Tiger, Burning Bright

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The drying scrawls of ink on parchment attested that Germany was a world power once more--for good or evil.

Only seven years after its total defeat, its penance was ended, the penance which its conquerors had vowed to impose for half a century. Germany--the richest, most populous, most important two-thirds of it--had climbed from defeat through vassalage to partnership with its Western conquerors. Its "contract" with the Western allies provided a peace more generous than even the most hopeful German could have imagined in the graveyard days of 1945. Its European Defense compact with the Western neighbors so recently overrun by German Panzers gave West Germans the right to have Panzers again--and the soldiers, rifles and munitions to go with them.

Already the defeated are living and eating better than many of the victors. West Germany's great industry, miraculously reclaimed from the rubble of surrender, competes seriously with the industry of the winners. Its Deutsche mark is sounder than France's franc, its economy (though not its moral position) less precarious in many ways than Britain's. By the act of affixing signatures last week to the peace contract and European Defense treaties, the Western democracies accepted the re-emergence of West Germany as a first-class European power. With this acceptance went the knowledge that soon the Federal Republic of Germany will be more than that--it will likely become the greatest power on the Continent outside Russia.

Without a Name. By the usual standards of human feeling, West Germany's 48 million people should have been elated over their change of fortune. But in what passes for German civilization in A.D. 1952, usual standards do not apply. In the week that brought it freedom and partnership with the Western democracies, West Germany was afflicted with a fever of doubts, fears, misgivings and unsatisfied yearnings. It was a complex state of mind that defied diagnosis and eluded a label. It was not simply "neutralism" or "nationalism" or "contrariness" or the cynical fatalism of ohne mich (count me out), but a combination of many things. Professed horror of a new war. Fear that West Germany is saying goodbye to a third of its land and 18 million brothers encased in Russia's East zone (not to mention the equally large chunk of Germany gobbled by Communist Poland). Understandable reluctance to take up arms that might some day be used against Germans in the East. The desire for a return of all that was German beyond the Elbe. The vision of a neutral, unified Germany situated like an annealing cartilage between the raw joints of East and West. The calculations of power politics. A brooding sense of guilt in some; a bland lack of it in others. A survival of the "Master Race" madness that twice in less than 30 years has threatened the world and in the end brought a stupefied, battered but unrepentant Germany to its knees.

Carriers of this fever of dissatisfaction were of all kinds--pacifists and generals, Lutheran pastors and conscientious objectors, idealists, industrialists fascinated by the historic markets to the East, maimed and forgotten veterans, homeless refugees from Communism, pan-Germans, threateningly resurgent neo-Nazis, Russian agents, tired old men who have abandoned hope and young men who have never known it. In short, the Germans were still Germans, a puzzle to the world--and to themselves.

Forgive or Forget. For all the diversity of the symptoms that beset the new Germany, the illness had a symbol and a spokesman. His name: Kurt Schumacher. Sick, dedicated, a man of relentless will, he lay in his cottage last week atop a wooded hill overlooking Bonn, provisional capital of the truncated nation he longs to govern and swerve from its present course. In the week when West Germany signed its contract with the West, Kurt Schumacher declared: the German who accepts this treaty "ceases to be a German." Six months ago he told an Englishman: "I will fight the signature of the European Defense Community. If it is signed, I will fight its ratification. If it is ratified, I will campaign against it while the soldiers are being mobilized. If I were then elected [Chancellor], I would repudiate the treaty as soon as possible."

These are the words of one of the most important men in Europe today, a man whose passionate contradictions and fierce convictions speak directly for one of every seven West Germans and emotionally for many, many more. If an election were held today, many Germans believe, he would topple Chancellor Konrad Adenauer from office. To the U.S. State Department, Schumacher is the man of the West who most threatens what the Western democracies are trying to build in Europe.

