Correspondents' Correspondence
SCHWARTZ, JOHN MANDER \ THOMAS LAND \ ARNOLD ABRAMS \ PAUL WALDO
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. The German Right BONN—Those who argue that the "German...
...The German Right BONN—Those who argue that the "German Problem" has always consisted more in the country's failure to develop a healthy Right than in the conflicts that divide its Left can find support in the leadership problems currently bedeviling the Christian Democratic Union (CDU...
...Even amid the positive demonstration there were those who had come to promote their own thing...
...The recent resignation of Kurt Georg Kiesinger as party chairman has dramatized the rivalries within the CDU...
...Indeed, it may well be too late for any other candidate to challenge him...
...The great glass arcades built by Napoleon III became a center for spontaneous theater and dance, animal and flower shows, art exhibitions and circuses...
...The question now is whether these can be resolved before the party conference to be held in Saarbriicken in October...
...when roles are so muddled, things are radically wrong in radical circles...
...beyond that there is no resemblance between the two months, for this is no Belle Epoque...
...aggressive, yet not doctrinaire...
...A week later the lootings moved to the rue de Rennes, which links Montparnasse and Saint Germain-des-Pres...
...His two losses of liberty thus came to symbolize both the fate of his people and religious suppression under Communist rule...
...All this organizational disarray comes at a time when the cdu appears to be gaining strength in the country...
...The major obstacle to rapprochement is the Cardinal...
...The man in the street is more preoccupied with Innenpolitik—prices, wages and inflation—than with adventures abroad...
...What is needed is a centrist figure, Catholic or Protestant, who can unite the various interests and factions in the CDU/CSU with efficiency and elegance...
...While the religious issue probably cuts very little ice today, the two men share a crucial weakness: They are extremely able politicians whose following lies within the party rather than with the voters...
...Barzel's main strength is that he is already the party's parliamentary leader, and his style of leadership has come to be widely admired by his colleagues: tough, yet flexible...
...In the latest melodrama, the state has indicted Jean-Paul Sartre for sponsoring certain banned newspapers of anarchistic tendency...
...The Cardinal last crossed the embassy gates on November 4, 1956, as Soviet troops were entering Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution...
...the many beautiful churches have been restored to their previous splendor and are full of worshipers...
...The one heartening demonstration took place some nights afterward in protest against the proposed destruction of Les Halles...
...The last visible progress in church-state relations here occurred in 1969, when the Kadar government permitted the Vatican to make some long-delayed church appointments...
...if he is convicted, we can expect the worst.—PAUL WALDO SCHWARTZ...
...Thus when the bulldozers threatened, the reaction was a true civic effort—as rare in France as wanton vandalism—complete with dense and animated crowds, dancing in the streets, petitions, and peace...
...The Chancellor's own popularity, however, tends to be exaggerated abroad...
...Consequently, the heterogeneous CDU/CSU often seems to resemble the U.S...
...JOHN MANDER A Mindszenty Deal BUDAPEST ?From his upper-story window in the American embassy, Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty watches the two police squad cars in Freedom Square awaiting a chance to arrest him...
...Several distinguished Vatican emissaries have begged the Cardinal to accept Kadar's terms, but to no avail...
...One cop at the scene remarked that he didn't know whether the culprits were "thieves or Leftists...
...Yet there had been heavy speculative investment in what is gently called "development," and at the end of the month the Municipal Council voted to demolish Les Halles...
...Foreign Minister Janos Peter recently had an audience with the Pope, and Archbishop Augostino Cassaroli, the Vatican official responsible for diplomatic affairs with the Soviet bloc, has been making tentative overtures to Hungary and other Communist nations...
...But times appear to be changing...
...While the daily police watch continues, Janos Kadar's reform-minded government has made Hungary perhaps the most liberal and humane country in Communist East Europe...
...After the central food markets were shifted to colorless Rungis, on the road to Orly Airport, colorful Les Halles changed...
...Mindszenty has repeatedly insisted that he would relinquish his position as Prince of the Church only if the state rescinds its original treason charges and allows him to appoint his successor and retire here in peace...
...Their story was indirectly endorsed by a riot squad member who said he and his colleagues were sick of being taken for brutes and bullies...
...Let's make love freely, and lead the war against this society which represses us...
...There were several interpretations of this comedy...
...If the SPD/PDF coalition fails in its Innen-politik, and if its Ostpolitik continues to stagnate, the CDU/CSU could win, despite its internal divisions, in 1973...
...Neither is a popular figure, both being somewhat cold in their public appearances...
...On the first Saturday night in June, a mob of young people smashed and looted some dozen shops on the much-beleaguered Boulevard Saint-Michel (New Yorkers may nod wearily, but Parisians still find such things shocking...
...The next day, a high police official was on the carpet because his men had arrived three hours late, of no use to anyone...
