West Germany: A Piglet for Onkel

Ludwig Erhard’s maiden foray in his six-week election campaign began with an address in the nation’s largest egg auction hall. There some 2,000 farmers and their families in the Saxon market town of Cloppenberg stood stolidly as the Chancellor launched into his basic campaign theme for 1965: the need to develop in West Germany a formierte Gesellschaft, meaning a well-ordered society, with equal restraint on government regimentation and private “stomach filling and greed.” The Saxon farmers interrupted Erhard neither for catcalls nor clapping, but they chuckled each time he lit another Black Wisdom cigar, and at the end presented him with a piglet as a good-luck token. Such appreciative receptions greeted der Dicke wherever he went. In three days of whistle-stopping by train, auto, helicopter and frigate in Saxony, Schles-wig-Holstein and on the island of Helgoland, his audiences totaled well over 100,000, not only in rural areas, which are normally favorable to his Christian Democrats anyway, but also in cities partial to Opposition Leader Willy Brandt’s Social Democrats. The response seemed to augur well for the campaign strategy Erhard’s advisers have urged upon him, which is to mute his attacks on the Social Democrats, steer clear of elaborate matters of foreign policy, and present himself as an apolitical Onkel. It is a role Erhard is well suited for, being apolitical by nature, bashful about handshakes, and gifted with a meandering professorial style useful mainly for drowning out hecklers. In the Wilhelms-haven suburb of Jever, Erhard rambled happily on through his speech, altogether forgetting to mention the local candidate, State Secretary Felix von Eckardt, until—as he turned to go—Von Eckardt plucked him by the sleeve. “Oh,” said Erhard, sheepishly returning to the mike. “There is always something one forgets.” The crowd loved it.-

*Possibly because everyone remembered the classic incident in 1956 when Von Eckardt, then Konrad Adenauer’s press chief, listened while der Alte chatted contemptuously about Erhard in a radio studio, not knowing that a tape recorder was running.