1953
Konrad Adenauer
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 4, 1954
On a mild morning last April, a band of dignitaries gathered before the
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. In the place of
honor stood a tall old man whose somber mask of a face looked stiffly ahead.
Before him, stretching to the hilltop, was an array of granite pillars, blocks
and crosses—the graves of Americans who had died in two wars with Germany.
Behind him fluttered the black, red and gold flag of the Federal Republic of
Germany.
The U.S. Army band sounded The Star-Spangled Banner. Then it broke into
the measured strains of Deutschland Uber Alles. "This," murmured the old man,
"is a turning point in history."
More dramatically than headline or speech or essay, the music symbolized
an amazing story. In 1953, only eight years after the shame, horror and
impotence of defeat in mankind's bloodiest war, Germany came back. It was a
world power once more. More than any other, the person who brought this about
was the stolid old man who stood in Arlington, visibly moved by the strains of
his national anthem echoing among the tombstones. He was Konrad Adenauer,
Chancellor of the West German Republic, apostle of United Europe, 1953's Man of
the Year.
Konrad Adenauer had already guided the hated land of the Hun and the Nazi
back to moral respectability and had earned himself a seat in the highest
councils of the Western powers. Though she still lacked a formal peace treaty,
and the Iron Curtain fenced her off from half her land and from 18 million
countrymen, Konrad Adenauer's West Germany last year emerged as the strongest
country on the Continent save Soviet Russia.
Her conquerors wooed her for her favors. Neighbors who had helped defeat
her so short a time ago talked fearfully once more of her new strength and her
even greater potential. Her economy glowed with health. Her products cascaded
into the world's markets. In September came an election which the whole world
nervously watched, to see whether the oil of democracy could mix with the
vinegar of German authoritarianism. The West German voters swept all their
Communists and Nazis out of national office and overwhelmingly put their faith
in the dedicated, firm- handed democrat, Konrad Adenauer. No longer the passive
object of other forces, Germany in 1953 was again one of the formidable forces
of history and Konrad Adenauer one of history's makers.
"This year," said the Man of the Year, "is the year in which the
re-emergence of Germany...changed the world picture."
Exhilaration in the Valleys. It was a year to alter the riverbanks of
history. A cease-fire without victory quieted Korea, but it was still the quiet
of the dormant volcano. Mankind's greatest tyrant died; his death touched off a
lupine scuffle for succession in the Kremlin and opened a new and unpredictable
era for the tyranny Joseph Stalin fixed on half the globe. Radioactive dust
particles borne east in a cloud from Siberia told the outside world that
Russia, too, had plumbed the secret of the thermonuclear bomb and could now
visit instantaneous death on the obscurest cranny of civilization. Yet somehow,
in the year in which he learned that a mere handful of chemicals could blast
his world to smithereens, the average man of the free world seemed to conclude
that the peril of general war had lessened.
It was also a year in which a white man and a brown man, held together by
a light nylon rope, climbed the highest mountain. In this feat of the New
Zealand beekeeper, Edmund Hillary, and the sinewy Sherpa tribesman, Tenzing,
millions down in the mundane valleys felt a vicarious exhilaration—the
reminder that by valor and dedication man may surmount his Everests.
In the streets of East Berlin, a camera shutter caught for posterity the
proof that man of 1953, on city streets and against the odds, would risk
everything for freedom: two brave youths fought off Soviet army tanks with
stones. It was June 17—the day East Germans rose up against their Communist
oppressors across their barbed-wire land, the day that showed that the Red
monolith might some day crack.
