WEST GERMANY: A New Nation

"Today . . . with deep satisfaction, the federal government can state we are a free and independent state," said Chancellor Konrad Adenauer into the microphone, in a little ceremony outside Bonn's Palais Schaumburg. "We are standing, free among the free, allied with former occupation powers in true partnership." No one cheered.

Thus, in apathetic silence, sovereignty was restored to defeated Germany, nearly ten years, to the day, after Colonel General Alfred Jodl stalked into a red-brick schoolhouse in Reims to surrender to the Allies. Ten years ago, in an atmosphere almost forgotten—on a day when millions in arms felt a sudden release from jeopardy, and the Red army choir sang Tip-perary—Germany was dismembered, demoralized and devastated. Last week West Germany was dynamically prosperous and once again the world's third largest trading nation. It had been restored to health by billions in U.S. aid, by a sympathetic occupation and, most of all, by the Germans' own astonishing energy. But its restoration to a place of trust in the Western world was primarily the achievement of one man: stern, formidable old Konrad Adenauer.

Five Minutes Only. Perhaps the West Germans' apathy came from the fact that the reality had so long preceded the ceremony. One German woman wondered why a foreign newsman congratulated her. "You are now a sovereign nation again," he explained. "Oh, that." she said, and walked away. A newspaper asked 40 people what was significant about the date, found that 33 had no idea.

Adenauer was not even allowed to tell the Bundestag the news. He was warned that if he read out the proclamation of sovereignty, the Social Democrats would consider the statement grounds for opening a full-dress foreign policy debate. After an hour's dispute, the Socialists agreed to allow Adenauer to send a message stating the fact that the Federal Republic was sovereign at last, but he must not read it himself. Each party would get five minutes for comment. That was all.

Adenauer listened stonily as the Socialists' Erich Ollenhauer used his five minutes to declare: "The end of the occupation statute is no reason for us to celebrate. One should not speak of German sovereignty until Germany is reunified."

Critics often accuse Konrad Adenauer of being content with a small Germany based on his own Catholic Rhineland, plus Bavaria. Well aware of this sentiment, Adenauer told "the millions of Germans who are forced to live separated from us, without freedom and without justice [that] you can always rely on us, because together with the free world, we will not rest until . . . you live peacefully united with us in one state."