A Good European

(See Cover]

It was 16 years since Adolf Hitler had seized power amid the hoarse cheers of German millions; ten years since his armies had invaded Poland; five years since the memorable period in history when 12,000 Jews died each day in the Nazi gas chambers at Oswiecim; four years since the battered Third Reich had surrendered to the overwhelming might of the U.S. and its Allies. A new regime, already endowed with many of the powers of a respected, sovereign nation, was rising from Germany's ruins. The Western world, led by the U.S., was about to slip the shackles off defeated Germany; it would try to guide the country which had been both monster and genius, insane destroyer and industrious creator, to a place among the free nations.

Inevitably, the decision provoked some shudders. Could good grow from the fresh, unquiet grave of evil? The U.S. and its postwar Allies had decided that the answer must be yes, if Europe (and all the West) was to have peace, prosperity and freedom. The German who more firmly than any other assured the U.S. that its decision had been wise, its hope not misplaced, was an aging, clear-eyed politician from the wine country along the Rhine: Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, without doubt the most important German since Hitler.

Says Adenauer: "During the Nazi years I sometimes despaired of my people. But afterwards, I realized that much decency had survived. Something good can and must be made of the Germans."

Who Lost the War? Last week, Chancellor Adenauer formally committed his country to the new Western policy of making something good of the Germans. In a quiet, unceremonious business session atop the Petersberg, overlooking the new German capital at Bonn (pop. 110,000), Adenauer and the Western Allied High Commissioners initialed the "protocol of agreements" which put into force the decisions of the Paris Foreign Ministers' Conference (TIME, Nov. 28). Next day, Adenauer submitted the protocol to the Bundestag (Lower House). The new German Parliament forthwith proved one thing: it was no rubberstamp Reichstag.

In a stormy all-night session, the Socialist opposition charged that Adenauer had made too many concessions to the West, particularly because he had formally recognized international control of the Ruhr by agreeing to send German representatives to sit on the Ruhr control commission. As usual, Adenauer kept his icy calm.

"The Allies have told me that dismantling would be stopped only if I satisfy the Allied desire for security," he said. "Does the Socialist Party want dismantling to go on to the bitter end?" Amid rattling desk tops and cries of "Pfui!" gaunt, fiery-eyed Socialist Boss Kurt Schumacher called Adenauer a liar, shouted: "Chancellor of the Allies . . .!"

Bundestag President Erich Kohler adjourned the session. Adenauer demanded an apology from Schumacher. That was at 3 a.m.; when Schumacher had not apologized by 6, the rules committee suspended him from the Bundestag's next 20 sessions.

This spiteful fracas would only deepen the skepticism with which most Germans regard parliamentary government. But the incident could not obscure the fact that the Paris and Bonn agreements had added greatly to the prestige of the West German Republic, just three months old. For his critics who said he had bargained away too much, Adenauer had a stinging retort --one which only a German of political courage would dare to make in 1949. Snapped Adenauer: "Who do they think lost the war, anyway?"

Schumacher had misjudged the German temper: he thought that Germans would reject the terms which Adenauer got from the Allies. But in West Germany last week, there was general approval of Adenauer's agreement. The Germans seemed satisfied with what they got. The lesson had begun to sink in that, after all, it was Germany which had lost the war.

Crisis of Confidence. From the hard, gritty North Sea ports to the lush Bavarian mountains, from Germany's iron heart in the Ruhr to the placid university towns which cherish their professors and their poets, the land ruled by Konrad Adenauer still bears the brutal stamp of total defeat. It also bears the pale, pinched look of poverty. The free-enterprise economic policies, put to work under military government, have led West Germany's 46 million hard-working people from near-starvation a long way toward recovery. But the country's economy is still far from healthy. Most of the shops are full, but intelligent Germans tell Americans: "What we see in the store windows are your dollars." It is nearly $1 billion a year from the U.S. which keeps West Germany going.

The Western powers allow Germany an industrial output keyed to an annual steel production of 11.1 million tons; actually, West Germany's mills produce only 9 million. The country has 1,300,000 unemployed. Industry's gravest trouble: a severe shortage of credit to finance reconstruction. Both Germans and Americans have been loth to invest in German industry. Said one wise U.S. economist: "The critical question is still one of confidence"."

Back in Underclothes. Prices are high: businessmen keep asking high prices for their goods, in an attempt to get the capital which they cannot borrow. A plain laborer earning no marks a month spends most of his wages on food; a cheap suit will cost him two months' pay, shoes more than a week's. "Stuttering," as the Germans call installment-plan buying, is in high vogue. Crack the stutterers: "Any honest man has debts today."

