Last of the Mavericks

Postwar West Germany has had three singular Socialist mayors who stood as stoutly against Communism as they did against Naziism, stood for alliance with the West against the dogma of their party's national leaders. Berlin's Ernst Reuter, defender of freedom's outpost during airlift days, died two years ago; soon afterward Hamburg's Max Brauer, sometime naturalized citizen of the U.S., was defeated at the polls. That left Wilhelm Kaisen, rebuilder of Bremen. Last week in the city-state of Bremen, smallest of West Germany's states, voters handed Kaisen's Social Democratic Party a handsome victory and Buergermeister Kaisen, 68, a fourth term.

City Farmer. Kaisen is a rare type--a big-city mayor who lives on and works his own farm. He has run Bremen since a summer's day in 1945, when a U.S. colonel came up to him as he tramped behind a plow-pulling pair of oxen. Would he care to be Buergermeister of Bremen, the colonel asked. "No," Kaisen snorted through his mustache, "the Nazis destroyed this well-ordered state. They are the ones who should have to rebuild it." The colonel returned with some prominent Buerger. They persuaded Kaisen to accept.

The son of a Socialist carpenter, Kaisen went to the party school in Berlin with Wilhelm Pieck, now puppet President of East Germany, grew up in Bremen's Socialist politics, was clapped into jail by the Nazis, released after two months and ordered to stay out of his city. Kaisen went no farther than the bleak moor, seven miles from Bremen, where the U.S. colonel found him.

The Hustler. Buergermeister Kaisen took over a city 65% destroyed. More than 5,900,000 cu. yds. of rubble was hauled away, and Bremen was rebuilt on modern lines. Kaisen hastened recovery by going to Washington and persuading the U.S. to remove an allied restriction on shipbuilding, wheedled $20 million of U.S. aid for shipyard repairs.

When his party took a licking in the Lower Saxony state elections last spring, Kaisen concluded that it had harped too much on national issues and foreign policy, decided to fight Bremen's election on strictly local issues, even hustled tubby Socialist Chief Erich Ollenhauer out of town when he came to support the campaign.

The strategy paid off with 52 of the 100 Buergerschaft (city-state parliament) seats for Kaisen's Socialists, a gain of six and a clear majority for the first time. Christian Democrats were held to 18 seats. The election entitled Buergermeister Kaisen to convert Bremen's coalition government into a wholly Socialist affair, but instead he invited Christian Democrats and Free Democrats, their right-wing cousins, to go right on helping him run Bremen.

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