What Ki-jo Secured
Staying on at the hotel, Ki-jo tried to see ahead to what would unfold. The first thing he turned over was the history of Krupp itself.
Krupp had been a war-criminal enterprise of the Second World War, a company that turned out every kind of war matériel for the Nazi forces. After the surrender it had come within a breath of being dismantled by the Allies, and only Chancellor Adenauer's intervention had barely spared it.
Adenauer conceded that Krupp was indeed a war-criminal concern, but he argued that it was indispensable to West Germany's recovery, and that under the Nazi regime no company had been left any choice but to cooperate. To break up Krupp alone, he insisted, offended reason. In the end the firm's dissolution was prevented by the narrower course of arresting only its president and committing him to a war-crimes trial.
Krupp passed through further trials after that, until the Korean War became the decisive occasion of its resurrection. Selling the supplies the war demanded, the company found the footing for a leap. It was a history much like that of Japan's own war-criminal enterprises, which had survived and then flourished.
By now the world economy had moved past the boom of the fifties, and the outlook was darkening. Krupp would know it. The United States, which had led the prosperity of the free world, was beginning to creak, its engine of growth slowing down.
Krupp would want, by whatever means it could find, to place with Cheongsan a commercial loan underwritten by the governments of Korea and West Germany. Korea had nothing to lose. West Germany, still racing down the road of growth, had a great deal it could ill afford to lose, and Ki-jo was convinced they would not wish to smother the spark of that high-speed expansion.
The expectation was soon proved true. The next day the vice president came in person and asked for a private meeting, and Ki-jo knew the man would be burning with anxiety. The president who had delegated full powers to him, and the vice president who had received them, must both have been perfectly certain that a commercial-loan contract with Korea was assured. He could read as much in the president's behavior—entrusting a thirty-million-dollar contract to his deputy and then departing on a trip. But the moment Ki-jo opened by digging in his heels, the urgency fell squarely on the vice president, and Ki-jo judged the man would try to lock the contract down before his president returned.
Receiving him in one of the rooms of the suite, Ki-jo heard out the remedy Krupp had brought.
"We will station resident personnel in Korea. And we will manufacture spare parts in Germany and ship them over to Korea in advance."
The proposal was practical enough. It was not, however, a solution of the kind Ki-jo wanted. A German technician living in Korea would remain a Krupp engineer to the last, not an employee of Cheongsan. Ki-jo knew how overbearing the German engineers Lucky had hired to build radios had been—and how, the moment things ceased to go their way, they had simply walked out of Korea. The side that holds the technology always holds the upper hand.
He told the man what he wanted.
"What I hope is that even with no German in Korea, and even if a machine breaks down when there is no spare part for it, Cheongsan will be able to repair the equipment by itself."
The vice president took a moment to gauge the meaning, then spoke.
"You want a transfer of technology."
"I do. And you need not worry about the technology leaking. Korea is a country that cannot even produce steel. There is no prospect of Krupp's know-how in fertilizer-plant equipment finding its way outside. What I am asking is that you transfer the whole of the repair technology for the plant."
The vice president considered the proposal at length before he answered.
"To be exact, you wish to be taught the repair technology alone. Is that right?"
"It is."
It came to the same thing. Master the work of repair, and one's grasp of a plant's structure deepened until one acquired the ability to build the equipment oneself. It was hardly different from a technology transfer, but Ki-jo could see that the vice president, impatient to hurry the contract, was shrinking what the transfer meant down to as little as possible.
"Very well. In return, you will have to send Korean technicians to Germany. It will take a long time. Germans are accustomed to teaching by apprenticeship."
"I don't mind if it takes years."
Once Ki-jo had agreed, the vice president asked whether the obstacles in the way of the contract had now been cleared. Ki-jo shook his head.
"Is there something further you wish to request?"
"There is. I want Krupp to cooperate with us on a broad scale."
