackle global warming, but to solve a welter of economic and political problems.
The first of these transitions is where West Germany’s experience with en-
ergy began to diverge already from the United States, Britain, and France. The
country experienced a more rapid shift to oil than any other industrial country
(see Figure I.3). After 1950 foreign-​owned oil flooded the country and wrecked
the once powerful hard coal industry. This transition wiped out hundreds of
thousands of jobs, destroyed an immense amount of capital, and forced do-
mestic companies to move into more dynamic sectors.
This first postwar transition, moreover, led the nation into great dependency
on a foreign-​owned hydrocarbon supply chain over which the Federal Republic
had little control because it lacked a multinational oil company. From an early
stage, this supply chain proved susceptible to crises: closures of the Suez Canal
in 1956 and in 1967, and coal crises in 1950, 1958, and 1966. Well before the
pivotal oil shock of 1973, during the very Economic Miracle that is so often
described as an era of stability, the nation suffered no less than five energy crises.
This turbulence turned energy into a politicized arena in West Germany
much earlier than in North America, and shaped policy in several ways. First,
as energy became politicized, West Germans began paying closer attention to
how it was priced. Beginning with vitriolic debates in the 1950s, politicians,

100%

90% Other

80% Renewables & Hydro

70% Hydro

60% Nuclear
50%
Natural Gas
40%
Oil
30%
Hard Coal
20%
Lignite Coal
10%

0%
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Figure I.3. The Federal Republic’s mixture of primary energy consumption, 950–​2020.
Percentage of total energy consumed. Source: Data from AG Energiebilanzen e.V.
14 Introduction

experts, and the public came to view the price of energy not only as something
that the market could not determine, but as something that it should not deter-
mine. Miners, environmental activists, and others began calling on the state to
guide the price of energy to achieve specific goals. These goals would change
with time, and eventually most groups came to accept that energy was a political
market, and many argued for a high energy price to stimulate conservation and
encourage alternative energies.
Second, because of energy’s politicization, West German economists began
studying it as a coherent field of knowledge earlier than elsewhere. On the one
hand, energy economics became a pillar of West Germany’s closed-​door tech-
nocratic governance, which would spark a backlash that demanded a more
democratic energy system. On the other hand, this field of knowledge did not
dematerialize the economy in theory, as did mainstream economics in the United
States. Because energy was so crucial to their models, German economists
grappled with the effects of energy crises more than their counterparts across
the Atlantic. This eventually led them to advocate an active government agenda
instead of leaving energy to the market, and to champion the new energy
paradigm.
Third, the politicization of energy made security a major issue in West
Germany well before 1973, as politicians, the coal industry, and nuclear
advocates criticized the foreign-​owned hydrocarbon supply chain already
in the 1950s and 1960s, to be joined later by environmentalists and natural
gas boosters. Conservation could gain more traction among political insiders
than in the United States or Britain because it was presented as a solution
to the long-​standing problem of security. So too did natural gas from the
Soviet Union.
West Germany’s shift to oil, in other words, created a fertile landscape in
which the seeds of a green energy transition might later take root, even if these
were planted for reasons that had little to do with ecology or climate. But other
developments contributed to this landscape, above all West Germany’s self-​
understanding as an export nation. With an economy powered by energy-​
intensive exports, like steel and chemicals, after 1950 Bonn worked to keep fuel
prices low. But as the global economy transformed and exposed these older
industries to foreign competition, German leaders began seeking new sectors
that could excel in the global marketplace, which it assisted with an “entrepre-
neurial state” that guided research and created new markets.36 In the 1960s Bonn
kick-​started nuclear power because experts believed reactors would be the next
great export engine. As the prospect for nuclear exports withered, some looked
to the construction of natural gas infrastructure across Eurasia as a new engine
for export contracts. But others fastened onto technologies that could either
conserve energy or produce it from new sources, redirecting the entrepreneurial
 Int roduc tion 15

state toward renewables in order to stimulate exports, creating avenues for col-
laboration between business elites and environmentalists.
After 1980, in sum, many West Germans wanted to overhaul their nation’s en-
ergy system. But calls for a transition were coming from two different directions.
The Greens hoped to democratize the energy economy through a decentralized,
citizen-​run power grid. Meanwhile, insiders—​the SPD, some unions, conven-
tional experts, and key business groups—​wanted to forge a new energy system
in the name of security and sales abroad.
What brought these strands together were the languages of Ordoliberalism
and Ecological Modernization. The former shared similarities with neoliber-
alism in calling for a strong state to set ground rules for competitive markets.
But its early theorists never sought to extend market logic to all walks of life,
and they fixated on economic concentration as the root of most problems. This
philosophy profoundly influenced West German politics after 1950, and it pro-
vided a common language for parties—​even the Greens, eventually—​to justify
their programs to a public proud of the social market economy. Over time, how-
ever, its formal ideas became hollowed out, and by the 1990s, Ordoliberalism
meant different things to different groups. But this was its strength as a language
of politics, which the Red-​Green coalition would use to sell its energy agenda
after 1998.
Substantively more important was Ecological Modernization, the bedrock
of the new energy paradigm, which highlighted the social costs of production
not included in market prices. After 1980, West German economists integrated
ideas about the social cost of energy with new theories of technological change
to create a novel justification for state-​guided prices and investment. When
global warming became a burning issue in the 1980s and 1990s, policymakers
thus had a language that was well-​suited for integrating economic and environ-
mental goals, for building alliances across parties, and for justifying robust state
action in an era defined by market fundamentalism.
In 1998 these two strands—​insiders and outsiders: Greens on the one hand;
Social Democrats, traditional experts, some unions, portions of the business
community on the other—​came together to pass groundbreaking legislation
that envisioned a holistic transformation of Germany’s energy system. And
while the immediate spark for the Red-​Green agenda came from anxieties about
global warming, it arose, in fact, from ideas and from a political economy that
had been in gestation for decades, and for reasons that initially had little to do
with climate.
The German story that culminates after 2000 shows how the history of energy
is essential for understanding the twentieth century. The rise and subsequent re-
volt against high energy, carbon-​intensive society is entangled with the pivotal,
conventional moments of postwar history; we cannot understand one without
16 Introduction

the other. The Economic Miracle; the emergence of consumer society; the rise
and the faltering of Social Democracy; the integration of Europe; the Cold War
and the collapse of Communism—​all of these events have shaped, and in turn
been shaped by, Germany’s rapid succession of energy transitions since 1945. In
the Federal Republic, the politicization of energy began well before the 1973 oil
shock, the emergence of climate change as a global issue, or the rise of the Green
Party. This timing helps explain the nation’s idiosyncratic energy trajectory,
which was made by a tense interaction between political insiders and outsiders.
And it explains as well the intensity with which Germans approach matters of
energy today.
But the story that follows also shows how energy transitions are multilayered
historical processes shaped not only by technology and prices, but also by human
agency and the ability of individuals and organizations to mobilize for or against
particular fuels. Alternative paths abound throughout history: the essence of the
discipline is excavating these alternatives to understand why some triumphed
and others failed. Germany’s energy path hinged on the interaction of global and
domestic markets, political parties, experts, and grassroots mobilization, and it
was determined by those actors who effectively built alliances, linked energy to
other issues, deployed powerful visions of the future, exploited crises, and ul-
timately, overcame their opponents. As Hermann Scheer poignantly observed,
transitions have spawned some of the most intense social conflicts in history,
precisely because energy touches so many aspects of life. Germany’s postwar
history illustrates just this point: how energy has been a battlefield in the twen-
tieth century, and will continue to be so in the twenty-​first.
 PA RT I

THE OLD ENERGY PARADIGM

 1

Energy Price Wars and the Battle

for the Social Market Economy
The 1950s

The old industrial heartland of Germany is a transformed landscape, many times

over. The Ruhr, a hilly region criss-​crossed by the Emscher, Lippe, Ruhr, and
Rhine rivers, emerged as one of Europe’s largest urban agglomerations in the
nineteenth century. The storied names of firms such as Krupp and Thyssen,
which drove German industry and which armed a nation that twice engulfed
the world in war, hailed from the Ruhr. Their success rested on a mixture of tech-
nical know-​how and patriarchal labor relations, but also on the energy found
beneath the Ruhr. Coal fueled Europe’s industrialization, and it was hard coal
from this region that brought steam, heat, and electricity to the cities of Central
Europe. The Ruhr was Germany’s dirty beating heart, a coal civilization with its
own rhythms, culture, and power centers. At its height during postwar recon-
struction of the 1950s, the Ruhr’s population peaked at 5.7 million, nearly five
hundred thousand of whom worked in the mines.1
Today the last mines in the Ruhr have closed. The hard coal civilization that
took a century to build has collapsed, leaving behind industrial relics and a cul-
ture of conservation, as grassroots organizations work to turn slag heaps into
parks and mining sites into some of the largest museums in the world.2
Hard coal’s collapse began in the 1950s, the very moment when it seemed
Germans had overcome the dislocation of World War II. During this decade
West Germany’s first postwar energy transition began. Between 1950 and 1970
the nation’s primary energy structure would change more rapidly than that of
any other European country, as the new Federal Republic transformed from
the continent’s largest consumer of hard coal into its largest consumer of oil.3
Yet, at the time, few realized what was to come. For in 1950 West Germany still
belonged to an older energy system where horses and coal stoves were more

