Leadership

1

Konrad Adenauer:
The Strategy of Humility

The Necessity of Renewal

In January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, the Allies proclaimed that they would accept nothing less than the 'unconditional surrender' of the Axis powers. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was the driving force behind the announcement, sought to deprive any successor government to Hitler of the ability to claim that it had been deluded into surrender by unfulfilled promises. Germany's complete military defeat, together with its total loss of moral and international legitimacy, led inexorably to the progressive disintegration of the German civil structure.

I observed this process as part of the 84th Infantry Division of the US army as it moved from the German border near the industrial Ruhr territory to the Elbe River near Magdeburg - just 100 miles away from the then-raging Battle of Berlin. As the division was crossing the German border, I was transferred to a unit responsible for security and prevention of the guerrilla activity that Hitler had ordered.

For a person like me, whose family had fled the small Bavarian city of FŸrth six years earlier to escape racial persecution, no greater contrast with the Germany of my youth could have been imagined. Then, Hitler had just annexed Austria and was in the process of dismembering Czechoslovakia. The dominant attitude of the German people verged on the overbearing.

Now, white sheets hung from many windows to signify the surrender of the population. The Germans, who a few years earlier had celebrated the prospect of dominating Europe from the English Channel to the Volga River, were cowed and bewildered. Thousands of displaced persons - deported from Eastern Europe as forced labor during the war - crowded the streets in quest of food and shelter and the possibility of returning home.

It was a desperate period in German history. Food shortages were severe. Many starved, and infant mortality was twice that of the rest of Western Europe. The established exchange of goods and services collapsed; black markets took its place. Mail service ranged from impaired to nonexistent. Rail service was sporadic and transport by road made extremely difficult by the ravages of war and the shortage of gasoline.

In the spring of 1945, the task of occupying forces was to institute some kind of civil order until trained military government personnel could replace combat troops. This occurred around the time of the Potsdam conference in July and August (of Churchill/Attlee, Truman and Stalin). At that summit, the Allies divided Germany into four occupation zones: for the United States, a southern portion containing Bavaria; for Britain, the industrial northern Rhineland and Ruhr Valley; for France, the southern Rhineland and territory along the Alsatian border; and for the Soviets, a zone running from the Elbe River to the Oder-Neisse Line, which formed the new Polish frontier, reducing prewar German territory by nearly a quarter. The three Western zones were each placed under the jurisdiction of a senior official of the occupying powers with the title of high commissioner.

German civil governance, once demonstrably efficient and unchallengeable, had come to an end. Ultimate authority was now exercised by occupation forces down to the county (Kreis) level. These forces maintained order, but it took the better part of eighteen months for communications to be restored to predictable levels. During the winter of 1945-6, fuel shortages obliged even Konrad Adenauer, who was to become chancellor four years later, to sleep in a heavy overcoat.

Occupied Germany carried not only the burden of its immediate past but also of the complexity of its history. In the seventy-four years since unification, Germany had been governed successively as a monarchy, a republic and a totalitarian state. By the end of the war, the only memory of stable governance harked back to unified Germany's beginning, under the chancellorship of Otto von Bismarck (1871-90). From then until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the German empire was hounded by what Bismarck would call the 'nightmare' of hostile external coalitions provoked into existence by Germany's military potential and intransigent rhetoric. Because unified Germany was stronger than any of the many states surrounding it and more populous than any save Russia, its growing and potentially dominant power turned into the permanent security challenge of Europe.

After the First World War, the newly established Weimar Republic was impoverished by inflation and economic crises and considered itself abused by the punitive provisions included in the postwar Treaty of Versailles. Under Hitler after 1933, Germany sought to impose its totalitarianism on all of Europe. In short, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, united Germany had been by turns either too strong or too weak for the peace of Europe. By 1945, it had been reduced to its least secure position in Europe and the world since unification.

The task of restoring dignity and legitimacy to this crushed society fell to Konrad Adenauer, who had served as lord mayor (OberbŸrgermeister) of Cologne for sixteen years before being dismissed by Hitler. Adenauer was by his background fortuitously cast for a role that required at once the humility to administer the consequences of unconditional surrender and the strength of character to regain an international standing for his country among the democracies. Born in 1876 - only five years after German unification under Bismarck - Adenauer was for the rest of his life associated with his native city of Cologne, with its towering Gothic cathedral overlooking the Rhine and its history as an important locus in the Hanseatic constellation of mercantile city-states.