"In which fields? Our businesses run rather wide, you see, so..."
The vice president looked at a loss. Ki-jo knew Krupp's fields well enough. There were four in which Cheongsan could use help at once: wood-processing technology and elevators, the manufacture of bearings and the forging of metal. When he named them, the vice president demurred.
"President Lee Ki-jo, the full authority my own president entrusted to me covers only the construction of the fertilizer plant."
"I am aware of that."
"A transfer of technology in other fields would be difficult."
"What I asked for is not a transfer of technology. It is cooperation."
"And what form of cooperation do you have in mind?"
"Have the companies that operate in those four fields enter Korea. Cheongsan will stand with them as a partner."
The vice president's thoughts seemed to tangle. But Ki-jo wanted every one of those technologies in his hands. He had come all the way to Germany; he could not walk away from them. This was the only moment in which he could face Krupp from the stronger side of the table.
"On that point, as I have said, I have no authority. When the president returns, I will take it up with him."
"When does he return?"
"Tomorrow."
Ki-jo was in no hurry. The hurried party was Krupp.
"For the present, I believe I ought to report to the president—in the form of a memorandum of understanding—that the two sides have come to substantial agreement on a good part of the matter."
He wanted an MOU drawn up. Hearing it, Ki-jo was carried for a moment back into an old memory: the time he had asked Major General Martin, commander of the 7th Division, to prepare an MOU so that Chung Ju-yung might be drawn in. He said he would be glad to.
"I'll call the staff up. Let us draft the language here."
"Very good."
Ki-jo gave the whole of that day to drafting, with Krupp's vice president, the memorandum on introducing the commercial loan. The four members of the delegation wrote it by weighing every phrase, and they worked over sandwiches sent up to the suite.
When the document was finished and they had taken a simple meal with the Krupp staff, Ki-jo shook his hand.
"Thank you for your trouble."
"And you, President Lee. You shaped the language so carefully that I suspect we could use this, just as it stands, for the contract itself."
Spent to the bone, the vice president managed a weary smile. Ki-jo pressed him once more.
"If Krupp will bring those four lines of business into Korea, I can sign this very day."
"Wood processing, elevators, industrial bearings, and metal forging. Those four, yes?"
"Yes."
The vice president confirmed it a last time, said his farewell, and left the room. The moment he was gone, Baek Young-hoon, Hwang Tae-young, and Oh Yang-soo, who had sat through the drafting with Ki-jo, let go of their tension and all but collapsed.
"Aigoo, my eyes..."
Hwang Tae-young wet a towel, laid it across his eyes, and sprawled limp on the sofa. Baek Young-hoon, who had interpreted with his whole mind fixed on every turn of phrase, seemed to have come to the end of his strength; he dumped sugar into his coffee and drank it off. Oh Yang-soo sat with his eyes shut and did not stir.
Ki-jo, loosening his own nerves, opened a window and set a cigarette between his lips. The instant he did, the others crowded in, each of them wanting one. Even Baek Young-hoon, who almost never smoked, took a cigarette. Fresh air and the noise of the city came in through the open window, and the four of them stood in a row at the sill and smoked.
"I told myself I'd drink beer once I got to Germany, and I haven't managed a single mouthful."
"Not tonight. The president of Krupp is coming tomorrow. We ought to meet him sharp."
"Surely a single glass would be all right? I'm feeling the craving rather badly..."
"German beer hits harder than American beer. I'd take one glass and go straight to sleep."
At that, Oh Yang-soo gave a step of ground.
"All right, then. Exactly one glass—truly just the one—and then we sleep."
The four of them went down to the bar on the ground floor in search of a proper beer. The moment it touched their tongues, their eyes flew open. German beer was different, as its reputation promised, from the aroma onward; the instant it entered the mouth, a thick rush of beer-scent broke upward through the nose. They emptied their glasses, and not one of them could rise.
Ki-jo was no different, but he said his piece anyway.
