The Statesmanship of Postwar Germany
ALLEMANN, F. R.
By F. R. Allemann The Statesmanship of Postwar Germany Chancellor Adenauer's policy is the 'inevitable result of the international situation' BONN FOR ANYONE who has been following German...
...On these grounds, the apprehensions that have been attached (here in Germany and abroad) to the problem of a change in the post of Federal Chancellor appear to me to be pointless—as pointless as the hopes that such a change will alter German policy...
...Now it is prepared to offer the neutrality of the Federal Republic without demanding any Soviet counteroffer in return...
...Many openings for German diplomacy remained unex-ploited because somehow they did not seem to fit into the Konzept...
...An Opposition, out of power and likely to remain so...
...can generously overlook this difficulty by taking a historical view...
...the less the Kremlin wanted to hear about German unity, the more concessions were recommended...
...and from sheer cleverness, imagination, and skill they reasoned hard European realities out of existence...
...Ten years of the Adenauer era have gone by, and they have produced so few surprises that the less use the imagination is put to the easier it is to foretell developments...
...The principal qualities of a statesman are less breadth and perspective than a simple eye for fundamentals, and the strength of will to hold fast to a few essential things...
...I doubt if the historic achievement of Konrad Adenauer is in any way lessened if one asserts that he was never a man of brilliant conceptions...
...the speeches of the late Kurt Schumacher were witty, brilliant, almost devastating, and not a few of his followers learned something from him...
...If this is a sign of anemic imagination, then the anemia is in Bonn's political life itself...
...The principal guarantee lies in the fact that no other German foreign policy could hold up or hold together...
...It is suddenly inclined to treat the "Confederation" propaganda of the Communist party (SED) as if it were a bona fide offer (instead of a far-sighted piece of tactical trickery) — and how can it do so without (at least for a transitional period) treating Communist chief Walter Ulbricht's regime as legitimate and thereby recognizing it...
...But slipshod stage-management in the last scene, however embarrassing or even tragic, doesn't alter the point of the play...
...the SPD has only been willing to sacrifice the German alliance with the West in order to secure Moscow's agreement to unification...
...that Germany (represented by this very Federal Republic as "the only legitimate German State corresponding to the will of the people") has few "natural" friends in the world and hence must create and maintain new friendships with a most prudent policy...
...With Adenauer, history has not quite been all that lucky...
...But 10 years of skilful Socialist debating and eloquent formulations have issued in neither persuasion nor power: for they were based on romantic German illusions...
...and lastly, that the German influence on world policy could become incomparably more effective by means of enrollment in the Western alliance than by a state of isolation which would give the victorious powers cause to remember their common interests against the vanquished of 1945...
...But what matter, if some of these happened to be just the right ones...
...Adenauer has been, to be sure, the embodiment of that policy, in its most consistent, inflexible, unruffled form...
...The man who was about to move from the Palais Schaumburg to the Villa Hammerschmidt but then decided to remain has shown the vanity and idiosyncrasy of age...
...His article appears also in the current issue of the British periodical, Encounter...
...Of course, the way to German unity is not by treating the Soviet Union as a quantite negligeable ; but are there no dangers in treating the West in this way...
...Even if it were possible to interest the Soviet Union in unification by this roundabout means ( and that would involve great risks for the young and weak West German state) what would be gained thereby...
...Everything, it seems to me, suggests that the Plan (even if Khrushchev at present appears likely to accept some of its elements) is just a piece of romanticism...
...I am afraid it was...
...But for years their strategy was to win over the Soviet Union to the idea of German unity by a system of concessions...
...The intellectuals' error has been in their assumption that this amounts to evidence against their Chancellor's political accomplishment...
...But it was he, who, in his uncomplicated way...
...a Government, with or without Adenauer, will not be in a position to afford such a luxury...
...But if it does begin to take some account of Soviet policy, it does not go to particular trouble to balance out the concessions it makes toward the East with some corresponding consideration of Western interests...
...Consider the new Social Democratic Deutschland-Plan...
...It is only necessary to listen to his speeches (I would not recommend them for reading) to realize that his view of the world is as limited as his vocabulary...
...A sensible policy for German unity ( insofar as such a thing is possible in the present circumstances ) has to reckon with the fact that the German territory on the other side of the river Elbe can be acquired peacefully by the Bundesrepublik only as a result of an understanding with the Soviet Union...
...This is only true to the extent that they have now, at long last, recognized the profound repugnance felt by the Eastern world power toward a Germany "reunited in freedom...
...that the Soviet Union looked upon the frontiers of the East German Communist state as its own "forward lines" which it was determined to hold in all circumstances...
...But Adenauer's few basic notions faced up to the problems of German postwar realities: the same cannot be said for the German political opposition, although the Socialists have mustered so many formidable arguments against the Chancellor...
...The SPD has always been very serious in its devotion to the ideal of "freedom for 17 million" in the Ostzone...
...The man wrote the script and created the role...
...No doubt the realities of world politics are incomparably richer and more subtle...
...Their new "Plan for Germany" signifies a new stage in the shadowy collective bargaining...
...Its authors (the restless, much misunderstood, but also much mistaken, Herbert Wehner is no doubt chiefly responsible for this astonishing document) state, with the odd mysticism that so-called German pragmatism alwavs takes, that they have taken their stand on "a foundation of facts...
...These have been the principles of the "Adenauer era...
...I cannot see why or how his successor, whoever he may be (and whenever he may come), can really depart from it...
...The Social Democrats can never, to be sure, identify themselves with Soviet objectives (not to say East Berlin propaganda)—at least not short of committing political suicide—and so the Deutschland-Plan manages to bring Erich Ollenhauer's party down with almost mathematical precision exactly between two stools...
...that all clever plans for German reunification were meaningless if they did not recognize the ideological basis of Soviet policy...
...During his lifetime, or certainly in the period of his governmental office, he may not F. R. ALLEMANN is our regular correspondent in Bonn...
...Adenauer's realities were these: that Germany lost the war and was no longer in a position to pursue an independent line of Grossmachtpolitik...
...By F. R. Allemann The Statesmanship of Postwar Germany Chancellor Adenauer's policy is the 'inevitable result of the international situation' BONN FOR ANYONE who has been following German politics from the birth of the Bundesrepublik in 1949 to the present, it takes some considerable mental effort to think of Bonn with any other Chancellor but Kon-rad Adenauer...
...Others might have been cleverer, more imaginative, more skilful...
...have had more than half-a-dozen ideas: perhaps less...
...This is one major fact which they had sedulously overlooked: this is almost a new "realism...
...Is the "continuity" often mentioned in connection with Bonn's foreign policy guaranteed solely, or even principally, by the person of the present Chancellor...
...How superior they have always seemed during the foreign policy debates in the Bonn Parliament...
...Few great statesmen have excelled the present German Chancellor in this respect, and Germany's intelligentsia has always taken this rather badly...
...I doubt it...
...Up till now...
...that a neutral Federal Republic would be an isolated one...
...Theoretically, the Social Democrats (SPD) have a point...
...but he did not invent the policy, and it is not his monopoly...
...It was, I suggest, the simple, obvious, inevitable result of the international situation...
...If, more than that, he is (like Bismarck or Churchill) a man of language and cunning and magic, a master of both words and events, then history is in luck...
...has done just those things that had to be done by a German statesman in the catastrophic situation after World War II...
...Was it somewhat one-sided and unsubtle...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 35
