West Germany

THERE has been so much talk in recent years about the approaching end of the Adenauer era that people were beginning, somehow, to disbelieve in its ever happening. At the age of eighty-seven the Chancellor is — at least on the surface — as confident of his powers as ever and as convinced of his indispensability. He is as curt with the unsolicited opinions of ministers and public and as resolute to assert his patriarchal authority in Cabinet and Bundestag.

Whenever members of his Christian Democratic Party have overenthusiastically advanced the claims of Ludwig Erhard to be designated as his successor, Adenauer has persistently produced a cutting rejoinder about his vice chancellor’s lack of political flair and talent. Whenever any of his followers have ventured remarks about the difficulty for an octogenarian to function as both Chancellor and Party Chairman. Adenauer has observed an acid silence. He has not merely wanted desperately to cling to political office; he has been unable to visualize anyone’s ever taking his place. There has never been anyone whom he would trust to do the job.

The announcement, on December 7, that Adenauer would definitely retire in the fall of 1963 came, therefore, as a surprise. Admittedly, the Chancellor a year ago agreed privately to retirement by October, 1963, as an inducement to the Free Democrats to participate in the government formed after the 1961 Federal election. His agreement was contained in a letter labeled “for information” and handed to his own Minister for Special Questions. Heinrich Krone. To set their doubts at rest, the Free Democrats were given a copy. But the agreement was of an elusive, unofficial, only semibinding nature. Those who knew Adenauer were convinced that he would not hesitate to revoke his decision, ostensibly in the national interest, if he saw fit to do so.

The December 7 announcement is of a binding nature. It was made to the 242 Christian Democratic members of the Bundestag by the Parliamentary Chairman of the Christian Democratic Party, Heinrich von Brentano, after personal consultation with the Chancellor. The Chancellor would retire “soon after” the 1963 parliamentary summer holiday. This normally ends in the third week of September. It seemed that Adenauer had at last set a term on his usefulness. It seemed that he had finally conceded something to his critics, and to those members of his own large family who felt that the old warhorse should not die in harness but should be allowed a few years of rest on the slopes of Bonn’s hills, tending his roses, sipping the fine wines which he appreciates.

Adenauer’s reluctance

In reality, Adenauer has made no real concession at all. Under the terms of the loosely defined coalition agreement of 1961 with the Free Democrats, he was bound to retire by October, 1963. He will now, in fact, stay in office until the last possible moment. Von Brentano rubbed this point in by adding that the Chancellor’s decision must be “respected by all,” and that there should be no challenge to his authority during the next ten months (the Free Democrats had previously reserved the right to press for his earlier withdrawal). Brentano also pointed out that Adenauer had “acted of his own free will” — a curious interpretation of his confirmation of the decision forced on him a year before.

If the December 7 announcement proved anything it was that Adenauer had, once again, kept a trump card up his sleeve by making his retirement a semiofficial, semisecret affair when he negotiated with the Free Democrats a year ago. All that he has now given up is the vague hope that he might have coaxed the government parties into allowing him to remain in office until 1964, or even until the 1965 Federal election. He would then have been in his ninetieth year.

Three factors have combined to ensure that the coming, final year of the Adenauer era will be one of grave internal difficulties. The first factor has been the so-called Spiegel affair, which has given a greater jolt to post-war German democracy than any other event since the Federal Republic came into being in 1949. The second Jactor has been the bitter feud which developed out of the Spiegel affair between the two government parties, the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats. The third factor has been the subsequent party political manipulations and contortions, during the weeks when Adenauer was trying to form his new administration.

The by-products of these three factors have been bitterness in the political parties, disapproval and alarm among the German people, and incredible confusions of motive and principle among political leaders who have grown stale and unsure of themselves.

TheSpiegelaffair

The Spiegel affair was so complex that it will take many months to sort it out. As a weekly paper, the Spiegel is refreshingly independent, but often overcritical and sometimes verging on the venomous. Its publisher, Rudolf Augstein, has been carrying on a personal feud with the Federal Defense Minister, FranzJosef Strauss, for over a year — a feud reflecting little credit on either man. With deliberate intent to provoke and hurt, the Spiegel inflated an incident of Strauss’s carelessness in approving a particular army contract into a nasty tale of alleged corruption. The Fibag case (Fibag was the name of the Bavarian firm to which Strauss would have handed the contract) ended on October 24, with only partial exoneration of Strauss. Two days later police pounced on the Spiegel’s offices in Hamburg and Bonn and arrested a number of the paper’s staff, including Augstein.

There were superficially reasonable grounds for this action, which was supposed at the time to have been executed by the state prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe on its own initiative. On October 10 the Spiegel had published an account of a NATO secret military exercise, under the title “Fallex 62.”The account gave a gloomy picture of NATO findings (15 million West Europeans killed in the event of nuclear war, lack of training and materials to carry on an effective defense, and breakdown of essential services). More important, the Spiegel’s account showed that Defense Minister Strauss was working directly counter to American military policies in Europe. The American concept was to check aggressive Soviet tendencies by building up NATO’s strength in conventional armaments; Strauss wanted to rely on the nuclear deterrent and give NATO, and even West Germany, increased control over nuclear weapons.

The grounds for the police action against the Spiegel, however, had less to do with differences between President Kennedy’s advisers and Strauss than with the fact that secret military information had been published in the West German press. It was assumed, probably rightly, that the Spiegel’s editors did this with their eyes open. Publication of military secrets is, under German law, a punishable offense, involving treason. The police accordingly seized members of the paper’s staff, confiscated its main offices for an indefinite period, took over its files, precensored the next issue of the paper (this may have been unintentional), and interrogated all suspects in jail, without bringing any charges against them.

