The third event was the return of Berlin to the centre of the cold war battlefront for the first time since the end of the blockade in 1949. This came with the erection of the Wall in August 1961. The reactions in Washington, London and Paris were greater than in the Bundeskanzlerei. Berlin was well beyond the Elbe, and Adenauer never took too much notice of what the Russians were up to. He was implacably opposed to them, he expected no good of dealings with them, he left it to the Allies to look after the security aspects, and he got on with his own job of making a success of the Federal Republic and tying it ever more firmly into the West. This bore several resemblances to his attitude to Nazism.
The bed of nails was constructed out of his ambiguity as to whether to exchange the Chancellorship for the Federal Presidency in the spring of 1959. The term of President Heuss, a Free Democrat, was coming to an end. The SPD had a strong candidate in Professor Carlo Schmid, whom Adenauer was determined to stop. At first he tried to persuade Ludwig Erhard to provide the road block. But Erhard did not want to become President. He wanted to become Chancellor, and was supported in this desire by most CDU members of the Bundestag. Adenauer was then tempted himself, and was encouraged in this direction by most of his blood and official families. But they wanted him to make the move as a form of honourable semi-retirement. He wanted to make it in order to give himself at least half of de Gaulle’s powers, and in particular the right to nominate a Chancellor other than Erhard. Erhard and most of the CDU made it clear they would not have this. Adenauer then decided that he would rather remain as Chancellor, which meant that he made an ass of himself before the public, to whom he had announced his presidential intentions eighteen days earlier, and an affronted enemy of Erhard. His power and his prestige were never quite the same again.
This was partly because he was approaching the most dangerous milestone in a democratic leader’s career. Three months after the presidential débâcle he began his second decade as Chancellor. There is now overwhelming evidence (more than there was at the time) that it is a mistake for any elected head of government (maybe any unelected one as well) to stay more than ten years in office. It has been so with Roosevelt, with de Gaulle, with Margaret Thatcher, with François Mitterrand. It was equally so with Adenauer. He did survive the 1961 election - up to a point - but the further two years of provisional power, like a prisoner on licence, which it gave to the Adenauer tenure were a sad travesty of his former glories.
The 1961 election cost the CDU its absolute majority. Its vote fell by nearly a million and its number of seats declined from 277 to 241. The SPD under Brandt by contrast polled an additional 1½ million and went up from 181 to 198 seats. The FDP did proportionally even better, increased their vote by over 50 per cent and their number of seats from forty-three to sixty-six. Some form of coalition was essential. Erich Mende, the FDP leader, was perfectly prepared for one with the CDU, but he wanted it under Erhard not Adenauer. Erhard of course wanted the same, had nominally an impregnable position from which to get it and plenty of grievances against Adenauer. But, like R. A. Butler in Britain two years later, he did not have the cold steel to hold out for his own ends. Adenauer went through the motions of negotiating with SPD for a ‘grand coalition’ (which in fact came about under Kiesinger five years later), but in 1961 this was not a serious Adenauer intention but merely a ploy to frighten Mende and Erhard. At the price of some indignity and even dishonour he succeeded. Eventually he was elected Chancellor for the fourth time, but by a margin almost as small as in 1949. He was eighty-five, but age was still setting no limit to his appetite for office. What did set a term was a secret letter that he had been forced to write to Mende. In it he promised to resign after about two years, in any event in good time before the 1965 elections.
In this twilight period he brought his great purpose of Franco-German reconciliation to a ceremonial conclusion with the signing of his treaty of friendship with de Gaulle, silently sustained the General in his rupture of negotiations for Britain’s entry into the European Community, and got badly stained by the fall-out of the Spiegel affair in 1962. (Franz-Josef Strauss, then Minister of Defence, was allowed to behave towards that not always admirable journal with a brutal intolerance which was alien to the whole spirit of the Federal Republic.) After this Adenauer made a last and fairly ludicrous attempt to block Erhard as his successor, wildly nominating almost any alternative whose name he could think of, until eventually even one of the most loyal and anonymous members of his government was reported to have cruelly said ‘don’t make me laugh’ to the hitherto intimidating face of the old statesman.