Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (114 page)

De Gasperi’s success undoubtedly helped to pave the way for Konrad Adenauer in Germany. Both men constituted possible alternatives to the inter-war totalitarian regimes of their countries. As we have seen, Adenauer might have become Chancellor in 1926. But he did not think he could have made a success of it. Weimar and the chancellorship were held in low esteem and in his view its problems were insoluble. He was out of sympathy with the prevailing wisdom in Germany. He was not a Rhineland separatist – he was a federalist
rather – but he had absolutely no confidence in any ‘German genius’. ‘Germans are Belgians with megalomania,’ he insisted. The Prussians were the worst: ‘A Prussian is a Slav who has forgotten who his grandfather was.’ He used to say: ‘Once the night-train from Cologne to Berlin crossed the Elbe, I got no more sleep.’
¹⁴
Under Weimar, the Mayor of Cologne was the unofficial head of the German Catholic community and that was enough for Adenauer. He had no trace of German racial feeling, no particle of respect for the Bismarckian state. What had it given German Catholics? The miseries of the
Kulturkampf.
Hitler dismissed him on 13 March 1933, and he was lucky not to be killed along with Schleicher under cover of the Roehm purge. He thought Hitler was insane to go to war and bound to lose it. According to his youngest daughter, Libeth Werhahn, the family prayed for defeat.
¹⁵
He did not believe in a German resistance and had no complaints about the Allied unconditional surrender policy, which he thought necessary.

Adenauer’s post-war career illustrates the importance of luck in politics. When the Americans took Cologne it had practically ceased to exist. Population had fallen from 750,000 to 32,000; André Gide, visiting the ruins, was so horrified he immediately asked to be driven away. It was Allied policy to restore those (if available) who had held office until the Nazis sacked them. So the Americans put Adenauer back in charge of the city. A few months after it became part of the British zone, he was sacked and expelled (October 1945), for reasons which were never satisfactorily explained.
¹⁶
No doubt Britain, now under a Labour government, favoured Social Democrats where possible. British administrators saw Germany as united and disarmed, mildly socialist, with industry taken out of the hands of such men as Krupps and nationalized. The education and political branches of the British military government were staffed with socialist-leaning officers, who ensured that Social Democrats ran the radio, the news-agency and quasi-official papers like
Die Welt.

Backing the Social Democrats was the first of many serious errors in British foreign policy towards Europe. It meant putting their money on the
SPD
leader, Kurt Schumacher. A tragic victim of the past, he had only one arm and was soon to have a leg amputated; his incessant pain made him bitter, excitable, impatient and often unreasonable. He was in many ways the opposite to Adenauer: a Prussian, a Protestant, a believer in a big state, a ‘big’ Germany.
¹⁷
He refused to grasp that his vision for Germany depended essentially on Soviet agreement to reunification: it would not work for the truncated Western zones. Equally important, he refused to see (and the British with him) that the real alternative to Hitlerian Germany, something which would get the poison out of the system, was not a
reconstruction of Bismarckian Germany on Social Democratic lines, with an all-powerful paternalist state, a Leninist centralized direction of nationalized industry, a huge, Prussian-style bureaucracy and a stress on equality, uniformity and collectivity. That was the formula the Russians chose for East Germany, and all it produced was a radicalized version of the Nazi state, the sort of version Goebbels (and Hitler in his final stage) would have favoured. The real antithesis to National Socialism was individualism, a society where private arrangements took priority over public, where the family was the favoured social unit and where the voluntary principle was paramount.

These were precisely the ideals in which Adenauer believed with life-long conviction. As a member, then the patriarch, of a vast, close and ramifying family, he had come to regard it (as many millions behind the Iron Curtain were also discovering) as the one reliable refuge from totalitarian invasion. Of course it could be destroyed utterly – Hitler had indeed wiped out entire Jewish families – but it could not be corrupted and perverted. Even if it lost many of its members, it closed ranks and re-formed itself with remarkable fortitude, as the Jewish experience proved. A society in which the family, as opposed to the political party and the ideological programme, was the starting-point for reconstruction, was the answer to the totalitarian evil. Schumacher’s assertion that Adenauer’s ideas would lead to a ‘restoration’ of all that was worst in Germany was one of the great misjudgements of history. It would be difficult to conceive of a man more out of sympathy with the German conventional wisdom from the 1860s onward.

