German Conservatives "Woo the Kremlin

...For the rest, speeches reflected the will to display independence, and circumstances have provided numerous targets of opportunity...

...It has become a second-class power, not because it is not strong and will soon he stronger, but because it will remain a midget between Russia and the United States...

...If anything, the pattern of revived Soviet foreign trade since Stalin's death indicates that Moscow itself is not seriously considering this as a possibility...

...Moscow is interested only in a German satellite under absolute and irrevocable control...

...It postulates an equality of bargaining power, since neither sentiment nor real identity of interest affects the balance...

...This conception is a distinct improvement on "the Nazis are coming...

...It is by no means impossible...

...A crisis need, in fact, never follow...

...A few days after all the other big parties had criticized the Pfleiderer project, the chairman of the FDP, Dr...

...The provincial parliamentary elections in the largest of Germany's nine provinces, North Rhine-Westphalia, slated for June 27, suggest an immediate cause for much of this maneuvering...

...It appealed to liberals in liberal terms and, at the same time, decked itself out in the old Imperial (and Nazi) red-white-and-black and went after what it thought was the large swarm of politically homeless nationalists and ex-Nazis...

...Nor can it camouflage the chewing gum and baling wire which hold the liberal and conservative wings of the party together...

...We should lose no time in taking remedial measures to end the vacuum in which "alternatives" jell...

...Specious and fragmentary though this alternative is, it could serve as a rallying point for those who find fault with the policy of Western integration...

...They reflect the paralysis of Western planning, and they inject into the German political scene for the first time the outlines of an alternative to the present course...

...There is no doubt that the Chancellor is vulnerable and is extremely sensitive about his exposed position...

...It carried heat, but no light, into a complex and unpleasant situation...

...Today, nine years after Germany's collapse, most sensible people have concluded that Nazism is as dead as a herringor as Kaiser Wilhelm and his spikes...

...Russia played an important part in his calculations, but nothing was farther from his mind than committing himself to a German-Russian partnership...

...But there is nothing to prove that he is not perfectly honest in his avowed allegiance to Western ideals and in his public attitude toward the policy of the Adenauer Government, of which the FDP forms a part...

...At present, this pressure is not critical...

...Unfortunately, it called for an altogether different kind of notice and comment...

...The proposals came after the collapse of the Berlin Conference had again confirmed the deadlock between Russia and the Western powers on the German question...

...Department of Justice...

...This article was written before former Chancellors Rruning and Luther publicly urged new German neutralist policy, based,on the philosophy of Rapallo and Locarno...

...The huge majority of Germans is keenly conscious of this fact...

...Ratification of the European Defense Community treaty and of the Bonn Conventions, which grant the sovereignty and equality that Germany demands, has been postponed, primarily by France, on pretexts that look flimsier and flimsier in German eyes...

...In the course of a Bundestag debate on the Foreign Office budget, Dr...

...The Weimar Republic foundered partly because the democratic forces which tried to keep it afloat received insufficient recognition and help from the Western nations which had the greatest interest in seeing it survive...

...The simple fact is that the world has outgrown Germany...

...The results will show whether it has guessed right...

...Hence, the main weight of campaigning may well swing to foreign policy...

...The new impulses in German-Russian relations are an expression and, at the same time, an active element of a potentially dangerous situation...

...Adenauer's coalition partners are growing impatient with the West German Conservatives Woo the Kremlin By Ricliard C. Hottelet Bonn There has been considerable talk here during recent weeks about the need for direct political contact with Soviet Russia...

...Lacking any evidence of specific sinister intentions, one must reply that the danger lies in the situation...

...A Russo-Prussian alliance could have taken care of this safely and with dispatch, but Bismarck turned it down without hesitation for fear that Russia would end by dominating Prussia...

...The FDP made its maximum effort in the Bundestag elections of 1953 on a schizophrenic tangent all its own...

...They have repudiated the insinuation that they might want to play the East off against the West...

...Projected into the present day, this could suggest only that some Volkspolizei general in East Germany would march his division to West Berlin, not that anyone in West Germany would make common cause with the East...

...Moreover, the quality of membership makes a great deal of difference...