He is the maimed reminder of the few Germans who resisted the Nazis and survived; yet he is the gospel-preacher of revived German nationalism. He is a man who will not let the Germans forget the sins and crimes of Naziism (he constantly reminds them of the wrongs to the Jews), yet acts as if the Western world should consider those sins forgiven if not forgotten. He advocates the rearmament of Germany against the Russian threat, but leads the fight against the rearmament now offered the Germans by the West. He is a democrat, but presides over the Social Democrats, the second most powerful political party in Germany, like a dictator. An implacable enemy of the East, he is also an uncompromising opponent of the West. Kurt Schumacher, a man of 57 whom sheer will power seems to keep alive, is the tiger burning bright in Germany's dark forests.

His comfortable, eight-room house above Bonn serves Kurt Schumacher like a general's command post. Propped up in bed, he directs his followers in a battle that may determine the future not only of Germany, but of the North Atlantic alliance. His stand is as inflexibly direct as a Mauser bullet: no cooperation with the West until all Germany is united, given full sovereignty and allowed to rearm as it pleases. Schumacher's goal: a Socialist government for united Germany, and if possible a Socialist U.S. of Europe.

The Veterans. Schumacher is a crippled, wasted man with a long, bony face and metallic eyes. His right arm is gone, severed at the shoulder by a Russian machine-gun burst in World War I. His left leg is gone, his digestion is chaotic, his heart unpredictable--the inheritance, in part at least, of ten brutal years in Dachau. When he talks, his left hand flicks and darts and claws at the air, and his eyes, affected by years of Nazi beatings, roll and bulge in a way that gives a continually fanatical cast to words that often do border on fanaticism. He lives on cigarettes, barbiturates and coffee; he wears perpetual pain as casually as an undershirt. Partly paralyzed, he is often confined to bed for prolonged periods--as he was again last week.

The sixth child and only son of a Prussian civil servant, Kurt Schumacher was born in the town of Kulm on the Vistula. It is now a part of Poland--to Schumacher a constant reminder of Germany's dismemberment in two wars. He went into the Kaiser's army in the summer of 1914, but in less than six months his soldiering was over, his arm gone. In an army hospital, he taught himself in two weeks to write lefthanded. Disgusted with "the Kaiser's war," he turned to Socialism, read Marx and was impressed, read Lenin and disagreed (particularly with his contempt for democracy), earned his doctorate at the University of Muenster. He rejected the Marxist notion of violent class revolution, embraced instead the doctrine of democratic evolution through parliamentary means. ". . . Marxism is no catechism for us," he said. "It is nevertheless the method to which we owe more than any other sociological method in the world." Unlike the ripsnorting old Sozis of the 1920s with their red caps and red scarves, the Schumacher Socialists of today have lost their enthusiasm for all-out nationalization of "all means of production, distribution and exchange" and advocate a more tepid Socialism like the Swedes and the British Laborites. They want some nationalization, some private ownership. They advocate something called Mitbestimmung (co-determination), which means giving workers the right to share with management in the operation of industry.

In the 1920s Schumacher, despite his missing arm, was a plump and healthy Socialist who enjoyed good food and the company of actresses, read detective stories as well as the turgid literature of Socialism, and liked to sit up late in a coffeehouse arguing politics. He early decided to remain a bachelor. "I am married to politics," he would say. From the beginning, he goaded Germany's older, more cautious Socialists. At the first weak rumblings of Naziism, in 1921, Schumacher organized young street fighters to combat the new evil, but the old Socialists would not get behind the movement.

Knock on the Door. Hitler was well on his way to power when Schumacher arrived in Berlin in 1930 as a newly elected Reichstag Deputy from Wuerttemberg. Almost immediately Schumacher made his mark. "He was most daring, most reckless, most lacking in respect," recalls the man who was then Reichstag president, "the same as today." His speeches were few but brash, sarcastic and courageous. One day in May 1932, after Goebbels had attacked the German Socialists on the Reichstag floor, Deputy Schumacher rose in fury to reply. "The whole National Socialist movement," he cried, "is only a lasting appeal to the inner swine-dog in man . . . For the first time in German political history, someone has succeeded in absolutely mobilizing German stupidity."

