West Germany: Duty Done

As a child, Konrad Adenauer was instructed by his father: “Do not let yourself be diverted until you have finished, not even if a cannon goes off at your elbow.” Amid thunderous salutes on the eve of his retirement, West Germany’s 87-year-old Chancellor remained faithful to that maxim. This week Ludwig Erhard, his longtime Economics Minister, against whose succession he had fought bitterly, takes over as Chancellor. In Bonn’s Palais Schaumburg, Adenauer gaveled to order the 700th and last Cabinet meeting since he took office in 1949.

Stiff and stony-faced, der Alte wasted no time on Wehmut, the sweet melancholy that Germans usually lavish on such occasions. Instead, he launched into a withering attack on President Kennedy’s proposal to sell wheat to Russia, calling it a fickle expedient that was inconsistent with Washington’s demand last winter that West German in dustrialists cancel a deal to sell pipeline to Moscow. Demanding that the entire subject of East-West trade be reviewed by the NATO Council, Adenauer insisted that the wheat would ultimately help the Russians fight the West, and he echoed a crack he had made in Mu nich earlier: “Only the stupidest calves choose their own butcher.”

Two Messages. In West Berlin, where he was made an honorary citizen although the welcoming crowds were notably thin, he argued that if grain sales to Russia were justifiable on humanitarian grounds, the West should exact a humanitarian price: demolition of the Berlin Wall. He also jolted his hosts with the remark that he might yet re-enter politics, “if I am asked to do so.” As Berlin’s Mayor Willy Brandt put it, no one could really believe that Konrad Adenauer would become a political teetotaler.

Throughout the tireless round of farewell appearances—including one at Cologne, the old man’s birthplace, where thousands of faithful Christian Democrats rallied to cry Auf Wieder-sehen—Adenauer returned to two themes that he hoped to leave behind in Germany’s consciousness. The first was that any East-West “détente talk” could only lead to “new Munichs.” Revealing that he himself last year had offered Moscow a ten-year “truce” in return for better treatment of East Ger many’s people (he was turned down), Adenauer insisted that any hope of easing the cold war without concessions from Russia is folly. Considering the latest Russian squeeze play against the West in Berlin, no one could say with assurance that Adenauer was wrong.

His other message was that Germans must do their utmost to strengthen their new alliance with France, since the two nations’ basic interests are “identical.” Adenauer now had perfunctory praise for the U.S. allies, whom he had once hailed as “the best Europeans of all”; the British he had scornfully dismissed as only “half-friends.”

Personal Continuity. “My God,” Adenauer once said, “I don’t know what my successors will do if they are left to do as they please.” Adenauer knows well that neither Erhard nor Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroder shares his ideas about foreign policy. In “the Erhard era,” Bonn will presumably use its influence to strengthen the Atlantic Alliance and bring Britain into the Common Market. The new Chancellor seems determined to resist Charles de Gaulle’s vision of an exclusive, inward-looking Europe dominated by France, and to reject France’s proffered membership in an independent European deterrent based on De Gaulle’s force de dissuasion. But even as Adenauer’s desk was being carted out of the Chancellor’s office in the Palais Schaumburg (he has bought it from the government), he seemed confident that his views would linger on.

What will remain, for a while, is the memory of a crusty, highhanded octogenarian who clung pathetically to power well beyond the moment when he should have relinquished it. Ultimately, however, Konrad Adenauer can only be remembered as the German whose idealism and hardheaded grasp of reality in one decade transformed the nature and condition of 20th century Germany. Winston Churchill accurately called him “the greatest German statesman since Bismarck,” but even Bismarck’s Germany did not rise from the rubble and bitterness of defeat to the position of respect and responsibility that West Germany enjoys today.

In his own person, der Alte restored to Germany the national dignity and political continuity it had lacked since World War I. As his seven children and then 23 grandchildren grew up around him, the years added a few more lines to der Alte’s face, whose almost Oriental cast is the result of surgery after a near-fatal automobile accident in 1917. But his ramrod back and unflagging vitality became legendary. He often attributed his staying power to the energies he stored up “during my strongest years,” when the Nazis sacked him as mayor of Cologne and he did little but tend the roses beside his white hillside house across the Rhine from Bonn.

Request of History. After he became Chancellor at 73, an age when most men’s careers are finished, Adenauer did more than make Germany “respectable” again; even as he bluntly admitted his country’s guilt for war and for Nazism’s horrors, he made clear to most of the world that a whole nation cannot be held guilty for all time. He himself distrusted his fellow countrymen—the “carnivorous sheep” who had followed Hitler to destruction—yet he also believed that “something good can and must be made of the Germans.” His solution was to lead his conquered nation “securely into the community of free and democratic peoples of the Christian West.”

Few Germans doubt that Konrad Adenauer will achieve his own ultimate request of history. “My wish,” he said ten years ago, “is that some time in the future, when mankind looks beyond the clouds and dust of our times, it can be said of me that I have done my duty.”