West Germany is desperately short of housing (it needs an estimated 8,000,000 two-room apartments). More than a third of the West Germans live in close, degrading quarters, whole families cramped into fetid, single rooms, the sick and infirm bedded beside the children. Nerves wear thin, minds grow bitter in the stifling intimacy of want. Among the demoralized, cheap vice grows weedlike and ugly. In bomb-battered Essen, one of the first businesses to recover was the red-light district: harlots' row was rebuilt while the rest of the city lay in rubble.

In its desperately cramped state, West Germany has been further burdened by a staggering influx of 9,000,000 refugees from the East--members of German minorities expelled from Eastern European countries, fugitives from the Red regime in East Germany. Daily, a thousand more straggle across the border into the Western zones. Some of the refugees have done well in the West; most live in misery. Many are agricultural laborers from the East's rich farmlands, who cannot find work in the Western industrial economy. West Germans bitterly resent the refugees, accuse them of taking away their jobs and living space. Most refugees are herded into dirty, former Nazi camps, like the one at Dortmund which townspeople ironically call "Sing Sing."

Many less fortunate newcomers, officially labeled by the refugee administration as "that group of persons which is not to be harbored in the Western zones," live in "wild camps" which are little more than mud holes--simply because there is no more room for them in the regular camps. Among the refugees, Communist agitators are busy extolling the glories of East Germany which they have left behind. Cried one rabble-rouser in a speech at Wiirzburg recently: "We have only one road--back home, barefooted and in our underclothes."

Partly Whipped Cream. Most West Germans live only about half as well as they did in 1936; most refugees live half as well as the West Germans. Old residents and refugees alike are incited by the spectacle of a few rich postwar profiteers who careen about the countryside in fine American cars and gorge on expensive delicacies. Said one German publisher as he watched a group of such well-fed Burger in a garish Frankfurt cafe: "This country is partly a whipped-cream paradise, but mostly a poor farm."

In little Bonn, where Beethoven was born, the new German federal government which has barely begun to function is still trying to find room for its ministries in schools, storehouses, private homes; the sleepy town, with its heavy Victorian houses and yellow streetcars, seems withdrawn and dreamy, as if it had decided to live in retreat from the harsh realities outside. But Communist propaganda, radiating from the Reds' Eastern puppet state, reminds Bonn of reality.

The Reds keep telling the West Germans that they would be better off united with their Eastern brothers. Communist agents whisper into the eager ear of discontent: "Just wait until we come." A heavy rattling of the Russian saber last week reinforced that whisper. Moscow, it was reported, was sending Marshal Ivan S. Konev, one of Russia's top military men, to head its Eastern zone army.

Germans, who have never shown any talent for democracy, are today corroded by 16 years' dictatorship, war and defeat. They have probably made greater progress toward democracy than the U.S. had a right to expect on V-E day; the many political-action groups which have sprung up all over West Germany, and the high turnout (nearly 80% of the eligible voters) at last summer's elections, indicate that at least some Germans have begun to see that the government is their concern. When Secretary of State Dean Acheson recently visited Germany, the people showed a genuine, spontaneous warmth toward America's representative which surprised and gratified Acheron and his advisers. But the mass of Germans remain doubtful and suspicious; a relapse in West Germany's economic health, or even its failure to improve, may incite bitter resentment and political collapse.

This is the land which Chancellor Konrad Adenauer must, with Western help, lead to democratic order and freedom.

A Credo. At first sight, 73-year-old Konrad Adenauer does not look like the man for this staggering task. A smalltown lawyer, he became an able mayor of Cologne and an effective figure in the pre-Hitler Catholic Center Party, but he has no experience in national administration. He has often been accused of being provincial, and he makes no secret of the fact that he prefers his native Rhineland to the raw, "uncivilized" Prussians; once he cracked to a Berlin friend: "Why do you go on living in a town where the monkeys still swing from the trees?" With his imperious eyes, his thin, determined lips, and his rather high, monotonous voice, Adenauer is not a popular leader, nor does he want to be. He never shouts, never tries for dramatic effects; in his political followers he inspires respect, but rarely deep personal devotion. Yet Konrad Adenauer brings to his task an unshakable confidence and a profound faith.

His credo, which is also his guide to practical action, is simple.

"Germany," he says, "must declare herself wholeheartedly for the Christian world of the West and all it stands for." Adenauer is a devout Roman Catholic, but his party and his cabinet include some Protestants, with whom he works well. Politically, he is a Christian Democrat. He was a firm anti-Nazi and is an equally firm antiCommunist. He has a profound distaste for socialism. He has told Americans: "To many people, socialism is all right, only national socialism is bad. I say socialism--if it runs its course--must ultimately become national socialism."

