The Professor

The first time Professor Walter Hallstein visited the U.S., he was marched ashore at the point of an M1 carbine in 1944. He was a P.W., an owlish-looking Wehrmacht lieutenant captured at Cherbourg, and he was bound for the stockade at Camp Como, Miss. He didn't mind much. "It was like a monastery," he recalls, "an ideal place for study. No alcohol, no girls, no outside diversions."

Last week, a bachelor at 51, the Herr Professor was back in the U.S. But behind him this time stood the growing importance of the Bonn Republic. The Wehrmacht lieutenant was now Bonn's first Secretary of State and, in all but name, Foreign Minister of the new West German Republic. His destination was not a prison camp but Washington's Georgetown University, where he was scheduled to deliver a lecture.

Candid Answer. In prison camp, Hallstein had quickly been spotted as a "good German," and hustled home after V-E Day to help remake his country. Elected rector of Frankfurt University, he was busy trying to run a university of penniless students and wrecked buildings when his phone rang one day in the spring of 1950. The call summoned Hallstein to Bonn. There Chancellor Konrad Adenauer asked: "What do you know about the Schuman Plan?" Replied the professor candidly: "Something less than there has been in the newspapers." Hallstein emerged from the Chancellery as chief of Germany's Schuman Plan delegation.

When the Allies allowed Bonn to have foreign affairs, Professor Hallstein, dressed in a worn tweed jacket and odd slacks, became the postwar successor to arrogant Nazi Joachim von Ribbentrop. He was no pro, but that fact was reassuring to Germany's unforgiving neighbors. To ease French fears that Germany might dominate the Schuman Plan, he quietly pointed out that the Ruhr will contribute more than half of the coal and one-third of the steel, but will have only two members on the nine-man high authority.

Wined & Dined. Arriving in Washington last week without fanfare, and all but ignored in the press, he expressed a mild hope that the State Department might find a little time for him. The Department did better than that. He chatted privately for 20 minutes with Dean Acheson, dined with two assistant secretaries, and was cross-questioned by 20 State Department German specialists.

Their verdict was the same as that of Western European diplomats: even those who question Germany's regeneration do not question the professor's sincerity. He calls European unity "the new reality," but realizes as well as anyone else that the new reality has not yet been sold to the West Germans themselves. Says the professor: "We won't stop trying."

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