...Continued high prosperity leaves only the religious-school question and the hapless Federal Minister for Family Affairs up for debate on the domestic scene...

...His program of unequivocal solidarity with the West has brought his country no political dividends for some time...

...And he hoped vaguely for progress in this respect...

...For the first time, too, the Pfleiderer plan presents a course which is capable of development and "improvement" in a straight line by the wrong people...

...After serving the Office of War Information in London, North Africa and Italy during 1942 and 1943, he joined CBS as a war correspondent in France and Germany...

...It elected a new, more energetic and independent, irreproachably democratic chairman in Thomas Dehler, painted itself a good republican black-red-and-gold, and looked around for new issues...

...The second interpretation of Yorck's behavior is that he was merely leaving a sinking ship...

...The Soviet Union has no reason even to be interested in a German ally which, by definition, would retain freedom of thought and movement and could be expected to defect to the West...

...1939 was probably the last time that Germany and Russia could come together as equals and join forces in a common enterprise...

...Thomas Dehler, gave it his full sanction...

...Such fear did not arise 60 years later, after Versailles, to prevent the two battered pariahs from clutching each other's hands in a feeble demonstration of independence...

...An earlier Pfleiderer plan attracted brief attention in the summer of 1952a scheme under which Soviet and Western forces would retire behind the Oder and Rhine respectively, leaving the bulk of Germany as a neutral zone between them...

...The Saar problem brought an almost open break when the FDP refused to support the Chancellor's decision to accept the van Naters plan...

...In many quarters, however, Hitler has been discarded as a current menace only in favor of a more sophisticated, more logical cliche, namely that West Germany is apt at any time to desert the West, join forces with Russia and go on the rampage again...

...I mean," he said, "the whole world from Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest and Moscow to Peking in the Far East...

...What he did was to juggle nineteenth-century power combinations in order, first, to unify Germany under Prussia by war and, then, to keep his German Empire at peace...

...It even edges over into probability so long as Western policy leaves its German supporters hanging in a void...

...But, for all his intelligence, he has irrepressible bridge-building propensities...

...Chancellor Adenauer, who had made no concessions to anyone in preaching his principles, was the triumphant victor...

...Hanging him was one of the chief popular enthusiasms in the Allied nations for years after the First World War...

...Bonn is in many essential ways far stronger than Weimar...

...High intelligence and a coy, dry humor make him one of the wittiest speakers in the Bundestag...

...The combined cowardice and confusion of Allied behavior after the very creditable showing in Berlin have made it most difficult for Adenauer and his associates to go on endlessly exuding optimism, counseling patience and brushing aside demands in the press and in politics that Germany undertake action in its own behalf...

...Viewed with detachment, the FDP seems little more than a brindled conservative auxiliary of the CDU, trying hard to develop ideas, leaders and followers who will protect it from absorption by its larger partner and keep it from breaking up under the steady strain of politics...

...It may be said that they have consistently sought more attractive variations of Adenauer's basic themes rather than logical alternatives...

...On the other hand...

...Swept away by their own logic and vigilance, sensitive observers might well go chasing after a Russo-German nightmare which has little basis in either fact or theory and thereby lose sight of the real danger that lies in the Bonn speeches...

...They were made at a time when France had reduced the policy of European defense and integration to a state of tragi-comic confusion...

...Bismarck had just embarked on his policy of unifying Germany by blood and iron when Russia, in 1863, made what must have been a most tempting offer of an alliance against Austria...

...On the economic side, the picture is no different...

...Early in May, Dr...

...Concretely, by implementing the Bonn Conventions and EDC, or by bringing Germany into NATO, the West must bind Germany to itself and restore the sense of common purpose which will otherwise fade...

...Chancellor Adenauer and his Christian Democratic party promptly took note of the Pfleiderer plan...

...Pfleiderer and the FDP Executive Committee have solemnly and repeatedly affirmed their devotion to the Western cause and have categorically disclaimed any intention of following the line of pro-Soviet policy which has come to be labeled Rapallo...

...Politicians and correspondents made hay reporting the imaginary resurgence of Nazism...

...Lastly, they came on the eve of an important provincial election, and from a political party that is ambitious, unsteady and rather unscrupulous when soliciting votes...

