Portraits and Miniatures (11 page)

Yet the achievements of Adenauer, the first, the oldest, the least flexible and by no means the most amiable, must be set above those of all the others. He began with a Germany that was shattered, impoverished and reviled, and he ended with one which, while likely to remain indefinitely divided, was rich, respected and even admired. Its real national income had grown threefold under his Chancellorship, its exports by fifty times or more, it had regained such sovereignty as was possible in an interdependent world (although Adenauer always had the sense not to
set too much store by sovereignty), had become America's most dependable and valued ally as well as the economic powerhouse of the Common Market, had buried a hundred years of Franco-German enmity and begun a partnership which was to run the European Community for at least a quarter of a century.

These achievements removed much of the jaggedness of the post-war German mood in which guilt jostled with resentment and poverty with pride. Objectively Adenauer's role was a calming one, but he was a divisive not a healing figure in West German politics. I doubt if he ever had a friendly relationship with a ‘Sozi', the not very respectful term by which SPD members were known in CDU circles, although he was on good terms with Hans Bockler, the first post-1945 leader of the German trades unions, and he was always a Christian Democrat and not a Conservative in industrial and social policy. Nor was he very well disposed towards members of his own party who showed an independence of view like Gustav Heinemann, whom he got rid of as Minister of the Interior in 1950 and who subsequently became an SPD-supported President of the Federal Republic, or who achieved too much independent success like Ludwig Erhard. He reserved his affection not for his ministers but for his blood relations or for those who by working for him in the Chancellery constituted an official family, although in the latter case at least a half of them eventually fell out with him.

He was not very forgiving or tolerant of his fellow men, so little so that his successor (Erhard) said that his salient characteristic was ‘contempt for humanity'. But this was after Adenauer was reported as having said of Erhard (then his Vice-Chancellor): ‘I'm told that I ought to nail him down. But how can you nail down a pudding?' Adenauer's dislikes extended from political parties and individuals to nations, and it was said that the three principal ones amongst them were ‘the Russians, the Prussians and the British'. Of the three it was certainly the second group, the Prussians, who aroused his most consistent dislike, and quite possibly the strongest as well. The Russians did not much obtrude upon him until they overran and lopped off half (but mainly the Prussian half) of his country in 1945, nor the British until they
sacked him as Mayor of Cologne in the autumn of that same year. But for the Prussians his dislike was much more immanent and life-long. He disliked them not just for what they did, which is a curable dislike, but for what they were, which is not.

He was born a Prussian subject, but as an ardent Catholic in an area of the Rhineland that had merely been thrown to Prussia at the 1815 Congress of Vienna his loyalty to Berlin was negligible. As a child he lived through the anti-Catholicism of Bismarck's
Kulturkampf.
As a young man he found Bach ‘too Protestant' for his taste. As a middle-aged Weimar Republic politician he claimed that his nights in the
Schlafwagen
between Cologne and Berlin always became disturbed when the train had crossed the Elbe, and, more seriously, he objected to working with such a respectable figure as Stresemann because of his bullet-headed ‘Prussianism'. As an old man he was content to subordinate his commitment to German unity to the prior need for the integration of the Federal Republic in the West. He had no burning desire to upset the religious and political balance in West Germany by the infusion of too many Prussians, particularly as they might have been subject to Communist indoctrination.

Romantically Adenauer was a Carolingian, whose
annus mirabilis
was 800, when Charlemagne was crowned at Aachen as Frankish Emperor. But he was not remotely a cosmopolitan. In reality as opposed to romance he was a provincial citizen of Cologne, the centre of whose world was the small area of that Rhineland city which contained the Cathedral, the palace of the Cardinal-Archbishop and the
Rathaus,
from which, however, he much preferred the westward to the eastward prospect. He had no real command over any foreign language, except perhaps for Latin, and although he had made a student visit to Florence and Venice his travels in the next fifty years were confined to a couple of holidays in (German-speaking) Switzerland and a two-day visit to a Paris conference.