Down went Kurt Schumacher's name in the Nazis' black book. The day of reckoning came in March 1933. By that time, the Socialists were meeting clandestinely.; those in danger of arrest were told to find sanctuary in Prague. Schumacher would not go. Four months later, in a hideaway in Berlin, he heard the expected knock on the door. The Gestapo took him to the Heuberg concentration camp near Stuttgart. Schumacher coolly calculated thaO he would be in jail eleven years (he reckoned that by that time the Third Reich would have fought and lost a war). His calculation was close. He spent ten years in concentration camps, most of them at Dachau of gas-chamber notoriety. There he ran a web of anti-Nazi conspiracy. He served one nine-month stretch in solitary, and ended another with a 28-day hunger strike that brought ruin to his digestive system.

At line-up in Dachau one morning, the Nazi guard ordered the sick and disabled to form on the left, the able-bodied on the right. An instinct of danger swept over one-armed Kurt Schumacher. He stepped to the right and marched off with the ablebodied. The men on the left were never seen alive again. By 1943, so ill and ravaged that the Nazis set him free to go home to his sister's in Hannover to die, he was a pitiful walking cadaver, with ulcers, yellowing stumps for teeth, flickering eyesight. Schumacher still carried in him 17 pieces of shrapnel from World War I.

The Incorruptible. His old friends, seeing him again at war's end, hardly recognized him. The change was more than physical. His disposition had become icy and acerbic, his patience with arguers was gone, his confidence in his own judgment absolute. "He was a skeleton," says Carlo Schmid, now the No. 3 man in the party, "but there could be no doubt that he was the strongest power, that he had the greatest political brain, the most evident power of judgment. He had never given in to atmosphere or psychological pressures . . . [Now] he was as incorruptible as a geometrical theorem."

The human wreck that hobbled into the British occupation political office in Hannover and asked how to go about starting a political party made little impression--"An interesting but completely nondescript fellow," says a Briton who was there. Like all who spoke for a bona fide anti-Nazi group, Schumacher was told he could go ahead. He rallied Socialists around him, whipped up interest across Germany, paved the way for a national convention, the first for the Socialists since the Weimar days. There was no question who was boss, but there was a basic decision to be made.

The Communists clustered around Kurt Schumacher like hummingbirds around a morning glory; some were friends from Dachau days. They wanted a SocialistCommunist coalition which would make Berlin plumo for their plucking. Inside the party, a wing led by Otto Grotewohl, who had sat with Schumacher in the Reichstag, argued for the coalition. After all, they said, Communists and Socialists are ideological brothers. "Yes," Schumacher would reply, "like Cain & Abel." He detested the Communists as much as he had the Nazis, and blamed their war against Socialists in the Weimar days for Hitler's rise to power. Even Western occupation officials, still dazzled by the wartime alliance with Russia, pressed him to cooperate with the Communists. One day, after Schumacher had made a particularly violent anti-Communist speech, he was summoned to a high Western official's office.

"You must remember that the Russians are our allies," said the general. Retorted Schumacher: "You must remember that the Communists are our enemies."

Grotewohl went over to the Reds, and got his reward: today he is the captive Premier of Communist East Germany. But he took only a tiny splinter of Socialists with him. Schumacher and Ernst Reuter, now the strong-minded Socialist mayor of West Berlin, stood their ground. As much as the allied airlift of 1948-49, that Socialist resistance saved West Berlin for democracy. "No matter what we think of Schumacher now," a U.S. official confessed last week, "we will gladly pay him tribute for having been right about the Russians at a time when we were dead wrong."

