The Warmup

Out of Bonn last week came news that surprised nobody: the nomination of West Berlin's personable Mayor Willy Brandt, 46. as the Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor in next year's West German elections. Hungry for office--they have not won a single federal election since the West German Republic was established in 1949--the Socialists had turned, logically enough, to the man whom a recent public-opinion poll rated even more popular with West Germans of voting age than 84-year-old Chancellor Konrad Adenauer himself.

Along with a new face, the Social Democrats put forward a new policy, designed to convert West German Socialism from a purely working-class party to one with an appeal for middle-class voters as well. Under pressure from Brandt--who would not take the nomination otherwise--the Socialists drastically cleaned out their ideological attic. Tossed into the dustbin with many other souvenirs of Victorian Marxism was the most cherished Socialist goal of all: nationalization. And abandoning their onetime fuzzy flirtation with the notion of neutralism, the Socialists now pledged to keep West Germany firmly in the Western alliance--including NATO. If all this seemed to add up to an enthusiastic endorsement of the best of eleven years of Adenauer's Christian Democratic rule, Willy Brandt, for one, was pleased to admit it. "We will not do everything differently," he said, "but we will do it better."

Short Circuit. One point on which the Socialists are clearly determined to do better was the emotion-charged issue of reunification of East and West Germany. Fortnight ago, Germany's most eminent living philosopher, craggy Professor Karl Jaspers, 77, who now teaches at Switzerland's Basel University, flatly told a West German television audience that he believed the demand for reunification "un realistic." The excesses of the Hitler era, said Jaspers, had made a unified Germany unacceptable to the rest of the world and probably undesirable for Germans themselves. In 1960, he added, the only thing that made sense was to demand freedom --presumably in a separate state--for the 17 million Soviet-zone Germans.

Though many Germans are deeply conscious of war guilt (see below) and few are foolish enough to think reunification an immediate possibility, no German politician is prepared to admit that it is not a just and necessary goal. But in the hue and cry against Jaspers, no one outdid the Socialists, who angrily accused him of suffering from a "mental short circuit." Brandt's obvious campaign plan on the reunification issue: to accuse Konrad Adenauer and his Christian Democrats of not sincerely desiring reunification and of doing too little to keep the hope of it alive in East German breasts.

Watching the Tables. But despite the new Brandt brand on the Socialist Party, Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats were sure to go into the election campaign running strong. Polls showed that 69% of West Germany's voters still considered Adenauer's performance as Chancellor "satisfactory," "good," or "very good," and the issue that in the past has cut most ice with West Germans politically--the Federal Republic's booming prosperity-was still in the Christian Democrats' favor. Moreover, the damaging and undignified rivalry between Adenauer and Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard. "the engineer of the German economic miracle," now seemed healed, at least for the duration of the campaigning. Measuring Konrad Adenauer's age against the actuarial tables, 63-year-old Ludwig Erhard could well conclude last week that his best bet of becoming Chancellor lay in waiting patiently, and in the meantime doing nothing to risk a Brandt victory.

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