WEST GERMANY: Hamburg Stakes

Hamburg was a dying city when cragfaced Socialist Max Brauer returned in 1946. The mayor of Altona, a Hamburg suburb, he had fled Germany 13 years before, a jump ahead of the Storm Troopers, winding up in the U.S., where he became German expert for the American Federation of Labor.

Back in Hamburg on a job for the A.F.L., he decided to stay. “America does not need me,” he said. “Germany does.” He renounced his U.S. citizenship and was elected mayor of Hamburg. Mayor Brauer’s task looked impossible: in three blockbusting nights, British bombers had leveled half the city; 300,000 of its 560,000 dwellings were destroyed, more than in all Britain. Huge mounds in the city cemetery were a memorial to Hamburg’s 80,000 air-raid victims; the once-busy harbor lay choked with 3,000 wrecks.

Rubble Lift. Under Brauer’s direction, three narrow-gauge railroads were driven into Hamburg’s ruins to cart out the rubble; at the peak one train ran every ten minutes, loaded with 4,000 tons of scrap steel and mortar. Hamburg rebuilt faster than any other city in Germany: 130.000 homes. 52 schools, enough new jobs to employ 65,000 more workers than prewar. Shipping shot back to 70% of normal, production rose 6% over 1936. Back to its prewar population of 1,600,000, Hamburg once more became West Germany’s biggest city.

Brauer could be brusque; lagging subordinates heard him roar: “You are so stupid.” He told citizens of his city, which was old when New York was still Indian territory: “In America they do it thus and so.” He wrathfully shoved aside the time-consuming forms and protocol of German bureaucracy that he called “the new totalitarianism of our time.” He irritated his own Social Democratic Party by publicly lambasting “shallow, commonplace Socialism, exhausting itself in theory.”

In the vigorous Fiorello LaGuardia tradition, Max Brauer was a good mayor. Pointing to reborn Hamburg, he trumpeted: “My administration has done this. I intend to stay.” But this week 66-year-old Max Brauer was out of the Rathaus. In local municipal elections to choose the 120-man Hamburg State Assembly, which in turn selects the mayor, a four-party conservative bloc inched out Brauer’s Social Democrats. The coalition won 50% of the vote, and 62 Assembly seats to the Socialists’ 58.

Adenauer Swing. Though Brauer himself was overwhelmingly re-elected to the Assembly from his own district, and his party as a whole considerably bettered its vote over the September general elections, he fell to the nationwide conservative swing to Konrad Adenauer. Scheduled to replace Brauer as mayor is his former executive assistant, Dr. Kurt Sieveking, 56. Patrician Sieveking, whose family name is the Hamburg equivalent of Lodge or Cabot in Boston, is currently West Germany’s minister to Sweden.

Adenauer himself had .campaigned hard in Hamburg; far more was at stake than local issues. By winning control of the Hamburg Assembly, Konrad Adenauer also won control of Hamburg’s three votes in the Bundesrat, exactly the number he needs to give him a two-thirds majority in the Federal Republic’s upper house. Now he can amend the federal constitution, if need be, to ensure the legality of West Germany’s participation in EDC.