The Other Franz Josef

Until the outcry against his high handed policing of the magazine Der Spiegel forced him to resign from Konrad Adenauer's Cabinet 21 years ago, Bavaria's bull-necked Franz Josef Strauss, now 49, was the fair-haired Knabe of Christian Democratic politics.

Even in Munich he has remained a power for Ludwig Erhard to reckon with because he heads the 50 delegates of the Christian Social Union, the C.D.U.'s affiliate in Bavaria. Nonetheless, as Strauss was re-elected C.S.U. leader in Munich last week amid the redolence of wurst, beer and cigar smoke, it was clear that Franz Josef was as imperial -- and imperious -- as ever, and a far less palatable Bavarian export than Loewenbraeu.

To be sure, the C.S.U. delegates gave him an overwhelming mandate, 643 out of 705 ballots. But that was because Strauss's fellow C.S.U. leaders did not want to rock the boat in an election year. Privately, they are furious with him over his continuing feud with Hamburg's Spiegel. The fault is not entirely his. Spiegel's publisher, Rudolf Augstein, worried that a good C.S.U. showing next fall might land the former Defense Minister back in the Cabinet, has hammered ceaselessly at Strauss's alleged "corruption" in office, until Strauss retaliated last summer with a libel suit.

Fortnight ago, Augstein's lawyer gave the judge who will hear the case in May a 73-page brief, accusing Strauss of all sorts of corruption, from lying in the Bundestag to consorting with "women of uncertain profession."

None of the charges have been proved in court, but Augstein leaked the whole thing to the press. Promptly headlined was the charge, from which all sorts of innuendoes were supposed to be drawn, that when Strauss was on a visit to Los Angeles in June 1960, Lockheed Aircraft arranged an "intimate" dinner for him and Actress Jayne Mansfield. From Lockheed came the smart rejoinder that the company had indeed entertained Strauss at an "intimate" dinner --for 14 U.S. and German officials. Jayne Mansfield, quite believably, said she had "never heard of Strauss," adding that in June 1960 she was avoiding public appearances, being seven months pregnant with her second child.

Burly Charisma. More disquieting to thoughtful Germans was Strauss's speech at the C.S.U. convention in which he expounded his own brand of echt Deutsch nationalism. Comparing the recent five-year extension of the statute of limitations for Nazi war criminals with the "thousands of murdered and tens of thousands of abducted" Germans on the Eastern front after World War II, he cried: "The misdeeds of Hitler's myrmidons were committed in concentration camps, which most Germans had only heard of by rumor, while in Czechoslovakia and Serbia, the torture, killing and burning alive of Germans in 1945 was a public amusement."

"I am not a devil and I'm not a saint. I am a human being with all his contradictions," he told the applauding delegates. Clannish Bavarians, who regard Hamburg publishers as hardly civilized interlopers from the north, may well respond by giving the local boy a handsome mandate in September's elections.

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