German Socialists Reorganize
ALLEMANN, R.
Party congress revamps machinery but not policy German Socialists Reorganize By F- R. Allemann Bonn For the first time since Kurt Schumacher reorganized the German Social Democratic party after...
...The army the Social Democrats envision would solely serve to establish a balance against the forces maintained by West Germany's immediate neighbors, especially East Germany...
...New members fought their way into the party leadership, such as Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt and the eminent economist Heinrich Deist, who pushed through, dynamically and without compromise, his new economic program...
...By a large majority, the congress voted for a general election...
...The party leadership suggested five separate votes: One for the party chief, one for the two deputies, one for the treasurer, one for the other four paid members of the directorate, and one for the remaining members of the executive...
...Two deputy party leaders were lo be elected in addition to the leader...
...The tendency toward more "party democracy" was quite apparent...
...The question of whom the SPD will present as its candidate for Chancellor was thus postponed for another two years...
...But this realistic SPD economic policy has no counterpart when it comes to the questions of foreign policy...
...The number of functionaries who, in addition to elected delegates, were entitled to a vote at the party congress was cut almost in half...
...Next, a proposal, with 45 signatures, suggested that Ollenhauer be replaced as leader of the party by Carlo Schmid...
...But this means that the SPD already seems to accept the idea of "disengagement" and of a "demilitarized zone" in Central Europe, while postulating, at the same time, that such an agreement should be the object of international negotiations...
...Party congress revamps machinery but not policy German Socialists Reorganize By F- R. Allemann Bonn For the first time since Kurt Schumacher reorganized the German Social Democratic party after World War II, an open revolt of the rank-and-file against the party leadership was partly successful...
...The party bureaucracy—represented primarily by the full-time members of the party directorate in Bonn—had kept the imposing organization going (the SPD has more members than all other German parties put together), but it had had no significant impact on the broad masses of voters...
...Professor Schmid— who joined the SPD in 1945, helped draft the Bonn Constitution and for several years has been Deputy President of the Bundestag—is the German Socialist with the biggest reputation in middle-class circles...
...He is also something that has become rare in the SPD: a full-blooded politician—not an easy-going, unimaginative bureaucrat but a strong, imposing personality...
...Both of them had worked in the party directorate for more than thirty years...
...This program of reorganization was approved by the delegates...
...Nothing was more apparent in Stuttgart than the desire of the Social Democrats for outstanding personalities, to put an end to the "regime of mediocrity...
...Although the SPD, for the first time, hesitantly approved the idea of national defense, this decision was clad in many reservations...
...Adenauer, in a barbed reference to his past, has called Wehner the "most radical socialist—in quotes" he could imagine...
...A "presidium'' of nine—four paid and five honorary members, among them the three deputy leaders of the Bundestag fraction—was to take over the day-to-day leadership, which hitherto had been exercised largely by the functionaries at Bonn headquarters...
...Wehner has been the subject of more attacks than any other German Social Democrat...
...The delegates knew that this arrangement would once more make the leading professional functionaries practically irreplaceable...
...For him, as he stated anew in Stuttgart, socialism is "not an ideological structure but a humanitarian impulse...
...Their resistance began with the election of the party executive...
...The other is Herbert Wehner, the stormy petrel of the German Left, a professional politician whose political past and flaring temper have made him a bogeyman to the German bourgeoisie...
...If one can place credence in public-opinion polls, Chancellor Adenauer's Christian Democratic Union has a good chance of equalling the 54-percent majority it won in 1957...
...One is the leader of the Bavarian section of the party, Waldemar von Knoenngen, scion of an ancient family of Bavarian barons, a pure idealist of irreproachable character and many ideas, but soft and not aggressive...
...A foTmer Communist, a comrade-in-arms of Ernst Thalmann and a member of the Communist underground politburo under Hitler, he became a close associate of Schumacher and has long been the guiding spirit behind Socialist foreign policy...
...SPD election propaganda in 1957, as in 1953, had been weak, and its effects negligible...
...It seems questionable whether, with this kind of mentality, the SPD can ever go beyond passing resolutions and win a national election...
...Should the current SPD propaganda campaign prove a failure, too, the moment may come when the question of the party's political reorientation will have to be faced—a question carefully avoided at the Stuttgart congress...
...A "party council," drawn from district representatives, was charged with preparing decisions of the party executive—instead of merely approving them, as had a previous party committee...
...In the subsequent voting, two of the former party managers were removed: the chief of the press and propaganda section, Fritz Heine, and the leader of the women's organization, Herta Gotthelf...
...The "reform" discussions which began last September had forced the directorate to advance suggestions for "overhauling'' the SPD organization...
...The two deputy leaders elected form a strange twosome...
...The discontent which had accumulated after three Socialist defeats in Parliamentary elections (1949, 1953 and 1957) turned against the SPD machine at the party congress at Stuttgart, and forced a drastic reshuffling of the party leadership...
...On July 6, state government elections will take place in North Rhine-Westphalia, largest state in the Federal Republic and its industrial heart...
...He certainly will be in a position to give the SPD a new vigor, but he is hardly the man to lead the party to victory in this period of prosperity and conservatism...
...This would mean that the massive campaign "against atomic death" has been a flop for the Social Democrats in terms of breaking out of their political isolation—thus repeating the previous SPD experience with campaigns against rearmament in general, EDC, the Paris agreements and conscription...
...Yet Wehner is a "radical" perhaps only in the sense that he places the problem of German reunification in the center of his political activity...
...For the faith that "atomic death'" slogans and the subjugation of all foreign-policy thinking to the fight against nuclear arms might "turn the tide" may soon prove to have been a decidedly wrong speculation...
...With Wehner, the SPD has elevated one of its strongest...
...The idea that the Bonn Republic, together with its Western allies, should create a military balance of power against the Soviet bloc was rejected...
...But Schmid declined to run, and Ollenhauer was re-elected, though with a loss of votes...
...For a while, the West German public responded to Social Democratic agitation, but this sympathy was never translated into votes...
...The desire for leadership also found expression in Stuttgart in other areas...
...The only acceptable form of defense was described as a small professional army of volunteers, with an equally voluntary organization of local defense...
...This program, although proclaiming as an immediate objective the social integration of the coal industries, also makes a strong stand for competition and a free market economy and constitutes a basic rejection of the idea of complete nationalization...
...Nevertheless, he also symbolizes the popular distrust of all "experiments" of the Left...
...Thus, they demanded that all "professionals"— with the exception of the three top leaders and the party treasurer—be elected with the rest of the candidates...
...Party leader Erich Ollenhauer fought this request with a rare fervor, but the congress turned a deaf ear...
...The rebellion was not essentially political, but concerned the reform of the party's organizational structure...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 24