Energy and Power. Stephen G. Gross, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197667712.003.0002
20 The Old Energy Paradigm

common than cars and refrigerators—​a regime of consumption that paled in

comparison to the voluminous energy used by the citizens of the United States.
The wrenching transition out of this older energy system had slowly started
in the years before World War II, but it accelerated qualitatively in the 1950s and
1960s. The catalyst came from the pioneer of high-​energy society, the United
States. Marshall Plan aid that promoted oil and inexpensive coal from the mines
of Appalachia promised unprecedentedly inexpensive energy and placed West
Germany’s hard coal producers under immense pressure.
But if America provided the spark, West Germany’s own government, under
the firm control of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), accelerated this
transition by pursuing a policy of low-​priced energy and welcoming anything
that would compete with the mines of the Ruhr. The popular economics minister
Ludwig Erhard treated energy as a commodity like any other, to be produced as
cheaply as possible. In the drive to advance exports and growth, contain infla-
tion, and shatter the coal cartels that had thrown their support behind Adolf
Hitler in the 1930s, Erhard’s new low-​priced energy regime led to a spectacular
rise in energy consumption and carbon emissions, vaulting West Germany into
the “Great Acceleration,” that mid-​twentieth-​century moment in which nearly
every metric of global consumption and pollution grew exponentially.4
This first energy transition, however, was deeply traumatic, imprinting on
West German policymakers and public a deep anxiety over energy crises. For
the Federal Republic was born in an energy crisis. While the oil shock of 1973
looms large in histories of the United States, energy shocks came much earlier
to the Federal Republic, and they helped turn energy into a coherent field of
political action sooner there than in America. Almost immediately after 1945,
the Federal Republic’s energy supply was exposed to the double-​edged sword
of postwar globalization, making foreign energy a tense issue that divided the
nation’s public because it entailed trade-​offs and redistribution from one group
to another.
In the 1950s these energy crises—​first the Korean War in 1950–​1951, then
a far more disruptive shock in 1958—​sparked intense debates. Should the
state make cheap energy and efficiency the sole criteria of policy, favoring oil
multinationals, exporters, and consumers, and placing the burden of any adjust-
ment entirely onto coal companies and miners? Or should it pursue different
priorities by embedding energy in a broader social framework and treating it
as something other than a pure commodity? And to what extent should energy
fall under supranational rather than national oversight? For these crises came
as Western Europe was making its first drive toward integration through the
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).
The stakes could not have been higher, because this discussion revealed the
limits of the fabled social market economy. Scholars have too often portrayed
 Energ y P r ice Wars 21

Germany’s postwar development through a triumphal lens, as a market-​driven

recovery catalyzed by the application of free market principles. This narrative,
however, distorts our understanding of postwar development, because many
fonts of growth bear the fingerprints of an activist state policy, while the market
price mechanism so praised by Erhard extended to only portions of the economy,
and in many ways not at all to energy.5
Well before climate change became a social issue, before the modern envi-
ronmental movement emerged, before the dramatic oil shocks of the 1970s, en-
ergy became politicized in the Federal Republic. Through crises, West Germans
came to understand energy less as separate fuels than as a coherent category that
warranted its own distinct policy. They increasingly saw price as a channel for
distributional conflict as much as a means for balancing supply and demand, and
energy prices became a political football as interest groups struggled to shape
West Germany’s economy. Unlikely coalitions formed that linked energy to first-​
order issues like exports and social stability. In the process, the debates and polit-
ical maneuvering surrounding this first transition began to change how Germans
approached energy, leading many to see energy as more than a mere commodity,
as nothing less than a fundamental component of social and political life.

Born in an Energy Crisis

The end of World War II marked the most profound political rupture in
modern German history. Total war led to the total defeat of Nazi Germany
at the hands of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain. By the
spring of 1945 Adolf Hitler, whose bid to forge a racial empire sparked a global
war, had committed suicide. His lieutenants were dead or imprisoned. His war
machine and death camps lay in ruins. His state was dissolved. His country
was occupied by the victorious Allied powers and partitioned into four zones.
Political collapse was mirrored in the physical destruction of Germany from a
conflict the Third Reich had itself incited. The war left a “blasted landscape of
broken cities and barren fields.” Allied bombing and Soviet bombardment had
reduced once thriving cities like Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, and Dresden to
smoldering heaps. Returning home, German soldiers were astonished by what
little remained: “as far as one could see, rubble, rubble, and rubble as well as
ruins which jutted ghostlike into the sky.” The transportation system, rail net-
work, water pipes, and electricity lines were decimated. A humanitarian dis-
aster lay on the horizon as Europe descended into famine. Most Germans, like
the many Europeans whose lives they had smashed, struggled to find nour-
ishment and shelter, much less the energy to heat their homes or power their
factories.6
22 The Old Energy Paradigm

After their victory the Allies worked to restore this shattered continent, and
chief among their problems was energy. In 1945 Europe had precious little of it.
For Germany’s coal sector, twelve years of economic dirigisme under the Nazis,
a decade of underinvestment, and two years of strategic bombing had created a
“hopeless situation,” as America’s most detailed study of the Ruhr concluded: a
state of “almost complete chaos.”7 The Third Reich’s bid for global power led to
the death or maiming of a generation of skilled miners. American and British
bombers had decimated two-​thirds of the coal industry’s housing, along with
the above-​ground infrastructure that moved this energy around the country.
Coal production in 1945 was a tenth its prewar level. In many areas, supply was
so scarce that civilians felled trees for heating and combed the woods for any-
thing they could burn to survive the winter, raising anxieties about deforestation
and environmental degradation.8
As the United States and Britain broke with the Soviet Union and began to
rebuild the Western zones of the former Third Reich, they poured resources
into the mines of the Ruhr. This region was the prime energy source not only
for Germany, but for the Europe that lay under American hegemony—​so
much so that the Soviet Union proposed partitioning the Ruhr to extract
reparations, while the French wanted to internationalize it under Western
control. By 1948 the Allies had surmounted the worst of the coal shortages,
but only barely. Production remained lower than before the war. And the
Ruhr’s mines were old: over half dated to the 1870s and ran on unmechanized
technology.9
In 1949, when the American, British, and French merged their occupation
zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany, their continued control over
this new state reflected worries about energy. With the memory of Nazism still
alive, the Western Allies passed two decrees that curtailed the sovereignty of
the young Bonn Republic, named for its sleepy capital on the Rhine. The first
reserved the Allies’ right to oversee West Germany’s foreign policy and any
changes to its constitution. The second was the “Ruhr Statute” that required the
country’s energetic hub to fall under the authority of an international supervi-
sory body.10
Upon its birth, the Bonn Republic still had both feet planted in an older en-
ergy system defined more by limits than abundance. Across the Atlantic, the
United States had forged a high-​energy society in which easy access to an in-
credible array of services supplied by prodigious amounts of fossil fuels had
become a normal feature of life. By the 1950s, gasoline-​powered tractors had
largely replaced animal power on farms. Four-​fifths of households had their own
refrigerator. Television sets powered by electricity flashed in the living rooms of
over 40 million homes. Over 40 million cars—​three-​quarters of all the world’s
automobiles—​roamed America’s roads. German visitors to the United States
 Energ y P r ice Wars 23

marveled at the high standard of living, the huge consumer power of the average
citizen, and the immensity of the nation’s mineral wealth in oil, coal, and gas.11
For the average West German, such energetic luxury seemed part of a dif-
ferent world given the devastation they saw around them. Even before the war,
Germans had lived in a society that was half as rich as America, and limited
in wealth and power by energy constraints. When it marched into the Soviet
Union, Hitler’s army relied more on horses, carts, and human legs than gasoline-​
powered trucks. Three million beasts of burden served in the Wehrmacht. As
they rode in jeeps through Western Europe in 1945, Americans were astonished
by the vast number of draft animals still used by the Germans. Hitler’s ambitions
for global dominance were constrained by scarce energy, despite the huge re-
sources he devoted to synthesizing petroleum from coal and capturing the oil of
Soviet Baku. The Third Reich was a coal country just as Imperial Germany had
been before World War I. In 1939 over 90 percent of all the energy consumed by
Germans came from this black rock, the same as when an imperial monarch had
ruled Berlin in 1914.12
It was this older energy-​regime that the Allies rebuilt at first, and it would
take much longer until the Federal Republic began to resemble the high-​energy
society of America. If 1945 marked a political rupture separating the Nazi past
from a more democratic future, in the world of energy the great break was
still to come. Through the 1950s most German farms still ran on the muscle
power of animals. Although many Germans had access to electricity, household
appliances remained a luxury: few people owned a washing machine, almost no
one a dryer, and less than one in ten a refrigerator. In 1957 there were but a mil-
lion televisions in the entire nation. Many, particularly in the Ruhr, heated their
homes and cooked their food with coal, lit from kindling embers brought home
from the workplace. Most people traveled by rail, foot, or bicycle. As late as 1948
one could see wood-​powered vehicles cruising the empty highways built by the
Third Reich, and only the elite could afford gasoline cars.13 In 1951 Germany’s
per capita energy consumption was roughly the same as in 1913, lower even
than during the 1920s or World War II. Average citizens consumed less than
40 percent of the energy of their counterparts in America. And like its imperial
and fascist predecessors, the new republic remained grounded in coal: in 1950
this source provided 90 percent of West Germany’s primary energy.14
Less than a year after the Federal Republic became a state and held its first na-
tional elections, this coal economy experienced the first of many energy crises.
When half a world away the North Korean army invaded South Korea in June
1950, German coal mines that had only just recovered from war found them-
selves on shaky ground. As American rearmament kicked into gear, supported
by the manufacturing centers of Western Europe, demand for coal exploded
and West Germany descended into a gripping energy shortage. This was
24 The Old Energy Paradigm

accompanied, driven in fact, by a dramatic spike in the price of raw materials

around the world as the Korean War generated an explosion of demand for steel,
iron, food, and textiles. A new round of inflation erupted, alarming a nation that
twice in a generation had experienced traumatic currency reforms.15
For Ludwig Erhard, architect of West German reconstruction, the Korean
War threatened his entire economic agenda. The son of a middle-​ class
business owner, Erhard had been deeply disturbed by Germany’s hyperinfla-
tion following World War I. After 1945 he had risen through the ranks of local
administrators to become director of Germany’s economic advisory council to
the American authorities. His signature policy was the liberalization of West
German prices in 1948. In a controversial decision, Erhard freed the price
of consumer goods, clothing, and machinery at the very moment the Allied
Occupation authorities reformed Germany’s dysfunctional currency. In his
mind, in order to function, a new currency must have market prices that would
extricate Germans from the legacy of the Third Reich’s rationing system. As
he highlighted in public addresses and private correspondence, “there is no
free market without free prices.”16 Supported by a vocal group of Ordoliberal
economists, Erhard overcame resistance to price liberalization from his
opponents, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and even from his own party,
the CDU. After an initial bout of inflation, by 1949 the economy rebounded,
productivity soared, and commentators heralded Erhard’s gamble as a remark-
able success. Price liberalization and competition turned Erhard into a political
star. The following year the CDU made his economic ideas the foundation of
their political platform, winning the first national election and cementing their
rule for over a decade.17
The Korean War struck at the heart of Erhard’s reforms. “Price inflation,”
he argued in a radio address shortly after the North Korean invasion, “must of
course not reappear on the political level, otherwise this will lead to the rein-
troduction of price freezes, the return of smuggling and the black market, the
supply of the population through an allocation system; in short, we will experi-
ence again exactly what we have just fortunately put behind us.”18 Erhard’s fears
soon materialized in the field of energy. Coal producers were barely keeping pace
with the growing demands of German industry. Korea tipped the scales, and by
the winter of 1950–​1951 coal bottlenecks turned into total blockages, forcing
Bonn to impose power cuts and ration electricity. By Christmas the lights went
out, as rolling blackouts spread across cities. Shop window displays went dark,
the German rail network reduced traffic, industry saw its electricity supply cut
by a quarter, households began hoarding coal, and black markets re-​emerged.
Industry, households, and local governments struggled to find the energy they
needed. For people who had just spent five hard years rebuilding from the
wreckage of war, the return of energy shortages came as a shock.19
 Energ y P r ice Wars 25

