Champagne & Silence

In the first flush of his unprecedented electoral third-term victory, Christian Democratic Leader Konrad Adenauer drove out to the Benedictine monastery at Maria Laach near Bonn, where he had taken refuge for almost a year during the worst days of being Nazi-blacklisted before the war. In one respect the Chancellor's hour-and-a-half meditation in the monastery gardens was like all his actions of his week of triumph: he kept a discreet silence about his intentions, as is the victor's prerogative. The opposition Socialists, on the other hand, might be expected to hold a noisy post mortem to complain about the lackluster campaign by roly-poly Erich Ollenhauer, but the important Hamburg state election comes up in November, and if the Socialists are to win it, they must seem to be united.

The final count of last week's election showed that Adenauer and the Socialists together tallied an impressive 81% of the popular vote. In defeat, the Socialists actually increased their share of the popular vote from 28.8% in 1953 to 31.75%. Under Germany's proportional-representation system, this gives the Socialists just over one-third of the Bundestag's 497 seats, or enough to block any constitutional changes. Of all the other parties, only Reinhold Maier's right-of-center Free Democrats, who won 41 seats, got more than the minimum 5% necessary to be represented in the Bundestag. Thus the prospect is that West Germany is well on the way to a reasonably well balanced two-party government, free from the fragmentation that did so much to destroy the Weimar Republic of the '20s. Christian Democrats were particularly heartened by the fact that they had scored sizable gains in traditionally Socialist strongholds in the industrial Ruhr. In a brief morning-after champagne celebration with party workers, 81-year-old Konrad Adenauer bubbled: "We can finally end the divisions of class."

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