Doctor's Verdict. But Kurt Schumacher was bound to resist the West, too. Speaking with the defiant snarl that often makes his mildest statements sound like ravings, reacting violently where a milder response might ease his way, he has made it hard for Westerners to trust him. In speech after speech, he attacked the West --first for having no policy, then for adopting a policy he did not like.

Some time before West Germany's election in 1949, his left leg became seriously diseased and, at the recommendation of General Clay's own chief medical officer, Schumacher gave in at last to the doctor's verdict--amputation. He had lived so long on painkilling drugs that the anesthesia barely worked, but soon after the operation he was puffing a cigarette and joking with the surgeons.

The more Kurt Schumacher's body failed, the stronger grew his will. From his bed, as from a throne, he dispatched lieutenants, issued orders, and whipped the Socialists into the most militant and best organized party in West Germany. He rose from his sickbed in time to campaign --workers wheeled him into meetings and carried him to the rostrum on their shoulders. His physical courage inspired his followers; his violence inflamed them. The Socialists polled nearly 7,000,000 votes. But it was not quite enough. The Christian Democrats polled slightly more. Not to Kurt Schumacher, the fierce and dedicated Socialist, but to slow, methodical Konrad Adenauer, the 73-year-old conservative Catholic from Cologne, fell the task of organizing the new West German state, Schumacher gave battle from the start.

A sympathetic correspondent watched Schumacher address a party meeting in Hannover and took away a frightening mental snapshot. "[When] he started to speak I could hardly believe my senses," wrote Leo Lania in the United Nations World. "Suddenly I felt as though I were back again in the late '205 in Berlin, at a Nazi meeting. It was not the content of Schumacher's speech that startled me. I had no objection to what he had to say . . . but the way he spoke was simply quite frightening. Unconsciously, he seemed to have acquired Hitler's terminology, his screeching mode of speech, his gestures and histrionic intonations . . . He barked like an SS sergeant."

On the floor of the Bundestag, where he deftly maneuvers a bloc of 130 Socialist Deputies (against some 200 who normally stand by Adenauer), Schumacher evokes the same feelings. With painful-looking gestures, hissing sentences, here a lightning jab and there a sour sarcasm, he seems--whether he means to or not-- the reincarnation of the rabble-rousers who all but destroyed his own body and led Germany down to catastrophe.

"No to All." One day, attacking Adenauer's cooperation with the occupiers, Schumacher looked at the Chancellor and growled: "Federal Chancellor of the Allies!" For that, he was suspended for 20 sessions (later reduced to four) and forced to make an apology which he obviously did not mean. To Adenauer's first proposal to bring together Germany and her Western neighbors, Schumacher replied: "No! to all [such] conservative, clerical, capitalist, cartelist attempts." The Schuman Plan is a near-relative of a proposal Kurt Schumacher has long urged, "socialized integration" of Western Europe's industry, but Schumacher issued a steely nein to the Schuman Plan because there was no socialism in it. "Federation," he argued, "must not be confused with a syndicate of private interests."

German rearmament seemed to horrify him at first, until he saw that it might be used as a bargaining weapon against the West. The European Army repels him because it confines Germany to military forces inside an international body. Proved anti-Nazi though he is, he talks like any Nazi general in his scorn of the French and Italians as soldiers. "The concept of a European army," says Schumacher, "is a fallacy, because six invalids cannot combine to make one athlete."

To Schumacher's Socialists, the peace contract is only half a peace: a compromise between occupation and partnership. It leaves the precious Saar in French hands for now; it "petrifies the division of Germany." The German yearning for the reunion of East and West Germany is common to all Germans, from those who long for Adolf Hitler's resurrection to those who worship the ikons of Stalinism. But Kurt Schumacher has made it his chief political issue.