Coal producers struggled to respond to the demand surge because in 1948

Erhard had not actually extended market pricing to all sectors. In fact, his reforms
created a bifurcated price system that favored consumer over producer goods.
Price controls remained in sectors ranging from housing to public transporta-
tion, and coal belonged to this controlled half of the economy. Because so many
production processes relied on the Ruhr for energy, Erhard feared a rise in coal
prices would ripple through the economy and spark inflation. Instead, Erhard
pegged the domestic price of coal below its market value, while the International
Authority of the Ruhr (IAR)—​created by the Allies to channel German coal to
the rest of Western Europe—​controlled the export price.20
Unable to raise the price of their good, coal producers found it impossible
to generate the investment they needed to expand. On the one hand, this was
nothing new for the Ruhr because the state had effectively controlled coal
prices since 1919. But in a period of rapid growth, this was causing problems.
Investment in German mines lagged behind that of other Western European
countries, and growth in the coal sector was lower than nearly every other
German industry.21
As tensions mounted, a three-​way conflict erupted that pitted Ruhr coal,
Erhard, and the American authorities against one another. Coal producers saw
Korea as an opportunity to revive their older tradition of corporatism. In the
nineteenth century a heavily organized industrial order had crystallized in the
Ruhr, composed of huge cartels and investment networks that connected the
owners of mines, collieries, and steel factories, and defined by fraught labor rela-
tions. Coal insiders saw cartels as a source of stability for an inflexible sector and
a way to regulate a chaotic market. After 1945, Ruhr producers hoped to revive
their traditional authority to set prices through collaboration instead of through
government dictate. The Korean War seemed to offer coal producers a chance to
reassert the power to price their own good.22
Erhard and one faction of America’s occupation authorities, however,
wanted to shatter the Ruhr’s industrial conglomerations. The economics min-
ister criticized this industrial order for leading to “unsocial concentrations of
market power” that jeopardized democracy.23 American New Dealers, along
with internationalists in the State Department, likewise believed that cartels
had aided Hitler’s rise to power, and that breaking them up was crucial to de-​
Nazifying Germany. In 1950 de-​cartelization was a pillar of America’s campaign
to democratize West Germany.24
Beyond the cartel question, however, Erhard and the American authorities
found little to agree on. Above all, they were divided over whether to directly
control investment into coal through state levers. Allied authorities wanted to
stimulate mining through state aid, but Erhard and his administrators stead-
fastly refused anything that smacked of dirigisme.25 In March 1951 the conflict
26 The Old Energy Paradigm

reached a tipping point when John J. McCloy, the US high commissioner for
Germany, in a letter to West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer,
demanded that Bonn actively channel investment into coal and other strategic
sectors. “Only a significant modification of the free market economy,” McCloy
mandated, “can meet the challenges of the new situation.”26 Under pressure from
McCloy, Adenauer conceded that Erhard’s liberalization had gone too far and
blamed his economics minister for the nation’s first energy crisis: “you [Erhard]
have apparently failed to recognize the greatest danger to our entire economic
well-​being, namely, the coal question.”27
The Korean War thus opened a rift between Adenauer and Erhard—​the two
most important West German leaders—​over energy. It also represented a set-
back for Erhard’s liberalization. McCloy’s ultimatum forced the Federal Republic
to ration coal as well as investment, and Bonn, which had already dismantled its
postwar allocation system, had to rely on the coal cartels themselves for distribu-
tion. Over the next two years, coal producers got a taste of their former power as
they distributed their goods and investment to meet the demands of a growing
economy.28

National and International Tensions

While this corporatist allocation relieved shortages, the resolution pleased no
one and created a rancorous atmosphere that would infect policy for the coming
decade. Erhard came out of the Korean crisis dissatisfied because coal remained
an island of concentration in the sea of his Social Market. But under pressure
from McCloy, Erhard pushed through a massive, state-​guided investment pro-
gram that flowed to coal and other bottleneck industries. This Investment Aid
Law of 1952 levied a contribution of 1 billion DM from sectors benefiting from
the low price of energy, which the government channeled into primary goods
sectors, coal receiving a quarter of the proceeds. After 1952 coal producers re-
ceived depreciation allowances to encourage investment, and Parliament began
subsidizing housing for miners. By 1956 coal was the most heavily supported
sector in West Germany.29
The need to rely on industrial self-​organization during the Korean War
underscored for Erhard how dependent he was on the barons of the Ruhr. So
after Korea he doubled down on his effort to impose competition in the en-
ergy market. As he argued to Parliament, we can only achieve “a fundamental
solution to the problem of our future energy supply by promoting competitive
forces in the energy market.” Energy, in his mind, should be forced to join the so-
cial market economy, like any other sector.30
 Energ y P r ice Wars 27

Under the guidance of Theobald Keyser, coal producers vehemently

protested Erhard’s agenda. Keyser hailed from Bochum, heart of Ruhr coal
country. During World War II he had helped administer the rapacious Nazi
mining operations in occupied Belgium, Romania, and Yugoslavia before
winding up as a prisoner of war. But he survived with his reputation in-
tact, and relentlessly climbed the ladder of state offices overseeing mining.
To counter the agenda of Erhard and the Americans, Keyser and other coal
producers entered into an unprecedented collaboration with what had once
been their greatest foe, the miners, who formed a new, national union for en-
ergy industries, the Industrial Mining Union (Industriegewerkschaft Bergbau—​
IGB). Together they proposed reorganizing their sector into integrated
conglomerates that would regulate the entire coal production chain, from ex-
cavation to sales and marketing.31
Bonn rejected this proposal. Instead, Erhard found an unlikely ally in the
emerging European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). In the spring of 1950
the French foreign minister Robert Schumann stunned Europe by announcing
his vision of placing the coal and steel sectors of West Germany and his own
country under the collective control of a higher authority. Schumann and his
allies saw the nascent ECSC as a revolutionary step toward lasting peace, and
one that would pave the way for a United States of Europe. For the Federal
Republic, the ECSC provided a way to thread a needle through thorny do-
mestic conflicts. Adenauer forcefully supported the project as a channel for
his country to rejoin Western democracies. The Left, however, wanted to
nationalize coal like so many of the Federal Republic’s Eastern and Western
neighbors had done. To win over the unions and Social Democrats, Adenauer
thus struck a bargain, by supporting their demands to give laborers a voice
running mining enterprises, or co-​determination. In return for accepting the
ECSC, in 1951 unions gained parity with owners on the domestic boards
overseeing coal companies. The Ruhr barons grudgingly accepted this frame-
work as the least offensive outcome, for they retained private ownership over
their assets.
Yet the ECSC served energetic as well international and social goals, above
all for the technocrat and former cognac merchant who led France into this
organization, Jean Monnet. Monnet had designed France’s postwar economic
plan, which centered on the steel industry and relied on German coal. But as
the Federal Republic rebuilt its economy, it began making greater claims on the
black gold of the Ruhr. Only transnational control, Monnet believed, would
ensure his country had the energy it needed for growth. He hoped the ECSC
would preserve French access to German coal and keep energy costs low. With
the Paris Treaty of 1951, the ECSC came into being, governed by Europe’s first
28 The Old Energy Paradigm

supranational executive bureaucracy, the High Authority, which could make

binding decisions on trade and production if approved by the European Council
that represented the member states. Monnet wanted the High Authority to reg-
ulate prices and smash the cartels that characterized coal and steel in Northern
Europe. And he harbored ambitions of expanding the ECSC to encompass all
energies.32
While Erhard resented the dirigiste outlook of Monnet, he welcomed any-
thing that could help him impose competition in the Ruhr. In conjunction with
the ECSC, after the Korean War, Erhard reorganized the coal sector in the name
of competition, leaving producers with far more enterprises than they or the
Mining Union wanted. The High Authority, meanwhile, acquired the power to
fix the domestic price of German coal.
Ruhr mine owners and unionized miners stewed, for the bitter legacy of this
first energy crisis went beyond questions of industrial organization and extended
to the contentious issue of pricing. After Korea, Erhard desperately wanted a low
coal price to contain inflation and spur growth.33 And under the ESCS’s new au-
thority, after 1953 West Germany had the lowest priced coal in the ECSC. This
infuriated Keyser and his allies, since they believed the ability to set their own
prices was a “matter of existence” for the industry.34
Erhard added fuel to the fire by pushing low-​priced energy across the
board. In 1951 the economics minister opened the door to coal imports from
North America, which could be produced far cheaper than in the Ruhr. For
the first time since industrialization, Germany began importing coal to meet
its energy needs. And in an effort to end the black market in energy, in 1951
Erhard dissolved the oil rationing bureau that had been operating since 1945
and freed the price of this new hydrocarbon. In the short term this caused oil
prices to spike, but over the long term it stimulated a wave of investment in
refineries.35
Coming out of the Korean War, in other words, West German coal began to
face intense competition from foreign sources of energy. The Ruhr, however,
did not take this sitting down. Under Keyser’s leadership they founded a new
organization, the Business Association for Ruhr Mining (Unternehmensverband
Ruhrbergbau–​UvRb), which would pursue a relentless campaign to claw back
industry control over pricing. With support from the mining unions, Keyser and
his colleagues protested the powers of the High Authority for the next six years.
They tirelessly pointed out how their nearest competitors—​large oil firms—​
could sell their products at whatever price they wanted and to whomever they
pleased. And they insisted on the contradictions of Erhard’s policies, namely, that
under the ECSC’s price regime “the foundations of the social market economy
simply did not apply to coal.”36
 Energ y P r ice Wars 29

