Going bananas

Commonweal, March 24, 1995 by John Rodden

Who would have ever thought the biggest trade issue in last year's European Community (EC) negotiations in Brussels would be regulations about bananas? Bananas? After months of wrangling, the EC ruled in the fall of 1994 that, beginning in January 1995, all imported bananas must be "free of abnormal curvature" and at last 14 cm (5 1/2 inches) in length and 27 mm (1.1 inches) in diameter--unless they come from several former European island colonies. This was at the same time as the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg rejected the bid of Germany, Europe's biggest consumer of bananas, to overturn the EC regulation that gives preference to bananas grown in EC member countries (especially Spain and Greece) and former EC colonies. Germany, you see, imports most of its bananas from non-EC countries, especially Latin America.

The decision was a strong blow to Chancellor Helmut Kohl during last October's German election campaign, from which his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), emerged with a scant ten-seat majority. Kohl had vowed that he would get the EC banana-import regulations liberalized.

The German outcry against both decisions was loud. Germany's EC spokesman warned that the ruling would "open the floodgates to protectionism." The German press gave vent to the popular outrage. In Munich, the respected Sueddeutsche Zeitung editorialized: "In Germany, a storm of indignation is brewing against the Brussels Commission." In Ulm, the Suedwest Presse summed up the reaction of the German Volk: "Germany is always being condemned .... How often other EC states manage to blind the Luxembourg Court with their national interests .... [But] we Germans will have to get used to the idea that we don't have any special status in united Europe."

What's going on here? What are we to make of the so-called EC "banana split"? Why are the Germans getting bent out of shape over banana symmetries, sizes, and quotas? We Americans take bananas for granted; we even trivialize them--we speak of playing second banana, being driven bananas, banana republics, and on and on. But bananas are no joking matter to Germans. In Germany, bananas are an impossibly overdetermined symbol, signifying justice, national self-determination, cultural pride, deprivation, prosperity, Communist tyranny, capitalist luxury, unity, and economic and even sexual freedom. Let me explain.

It turns out that banana politics bears deeply on the issue of German identity, reflecting Teutonic tensions both within and outside reunited Germany. For the early postwar generation, many of whom as children knew of bananas only through the reminiscences of their elders, the fruit still evokes memories of humiliation, deprivation, and even famine. Ever since hunger overtook war-torn, occupied Germany in the mid-1940s when even basic foodstuffs were unobtainable, bananas have symbolized luxury to both West and East Germans. This began to change in West Germany with the Wirtschaftwunder [economic miracle] of the late 1950s and '60s. Parents delightedly weaned their infants on "Banana Salad" baby food, the Gerbers of West Germany. Older West Germans still recall with pride the dramatic speech of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in July 1957, when he brandished a banana at the Bundestag podium and hailed the fruit as "paradisiacal manna." Adenauer had just returned in triumph from a four-day filibuster in Rome, having finally gotten "Protocol Number 10"--which guaranteed West Germans tariff-free bananas in unlimited quantities--written into the founding Treaty of the European Economic Community (EEC), predecessor of the present-day EC.

The story in East Germany was very different, and consequently the timing of last fall's European Court ruling came at a particularly cruel moment. After the war, bananas were simply absent from East German life--except as a special treat, courtesy of Castro's Cuba, at Christmas time (a holiday never officially recognized in the atheistic GDR). Bananas were regarded as a Western delicacy; their absence came to symbolize communism's failure to provide simple pleasures taken for granted in the West. Even through the 1980s, bananas were virtually unavailable to ordinary GDR citizens. Indeed, before the Wall fell, visiting West Germans often brought a feast of bright, ripe bananas to their East German relatives as a house gift.

When the Berlin Wall crumbled in November 1989, the banana became for Easterners an unofficial symbol of German unity and liberty. By 1992, East Germans were consuming nearly twice as many bananas per year as West Germans. Jubilant East Germans sported bumper stickers featuring two bananas forming the letter "D" for Deutschland. It all seemed a sign of better days to come.

Indeed the Eastern lust for bananas soon symbolized more than just economic liberty. How deep had the banana slipped into the German psyche? Well, Der Stern reported that, according to a survey of East German sex shop sales in 1990, a banana shaped vibrator and a banana-flavored condom known as the "Wild Banana" led all other brands. But the banana passion soon turned ugly and began to divide, not unite, Germans. West Germans soon began referring to their naive countrymen in the Wild East as "Bananen." East Germans, in turn, resented West German "banana politics." After the March 1990 elections in East Germany, the last Communist ambassador to the U.S. angrily attacked Chancellor Kohl for interfering in the East German elections. The CDU had attracted crowds in the East by handing out free bananas; castigating Western consumerism, the ambassador attributed the CDU victory to "two months of banana policy."