A Lesson for the Chancellor

"That I should be forced to make a German national army is ridiculous; it is grotesque," West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer complained not long ago. But having accepted the necessity, Adenauer decided to get on with it, and to have something started before Geneva could undo it. In his haste, Chancellor Adenauer, a democrat at heart but sometimes an autocrat in practice, had demanded a blank check from the Bundestag (TIME, July 11). Last week the Bundestag gave the chancellor a salutary lesson.

The lesson was administered principally by a member of Adenauer's own Christian Democratic Party, Richard Jaeger, 42, chairman of the Bundestag's Security Committee. Jaeger, whose distrust of generals is exceeded only by his scorn for Prussians, is by heritage and career a Bavarian (which, as regional patriotism goes among Germans, is something like being a Texan). Jaeger regards it as his everlasting misfortune that, when he was born, his parents happened to be in Berlin, deep in the heart of Prussia. "The course Germany took under Prussia's leadership," he warned the Bundestag recently, his eyes flashing behind his rimless spectacles, "ended with blood, tears and catastrophe."

Parliamentary Protection. In committee, Chairman Jaeger insisted on writing into Adenauer's vague 250-word "volunteers bill" all the assurances Adenauer had verbally given a hesitant Bundestag. By the time he got through, parliament kept for itself the power to pass on the Defense Ministry's organization, limited recruitment to 6,000 men (3,000 officers, 1,500 noncoms, 1,500 enlisted men), and prohibited the formation of combat units. Under this stopgap bill, which would expire next March, the volunteers would be used only to staff the Defense Ministry and military missions to SHAPE, to maintain military equipment received under the U.S. aid programs, and to attend courses at allied training camps. Jaeger also wrote a separate bill setting up a selection board to screen all officers from colonel up, giving both parliament and President Theodor Heuss veto power over the board's membership.

Such parliamentary control, huffed the chancellor, was an infringement of the executive power. He threatened to ask the courts to declare the bill unconstitutional if passed, and demanded that the Bundestag back down. Jaeger would not budge. Having recently visited the U.S., he had seen how "the legislature has the right to determine the basic principles" of an army's functioning, and that was good enough for him. In West Germany's present climate, compounded of a reluctance to go back into uniform and a determination that no military caste shall ever dominate the country again, Jaeger found wide support.

Good Grace. When Adenauer's men made a nose count of the Bundestag, they found that Jaeger could count on the votes of no coalition Deputies, as well as the big Socialist opposition, and had a clear majority. Seeing that he was beaten, Der Alte decided to retreat with good grace. He joined up in support of the Jaeger bills, and at week's end got his emergency army bill through, albeit cut to the Bundestag's pattern and not his own.

One of the four parties in Adenauer's coalition is the Refugee Party (27 seats), a strange band that ranges from ex-Nazi to ardent Socialist. Last week the party was rent by internal squabbling; its two Cabinet ministers resigned from the government and from their party, taking seven Deputies along with them. Adenauer was left for the first time short of a technical two-thirds majority in the Bundestag. But Adenauer's strength is still the envy of other Western heads of government, who count themselves lucky to muster a simple majority.

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