The Last Nein

One afternoon last week, in his book-lined study on the Venusberg overlooking Bonn, Kurt Schumacher received newsmen and a MARCH OF TIME cinema crew. He asked that pictures be taken of his boxer Ajax, because, "after all, he is the best looking." Then Schumacher repeated his familiar line: "The partition of Germany is the greatest source of strength for Soviet policy. Reunification is an aim more pressing and more important for peace . . . than any form of integration of one portion of Germany with other European countries." It turned out to be his last no to Western policy. That night, Kurt Schumacher, 56, leader of 7,000,000 German Socialists, died in his sleep of coronary thrombosis.

His countrymen, many of whom thought him wrongheaded and reckless as a politician, honored Schumacher as a man. A spokesman for his bitter political foe, the right-wing Free Democratic Party, said of him: "Great opponents are blessings of fate, even if they work fiercely against us and are a great discomfort."

Courage. Kurt Schumacher had worked fiercely all his life, and always in opposition. The only son of a Prussian civil servant in the fortress town of Kulm (now part of Red Poland), he joined the Kaiser's army in 1914; six months later, his right arm was severed at the shoulder by a Russian machine-gun burst. He became an ardent Socialist, railing unheard at the "Kaiser's war." By the time he could get anyone to listen, as a brash Socialist Deputy in the moribund Weimar Republic, the enemy was Hitler. Schumacher told Goebbels in 1932: "The whole National Socialist movement is only a lasting appeal to all that is worst in man."

He paid for his courage. After eleven years in Nazi concentration camps, Schumacher was a walking skeleton, his heart weakened, his eyesight half gone. Suffering lent him stature and magnified his will. To this gaunt, bitter man with the eyes of a Savonarola and a voice not unlike Hitler's, German Socialists rallied in the postwar gloom.

Bitterness. In 1948, his left leg became seriously diseased. It had to be amputated. But Schumacher rose from his sickbed to barnstorm Germany in the country's first free elections since the Weimar Republic. His program: all-out nationalism. His voice, stabbing and snarling, demanded return of the Saar (grabbed by France) and the lands east of the Oder (grabbed by Russia), demanded an end to reparations and occupation. The voters turned him down--by a narrow margin. The task of establishing a new German state "fell not to Socialist Kurt Schumacher but to conservative, commonsensical Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer.

Embittered, Schumacher opposed and insulted Adenauer at every turn. Although he was as fierce an anti-Communist as he had been an anti-Nazi, Schumacher said no to every statesmanlike gesture made in postwar Europe--the Schuman Plan, NATO, West Germany's joining the European Defense Community. Even in his own party he became dictatorial and sour, antagonized such figures as witty, courageous Ernst Reuter, West Berlin's mayor, who thought Schumacher's opposition to the West was dangerous. Schumacher earned the name Herr Nein.

The man most likely to take his place was tubby little Erich Ollenhauer, 51, the backstage politician who held the Socialists together during Schumacher's bouts of sickness. At his master's bier last week. Ollenhauer announced that German Socialists would keep on saying nein. But chances were that henceforth the nein would be less fanatical. It seemed certain that without Kurt Schumacher's fierce, embittered opposition, the West German Parliament would quickly verify the treaty bringing West Germany formally into the allied camp.

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