LAND OF THE ALMOST-FREE

WEST GERMANY

"I am very satisfied," said stern-faced Konrad Adenauer last week, with a rare smile. He, the Chancellor and Foreign Minister of West Germany, had just come from a meeting in Paris with the U.S. Secretary of State, British Foreign Secretary and French Foreign Minister. For the first time, the German had been treated as an equal by the conquerors. "We have become partners only six years after the collapse," said Adenauer trimphantly.

The end of the Occupation, and the departure of the Allied Commissioners, was drawing near--but not complete independence. What made Adenauer rejoice was the drawing of a "roof treaty," to go into effect when--in the terms of the occupying powers' odd figure of speech--the walls are added. The treaty will make West Germany an almost-free state. West Germany must agree to let allied troops remain, but as defenders, not occupiers. She must allow the allies to intervene if the security of their forces seems threatened, from within Germany or without. Most important of all, she will get her near-independence only when she has contributed forces (probably twelve divisions) to a European army, and this army plan is ratified by all the Western nations and the West Germans themselves.

These ifs are the walls, waiting to be put up, but last week the roof was ready and Konrad Adenauer could smile.

Westchester-on-the-Rhine. Striking proof of Germany's resurgence is to be found in the university town of Bonn (pop. 124,000), on the banks of the Rhine 15 miles south of Cologne. It lies in the British zone, but like Washington, D.C., it is a neutral enclave, which West Germans have made their capital. In recognition of this, the U.S. is now moving out of its occupation headquarters in Frankfurt (in the unbombed I. G. Farben office building), to make its new GHQ in Bonn. This move is symbolic of Bonn's status as the newest and one of the most important of world capitals.

Almost every day this month, moving vans from Frankfurt-am-Main have lumbered into Bonn. Behind them trailed the chrome-grinning cars of U.S. occupation families, loaded with children, cats and dogs, Bavarian cuckoo clocks. Some 1,000 U.S. occupation employees and dependents attached to the Office of U.S. High Commissioner for Germany--HICOG for short--have moved to the capital. In overcrowded Bonn, they will jostle beside burgeoning French and British communities.

To make the move, the U.S. has spent nearly $25 million to build a Westchester-on-the-Rhine on several acres of apple orchards and woodland in Bad Godesberg, a suburb on the southern edge of Bonn. For HICOG headquarters, there is a seven-section concrete and glass structure with a 1,500-seat cafeteria and a 100,000-volume library. Four miles away stands a cluster of new two-story apartment houses, 458 apartments in all, each furnished down to the last curtain, dessert spoon and teacup. They range from tasteful bedroom, living room, kitchen combinations for bachelors to four-bedroom duplexes, and offer three kinds of decor: Greenwich Village modern, heavy German, or imitation French classical. Rent: free.

In the midst of this upholstered island stand three pillars of American life overseas--the PX, the commissary and the newsstand, well-stocked with comic books and westerns. For recreation there are playgrounds, a gymnasium, bowling alleys. It is all strictly U.S.A.: life can proceed without the need of a single phrase in German (a language which a surprising number of American occupiers in Germany have ignored). At a discreet distance are two other U.S.-financed housing projects for HICOG's 540 German employees.

To the townspeople of Bonn (whose 3,000-year-old community should be accustomed to occupiers: the Romans, Prussians, French and British), it is all a little bewildering. "I thought they were going to pull out of Germany," grumbled a storekeeper. "If they are investing so much money in this, they'll probably stay for ages." They will--but when the final agreements are signed, the Allied establishments will become embassies.

The Chancellor. Today in Bonn, the birthplace of Beethoven, the streets are clotted with traffic, abustle with politicians, stonemasons, civil servants, carpenters and lobbyists.

Foremost among the politicians is Chancellor Adenauer, Catholic and conservative, the sharp-nosed, waxen old man of 75 who stolidly labors to transform his sullen, splintered half-country from a proconsul's province into a nation. Through the tall windows of his green-draped chancellery, Adenauer gazes at the green vineyards and the broad, busy Rhine. Beyond it stand the myth-shrouded Siebengebirge--the Seven Hills. One of them is the Drachenfels, where Siegfried slew sulphurous Fafnir the Dragon and drank its blood to become stronger. The legend still stirs the glory-conscious Germans, hundreds of whom climb the Drachenfels every Sunday to see the dragon's cave.

