An Imperishable Place

Konrad Adenauer would have liked the company, and enjoyed being the center of attention. To his funeral in Cologne this week came the rulers and statesmen of the Atlantic world, including Presidents Johnson and De Gaulle, Britain's Harold Wilson, and the heads of some ten or more other European governments. It was a fitting tribute to the man who, more than any other, had shaped the destiny of postwar Europe. His death last week at 91 came at a time of change and unease within Europe and between Europe and the U.S., and the summit gathering for his funeral thus focused attention on one of his favorite approaches to trouble: whatever the disagreements, get together and talk.

Though no formal talks were planned, the statesmen attending the funeral would have plenty of chances to get together, particularly at a lunch and dinner given by the West Germans. Lyndon Johnson especially wanted to meet West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, and he would, of course, see Charles de Gaulle, to whom he had not talked in person since President Kennedy's funeral. In the American delegation were Secretary of State Dean Rusk; former High Commissioner in Germany John J. McCloy; General Lucius D. Clay, onetime military governor of the U.S. zone; and former CIA Director Allen Dulles--all old friends of Adenauer.

The funeral obsequies themselves were planned to take careful note of the detailed habits and personal preferences of der Alte. Through the streets of the village of RhOendorf, where he had so often walked, rolled his caisson, passing the white Catholic church in which he had worshiped, crossing his beloved Rhine on a ferry beneath the brooding Drachenfels. It proceeded over the exact route through Bonn that Adenauer had always taken on his way to the Bundestag. There, on the very spot where for 14 years as Chancellor Adenauer had presided over Cabinet meetings, the simple brown oak coffin lay in state for two days, while thousands of Germans filed past. Then, in the soaring, twin-spired Cathedral of Cologne, where he had knelt as the city's mayor, a pontifical Requiem Mass was to be sung by Josef Cardinal Frings. From Cologne, Adenauer's body was to be taken by a German navy patrol boat up the Rhine and back to RhOendorf for burial in the secluded family plot where rest his two wives and an infant son.* Adenauer loved flowers and trees, and the site is already blooming in azaleas, pansies, primulas and red and pink rhododendrons.

Hideous Heritage. Der Alte himself bloomed late in life, beginning his main mission when he was 73. In 1949, when, as Chancellor Kiesinger said last week, "he took over the office of Chancellor, the name of Germany in the world was that of an outcast. He who had opposed dictatorship had to take over the heritage of misery, bitterness, hostility and hatred that it had left behind." As the architect and first Chancellor of West Germany, Adenauer singlehanded led his nation from the ruins of that hideous heritage to a respected and prosperous place among Western nations.

He saw that the way to save Germany from itself was to forge strong ties with the U.S., to end the ancient animosity between Germany and France and to so tie Germany to a larger united Europe that it could never again turn to its dark past. He understood the German character and the nation's need in the dire days after the war for an authoritarian father figure, which he provided. He did not allow notions of guilt to cripple his actions, but he unflinchingly accepted German guilt for the war and the Nazi atrocities and unhesitatingly made massive reparations to Israel. Adamantly opposed to Communism as a tyranny as evil as Nazism, he insisted that U.S. troops remain in Germany. And when the time came, he insisted, too, that Germany rearm as part of NATO even though much of German public opinion opposed it. He built the Christian Democratic Party into West Germany's strongest, and made it live up to its name--both parts. He was, as Socialist Willy Brandt observed last week, above all a man who "set standards."

A Thick Skin. Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876, when Bismarck was governing a recently united German nation. At 29, he was refused a life insurance policy as a bad risk because of weak lungs; at 68, his Gestapo jailers feared that he might commit suicide because, they reasoned, at that age, he "had nothing more to expect from life." He grew up in the Rhineland, with a Rhenish and Roman Catholic German's lifelong distaste for Berliners and Prussians. His weak lungs also kept him out of World War I; by 1917, he was Lord Mayor of Cologne, his birthplace. That year plastic surgery following an auto accident froze his facial features into the cat's mask the world was later to know so well.

Adenauer served as Cologne's mayor until 1933, when Hitler took over. Brownshirts adorned the city's bridge with swastika flags for the Fuhrer's first visit, but Adenauer had them torn down before Hitler arrived and refused to greet him. That abruptly ended his career as mayor, and he was classified as "politically unreliable." He spent the next twelve years alternately in prison or reading and tending his roses in the hillside villa he built at RhOendorf. There, near war's end, he was nearly hit by an American shell as he watched the advancing U.S. Army cross the Rhine.