The Zenith of Coal and the Rise of Oil

The Federal Republic, in sum, had become a sovereign state in the midst of a
crisis that turned energy into an intensely politicized sphere. But after the Korean
War these tensions were submerged by West Germany’s astounding Economic
Miracle. In 1952 the huge global demand for capital goods sent West German
industries humming. Over the next six years the Federal Republic experienced
the most rapid economic expansion in its history, which pulled along the entire
energy sector. The mid-​1950s marked the high point of West German coal in
terms of tonnage mined, workers employed, and capital deployed. Erhard’s 1952
Investment Law unleashed a wave of investment in mining, with fifty pits either
newly dug or newly expanded. Keyser and the UvRb guided this new capital in
a coordinated program, building new worker housing, improving above-​ground
processing facilities, and mechanizing mining. Demand for energy kept the
pits running near full capacity, and by 1957 West Germany was producing over
130 million tons (SKE) of hard coal annually, up from 110 million in 1950. For
the first time since the 1930s, Ruhr mines entered the profit zone, just barely.37
The boom, however, was not without its challenges. The urgent need for coal,
for one, gave leverage to the Industrial Mining Union. Its energetic vice presi-
dent Heinrich Gutermuth, who had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht and
interned in a Soviet POW camp through 1946, used this newfound influence to
push through pay raises. By 1956 mining wages were among the highest in the
country, while mechanization was taking much longer than anticipated. Ruhr
mines also suffered from financial obstacles. The long period required to dig new
mines or to expand old ones—​fifteen to twenty years for the former, five to ten
years for the latter—​tied up capital for such a long time that investment into coal
was risky.38
While King Coal navigated its growing pains, American authorities and West
Germany’s Economics Ministry began laying the foundation for a new energy
system. As a legacy of its wealth in hard coal, West Germany remained an oil
laggard after 1945, using much less petroleum than the rest of Europe: 4 per-
cent of total energy consumption, in comparison with 18 percent in France and
35 percent in Italy.39 After 1949 the occupation authorities worked to change
this. Oil, after all, was a pillar of high-​energy consumer society, which American
leaders hoped to extend around the world to legitimize their struggle against
Soviet Communism. With the descent into Cold War, Washington came to be-
lieve its hegemony rested as much on ensuring the flow of energy to its allies as
it did on providing a stable monetary or trading system. The war, moreover, had
driven home to American policymakers the strategic importance of petroleum,
leading officials from the State Department to the Interior Ministry to see their
30 The Old Energy Paradigm

nation’s multinational oil corporations as tools for maintaining political control

over this critical resource.40
Thus when the United States designed its Marshall Plan in 1948 to rebuild
Europe, it laid the foundations for a new energy in West Germany, in part for its
own security agenda, in part to revive a devastated continent. Over 10 percent
of all aid from the European Reconstruction Program went toward petroleum
products, more than any other single commodity. The Economic Cooperation
Administration (ECA), which dispersed Marshall Plan funds, paid for over half
of the crude sold in Europe between 1948 and 1951 by American corporations.
The ECA, moreover, pressured petroleum companies to keep prices low. Other
American aid went toward constructing refineries in West Germany itself, but
on the condition that Bonn give American companies equal access to its market.
Through the early 1950s American corporations received over 90 percent of
Marshall Plan oil funds going to West Germany.41
While the world wars had dashed German ambitions to become an oil power,
some domestic firms retained a presence in West Germany’s oil market. Before
1914 the country’s largest financial institution, the Deutsche Bank, had mus-
cled into the petroleum concessions of the Ottoman Empire, future oil heart-
land of the world, only to lose its shares when Germany lost the First World War.
Two decades later, the Third Reich advanced synthetic petroleum and exploited
crude in its occupied territories through the chemical giant IG Farben and the
state-​led Koninental Öl AG. After 1945 the Allies broke apart these corporate
titans, with some of the pieces falling to other German companies. But the do-
mestic oil firms that survived the wreckage of war remained small, nationally
bound, and drew their oil from West Germany’s limited and pricey domestic
reserves or bought it from international companies.42
So it was the foreign oil majors that would dominate West Germany’s en-
ergy market. These were vast, complex, multinational companies that spanned
the globe, that held immense stocks of capital, that possessed extensive pe-
troleum concessions, and that could mobilize intricate distribution networks.
There were seven of these firms, five based in the United States, one in Britain,
and one in the Netherlands, and to contemporaries they seemed like extensions
of American, British, and Dutch power. Three of these would use their global
reach and lobbying power to help their subsidiaries penetrate West Germany’s
market: ESSO-​Exxon, British Petroleum (BP), and Shell, with headquarters in
the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, respectively. With their German
operations based in Hamburg, these corporations each amassed a capitaliza-
tion that dwarfed Germany’s domestic energy companies.43 Their initial success
stemmed partly from Allied policy, since they benefited not only from Marshall
Plan aid but also from the dismemberment of the Nazi industrial complex.
More importantly, these companies controlled complete processing chains. In
 Energ y P r ice Wars 31

contrast to German companies, the majors possessed rights to the most pro-
ductive oil fields of the world, where they extracted crude at extraordinarily low
costs, refined it, shipped it to Europe, and sold it through their sales network
across West Germany.44
After 1950 Bonn worked with the United States and the majors to build a
modern oil infrastructure. The Economics Ministry cultivated cooperative tech-
nical ventures between domestic and American firms. It provided a range of
incentives to encourage refinery construction in West Germany, including tax
rebates, low interest loans, priority access to foreign exchange, an exemption
from the sales tax on petroleum products, and after 1953, a tariff on imported
crude. With these incentives, the majors built new refineries around the exterior
of the Federal Republic, on the estuaries of Germany’s major rivers—​Rotterdam
along the Rhine, Hamburg along the Elbe, Bremen and Wilhelmshaven along
the Weser. Between 1950 and 1955 German refining capacity quadrupled to
13.2 million tons a year. Consumption of oil products quadrupled too, and
by 1957 oil accounted for 12 percent of total energy use. West Germans were
acquiring the taste for a new type of energy.45

Energy Price Wars

Both oil and coal producers at first thrived in this booming economy. Yet West
Germany’s energy system had hardly stabilized before a conjuncture of events
unleashed a bitter feud about pricing that would disrupt the political economy
of German energy and lead many to question the very nature of the nation’s en-
ergy market.
This shift began with a set of forecasts that led Europeans to fear their conti-
nent would soon face energy shortfalls. In 1955 the Organisation for European
Economic Co-​ operation (OEEC)—​ Europe’s leading body of economic
experts—​commissioned its first comprehensive energy forecast. When Harold
Hartley, the British chemist who led the study, released his report in 1956, it
caused a sensation. Hartley predicted Europe was entering a “new world” of rap-
idly rising energy consumption, driven by a growing population and changing
consumer habits. The gold standard of energy use was the United States, whose
mineral wealth and mechanized production meant its workers could deploy
three times as much energy as those in Europe, and thus enjoyed an unparalleled
level of productivity. Europe must match this to compete. But where would it get
its energy, for according to Hartley the continent would soon outgrow its own
sources of fossil fuels? Europe, he concluded, “must have sufficient quantities of
energy at the lowest possible price in order to preserve our position in this world
of competition and to improve our standard of living.”46
32 The Old Energy Paradigm

In 1956 Hartley defined a Western European energy problem: the conti-

nent must close the gap with the pioneer of high-​energy society to sustain a
high standard of living. These anxieties struck a chord in West Germany, for in
1956 the country became a net importer of energy for the first time since in-
dustrialization. Coal producers predicted the economy would hit its “capacity
limit” because energy was in such short supply. Domestic forecasters and the
Economics Ministry confirmed the dawn of a new age of energy scarcity.47 Few
contemporaries anticipated the immense energetic transformations that lay
ahead. Experts like Fritz Baade, director of the Institute for Global Economics
at Kiel and a parliamentarian for the SPD, believed the future lay with hard coal.
In a widely selling energy forecast, he argued this rock would remain “the prime
foundation” of Europe’s energy supply through 1975, perhaps even 2000.48
Coal producers reacted to these forecasts by ramping up investment. So too
did the oil industry. Erhard, meanwhile, pushed through three major changes
to meet the nation’s anticipated need for more energy. First, he increased coal
imports from the United States by reducing the tariff on American coal. North
American coal, already cheaper at the source than Ruhr coal, was now held in
check only by high freight rates, and coal imports from the United States rose
50 percent between 1955 and 1957.49
Second, Erhard seemed to change his tune on the question of pricing. With
the return of full sovereignty to the Federal Republic in 1955, the ECSC agreed
to end the pricing regime that had kept German coal inexpensive for the rest of
Europe, and it signaled that Bonn should have the final say over whether to fix
the price of coal. With encouragement from his liberal advisors, Erhard agreed
to end state control over coal prices.50 On April 1, 1956, West Germany freed its
coal prices, with Erhard presenting this as “a decisive step towards integrating
hard coal into the market.”51 His decision, however, met resistance from many
quarters. The cabinet passed it by the narrowest of margins. Opponents warned
that freeing coal prices would spark wage demands that would unleash an infla-
tionary spiral. The SPD and the Industrial Mining Union disapproved and in-
stead called for energy import quotas and a massive state investment project to
modernize the energy sector as a whole.52
In reality, though, Erhard never wanted the coal price to be determined en-
tirely by supply and demand. As he noted in discussions with the European
Council, “even if one wants to grant a market price, one must still have the right
to influence the market.”53 Though technically freeing coal prices, he still wanted
to retain indirect control. In his mind, German welfare depended on exports.
Driven by traditional industries like steel, chemicals, and increasingly cars,
exports were becoming the motor of the economy, accounting for 19 percent of
national income. For the economics minister, “a plentiful supply of the cheapest
possible energy is becoming ever more important. No one can dispute that
 Energ y P r ice Wars 33

