Portraits and Miniatures(29)

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.

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.