The Americans reinstated him as mayor of Cologne, but when the British took over the city, they fired him; they wanted someone more tractable than the strong-willed Adenauer. The experience, der Alte acidly reminded the British, was not a new one for him. Cologne's loss was Germany's gain; he entered national politics with the joung Christian Democratic Party, in 1949 squeaked in as Bonn's first Chancellor by a single-vote majority--his own.

For the next 14 years, even when at times he did not possess an absolute majority, he ruled with an iron patriarchal hand, guided by a deep Christian faith, a humanist's conviction in the Tightness of democratic ways and a shrewd political gift for manipulating men. He thought out his strategies well in advance, reducing alternatives to their simplest dimensions, and he dealt with problems according to his maxim that "a thick skin is a gift from God." When the German public grumbled about the slowness of Allied decontrol, he replied: "Who do you think won the war?"

Unchaste Offers. In 1951, Adenauer met secretly in a London hotel suite with Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress. Goldmann spoke for 25 minutes of Germany's crimes against Jewry. When he had finished, the usually unemotional Adenauer said: "While you spoke, I felt the wings of history in this room. What do you want concretely?" Goldmann asked for $1 billion in reparations for Israel; Adenauer agreed on the spot.

His first major step to bind Germany to France and Europe was the 1952 merger of the coal and steel resources of France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux nations. The six went on to form the Common Market in 1958 and became Europe's best hope of unity. In 1955, he won for Germany a place in NATO and thus further links to the Western community of nations. Like John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State at the time, der Alte saw Communism as an implacable threat to his Christian conception of Western civilization. Dulles and Adenauer became fast friends. As with no other American diplomat, Adenauer felt that Dulles always told Bonn the truth. Dulles was, in fact, the statesman der Alte most admired be cause "he thought clearly, thought ahead, and he kept his promises."

Distasteful though it was, Adenauer journeyed to Moscow in 1955 to see whether any hope could be found in the Kremlin for German reunification. There was none, except in the form of "some very unchaste offers" from Khrushchev. Even though European unity was set back by the ascendancy of Charles de Gaulle, and specifically by De Gaulle's veto of British Common Market membership on Jan. 14, 1963, Adenauer a scant week later concluded a perpetual Treaty of Friendship with France, to much dismay in the West.

A Latter Mistrust. It was not done out of admiration for De Gaulle, whose narrow nationalism der Alte found an emotional atavism. Rather, in the absence of genuine European unity, Adenauer fell back on the keystone relationship of France and Germany for the well-being of Europe. And he kept right on working for the larger goal of a united Europe after his retirement as Chancellor. In the last month of his life, before he came down fatally with flu and bronchitis, Adenauer met with Chancellor Kiesinger and "urgently impressed on me," said Kiesinger, "this great concern of his life." He also wrote to De Gaulle in the same vein, well aware that the general was evincing reluctance to attend the summit meeting of Common Market leaders in Rome next month.

In recent years, der Alte came to mistrust American policy around the world. He wanted the U.S. to withdraw from Viet Nam, believing that it was diluting Washington's interest in Bonn and Europe. Every fresh move toward detente with Russia added to his unease about the course of Atlantic affairs. Much of his unseemly sniping at his successor, Ludwig Erhard, stemmed from his worry that Erhard was too uncritically--and undemandingly--pro-American.

Toward new Chancellor Kiesinger, Adenauer was more kindly disposed. Kiesinger moved to tighten ties with France and, in Adenauer's view, acted a little more aloof from Washington. These were policies that followed der Alte's own counsel; trust in the wisdom of others was never one of Adenauer's virtues. That the changing nature of Communism in Europe, and of Europe itself, might be outrunning his own concept of Realpolitik did not seem to have occurred to him. But then, it hardly mattered. Adenauer's certainty of purpose at a time when Germany most needed it had already earned him an imperishable place in history.

*Adenauer's seven surviving children: Konrad Jr., 60; Max, 56; Marie, 55; Paul, 43; Lotte, 41; Libet, 38; and Georg, 35.

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