Rising Young Man

West Germany has successfully cleared its rubble, and achieved a hard-won economic recovery. But how successfully has it cleared its old habits of thought? Opportunities to test such changes of mind are hard to come by. Last week a cabinet crisis in Lower Saxony provided a dramatic test case.

When a new state government took office last month, the job of Minister of Culture went to aggressive, 34-year-old Leonhard Schlueter. He had been a hard, bright, ambitious youngster in Hitler's Germany. His mother was half-Jewish, but somehow even this did not handicap him too much. While some of his relatives were killed in concentration camps, young Schlueter went into Hitler's Wehrmacht, won a decoration in France, was wounded and discharged, then entered the University of Goettingen as a law student.

When to Shift. When the British occupied Lower Saxony, Schlueter presented himself as a victim who had suffered for his trace of Jewish blood, got a job as a high-ranking police officer in the Goettingen Allied Military Government. He proved a tough cop, efficient at rounding up local Nazis, but just as rough on others, too. But when his administration was involved in accusations of bribery, embezzlement and maltreatment, the British fired him.

Schlueter turned to politics, and displayed a blatant affinity for Naziism. "National Socialism is the most healthy movement in Germany since the turn of the century." he is reported to have shouted from a political platform. In the ultranationalist region of Lower Saxony and in the disorder of early postwar politics, such demagoguery served him well. But he always knew when to shift his line, when to recall his Jewish blood and pose as a victim of the Nazis.

He became an organizer of extreme right political parties in the British zone, won a seat in the Goettingen town council, and headed a publishing house whose favorite authors were old Nazis justifying their pasts. In 1949 the British banned him from politics. But with the end of military government, he was back with a new party that he called the National Right, and got elected to the Lower Saxony parliament. Two weeks later he abandoned his own party, jumped over to the more respected Free Democrats, the right wing of Chancellor Adenauer's four-party federal coalition. Despite his past, he rose fast in the FDP, was a party leader in Lower Saxony when he became Minister of Culture.

War of Protest. When his appointment was announced, the rector and his entire senate (some 20 professors) at the University of Goettingen resigned in shocked protest. Then followed one of the most heartfelt outbursts of democratic feeling in West Germany's brief history. Students all over Germany protested; Goettingen's 5,000 students remained off campus, educators and scientists flooded the state government with protests. The West German press blasted him with editorials, devoting more space to his case than to Khrushchev's visit to Belgrade. Said the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "Schlueter is not accused of a false belief of yesterday but of wrong actions today. These actions are opposed to the idea of freedom." Last week, bowing to this wave of protest, Schlueter resigned as Minister of Culture.

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