Ja or Nein

(See Cover)

Three cars, one bearing the black, red and gold pennant of the West German Federal Republic, wound upwards through the vineyards on the east bank of the Rhine. The first car was a Porsche, weighed down by two policemen; the second, a huge Mercedes with two blue spotlights blinking. A smaller Mercedes brought up the rear, and in it, four policemen sat within gripping distance of four submachine guns.

The three cars came to a halt in the village of Rhoendorf, across the Rhine from Bonn. While they waited, a tall old man, whose face is a graven image, strode down the 53 steps leading from his villa to the street. The policemen's iron heels clicked in unison and the old man, with no smile, lowered himself into the cushions of the big Mercedes. The convoy moved off, purring through vineyards and pine woods until it came to the Autobahn and merged with the traffic flowing towards the Ruhr.

"How fast are we going, please?" said the old man, leaning forward.

"One hundred twenty kilometers, Herr Bundeskanzler."

"Go a little faster," commanded Konrad Adenauer, and the needle leaped up to a steady 130 (81 m.p.h.). 15 Million Posters. Almost every day for the past month, the Federal Chancellor of Germany has been urging his driver on. It is election time in Germany, and before the votes are counted on Sept. 6 he hopes to drive 6,000 miles to deliver 45 major speeches. Hundreds of other candidates are also stumping the land.

With less than two weeks to go, 65 different parties are promising the voters everything from a Hohenzollern restoration to a holy war against Russia. Fifteen million posters and 60 million leaflets extol the panaceas of Nazis and Nihilists, Regionalists and Royalists, Capitalists and Socialists. Catholics and Communists. It did not help at all that two groups, with separate slates, presented themselves to the voters as one and the same party: the German Reich Party.

In a nation where democracy has yet to sink its roots deep. 33 million Germans are eligible to vote, and probably 80% of them will. They will elect 484 deputies to the Bundestag, but to most of them the issue is simpler than that. The issue is Ja or Nein for the man whom Winston Churchill has called the greatest German statesman since Bismarck: Konrad Adenauer. Adenauer himself believes that the "fate of Europe, the fate of Germany, the fate of our Christian civilization depends on the outcome of September 6." There is much in what he says.

Defeat for Adenauer would be regarded in Moscow as a major tactical gain. In Germany, it might easily lead to the kind of governmental chaos that emasculated the Weimar Republic in the '20s.

Victory for Adenauer would be great news for the West. It would: 1) confirm Germany's decision to rearm on the side of the West; 2) strengthen Germany's slow experiment in democracy by continuing strong, also stable government. It would bolster the faltering cause of European Union, in which Konrad Adenauer devoutedly believes.

Herr Professor. Adenauer has governed West Germany since 1949. Many Germans regard him as the father in Vaterland. He seems to tower above them like some eternal Herr Professor, not to be argued with, only to be obeyed.

At 77, Adenauer is stiff and unbending, a man of the old school who thinks children--and cabinet officers--should be seen and not heard. Age has not mellowed him, it has made him wise; power has not wearied him, but it has made him as hard as nails.

Opponents call Adenauer foxy, and he is cunning. A more important characteristic is his stonewall immovability, once he is convinced. By refusing to budge an inch in argument, the stonewall Chancellor has worn out general after general of the Allied occupation armies, and sometimes as many as two or three High Commissioners at a time. Adenauer's guiding light is what he calls "the dynamic spiritual force that outlives all politics"--Christian humanism. "Christianity," he says, "is the answer to all ideologies."

Restoration. Firm in this faith, Roman Catholic Adenauer has led his conquered nation, which had been both monster and 'genius, insane destroyer and industrious creator, back into the society of free nations. This is his greatest claim on the German electorate.

Eight years after the Goetterdaemmerung of 1945, the Western half of Germany is rapidly becoming the most powerful nation in Europe. U.S. aid got the wheels of industry turning; German hard work turned revival into boom. Last week Chancellor Adenauer, touring his busy nation, watched farmers getting in what looked like the biggest harvest since World War II. Franconia's hop fields promised all the beer Germans could drink; the sunny Moselle Valley flowed with good white wine. So fatly prosperous was the countryside that one small town ordered all its councilmen's chairs to be taken out and widened.

