Troubles amid Tributes

Congratulations flooded into Bonn from all around the world last week as Konrad Adenauer celebrated his 85th birthday. A score of grandchildren romped through his official residence as the Chancellor stood for seven hours sipping champagne and cracking little jokes with a rigorously marshaled throng of well-wishers. It was a famous tribute to the maker of modern Germany, the world's oldest ruling leader, the redoubtable favorite to win a fourth term as Chancellor in 1961.

Yet in the midst of all these festivities, der Alte was a deeply disquieted man. In the West, the U.S. seemed to him adrift in the dangerous hours of change from one leadership to another. The great goal of European unity that he had preached for eleven years seemed to be endangered by President de Gaulle's new determination to go it alone. When De Gaulle proclaimed he would build up an independent French striking force outside NATO and make France the leader of a Western Europe of sovereign "fatherlands," Adenauer pronounced these ideas "catastrophic," and warned De Gaulle's emissaries that they would break down NATO and "launch Germany into nationalism and neutralism." For of all the West's leaders, it is West Germany's Chancellor, ironically enough, who seems most profoundly to distrust the latent nationalism of the Germans. Last fortnight's French A-bomb test in the Sahara was greeted in Bonn with unconcealed dismay. Adenauer's question in effect: How can I and my successors continue to convince our thrusting and ambitious people that they should renounce nuclear weapons when even France has them?

This question has chilled the new Franco-German friendship that was to unite past enemies and form the keystone of the new Europe. The Germans are now convinced that the French, out of fear of their competition, are maneuvering against them in the European Coal and Steel Community to keep the German steel industry inefficiently dispersed. Germans grumble that De Gaulle is prepared to settle German territorial claims east of the Oder-Neisse line because he knows that any hope of French domination of Europe would vanish if Germany were really reunited. Adenauer in his turn has annoyed the French by talking to the British about devising ways to ease the Common Market's discrimination against British imports. Both Adenauer and De Gaulle are convinced that French-German friendship is essential. But Adenauer is finding De Gaulle a difficult friend.

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