West Germany: An Imperishable Place

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Unchaste Offers. In 1951, Adenauer met secretly in a London hotel suite with Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress. Goldmann spoke for 25 minutes of Germany's crimes against Jewry. When he had finished, the usually unemotional Adenauer said: "While you spoke, I felt the wings of history in this room. What do you want concretely?" Goldmann asked for $1 billion in reparations for Israel; Adenauer agreed on the spot.

His first major step to bind Germany to France and Europe was the 1952 merger of the coal and steel resources of France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux nations. The six went on to form the Common Market in 1958 and became Europe's best hope of unity. In 1955, he won for Germany a place in NATO and thus further links to the Western community of nations. Like John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State at the time, der Alte saw Communism as an implacable threat to his Christian conception of Western civilization. Dulles and Adenauer became fast friends. As with no other American diplomat, Adenauer felt that Dulles always told Bonn the truth. Dulles was, in fact, the statesman der Alte most admired be cause "he thought clearly, thought ahead, and he kept his promises."

Distasteful though it was, Adenauer journeyed to Moscow in 1955 to see whether any hope could be found in the Kremlin for German reunification. There was none, except in the form of "some very unchaste offers" from Khrushchev. Even though European unity was set back by the ascendancy of Charles de Gaulle, and specifically by De Gaulle's veto of British Common Market membership on Jan. 14, 1963, Adenauer a scant week later concluded a perpetual Treaty of Friendship with France, to much dismay in the West.

A Latter Mistrust. It was not done out of admiration for De Gaulle, whose narrow nationalism der Alte found an emotional atavism. Rather, in the absence of genuine European unity, Adenauer fell back on the keystone relationship of France and Germany for the well-being of Europe. And he kept right on working for the larger goal of a united Europe after his retirement as Chancellor. In the last month of his life, before he came down fatally with flu and bronchitis, Adenauer met with Chancellor Kiesinger and "urgently impressed on me," said Kiesinger, "this great concern of his life." He also wrote to De Gaulle in the same vein, well aware that the general was evincing reluctance to attend the summit meeting of Common Market leaders in Rome next month.

In recent years, der Alte came to mistrust American policy around the world. He wanted the U.S. to withdraw from Viet Nam, believing that it was diluting Washington's interest in Bonn and Europe. Every fresh move toward détente with Russia added to his unease about the course of Atlantic affairs. Much of his unseemly sniping at his successor, Ludwig Erhard, stemmed from his worry that Erhard was too uncritically—and undemandingly—pro-American.