Portraits and Miniatures (12 page)

Later, under the Weimar Republic, his life as Lord Mayor involved more of Berlin than he would have wished. From May 1921 onwards he was President of the State Council, the second house of the Prussian Parliament, which retained a separate although not perhaps very pointful existence under the Republic as it had done under the Empire. In the endless round of shifting governments that undermined Weimar, he was three times suggested for the post of Reichskanzler. The first two suggestions in May 1921 and November 1922 were only glancing propositions. The third, substantially later in May 1926, was more serious. He was summoned to Berlin by two leading members of his own party, the Centre Party, which in spite of its name was more confessional than middle of the road, being rather right-wing and almost exclusively Catholic, and told that he would be acceptable to the other parties as head of a broad-based coalition.

After two days of talks he decided that he would rather stick to Cologne. The People's Party were not reconciled to joining with the Social Democrats, and the Social Democrats feared that Adenauer was too far to the right for them. In addition, Adenauer and Stresemann (People's Party, who had been Chancellor, was
Foreign Minister and would insist on remaining so) were each frightened that the other would be too strong-willed for them to work together in partnership. Adenauer went home, Wilhelm Marx became head of a more limited government, and the Republic staggered on through six more governments and nearly seven more years to Hitler's coming to power. Throughout these years of Weimar failure Adenauer was more than a provincial mayor, but none the less just short of achieving the international fame which gave the names of Ebert or Rathenau or Stresemann or Brüning a resonance outside Germany. I doubt if Brigadier Barra-clough, the intrepid British officer who in October 1945 sacked Adenauer from the Cologne mayoralty (to which he had been reappointed by the Americans in March of that year), knew what Adenauer had been before the war, let alone what he was about to become.

One of Adenauer's sensitivities was whether he had or had not been a Rhineland separatist in the inter-war years. Both in 1919 and in 1923 he had been involved in movements for the setting up of a Rhenish Republic. The key questions were whether he intended this to be little more than the equivalent of a modern
Land
within the Reich, and how far he was working with people who were in effect French agents intent upon the disruption of Germany. On the answer to these questions there depended the issue of whether he could reasonably be accused of having tried to turn his back on the ‘Vaterland'. What he undoubtedly wanted to do was to get the Rhineland out of Prussia, in which it had been incongruously placed after 1815. But not out of Germany, he rather obsessively subsequently insisted, even causing his authorized 1957 biographer to blow up an account of Berlin meetings in November 1923 at which, he claimed, Stresemann and others, panicked by currency collapse and the French occupation of the Ruhr, tried to force him against his will to follow the autonomous course. All accounts leave an impression of his protesting too much on the issue.

There is also some ambiguity about Adenauer's life during the twelve Nazi years. What is certain is that he declined to join the bandwagon of the incoming Führer in 1933 and consequently
found himself quickly dismissed from his mayoralty. Hitler was appointed a minority Chancellor by President Hindenburg on 30 January and immediately announced Reichstag elections. On 17 February he came to Cologne. Adenauer declined to meet him at the airport (admittedly at 11 p.m.) and then ordered swastika flags to be taken down from the pillars of the municipally owned Rhine bridge, although saying that they could be flown in front of the Trade Fair Hall (where Hitler's meeting was to take place). On 5 March Hitler won a landslide victory, with a strong vote in Cologne. A week later, warned of impending danger, Adenauer fled and/or was dismissed from his office and his city.

It was never wholly clear which came first, the dismissal or the flight. And his destination was also surprising. He went to Berlin and made a personal petition of complaint to Goering, of all people, against the local conditions that had made him flee from Cologne. And he took up residence as president of the second chamber in the state apartments of the Prussian Government, situated in the Wilhelmstrasse, of all places. He had gilded furniture but no money and no security. The former deficiency was repaired by a sudden cash gift of 10,000 marks (the equivalent today of about £20,000) by a Jewish American admirer, a businessman resident in Belgium. (There is some evidence that this vital subvention had a permanent effect on Adenauer's attitude to Jews and Israel; no doubt as a post-war German Chancellor he would in any event have felt it necessary to show evidence of guilt, but he did so with more spontaneous conviction than might have been expected from a central European Catholic of his generation.)