In the U.S., the Big Change came—after 20 years. The Democrats packed out
and the Republicans moved in. Dwight Eisenhower rode down Pennsylvania Avenue
and into the White House on a surge of immense popularity and high hopes. His
popularity continued high throughout 1953, but he did not choose to invoke it
openly, and it remained in reserve, like troops uncommitted to battle. His
major achievement (whose effects will be measured in 1954) was in the field he
knew best: a vast readjustment of the U.S. military to the age of the atom. In
practical politics, a field he knew less about and felt a soldier's distaste
for, he had yet to make his mark. He had yet to harness the divergent wills and
pressures within the Republican Party, and command them, but the signs at
1953's end were that he was prepared. His task was made more difficult, perhaps
postponed, by the death in July of Ohio's Robert A. Taft, the Republicans'
great Senate leader and selfless counselor of the man who had defeated him for
the presidential nomination.
Not for what he accomplished, but for the noise he made, Senator Joe
McCarthy was the most discussed man of 1953. His name became an epithet to
millions, a cheer to countless others. In 1953, McCarthy was the most discussed
man of 1953. His name became an epithet to millions, a cheer to countless
others. In 1953, McCarthyism crossed the twelve-mile limit and became an
international word, widely understood around the world to mean a cynical
exploitation of genuine fears, a studied contempt for fair play, a cunning
talent for concealing failures by loudly baying after new victims. Too many
abroad, urged on by a U.S. press that would leave no word of McCarthy
unrecorded—no matter how outlandish—took him as their image of the American
statesman and over-emphasized his influence.
Rollin' Along. The republic, though, was in condition to survive McCarthy
and McCarthyism. Though business pulses slowed a bit here & there, never
had production been so high or prosperity so great. The American of 1953 was
still living on top of the world, and, as the song says, just rollin' along. In
this age of managers and machines, of complexities and coordinators, this was
the achievement of many, not one.
It was also the 50th anniversary of man's first powered flight, and it was
celebrated by two Americans, first Scott Crossfield, flying at 1,327 m.p.h.,
then the Air Force's Major "Chuck" Yeager, ripping through the substratosphere
at more than 1,600 m.p.h., 2 1/2 times the speed of sound. In sport, Casey
Stengel of the New York Yankees became baseball's first manager to win five
consecutive World Series championships. Native Dancer, a big grey horse with
the legs of a champion and the inbred ham of a Barrymore, teamed with TV to
make horse-racing fans out of millions who did not know a fetlock from a
padlock. The year brought reminders of previous champions: Jim Jeffries died;
so did Bill Tilden and Jim Thorpe. Handy Earl Sande, 54, and hard up for eating
money, cinched on a saddle and tried for a comeback (but booted home only one
winner). And in the biggest sweep since Bobby Jones's "grand slam" in 1930, Ben
Hogan wrapped up the three big titles of golf, to become sport's Man of the
Year. It was also the year of 3-D, Cinema-Scope, Cinerama, big screen,
stereophonic sound and other technical tricks designed to make Marilyn Monroe
look 64 feet long (couchant) and intended to lure back, by sheer gigantism, the
public that had been lost to 17-inch TV screens. This too was sometimes called
progress.
The year's obituary list, not even counting Joe Stalin and Bob Taft, was
forbiddingly distinguished: Eugene O'Neill, the greatest playwright the U.S.
had produced; Welshman Dylan Thomas, the best young poet in the English
language; Sergei Prokofiev, Russia's great composer; General Jonathan
Wainwright, hero of Bataan; Mayor Ernst Reuter, hero of the cold-war battle of
Berlin; Saudi Arabia's fabulous King Ibn Saud; Britain's redoubtable Queen
Mary.
Empire Troubles. Asia, with its shortfused peace in Korea, its seemingly
unwinnable war in Indo-China, and its tendency to fear a dying colonialism more
than an expansive Communism, remained the hot battlefield of the cold war.
Appropriately, it had not one Man of the Year but three—men diverse in almost
every respect: Jawaharlal Nehru, the exasperating high priest of neutralism;
Ramon Magsaysay, the young and dynamic, U.S.-loving man of action who became
President of the Philippines; wrinkled old Syngman Rhee of Korea, the angry
ally of the West. Syngman Rhee's intractability towards his allies, and his
ruthless quelling of domestic rivals, led many to dismiss his great claim to
distinction: without his half-century fight for liberty and his stouthearted
hatred of Communism, there would have been no South Korea to save.
The British Commonwealth crowned its Queen in elegance that momentarily
revived a great past and lifted spirits. But the vast realm over which she
reigns trembled again with the ague of disintegration—the Sudan broke away,
all colonial Africa throbbed with the presence or possibility of violence and
shouts for independence. The Queen was Britain's Woman of the Year; Britain's
Man was clearly its great, aging political chieftain, newly knighted Sir
Winston Churchill.
The new Red Empire quavered uncertainly at the change of rulers. The
cerebral hemorrhage that killed Stalin—if that is what did it—assuredly left
behind the man of some future year. Perhaps he was Georgy Malenkov, the suety,
waxen-faced Great Russian who donned the dictator's mantle. But perhaps it was
another, Nikita Khrushchev, Marshal Zhukov, or some figure still invisible to
the eye of the outside world. One it was not: Laverenty Berie, b. 1899, d. 1953
at the hands of the executioner.
Communism's Men of 1953 were not its leaders, but its subjects. At home
the Kremlin was harassed by the restlessness of the Soviet masses and a serious
crisis in agriculture. Abroad, it suffered sharp setbacks—an armistice that
acknowledged its failure in Korea, the uprisings in East Germany, a rash of
troubles in the other East European satellites, the stunning psychological
defeat in the explanation tents of Panmunjom.
Creatures of Destiny. It was a year in which the so-called big powers,
Eastern and Western alike, seemed less the shapers of destiny than its
creatures. The change in the hands which governed the two greatest powers
brought a strange sense of indecisiveness to world affairs. The strain of the
cold war brought hesitations and serious arguments to the Western Alliance. The
dawning of the thermonuclear age, with its talk of megaton bombs (equal to
1,000,000 tons of TNT), cast great and sudden doubt on the validity of the
thinking and the plans of statesmen and diplomats and soldiers. Both sides were
caught in a sort of pause, to re-examine and to retool. It was in this
atmosphere of confusion, holding back and reassessment that the unhesitant,
unconfused, unswerving re-emergence of West Germany made its mark on 1953.
Energy, Ambition, Work. Like so many turning points, it was a long time in
the reaching, but it was a shorter time than even the most sanguine German had
a right to expect when he crawled from the smoking rubble one day in 1945 to
learn that the Nazi Reich was no more. And, as with most great, historic turns,
it was made possible by countless events. There was the decay of the wartime
Alliance, Russia's shortsighted intransigence in the German occupation. There
was the West's decision to form one unified country of West Germany without
waiting for a peace treaty. There was the Berlin blockade, which jolted the
West into the urgency of rearmament; the Korean war, which shocked it into the
decision that it needed German troops as well. There was some $3.3 billion in
U.S. aid to Germany. There was the privilege of concentrating on building
industries and markets while West Germany's conquerors bent to the ordeal of
arming themselves. There were the uprisings in East Germany. Above all, there
was the happy combination of energy, ambition, and respect for work which
distinguishes the German.
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.
— West Germany would be swallowed up as a Red satellite if it tried to remain
neutral and play Russia against the West.
— West Germany must some day be reunited with the German land east of the Iron
Curtain, but that day will come only when the Western world stands strong
enough to force—without war—a Soviet withdrawal from Central Europe. He
refuses to recognize the Oder-Neisse frontier, but is ready to promise not to
cross it with troops.
— West Germany must earn the West's trust and confidence by demonstrating that
its lesson has been learned in the two disastrous German adventures of the 20th
century.
— Germany still cannot be trusted to rearm by itself. "It is no secret," said
close associate, "that he considers Prussians savage and dangerous."
— Nevertheless, the rearmament of Germany is inevitable; if it is not armed as
a part of a supranational army, with controls on its size and use, then it will
be armed with a new national Wehrmacht.
— Far greater than the need for German troops is Europe's need to
unite—politically, militarily and psychologically—those historic antagonists
in war, Germany and France.
