Capitalism, communism, and environmental protection: Lessons from the German experience

Environmental History, Jul 1998 by Dominick, Raymond

Air pollution in the West was bad, but water pollution was worse. Germany's most important river, the Rhine, had suffered from serious pollution for over a century, but conditions deteriorated still further in the 1950s. One government survey showed that the oxygen content of the lower Rhine fell by almost 70 percent between 1954 and 1969. A report in Der Spiegel highlighted a major reason for this degradation: in the latter 1950s, only 17 percent of West German households had satisfactory treatment for their sewage. According to this same report, industry performed slightly better, but its record-only 43 percent of effluents treated-still resembled that of the former Soviet zone. Similarly, a 1978 West German government report admitted that contamination of the Rhine was twenty times greater than it had been when the republic was founded three decades earlier.15 The predictable results of all this contamination included several hundred fish kills each year.6

Since the late 18oos, towns along German waterways had dumped their excrement into neighboring streams and lakes, but in the 1950s, these already foul conditions were exacerbated by wartime destruction of sewage treatment facilities and by a rapid growth in total population. Figure 2 compares the increasing population density of West Germany with the unchanging population level of the East. In the West, with such population pressure and with generally poor wastewater treatment practices, even previously unspoiled bodies of water started to suffer. Lake Constance, for example, which had survived into the 195os as a crystalline jewel nestled at the base of the Alps, became a stinking, brownish-green brew by the mid-ig6os. Scientific studies showed that the load of organic material in the lake had been undetectable in 1935; by 1950, it measured two milligrams per cubic meter, and by 1959, it stood at nine milligrams. As a result, bans on swimming had to be enforced on Lake Constance. The same deterioration happened elsewhere throughout the country, and concerns about fecal contamination of drinking water became widespread.17

To underscore the connection between this wave of water pollution and free enterprise, one might examine the mounds of detergent foam that accumulated on West Germany's waterways in the 196os. Hoping to gain a competitive advantage in the scramble for markets, capitalist detergent manufacturers invented and sold soaps whose suds were virtually indestructible. These bubbles survived through the washing cycle in West German homes and through the sewage treatment process; ultimately, they collected in incredible drifts on virtually every body of water in West Germany. In 196o, Der Spiegel featured a photo of a barge in a lock on the Neckar River surrounded by billows of foam; a few years later, at the height of this phenomenon, the magazine published a picture of three children stepping carefully, hand-in-hand, through a knee-deep blanket of detergent foam that had blown across a sidewalk. The accompanying story reported that a capable swimmer had fallen into a foam-laden river and drowned. The communist managers of East Germany were comparatively backward in detergent technology and lacked market incentives to improve their products, so they escaped this particular calamity.18