Last week the Ruhr's industrial workers were returning from paid vacations. Half a million Germans traveled outside their country in the first six months of 1953, many of them in the humpbacked little Volkswagen that are driving British cars off Central Europe's roads. Millions more camped by picture-postcard rivers or along the Baltic shores. Germans pointed Leicas at Rome's Colosseum, Istanbul's bazaars, Granada's Alhambra. Their wives thumbed the lingerie in the Faubourg St. Honore, where Parisian shopkeepers endured the hated language for the sake of the Deutsche mark. Richer folk drove to Greece by way of Yugoslavia, and one of them reminded his host that he had passed this way before--in 1941, in a tank.

Home again in Germany, the vacationists got down to work with the special "Teutonic fury" that is the pride of Germandom and the despair of all its neighbors. August's steel production equaled Britain's (or a rate of 17 million tons a year). Unemployment fell below the 1,000,000 mark for the first time since the war. In Stuttgart, five industrialists formed a new "Aero Union" that would leap into production as soon as the Allies remove controls from German aircraft industry--some time next year. The names of their firms: Messerschmitt, Dornier, Heinkel, Focke-Wulf and Daimler-Benz.

New Marks for Old. Not all the outward plenty has spread to the German people. Since the war, 200 new millionaires have risen up; but 10 million Germans are desperately poor. Two million new dwelling units have been built since 1945, but 4,000,000 more are needed.

The uneven distribution of Germany's new-found wealth gives the Socialists ammunition to fire at Adenauer. Their particular targets: Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard and Finance Minister Fritz Schaeffer, a pair of thrifty Bavarians who go together like stocks & bonds. These men prescribed hard remedies for Germany's sick economy--and they also effected a cure. Erhard, a professional economist, unshackled German industry from bureaucratic controls. One June day in 1948, he closed the banks and abolished the grotesquely inflated Reichsmark (1,000 marks for a carton of U.S. cigarettes). He introduced the new Deutsche mark at a rate of one to ten of the old Reichsmarks. The exchange wiped out many Germans' savings, but it restored the nation's faith in its currency. Overnight, business boomed.

Erhard has seen to it that business profits are high. Unemployment has kept the price of labor low. With Adenauer's backing, Finance Minister Schaffer slashed social security benefits to a bare minimum. Widows and veterans suffered, but the German budget balanced. Today, German workers are eating better and earning higher real wages than they did before the war. Most thanked Adenauer for it.

Beamter. The man they thank is a Rhenish bourgeois, and proud of it. The son of a Prussian official, Konrad Adenauer was born in the shadow of Cologne's magnificent Cathedral. His father wanted him to be a banker, but young Konrad was more impressed by the high Beamte (officials) who strode about the city in the name of the Kaiser's Reich. At 30, after studying law and economics, he became a Beamter too.

Promotions came fast for this grave young man with the Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and high, starched collar. In four years he was deputy mayor. One day in 1917, his driver fell asleep at the wheel and smashed into a streetcar. Adenauer's handsome features were frozen into the scarred mask that distinguishes him today. While he was in the hospital the mayor died, and Cologne's city fathers dropped in to give him the news. "It was a delegation," says Adenauer. "They wanted to make sure I was still normal." He was, so they named him mayor.

Devoted to the mellow, humanist culture of his native Rhineland, Adenauer makes no secret of his distaste for the "uncivilized" Prussians. In 1919 he approved a French-inspired attempt to detach the Rhineland from the Reich. It failed. Today, a German patriot, he is the world's most ardent champion of a Franco-German entente. Explaining his preferences, Adenauer, who seldom drinks, once observed: "There are three Germanys. One (Bavaria) is the Germany of beer. A second (Prussia) is the Germany of schnapps, and the third (the Rhineland) is the Germany of wine. The only people sober enough to rule all three in a sane, sensible manner are those from the wine country."