The security deficiency was less easily repaired. After a few weeks he clandestinely left Berlin and took refuge, without his family, in a remote Benedictine monastery in the Eifel mountains, of which the abbot was a former school-fellow. He stayed there until the beginning of 1934. Then he was offered and accepted the tenancy of a lavish house whose owner was leaving Germany, which probably drew attention to it and which was most inappropriately situated for Adenauer, very near to Berlin and in flat, sandy, Prussian pine forests. There most things went wrong. He was accused of massive municipal peculation in Cologne,
succeeded in destroying his accuser and in establishing his innocence of dishonesty (although it was clear that he had been most handsomely remunerated), but was none the less arrested and harshly interrogated in Potsdam at the time of the Röhm ‘blood-bath' in June 1934.

Then he was released, as suddenly and irrationally as he had been arrested. He spent a few months - or was it a few weeks, or a few quarters, details are curiously imprecise - more or less on the run, and settled in Rhöndorf, a village across the Rhine and a little above Godesberg, at first in a rather mean house. Rhöndorf was to remain his base for the rest of his life. Then he was expelled from the Cologne rural district, in which Rhöndorf was just situated, and moved about four miles. Then he was allowed back, then mysteriously his Cologne city pension was half restored at a rate sufficient to give him about £40,000 (at present-day values) a year. Out of this, and some compensation for his sequestered Cologne property, he built a substantial house, with mounting terraces, a lovingly tended rose garden, and a striking westward view across the river to the Eifel mountains.

There he lived unmolested for seven or eight years. He was detached from the regime, but not its active enemy. His three sons served in the German army. He declined to have anything to do with the ‘July plot' against Hitler, but was none the less arrested in August 1944. He then hovered on the brink of Buchenwald and extermination for a few months, but survived through a mixture of luck and the respect in which he continued to be held by most Rhinelanders, even if they were serving as policemen or guards or doctors in Nazi camps. He was back in Rhöndorf well before the Americans arrived in March 1945 and drafted him to his old post in the Cologne
Rathaus.

Adenauer's experiences under Nazism remind me of Sakharov's extraordinary life in the last years of Soviet oppression. As Sakharov travelled to protest at the trial of a fellow dissident he was in constant danger of arrest. But until it actually happened he was allowed to flash his pass as a member of the Soviet Academy of Science and get priority travel to his point of protest. Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were oppressive societies,
but they were also onions of civilization (Germany more than Russia) with a lot of leaves to be peeled off before pluralism could be destroyed.

On this record Adenauer could never be accused of having given a flicker of support to Nazism. But he treated it more as an aberration which had to be endured than as an evil that had to be opposed at all costs. His attitude to it was rather like that of the Catholic Church to unwelcome and potentially hostile regimes. They would sooner or later perish. The Church would endure. As a result, while he had the utmost distaste for a system that had predictably brought Germany so low, a sense of anti-Hitler solidarity, as opposed to a determination to correct the mistakes of the past, never seemed part of his motivation.

He was content to have some former Nazis in his governments. And he was able within days of the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to pronounce the most self-damaging sentence of his political life against the Governing Mayor of that city, who was also his principal opponent in the Federal elections then taking place. When the monstrous barrier sprang up in the middle of an August night Willy Brandt immediately interrupted his campaign for the Chancellorship and flew to what was then the most exposed sector of the Western world. Adenauer, after the briefest pause, went on electioneering, and in Bavaria a few evenings later said with almost incredible insensitivity: ‘If ever anyone has been treated with the greatest consideration by his opponents, it is Herr Brandt, alias Frahm.' Brandt had been born illegitimate in Lübeck and was brought up in Germany as Herbert Frahm. After Hitler came to power he emigrated to Norway and in 1940, joining the resistance movement there, he assumed the name by which he was known to the world. He resumed German citizenship after the war and became Mayor of West Berlin in 1957. But for Adenauer, at least during the election, he was more an émigré ‘Sozi' than a noble fellow-resister. Hence the clanging remark.

In spite of or perhaps because of this partisanship Adenauer was a great election winner. When he was dismissed (for the second time) from the Cologne mayoralty in 1945 he was also banned from taking part in politics in the British zone. Noël
Annan, as a colonel in the Control Commission, was instrumental in getting this ban lifted. For the next three years Adenauer devoted himself to building up the CDU and to securing as absolute a personal control of it as is possible in a democratic party. He eliminated his old Centre Party rivals from Berlin, Jakob Kaiser and Andreas Hermes, as effectively as, seven years later, he was within a few weeks to make Heinrich Brüning, who reappeared in Germany trailing the clouds of glory of being Weimar's last hope before Hitler, feel that he would do better to return to the New England groves of academe from whence he had come. (Brüning, at once amazingly for a pre-Hitler Chancellor but also typically for a possible Adenauer rival, had the dangerous attribute for being ten years his junior.)