If the British had allowed Adenauer to remain in charge of Cologne, he might never have entered the new national politics. They drove him there. The Soviet authorities helped by excluding his most dangerous rival, Andreas Hermes. During the summer and autumn of 1945 Christian Democrat groupings emerged in various parts of Germany. Adenauer’s sacking in Cologne might have been deliberately timed to enable him to get control of the New Christian Democratic Union by constructing it as a West German federal party with its power-base in the Cologne area. He thus created a party organism precisely suited to the salient features of the new German state which was emerging.
¹⁸
In March 1946, in his first public speech, he outlined his aims. The new state must no longer dominate the individual. Everyone must be allowed to take the initiative in every facet of existence. The Christian ethic must be the basis of the German community. The state must be federal, and conceived with the view to an eventual creation of a United States of Europe.
¹⁹

This speech, one of the most important in the post-war world, which marked the real beginning of post-war German and indeed West European politics, was made at Cologne University. Adenauer had
delivered another remarkable speech there, twenty-seven years before, in June 1918: ‘Whatever the ultimate shape of the peace treaty,’ he had then warned, ‘here on the Rhine, at the ancient international crossroads, German civilization and the civilization of the Western democracies will meet during the decades to come. Unless a genuine reconciliation is possible between them …European leadership will be lost for ever.’
²⁰
That opportunity had been missed; European leadership had gone, probably for ever. But European stability and prosperity were still realizable aims. In 1919 Adenauer had conceived the idea of a Rhine-Ruhr state within a German federation. In July 1946, the British created the
Land
of North Rhine—Westphalia, uniting industrial Rhineland and agricultural Westphalia, along almost identical boundaries with his 1919 conception and so handing him the perfect instrument for his design: his luck again.

For the next three years Adenauer played the cards Britain had unwittingly handed him with consummate finesse. He was a tough old bird; he had learnt patience. He kept his dignity and his temper. He was flexible, quiet, never banged the table or fawned, but charmed and sometimes discreetly flattered. He had taken to heart Churchill’s saying, ‘The Germans are always either at one’s throat or one’s feet’; he was neither. As one British minister put it, he had ‘a power to stand outside the Germans’; he knew ‘the weaknesses that had betrayed them’.
²¹
Events played into his hands. The tighter the Russians screwed down the Iron Curtain, the more committed the Allies became to the creation of the West German state he wanted. He ruled out Berlin as a capital: ‘Whoever makes Berlin the new capital will be creating a new spiritual Prussia.’ The capital must be ‘where Germany’s windows are wide open to the west’.
²²
The first Berlin crisis reinforced this view. Adenauer blocked Social Democrat plans for the general nationalization of German industry, which initially had British support. By rejecting Marshall Aid for East Germany, the Russians did Adenauer a double favour: they undermined Jakob Kaiser, the Christian Democrat union leader and his chief party rival, and they made possible the separate economic development of West Germany which Adenauer required for his long-term aims. For he recognized, even at this early stage, that France would never consent to a United States of Europe which included a paramount Germany with its undivided industrial base and all its 80 million people. The Russians were the real creators of Adenauer’s Germany by their policy of keeping Germany divided; and their successive moves to intensify the Cold War in 1947–8 accelerated the formation of the West German state. Adenauer paid lip-service to reunification, then and later, as every German was
conventionally supposed to do. But in reality he wanted to keep it divided, and the Russians did his work for him.

