Balk in the Bundeshaus

Konrad Adenauer stood inside the glass-walled caucus room of Bonn's ultramodern Bundeshaus one afternoon last week, white-faced and trembling. Nobody could recall ever seeing him quite so mad before. He had personally hand-picked Eugen Gerstenmaier, 48, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, as the man to succeed the late Hermann Ehlers as Speaker of the Bundestag (Lower House). Gerstenmaier was a Christian Democratic Deputy, a leading Protestant Church official (and thus a politically useful counterweight to the Catholic Chancellor himself), a devoted follower of Adenauer, a passionate believer in European unity. Besides Gerstenmaier's qualifications for the speakership, Chancellor Adenauer also had a reason for wanting him kicked upstairs: as a passionate defender of EDC and its supranational ideal, Gerstenmaier might not be flexible enough to accomplish the horse-trading needed to get the Paris accords through the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Presumably this deal was all set. All that remained was Bundestag approval, and never in the history of the Republic --Federal or Weimar--had the Lower House failed to elect the Speaker right off, by "acclamation."

But last week, while Adenauer gasped at its impudence, the usually compliant Bundestag balked. On the first ballot 171 Deputies abstained, including members of the C.D.U., and 41 other Deputies bolted to vote for roly-poly Ernst Lemmer, a C.D.U. leader in West Berlin. This was one way of showing their dissatisfaction with Adenauer's "giveaway" of the Saar to the French.

The effect, however, was to stiffen Adenauer's iron determination. Back in the caucus room after the first ballot, he shook his fist at the C.D.U. Deputies and shouted: "Some people in this room, some people in my own party voted against Gerstenmaier. If I find out who they were, they'll take the consequences!"

Then he shooed his followers back into the Chamber. Again Gerstenmaier failed of a majority. He finally made it on the third ballot, which under the rules requires no majority, but simply awards the post to the leading candidate. The vote: Gerstenmaier 204, Lemmer 190. The new Speaker, having torn up his confident acceptance speech, made a sad little talk, declaring that he hoped to be able "to win the confidence of the Chamber." The old Chancellor drove off impatiently to a political meeting in Limburg and explained his being three hours late by growling: "I have just come from a Bundestag session which was a disgrace."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.