GREAT BRITAIN: Without Waffle

GREAT BRITAIN Without Waffle As the leathery old gentleman with the fixed smile stepped out of his train in smoggy Victoria Station last week, a solitary admirer among the 200 Londoners who had turned out to greet him raised an abortive cheer; in response, another member of the crowd shouted, “Adenauer, go home.” then lapsed into abashed silence. Over the faces of a waiting band of British officials came a look of relief. All things considered, the visit of West Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to patch up Anglo-German relations had got off to a good start.

A year ago when West Germany’s then President, mild-mannered Dr. Theodor Heuss. visited London, the deep-seated hatred for Germany induced in Britons by the two World Wars flared out in the British press (TIME, Nov. 3, 1958). And Adenauer himself cherishes a grievance against Britain, which began in 1918 when, as mayor of Cologne, he was directed by a British occupation official to order all male inhabitants of the city to doff their hats to British officers in uniform. In 1945, once again mayor of Cologne, he was dismissed by British officials after he refused to cut down the trees in the city’s parks for use as firewood.

Time for Candor. This time, Manchester’s Guardian reassured Adenauer that a small hello in the streets “is simply the way we behave when distinguished visitors arrive from overseas” and that the Shah of Iran, among others, could testify to the “ride of silence.” (The Guardian did not mention Ike’s enthusiastic welcome in August.) Paradoxically, the history of mutual antipathy between Germany and Britain proved an advantage last week; it meant, noted London’s Daily Telegraph, that Adenauer and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan could settle right down to a discussion of their differences without “a lot of waffle about past friendship and eternal amity.” In fact, scarcely had the two men met at No. 10 Downing Street when Adenauer candidly proclaimed his fear that the British want “disengagement” in Central Europe, but Macmillan assured him that the British really want only a “thinning out” of forces in Central Europe, to agreed limits, with satisfactory inspection safeguards.

Next day, after a visit with Sir Winston Churchill, who was ailing at home with a cold, Adenauer joined Macmillan at Chequers, country residence of Britain’s Prime Ministers—and this time it was Macmillan who went on the offensive. Bluntly, Macmillan stated his displeasure at Adenauer’s hostile comments on the Macmillan mission to Moscow last spring, went on to express strongly British fears that the European Common Market was being transformed into an anti-British cabal which would, in time, threaten the unity of NATO. Adenauer’s reply—a suggestion that Britain use the moribund Western European Union as a channel for periodic consultation with the Common Market Six—was of dubious practical value, but it served to reassure Macmillan that Adenauer, unlike De Gaulle, does not conceive of the Common Market as a device for reducing British influence on the Continent. On one basic topic the two were unable to agree: for all Macmillan’s eloquence, Adenauer clearly remained unconvinced of the wisdom of trying to negotiate at the summit an “interim” agreement with Russia on the status of West Berlin.

Singers & Cynics. When at last Adenauer returned to Victoria Station to entrain for Gatwick Airport, a small crowd (among them some Germans) astounded the Chancellor and everyone else by breaking raggedly into the strains of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. Cynics muttered that the singers must be Foreign Office men in disguise, but if the visit had not endeared Adenauer and the British to each other, it had at least reduced their mutual distrust. “It is from France and not West Germany,” sighed the Guardian, “that Britain is now most seriously divided.”