Adenauer’s crowning mercy was that, as President of the Parliamentary Council, he was able to write his own constitution. He took a lot of time and trouble over it and eventually produced one of the best constitutions ever drawn up for a modern state, which skilfully balances sufficient authority for the Chancellor against the entrenched powers of its federal constituents. By comparison with the Weimar constitution it was a masterpiece. For the first elections, set for 14 August 1949, he formed an alliance with Professor Ludwig Erhard, head of the Bizonal Economic Council, whose free market economic philosophy, based on low tariffs, free trade, cheap imports and high exports, was exactly suited to his own political philosophy and was, indeed, already producing results by the summer of 1949. The British, wrong to the end, assumed the Social Democrats would win easily. In fact the
CDU
vote was 7,360,000, against fewer than 7 million for the Socialists, and Adenauer, in rejecting the idea of a non-party coalition government, was able to argue that a total of 13 million Germans had voted for free enterprise – that is, for Erhard’s ideas – and only 8 million for nationalization. What emerged, after the election, was that Adenauer was in total control of his party (and of Erhard). In getting himself made Chancellor and forming his government he behaved in an authoritative, not to say high-handed, manner. He said that, on doctor’s advice, he could only remain in office for two years.
²³
He remained for fourteen. The August election was thus one of the critical events of the post-war world. An
SPD
government, with the economic philosophy and programme it then possessed, could never conceivably have achieved the German
Wirtschaftswunder.
The Adenauer-Erhard combination was essential to it. By the time the
SPD
finally achieved power, in 1969, they had already renounced Marxist collective ownership and had, in effect, embraced the Erhardian market philosophy.

Adenauer enjoyed a further critical advantage, again thanks to the British. Hitler had destroyed the German trade union movement completely. The British believed it essential to the refounding of German democracy, and encouraged unions to come into existence in 1945 long before they would permit parties. The man they backed to do it was a Rhineland metal-workers’ leader, Hans Boeckler. He thought in terms of one big union, a weird syndicalist notion going back to pre-1914 days. The British sent over Will Lawther, president of the mineworkers, and Jack Tanner of the engineering workers, to persuade Boeckler to go for industrial unions. What in effect Germany was given, by a
diktat
which any normal process of historical development would have made impossible, was a perfected
version of the British trade union model, shorn of all its weaknesses, anomalies, contradictions and inefficiencies. By an act of suicidal generosity unique in history, a union structure exactly designed for the needs of modern industry, which Britain had tried and failed to achieve over half a century by democratic consultation, was handed by her
gratis
to her chief commercial competitor.

Some sixteen industrial unions were created, within a single federation, the
DGB
(Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund).
At British urging, the
DGB
was given not only constitutional powers of expulsion but the financial leverage of a fixed percentage of all union subscriptions, enabling it to hold vast financial reserves, on which unions could, and in case of strikes were obliged to, draw. To strike at all, a 75 per cent secret ballot was necessary, and the
DGB
in effect had a further veto.
²⁴
Strikes for political purposes were ruled out as was any organic connection between unions and political movements. Thus West Germany acquired the most effective union structure of any leading industrial nation, with no rival federations (as in the USA), no religious-Marxist divisions (as in Italy and France), no political unions (as in Britain) and, above all, no craft unions, that disastrous relic of an earlier industrial phase which constituted the chief institutional barrier to raising productivity.

Adenauer capitalized skilfully on this gift from Britain. Boeckler, elected first Chairman of the
DGB
in October 1949, and thereafter its virtual dictator, had served with Adenauer on the Cologne city council. The new Chancellor made him, along with Erhard, the co-architect of his social and economic policy. He persuaded Boeckler to renounce public ownership in favour of
Mitbestimmung
(co-partnership of labour and capital) and a high-wage policy based on productivity agreements.
²⁵
Adenauer got the co-partnership law through the Bundestag in 1951 with the help of
SPD
votes and at the risk to his coalition, but it paid handsome economic and political dividends. By the next year Germany was already rich enough for Adenauer to reorganize German social security in a way which secured most of the objects of
SPD
policy.
²⁶
By the mid-1950s, German labour had settled for what was essentially a non-political policy based on high profits, high wages and bonuses, high productivity, excellent social security and seats on policy-forming boards. In the process the class-war in West Germany died, and one consequence of its demise was the rejection by the Social Democrats in 1959 of their original Marxist philosophy.