To get East Germany back, he is quite willing to bargain with the Communists he hates. Had he not learned that compromise with the Communists is impossible? a reporter asked him. "I have also learned in my life that compromise with the property-owning class is also impossible," was Schumacher's unanswering answer. He believes that the Russians, knowing they would lose East Germany in any free election, might be willing to lose it in return for a united, neutral Germany whose Ruhr industries sell impartially to the East & West. Germany would probably then have to give up its participation in the European Army; Schumacher is quite willing to. America's atomic bomb is deterrent enough to hold off the Russians, he says. This line of argument is highly persuasive--to Germans: all gain and no sacrifice.

Iron Hand. Few doubt that Schumacher's desire for German unity is sincere. It is an incidental (even his critics admit) but nonetheless important fact that with German unification the heavily Socialist and Protestant areas of East Germany would give the Social Democrats the votes they need to beat Adenauer and win power.

As it is, Schumacher's Social Democrats (the SPD) control nearly a third of the Bundestag, have the support of 28 newspapers, command the voting allegiance of most of West Germany's 6,000,000 trade unionists, and boast 650,000 dues-paying regulars. Schumacher has built up a vast Socialist intelligence service. Through the big Socialist following in East Germany, he commands the best intelligence available of what the Russians and German Reds are up to. The U.S. and British occupation officials have found it invaluable.

Schumacher's iron hand brooks no opposition in his own party. He is the SPD --boss, organizer, judge, theoretician, tactician and strategist. For questioning some of Schumacher's violent stands, three of the strongest and, to the West, most friendly Socialists in Germany have been consigned to Schumacher's limbo. They are called "the three mayors"--Ernst Reuter of West Berlin, Wilhelm Kaisen of Bremen and Max Brauer of Hamburg, a onetime U.S. citizen.

Ten Cigarettes, One Cigar. The Cause is what remains of life for Kurt Schumacher. He has no hobbies, no social friends, little taste or strength for recreation. His home above the Rhine (originally built for a polio victim) has an elevator to carry him from his upstairs bedroom to his downstairs study, and a terrace where on sunny days he reads, dashes off memos and receives a steady stream of callers who come for inspiration, discipline or orders. A lively boxer named Ajax sits at his feet; a charming German widow of 32 is secretary, nurse and traveling companion. "I have no private life," explains Frau Annemarie Ren-ger, who grew up with Socialism, lost her husband in the war and came to Kurt Schumacher offering to be "his right arm and left leg." She watches over his smoking (ten denicotinized cigarettes and one cigar a day) and his rest (ten to twelve hours a day).

In his austere, lonely dedication, Kurt Schumacher manipulates a party and directs a force that will last after his own broken body and strong will give out. To the men who know and work for him, he is neither the dangerous rabble-rouser nor neo-nationalist he seems, but a savior of Germany. They excuse his violent speeches. Often, they say, he will descend from a rostrum shaking his head and murmuring, "Well, I believe that I was again somewhat too sharp." His byword, they insist, is not nein, but ja, aber so nicht--which means "yes, but not this way." Schumacher himself professes to be hurt that the West misunderstands him so. Can't they see that his party is pure, and that the big Ruhr industrialists who once helped Hitler are the men behind Adenauer? He is convinced that the allies favored Adenauer because he is more tractable and conservative: What can you expect of the Wall Street lawyers and bankers who have run the occupation? "I wouldn't be a pleasant bedfellow," he once told a U.S. official, "but I would be more dependable." U.S. officials are skeptical.

Man in the Way. On the course the West has chosen, Kurt Schumacher is the Man in the Way. For four years the West has labored to build a wall to contain Communism. The German peace contract would complete that wall in Europe, the European Army give the West means to defend it. Schumacher, with his obstructionist "Yes, but" hopes to defeat both plans. Why? "We are neither Russians nor Americans nor Britons nor Frenchmen," he says. "We are Germans. We in Germany promote neither Russian nor American nor British nor French policies. We promote German policies."

Once, when dedicated German Kurt Schumacher harangued the Bundestag, he was told: "Your time is up." "On the clock it may be, mein Herr" answered Schumacher. "But politically it is not."

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