All this is permitted under German law, which is based on the Code Napoléon (this obliterated German tribal law, which had provided much of the essential basis of both British and Americal legal practice). In Germany today it is possible to hold a suspect indefinitely in a state of “interrogatory arrest,” without bringing any charge whatever against him. A suspect may be released a year or even two years later, and has no right of redress against authorities which have tacitly admitted his innocence.

Strauss resigns under pressure

The Adenauer government set out to encourage prosecution of the action against the Spiegel, in spite of a popular outcry which had less to do with respect for the weekly paper than with dislike of the arbitrary methods used against it. The implication here was that the Spiegel was being singled out for judiciary inquiry because it had deliberately provoked Defense Minister Strauss.

Strauss, however, said at once that he had known nothing about the proposed action against the Spiegel. It subsequently transpired that he had previously studied the case against the paper, that he personally ordered the arrest in Spain of the Spiegel correspondent who had written the “Fallex 62” article, that he did this on his own initiative and not, as he declared to the Bundestag, to help the state prosecutor’s office, and that he personally made sure that Free Democratic Cabinet ministers were not informed of what was going on.

The case against Strauss, as a minister who refused to tell the truth or accept responsibility, was overwhelming. But it took four weeks to secure his resignation, and the credit for that was divided between public opinion and the Free Democrats. They realized, at a crucial moment, that some standard of honesty was necessary if they were ever to explain their part in this unsavory affair.

Like Strauss, Adenauer affected to know nothing about the legal action against the Spiegel. He continued to assert this while Spiegel editors and correspondents sat in jail (every second one appears to have been innocent, and was released without any charges being brought). According to Strauss, Adenauer had been kept in the picture over the Spiegel affair and had authorized his action against the Spiegel correspondent in Spain. Adenauer, again, may have been a party to the deliberate failure to inform Free Democratic ministers. The Strauss-Adenauer recriminations only began after the former had resigned, on November 30.

Government crisis

In the internal governmental upheaval over the Spiegel affair two secretaries of state (ranking after Cabinet ministers in their departments) were dismissed, and then reinstated — after it was shown that their ministers had known more than they. Two senior members of the Bundeswehr were arrested, and a bitter feud between two separate West German counterintelligence organizations was uncovered. At least two members of the Defense Ministry retired gracefully, in order to avoid further investigations. The Federal Ministry of the Interior was involved too, to a minor extent. The implication of all this was that the West German apparatus of government needed a cleanup.

The Spiegel affair led on into a governmental crisis, which brought further manifestations of political instability. The immediate cause of the governmental crisis was the resignation of the five outraged Free Democratic ministers. When this happened, Adenauer was confronted with two logical choices - to offer his own resignation, or to promise a full inquiry into the Spiegel affair and pacify the Free Democrats. He did neither.

His first reaction was to treat the crisis with ill-timed levity. Next, he tried to play off Social and Free Democrats against each other, thereby frightening the Free Democrats back into the fold but at the same time ensuring that mutual distrust and distaste would be the salient features of the next coalition government. It was inevitable that plenty of German commentators should have noted the tragic deterioration of a Chancellor who used to set his sights on worthwhile, long-term objectives and who today struggles only for the prolongation of his tenure of power.

Adenauer tried to inveigle the Social Democrats into temporary alliance by promising electoral reform, the dropping of the present system of proportional representation and the substitution of one of direct election. This would have sounded the death knell of all but the two principal parties, and would have driven the Free Democrats out of the Bundestag. Adenauer’s brief, unreal flirtation with the Social Democrats was untrue to himself, to the Social Democrats, to common sense, political honesty, and to an infant German democracy.

The public responds

The shock administered to the German public by the Spiegel affair and the governmental crisis has overshadowed all other recent events in Germany. The Cuban crisis, which Germans faced up to with admirable resolution and which caused no wavering of German confidence in the Kennedy Administration, was forgotten a week after it ended. The Berlin Wall, in spite of Communist shootings at desperate would-be escapers, virtually vanished from the news.

Following his return from a threeday visit to Washington, Adenauer’s failure to make any public statement about his talks with Kennedy passed unnoticed. The Bavarian Land election, in which the Christian Democrats did better than might have been expected and Strauss stumped his home state, trumpeting his unrepentance over the Spiegel affair, aroused only passing interest. For a time, at least, the average citizen lost his preoccupation with the terms of his material existence, with the continuing rise in food prices, the sharp recession on the German stock market, and the threat of higher taxation during the next twelve months.

This was in itself all to the good. In daily speech, in thousands of letters to the press, in public meetings, and in the home, the average citizen has shown a lively and welcome interest in the maintenance of democracy and the rule of law. This has been the solitary, but substantial gain from the seven weeks’ crisis. West Germans were handed their political liberties on a platter after the war by the Allied occupying powers. But they have become wary and watchful in defense of them.

Still, the outlook for the months ahead is unhappy. Adenauer’s formidable authority is draining away, and as long as he remains at the helm there will be no reconciliation between the political parties. There is lack of leadership in the Bundestag and outside it. The question of who will succeed the aging Chancellor has still not been settled.

It is well that the firm hand of Gerhard Schroeder is taking increasing hold of West German foreign policy, and that Erhard is still in the government to guide the economy through a period of diminishing foreign trade surpluses and creeping inflation. When Adenauer retires next October, it is around these two men — and the party reformer of the Christian Democrats, Joseph Dufhues—that a rejuvenated and responsible administration will have to be grouped.