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.