Portraits and Miniatures(27)

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 union  s, 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.