As an adult, Adenauer had experienced the unified German state's three post-Bismarck configurations: its truculence under the Kaiser, domestic upheavals under the Weimar Republic, and adventurism under Hitler, culminating in self-destruction and disintegration. In striving to remake a place for his country in a legitimate postwar order, he faced a legacy of global resentment and, at home, the disorientation of a public battered by the long sequence of revolution, world war, genocide, defeat, partition, economic collapse and loss of moral integrity. He chose a course both humble and daring: to confess German iniquities; accept the penalties of defeat and impotence, including the partition of his country; allow the dismantling of its industrial base as war reparations; and seek through submission to build a new European structure within which Germany could become a trusted partner. Germany, he hoped, would become a normal country, though always, he knew, with an abnormal memory.

From Early Life to Internal Exile

Adenauer's father, Johann, once a non-commissioned officer in the Prussian army, was for three decades a clerical civil servant in Cologne. Lacking education beyond mandatory primary school, Johann was determined to provide his children with educational and career opportunities. Adenauer's mother shared this objective; the daughter of a bank clerk, she supplemented Johann's income through needlework. Together, they assiduously prepared young Konrad for school and strove to transmit their Catholic values to him. Cognizance of sin and social responsibility ran as an undercurrent throughout Adenauer's childhood. As a student at the University of Bonn, he achieved a reputation for commitment through his habit of plunging his feet into a bucket of ice water to overcome the fatigue of late-night studies. Adenauer's degree in law and family background of service induced him to join the Cologne civil service in 1904. He was given the title of Beigeordneter, or assistant mayor, with particular responsibility for taxation. In 1909, he was promoted to senior deputy mayor and in 1917 became lord mayor of Cologne.

Mayors of Cologne were typically former civil servants who strove to elevate their conduct above the violent and intensely partisan politics of the era. Adenauer's reputation grew to the extent that, in 1926, there were even discussions in Berlin as to whether he might be drafted as chancellor of a national unity government. The effort fell apart because of the difficulty of finding a nonpartisan alliance, Adenauer's condition for accepting the position.

Adenauer's first conspicuous national conduct occurred in connection with Hitler's designation as chancellor on January 30, 1933. To fortify his position, Hitler called a general election and proposed to the German parliament the so-called Enabling Act, suspending the rule of law and the independence of civil institutions. Adenauer, in the month after Hitler's designation as chancellor, undertook three public demonstrations of opposition. In the Prussian Upper House, to which he belonged ex officio as lord mayor of Cologne, he voted against the Enabling Act. He refused an invitation to welcome Hitler at Cologne airport during the election campaign. And in the week before the election he ordered the removal of Nazi flags from bridges and other public monuments. Adenauer was dismissed from office the week after Hitler's foreordained electoral victory.

After his dismissal, Adenauer appealed for sanctuary to an old school friend who had become the abbot of a Benedictine monastery. It was granted, and in April Adenauer took up residence in Maria Laach Abbey, 50 miles south of Cologne on the Laacher See. There, his main occupation was to immerse himself in two papal encyclicals - promulgated by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI - which applied Catholic teaching to social and political developments, especially the evolving condition of the modern working class. In these encyclicals, Adenauer encountered doctrines that meshed with his political convictions: emphasizing Christian rather than political identity, condemning communism and socialism, ameliorating class struggle through humility and Christian charity, and ensuring free competition instead of cartel practices.

Adenauer's time at Maria Laach was not to last. While attending a Christmas Mass - which had drawn people from the surrounding area to see and support him - Nazi officials pressured the abbot to evict his admired guest. Adenauer left the following January.

The next decade of his life brought difficulty and instability. There were moments of grave danger, especially after the unsuccessful plot on Hitler's life in July 1944 organized by representatives of the Prussian upper class and including remnants of pre-Nazi political and military life. Hitler's vengeance sought to destroy all these elements. For a while, Adenauer escaped their fate by traveling peripatetically, never staying in one place for more than twenty-four hours. Danger never altered his rejection of Hitler for trampling on the rule of law, which Adenauer considered to be the sine qua non of the modern state. Although a known dissenter, Adenauer had been unwilling to join with anti-regime conspirators, whether civilian or military, largely because he was skeptical of their possibilities of success. On the whole, as one scholar describes it, 'he and his family did their best to live as quietly and inconspicuously as possible'.