"I deem it false...to speak of German rearmament," Adenauer said not long
ago. "This is an expression which has no place in those new forms toward which
we are striving. We want nothing of the old. We do not want to restore a
national army."
By "those new forms," Adenauer means the European Defense Community. The
idea came, providentially, from France. Germans could not propose it without
risking the impression that it was simply a cunning maneuver to unlock the
occupation shackles and revive the Wehrmacht. But when the enemy from across
the Rhine proposed it in 1950, Konrad Adenauer could more easily champion it.
The Dream Fades. The U.S. made EDC the core of its European policy.
Britain supported it. Italy could hardly wait to approve it. The Benelux
countries got behind it.
But by 1953, the clear dream had clouded over. The sharp- beaked vagaries
of politics tore at the men who did most to shape and promote the EDC idea.
First, down went Good European Robert Schuman, France's longtime Foreign
Minister. He was thrown aside because France, tortured by division and
illusion, turned in confusion and fear from its own brain child. Next went Good
European Alcide de Gasperi, and Italy's ratification became questionable. The
death of Stalin, and Churchill's insistence on sounding out the dictator's
successor, gave the French more opportunity to haggle and hesitate. The EDC
idea was close to dying.
Then came West Germany's time to decide. EDC meant several unpalatable
things to Germans. Two disasters in half a century had been enough; thousands
wanted never to bear arms again. On the other side, Nationalists balked at
joining hands with the French, and oldtime professional soldiers seethed at the
"disgrace" of banning for good the Wehrmacht and General Staff. Joining in with
the West, they argued, might turn the East-West German boundary into a 38th
parallel and Germany into another Korea. It might seal off forever the
Communist-held lands to the East. Would it not be smarter, more comfortable,
less dangerous, to stay uncommitted and play off the fears of both sides?
Across West Germany, tireless, graven-faced Konrad Adenauer campaigned
bluntly on the issue of United Europe. His main opponents, the socialists,
bluntly campaigned against it. Germans had a clear-cut choice. "Our country,"
said Adenauer, "is the point of tension between two world blocs...Long ago I
made a great decision: we belong to the West and not to the East...Isolation is
an idea created by fools. It would mean that the U.S. would withdraw its troops
from Europe. Ladies and gentlemen, the moment that happens, Germany will become
a satellite."
On Sept. 6, the people of West Germany walked up to two doors to the
future. Which would they choose? Western diplomats, disheartened by the fall of
Schuman and De Gasperi, guessed timidly that Adenauer and the dream of Europe
would squeak through—but barely. But the old man in the high, starched collar
simply rode up to his Rhondorf home, went off to Sunday Mass, left order not to
be disturbed, and at day's end turned in for a long night's sleep.
The Flag of Europe. The results astounded even composed Konrad Adenauer.
From the historic election, no party was left strong enough to challenge Konrad
Adenauer's Christian Democrats, and no person or bloc within the Christian
Democrats was left strong enough to challenge Konrad Adenauer. When his
followers gathered at the Chancellery steps next morning to salute him,
Adenauer smiled his thoughtful, deep-frozen smile. "Perhaps," said he, "we have
won by a little too much."
Adenauer's victory was a victory for Europe, and the West's big cold-war
success of 1953. When the striped German flag was raised in post-election
triumph above the Chancellor's Palais Schaumburg, the green and white flag of
European unity was run up alongside it. "The elections," said Konrad Adenauer,
"have decided that Europe will come about, that the EDC will come about, and
that the cold war is lost for Russia."
By 1953's end, his certainty was not so widely shared. France might or
might not ratify EDC. But Germany's vote had saved it from death in 1953, and
kept alive the hope that in 1954, Europe might yet be born.
If the European dream does come true, Adenauer will go down in history as
one of its creators. If it fails, his efforts will still have served Germany
well. He has won her respectability.