...They felt about evenly matched in power, and, up to a point, their interests ran roughly parallel...

...Since then, he has alternated between U.S...

...It is worth noting that the Social Democrats, for all the verve with which they attack Adenauer, have stayed away from this dubious and delicate field...

...And neutrality, as everybody but the neutralist knows, is a cloud-cuckoo land between East and West whose integrity is respected while the Communists take over...

...But the generous financial support of the Ruhr does not seem able to make up for the lack of a policy and the absence of dynamic leaders...

...Pfleiderer, a somewhat precious little man with a considerable career in the German diplomatic service until 1945, fancies himself as an old-school diplomat...

...But there is no guarantee that its present leaders and their policy would long outlast the failure of their main efforts...

...Yorck may have been deserting Napoleon, conqueror and tyrant, in order to join the grand coalition for the liberation of Prussia and Europe...

...That it never lost its sense of realism was revealed by the fact that one man who survived all changes in the party hierarchy was Herr Middelhauve from the Ruhr, where the money comes from...

...Pfleiderer remarked that, while Germany was now well represented abroad, there remained a large blank space on the map, a terra incognita for Germany except through hearsay...

...Tauroggen, Bismarck, Rapallo and 1939, dissimilar as they are, are hauled in as specific precedents...

...But here is where the danger lies?a danger of which the West would do well to take notice early...

...A real program, however, eluded the party as successfully as ever despite much scampering around in the ripe fields of poetic liberalism...

...There is no such independent bargaining factor in Germany today...

...For seven months during 1946, he was CBS correspondent in Moscow, obtaining while he was there a remarkably frank interview from Maxim Litvinov which was published after Litvinov's death...

...Rapallo did little more, from the viewpoint of Western interests, than thumb a nose at the stuffed shirts whose aim in life was squeezing reparations out of the Weimar Republic...

...and West German assignments...

...As a matter of fact, his deep distrust of Russian aims provides a timely analogy...

...The chances of Germany freely joining forces with Russia against the West are negligible in anything like the present circumstances...

...It begins as a modest, reasonable desire to set up channels of communication with a vast neighboring power...

...In this spring of 1954, the FDP is a very restive member of the Bonn coalition...

...All this may seem a very dark construction to put on recent events...

...Barring some upheaval which would upset all calculations, it is impossible to see how this equality could again be achieved for Germany and Russia...

...In March 1941, he was arrested by the Nazis for "espionage" and spent four months in solitary confinement in the notorious Alexanderplatz and Moabit jails...

...It was on April 7 that Dr...

...Yet, nothing shows more eloquently than the events of 1939 to 1941 that a German-Russian alliance is inherently unstable...

...Pfleiderer did not reveal that he had already been to East Berlin to sound out Soviet Deputy High Commissioner Mirozhnichenko about an informal trip to Moscow by a group of Bundestag deputies, and that he had received an encouraging answer...

...The FDP drew its conclusions from this setback...

...Richard C. Hottelet, CBS Radio correspondent in Germany, has been reporting world affairs since 1937...

...All the while, of course, the new Pfleiderer plan was bubbling in the background...

...The election returns brought sad disillusionment...

...For all our justified pessimism, it would be pretty farfetched to say that the Western position today resembles that of Napoleon in the winter of 1812...

...Karl-Georg Pfleiderer of the Free Democratic party publicly broached the idea of a direct political approach to the Soviet Union...

...Bismarck is another poor illustration...

...The real damage had been done earlier, in secret, when the Soviets came to terms with von Seeckt and the Reichsivehrfor them a far more valuable partner than the Weimar regime...

...In its way, it has been dangerous talk and deserved the prompt attention it has received in most Western countries...

...In that case, his motives were patriotic and libertarian...

...It leads, probably with several shifts in the dramatis personae along the way, not to 1939 or Tauroggen but to neutrality...

...In the light of this rather heartening appraisal of German immunity to Soviet attraction, where is the danger in recent proposals of direct contact with the Soviet Union...

...Pfleiderer elaborated his plan somewhat in public to emphasize the informal nature of any delegation which went to Moscow and to tack on the humanitarian aim of discussing the release of German prisoners of war with the Soviet Red Cross and religious quarters...

