All entries for Sunday 14 December 2008

Conversations with Cab Drivers

Since conversations with cab drivers are becoming a minor theme of this blog, let me add two more. In March this year I visited Berlin for the first time. Flying into Schönefeld airport, I had a long ride into the city centre and another back again a few days later.

On my inward journey, the driver was a young man with broken English. (I don't speak German.) I say young, but he seemed aged by anxiety. He was worried about the credit crunch, which at the time was gathering pace. The run on Northern Rock, the iconic event for British readers, was still six months in the future. My driver's worry was not about recession, which at that time lay below the horizon; it was about hyperinflation.

Central banks were printing too much money, he said, and this worried him. To emphasise this he took both hands off the steering wheel and clapped them to his head, which was balding. During our conversation he would do this again any time he was lost for words, or perhaps if he thought I was showing signs of complacency.

I wasn't complacent at all; I'd been concerned about the state of the financial world for some months already. I just thought he was worrying about the wrong thing. I tried to explain that when financial intermediation was unwinding demand would switch from other assets to cash, which only central banks could supply. The danger was that monetary conditions would become too tight, not too loose.

To support his argument my driver gave me a gift, the only one I have ever received in a taxi. This involved his taking a hand off the wheel and both eyes off the road to find his wallet in a jacket on the seat beside him and open it. He collected memorabilia, he told me, of the German hyperinflation after World War I. My gift was a 10-million Reichsmark note of 1923. I thanked him sincerely, and in truth it was kind of him, although I would have been happy for him to wait until he had stopped the car.

On the return journey my driver was wiry, short, and brown as a nut, with sharp eyes and a striking beard, white and very long. Because of the beard I thought at first he was very old, but as it turns out he was most likely younger than me. At first I thought we had no common language, but a few minutes of experimentation showed that we shared Russian. He was ready to talk, and he talked to me calmly and with emphasis. He kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel; all I had to do was ask a few questions, sit back, and listen.

The driver recounted: His family had left Germany for Russia late in the eighteenth century, at the time of the Empress Catherine the Great, settling in the region of Odessa. Caught up in Stalin's deportations of national minorities before World War II, they were exiled to Siberia, eventually resettling in Ekaterinburg. In 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl agreed on the right of ethnic Germans to return from the Soviet Union to Germany. His surviving relatives came first; he followed them reluctantly, after economic conditions in Russia had worsened.

I asked if my driver was satisfied with his life in Germany. He answered firmly: No. In Russia, as a German he had been treated with respect. In Germany, seen as a Russian, he was treated accordingly. Worse, the Germans had forgotten how to be German. Their politicians were corrupt and decadent. They were selling their own country off to the Jews. Their daughters were prostitutes, he said, waving his hand at a group of girls by the roadside. He would take a strap to them. He added, for clarity: not to the girls, but to their parents, who had failed to bring them up properly.

I asked him what he thought of Russia today. Putin, he told me, was doing the right thing for Russia. He was building a strong country that would once more command respect in the world. This was what Russia needed.

He dropped me at the airport in good time and good shape, but troubled. It was symbolic, I decided, that in Berlin, a city at the heart of Europe that already had too much history, I should find a Russian German that hated Jews and Germans and tended the flame of Russian nationalism in his heart.

Mark Harrison : 14 Dec 2008 21:19 |  Tags: Cab-Drivers Recession Russia |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem