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REFINED INFORMALITY
limes, and the good attitude will quite frequently burgeon of its own
accord. There are probably plenty of people who feign it for the sake
of their own advancement: so-called 'blood oranges' - yellow on the
outside, red within. You flatter the bosses in the sports groups; you
bathe in the radiance of the merciful sun that rises over employees on
festive occasions, in the shape of some great patron or other. 'No stiff,
solemn ball characterized by grave dignity and respectable boredom',
'nthuses the diarist of one works newspaper over an event at the rowing
dub attached to the firm,
but a family party in Ihe setting of the rowing club all a colourful
medley, many leading gentlemen from our establishment with their ladies
and, as a special honour for us, the chairman of the board of directors, Privy
Counsellor X, who nodded affably to the dancing couples and appeared to
feel entirely at his ease. No resenre, no sepanltion, a purely human gettogether
for the pride and pleasure of the coming generation. 'Refined
informality' was the watchword of the evening.
Hard to decide which is more pitiable: the confusion of joviality with a
purely human get-together, or the over-zealous triumph at the fall of
barriers. Probably not everyone has the good fortune to feel at ease in
such circumstances.
In employee-union circles, the conviction prevails that company
sports associations do not primarily serve the purpose of physical
training, but are intended to distract from trade-union interests. Various
works-council members tell me of their experiences. Young people
especially, says one, easily fall for a magic that is as cheap as it
marvellous; while another maintains that employees blessed from 011
high with the pleasures of sport gradually slip away from the all
councils. The contest with the neo-paternalist structures for the time
being occurs in the form of fierce propaganda skirmishes. 'They Arc
After our Souls!' runs the title of a piece by Fritz Fricke (put out by the
publishing house of the General Confederation of German Trade
Unions) , in which among other things he argues: 'Are we perhaps to
recognize the will to community from the fact that, in a growing crisis,
the employer first seeks to protect the interest on his capital by
depressing wages, lengthening working hours and sacking workers?'
And he draws the succinct conclusion: 'An integration of interests
between employer and worker is quite impossible, so long as the
economy is organized exclusively on a private-enterprise basis.
The theoretical rejection is matched by practical conduct. Even if
some officials do not really believe in the seductive power of company
event�, worried souls still warn against sporting activity even in mixed
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