On another of the seven hills, Petersberg, stands the ornate hotel where in 1938 Chamberlain stayed while negotiating with Hitler the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. In the same hotel today sit the three Allied High Commissioners (John J. McCloy, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick and Andre Franc,ois-Poncet), the occupation rulers of West Germany. At least once every week, Adenauer crosses the Rhine to confer with the commissioners, returning to impose their wishes on a balky Parliament or to plot ways of getting around them. For this, he has earned from German wits the nickname Moses--"He goes up to the mountain to get his laws, then comes down and breaks them."

The joke applies more to West Germans as a whole than to Adenauer. He is generally cooperative with the West (too much so, his enemies complain), and he is too shrewd to break the High Commissioners' stone tablets. He uses a sculptor's chisel.

At the Petersberg hotel today, in fact, both sides use sculptor's tools. The High Commissioners no longer order, they seek to persuade. They are committed to the premise that there can be no stable Western Europe and no workable North Atlantic defense without a West Germany that is economically healthy and militarily willing to help. Germany no longer begs, with the voice of a conquered wrongdoer; she demands, brash in the knowledge that the West will pay heavily for West German help.

"It's So Safe to Criticize." TIME Bureau Chief Eric Gibbs wrote from Bonn last week:

"The Germans are not rebels by nature. It is a notable fact of their strange national history that they have never had a successful revolution--there is no German counterpart of Yorktown, Naseby or the taking of the Bastille, and little of the democratic yearnings that brought such events about. By long tradition they respect effective authority--good or bad. When they cease to respect it, it is because they believe the force behind the authority is no longer there. While the Western powers still hold great authority under the occupation, they now fear to use it. Since we are dedicated to the setting up of free democratic institutions and we are trying to enlist voluntary German cooperation, the big stick is out.

" 'It's so safe to criticize us,' a high occupation official remarked bitterly the other day. 'They know we won't put them in jail or a concentration camp.'

"The U.S. has given Germany millions more in aid of all kinds than she has taken in occupation costs, but recently in Bonn a German parliamentary delegation checking up on occupation costs asked to inspect High Commissioner McCloy's home to see if charges for remodeling and redecorating were excessive.

"The prevailing tone of voice here today is something between a whine and a growl. What sometimes muffles this unpleasant sound is the sweetly reasonable voice of Adenauer himself . . . He is for the Schuman (coal and steel) Plan and the Pleven (European army) Plan. He is against both neo-Nazis and Communists. He manages to be on the side of the angels, the Anglo-Saxons and even the French . . . But the voice of Adenauer is a voice that finds little echo in the German nation. He has great qualities, but not the capacity to evoke affection for himself or real enthusiasm."

"My Esteemed Reichsfuehrer." A far shriller and more demanding voice in Germany today is that of Adenauer's arch political enemy, Socialist Kurt Schumacher, 56. It is not the voice of cooperation, but the high-strung voice of a nationalist, a patriot gone zealot. Schumacher is a frail, cadaverous man of unexpected vigor. He gave his right arm to the Fatherland on the Russian front in World War I, lost his left leg following his ten years in Nazi concentration camps. In the Bundestag, where he holds great sway, he is a frightening performer. He jabs at every word with the bony fingers of his one hand. He has staked his future--and would stake Germany's--on the narrow and dangerous path of fervent nationalism and neutralism. Even in his own party, Schumacher causes discomfort; one high party colleague sarcastically refers to him as "my esteemed Reichsfuehrer."

But Schumacher, with his violent stand against West German cooperation with the West, against West German rearmament for defense, against the Schuman Plan, speaks for an ever-growing segment of the German people--probably far more than any other German politician. In 1949 his SPD Party won 131 Bundestag seats against 139 won by Adenauer's Christian Democrats. If a federal election were held now, Schumacher's would probably become the largest party in the Bundestag, supported by the votes of at least 7,500,000 Germans. If East and West Germany were united (as Schumacher keeps demanding), and elections were free, he certainly would become Chancellor. Or if West Berlin were to be included politically in West Germany (as Schumacher also demands), he would clearly be Germany's top politico, for the party of Berlin's able Mayor Ernst Reuter is the party of Schumacher.

"On his past form," wrote Gibbs, "Schumacher could be expected to play a ruthless opportunist game, trying to maintain a neutral Germany high on the international fence by the old device of blackmailing both sides. Schumacher is no Communist, but in the end he would be playing the Communist game by undoing schemes of West European cooperation."

It is the spirit that Schumacher symbolizes, more than the particular program he advocates, that catches the imagination of a nation that still dreams of Siegfried, finds it hard to learn from past errors and even harder to understand democracy. The spirit hovers constantly over the negotiators at Petersberg, reminding them, as they struggle for the Germans' help in solving "the Russian problem," that the old and dangerous "German problem" is itself still very much alive.

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