The Good Gardener. The Nazi revolution first came to light in the beer cellars of Bavaria. Prussians made it strong. One day in 1933 Hitler planned a visit to Cologne. His followers draped the Rhine bridge with swastika flags, but Adenauer ordered his police to tear them down. Hermann Goering moved in, fired the bold mayor and ran him out of town.

For the next twelve years Adenauer was a virtual prisoner in his home at Rhoendorf. "I became a very good gardener," he says. Twice the Gestapo arrested him, but he was treated as an Ehrenschutzhaeftling (honorary prisoner) and released unharmed. But Adenauer heard and saw enough of Gestapo brutality to feel bitterly ashamed of his countrymen.

Big Mistake. World War II came to an end for Konrad Adenauer on a quiet Sunday morning. The U.S. 9th Armored Division broke into Rhoendorf in its drive for the Remagen bridgehead. The lead tank fired three shells in the general direction of a 69-year-old gentleman who was quietly tilling his garden in overalls and straw hat. Adenauer threw himself down and escaped with nothing worse than bruises.

He was still convalescing when a message arrived from the U.S. commander in Cologne, reinstating him as mayor. Five months later, when Cologne became a part of the British zone, Adenauer was sacked for "inefficiency." The British government has since offered to "confess its mistake," but Adenauer has no hard feelings? Being fired by the British made him a hero, and his popularity boomed. He began laying the foundations for his Christian Democratic Union (C.D.U.), and when the Allies summoned a Parliamentary Council, he was named its president.

In the debates over a constitution for the new West German State, Adenauer threw his weight on the side of a strong executive, which he knew from experience was needed to govern Germany. Adenauer had his way, and, so far, the German constitution that resulted has proved far more workable than the French and Italian systems, which make the executive the prisoner of the legislature.

He also led the movement to establish the new German capital in his native Rhineland. "The future capital of Germany should be located among the vineyards," said he, "not in potato fields." One by one, Adenauer ticked off the other possibilities: Berlin--"a city where the monkeys still swing from the trees"; Frankfurt--"too immoral." Adenauer plumped for Bonn, which, conveniently, was within easy commuting distance from his home in Rhoendorf. As usual, he got what he wanted.

I Am 70%. The 1949 elections made Adenauer Chancellor by the irreducible margin of one vote (his majority in the Bundestag: 202 out of 402). His governing coalition has never commanded a steady majority, yet for four years Adenauer has given Germany the most stable government of any large nation in Europe. Most of the time he ruled by sheer force of character, ignoring hostile votes, whittling, down men whom he could not overawe, driving where he could not lead. He has the courage to be unpopular.

Adenauer hates to delegate power (he is his own Foreign Minister as well as Chancellor). He trusts no one's judgment but his own. and when subordinates fail to follow his reasoning, he raps out a sarcastic reprimand: "Mein lieber Freund, aren't you intelligent?" His Cabinet members protest that he acts first and consults them afterwards. Asked once if his colleagues would support a controversial measure, Adenauer snapped: "Don't worry about that. I am at least 70% of the Cabinet."

Vati. Adenauer takes his autocratic manners home from the office. His seven children are all grown, but they still understand that Vati (Daddy) knows best. "He rules our family with a strong hand," son Paul once explained. "If a rose tree must be transplanted, he decides when and where. If my sister wants to bake a cake, he must say yes or no. This is not unusual in Germany, you know. This is how it should be."

The Chancellor gets up at 6 a.m. and shuffles into the bathroom with note pad and pencil. "I get some of my best ideas when I am shaving." he explains. By the time daughter Lotte, 27, leaves for the village school where she teaches German, Vati is at work, dictating--in his flat, high-pitched voice--to a private secretary. It is a rigid schedule: the conferences with subordinates in the elegant Schaumburg Palais, the dictated memoranda, the noon nap, the evenings listening to recordings of Haydn, Mozart and Schubert.

Giving up his evenings to race about Germany, making speeches and pumping hands, wrenches the schedule-minded Chancellor more than he cares to admit. Asked how he manages to keep going, the old man replied: "First, one must be of good stock. Second, one must have great patience. There is also a third necessity. One must do everything in one's power for an ideal that one believes in. In my case, it is the ideal of saving Christian civilization ..."

