German port may be ‘Trumped’
bremerhaven (Germany) — When Michael von Harten started loading cars onto ships in the German port of Bremerhaven 27 years ago, the facility handled some 700,000 vehicles a year. That number has since surged to 2.1 million, fuelled by a dramatic increase in trade that has created thousands of jobs and shored up the local economy.
In a town with few options, Von Harten is concerned Donald Trump could threaten Bremerhaven’s main source of prosperity.
The new US president has called on Germany to rein in its €253 billion ($272 billion) trade surplus, saying he may impose stiff tariffs on imported goods. As Angela Merkel prepared for a meeting pm Friday at the White House — the chancellor’s first encounter with Trump after months of verbal sparring over trade issues — Germans want her to push back against any restrictions that would hurt their livelihood and threaten their country’s economy.
“I worry about someone like Trump banging his drum and slapping tariffs on our exports,” von Harten says as he surveys the Bremerhaven quays, where a halfdozen ships the size of floating warehouses are being loaded with Volkswagens, Porsches, Audis, BMWs and other jewels of German manufacturing. “Of course we would feel that.”
Relations between the two countries appeared to warm slightly on Thursday as US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble met in Berlin. “It is not our desire to get into trade wars,” Mnuchin told reporters, acknowledging that Germany — as a member of the eurozone — doesn’t have control over its currency.
Even so, Germany’s economy relies heavily on foreign trade, and Bremerhaven more than just about any place in the country: a quarter of the people in the state hold jobs directly or indirectly related to shipping, according to the local port operator, Bremenports. Keeping those jobs intact is critical, with unemployment more than double the national average in what by some measures is Germany’s poorest city.
The port which eventually evolved into a city was founded in 1827 after the harbor at Bremen — 60km upriver — started to silt up. It grew rapidly as German industry took off and everything from factory equipment and textiles to beer and bananas crossed its docks.
For decades in the 19th century, it was also Germany’s primary port for emigrants; on October 19, 1885, Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Trump embarked at age 16 in steerage on the Norddeutscher Lloyd Eider, sailing from Bremerhaven to New York, local records show.
Bremerhaven was almost totally levelled in one night of Allied bombing in September 1944. But it bounced back, growing into Germany’s No.2 port, after Hamburg, even though a collapse of the fishing and shipbuilding industries in the 1970s chipped away some of its past prosperity.
Cars were first shipped from Bremerhaven in 1957, and the city has become Germany’s biggest port for autos — the country’s top export. The complex stretches across an area the size of 240 football fields, a dense web of railway sidings, docks, and parking garages where tens of thousands of vehicles await shipment to markets from Seoul to Sydney to Seattle.
Trump’s threats of higher tariffs on imports worry Bremerhaveners like Wolfgang Stoever, marketing director at BLG Logistics, the company that operates much of the port. Stoever says that before the US election last November, BLG had expected a modest increase in car shipments to and from the US in 2017. After Trump’s election he scaled back forecasts — 40 per cent of the harbor’s auto exports go to the American market — and instead expects the number to remain flat this year.
“There’s clearly still uncertainty,” Stoever says. “We’re not seeing any significant revival.” — Bloomberg