Adenauer rejects Kurt Schumacher's talk of a welfare state and a controlled economy as remedies for Germany's economic ills. He believes that, under "free incentives, and with some foreign investment, German industriousness can produce enough to give all Germans work and a decent standard of life.

The Christian Democrats' official program contains some welfare state features; Adenauer himself has often said that capitalism must assume "social responsibility." Actually t his party's attitude toward labor is still undefined. Many of West Germany's industrialists, who generally support Adenauer, do not like the innovations--profit-sharing plans, management-labor councils--which the military government introduced. Sighed one union leader last week: "Capitalists in the U.S. are so much more farsighted in their labor relations than our bosses."

"I Am 70%." Adenauer, the man of principle, is well served by Adenauer, the politician. With great political skill and iron tenacity, he has put his ideas into effect. He is undisputed boss of his party; when opponents arise who might challenge his position, he tries to win them over; if that does not work, Adenauer slowly undermines their prestige--sometimes by subtle press attacks, sometimes by carefully planted parliamentary questions about their conduct of office. The Bundestag elected him Chancellor by only a one-vote majority, but that did not worry Adenauer. In his 13-man cabinet, eight Christian Democrat ministers (of the remaining five, three are Free Democrats, two are members of the German Party) always assure him of a working majority. When he is asked if he can get cabinet approval of a particular measure, he is apt to say bluntly: "Don't worry. I am at least 70% of that cabinet."

He does not get his way by pounding the table; he uses men by flattering them, charming them with silky good humor, or freezing them with quiet contempt. His political pliability sometimes leads him to weakness. Recently, the Socialists introduced a bill in the Bundestag providing cash Christmas gifts for refugees. A Christian Democrat spokesman pointed out that this was a purely political bill designed to win votes, and that the government had no money to spare for the bonus proposal. But when the Socialists forced an open roll-call vote and Adenauer's name was called as the first on the alphabetical list, the Chancellor did not dare oppose the bill. He rose and weakly voted "/a." The other Christian Democrat deputies followed suit.

Adenauer lives quietly in a white, comfortable house amid the vineyards near Bonn, with the three youngest of his seven children. Colleagues sometimes take jovial pokes at his bourgeois dignity. When Adenauer argued against Frankfurt as capital for the new republic because he thought it an "immoral city," a fellow politician cracked: "Dr. Adenauer, we assure you, we are smart enough to protect ourselves from those pitfalls that you escape by virtue of your age."

The Politicians. When Konrad Adenauer applied for the post of assistant to the mayor of Cologne 43 years ago, he argued that he ought to get the job because he was no worse than the other candidates. Some of Adenauer's critics today say that the same applies to his new job as West Germany's Chancellor. Actually, Adenauer is a great deal better than other candidates; he ranks far above most other figures on the German political scene. The only man who approaches Adenauer's stature is the Socialists' Kurt Schumacher. With sharp, sardonic intelligence and fierce oratory, one-armed, one-legged Schumacher accuses Adenauer of being dominated by Ruhr industrialists and the Roman Catholic Church, belabors him because some former Nazis have drifted into his party. Other leading Socialists: hulking Carlo Schmid, able party strategist, and West Berlin's tough Mayor Ernst Reuter, who has again & again defied the Russians in their own backyard.

The Socialists (who won 131 parliamentary seats in the last election to the Christian Democrats' 139) have made a .tactical mistake by concentrating their fire on Adenauer's deal with the West, which most Germans welcome. For the time being, Adenauer was in no danger of being ousted by Schumacher & Co.

One of the ablest men in Adenauer's own party is Ludwig Erhard, Minister of Economics, who in the past two years has helped guide West Germany back to a relatively free economy. Generally considered a man to watch is 48-year-old Karl Arnold, president of Bonn's Bundesrat (Upper House), a hard-hitting Catholic trade-union leader who frequently acts as spokesman for the workers in his native Ruhr. No friend of Adenauer's, whom he considers too conservative, Arnold may some day be his rival for party leadership.

The large, loosely organized Christian Democratic Party also contains some dubious figures who frequently embarrass

Adenauer, e.g., black-bearded Alois Hund-hammer, Bavarian Minister of Education who successfully sabotaged U.S. Military Government efforts to reform the German school system.

The two men on whom Adenauer really relies for advice have no official rank. One is Robert Pferdmenges, partner in the Cologne banking firm of Salomon Oppenheim & Co., and, unlike many a Ruhr magnate, no Nazi supporter; he acts as Adenauer's economic counsel. The other is boyish-looking, 45-year-old Herbert Blankenhorn, a former German diplomat who served in the prewar German embassy in Washington; his task is to smooth Adenauer's relations with the Allies.

