Barzel: A Cool, Ambitious Infighter

NO politician in West Germany's postwar history has risen so fast and made so few admirers in the process as Rainer Candidus Barzel. He is almost all a politician should be: intelligent, hardworking, cool under pressure, a first-rate tactician and gifted debater. Yet Barzel suffers from a serious image problem. In voter preference polls, he badly trails the warmer and more personable Brandt, and even rates below some members of his own party. His critics have pinned on him a wide assortment of unlovely epithets: "aalglatt" (slippery as an eel), "a well-rehearsed Pharisee," "spontaneous as a robot."

Perhaps the kindest cut is that Barzel's image has been compared with that of both Lyndon Johnson, as a behind-the-scenes manipulator, and Richard Nixon, as an ambitious opportunist. Barzel tells his aides that "the people should look at what I have done, not just at my image." Even so he has been trying to improve that image by toning down his speaking style and trying to project himself as a thoughtful, issue-oriented leader.

Barzel deserves his reputation as a tough and skillful political infighter. The son of a Prussian schoolmaster, the Christian Democratic leader was elected to the Bundestag in 1957 after a short but highly successful career as a civil servant. He quickly became known as the German counterpart of the U.S.'s Communist-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy, reportedly under the influence of his later political partner, Franz Josef Strauss. Barzel founded an anti-Communist organization called "Save Freedom," whose primary activity was a "red book" that accused 453 West German intellectuals and artists of Communist ties. He also asserted that his party acted under the will of God.

Despite a series of blunders that would have finished off a less resilient politician, Barzel began an irreversible march to the top. In 1963, when an aging Konrad Adenauer finally decided to resign as Chancellor and toyed with the idea of taking the ceremonial post of federal President, Barzel prematurely backed Der Alte for the job before the old man had made up his mind (Adenauer never took the presidency). At the same time, Barzel pushed Ludwig Erhard as Chancellor, although Adenauer, who remained party chairman, did not want Erhard to succeed him. In his greatest miscalculation, Barzel backed himself as a Chancellor candidate inside the party in 1966--and finished a poor third in a field of three.

Eventually Barzel got his big opportunity through his party's loss of power. After the C.D.U. was left out of the government in 1969, Barzel picked up the pieces of his shattered party more deftly than anyone else. Last year, after forming an alliance with the conservative Strauss, who commands the party's Bavarian wing, Barzel won an easy victory for party leadership.

Barzel likes modish suits and wears fashionably long sideburns. He does not socialize much, but does like to invite business and professional leaders to his home for wide-ranging discussions. He and Strauss have occasionally amused their associates by holding heated arguments in Latin.

Barzel is also a fitness enthusiast. He frequently pops into a health club across from the chancellery in Bonn where he takes saunas and lounges nude under sun lamps. He often swims in the pool at the American Embassy Club, rippling the water with a powerful Australian crawl. He lives with his wife Kriemhild in a plain, modern home in neighboring Bad Godesberg. Their daughter Claudia, 23, a philosophy student, is working during the campaign at C.D.U. headquarters.

Barzel takes obvious delight in the cut-and-thrust of political battle; if his audiences are too friendly and attentive, he tends to lose some of his oratorical spark. In contrast to past C.D.U. leaders like Konrad Adenauer, who have been father figures to their countrymen, Barzel is the first to be a member of the under-50 generation--and that may partly explain the unease with which West Germans generally regard him. Barzel's strength lies instead in intelligence, political skill, and a driving --some say consuming--ambition.

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