preserving our position on the global market requires not the least a low cost of
energy.”54 To achieve his goal of a technically free but in fact monitored and low
energy price, Erhard struck a gentleman’s agreement with coal producers, who
pledged not to raise prices without first consulting the Economics Ministry. And
he reinforced this with a new round of subsidies to keep coal prices low. With
new wage support for miners, new contributions to pensions, and new depre-
ciation allowances, all of which cost the federal budget 200 million DM a year,
Bonn effectively subsidized coal by 3.5 DM a ton.55
Erhard paired this with a third policy that removed the tariff on fuel oil imports.
This made West Germany the least protected oil market in Europe: France man-
aged petroleum imports through a strict licensing and quota system; Britain
taxed fuel oil heavily, and would even ban oil from the Soviet Union. The move
demoralized coal producers. On one level, petroleum posed little threat to coal.
By the mid-​twentieth century, oil had become above all a fuel for the automo-
bile. Since the industry began thermal cracking in 1913 it had maximized gaso-
line as a refinery output because of its profitability. Gasoline for cars, however,
was a novel market that did not detract from coal sales, particularly in Germany,
where automobile ownership lagged behind that of Britain and France. But as
demand for cars grew across Western Europe, the refining process that produced
gasoline also churned out byproducts, like fuel oil. And this oil derivative did
rival coal across a range of markets. Ships began using fuel oil, including the
growing fleet of supertankers that brought crude to Europe. Railroad companies
started burning it in their trains. Industry and agriculture increasing employed
it for machinery. Households consumed it for heating. Power plants even began
turning to it for electricity. Coal’s one major market that remained untouched by
fuel oil was coking for steelmaking; by the late 1950s every other one now faced
a new rival.56
In closed-​door discussions between Germany’s leading oil and coal firms,
Helmuth Burckhardt, chairman of Bergbau-​AG Lothringen in Bochum, one of
coal’s most influential lobbyists, and an energy expert for the CDU, admitted that
coal was simply “not flexible enough” to compete with fuel oil.57 Since 1953, coal
producers had consistently predicted tariff-​free fuel oil would lead to a disastrous
rise in oil consumption at the expense of coal.58 Erhard paid these complaints no
heed. As he explained to the European Council, his three policies functioned as
a cohesive strategy to “introduce as quickly as possible an all-​embracing compe-
tition between [West Germany’s] individual energy suppliers. Toward this end
we are trying to strengthen the competitive position of American coal vis-​a-​vis
Ruhr coal, and to promote the consumption of oil products.” He wanted to force
Ruhr cartels to modernize in a fight for survival in a low-​price energy regime.59
While 1956 altered the playing field between West Germany’s two main en-
ergy sources, the dire effects predicted by Burckhardt did not at first materialize.
34 The Old Energy Paradigm

That summer and fall, Egypt’s new pan-​Arab leader nationalized and then closed
the Suez Canal, throwing the energy markets of the Federal Republic into tur-
moil. Oil prices spiked by nearly 50 percent, dampening the changes Bonn had
just implemented and leading the OEEC to call on coal producers to ramp up
production still further.60
However, 1956 did spark an intense debate about how the Federal Republic
should manage the price of energy, raising questions of efficiency, inflation, dis-
tribution, favoritism, and equity that would animate energy discussions for the
rest of the century. In public lectures, in the press, and in discussions before
Parliament, Ruhr elites vehemently criticized Erhard’s pricing regime. Keyser
and Burckhardt estimated the fixed price of coal had cost Ruhr producers billions
since 1948, and that this was the root cause of coal’s problems.61 Subsidies, mean-
while, had not stimulated investment as intended: over the past several years
total investment in West Germany rose, while investment in coal declined by
10 percent. Continuing these policies, Keyser and Burckhardt concluded, would
only “lead to new gaps that would have to be filled with new subsidies.”62 Instead,
they demanded “a true price” for coal.63 Yet their idea of a “true” price differed
from Erhard’s: it should be the Ruhr cartel that determined prices, and it was
only fair that it should cover the costs of production as well as the new invest-
ment demanded by the rest of the economy.64
Confident from the forecasts of 1956, in October 1957 the Ruhr cartel
exercised its new legal power and unilaterally raised the price of coal. The price
hike came just days after West Germany’s third national election, in which
the CDU promised stable energy prices for exporters. The decision outraged
Erhard, who saw it as a violation of the gentleman’s agreement and a “declaration
of war” by the Ruhr.65
In denouncing the price hike, Erhard argued that questions of equity had no
place in Bonn’s energy framework, only competition. In a detailed discussion at
the European Council in Luxemburg, Erhard claimed that the ideas of Keyser
and Burckhardt in no way “conformed to the principles of a free economy.” For
nothing in a market economy gives producers “a legal and moral claim to recover,
at all times, their costs.” If coal cartels had their way, it would lead to a “virtual
dictatorship” by a sector with high costs and would place inflationary pressure
on the rest of the economy. Instead, Erhard reiterated his standard position, that
energy prices must be flexible, low, and under constant competitive pressure.66
In the price debates, Erhard and the Economics Ministry portrayed oil as the
binary opposite of coal, a sector governed by the market on a global scale, and
one that through competition would modernize West Germany.67 Oil producers
were happy to play this role, and they mobilized the language of the Social Market
in ways that coal was never able to. Where coal spoke of fairness, covering costs,
and maintaining employment, oil spoke of consumerism, productivity, exports,
 Energ y P r ice Wars 35

and efficiency. In a joint letter addressed to Erhard and Adenauer, the directors
of BP, Shell, and ESSO-​Exxon synced their arguments to the tenets of the Social
Market. Competition between providers, they argued, is “the prerequisite for
efficiently supplying the Federal Republic with energy.” Protectionist measures
meant to favor one type of energy over another would “trigger even worse crises
at a later date.”68 Oil succeeded, the directors of the majors claimed, because
their firms merely followed trends that consumers themselves were generating
for more flexible and cheaper energy. Consumers, “with their growing demand
for comfort,” were the true “pace setters” of the energy market, not producers.
This was captured in the slogan “everyone should live better.” Coined at West
Germany’s largest industrial exhibition in Dusseldorf, this motto was adopted
by Erhard and his publicists during the 1950s to promote their vision of
transplanting American consumerism into West Germany. The oil majors
quickly latched on. As Ernst Falkenheim, general director of Shell’s German sub-
sidiary, argued, motorization and the growing use of oil “belong to those things
that are embodied by the motto ‘everyone should live better.’ ”69
The majors likewise aligned their demands with the export agenda of the
Economics Ministry. In a statement that could have come from Erhard himself,
their representatives concluded that “the meaning and objective of economic
policy in our country” was not about choosing one energy over another, but
rather about “raising productivity, that is to say, raising the output for each
hour worked so that West German industry will be competitive on the global
market.”70 The problem, however, as oil lobbyists reiterated on countless
occasions, was that West Germany lay behind its competitors in nearly every
metric of petroleum consumption. An investment study by ESSO-​Exxon’s eco-
nomic research department claimed that using more oil was the only way West
Germany could “close North America’s lead.” Playing on the Hartley report, it
emphasized how America’s high standard of living stemmed from its “unlimited
use of petroleum.” To catch up, West Germany needed a multi-​billion DM in-
vestment drive to expand refineries, lay pipelines, build tankers, and construct
processing facilities. Fortunately, ESSO-​Exxon concluded, West Germany need
not fund this project on its own; rather, oil firms could do so with their deep
pockets.71 Playing on a new iconography created by boosters in the 1950s, West
German oil men portrayed their industry as “the raw material of progress,”
which would offer the world “nearly unlimited possibilities” from automobiles
to air conditioners and plastics.72
Despite this publicity, however, the majors did not emerge from the price
debates unscathed. For just as a new heroic iconography of oil was emerging,
critics began looking more carefully into the global supply of petroleum. The
first criticism came in 1955, when a report by the United Nations Economic
Commission for Europe (UNECE) suggested the majors were keeping the
36 The Old Energy Paradigm

