Portraits and Miniatures(31)

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.