BIRTHDAYS--BONN AND BERLIN
By Our German Correspondent ' Bonn DR. KONRAD ADENAUER and President Wilhelm Pieck joined the ranks of the distinguished octogenarians last week. Sir Winston Churchill, the doyen of the corps, sent Dr. Adenauer a message of good will,.and presumably Mr. Stalin, if he had lived, would have sent one let President Pieck. In both parts of divided Germany the occasions were treated like a public holiday. In fact, the, two feast-days had the almost antiphonal character which has marked each step in the pro- gress of the two Germanies away from each other over the last eight years.
On both sides school children were given the day off, notables queued to shake the great man's hand, postmen groaned under the load of private and public presents that were sent in from home and abroad, security agents having ascertained in each case that there were no bombs among the offerings. Each received a miner's lamp, though President Pieck's was in silver. Each had a dawn serenade, and a military salute. President Pieck .could not match Dr. Adenauer's lion cub (a gift from Bavaria) or the live sheep (from the textile trade), but a host of two-footed friends (including Mr. Harry Pollitt) brought him fraternal greetings from the Communist parties of the World. Dr. Adenauer received the Order of the Golden Spur from the Pope, who himself will be an octogenarian next March. President Pieck's ideological reward was a warm hand- shake from Marshal Voroshilov, the symbolic head of the Soviet Union. Dr. Adenauer was given a set of stained-glass Windows for his village church, one of which commemorated Saint Konrad, a name of which hagiographers may well have more to say. President Pieck had a steel factory in Czecho- slovakia renamed in his honour.
Thus did the two states put their wares in the shop window for their citizens to admire. The two birthdays came after a Christmas which was celebrated in the West with a gusto un- equalled since the war, while Eastern Germany was still suffer- ing from coal shortages and food rationing. And Dr. Adenauer has a number of divisions which did not appear on parade alongside the rather scrappy military band in the chancery garden. These are a stable political system, a hard Mark and the confidence of a powerful Western alliance. The Kremlin. on the other hand, knows just how reliable President Pieck's State is from the June riots of 1953 and from the daily flood of refugees fleeing military conscription and a bankrupt economy.
There is one more feature which the two states have in common. The same team of men has, with minor adjustments, controlled each government since their foundations in 1949. None of the great powers can claim such continuity. The further continuity of the East German Government seems assured by Herr Ulbricht and Herr Grotewohl, both much younger men than Pieck. Western Germany's political future seemed in doubt last autumn when Dr. Adenauer was ailing. But the new year has brought two encouraging facts : Dr. Adenauer's remarkable convalescence and the emergence of Herr von Brentano as his obvious political heir.
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