...If Sartre, who had been doing his utmost to provoke court action, is actually tried, we can expect a waxing phase in the cycle of protest...
...At home the polls suggest that Economics Minister Karl Schiller and Defense Minister Helmut Schmidt are held in higher esteem...
...Although members of the Left took this with considerable indignation, cogitation might have been a wiser response...
...There appear to be only two men in a position to do so: the former defense, foreign and interior minister, Gerhard Schroder (a Protestant), and the formidably skillful, younger, highly ambitious party whip in the Bundestag, Rainer Barzel (a Catholic...
...Pretty girls, for instance, distributed tracts put out by the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action...
...A few witnesses claimed that the police actually passed down the boulevard in wagons, but refused to act...
...That is undoubtedly good news for Brandt's coalition, since Barzel so plainly lacks voter appeal...
...Their initiative was hardly calculated to enhance public support for Les Halles, but that, like so much recent agitation here, is show biz...
...Together they won a very respectable victory in Schleswig-Holstein a couple of months ago, and they have done consistently well in each regional election since 1969...
...A civic installation that needed no special financing, Les Halles gave promise of deflecting some of the huffing and puffing from the congested boulevards...
...In fact, it is becoming increasingly evident that Chancellor Willy Brandt's coalition government of Social Democrats and Free Democrats is being sustained in office largely by divisions in the conservative opposition...
...Schroder, now 60, has shed the illiberal image he acquired as Adenauer's protege—he initiated the Ostpolitik, after all—but he seems unable to decide whether or not to fight for the nomination...
...Strauss, a veteran campaigner who has let it be known in recent weeks that he would accept a draft, is almost certainly unacceptable both to his colleagues and to the country at large, and it is generally agreed that he has privately settled for the Foreign Ministry...
...At that time, the Cardinal refused to leave his office despite the Pope's publicly announced wish that prelates retire at age 75...
...Now it is believed that Janos Peter's visit to Rome has produced an agreement whereby the Vatican will retire the Cardinal and the Hungarians will drop the treason charges when Mindszenty turns 80 early next year.—THOMAS LAND Leftists' Follies PARIS—Last month was the wettest, coldest, grayest June here since 1881...
...Brandt's Social Democratic party (SPD) has managed to hold its own, picking up a clear majority of the younger voters as the wave of radical student agitation has ebbed, but its partner, the Free Democratic party (FDP), has slipped somewhat the past two years...
...Meanwhile, the CDU/CSU has been gaining support from disaffected Free Democrats as well as those who were formerly attracted to the extreme Right by Adolf von Thadden's National Democratic party...
...Many of the local party chieftains are potential future Chancellors, especially the early-40s generation of Helmut Kohl (from Rhineland-Palatinate) and Gerhart Stoltenberg (from Schleswig-Holstein...
...Republican party more than Britain's tightly knit Conservatives...
...A decentralization program has to a large extent liberated the economy from bureaucratic national control...
...Religious suppression is on the wane...
...This, of course, complicates the problem of selecting a new leader...
...The opposition alliance of the cdu and the Christian Social Union (CSU)—Franz-Josef Strauss' Bavarian tail that seeks to wag the CDU dog—has reaped the benefit...
...Kadar, however, feels unable to go beyond a guarantee of safe conduct out of the country...
...Now, however, it looks like he and Stoltenberg made their bids too early and have lost favor, though either of them could still win the party chairmanship...
...Nine months ago, writing in these pages, I put my money on Kohl as the man most likely to emerge as the challenger to Brandt in the 1973 national elections...
...If not, personal wrangling is likely to distract the conference from its vital tasks: choosing a cdu candidate for the Chancellorship and deciding whether he should also serve as party chairman as in the past, or whether the two jobs should be separated to embrace a broader spectrum of the party...
...He had arrived in the capital only five days earlier, after insurgent soldiers liberated him from a life imprisonment term for treason imposed by the Matyas Rakosi regime in 1949...
...Meanwhile, every Leftist organization in Paris was denying responsibility...
...It is possible that he would prefer to be the next President of the Federal Republic...
...Boutiques and antiques stalls proliferated...
...And here Brandt's image is as bad as Edward Heath's or Richard Nixon's...
...Some believed the incident had been instigated by the police for this purpose...
...And innovations in the voting system have produced contested parliamentary elections for the first time...
...Another hypothesis had it that the police held off deliberately in order to show how life is worse without them than it is with them...
...Moreover, there are indications that the Vatican—no less than the Hungarian government—would like to see the current negotiations for improved church-state relations reach a successful conclusion...
...Amid all this change, Mindszenty has become something of a forgotten man, especially among the young...
...Brandt's celebrated Ost-politik, despite the fascination it holds for foreign observers, does not excite West German voters...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 15
