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.
The 1957 elections were an even greater triumph for Adenauer than the 1953 ones had been. Schumacher had died and his angularities were replaced by the pedestrian fuzziness of Erich Ollenhauer, who made the SPD election slogan ‘Instead of Adenauer, Ollenhauer’ into a sad boomerang. The CDU vote rose by another 2½ million to over 50 per cent of the poll and their Bundestag representation to an absolute majority of forty-three. This time Adenauer dropped the FDP and continued only in alliance with the German Party which had become his creature. He was eighty-one.
In the next four years he had three major international developments to which to accommodate, one bed of nails which he made entirely for himself, but which, when he got up from it, left some nasty scars, and one hidden climacteric in his career to pass. To the first of the international developments he adjusted brilliantly, the second threw him considerably, and to the third he was curiously indifferent. The first was the replacement as his French opposite number of the transients of the Fourth Republic by the General de Gaulle of Verdun, of the Cross of Lorraine and of the Liberation. In six bilateral meetings the two old men (or so they seemed, although de Gaulle was a boy compared with Adenauer), beginning at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises within a few months of de Gaulle coming to power and including a triumphant tour of Germany by the General in 1962, surmounted strains to keep their two countries in a Carolingian direction. It showed a great sense of purpose and proportion on both their parts.
The change that threw Adenauer was that from Eisenhower to Kennedy as the captain of the West. Neither the old Chancellor nor the young President appreciated the other. Perhaps the age gap was simply too large, particularly as the power discrepancy ran in the opposite direction. Even their common religious affiliation, because it sprang from such different traditions and left such different personal imprints, was more a barrier than a bond. Adenauer referred to Kennedy as ‘a mixture of a junior naval officer and a Roman Catholic boy-scout’. Kennedy thought Adenauer’s outlook on world affairs was sclerotic. Dulles’s death in May 1959 made the Atlantic prospect less bright for Adenauer. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961 made it positively uncomfortable.