Foreign News: Freedom Rings

Germany took its first steps in parliamentary government since Adolf Hitler reduced the old Reichstag to the status of a servile operatic chorus. The voice of the new Federal Republic’s Bundestag last week was vigorous, sometimes shrill; in their new-found freedom of debate, the Germans missed few tricks.

In the packed, floodlit Bundestag hall, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer delivered a keynote speech listing Germany’s major concerns: the P.W.s held by Russia, the Oder-Neisse boundary deal which ceded a large part of Eastern Germany to Poland, the dismantling of German plants. He also touched on the sore spot of denazification. “The truly guilty,” he said, “must be severely punished, but beyond that we can no longer have two classes of people in Germany—the politically reliable and the politically unreliable.”

As head of the opposition, gaunt Socialist Kurt Schumacher replied. The abolition of the “two classes of Germans” was not enough; why, he asked insinuatingly, had not Adenauer mentioned the victims of Naziism, including Germany’s surviving 30,000 Jews?

Schumacher turned to economics, called for British-style Socialist planning. He was interrupted by a deputy from the far right who cried out: “Just like under the Nazis!” Schumacher turned to his heckler, snapped: “Gentlemen, I thought you were the Nazis, not the British.”

After Schumacher’s speech, extreme right-wing delegates shouted demands that Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland be returned to Germany, called for a new Anschluss with Austria. Other delegates whistled, shouted “Pfui!”

Communist Max Reimann, leader of a bloc of only 15 votes in the Bundestag’s 402, joined in the melee. When he described the Oder-Neisse line as the “boundary of peace,” all parliamentary decorum disappeared. As the delegates raged against Reimann, two men in dirty, torn, Wehrmacht greatcoats, P.W.s just released by Russia, shoved their way into the chamber and yelled: “No home, nothing to eat, and then we have to listen to this Red gaff!” Communists charged a “provocation.” Said one Christian Democrat delegate gloomily: “It’s a good thing we still have an Occupation Statute.”

Chancellor Adenauer’s government faced plenty of parliamentary fights with its enemies and with its own supporters; but that was not necessarily a cause for worry. In its first days, the new German legislature had behaved no more irresponsibly than any of the Continent’s traditionally raucous parliaments; the Germans might get to learn the old parliamentary lesson of how to fight and still get the work done.