By September 1948, when the Parliamentary Council began its nine months of work on the Basic Law (or constitution) for the Federal Republic, Adenauer had the CDU under full control and was able (for once with SPD support) to become the President of the Council. He then got his way on most constitutional issues. Bonn (almost in the shadows of the spires of Cologne Cathedral) became the capital. Frankfurt, with its past in the lay revolution of 1848, its present in the SPD
Land
of Hesse, and its future as the city of mammon and the D-Mark, was the rejected rival. Moreover, the main weaknesses of Weimar were corrected. The electoral system, while roughly and adequately proportional, kept out splinter parties by its 5 per cent threshold for representation in the Bundestag; and that Bundestag, once it had elected a Chancellor, was prevented from undermining him by a vote of no confidence unless and until it was able to provide a majority for an alternative candidate.

The first elections in the late summer of 1949 produced a near equality of members for the CDU and the SPD, but with a slight edge for the former, and with an almost equal third being divided amongst a variety of other parties of which the FDP was the biggest. From this somewhat motley assembly Adenauer succeeded in getting an absolute majority of one - 202 out of 402 -for his election as the first Chancellor of the new Germany. One hundred and forty-two voted against, and fifty-eight, in one way
or another, failed to cast a valid vote. He was nearly seventy-four years old, but he did not hesitate to vote for himself.

That narrow victory gave him four years of coalition power, not a big coalition with the SPD, which much of the CDU favoured but which Adenauer firmly rejected, but a more limited one with the FDP and the German (or refugee) Party. During these four years he negotiated the effective return of German sovereignty with the three occupying western High Commissioners, turned Germany from a pariah amongst nations to a member of the Council of Europe and of the Coal and Steel Community, with membership of the European Defence Community and, through it, of NATO on the near horizon. In addition, the German economic miracle was already burgeoning although not yet in full bloom. On the other hand, German politics became rent with bitter division. The SPD, under the incorruptible intransigence of the war-crippled Kurt Schumacher, opposed all these developments and dug themselves into a bunker of resentment. ‘Federal Chancellor of the Allies' was Schumacher's Bundestag epithet for Adenauer. But this nationally divisive factor joined with the favourable ones to strengthen Adenauer's political position. Schumacher was not only incorruptible but also unelectable. The result was that on a very high poll the CDU plurality of votes over the SPD moved up from 400,000 to 4½ million, and its strength in the Bundestag less dramatically went to a bare but absolute majority. Adenauer none the less continued the centre-right coalition.

The first of the next four years was bad. The rejection of the European Defence Community by the French National Assembly in August 1954 was one of the two worst setbacks of Adenauer's Chancellorship. It not only upset his central policy of rapprochement with France, but also temporarily blocked Germany's route to full rehabilitation in the Western community. However, an alternative route for Germany's entry into NATO was quickly found through the Western European Union treaty. The French Government made some amends by relaxing its grip on the Saarland and allowing that coal- and steel-rich territory to begin its return to Germany in late 1955. The European unity train was
triumphantly put back on the rails at the Messina Conference in the summer of that same year, which led on to the signature of the Treaty of Rome and the inauguration of the EEC in 1957. The
Wirtshaftswunder,
which was a little too imbued with the Protestant ethic and the personality of Ludwig Erhard for Adenauer's ideal taste, but which none the less greatly redounded to the credit of his Chancellorship, got fully into its stride. And Adenauer basked in the glow of easy transatlantic relations with Eisenhower, and shared with Dulles, then at the peak of his moralizing powers, a suspicion of all attempts to soften the asperities of the cold war. In 1955 Adenauer surrendered the foreign affairs portfolio, which he had carried jointly with the Chancellorship since 1949, but to a wholly pliant acolyte, Heinrich von Brentano. His government did not lack strong figures, however. Both Erhard and Gerhard Schröder, Interior Minister until he succeeded Brentano as Foreign Minister in 1961, were their own men.