price of crude oil artificially high for European consumers. Before 1955, little
empirical public data had been published on the price of European petroleum
products. The authors thus presented some of the first rough, public estimates of
global crude prices, and in doing so they inflamed the fraught question of pricing
by concluding that the global market for oil “could scarcely be regarded as uni-
fied nor prices as resulting from the free play of competitive forces.”73
Those countries that harbored the majors, above all the United States,
condemned the study, as did the majors themselves. Realizing it was treading
on thin ice, UNECE muted its conclusions in cautious language. The press,
however, sensationalized the report and accused the majors of unjust profits
and pricing. In West Germany, shortly after it appeared, the SPD initiated a par-
liamentary inquiry into the price of gasoline, asking why it was higher in West
Germany than in other European countries and suggesting the majors might be
reaping unreasonable profits.74
The SPD’s salvo marked the first major publicity attack on West German
oil. Lacking detailed price information, the Economics Ministry turned to the
majors themselves for data. The subsidiaries of ESSO-​Exxon, Shell, and BP
responded defensively with reports that contested the SPD’s charges. They
argued it was not the government’s place to “review the gasoline prices at ser-
vice stations for their adequacy.” Such an action, BP noted, “represented discrim-
ination against the oil industry,” a remark that betrayed a willful ignorance of
how Bonn monitored coal.75 They argued that profits from gasoline sales were
low, that West Germany’s market for oil was highly competitive, and that the
subsidiaries of ESSO-​Exxon, BP, and Shell earned profits that were typical.76
But the press remained unconvinced. For the UNECE and SPD had raised
the question of whether the price of oil was actually made by the market, like
Erhard and the majors claimed. As the nation’s leading newspaper pointed
out, West Germans simply had little information about the price of petro-
leum products; the reports from ESSO-​Exxon, Shell, and BP were some of
the first studies with data on cost that reached an external audience. The
task of judging whether gasoline was unjustifiably expensive was made even
more difficult because petroleum products such as fuel oil and gasoline were
co-​produced, or made from the same refining process. A major could use
profits it made from selling one byproduct, like gasoline, to offset the costs
of another. And because Deutsche Shell, Deutsche BP, and Deutsche ESSO
belonged to international conglomerates, they could easily shift capital and
profits across borders.77
More generally, the price debates of the mid-​1950s began to reveal the lie at the
heart of the social market economy when it came to energy: namely, that there
was no actual market price for coal or for oil, at least not the competitive one
Erhard claimed was necessary for West Germany’s export economy. As analysts
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be a comfort to my father, I would welcome you gladly again; but you
can hardly expect it when you trouble and distress him.”
“Bride, Bride, do not speak so! do not drive me to despair!” cried
Eustace suddenly, losing his long-preserved self-control. “Do you not
know that I love you, that I have loved you almost ever since I saw
you first three months ago? Oh, my love, my life, only love me in
return, and do what you will with me! I am yours, body and soul, and
together we will walk through life, and yours shall be the guiding and
directing will, for you are the guiding star of my life! Bride, Bride! hear
me! Be my wife, and I will be in the future what you will. You shall
rule my life for me. Only let me know that your love is mine, and I
care for nothing else!”
She understood then, and the surprise of it all held her mute and
spellbound. Perhaps no maiden in the length and breadth of the land
had grown up more oblivious of the thought of love and marriage
than Lady Bride Marchmont. No young companions had she ever
known to suggest such ideas. Her mother had preserved the
guarded silence on the subject that mothers are wont to do whilst
their daughters are yet young, and her father had followed his wife’s
example. She had seen the best and happiest side of married life in
the tender love and dependence of her parents; but as a thing
applied to herself she had never given it a thought, and now she
recoiled from this passionate appeal with a sense of shrinking and
distaste which she found it difficult to refrain from expressing in
words that would inflict pain on the man before her. She did not wish
to pain him. She was woman enough to know that he meant to do
her honour by this proffer of love and service; but he had utterly
failed to awaken any answering chord in her heart, and she felt that
he ought not to have spoken as he had done, or to use such
arguments to her.
“No, Eustace,” she said, not ungently, as he tried to take her hand.
“You must not speak to me so. It is not right. It is not even manly. I
think you can know very little of me when you speak of offering
yourself to me body and soul, or tell me that you care for nothing
else if you can have my love. Do you think I can love any one, save
with the love of a deep pity, who can place a mere earthly love
before everything else, and talk as though his soul were his own to
give into the keeping of another? Do you think I like to hear you say
that you would even abandon a cause which seemed to you holy
and just and right, simply because you think I may not approve it?
Do you wish to make of me your conscience-keeper? O Eustace!
think what such words mean!—think what treachery they imply, not
only to God but to man, and I am sure you yourself will be ashamed
of them.”
“I can think of nothing but that I love you, Bride,” broke in Eustace,
hotly and passionately, his heart moved by the wonderful beauty of
the woman before him; her utter unconsciousness of the wild
passions of love and tenderness stirring within him only rousing him
to a sense of wilder resolve to win her at all cost. “I love you! I love
you! I love you! All my religion, all my faith, all my happiness here or
hereafter are comprised within the limits of those three little words. I
love you! Surely you will not tell me in return that you hate me, and
would spurn me from your presence. O Bride, my life, my love! do
not say that you have no love to give me in return.”
There was something so appealing in his voice that her heart was
touched with compassion, though with no answering response. She
let him possess himself of her hand, but it lay cool and passive in his
hot clasp.
“I do not hate you, Eustace—why should I? I do not hate any living
thing. I do not spurn you. I do not spurn your love.”
“My darling, ten thousand thanks for that sweet word. If my love is
not spurned, surely it will some day be returned! Bride, you will at
least let me hope that?”
“I cannot help what you hope,” she answered, with childlike
frankness. “But, Eustace, I do not think I can ever love you as you
wish, and I can never, never, never be your wife unless I do. I like
you as a cousin; but indeed that is all. I do not understand what it is
that makes you wish to marry me. We should be very unhappy
together—I am quite sure of that.”
“Ah! no, Bride! Do not speak so. Unhappy, and with you!”
“I should be very unhappy,” answered the girl steadily, “and you
ought to be, Eustace, if you really knew what love meant.”
He looked at her in amaze; that she should be speaking to him of the
nature of love with that look of divine compassion in her eyes was a
thing altogether too strange and perplexing. Her very attitude and
quiet composure told of a heart unruffled as yet by any touch of
human passion, and yet she was turning upon him and rebuking him
for his ignorance. It was she who broke the momentary pause,
seeming almost to read his thoughts.
“You wonder how I know perhaps, but, ah! if you had seen my father
and mother together you would have understood. If you had known
what love there was between my mother and me, you would
understand. Do not I know what love is? Ah! do I not? It is the power
to lay bare the innermost sanctuary of your soul, and to know that
you will be understood, helped, strengthened, comforted. It is the
knowledge that thoughts too deep, and hopes too wonderful and
mysterious for words are shared together, and can be whispered of
together without being tarnished by the poor attempt to reduce them
to speech; the consciousness that in everything we are in accord,
that we are often thinking the same things at the same moment; the
knowledge that the deeper and deeper we go the more and more
sympathy and sweet accord there is between us; that not only are
we one in opinion about temporal and changing things, but knit
close, close together in soul and spirit as well, sharing the same
faith, the same hope, the same love! Ah! Eustace! if you had known
such a love as that, you could never think that there would be
happiness for you and me in linking our lives together!”
He stood silent, almost abashed, before her, marvelling alike at her
eloquence and at the insight displayed of a union of spirit, of which
Eustace was forced to admit that he had not thought. To win Bride as
his wife, to set her up as his object of adoring love, had seemed all-
sufficient to him hitherto. Now it suddenly dawned upon him that with
such a woman as this, that would be but the travesty and mockery of
happiness. She was right and he was wrong: without a deeper
sympathy and love than any which had come into his philosophy as
yet, marriage would be a doleful blunder. He would be no nearer to
her than before—perhaps farther away. He must learn to share with
her that inner and mystic life of which he saw glimpses from time to
time when she opened out for a moment and showed him what lay
below the calm surface of her nature. Either he must share that with
her, or wean her away from it; replacing mysticism with philanthropy,
fanaticism with practical benevolence, objective with subjective
religion. One of those two ends must be accomplished before he
could hope to win the desire of his heart. As he stood in the bright
spring sunshine facing her, he became suddenly aware of that, and a
new light leaped into his eyes—the light of battle and of resolve. He
would win her yet, but it must be by slower steps than any he had
contemplated hitherto. She was worthy of better things than
becoming a mere dreamer and nunlike recluse. It should be his to
lead her steps to surer ground, to show her that there was a higher
Christianity than any of which she had hitherto dreamed. Not now—
not all at once, but he would come again and begin upon a surer
foundation. He looked into her eyes, and gently taking her hand
before she had time to draw it away, he said quietly—
“Do not be afraid, Bride; I see that you judged more wisely than I.
You are right and I am wrong, and I will go away and trouble you no
more in the present; but the time will come when I shall return, and I
trust that by slow and sure degrees we shall draw so closely together
that you will no longer shrink from me in fear and trembling. You are
very young, sweet cousin, and there are many things you have yet to
learn. It is a beautiful thing, I doubt not, to hold commune in the spirit
with the higher world; but we are set in our place here below for
something I hold to be more truly noble than that. We are set in a
world of sin and misery that we may gird our armour upon us and
fight the battle with this sin and misery—fight it for our poor and
afflicted brethren, as they cannot fight it for themselves. That is the
true Christianity; that is the highest form of religious devotion. You
can read it for yourself in your Bible—‘True religion and undefiled
before God and the Father is this, to visit the widows and orphans in
their affliction’—to be ministers, in fact, of mercy and blessing in any
sphere, of which one is given as the type.”
“Yes,” answered Bride very softly, “and to keep himself unspotted
from the world.”
She looked straight at Eustace as she spoke, and he looked back at
her, marvelling at the extraordinary depth and beauty of those dark
eyes. He longed, as he had never longed before, to take her in his
arms and hold her to his heart; but he knew that he must not, so with
a great effort he restrained himself, and kept back the words of
passionate love which rose to his lips.
“Yes,” he answered steadily; “and for your sweet sake, Bride, I will
strive to do even that—evil and full of temptation as my world is.”
“Not for my sake, Eustace, not for my sake,” she replied, with an
earnestness he scarcely understood; “that would be indeed a vain
resolve. If you cannot yet strive in the power and might of the Risen
and Ascended Lord, whom you deny, strive at least in the power of
the right you own and believe in, though you know not from whence
it comes.”
He looked at her in some amaze.
“Why do you say I deny your Risen Saviour, Bride?”
“Because I heard you with your own lips do so, in effect if not in
actual words. You spoke of His miracles as being ordinary gifts of
healing exaggerated by the devotion of His followers; of the
Transfiguration being a like delusion—men awakened from sleep
seeing their Master standing in the glory of the sunrise, and
mistaking the morning mists for other luminous figures beside Him.
You said that the Resurrection had been accounted for by the theory
that the Saviour did not die, but was taken from the Cross in a state
of trance, from which He recovered in the tomb.”
A flush mounted quickly into Eustace’s face.
“You mistake me, Bride,” he answered hastily. “We were discussing
—Mr. St. Aubyn and I—some of the teachings of various
philosophers and thinkers, and I was explaining to him how Paulus
had extended to the New Testement the method which Eichhorn had
applied to the Old. I was not defending the theory, but merely stating
it as a matter of speculation amongst men of a certain school.”
Bride looked at him intently.
“If that is so, I am thankful and glad; but I heard too much not to
know very well where your sympathies and convictions lie. If you do
not follow the impious teachings of this Paulus, you are very far
along the road which does not lead to the Father’s house. No,
