"We Belong to the West"

(5 of 9)

In this mixture of happenstance, deliberate policy, improvised decisions and national persistence can be found the explanation for the speed of West Germany's comeback. But the ideas and leadership of Konrad Adenauer explain, more than anything else, the character of the comeback.

When the Western Allies stumbled upon him right after V-E Day, Konrad Adenauer was just an old man in a high, starched collar, stern and vigorous and proud, already well into the twilight of his life. In his three-score-and-ten, his homeland had soared and sunk through two great historical phases and entered a third. Two of these phases Konrad Adenauer had lived out in a routine of efficient ordinariness and relative obscurity. He was born (Jan. 5, 1876) in the age of Bismarck; he was already 42 when the Kaiser fell. Through the sad days of the Weimar Republic and the ugly early days of Naziism he was respected as veteran mayor of Cologne and a wily politician, until he was forced out of office by the Nazis, for whom he showed nothing but flinty scorn. Had he died at 70, he would not have rated a paragraph in most U.S. newspapers.

He lived not only to see a third phase of German history, but to mold it.

He Will Have It. "I remember a meeting of the Cologne municipal council in 1918," Adenauer wrote recently. "As mayor, I wanted to see the old fortifications circling the city replaced not by factories or houses crowded together, but by a refreshing green girdle of parks. No one on the council agreed. I began to feel that I would have to capitulate. Then ... I went all the way in marshaling my data . . . After I had presented the facts at several meetings, all the councilmen but one were convinced. Finally, that one rose and said: 'Let him have his way—he will have it anyhow!'"

Germans, Western occupiers and Russian antagonists have all since learned to know how that lone Cologne holdout felt. To the occupiers, Adenauer has proved a rugged bargainer—tireless, insistent, all but immovable. "We are not an African tribe," he snapped one day, "but a Central European nation proud of its country." On another occasion: "It was the German army and not the German people that capitulated, and this the world had better remember." One day in 1949, when Adenauer visited U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy, the two men fell into a Gaston & Alphonse routine at the door. "After you, Chancellor," said McCloy, "I'm at home here." A chill smile flickered on Adenauer's flat, leathery face. "No, no," said he, "after you, Mr. McCloy."

To Germans he also talked sternly. When they complained of occupation pressures, or of the slowness of Allied decontrol, he stopped them with one indignant question: "Who do you think won the war?" He preached: "We must part with concepts of the past. When you fall from the heights as we Germans have, you realize it is necessary to break with what has been. We cannot live fruitfully with lost illusions. I do not believe in fairy tales."

Christians Hold Together. What Adenauer does believe is the key to the strategy he has followed to reconstruct Germany and to promote the construction of Europe. He believes that:

¶ A Christian civilization must hold together politically or perish before Communism.