Adenauer and After
MUHLEN, NORBERT
Adenauer and After By Norbert Muhlen Is the cooperative Germany he symbolizes a permanent reality or a passing phase? West Germany today is the lengthened shadow of a man--Konrad Adenauer. The...
...Comparison with Hitler reveals some of Adenauer's most important personality traits...
...Understandable as French anxieties are, they may yet help bring about what France fears most--namely, a new German temper which shuns collaboration with the Western community...
...Why, then, do Soviet strategists continue to dangle the prize of German unity (at the cost of German participation in an integrated Western Europe) before German eyes, and why do they continue trying to dissuade the other Western European peoples from accepting Germany in the European community...
...but, in the years ahead, such a turn would become more possible in proportion as the West denies Germany just and equal partnership...
...Adenauer cultivates roses...
...There are many reasons for this...
...Or else it is said that Adenauer is just another Fuehrer, strong men being what the Germans supposedly crave...
...This discovery in turn has stimulated among Germans a sense of the common Western cause and an identification with the common Western values--an important and promising change from the past...
...Adenauer is a devoted family man...
...Adenauer is little interested in, and rather skeptical of, ideologies...
...rather, it is the memory of the past chapter which closed only nine years ago...
...Today, true enough, there is practically no evidence of a German turn away from the West...
...Hitler tried to create the image of an utterly lonely man, towering above common life and human love relations...
...Homesick for the old days before the dictatorship, they set out to restore the pre-Hitler past, which Adenauer seemed to personify...
...Does Adenauer represent more than a passing episode (like Stresemann) in German histoy...
...Only if such a union does take place, I believe, can Adenauer's Germany survive...
...Hitler's public performances were frighteningly unforgettable, Adenauer's colorless, almost dull...
...Will history now repeat itself...
...Yet, this neutralism would, in practice, be directed against the West, whose defense concept it would shatter...
...Childs said "almost believe...
...The past was so horrible, so traumatic, so spectacular...
...the Germans resolved to be sober, respectable and hard-working, and to tend strictly to their own private, everyday lives...
...Adenauer and After By Norbert Muhlen Is the cooperative Germany he symbolizes a permanent reality or a passing phase...
...In the presence of this stubborn old man," Marquis Childs wrote after a talk with Adenauer, "one can almost believe that the transition is being effected between the wild, demonic Germany of the past and a new Germany taking its plate within a framework of European law and order...
...And, with the spiritually exhausted, economically ambitious, materialist and quietistic state which is likely to continue in Germany for some years to come, a program of neutralism would seem to be more probable than one of nationalism...
...Western concessions to German democracy during the 1920s were too little, too late and often accompanied by pinpricks...
...Then, ironically and tragically, the West swiftly granted to the hostile Nazi bullies what they had steadfastly refused to friendly and reasonable German democrats...
...What Adenauer incarnates, and what has become the ruling temper of his country, is middle-class respectability, a sharp contrast to Hitler's desperate demon-ism...
...A great sense of let-down would overcome many who today set all their hopes on a united Europe...
...Hitler created and utilized slogans in quantity...
...Adenauer is soft-spoken and matter-of-fact...
...Compared with this, the issue of German reunification is a subordinate one...
...But Adenauer acts within the checks and balances of a republican constitution...
...they have shown their approval by their votes...
...The sorry fact is that bitter French or British opposition to Germany tends to alienate Germans from Western unity...
...But, ironically enough, in order to restore the good old ways Adenauer had to promote a revolutionary program, European integration, and take the lead in dismantling the old nationalism...
...In fact, their new contentment showed most Germans that, if dictatorship and war bore bitter fruit, peacefulness and individual liberty paid rich rewards...
...And it is also true that present-day Germany's spiritual exhaustion, materialism and quietism have made her condition more similar to the other nations of Western Europe than ever before...
...These resolutions, made in the days of the national hangover, remained valid German rules of conduct in the subsequent years of recovery and reconstruction...
...Hitler was a lumpen-intellectual who waded through murky ideas and grandiloquent theories...
...Fed up with conquest, glory and heroics, faced with a serious challenge to its peace and prosperity, postwar Germany fastened its hopes on the Adenauer program...
...the great majority of Germans were better off in 1953 than in the past, and the prospects for the future looked even brighter...
...Adenauer, now almost 80, enjoys perfect health...
...Adenauer has hardly created a single "quotable quote...
