Germany: Ollenhauer Quits

The Social Democrats of West Germany have lost the last three elections and seem doomed to lose .the next--unless they stop calling Volkswagen-driving Germans "comrades," discard their faded red proletarian banners and try to attract the middle-class votes that alone can win them first place. The dissension in West Germany's Socialist opposition has been largely obscured by the spectacular personal struggle between Chancellor Adenauer and Vice Chancellor Erhard in the ruling Christian Democrats.

Hat in Hand. Last week this half-hidden conflict cracked the disciplined front of Socialism and opened the way for a decisive change in the 90-year-old party's leadership. Party Chairman Erich Ollenhauer, 58, the colorless compromiser who has held his post through two smashing election defeats precisely because the party could not make up its mind about its future, abruptly announced that he was stepping down as a candidate for Chancellor next time. In a sense it was Nikita Khrushchev who forced the decision. Last March Leftist Social Democrats put over a new party program, hoping to reunify Germany by appeasing the Russians. But when Ollenhauer went hat in hand to Khrushchev in Berlin, he found the Soviet leader frankly contemptuous of the Socialists' offer of German withdrawal from NATO. After that humiliating meeting, Socialist popularity fell. Instead of gaining from the Adenauer-Erhard bickering, the Socialist standing in public opinion polls has plummeted from 32% to 26%. When Ollenhauer bowed out last week, the leftists also took a beating.

On the seven-man commission appointed to find a candidate and a program to lead the Social Democrats to victory in 1961, party moderates won all the places. Conspicuously left off was Deputy Party Chairman Herbert Wehner, a onetime Communist agitator who was the man most responsible for Ollenhauer's luckless flirtation with Khrushchev. The likeliest candidate to lead the party is Bundestag Vice President Carlo Schmid, 62. Convivial, mellow-voiced Carlo Schmid is by all odds the most articulate Social Democrat advocate of broadening the party's middle-class appeal. He was once an officer in Hitler's army, but in a noncombat occupation job in France, where his command of the language is said to have enabled him to give secret help to the French underground. He is a professor--the most respected title in Germany--and an excellent speaker.

If Schmid's health should fail (he suffered a stroke in 1956), the party might put forward another member of the selection commission, a man who is otherwise being groomed to run for Chancellor in 1965 : West Berlin's dynamic Mayor Willy Brandt, 45. Nobody needs to worry where Willy stands on Communism.

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