The Berlin Dilemma. The most obvious, and the most important political fact facing Konrad Adenauer's government is that it governs only two-thirds of Germany. Simply by holding the other third, the Russians can constantly dangle the prize of unity before West Germany's eyes. The focus of this continuing battle for Germany's allegiance is Berlin. In the divided city's Eastern sector, the Russians have set up the capital of their puppet state; to all Germans, they proclaim Berlin once more the capital of the Reich. But the city's Western sector feels itself abandoned by the West.

Berlin's U.S. commandant, Major General Maxwell Taylor, calls Berliners "the best democrats in Germany." Most of West Berlin went cold last winter during the Russian blockade rather than accept coal offered by the Russians; hundreds of thousands of Berlin workers refused Russian gifts of schnapps and potatoes. Today, six months after the great Western victory over the blockade, West Berlin is partly paralyzed by rising unemployment.

Half its people live on a U.S. dole; they have lost much of their hope and purpose. To Germans in the Eastern sector, the move of U.S. headquarters to the West was even more depressing. For years, the East Germans had been asking: "When will the Amis [Americans] get here? When?" The Amis now seemed more interested in Bonn.

The shift had been inevitable. Berlin is a precarious outpost 100 miles inside Russian-held territory, subject to constant Red harassment. The U.S. is determined to keep its flag flying in Berlin, and Berlin could yet turn from a weight on West Germany's nerves and economy into a propaganda post against the Eastern puppet regime. But the second postwar battle of Germany will not be fought in Berlin: it will be fought in the West. If the new Federal Republic lives and prospers, the Reds in East Germany will be contained; but if the West German experiment fails, the Communists in one way or another will sweep westward.

Can the experiment succeed?

The answer depends on the U.S. and on Western Europe as much as on Germany.

Clearing the Road. In the French National Assembly last week, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman asked for a historic decision. "The road between France and Germany must be cleared of hatred," he said. He was urging the Assembly to endorse the decisions taken at Paris and Bonn for strengthening the West German Republic and bringing it into the framework of Western European integration (see INTERNATIONAL). Schuman faced heavy opposition from some Socialists, who dislike the economic liberalism which integration implies; from the Communists, who know that a FrancoGerman rapprochement would be bad for Russia; and from plain Frenchmen who --while knowing that Russia is the greatest threat to France--cannot quite overcome their fears of Germany.

Nevertheless, the Assembly voted 327 to 249 to support Schuman's program. But the motion on which the vote was taken opposed the formation of armed forces in Germany and excluded West Germany from the Atlantic pact.

Adenauer, who has strong pro-French sympathies and speaks French fluently, recognizes France's right to security. Says he: "If France demands too much security, without regard for Germany's needs, then our attitude will stiffen. If, on the other hand, we offer too little security, we cannot reach an understanding with France . . . The federal chancellor must be both a good German and a good European . . . I want to be both . . ."

The balance between German recovery and Western Europe's security is delicate. For most of the past 50 years Germany has produced more than the rest of the Western European continent together; even today, with its industry running below capacity, defeated Germany produces as much steel as victorious France.

Even without a stoppage in dismantling, economists believe that Germany could have attained a reasonable standard of living; now that dismantling has been all but stopped .as a political and psychological threat to the new republic, German competition will soon be a force to be met by the French and British in commerce and trade. Obviously, further demands for wider sovereignty and the chance to produce even more will be revived by the Germans when the Western occupation statute is reviewed next fall.

"Germany Must Be Defended." Obviously, also, West Germany--as the Western world's most critical frontier against Communism--is worried about its ability to defend itself. To U.S. military leaders in Washington last week, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery gave his views on the matter (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). In Frankfurt, U.S. Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson was quick to announce that as far as the U.S. was concerned, Germany must not be permitted to maintain an army. Nevertheless, arguments for arming

West Germany were becoming louder. Wrote London's wise Economist: "It is quite impossible to think of neutralizing Germany . . . Germany must therefore be defended. Indeed it is in Germany that the defense of the West must begin, and that it might fatally end." To overcome Western Europe's inevitable resistance to arming Germany, military men have suggested that a Western German army be placed under the command of Western Union headquarters.

Giving German industry increasingly free rein involved risk; giving the West Germans more sovereignty involved risk; backing Konrad Adenauer was a gamble; arming the Germans would be a gamble-But the only real alternative to what the U.S. was doing in Germany would be to let the country stagnate and, eventually, fall to Communism. That would not be a gamble: it would be certain disaster.

Konrad Adenauer, who tries to be a good German and a good European, last week said: "The world must be convinced of American strength . . . The U.S. has today perhaps the mightiest mission in history. In a human and historic sense America has the duty--if you don't mind my sounding poetic--to see that the light never goes out on our earth ... I want to see a united Europe. Only then can my country be free. To do that, we need the help of the best Europeans of all--the Americans."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.