...Others had for so long identified the German people with the Nazi regime (maintained by force) that they cannot bring themselves to identify Germany now with the Adenauer Government (supported by consent...
...Even in the last year, a change in German attitudes has been perceptible as a result of the opposition to EDC in France and, to a lesser extent, in England...
...The contrast between the two men reflects the contrasting eras in which they governed...
...There should be no question that the majority of Germans hope for the success of Adenauer's program of Western integration and defense...
...Today's Western opposition to German participation in EDC and other natural German desires recalls the first act of the past tragedy...
...Yet, Germany today is fully aware of the Communist threat to her liberty and prosperity, and wants to defend herself against this threat...
...The German chapter still being written--the Adenauer era, which began in 1949--seems to have its one-man leadership in common with the preceding chapter, the Hitler era...
...In public, Hitler shouted, thundered, wept before his audiences...
...Hitler's murderous extremes have been succeeded by Adenauer's just milieu...
...The answer is that they are operating on a long-term basis...
...Adenauer seems ill at ease with crowds, and prefers talking with individuals or small groups...
...the West Germans now seem willing to sacrifice their Eastern brothers for the time being if they themselves can become partners of the West...
...Furthermore, many Germans have discovered that this threat endangers all of Western Europe, and not just Germany alone...
...If a European Defense Community including both France and Germany is America's best hope in Europe, the opposition to EDC would seem to promise most to the Kremlin in its long-range struggle for the domination of Europe...
...Hitler felt at home as the hero of hysterical mass meetings...
...Given a serious new economic setback, with all the frustration and hopelessness it would create, new leaders and programs very different from Adenauer's would find followers which they have not been able to find till now...
...Will they continue endorsing it...
...Adenauer says he owes his best qualities (patience and perseverance) to his father, and likes to point to the modest house on Bonn's Kasernenstrasse where his grandfather ran a small bakery...
...They are shrewdly preparing for the day when the German sense of disappointment and rejection has reached the point where the people would be ripe for a new leadership untainted by, if not opposed to, Adenauer's commitment to the West...
...the Adenauer present seems so modest and tepid that it does not register with many people...
...Without such a union, freedom in Europe cannot long survive either...
...Hitler during his life had been a soldier, manual worker, artist and bum...
...On the other hand, many of the same observers cite French and Italian failure to form stable governments as evidence of democratic weakness...
...After he is gone, will his people follow new ideas and programs again...
...No contemporary evidence motivates these speculations...
...Nevertheless, one cannot understand present-day West Germany unless one understands the character of its leader...
...The answer is yes, if--and this is a big "if"--the program continues to satisfy their needs and aspirations...
...If the Germans are made to feel unwanted again, it should surprise nobody if they again turn from the path they now follow under Adenauer...
...If most Germans today take the big change of this decade so much for granted that they think too little about the Hitler past, many Westerners are still so preoccupied with the past that they do not recognize the big change which has taken place...
...The Germans in 1945 were disenchanted by their experience with dictatorship, its drunken dreams of glory, its revolutionary nationalist lusts, its contempt for human rights...
...Hitler denounced his father as a petty tyrant and despised his origins (he did not even stop in his own native town the only time he passed through it, en route to Vienna...
...since he is variously limited by a free press, a freely elected legislature and an independent judiciary, he embodies the temper and aspirations of the majority of his people far more closely than his predecessor...
...Hitler's hobby was drawing grandiose blueprints of new buildings and cities...
...One main reason most Germans approve the Adenauer policies is to be found in their pocketbooks...
...Adenauer spent almost his entire career as a municipal official in Cologne...
...One cause of the breakdown of the Weimar Republic was the fact that the West, under French pressure, denied it equal partnership...
...And so Germany is still willing to bind herself to the West--of the West is capable of binding itself to Germany...
...This argument is generally based on the smashing electoral victory won by the Adenauer coalition last September: rather than compare this to the Roosevelt landslide of 1936 or the Eisenhower triumph of 1952, some observers instinctively conjure up Hitler's ghost to show the election as an anti-democratic trend...
...The tension had been dissipated by defeat, disgrace, fatigue...
...Likewise, Adenauer's program of West German integration with the Western community might lose support if the NATO powers rejected Germany as a partner...
...Hitler suffered from insomnia and a number of other ills, for which he was treated by quack doctors...
...deeper fears do remain, lor while Adenauer has slowly come to be accepted as a devoted and sincere partisan of the Western world, misgivings about the German nation still are strong...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 15