Great Decision. All last week Adenauer preached his great idea to the German electorate. His biggest rally was at Frankfurt (pop. 524,000), a Socialist stronghold where he drew a Saturday afternoon crowd of 15,000. He was solemn, cool and didactic (and he reminded an American, seeing him for the first time, of Robert A. Taft). "Our country," said Adenauer, "is the point of tension between two world blocs . . . Long ago I made a great decision: we belong to the West, and not to the East . . . [German] isolation is an idea created by fools. It would mean that the U.S. would withdraw its troops from Europe. Meine Herren und Damen" the Chancellor said gravely, "the moment that happens, Germany will become a satellite . . ."

He was getting the biggest crowds, and was supremely confident of victory. U.S. officials in Germany, who want him to win but don't want to hurt his chances by saying so, wash he were more inclined to "run scared." It is not his nature.

In Germany's cluttered political landscape, Adenauer does not risk defeat by one strong opposing candidate (as would be the case in a two-party system). His danger is that votes will be dispersed so widely from left to right that he would have difficulty reassembling his coalition.

Half-Moon Chamber. Adenauer's Christian Democrats occupy the center aisles in the half-moon Bundestag chamber. Their opponents sit all around them. The present composition of the Bundestag:

ADENAUER'S COALITION: C.D.U (Christian Democrats) 145 FDP (Free Democrats) 51 DP (German Party) 20 216 AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT: SPD (Socialists) 130 FU (Bavarians and Pacifists) 18 BHE (Refugees) 3 KPD (Communists) 14 Splinter parties 21 186 Most of the opposition "splinter parties" will be massacred at the polls by the "5% rule," which invalidates all groups winning less than that much of the total vote. The Communists are no danger at all: this time they too may fail to get 5%. Unlike other European nations, West Germany has no big Communist Party, for the reality is too near.

Three big groups will cause the Chancellor trouble:

The Socialists (SPD) are West Germany's second largest party. They condemn Adenauer as a U.S. puppet and call him "Chancellor of the Allies"; they reject EDC as likely to delay German unity, but when the chips are down, they stand squarely with the West. The Socialists polled 7,000,000 votes in the 1949 election. This time they hope to do better, yet in their speeches at their rallies, something big is missing. It is the great voice and flashing eye of the late Kurt Schumacher (TIME, June 9, 1952), the only man in postwar Germany who could measure up to Adenauer.

Schumacher's successor is tubby little Erich Ollenhauer. He lacks spark, and his party lacks an issue. Old-fashioned Socialist oratory about class warfare falls on deaf ears in the Germany of today. For a time, German unity looked like a hot issue: all Germans want it, and Adenauer seemed slow about pressing for it. But since the June 17 East German riots, Adenauer's contemptuous and firm treatment of the Russians has proven good politics.

The Refugees. One West German in five is a refugee. To politicians in a campaign year, the refugee vote is an irresistible temptation to demagoguery. There are more than 10 million refugees, expelled from Communist Eastern Europe in three great waves. The advancing Red army chased 650,000 from East Prussia and Mecklenburg; most of them settled in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, which has become known as the "poorhouse of Germany." Next came the 8,000,000 Volksdeutsche (German ethnic groups) expelled from Eastern Europe. The last wave started when two million hungry East Germans began fleeing across the border.

The refugees live like animals, when and where they can. Konrad Adenauer confesses that "the task of integrating them into a tightly populated area, to see that they get employment, not to let them degenerate and waste away, to care for their young people, to make useful citizens of them--that task reaches out beyond our capacities."

Every German party is wooing them, but one excels all the rest. The All-German Bloc (BHE) began as the League of Expellees and Victims of Injustice. Today it is the private political vehicle of a Polish-born, ex-SS captain named Waldemar Kraft. In the refugee-laden farm steads near the Danish border, Kraft's name is magic. In 1950 he ran up 23% of the vote in local elections in Schleswig-Holstein. BHE might win 40 to 50 seats in the Bundestag.

