The Beginnings

In the battered, bustling towns of Western Germany, campaign posters and blaring sound trucks shattered summer's sluggish quiet. Next week, in their first free general election since Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933, Germans will choose 400 representatives for the Bundestag (lower house) of the Deutsche Bundesrepublik, the long-awaited Federal Republic of Germany. Chief contestants for power: the Christian Democrats and the Socialists. Their platforms had one vital plank in common: sharp criticism of the Western occupation powers.

"Our Lord's Will." West Germany's pre-election atmosphere was scarcely democratic in the U.S. or British sense. The mental and moral morass left behind by Hitler nourished many factions on the lunatic fringe. The tiny, extreme-right-wing Deutsche Rechtspartei advertised itself with the command: "Vote for DRP--this is Our Lord's Will." In Duesseldorf an anonymous group distributed swastika, swathed pamphlets extolling Hitler, reviled Jews, urged Germans--many of whom were weary and wary of all political parties--to stay away from the polls.

Even the major parties grew shrill in their attacks on each other. Last week, in Frankfurt's Roemerberg Square, Socialists and Christian Democrats matched principles and lung power. As pink, plump Dr. Ludwig Erhard, the Christian Democrats' free-enterprising economic boss of Bizonia, started to speak, Socialist hecklers broke into a chorus: "Liar--liar--liar, we are jobless!" Cried Erhard: "I remain confident of the energy and determination of the German people . . . What we need is optimism, not control." This time, cheers drowned out the hecklers.

The question of a free v. a controlled economy was not the only issue between the two parties. The Christian Democrats, headed by foxy, polished, 73-year-old Konrad Adenauer, were backed by the Roman Catholic Church. Western Germany's bishops last month published a pastoral letter urging the faithful to vote for "Christian" candidates. To the bishops' letter, gaunt Socialist Leader Kurt Schumacher, violent champion of separation between church and state, made bitter reply. His party, he cried, had consistently fought all dictatorships, "whether marked by a swastika, a hammer and sickle, or deep black robes."

"Quite Necessary?" Both Adenauer, in his smooth and sibilant manner, and Schumacher, in his sharp and strident way, railed at Allied "interference" in German affairs and especially at dismantling of German industrial plants. One-armed, one-legged Schumacher had to be helped up onto the rostrum (see cut), but his rhetoric was as vigorous as ever. Cried he last week: "The Allies have no right to condemn the entire German people because of Naziism. All European nations were for a time Nazi followers. Western EuroDe continued to conclude treaties with Hitler at a period when hundreds of thousands of German anti-Nazis were already in concentration camps."

To most Germans, who like occupation no better than any people ever had, these anti-Allied brass tones were sweet music. After one Schumacher speech in Frankfurt, a middle-aged man told his Hausfrau: "That's what we need--a man running our government who will speak up for us against the Allies." By the principles of representative government, the man was right; by the rules of occupation, he was dead wrong.

But this grating contradiction--and evident flashes of German insolence--might prove to be less important than the fact that the Communists had not been able to prevent the beginnings, however tenuous, of democracy in Germany. "I hope you'll pardon us for a lot of this talk," one German politician recently told an American official, "but in political campaigns such talk is quite necessary, nicht?"

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