GREAT BRITAIN: Lest They Forgive

In this era of wing-footed Prime Ministers, who find it easier to pop over in a plane than to telephone. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had been in and out of London on several occasions, and always welcome. Thus nobody expected anything untoward when an equally respected figure, West German President Theodor Heuss, 74, arrived to pay a call. But Heuss also happened to be the first German head of state invited to Britain on a ceremonial visit since Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907, and he came as a symbol of the German nation. In the intervening 51 years Britons and Germans had fought each other in two world wars, and in them more than a million Britons had died.

To welcome Heuss, official Britain rolled out its full panoply of protocol, pomp and pageantry. Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret, Harold Macmillan and his Cabinet and Britain’s military service chiefs were waiting, with smiles and handshakes, on a red carpet in London’s grimy Victoria Station. Artillery in Hyde Park thundered in salute. The scarlet-coated band of the Scots Guards even broke into Deutschland über Alles. Headlined London’s tabloid Daily Sketch: O.K., FRITZ, YOU’RE OUT OF THE DOGHOUSE.

Royal Ancestry. But “Fritz” was not out yet. As Heuss and the Queen rode at a horse’s pace in an open coach from the station to Buckingham Palace, the crowds stood silent except for an occasional shout, mostly in German. There was none of the hostility shown Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, but Londoners were at best curious, and at worst cold.

At a state banquet at the palace, the Queen declared forthrightly: “Nothing can ever erase from the record certain deeds and events perpetrated in Europe within our memory. But their most important significance today is as a warning to the whole world of what can happen when democracy breaks down.” After getting past this sticky need to separate Heuss from the Nazis, the Queen went on to recall her own and her husband’s German ancestry.*

OUR GERMAN BLOOD, headlined Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express next morning, and Express readers took up the cry as the paper intended. Said one wire signed by three Londoners: “We are not particularly pleased to be reminded of the Queen’s rather unfortunate ancestry.”

No Tips from Santa Claus. While London’s more mannered newspapers either ignored Heuss editorially or muffled their welcome, Cassandra, the acid-veined columnist of the tabloid Daily Mirror (circ. 4.6 million), let fly: “Heuss has been marketed over here as a gentle, learned Santa Claus utterly removed from the Krupps, the Thyssens, the Schachts, and all the other industrialists and scientists without whose enthusiastic cooperation World War II would never have been possible . . . The President is, in fact, a skillful apologist for the German people.” Cassandra was unmoved by Heuss’s contribution of £5,000 ($14,000) for windows for the rebuilt cathedral of Nazi-blitzed Coventry: “We want no apologetic tips on our national tombs . . . All I want of them is to wait for a generation to pass before they come sidling up to us saying it was all just a big mistake.”

At this point the German press joined in. Reporting the “antipathy of the majority of the British people,” Hamburg’s Die Welt declared: “This is disappointing to many of us who had expected more progress in friendship during the past few years. Now we know we were wrong.” The Germans’ sensitivity, in turn, stung the British. “What the hell can they expect?” asked one harassed British official. “Heuss was jolly lucky not to have anything thrown at him.”

In the eyes of British officialdom, Heuss brought off his four-day official visit with tact, taste and humor. Said Heuss himself, when someone tried to compliment him on the sparse cheers he received: “Don’t be ridiculous. Eighty percent were cheering for the Queen. 10% were cheering the horses, and 10% were cheering me—but they were Germans.”

* Both are great-great-grandchildren of German Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, husband and consort of Queen Victoria. Victoria herself was a descendant of the Hanover Georges. Elizabeth’s grandmother, the late Queen Mary, was the daughter of the German Duke of Teck. Philip’s maternal grandfather was German Prince Louis of Battenberg, who Anglicized his name to Mountbatten.