Clean Sweep

A small group of men worked quietly in the dark outside West Germany's Parliament building in Bonn one night last week. They were filling an empty truck with the files, documents and official papers of 14 Communist delegates who had just been voted out of their seats (and their office space) in Germany's legislature.

The housecleaning was symbolic of a clean sweep that overtook Germany's whole political household in the huge (86% of all eligible voters) turnout of last week's general election. With one sweep of the electoral broom, some 28 million German voters had pushed aside all the troublesome, totalitarian splinter groups (including Communists and Neo-Nazis) that clutter most European politics, giving Germany alone of Europe's nations a workable two-party Parliament in the pattern of Britain and the U.S.

To put the house in even better order, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's victorious Christian Democratic Party had won a clear majority of 244 out of 487 Bundestag (lower house) seats, giving the Christian Democrats voting control even without the extra 63 votes collected by their old coalition partners, the Free Democrats and the German Party. No German politician, not even Hitler or Bismarck, had ever received such a vote of confidence from his people in a free election.

Too Good to Be True. For the Christian Democrats, for Adenauer himself and for his friends in the Wrest, the overwhelming victory seemed almost too good to be true. Characteristically, many a German, like many wondering observers elsewhere (see INTERNATIONAL), began to look for flaws in the picture.

The obvious cry, and one promptly raised by the defeated Socialists, was that Germany's voters had repudiated one kind of totalitarianism only to substitute a greater one. Germany is a nation addicted to strong men, and Adenauer's victory had been in many ways as personal a triumph as that of Eisenhower in the U.S. ten months before. Left-wing Germans were quick to charge that the Adenauer sweep had raised the possibility of his becoming another Fuehrer. The Germanic equivalents of "I told you so" echoed loudly in some quarters a day or so after the election, when the Chancellor let loose a blast at the Socialist-dominated Federation of Trades Unions, which had lined up against him in the election. Demanding a change of leadership in the federation and adherence to the Gompers principle that labor should steer clear of politics, an Adenauer spokesman insisted that "under no circumstances are we willing to let things go on as they are" in the federation. The left also spread rumors that the Chancellor intended to impose a censorship on Germany's press, a majority of which, Adenauer noted tartly after his victory, had opposed his reelection.

A Clear Request. On the record of the man, the alarms had no justification. Stern, steel-hard Konrad Adenauer has never been one to take criticism or interference kindly, and he no doubt will dominate the new, stronger government he picked to run Germany for the next four years just as he dominated the government of the last four. The old man demonstrated this last week when he heard that dapper, ambitious CDU Floor Leader Heinrich von Brentano had told newsmen that he might take over the Foreign Ministry from Adenauer. In a matter of minutes the federal press office issued a flinty statement from Adenauer. The vote, it said sharply, "was a clear request for continued conduct of foreign policy by the Chancellor himself."

It was a clear and forthright reply by the man who has the confidence of the people--and their mandate--to build trustworthy democracy on the ashes of Hitlerism. Konrad Adenauer is too wise and too old (77) to forget that Germany's massive vote of confidence is more than a personal tribute. "In greater numbers than in any other Western country, [the Germans] voted for the integration of Europe and partnership with France," wrote the New York Times's sage Anne O'Hare Mc-Cormick. "It is idle to say that they voted for Adenauer without a full understanding of what his policy implies." The policy is not that of Adenauer alone, but is also the work of several who will now bulk larger on Europe's political scene. Some of them:

P: Hardheaded Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard, 56, architect of West Germany's free-enterprise economy and rebuilder of war-stricken heavy industries. Last week the Ruhr industrialists, who financed much of the Adenauer campaign, served notice that they expect Adenauer to maintain Erhard in the dominating position in the nation's economic affairs.

P:Finance Minister Fritz Schaeffer, 65, Erhard's frugal, white-thatched counterpart, who once gave German spenders a stern object lesson in national economizing by ostentatiously buying his cigarettes one at a time at the Bundestag tobacco stand. P: Stocky Theodor Blank, 48, ex-official of the German miners' union, who, as "Special Representative for Questions Arising out of the Reinforcement of the Allied Forces," has worked out the blueprints of German divisions for the European Army. If and when Germany is allowed to rearm. Blank will almost certainly become Minister of Defense. P: Crinkly-haired Bundestag President Hermann Ehlers, 48, a peace-making Protestant who helped to swing many Lutheran votes in Northern Germany to Catholic Konrad Adenauer's cause.

Other Cabinet or sub-Cabinet possibilities: Waldemar Kraft, 55, onetime Nazi, now leader of the Refugee Party, who hopes for a Cabinet job in return for a promise to throw the Refugee Party's 27 Bundestag votes to Adenauer; Karl Arnold, 52, Christian trade-union leader; Franz Josef Strauss, young (38) and rising Christian Democrat who led the party's Bavarian wing to a victory that knocked the once strong Bavarian Party completely out of Parliament.

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