The Well-Tempered Clavier

MEMOIRS 1945-53 by Konrad Adenauer. 477 pages. Regnery. $10.

Memoirists are the musicians of history. Churchill's English eloquence thumped the drumhead of World War II into a heroic thunder with his wartime memoirs. Charles de Gaulle drew a dry bow over the taut strings of French postwar political chaos to produce his searching remembrance of things past. Now Konrad Adenauer is onstage with the first volume of his memoirs, covering the period from 1945, when Germany lay in ruins, to 1953, when the postwar Wirtschaftswunder dawned. Adenauer's instrument, not surprisingly, is a brisk and Bachlike clavier, well tempered by the author's 90 years.

Keen Vision. "At the end of September 1944," he begins, "I was arrested again and sent to the Gestapo prison at Brauweiler. I was kept in solitary confinement and liked it." Adenauer had been in and out of Nazi prisons since 1933, when Hitler booted him from the lord-mayoralty of Cologne. At war's end, he was a tough, uncompromising democrat of 70, unfazed by the horrors of defeat (he had witnessed the decline of both Bismarck and the Kaiser). When the Gestapo released him during the Goetterdaemmerung of the Allied advance, Adenauer trekked circuitously through the flooded Rhineland to his home at Rhoendorf, then sat out a vicious artillery duel between U.S. troops at the Remagen bridgehead and Wehrmacht gunners who were dug in directly behind his house. Walking in his garden one Sunday, Adenauer came under fire. "About 300 yards away, I saw a shell hurtling towards me," he writes. "I could gauge distances fairly well, because I knew the area intimately." Der Alte hit the dirt, and survived to become West Germany's first postwar Chancellor. His keen vision paid off well in both situations.

Adenauer saw that the old, Roman Catholic -oriented Center Party of Weimar days could no longer survive in a Germany divided first by occupation zones, then by the Iron Curtain. His Christian Democratic Union split the Center, encouraged Protestant and peasant membership, and in 1949 edged out the older, better organized Socialist Party of Kurt Schumacher to win Germany's first free election in a generation. Then began the adroit maneuvering that brought Germany into NATO and won back the Saar coal and steel complex that France had taken. In 1953, he made his first trip to the U.S. and stood at attention in Arlington Cemetery while an American military band played Deutschland fiber Alles.

Venom Aplenty. In orchestrating this remarkable account of Germany's rise from defeated enemy to much courted ally, Adenauer's tone is dry and professorial, often lacking in the details of the humanism that his C.D.U. programs espouse philosophically. But there is venom aplenty--directed mainly at the British Labor government of Clement Attlee (which Adenauer accuses of unfairly aiding his German Socialist opposition in the immediate postwar years) and at Socialist Party Leader Schumacher. Adenauer scarcely mentions his successor as Chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, who during these years as Economic Affairs Minister was laying the groundwork for the "economic miracle," and he gives short shrift to every postwar Allied leader save Harry Truman. His characterization of Truman, whom he credits with saving Western Europe from Communism through his strong stand in 1947-48 in Greece and Turkey, might well be applied to der Alte himself: "Truman was a personality apt to stick tenaciously to a decision once taken, and unlikely to be deflected from it by criticism." A later volume of Adenauer's memoirs will deal with Dwight Eisenhower.

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