Death of a Chancellor
D. C. WATT
Dr Konrad Adenauer was not the kind of German to win very great appreciation in Britain. British opinion is always prone to judge foreign statesmen by the degree of their reported friendliness towards this country. And even before Dr Adenauer committed the un- forgivable crime of signing the Franco-German treaty on the morrow of France's rejection of the first British bid to join the Common Market, he had come to be seen in Britain as an acidulated over-suspicious• Anglophobe,. an exaggerated German nationalist and a per- manent obstacle to any ending of the cold war in. Europe. Political Catholicism still wears much of the aura of Foxe's .Book-of Martyrs.- the Armada and the Inquisition_ in Britanwarid. Dr Adenauer was the head of the largest Catholic party to command the loyalties of an electorate in Europe, an ally of other such parties in France and Italy. He was an authori- tarian, a rabid anti-Communist, and unpardon- ably lax in tolerating ex-Nazis in the German civil service and among his personal entourage. He was one of the last of that extraordinary collection of vieillards who dominated world politics in the second half of the 'fifties and beyond: when he was finally edged out of office in 1964, British onlookers could hardly forbear to cheer and the immediate improve- ment in British relations with Germany was extraordinary.
There was much that was true in this picture of der Alte. But the totality of it added up to so much less than either the personality or the stature of the man as to constitute a great injustice to him as well as hampering the proper handling of British policy towards both Germany and Europe. Dr Adenauer has already won himself a position in German history alongside Luther, the Great Elector, Frederick the Great and Bismarck as the architect of a German state. He guided the Federal Republic back to international status and economic strength. He oversaw the rebirth of a German army. He .guided German foreign policy to make his country again one of the major powers in the non-Communist world. He did all this in the fourteen-odd years he held the position of Chancellor of the Federal Republic. And he did it all while remaining unmistakably a civilian. He fought in neither world war: even in 1914 he was, at thirty- eight, almost too old for active service. Before 1949 he had held no position in German politics higher than that of Lord Mayor of Cologne. And he was dismissed once from that position by the Nazis for open non-co- operation in 1933,.and. once again by- a British brigadier in 1946 on - largely -similar grounds. In his political- conceptions Dr Adenauer was first and foremost a Rhinelander, secondly a Carolingian, thirdly a popular democrat and fourthly a believer in strong though limited government. His Rhenish loyalties always made him an opponent of those who wished to make Germany a cen- tralised state. His vision of a Germany anchored firmly into a West European frame- work made him the enemy of those who wished to see his country balancing and arbitrating between East and West. He declined high national office in the 1920s because of his rejection of the degree to which the Weimar Republic embodied both these views. And when he became first chairman of the Christian Democrats and then by one vote (his own) first Chancellor of the Federal Republic, he turned firmly away from those counsels which advised accepting Soviet terms for a unifica- tion with Eastern Germany, a new Ostpolitik, a new Rapallo,
The loss of East Prussia,. of Kiinigsberg, Danzig, Breslau, Stettin left him unmoved. Instead he took up NATO, the Schuman plan, the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Defence Community. Through them he won control of German foreign policy, and then, by sheer wearisome reiteration, a nega- tive control over the policy of the Western alliance. It was his constant and by no means unjustified suspicion that the Federal German
• state, as the stepchild of East-West tension, - was in continuous danger of-being the sacri- ficial victim of -an East-West settlement. And - he- came to regard eternal vigilance as • the price of German liberty. British talk of dis- engagement, British longings for a summit conference, British unwillingness to hold the line over Berlin, unfortunately confirmed his suspicions and did more than anything else to poison Anglo-German relations in the last years of his chancellorship.
For his fellow-countrymen he became the patriarchal guarantee of stability, recovery and continuity, a link with the German past before the period of what Friedrich Meinecke called the German catastrophe. He was a Chancellor rather than a parliamentarian, a giant among ordinary small-time politicians. Events con- spired to preserve him from association with any of the shame either of German hubris or of the nemesis which followed. His authori- tarianism was a welcome assertion of certainty amidst the doubts and uncertainties of post- war Germany in a country whose politicians believe much more in the representation of electoral minorities than we do in Britain, but whose electorate is prone to distrust the in- decisions and compromises of the coalitions their electoral system necessitates. He came to embody the unity, spiritual rather than terri- torial, that German nationalist feelings de- mand. All this he achieved between the ages of seventy and eighty-seven. • On the German heritage of hatred,-suspicion and distrust he was a realist and a just man. The programme of restitution to German Jewry and to the state of Israel owed a very great deal to him. His regard for national unity made him, however, slow to track down the criminals in Germany's midst, and in- clined -to tolerate-an administrative past of co- operation, even of active cooperation with Nazism. He was not, save to his close en- tourage, a man to be loved; admired, respected, yes—but not loved. But for the fact that Federal Germany today is a federal state, with an elected representative government, a strong executive, an army firmly under civilian con- trol, a strong economy, an absence of social strife, firmly tied into the Common Market, into NATO and reconciled with her oldest enemy in the West, the world has a great deal• to thank Dr Konrad Adenauer.
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