Konrad Adenauer

Konrad Adenauer: The Old Man Who Anchored Germany West

On 15 September 1949 the Bundestag elected its first Chancellor by a majority of exactly one vote. Adenauer cast it himself, for himself, and later admitted as much without embarrassment. He was seventy-three years old, had been sacked by the Nazis, jailed twice by them, and dismissed by the British; everyone assumed he was a caretaker. He governed for fourteen years, left office at eighty-seven, and in 2003 German television viewers voted him the greatest German who ever lived.

Mayor of Cologne

He was born in Cologne on 5 January 1876 into a devout Catholic family of modest means — a background that gave him both his lifelong faith and his instinctive suspicion of Prussia. He read law at Freiburg, Munich and Bonn, graduating in 1900, and joined a Cologne firm in 1902. Politics followed naturally: as a Rhineland Catholic he gravitated to the Centre Party, joining in 1906, and rose through the city administration as alderman and then first alderman by 1909.

In 1917, in the middle of a war his country was losing, he was elected Lord Mayor of Cologne — the youngest municipal leader in Prussia. He held the office until 1933, re-elected in 1929, and he transformed the city: reopening its university, reviving the trade fair, expanding the harbour, drawing in industry. He was simultaneously president of the Prussian State Council from 1921 to 1933. Twice, in 1921 and 1926, he was sounded out about becoming Chancellor of the Weimar Republic. Twice he declined.

The Wilderness Years

The Nazis dismissed him on 4 April 1933. What followed was twelve years of internal exile at his house in Rhöndorf, above the Rhine. It was not quiet survival. He was imprisoned briefly after the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, and arrested again in 1944 in the round-up that followed the 20 July plot against Hitler. He was saved that autumn by a former communist worker, Eugen Zander, who contrived to have him admitted to a hospital; he was released from Brauweiler Abbey in November 1944.

The Americans reinstated him as mayor of Cologne in 1945. The British sacked him again in December of that year for insubordination. At sixty-nine, unemployed and out of favour with the occupying powers, he began building a political party.

A Party and a Constitution

The Christian Democratic Union was Adenauer's answer to the fatal weakness of Weimar: a confessional split that had left German conservatism fragmented and vulnerable. He wanted one party that could hold Protestants and Catholics together, and he got it. In 1948 he chaired the Parliamentary Council that drafted the Basic Law, West Germany's constitution — a document he would then operate more forcefully than its authors had imagined.

The system he then ran acquired a name: *Kanzlerdemokratie*, chancellor democracy, in which the head of government made the major decisions personally and the cabinet found out afterwards. It was the source of both his effectiveness and the most serious charge against him.

Westbindung

His grand strategy had one word: *Westbindung*. West Germany would be bound irreversibly into the Western alliance, and everything else — including reunification — would wait. The Treaty of Paris of April 1951 brought Germany into the European Coal and Steel Community, a deal unpopular at home, where it was read as a French raid on German industry. NATO membership followed in May 1955 and the Bundeswehr in November. In 1957 he signed the Treaty of Rome, making Germany a founding member of the European Economic Community. In January 1963 he signed the Élysée Treaty with Charles de Gaulle, converting the oldest enmity in Europe into a formal partnership; de Gaulle, he said, was a rock, and the only foreign leader he trusted completely.

The hardest thing he ever did was the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952, committing West Germany to pay reparations to Israel and to the Jewish Claims Conference — roughly three billion deutschmarks to the state and 450 million to the Conference. His cabinet was against it, his voters were against it, and he pushed it through the Bundestag only with SPD votes. He survived a bomb plot in March 1952, the evidence for which his own government sealed away. In 1955 he went to Moscow and came home with the last German prisoners of war; the "Return of the 10,000" was, for decades afterwards, the achievement Germans admired most.

The Miracle and the Silence

At home the numbers were extraordinary. With Ludwig Erhard as economics minister and the social market economy as the doctrine, real wages doubled between 1950 and 1963, working hours fell by a fifth, and unemployment dropped from eight per cent to 0.4. Adenauer bolted a welfare state onto the boom: maternity protection in 1952, expanded unemployment benefits, and above all the 1957 pension reform that indexed pensions to wages, making the old share in the miracle.

The price was silence about the recent past. He ended denazification in 1951 and pushed through an amnesty that by that January had benefited 792,176 people, including men convicted of Nazi crimes. He kept Hans Globke, who had written the official commentary on the Nuremberg race laws, as his closest aide in the Chancellery. He lobbied the Allies for the release of convicted war criminals, arguing that rearmament was impossible while they sat in cells.

The Long Goodbye

He stayed too long. In 1959 he manoeuvred toward the presidency, then withdrew on finding he could not enlarge the office. The 1961 campaign produced an ugly personal attack on Willy Brandt over the circumstances of his birth, delivered as the Berlin Wall went up; the CDU lost its majority, and the FDP extracted a promise of early resignation as the price of coalition. The Spiegel affair of 1962 — journalists arrested at the defence ministry's instigation — did further damage, and cost Franz Josef Strauss his job. It later emerged that Adenauer had directed the intelligence service to spy on Brandt. He resigned in October 1963, at eighty-seven, succeeded by the Erhard he had tried to block.

Why Konrad Is Called a Genius

Adenauer's gift was strategic clarity of an almost brutal kind. In 1949 he governed a bankrupt, partitioned, morally ruined half-country under foreign occupation, and he identified a single objective — permanent integration into the West — and subordinated everything to it for fourteen years, including options his own voters wanted. He grasped before almost anyone that sovereignty could be regained by giving it away: that binding Germany into European institutions would make Germany trusted, and being trusted was the only route back to power. He was also a formidable tactician, capable of one-vote majorities, of the Luxembourg Agreement passed on his opponents' votes, and of turning de Gaulle from adversary into partner. Historians who dislike him concede the achievement; the West German democracy that has now lasted three times as long as Weimar is largely his design.

The counter-case is serious. He dismissed the 1952 Stalin Note and other Soviet reunification offers without genuinely testing them, and critics have argued ever since that he cemented Germany's division to secure his Western project — while privately writing off the eastern provinces as lost. His governing style hollowed out cabinet government; he spied on the leader of the opposition and smeared him in public. And his handling of the Nazi past was, at best, a cold political calculation: mass amnesty, Globke in the Chancellery, lobbying for war criminals' release. He rebuilt a decent state by declining to look too hard at whom he was rebuilding it with. Genius, here, means judgement and will rather than virtue.

Legacy

He died at Rhöndorf on 19 April 1967. Representatives of more than a hundred countries came to the requiem, among them Lyndon Johnson and de Gaulle. The Federal Republic he built outlived the division he was accused of accepting, and the Franco-German axis he signed into being in 1963 remains the engine of the European Union.

Achievements

• Federal Chancellor of Germany (1949–1963)
• member of the German Bundestag (1949–1953)
• member of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia (1946–1950)
• lord mayor of Cologne (1917–1933)
• Charlemagne Prize — 1957
• Grand Cross special issue of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, special issue — 1954
• Bavarian Order of Merit — 1958
• Grand Cross of the Order of the Southern Cross — 1953
• Educated at University of Freiburg and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München