At the Big Three's Bermuda conference, the absent, uninvited Chancellor of
West Germany was even more a participant than France's ailing Premier, who
spoke scarcely a word. Before dispatching to Moscow their agreement to a Big
Four conference in Berlin, the Big Three leaders solicited Adenauer's approval.
When Prime Minister Churchill suggested it might be wise to consider some
alternative to EDC for Germany's rearmament, President Eisenhower dismissed the
proposal with a wave of his hand. The U.S. will not consider alternatives, said
the President, and besides, "EDC is what Adenauer wants."
Decisive Events. West Germany has won this place at the council table
despite the fact that it is still nominally an occupied country, and has yet to
arm a single soldier, build a plane or roll out a tank.
Seated one day last week in his huge office in the Palais Schaumburg,
Chacellor Adenauer made a temple of his fingers and, chatting with TIME
Correspondent Frank White, allowed himself the luxury of some mild
self-satisfaction. "I cannot avoid smiling a little when, as chief of an
occupied country, I sit down with the leaders of the occupying nations, such as
Mr. Eden and M. Bidault. In spite of the fact that Germany hasn't yet full
sovereignty, its economic and political impact is fully felt in world affairs."
Adenauer had his own list of "the decisive events' of the year, the clear
and determined attitude" of the U.S. to take the lead in the struggle against
Communism, the uprisings in East Germany, his own election victory, and
President Eisenhower's atomic pool proposal, which Adenauer believes "may well
be the beginning of real understanding between East and West." Stalin's death,
he says, was "not a factor of major importance." It did not increase the
chances for peace. "Stalin had the power and prestige to alter the course of
Kremlin foreign policy. His successors have not."
Adenauer has some advance worries for 1954: "There is wind in the air, and
the sky is not without clouds." Biggest clouds: indecision in France, the
approaching four-power conference on Germany, the state of mind of the U.S.
Congress.
As for France: "...The French people have a much clearer conception [of
EDC] than does the French Parliament...I am convinced the French will finally
agree to the formation of an integrated Europe."
On four-power negotiations: "The hope that the Soviets have altered their
course is unfounded. Their strategy for the Berlin conference is mainly that of
delay...The three [Western] ministers must maintain an undivided front. Russia
will attempt to weaken the French will to ratify EDC. If successful...it would
be Russia's greatest triumph."
On Congress: "I fully understand that there should be impatience. I
confidently hope, however, that as much as they dislike what happens, they will
be wise enough not to stop giving [moral] assistance and [financial] support at
this critical moment, when final success is in sight."
"The first six months of 1954 will be decisive."
Near the Heart. As far as it went, the story of Germany's rise in 1953 was
good for the democracies and bad for Communism. But other years and other men
will determine whether there will be a happy ending. Konrad Adenauer is 78 this
month. In the frost of his rigid, imperious command over machinery of both
party and government, few sprouts of leadership have been able to grow. "How
long I can hold my present office no one can tell," he said. "Even I cannot. My
health and strength are excellent. Nothing, however, is nearer my heart than
that before I go...I shall have brought Germany securely into the community of
free and democratic peoples of the Christian West..."
The question mark of the future intrudes like a brooding outsider on the
encouraging spectacle of a West Germany healthily revived, strongly and
democratically led, dedicated by its electorate to a United Europe as well as
to a new Germany. "We never question Adenauer's sincerity when he talks of
Franco- German agreement," said a top French diplomat. "He is truly
European...But we don't forget another German, Stresemann, who wanted good
relations with France. Six months after he died [1929], what happened? His
party and policy collapsed."
Konrad Adenauer himself has also seen the brooding outsider. If the dream
of Europe collapses, there is, he fears, the possibility of a revival of German
militarism. "I never minimize this possibility if Europe fails," said he last
week. "If France refuses to accept reconciliation with her former enemy, how we
would accept the effect of such a reversal I do not know...The whole population
would be affected. We cannot say what would happen. But we have had experience
in the past."
"Perhaps I had better not die yet awhile," said Konrad Adenauer. "There is
still too much to do."
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1953
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