Yet his European vision was extraordinarily clear-sighted. He was determined to transcend the problem of Germany's past by tying the country into a European future; he saw that the key to that was the partnership with France, and he pursued this goal
relentlessly, undeterred by setbacks like the collapse of the European Defence Community and undeflected by side issues like several years of fairly intolerable French behaviour over the Saarland. He also took in his stride the change from the weak Prime Ministers of the Fourth Republic, compared with whom he was manifestly more famous and more permanent, to General de Gaulle, compared with whom he was not.

The strain between these two old eagles was that Adenauer, Carolingian though he was, knew how necessary America was to Europe, and in particular to Germany, at a time when Khrushchev was about to build the Berlin wall, whereas de Gaulle was eager to cock snooks at Washington. Had this been compounded by an equal difference about Britain's relationship with Europe the gap might have become uncontainable. But in fact, although not in theory, there was no such difference on this issue. The official position of the German Government was in favour of British entry, and Atlanticists like Erhard and Foreign Minister Schröder genuinely cared about it. But Britain in Europe was no part of Adenauer's Rhenish vision. He was a clandestine Gaullist on the issue, privately believed that the General was quite right to veto the negotiations for British entry, and had no intention of applying the only effective German sanction, which was to hold up the signing of the Franco-German Treaty of friendship. So, within six days of the veto, he went to Paris and signed the Treaty. Britain's hope of relying on ‘the five' (which meant Germany plus four) to counteract Paris was in ruins.

Was the unhelpfulness based on a desire by Adenauer to avenge past British insults? Not directly, I think, for it was deeper rooted than that. Adenauer was a ‘little European' and he could not see Britain fitting into his idea of a tightly integrated grouping. And, in view of Britain's behaviour over the twenty years of her delayed membership, who is to say that he was wrong? The danger he saw was compounded in early 1963, when de Gaulle's veto was applied, by the looming threat of a British Labour Government. Adenauer not only disliked socialists in general; he had a particularly strong view against British ones. Almost paranoically, he regarded the generals, brigadiers and colonels
who had been the agents in Germany of the Attlee/Bevin Government after 1945 as having grossly favoured the SPD and increased his own difficulties in coming to power. He saw the radio stations and Hamburg-based newspapers, such as
Die Welt,
which the British occupation had fostered, as being centres of left-wing propaganda, and continued to bear a grudge for this.

It was not, however, purely political, for I do not think that Adenauer ever got on to the friendly terms with any British politician that he achieved with Eisenhower, with Dulles (perhaps above all), with Acheson, with Schuman and with de Gaulle: not with Churchill, not with Eden, not with Macmillan, although it was with the last that he may have come closest to so doing. When Macmillan had him to Chequers in November 1959 and showed him the somewhat doubtful glories of the ‘Tudor' hall, including the ‘Rembrandt', in the corner of which Churchill had painted a small mouse, Adenauer's reported comment was ‘
das ist kein Rembrandt'.
While recent research strongly suggests that this comment was more than justified it was not perhaps the most welcome or warming to be expected from a friendly guest.

A great deal of Anglo-German reconciliation went on during the Adenauer years. The
Deutsch-Englische Geselschaft
began in 1950 the continuing series of Koenigswinter Conferences between politicians, journalists and academics of the two countries, which became amongst the most influential because the most spontaneous international colloquia ever held. But these and other fructuous activities were at a level a few steps below that of Adenauer.

Franco-German reconciliation leading into close partnership came essentially from the top downwards, alike in the Adenauer–Schuman, the Adenauer-de Gaulle and the Schmidt-Giscard days. It was not for this reason artificial or fragile, for it could be observed seeping downwards like water to the roots of a plant, and it produced very effective political co-operation. Anglo-German reconciliation was more of an unofficial and spontaneous affair and arguably produced more cultural cross-fertilization. Certainly it was more linguistically fecund on the German side. But it did not produce comparable political results. This was
substantially due to British detachment from Europe, although there were also strong personal factors at work. Adenauer set the pattern for these, although it must be said that they also made Schmidt less than enchanted with Harold Wilson, and Kohl still less enthusiastic about Margaret Thatcher. Adenauer, moreover, had a belief in grace through the calm and patient endurance of vicissitudes, accompanied by a concentric view of Europe, which made him more at home with the Catholic statesman from the border regions of the defeated continent than with those who had led more oceanic and victorious lives.