BHE will sell its support to the highest bidder. Conceivably it could provide the Socialists with enough extra seats to enable them to govern. Germans call the BHE the "wild card in the pack." It is the party to watch.

Neo-Nazis. Since 1949, a million ex-Nazis have been re-enfranchised. A dozen pennywhistle Fuhrers are after their votes, but most of their votes will probably go to the extreme right wing of Konrad Adenauer's coalition. Some queer fish have swum into the Free Democratic Party and the German Party, seeking respectability. Until recently they had nowhere else to go.

Now a neo-Nazi outfit called the German Reich Party (DRP) has brazenly entered the lists. Its Fuehrer is handsome Werner Naumann, 43, former chief of staff to Dr. Goebbels, and, by his own account, "the top-ranking Nazi at large." It was he who in 1945 broadcast from the Berlin bunker in which Hitler and Goebbels cowered,* promising the German people that "final victory" would be theirs.

Last January the British arrested Naumann and six associates, three of them ex-Gauleiter, on charges of conspiracy. Germans hissed and booed, but after a close look at the evidence, Bonn's Minister of Justice agreed that the danger was "acute." Naumann went to jail, but later was freed without trial.

His group, it appeared, had used a Duesseldorf import-export firm to organize a neo-Nazi International, with contacts in France, Britain, Spain and Argentina. German firms looking for business in Madrid were told to see Otto Skorzeny, the scar-faced ex-SS officer who recaptured Mussolini in 1943. In Buenos Aires the man to see was Hans Ulrich Rudel, the one-legged Panzer knacker (tankbuster) now attached to Dictator Peron's army-training staff, who last week was given special leave to fly to Germany for a "whirlwind tour of speeches" on behalf of the DRP.

Last week Naumann addressed a beer-hall rally in Hanover that was grimly reminiscent of early Nazi fracases. Local officials in Westphalia tried to get him banned from the ballot but the publicity would probably do him more good than harm. The betting was that his DRP would win several seats.

No More 1933s. German democracy, a sensitive plant at best, was not yet in mortal danger from evil men like Naumann. It might never be--yet a world that had ignored the doings in a Munich beer cellar in the '205 was not anxious to be duped again. The rise of neo-Naziism and the echoes it was getting from veterans, refugees, chauvinists, and a few big businessmen, served as a warning to the West: that in seeking German arms to solve the "Russian problem," it risks reviving the old "German problem."

Konrad Adenauer's virtue is that he recognizes, and knows how to deal with, both threats to freedom. During his visit to the U.S., he pledged: "We are firmly resolved not to repeat the mistakes of the Weimar Republic, which, by its exaggerated liberalism, permitted the enemies of the country to destroy its democratic institutions. We have . . . laws to prohibit and dissolve such organizations . . . and we will apply them against radical elements of both the right and the left. There will not be another 1933."

That worriers in the U.S. were assured by Adenauer's promise is a testament to his stature in the world beyond the Reich. And this fact in turn is perhaps his greatest strength at home. For of the many things that Germans have Adenauer to thank for, the greatest is his achievement in restoring Germany to the world's.councils. After years of non-fraternization, denazification, war guilt and moral outlawry, Germans were deeply moved to hear that their Federal Chancellor was consulted by Winston Churchill, honored and deferred to by the President of the U.S.

Adenauer knew the feeling; perhaps he shared it himself. Back from his U.S. visit, he told the German radio audience: "I shall never forget the visit to Arlington Cemetery," for there, "for the first time," Deutschland ueber Alles was played together with The Star-Spangled Banner.

The Chancellor's campaign managers rammed the point home in big posters:

"He Established Relations with the Free World." A Frankfurt clerk put it more convincingly, after listening to an Adenauer campaign speech. "We Germans have for a long time been on the outside," said 24-year-old Hans Joachim Berkemeier. "We were hated everywhere. Now they respect us. Other countries want to work with us. This is very important." Hans Joachim paused. Then he added: "The old man is the one who did this He is a great man."

* For Hitler's ramblings, some of them from the bunker, see BOOKS.

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