WEST GERMANY: The Sign of the Sausage

Deep in the heart of every good German is an abiding conviction that as a succulent symbol of wellbeing, there is nothing to equal the sausage. Some Frenchmen maintain that when Germans cannot sleep, they count sausages rather than sheep. In West Germany last week, as 81-year-old Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his Christian Democrats carried their election campaign into industrial Essen, Adenauer had the sausages on his side. Wily Campaigner Adenauer talked of sausages, and brought his audience rising with cheers to their feet when he told them just how much more fat sausage they eat in free-enterprising West Germany than in Socialist Sweden or Denmark.

Flying Coattails. There was no argument that West Germany’s third postwar national election was a “stomach election”; and there seemed little if any doubt that Adenauer was going to win it (whether his party as a whole would win a majority or merely a plurality was the real question). The man most determined to erase any doubt was peppery, spartan Chancellor Adenauer himself. By motorcar and by special, five-car diesel train, Konrad Adenauer was campaigning with the verve and enthusiasm of a man half his age, and the knowledge that his age is one of the few effective arguments his opponents have against him. In Celle, citizens looked on delightedly while Adenauer skipped up the steps of city hall, his coattails flying behind him. At another rally he cracked: “They say I’m old, eh? Well, I’ll take on any of the opposition and show them how old I am.” The audience howled.

To Socialist charges that Adenauer and the Christian Democrats were leading Germany in the direction of a one-party state (their principal campaign accusation), Adenauer snapped: “Look at the record,” pointed out that while Erich Ollenhauer and his Social Democrats had voted as a bloc on 162 ballots during the last Bundestag session, the Christian Democrats and their supporters had split on more than 100. “Who did they say was not democratic?” snorted Adenauer. “We do not impose ironclad discipline on our members.” Then Adenauer hit out at the Socialists on foreign policy. “We stand by NATO and above all by a unified Europe,” said the Chancellor. “Where do the Socialists stand?”

The truth seemed to be that the Socialists themselves did not quite know. Erich Ollenhauer was flying about Germany in a rented, five-seater yellow Cessna, accompanied by his plump wife Martha and a pressagent. Socialist campaign slogans consisted for the most part of scare posters designed to show that Adenauer was leading Germany to atomic war. “Who Chooses CDU Risks Atom Death!” shrieked one Socialist poster. In Bremen, CDU workers countered with posters that said bitingly: “Who Chooses SPD Chooses Ollenhauer.” Nikita Khrushchev had done Adenauer the great favor of pointing out, two weeks ago in Berlin, that Russia was determined to keep Germany divided, thereby destroying Ollen-hauer’s thesis that it was der Alte’s obduracy that prevented reunification.

“Achtung, Achtung!” In a Hamburg suburb, Ollenhauer lambasted German rearmament with the particularly hollow charge that it was lowering Germany’s standard of living, then motored out to the East-West border village of Eichholz on what he hoped would be a dramatic demonstration of his concern for German reunification. Ahead of Ollenhauer’s Mercedes went a grey Volkswagen with loudspeakers chanting: “Achtung, Achtung!

Hier ist Ollenhauer.” A few hundred mildly curious villagers heeded the Achtung, listened to Ollenhauer in a chatty little speech about reunification, while nervous border guards watched through field glasses to see if the Communist Volkspolizei across the border thought Ollenhauer, was going to attempt reunification on the spot. Nothing happened: the barriers did not fall. Ollenhauer, jolly and beaming, got back into his Mercedes and resumed his pursuit of an issue, any issue, that would stand up against Konrad Adenauer and the sausages.