The other salient truth about Adenauer was that he was immensely old for those with whom he was mostly dealing. He was Churchill's contemporary within fourteen months but then Churchill was himself immensely old in his second period of office, and was eight and a half years gone when Adenauer at last ceased to be Chancellor. But Adenauer was fifteen years older than both Eisenhower and de Gaulle, nineteen years older than Macmillan, and forty years older than Kennedy. He was born in the heyday of the Second Reich of Wilhelm I and Bismarck. He liked its apparent stability and burgeoning success as Germany (and America) bounded ahead of Britain to become the leading heavy industrial powers in the world. But he was always somewhat detached from both the militarism and the Protestantism of the Berlin-centred Empire.

His father was a minor law-court official, who had surprisingly fought with sufficient enthusiasm for the Prussians against the Austrians at Koeniggrätz (or Sadowa) in 1866 that he had been commissioned in the field. But he had no money with which to support a wife in a style adequate for an officer in the caste-ridden Prussian army, and when he wanted to marry he had to resign. He then became a petty bureaucrat, short of money but of some force of character. He was hesitant as to whether he could afford to send his third son to university but eventually Konrad Adenauer got to both Freiburg and Munich and then came back to become a successful Cologne advocate.

In 1904 he married several ranks up into the
haute bourgeoisie
of the city. His bride's father was dead but her paternal grandfather
had been a small-scale Frick, building up a gallery of six hundred or so significant paintings, and her mother was a Wallraf, which family was soon to provide an Oberbürgermeister (or Lord Mayor) of Cologne, which was important to Adenauer, for in 1906 he entered the city administration, rose rapidly through it, and in 1917, when Wallraf was enticed to Berlin as Under-Secretary at the Ministry of the Interior, succeeded him as Lord Mayor. By then his wife, who had long been sickly, had died at the age of thirty-six, leaving him with three young children. She had also provided him with the route to becoming a prosperous notable, although this was not the motive for the marriage, for he was a devoted husband and a desolated widower. He was married again after three years to the daughter (eighteen years his junior) of a medical professor who was his next-door neighbour. They were Protestants, but Gussi Adenauer was converted to Catholicism before the marriage. They had a further three children. She died in 1948, leaving him to live the last twenty years of his life and the whole of his Chancellorship as a second-time widower. He was close to his children, but the reconciliation to and endurance of loneliness was an important strand in his make-up.

In early 1917 he was seriously injured in a motor crash. His municipal limousine ran into a tramcar in the centre of Cologne. It was a very civic accident. The confusion and agitation must have been worthy of a street scene in an early German film. Adenauer walked the short distance to hospital, but his head injuries were severe. He was in hospital for four months. The shape of his face was permanently changed, and when a deputation from the City Council came to visit him in convalescence in the Black Forest they took a long time in conversational gambits somewhat ponderously designed to explore whether his brain was functioning normally. Then they offered him the Lord Mayoralty, which he accepted.

His brain was certainly not impaired, but nor was it ever very nimble or original or fluent. He always employed a small vocabulary and expressed simple ideas, but with force and persistence. His wit, which was considerable, was dry and deflating.
His oratory was far from charismatic, and its force came not from his words or gestures but from his inner certainty. He had a capacity for hard work and for the complete preparation of a case, whether legal or political.

The Lord Mayor of Cologne, whether under the Empire or the Weimar Republic, had almost
ex officio
an influence in German national politics. Cologne was the fourth-largest city in the Reich, and its history, its Cardinal, and its Rheinbrücke, which made it the great gateway to the west, then gave it a traditional preeminence over Düsseldorf which it has not fully maintained in the last fifty years. In 1918, with the armistice and the fall of the Hohenzollerns, it was the focal point for the disorderly demobilization of the defeated Imperial army making its way back from the Western front. First in the confusion of the disintegration and then with the mutual prickliness involved in dealing with the British occupation force, Adenauer had a more testing time than most major mayors.