Adenauer Beatified
SEGER, GERHART H.
Adenauer Beatified Adenauer and the New Germany. Reviewed by Gerhart H. Seger By Edgar Alexander. U.S. correspondent, Berlin "Telegraf"; Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. 300 pp. $5.25. author,...
...When Adenauer draws West Germany into the Western defense system, he acts primarily as a realist...
...From this background stems Adenauer's somewhat paradoxical personality...
...Alexander thus overplays his theme...
...This is certainly true in many instances, particularly in Adenauer's contribution to the institutions of the new German Republic and some of its domestic policies...
...Whatever Adenauer has said, thought or done is explained here as stemming from his Christian attitude...
...Edgar Alexander calls his book "a history and an estimate," it might have been expected that, even if he disagrees with Adenauer's critics, he would try to present a rounded picture...
...But who can, in all sincerity, hail Adenauer's stand on atomic weapons and bases in Germany as the manifestation of a new, ethical Christianity...
...He might at least have mentioned some of Dr...
...It is one of the intricacies of German politics that Adenauer's home province, the Rhineland, was traditionally rather democratic but had the most conservative, if not reactionary, municipal institutions...
...Adenauer was Lord Mayor of Cologne for 17 years and, as such, uncrowned king of the city...
...He has not...
...This has nothing to do with the obviously excellent translation by Thomas E. Goldstein but must be equally unreadable in German...
...Alexander also points out, Adenauer is not a supporter of narrow clericalism and shows a liberal attitude in his dealings with Protestants, who make up an ever-increasing proportion of his party, the Christian Democratic Union...
...His political acumen, untiring energy, skill at diplomatic negotiation and steadfast adherence to Western policies have earned him a great deal of deserved admiration in Germany and this country...
...But any person of this stature has opponents...
...But, though this reviewer has no quarrel with Adenauer's foreign policy of adherence to the West, the author's attempt to explain every last item of that policy as specifically Christian is impossible to digest...
...At times the book seems written on the principle: Why should I say what I have to say clearly and simply if I can make it complicated...
...for it is a decision which, though realistic in my opinion, may well have inhuman consequences...
...He also makes the reading of his book quite difficult by engaging in a terminology of his own...
...One may say, on that basis, that he does not shy away from the unpleasant consequences of his policies...
...Nor can one quarrel with the author's emphasis on the Christian idea of natural law, though one could conceive of other sources of the development and recognition of basic human rights...
...His city commissioners were nothing but glorified bellhops...
...author, "Dictatorship—War—Disaster" Kokrad Adenauer, the 82-year-old Chancellor of the German Federal Republic, is without doubt one of the leading statesmen of today's Europe...
...In spite of its scholarly manner, therefore, this book is nothing but a premature beatification of Adenauer, and the author, himself a Catholic, should know the more restrained practice of his church in this respect...
...Indeed, devout believers may well claim that Adenauer left his Christian abode when he decided to include Germany in the Western defense system...
...While a staunch fighter for democracy, he is personally—in dealing with his staff, his cabinet and with Parliament—an autocrat...
...A sample sentence: "We may now proceed to a deliberate historico-sociological attempt to determine the ideopolitical positions of Adenauer and Heuss— without doing violence to a peeper ideohistorical understanding of the most recent chapter in German history...
...As Dr...
...Adenauer's less admirable traits...
...Things of this kind should have been included in an estimate of the man and his work...
...Since Dr...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 21