Despite his departure from politics, the Nazis eventually imprisoned him. In fall 1944, he spent two months in a prison cell from the window of which he witnessed executions, including that of a sixteen-year-old boy; above him he heard the screams of other inmates as they were tortured.

In the end, his son Max, who was serving in the German army, managed to secure his release. As American tanks entered the Rhineland in February 1945, Adenauer began to think about whether he might find a role in his militarily defeated, morally devastated, economically reeling and politically collapsed country.

The Road to Leadership

Hitler's savage reaction to the July coup in the frenzied final year of the Second World War had decimated the ranks of those who might try to succeed him. Some senior Social Democratic Party politicians had survived the concentration camps - including Adenauer's later rival Kurt Schumacher - and possessed the political stature for the position of chancellor. But they lacked followings large enough to win the public support needed to implement the country's unconditional surrender and its accompanying penalties - preconditions for gaining the confidence of the Western Allies.

In May 1945, the American forces that first occupied Cologne reinstated Adenauer as mayor, but with the transfer of the city to British authority as a result of the Potsdam agreement, tensions arose, and the British dismissed him within a few months. Though he was temporarily excluded from political activity by the occupying power, Adenauer quietly concentrated on building a political base in preparation for the re-emergence of German self-government.

In December 1945, Adenauer attended a meeting to form a new party influenced by both Catholic and Protestant Christianity. Former members of the Catholic Center Party, with which Adenauer had been associated as mayor of Cologne, as well as of the conservative German National People's Party and the liberal German Democratic Party, were in attendance. Many had opposed Hitler, and some had been imprisoned for their resistance. The group lacked a clear political direction and doctrine; indeed, the tone of discussions at this initial meeting was more socialist than classically liberal. In part because of Adenauer's objections, the question of first principles was put aside, and the group simply settled on its name: the Christian Democratic Union.

The following month, Adenauer helped to imbue the CDU with its political philosophy as the party of democracy, social conservatism and European integration, rejecting Germany's recent past as well as totalitarianism in any form. At a January 1946 congress of the CDU's important members in the British occupation zone in Herford, Westphalia, Adenauer elaborated on these principles and consolidated his leadership of the nascent party.

Adenauer's first public speech after the end of the war on March 26, 1946, was a preview of his subsequent political leadership. Criticizing Germany's conduct under Hitler, Adenauer asked an audience of thousands in the severely damaged main hall of the University of Cologne how it was possible that the Nazis had come to power. They had then committed 'great crimes', he said, and the Germans could find their way toward a better future only by coming to terms with their past. Such an effort would be necessary for their country's revival. From this perspective, Germany's attitude after the Second World War needed to be the opposite of its reaction to the First. Instead of indulging in self-pitying nationalism once again, Germany should seek its future within a unifying Europe. Adenauer was proclaiming a strategy of humility.

Tall and seemingly imperturbable, Adenauer tended to speak tersely, though mitigated by the lilting tones of the Rhineland, more conciliatory than Prussian speech, in which, according to Mark Twain, sentences march across conversations like military formations. (The Rhineland had had an autonomous history until it was acquired by Prussia in 1814-15.) At the same time, he exuded vitality and self-assurance. His style was the antithesis of the blaring charismatic quality of the Hitler era and aspired to the serene authority of the pre-First World War generation, which had operated while governed by restraint and shared values.

All of these qualities, together with the standing he had acquired by a decade of ostentatious aloofness from Hitler, made Adenauer the most obvious candidate to lead the new democratic party. But he was not above practical maneuvers to achieve his end. The first CDU meeting was set up with one chair positioned at the head of the table. Adenauer strode up to it and announced, 'I was born on 5 January 1876, so I am probably the oldest person here. If nobody objects, I will regard myself as president by seniority.' That elicited both laughter and acquiescence; from that point on, he would steward the party for over fifteen years.