Adenauer's Germany

...It is Thayer, in The Unquiet Germans, who puts his finger on the German conundrum...

...Twelve years after the greatest catastrophe in their history," he says, "the Germans are still groping unsteadily for some form in which to fulfill themselves as a nation...

...At other times, they tentatively seek entirely new methods for their complex problems...

...In Weymar's case this is unfortunate because he has done quite a bit of digging into Adenauer's long and interesting career and has provided a number of intimate and hitherto untold accounts of significant incidents in his political life...

...Democracy is not yet an incurable habit in West Germany, and books glorifying Adenauer and his admittedly firm devotion to the concept of Western European unity should not blind us to the fact that the real test of what this astute politician has wrought is yet to come...

...The casuistry employed in this particular chapter is remarkable for its agility, if not for its logic...

...Alexander, in fact, does so much moralizing about his hero as to become almost abstruse...

...Sometimes they grope backward to the good old days that failed them...

...One wonders how much Alexander has been around outside Germany with his ears open...

...Reviewed by Theodore Kaghan OF THE three books under review, the one by the American, Charles Thayer, is the least scholarly...

...By selecting the proper quotations, it is also easy to show how unjust was the criticism of him, years later, when he attempted to use the Allied occupation authorities against his political adversaries during the constitution-writing days after World War II...

...Much, of course, depends on where the rest of the world goes...

...The strong Catholic bias of both German authors may be difficult for Americans to swallow, but Catholicism has always been a strong influence in German political affairs...

...With the question of German reunification still unsettled, with the lost lands beyond the Oder-Neisse line a political abrasive in the body of Europe, and with the aged Adenauer's successor an unknown but vitally important quantity, more unexpected events can and will take place than any writer can suggest or any of our political thinkers in Washington seem to have planned for...

...He even proves, probably more to his satisfaction than to that of many living Germans, that Adenauer's trip to Moscow in 1955 was a great success instead of the sorry failure so many of his contemporaries think it was...

...one looks expectantly but in vain for other and less biased references to the same story...

...Sometimes they grope toward models other nations such as America have worked out with apparent success over the centuries...

...Weymar's authorized biography is particularly guilty of presenting Adenauer's own versions, or equally friendly ones, of his life's events, but perhaps one must be ready to accept one-sided accounts in a book subject to the approval of so determined and opinionated a man as the German Chancellor...

...But when Weymar tells how Adenauer turned down the chance to become Chancellor in 1926, he depends only on what the German leader himself has to say about it...

...The Unquiet Germans, by Charles W. Thayer...

...It is probably too early to expect a balanced biography of Konrad Adenauer, just as it is too early to expect anything but an uninformed guess about Germany's future...

...275 pp...

...In this kind of fixed racing, it is easy to prove, for example, that Adenauer's apparent interest after World War I in separating the Rhineland from Prussia was not in fact the treason his enemies say it was but a clever maneuver on his part to take over the separatist movement in order to smother it...

...He has a predilection for combination words, and he embroiders Adenauer's motives with such terms as "metapolitical...

...Nobody, it appears from Alexander's account, could have done for Germany what the Chancellor accomplished...

...Only the socio-biographical presentation, combining the methods of ideohistorical analysis with the historicosociological interpretation," he says, can lead to a deeper understanding of the subject...

...The other two, replete with research and detail though they may be, are so uncritical and at times so sychophantic that they almost subvert their purpose...

...it runs all through Adenauer's philosophy of government as well as his private life and provides the basic principles of Christian ethics on which he insists his Christian Democratic Union is based, even though the party is not exclusively Catholic...

...But the word Christian means a great deal to Adenauer...

...Naturally, both Weymar and Alexander make much of this, but there are times, particularly in Alexander's book, when this reviewer wished there were a little less concern with grafting ethical principles onto much that is just plain political hurly-burly...

...Adenauer is always the statesman, the others mere politicians, either with ulterior motives or just naive...

...Neither Adenauer's nor his biographer's anti-Nazism can be doubted, but statements like this tend to pull the reader up short: "It has been recognized," says Alexander somewhat pompously, "even outside of Germany that there is no sound reason for holding the average German official, technician, or industrialist responsible for his enforced submission to Hitler...

...This makes it possible for him to dismiss not only political opponents as amateurs in government and "extremely primitive in ideopolitical respects," but also to dismiss almost all of Adenauer's colleagues...

...Harper...

...Hero-worship is understandable, even forgivable, but these two examples of it are such obvious promotion jobs that they put the reader on guard against evaluations to which he might normally be predisposed...

...Even to one prepared to accept the fact that Konrad Adenauer is a statesman of considerable stature and political integrity, the books by his two countrymen are hard to take...

...his faith in Christian ethics, as the record shows, is far more than lip service...

...One may concede that West Germany under Adenauer has followed a democratic path, despite or even because of the Chancellor's autocratic grip (Weymar insists the grip is paternalistic, not autocratic), but no one can say with certainty what road it will travel in the future...

...And always Der Alte comes out not only on top of any argument, but appears as a logical winner because of superior wisdom and purer motives...

...He then proceeds to go so deeply into the German soul in search of theoretical postulates that he can justify virtually any conclusion...

...But until they have set their minds on one course, it would be folly to attempt a final judgment on what they can expect of the future or what we can expect of them...

...Alexander's work, Adenauer and the New Germany, pretends to deeper analysis, but ends up, after a dialectical tour de force, on the same eulogistic level...

...Alexander, in the belief that most biographies are too simple, starts out quite frankly to write something special and complicated...

...Yet it is only in Thayer's book that there is any honest effort toward impartial judgment...

...Or when Weymar does attempt to broaden the scope and describes more recent incidents which still rankle in the minds of Adenauer's political opponents, he manages to weight the story in his hero's favor...