"We ought to go up. We've finished them."
Oh Yang-soo's eyes wavered. He, who had been the one to insist on exactly a single glass, looked the most bereft of all. The four men got to their feet with tears standing in their eyes. It rankled too much to stop at one, and their feet would not come unstuck. They barely made it back to the room, put out the lights, and slept.
The next day Ki-jo went to Krupp's headquarters and met the president, a member of the Krupp family and the highest authority in the firm. The man who received him in the president's office had the look of a person of breeding.
He belonged to a house that carried the dark history of collaboration with the Nazis, and yet, when the Allies already had the dissolution of the Krupp Group scheduled, the family had tried to see its own duty through. Should the group pass under the auctioneer's hammer, they asked that every cent of the proceeds be divided among the workers who had labored at Krupp. They themselves, they said, could live without money; they could not turn their backs on employees who had given the company more than forty years, beginning in their late teens.
Had it been Korea, there would have been a frantic scramble to buy up the Krupp businesses the Allies had broken apart and put on the block. No one stepped forward. It may have been the stigma of a Nazi war-criminal firm. It may equally have been German society's tacit understanding that Krupp ought to be run by the House of Krupp.
The president shook Ki-jo's hand, and they sat down together and began. The first thing he raised was not the fertilizer plant.
"I understand you want cooperation in four fields of business. May I ask a few questions?"
"Please do."
He asked first whether Cheongsan had already entered those four fields. Ki-jo answered that the company meant to enter wood processing and the elevator business.
"How many lines of business does Cheongsan have?"
When Ki-jo answered, a flicker of surprise crossed the president's face.
"The Cheongsan Group has more lines of business than Krupp."
"It can't be helped. Korea has scarcely any manufacturers. Most of them are small, and anything that doesn't turn a profit, they would rather not touch."
The president took on a look of understanding.
"The war must have done terrible damage. Supplies are short in every direction, and the industrial base has collapsed."
"It has."
His face was that of a man who knew the wreckage of war better than anyone.
"If there is anything you need, please say so here and now, with nothing held back. That Krupp survived at all owes a great deal to the special demand of the Korean War. By way of repayment, I will help you as far as I am able."
The Germans were more sympathetic to Korea than he had expected, and they were moving the business forward with a refreshing readiness. The more they did, the more carefully Ki-jo gathered himself and answered in the terms of what was real.
"If I followed my own greed, I would want a steel mill as well. But that is beyond Korea's industrial capacity as it stands. I will count it good fortune if even the four areas I named succeed. For the rest, I hope we may cooperate in time to come."
The president of Krupp nodded.
"Just so. If you cannot make steel, the rest is hard to make as well. When Korea is able to produce steel, come and see Krupp again."
He made a few notes, called in his secretary, and passed them over.
"Minister Erhard impressed it upon me in the strongest terms. The fertilizer plant will go forward, without fail. And Krupp, having benefited from the Korean War, will cooperate with the Cheongsan Group in those four fields, by way of return."
With that, he wished once more for Korea's rise.
"I hope, with all my heart, for the revival of Korea."
Having carried every demand he had brought, Ki-jo spent the rest of the time in talk with him. The president of Krupp put the history he had lived through in German society into a single sentence.
Capitalism and communism alike, he said, were occupied with the question of how bread was to be put in the hands of the people.
"When bread runs short, an ideology is born. The most recent of them was communism."
German workers, he went on, had soaked themselves in communist ideas while they were hungry; once bread grew plentiful, they had hauled down the red flag and started taking their holidays in Volkswagens.
Ki-jo felt the truth of it to the bone. For something like the next forty years, that philosophy would hold in Korea as well. Society would bend its whole strength to the baking of a larger loaf, and once the great loaf was made, the protests would come bursting out—why was the share one had received smaller than another's? But for the present, just as the man had said, Korea was in a season when it had to throw everything into making the loaf large enough to divide.