West Germany: An Imperishable Place

(2 of 4)

He saw that the way to save Germany from itself was to forge strong ties with the U.S., to end the ancient animosity between Germany and France and to so tie Germany to a larger united Europe that it could never again turn to its dark past. He understood the German character and the nation's need in the dire days after the war for an authoritarian father figure, which he provided. He did not allow notions of guilt to cripple his actions, but he unflinchingly accepted German guilt for the war and the Nazi atrocities and unhesitatingly made massive reparations to Israel. Adamantly opposed to Communism as a tyranny as evil as Nazism, he insisted that U.S. troops remain in Germany. And when the time came, he insisted, too, that Germany rearm as part of NATO even though much of German public opinion opposed it. He built the Christian Democratic Party into West Germany's strongest, and made it live up to its name—both parts. He was, as Socialist Willy Brandt observed last week, above all a man who "set standards."

A Thick Skin. Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876, when Bismarck was governing a recently united German nation. At 29, he was refused a life insurance policy as a bad risk because of weak lungs; at 68, his Gestapo jailers feared that he might commit suicide because, they reasoned, at that age, he "had nothing more to expect from life." He grew up in the Rhineland, with a Rhenish and Roman Catholic German's lifelong distaste for Berliners and Prussians. His weak lungs also kept him out of World War I; by 1917, he was Lord Mayor of Cologne, his birthplace. That year plastic surgery following an auto accident froze his facial features into the cat's mask the world was later to know so well.

Adenauer served as Cologne's mayor until 1933, when Hitler took over. Brownshirts adorned the city's bridge with swastika flags for the Fuhrer's first visit, but Adenauer had them torn down before Hitler arrived and refused to greet him. That abruptly ended his career as mayor, and he was classified as "politically unreliable." He spent the next twelve years alternately in prison or reading and tending his roses in the hillside villa he built at RhÖndorf. There, near war's end, he was nearly hit by an American shell as he watched the advancing U.S. Army cross the Rhine.

The Americans reinstated him as mayor of Cologne, but when the British took over the city, they fired him; they wanted someone more tractable than the strong-willed Adenauer. The experience, der Alte acidly reminded the British, was not a new one for him. Cologne's loss was Germany's gain; he entered national politics with the joung Christian Democratic Party, in 1949 squeaked in as Bonn's first Chancellor by a single-vote majority—his own.

For the next 14 years, even when at times he did not possess an absolute majority, he ruled with an iron patriarchal hand, guided by a deep Christian faith, a humanist's conviction in the Tightness of democratic ways and a shrewd political gift for manipulating men. He thought out his strategies well in advance, reducing alternatives to their simplest dimensions, and he dealt with problems according to his maxim that "a thick skin is a gift from God." When the German public grumbled about the slowness of Allied decontrol, he replied: "Who do you think won the war?"