Still Nein

A huge, brooding portrait of the late Kurt Schumacher looked down last week from the speaker's stand on the convention of West Germany's Social Democratic Party at Dortmund. Not far from the assembly room the SPD had rigged up a small shrine to the dead leader. The implacable spirit of Schumacher still dominated the country's second largest party. In the keynote address, Schumacher's chief deputy, Erich Ollenhauer, repeated Schumacher's old neins: the Socialists still stood against a peace treaty with the Western powers, against the Schunian Plan, against anything that took precedence over the re-unification of West and East Germany.

Then the convention elected Ollenhauer to succeed Schumacher as head of the party. A Socialist since his teens, Ollenhauer was born (1901) the son of a Magdeburg mason, and he came up the party ladder during Weimar Republic days. He fled from the Nazis, first to Prague, then to London, and returned home in September 1945. Pudgy, bespectacled, pipe-smoking Ollenhauer has little of Schumacher's tigerish fire, but he is just as stubborn.

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