by Roy Jenkins
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.
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 hom
e, 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.
One of Adenauer’s sensitivities was whether he had or had not been a Rhineland separatist in the inter-war years. Both in 1919 and in 1923 he had been involved in movements for the setting up of a Rhenish Republic. The key questions were whether he intended this to be little more than the equivalent of a modern Land within the Reich, and how far he was working with people who were in effect French agents intent upon the disruption of Germany. On the answer to these questions there depended the issue of whether he could reasonably be accused of having tried to turn his back on the ‘Vaterland’. What he undoubtedly wanted to do was to get the Rhineland out of Prussia, in which it had been incongruously placed after 1815. But not out of Germany, he rather obsessively subsequently insisted, even causing his authorized 1957 biographer to blow up an account of Berlin meetings in November 1923 at which, he claimed, Stresemann and others, panicked by currency collapse and the French occupation of the Ruhr, tried to force him against his will to follow the autonomous course. All accounts leave an impression of his protesting too much on the issue.
There is also some ambiguity about Adenauer’s life during the twelve Nazi years. What is certain is that he declined to join the bandwagon of the incoming Führer in 1933 and consequently found himself quickly dismissed from his mayoralty. Hitler was appointed a minority Chancellor by President Hindenburg on 30 January and immediately announced Reichstag elections. On 17 February he came to Cologne. Adenauer declined to meet him at the airport (admittedly at 11 p.m.) and then ordered swastika flags to be taken down from the pillars of the municipally owned Rhine bridge, although saying that they could be flown in front of the Trade Fair Hall (where Hitler’s meeting was to take place). On 5 March Hitler won a landslide victory, with a strong vote in Cologne. A week later, warned of impending danger, Adenauer fled and/or was dismissed from his office and his city.
It was never wholly clear which came first, the dismissal or the flight. And his destination was also surprising. He went to Berlin and made a personal petition of complaint to Goering, of all people, against the local conditions that had made him flee from Cologne. And he took up residence as president of the second chamber in the state apartments of the Prussian Government, situated in the Wilhelmstrasse, of all places. He had gilded furniture but no money and no security. The former deficiency was repaired by a sudden cash gift of 10,000 marks (the equivalent today of about £20,000) by a Jewish American admirer, a businessman resident in Belgium. (There is some evidence that this vital subvention had a permanent effect on Adenauer’s attitude to Jews and Israel; no doubt as a post-war German Chancellor he would in any event have felt it necessary to show evidence of guilt, but he did so with more spontaneous conviction than might have been expected from a central European Catholic of his generation.)
The security deficiency was less easily repaired. After a few weeks he clandestinely left Berlin and took refuge, without his family, in a remote Benedictine monastery in the Eifel mountains, of which the abbot was a former school-fellow. He stayed there until the beginning of 1934. Then he was offered and accepted the tenancy of a lavish house whose owner was leaving Germany, which probably drew attention to it and which was most inappropriately situated for Adenauer, very near to Berlin and in flat, sandy, Prussian pine forests. There most things went wrong. He was accused of massive municipal peculation in Cologne, succeeded in destroying his accuser and in establishing his innocence of dishonesty (although it was clear that he had been most handsomely remunerated), but was none the less arrested and harshly interrogated in Potsdam at the time of the Röhm ‘blood-bath’ in June 1934.
Then he was released, as suddenly and irrationally as he had been arrested. He spent a few months - or was it a few weeks, or a few quarters, details are curiously imprecise - more or less on the run, and settled in Rhöndorf, a village across the Rhine and a little above Godesberg, at first in a rather mean house. Rhöndorf was to remain his base for the rest of his life. Then he was expelled from the Cologne rural district, in which Rhöndorf was just situated, and moved about four miles. Then he was allowed back, then mysteriously his Cologne city pension was half restored at a rate sufficient to give him about £40,000 (at present-day values) a year. Out of this, and some compensation for his sequestered Cologne property, he built a substantial house, with mounting terraces, a lovingly tended rose garden, and a striking westward view across the river to the Eifel mountains.
There he lived unmolested for seven or eight years. He was detached from the regime, but not its active enemy. His three sons served in the German army. He declined to have anything to do with the ‘July plot’ against Hitler, but was none the less arrested in August 1944. He then hovered on the brink of Buchenwald and extermination for a few months, but survived through a mixture of luck and the respect in which he continued to be held by most Rhinelanders, even if they were serving as policemen or guards or doctors in Nazi camps. He was back in Rhöndorf well before the Americans arrived in March 1945 and drafted him to his old post in the Cologne Rathaus.
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.