Eustace; let us talk no more of this—it is only painful to both. I shall
never convince you; but I shall pray for you. And now farewell. I trust
when next we meet it will be without this sense of unutterable
distance between us; but it must be you to change—for I never
shall.”
She turned and left him standing there in the sunshine. That same
day Eustace took leave of Penarvon, and commenced his backward
journey to London.
 CHAPTER IX
THE WAVE OF REVOLT
“FEGS! if theer’s tu be a bobbery up tu Pentreath, us lads o’ St.
Bride’s wunt be left owt on’t!”
“Dashed if us wull! Wheer theer’s fightin’ and a fillyboo, theer’s
more’n hard knocks to be gotten. Us’ll soon see what us can get by
un!”
“Aw dally-buttons, that us wull! They du say as our Saul’s theer in t’
thick of un. But what’s it awl about? Dost any o’ yu knaw?”
The swarthy fishermen looked each other in the face with a grin, but
nobody seemed ready with an answer.
“May’ap ’tis because the king’s dead,” suggested one.
“Naw, ’tidden that ezakally,” objected another. “’Tis becos they
Frenchers ’ave abin an’ gone for tu ’ave a new bobbery ower theer—
what the great folks calls a reverlooshon. They’ve a druv theer king
over tu England: that’s what ’as set all the lads ower heer in a takin’
after theer roights.”
“’Tidden theer roights theer a’ter,” remarked a woman who was
sitting hunched up in the chimney-corner of the hut where this
confabulation was going on, “’tis other folks’ goods they want. They
thinks wheerever a bobbery be theer’ll be gutterin’ and guzzlin’, and
that’s all they care for. You’d a best ’ave nowt tu du with un.”
But this piece of advice was received with ridicule and disfavour.
“Ef theer be zo much as gutterin’ and guzzlin’ why shetten us be left
behind? ’Tidden much of either us gets nowadays with those dashed
customs-men always a’ter we. Crimminy! but us’ll take our share ef
zo be as theer’s awght to be gotten. I’ve heerd tell theer be a real
hollerballoo up tu Pentreath. I be agwaine to see un.”
“Zo be I! Zo be I!” echoed in turn a dozen or more voices, and from
the dim chimney-corner there only came a rough snort of
disapproval.
“Go ’long wi’ ye then. When the dowl’s abroad ’twidden be in yer to
bide tu home. Go ’long and help make the bobbery wusser. ’Tidden
hurt I. But it’ll be a poor-come-along-on’t for some o’ yu, I take it.
Theer’ll be trouble at St. Bride along on’t.”
The men hesitated for a moment, for the old woman who thus spoke
had won the not too enviable reputation of being next door to a
witch, and of reading or moulding future events—which, it was not
altogether certain in the minds of the people. She was a lonely
widow woman, but lived in one of the best cottages in the place,
where she kept a sort of private bar, selling spirits and tobacco to the
fishermen, and allowing them to make use of her sanded kitchen,
where at all seasons of the year a fire was burning, as a place of
resort where all the gossip of the place could be discussed. They
never put two and two together in seeking to account for the occult
knowledge possessed by the old woman respecting the private
concerns of the whole community. She affected to be rather deaf,
and therefore low-toned conversations were carried on freely in her
presence. Old Mother Clat was quite a character in her way, and a
distinct power in the fishing community of St. Bride.
But her advice was not sufficient to deter the bolder spirits from
taking part in the exciting scenes known to be passing in the country
round them. At that moment England was passing through a crisis
more perilous than was fully realised at the time. The sudden
revolution in France, which had culminated in the abdication and
flight of the king, the death of the English king, George the Fourth, at
almost the same moment, and the whispers in the air that Belgium
and other countries were about to imitate France, and rise in revolt
against the oppression and tyranny of princes, acted in an
extraordinary fashion upon the minds of the discontented population
of this land. The long period of depression and distress, whilst it had
ground down one section of the community to a state of passive
despair, had aroused in others the spirit of insubordination and
revolt. Like leaven in the loaf was this fermentation going on, greatly
helped by the knowledge that the cause of the people was exercising
the minds of many of the great ones of the land, and that in them
they would find a mouthpiece if only they could succeed in making
their voice heard.
Now when there is any great uprising in any one district, there is
generally a local as well as a general cause of complaint; and in this
remote West-Country district it was far less the question of reformed
representation and the abolishment of certain grave abuses which
was exercising the minds of the community than the fact that new
machinery had recently been set up in some of the mills at
Pentreath, and in some of the farmsteads scattered about the
district; and the panic of the Midlands had spread down to the South
and West, the people fully believing that this would be the last straw
—the last drop of bitterness in their cup, and that nothing but
absolute starvation lay before them unless they took prompt
measures to defend themselves from the dreaded innovations.
The Midlands and North had set the example. Ever since the rising
of the Luddites there had been more or less of disturbance in the
manufacturing districts, where, of course, in the first instance the
introduction of machinery did throw certain classes of operatives out
of employment; and they were unable to realise that this would soon
be more than made up to them by the increase of trade resulting
from the improvement in the many complicated processes of
manufacture. In the North the riots were on the wane. It was just
beginning to dawn upon the minds of the more enlightened artisans,
that if they would leave matters to take a peaceful course they would
soon see themselves reinstated in the mills, where trade was
growing more brisk and active than ever before. But away down in
the remote West, any innovation was received with the greatest
horror and aversion, and the people had heard just enough about
their wrongs to be in that restless state when any sort of activity
becomes attractive, and any uprising against authority appears in the
light of an act of noble resistance to tyranny.
Pentreath was an ancient town, though a small one. It sent a
member to Parliament, although the huge and fast-increasing towns
of the North did not. Of late years it had become a small centre of
manufacturing industry, the water-power there being considerable.
There were two cloth-mills and one silk-mill, a paper manufactory,
and another where soap and essences were made. One reason why
the district round Pentreath was not feeling the general poverty and
distress very keenly was that from the rural districts men who could
not get employment upon the land could generally find it in the mills.
But when almost at one and the same time improved machinery
became introduced both into agriculture and manufacture, the sense
of revolt was deeply stirred. A certain number of turbulent spirits had
been simultaneously dismissed both from the farms and from the
mills, and these two contingents at once banded together in
somewhat dangerous mood to talk over the situation and their own
private grievances, and to set about to find a remedy.
It was the Duke who first introduced the machinery into the
neighbourhood, although he had dismissed no servant of his until
three of his men were found tampering with and injuring the new
machine, when he promptly sent them about their business. Their
bad example was followed by others, and four more were summarily
dismissed; whereupon the Duke let it be thoroughly understood that
any servant of his taking that line would be promptly discharged, but
that he had no intention of dismissing any of those on his estate who
were orderly and obedient, and used the improved implements in a
right and workmanlike way. This declaration had the effect at
Penarvon of stopping depredations for the moment, and no more
labourers were sent away; but those who had already received
notice were not taken on again: for the Duke, though a just and
liberal master, was a stern upholder of law and order, and had no
intention of having his will or his authority set at naught by a handful
of ill-conditioned fellows, who refused to listen to any other guides
than their own blind passions.
These men gravitated naturally into Pentreath, in the hope of finding
employment there, only to be met by the news that the mills were
turning off hands, owing to the saving of labour by the introduction of
improved machinery. The band of what in these days would be
termed “unemployed” gathered together by common accord, and
roved the streets by day, begging and picking up odd jobs of work as
they could get them, and meeting at night in a low tavern on the
outskirts of the town to spend their pittance generally on raw spirit,
and to talk sedition and treason.
Possibly, had no other power been at work just at that juncture, the
whole thing might have begun and ended in talk; but there were
other forces in operation, all favourable to the spirit of revolt and
vengeful hatred which actuated this small band; and as discontented
men of every class draw together by common consent, however
various their grievances may be, so did the newly aroused politicians
of the place, eager and anxious to awaken the country to a sense of
its political grievances, and the urgent need of parliamentary reform,
gravitate towards the little band of discontented labourers and
operatives, sure of finding in them allies in the general feeling of
revolt against the prevailing system, which they had set themselves
to amend, and hoping quickly to arouse in them the patriotic
enthusiasm which kindled their own hearts.
Saul’s friend the cobbler was the first to address these men on the
subject of the hoped-for reform. He went to them upon several
evenings, strove to arouse in them a sense of indignation against
prevailing abuses and evils, and found his task an easy one.
Wherever he made out that the country was suffering from the
oppression of tyrants and the greed of the rich, he was received with
howls of approval and delight. The answer of his audience was
invariably a cry of “Down with it! Down with them!” They would have
rushed with the greatest pleasure through the streets, and attacked
the houses of the mill-owners, or have broken into the mills and
gutted them, had there been any to lead them. But the cobbler was a
man of words rather than of action. He was one to foster fierce
passions, but his talents did not lie in directing the action which
follows upon such an arousing. One Sunday afternoon, it is true, he
headed a procession which marched through the streets, shouting
and threatening, so that the people shut their shutters in haste, and
begged that the watchmen or the military might go out and disperse
the mob. No harm, however, came of the demonstration, save that
an uneasy feeling was aroused in the minds of the townfolk, who
looked askance upon the haggard men seeking alms or employment
about their doors, and were less disposed to help them than they
had been at first.
Thus the ill-feeling between class and class grew and increased, and
it was to a band of men rendered well-nigh desperate by misery and
a sense of burning wrong that Saul came down one Sunday, his own
heart inflamed by passion and hatred, to supplement the efforts of
the cobbler by one of his own harangues, which had already won for
their author a certain measure of celebrity.
Saul had greatly changed during the past six months, changed and
developed in a remarkable manner. When he stood by the orchard
wall making love to Genefer Teazel, he had looked a very fine
specimen of his race, and superior in many points to the labourers
with whom he consorted, and whose toil he shared; but since the
rapid development of his mental faculties had set in, he had altered
wonderfully in his outward man, and no one to look at him would
believe, save from his dress and the hardness of his hands, that he
had spent his life in mere manual toil on a farm. His face, always
well-featured, had now taken an expression of concentration and
purpose, seldom seen in a labouring man; the eyes were very
intense in their expression, and, as the fisher-folk were wont to say,
went through you like a knife. His tall figure had grown rather thin
and gaunt, as though the activity of the mind had reacted on the
body, or else that he had been denying himself the needful support
for his strong frame. He looked like a man whom it would not be well
to incite to anger. There was a sufficient indication in his face of
suppressed passion and fury held under firm control, yet ready to
blaze up into a fierce life under provocation. He looked like a man
born to be an Ishmaelite in his life’s pilgrimage—his hand against
every man, and every man’s hand against him—a man in revolt
against the world, against society, against himself. A keen and yet
sympathetic physiognomist could hardly study that face without a
sigh of compassion. Saul Tresithny, with his nature, his
temperament, his antecedents, could scarcely have any but an
unhappy life—unless he had been able to yield himself in childlike
submission to the teachings of his grandfather, and look for peace
and happiness beyond the troublous waves of this world, to the far
haven of everlasting peace.
Saul had spent the past six months in close reading and study,
whenever time and opportunity were his. First from his friend the
cobbler, then from his friend the Duke’s heir, he had received books
and papers; and out in the fields in his dinner-hour, or trudging to
and fro with the plough, or up in his attic at night, with his
companions snoring around him, he had studied and read and
thought—thought till it seemed often as though thought would
madden him, read until he looked haggard and wan from his long
vigils, and he found the best part of his pittance of wage go in the
purchase of the rushlights by which he studied his books at night.
Eustace had lent him histories of other nations—down-trodden
peoples who had revolted at last from their oppressors, and had won
for themselves freedom—sometimes of body, sometimes of mind, at
