No Dreyfus

The powerful publisher whose arrest touched off Konrad Adenauer's crisis still sits in jail. Der Spiegel's Rudolf Augstein, 39., has not yet been tried, or even formally charged with a crime. Under West Germany's law, a suspect can be held behind bars indefinitely while the police determine if there has been any serious wrongdoing.

Augstein and four of his executives at the newsmagazine Der Spiegel were scooped up in a series of arrests beginning with a Keystone-cop raid on the magazine's Hamburg offices last October. The stated reason: "Suspicion of treason," for allegedly using classified government information in a story blasting the performance of the West German army. After sifting literally millions of papers in the defendants' homes and Der Spiegel's offices, the police glumly stood watch as the remaining editors published successive weekly editions, each of them acidly critical of the whole affair.

Triple Victory. Though jailed, Augstein seems remarkably content. He apparently does not envy those of his colleagues--including Managing Editor Claus Jacob,. and his brother, Lawyer Josef Augstein--who have been freed. He has. in fact, made little attempt to challenge the government's right to imprison him. After all, Augstein's arrest has already resulted in 1) a Cabinet crisis in Konrad Adenauer's government, 2) the resignation of Augstein's hated enemy. Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, and 3) a surge in Der Spiegel's circulation from 525,000 to more than 700,000.

When first jailed in Hamburg, Augstein was allowed to make daily visits to Der Spiegel's office, but, to make sure that he did not try to escape or to destroy evidence, police escorted him everywhere, even to the men's room. Even so, he was free to write flaming anti-Adenauer editorials for Der Spiegel, the brisk, irreverent, and often sensational newsmagazine he founded in 1947. Moved last month to a more confining prison at Coblenz, Augstein is now undergoing daylong interrogations. But he still wears his own expensive suits instead of the usual prison uniform, orders his food from nearby restaurants, reads all the books and newspapers he wants. "You cannot say he is in good spirits," said a friend who visited him recently, "but he is energetic, prudent and determined."

"Do Not Worry." What Augstein seems most determined to do is prove that his continued imprisonment is more injurious to Adenauer than to Augstein. He seems confident that the government will never be able to present a winning case against him. And he now sees himself as something of a martyr. "I owed this service to the nation," he said in a recent column, and added, with strained modesty: "I should like to ask all of you who concern yourselves about us: Do not worry. No one of us is a Captain Dreyfus and no one, unfortunately, an Emile Zola."

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