...The historical examples do not really apply...

...Germany can exist only as a member of the Eastern or the Western bloc, never again as an independent operator between them...

...And finally comes the argument that Russia is in a position to offer restoration of the eastern territories and possibly another partition of Polanda price for alliance which the Germans would find irresistible...

...In a radio broadcast, Dr...

...Unrequited love may make beautiful poetry, but it draws few votes...

...he was finally exchanged for Nazi correspondent held by the U.S...

...Free Democratic shafts have since been flung in all directions, but most have landed near Adenauer...

...One of Germany's many tragedies has been the ease with which it has lent itself to caricature and nutshell definition...

...And, as the next step, the Executive Committee of the FDP approved the Pfleiderer idea of taking the initiative "to normalize relations between the Federal Republic and the Soviet Union...

...The FDP lost ground almost everywhere, including its stronghold of North Rhine-Westphalia...

...After covering the Czech crisis and the Munich Pact for the United Press, he accompanied German troops that marched into Prague, visited Nazi-occupied Poland, and followed the Wehrmacht into Belgium and Northern France...

...at least it rests on the fact that Germany lies between Russia and the West and is theoretically in a geographical swing position...

...on the contrary, through it Germany has remained suspended in a sort of limbo under the Occupation Statute, neither occupied nor fully free...

...He arrived in Berlin 48 hours after it was taken by the Red Army, covered the Potsdam Conference, and delivered the first postwar broadcast to America from Warsaw in September 1945...

...There are no grounds for assuming that Russia could buy West Germany with trade, in good times or bad...

...In short, he had to counterattack with a meat cleaver, threatening to throw the FDP out of the coalition and block the re-election of Theodor Heuss (FDP) to the West German Presidency...

...It feels, as it has felt before, that it should somehow be stronger and more influential than it is...

...He knew that Austria was the most formidable obstacle to his plans and that Prussia, though smaller, would sooner or later have to crush her opposition by force of arms...

...It proceeds, with Moscow's discreet encouragement, to the growth of a good-neighbor policy in which, it goes without saying, "provocative" acts and entanglements like EDC or NATO have no place...

...No overriding domestic issues have arisen...

...Dehler declared: "It would be foolish to deny that developments in the past months have been unfavorable, that time has been working against us and against the West, that the chances of the military and political integration of Europe which we desire have not improved, that since the Berlin Conference things have been going more Molotov's way than Dulles's...

...They found an eager audience whose interest and gullibility somehow never flagged as "incident" after "incident" petered out...

...This more streamlined train of thought started roaring down its track the moment politicians in Bonn began talking about going to Moscow...

...Dehler, Dr...

...After 1945, the Western world, with hot Soviet encouragement, went right on fighting Hitler...

...Not until the Weimar Republic was on its last legs did the West become dimly aware that there was more to Germany and its problems than the Kaiser and his tribe of Huns...

...And suggestions of discontent and self-assertion began to appear in another coalition party, the refugee group known as the "All-German Bloc...

...Alliance between these two countries is, in any event, a relationship that belongs to the past...

...He is one of the few non-fellow-traveling figures in German public life who chooses to give the Soviet Zone the full title it invented for itself: He calls it the German Democratic Republic, with a straight face...

...Kaiser Wilhelm was the villain before and after 1918, a beautiful bargain-basement villain with spiked mustache and spiked helmet...

...The FDP certainly seems to feel that, by openly attacking some of the key elements of Adenauer's alignment with the West, it can recoup its losses and heighten its influence if not inside then outside the Government...

...My friends and I have considered whether it is not necessary in these circumstances to enter into conversation with the rulers in Moscow and Peking and thereby contribute to relaxation of the foreign-policy deadlock between East and West...

...While admitting the need for diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in the long run, Adenauer emphatically deplored as mischievous and harmful any private attempt to anticipate them at this juncture...

...Dr...

...Adenauer had to use all his persuasion and influence to bring the party back into line...

...Tauroggen, where Count Yorck von Wartenburg in 1812 took his Prussian corps over to the Russians, can be interpreted in two ways...