the sword’s point. Eustace had tried to choose writers of impartiality;
but his own bias had been too strong to make him a very good
director of such a mind as Saul’s; and when a man of that
temperament reaches passages which are not to his liking, he simply
skips over them till he reaches what is more to his taste; and Saul
had invariably missed out those explanatory and exculpatory pages,
wherein the historian shows the other side of the question, and
explains how some of the grievances most declaimed against by an
oppressed people are the result rather of circumstance, and the
changing order of the day, than the direct outcome of a real injustice
and tyranny.
So his mind rapidly developed in a fashion by no means desired by
his mentor; and so soon as the restraining influence of Eustace was
removed, the wild and ardent imagination of the young man had full
sway, and he had none to give him better counsel or strive to check
the hot intemperance of his great zeal. He avoided his grandfather,
and Abner was too wise to force his company where it was not
wanted. He would not speak to Mr. St. Aubyn when the latter found
him out, and sought, in his gentle and genial way, to get the hot-
headed youth, of whom much talk was going about, to make a friend
of him, and open out upon the subjects of such moment to all the
country. No; Saul maintained a rigid and obstinate silence; and the
Rector went away disappointed, for he feared there were evil days in
store for Saul. Farmer Teazel, who was a staunch old Tory, and an
ardent believer in the existing state of things, even though he
admitted times to be bad in the immediate present, had no manner
of patience with his new-fangled notions, that were, as he said,
“driving honest folks crazy.” He had winked at Saul’s conduct as long
as he could, valuing the many sterling qualities possessed by the
young man, and hoping every day that he would turn over a new
leaf. But his patience had long been sorely tried. Saul, not content
with haranguing the fisher-folk down in the hamlet, who were always
ready to imbibe any sort of lawless doctrine—their one idea being
that the law and the customs were one and the same, and that to
revolt against any existing order was a step towards that freedom of
traffic which was their idea of prosperity and happiness. Not that they
wished the excise duties withdrawn—for that would render abortive
their illicit traffic; but they always fancied that there was advantage to
be gained from stirring up strife and revolting against established
order, and were eager listeners to Saul’s speeches. But not content
with that, Saul was working might and main amongst the more placid
and bovine rustics, his fellow-labourers on the farm, to emulate the
fisher-folk in their restless discontent, and with this amount of
success, that when Farmer Teazel, in imitation of his noble landlord,
introduced with pride and delight a new and wonderful machine into
his own yard, his own men rose in the night and did it some fatal
injury, which cost him pounds to repair, as well as delaying for a
whole month the operations which it had especially been bought to
effect.
This was too much. The farmer was in the main a placid man and a
good-tempered one; but he could not stand this, and he well knew
whom he had to thank for the outrage. Whether or no Saul had
prompted the men to do the mischief mattered little. It was he who
had fostered in them the spirit of disobedience and self-will which
had been at the bottom of the outrage; and so long as he remained
on the place there was no prospect of things being better. Before his
anger had had time to cool, he summoned Saul, and a battle of
words ensued, which led to the summary dismissal of the young
man, whilst the farmer strode out of the kitchen, in which the
interview had taken place, in a white heat of rage and
disappointment.
Saul stood looking after him with a strange gleam in his eyes, and
then his eyes caught sight of Genefer crouching in a corner with her
hands over her face.
Saul had not thought much of Genefer all this while, as presumably
she had been well aware; but the sight of her distress touched him,
and he would have approached her to offer some rude sympathy,
had she not suddenly sprung up and faced him with blazing eyes
and a fury only second to that which her father had displayed.
In the emphatic and most idiomatic vernacular, which is always used
by natives in moments of excitement, she told Saul her opinion of
him and of his conduct; she let loose in a flood all the mingled pique,
anger, disappointment, and jealousy which his conduct of the past
months had inspired. That he should presume to ask her love, and
then care for nothing but wild notions that savoured to her of the
devil himself, and which all right-minded people reprobated to the
last extent, was an insult she could not put up with. Woman-like, she
had looked to stand first and to stand paramount with handsome
Saul, when once she had permitted him to woo her; and instead of
this, he had heeded her less and less with every week that passed,
and had even refused to remain on Sunday at the farm when she
had asked it as a favour; and at last had done this mischief to her
father through his mischievous, ill-conditioned tongue. She would
have none of him, no, not she! He might go to his friends the fisher-
folk, or to the slums of Pentreath for a wife, if he wanted one!—she
would have none of him! He had been false to her, he had treated
her shamefully, and now he might go. She never wished to see him
again! And bursting into tears (the almost invariable climax to an
outburst of anger with women of her class) Genefer rushed from the
room, and Saul, looking white about the lips, but with a blaze in his
eyes which made all who met him shrink away from him, put
together the few things he had at the farm besides his books, and
stalked away into Pentreath, where he found an audience as ready
to listen to him as he was to address them.
And this is how it came about that St. Bride was set in a ferment of
excitement by the news that there were exciting scenes going on at
Pentreath—mysterious outbreaks of popular fury—machines broken
in the mills—a statue of the old king standing in the market-place,
found in the river-bed one morning greatly shattered by the fall—a
baker’s shop looted in broad daylight another day; and over all a
sense that there was more to come, and that this was but the
beginning of what might grow to rival one of the great risings of the
Midlands and the North, when private houses had been broken into,
and an untold amount of damage inflicted upon rich men, who had
drawn upon themselves the popular hatred.
Now St. Bride, as represented by the fishermen, had no wish to be
left out of any enterprise which promised either excitement or
reward. It was whispered in all quarters that Saul was at the head of
the rioters, and that his was the master-mind there. If so, they would
be certain of a welcome from him if they joined his little band; and so
it came about that, whilst the boats still lay high and dry upon the
beach, the men of the place were almost all mysteriously missing,
and their womenfolk professed absolute ignorance as to what had
taken them off.
“Oh, Mr. St. Aubyn,” said Bride, with tears in her eyes, as she
encountered the clergyman of St. Erme on the downs, bent in the
same direction as herself, to the cottage where a sick woman was
lying, “do you think it is true what they are all saying, that Abner’s
grandson is gathering together a band of desperate men, and
intends to try and provoke a general rising, and to march all through
the district, breaking machines and robbing and plundering? It
seems too dreadful to think of; but wherever I go I hear the same
tale. Do you believe that it is true?”
“I trust that you have heard an exaggerated account of what is
passing, Lady Bride,” he said; “though I fear that there are troublous
days before us; but I think we are prepared for that, and can look
without over-much dismay around. Remember, my child, that when
we see the beginning of these things coming to pass, we are to lift
up our heads, because our redemption draweth nigh. In that is our
safeguard and our hope.”
The light flashed into Bride’s eyes.
“Ah! thank you for reminding me. It is so hard to keep it always in
mind; but indeed it is like the beginning—men’s heart’s failing them
for fear, and for looking after those things that are coming on the
earth. Mr. St. Aubyn, tell me, are the people altogether wrong in
demanding redress of those grievances which lie so heavy upon
them? Is it right that they should have so little, so very little voice in
the government of the nation, when we call this a free and a
constitutional form of government? Need we condemn them
altogether for doing what their ignorance and misery drive them to
do? Are we not also to blame in that they are so miserable and
ignorant?”
“In very truth we are, Lady Bride——”
“Ah! no; not Lady Bride to you, when we are alone like this,” she
pleaded. “It never used to be so. Let it be Bride again, as though I
were a child. Ah! would that I were, and that she were with me! Oh, it
is all so dark and perplexing now!”
“It is, my child, it is, even for the best and wisest on the earth. Let us
take comfort in the thought that it is light with God, and that He sees
the working out of His eternal purposes, even where most let and
hindered by the sin and opposition of man. A time of darkness is
upon us—that none can deny—not in this land alone, but in all the
lands of Christendom; and you are right in your feeling that it is not
the ignorant masses who are alone in fault. We—the Church—the
nobility, the great ones of the earth, have failed again and again in
our duties towards those below them, and now they have to suffer.
Two wrongs do not make one right, and the method in which the
ignorant seem like to set to work is not only foolish, but sinful also;
and in our sense of sympathy for the people and our self-
reprobation, we must not palliate, even though we may partially
understand the cause of the sin. It is right that the people should be
thought of and rightly done by. God has taught us that again and
again; but it is not the ordinance of God that the people should
govern—and yet, if I read my Bible and interpret aright, that is what
we shall come to in the days of the end; it will no longer be the voice
of God, nor yet the voice of the king which will prevail, but the voice
of the people; and we shall again hear in newer and more subtle
forms that word of blasphemy which tells us that the voice of the
people is the voice of God.”
“Ah! do you think so? That is what I have heard said; but surely it will
take long, very long, to accomplish?”
“Perhaps; I know not. In France it was accomplished in a few terrible
years. Methinks in this land, where God has been so gracious times
and again, it may be differently done and with less of terror and
bloodshed; but the end will assuredly be the same. One can see,
even from a worldly aspect, how it will be accomplished. Men say,
and with justice and truth, that there should be in the community, for
the good of all, a fair class representation—that is, that each class
should have such a voice in the discussion of the affairs of the nation
as will secure for that class the meed of justice and consideration to
which its position entitles it. At present this is not so. The rising and
important middle class have almost no representation, and the
labouring and artisan class none. Yet they have a stake in the
country, and are entitled to a voice.”
“That is what Eustace says, and it sounds right.”
“It is right, according to my ideas of justice, and will be gradually
accomplished, as you know, by extension of franchise and so forth.
We need not discuss that theme now. What I mean to point out to
you is the danger that threatens us in the future. From claiming a fair
class representation as the basis of sound government, the next step
will be the theory that every man—or at least every householder—
should have a vote, and most plausible reasons will be given for this.
Probably in time it will be carried into law, and then you will see at
once an end of class representation as well as of fair constitutional
government. The power will no longer be balanced. It will all be
thrown into the hands of one class, and that the most numerous but
the least educated, the least thoughtful, the least capable of clear
and sound judgment, because their very conditions of life preclude
them from study and the acquisition of the needful knowledge
requisite for sound government. The power will be vested in the
class the most easily led or driven by unprincipled men, by the class
with the least stake in the country, and the least power of seeing the
true bearing of a measure which may be very plausible, but
absolutely unsound. It may take the people very long to find their
power, and perhaps longer still to dare to use it; but in time both
these things will be achieved, and then the greatness of England will
be at an end; and, as I think, the state of misery and confusion which
will ensue will be far, far greater than what she has endured beneath
the sway of her so-called tyrants and oppressors.”
Bride heaved a long sigh.
“Eustace would not think that,” she remarked softly.
“No, nor many great men of the day; and time has yet to show
whether they are right, or an old parish priest who has been buried
alive all his days and knows nothing, as they would argue, of the
signs of the times;” and here Mr. St. Aubyn smiled slightly. “Well,
well, God knows, and in His good time we shall know. For the
present that must content us. Let us not be in haste to condemn. Let
us be patient, and full of faith and hope. He has always pointed out a
way of escape for His faithful servants and followers before things
become too terrible for endurance. Our hope no man can take from
us. Let us live in its heavenly light, and then shall we not be
confounded at the swelling of the waters and the raging of the flood
—those great waters of the latter days—supporting the beast and his
scarlet rider, which are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and
tongues, the power of a great and lawless democracy.”
Bride looked awed and grave, yet full of confidence and hope; but
the conversation was brought to a close by their arrival at the cottage
whither both were bound.