Bonn

THERE is no word in the German language “disengagement,” nor does Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s foreign policy include the word “disengagement.” Adenauer is opposed to plans which make calculated surrenders to Soviet policies in Europe, in the hope that they will induce Mikoyan and Khrushchev to strike a fair bargain over Germany. Both Mikoyan and Khrushchev, Adenauer believes, smile and bluster for the same reason: to get something for nothing.

Adenauer has been through two wars, a Nazi era, and an Allied occupation of his country. He sees these as connected incidents which have derived partially from the shortcomings of German people. The fact that he has comprehended this has made him supremely unwilling to take risks when looking for a solution of German problem. “It is unfortunately true,” he said recently, “that many of our own people cannot be trusted. To whom was he referring? To Communists and fellow travelers, the extreme right-wingers, and plenty of others, to Adenauer’s way of thinking. For “political maturity is matter of common sense and experience, not of emotions and good intentions.”

Adenauer’s foreign policy

Khrushchev, Adenauer thinks, was right in telling columnist Walter Lippmann that “Russia and Germany may very well stand nearer to each other today than ever before.”For the primary hope of every German is that his country should be reunified. But reunification requires the assent of the Kremlin — in return, possibly, for another Russo-German entente, which might recall the glamour of the 1912 Prussian War of Independence but which would bear a nearer, nasty resemblance to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.

Here is one basic feature of Adenauer’s foreign policy: to limit risks according to the capacities of his own people. That is why he rejects out of hand the Soviet plan for a German confederation. For it would offer unlimited possibilities for Soviet exploitation of the German desire for unity and of German disillusionment with Western partners who cannot grant this desire. The confederation would put into the same pen the overfatted West German calf and the vicious East German jackal. In Adenauer’s eyes this is not an unfair simile. In a confederation West Germany would be assured only of Western benevolence and sense of fair play, but East Germany would be backed by the ruthless strength of single-minded Soviet diplomacy.

Another basic feature of Dr. Adenauer’s present policy is his refusal to make concessions to the Soviet Union in advance of the Summit conference, which can thrash out the German problem. To make premature concessions, Adenauer believes, is the ultimate foolishness; it can only encourage the Soviet Union to ask for more. The London Times would recognize the Oder-Neisse frontier in advance; the London Observer would agree to a militarily neutralized all-Germany; Mr. Lippmann would support the Soviet plan for a confederation because “any horse is better than no horse”; and the West German Free Democrats are veering toward acceptance of the East-West allGerman talks demanded by East German Communist boss Walter UIbricht. There are so many, many plans for giving away Western positions; so very few for penetrating into enemy territory.

With a touch of bitterness, federal press chief Felix von Eckardt described how he was repeatedly asked during his January visit to the United States why his government did not develop “more flexible policies.”To which he invariably answered, “Can you give me an idea of what form these more flexible policies should take?” But to his own question Eckardt added, “There was never a clear reply.”

It is a moot point which approach is the more likely to yield results, a desperate search for new ideas at a time of emergency or steady reliance on the “Adenauer dogmas” that the stratified German problem will be solved only in conjunction with a global understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union and that Germany will have to stay divided until then.

On one point it is fair to agree with the Chancellor: the German people have not been rendered shockproof to Soviet diplomacy and propaganda. Every sort of damaging emotion lies just beneath the surface of life in West Germany. Recent outbreaks of anti-Semitism are only one symptom of emotional stress and uncertainty. How could it be otherwise? West Germans did not win democratic freedoms for themselves j but were handed them as a gift. Everything has happened so quickly that democracy has been only savored, not digested.

A few weeks ago a fifty-five-yearold Nazi stood in the dock, accused of the murder in May, 1945, of his wife and two sons. At his wife’s request he shot all three before the Red Army arrived. He had meant to shoot himself too, but the fourth bullet was missing from his revolver. And so he became a prisoner of war. The West German court found him guilty but set him free under the 1949 Act of Amnesty. What stability of mind and judgment is left to a man like this? And his case is not unique.

A few weeks ago a young student wrote to the newspaper Die Welt that the persisting belief that the Germans were mainly responsible for the war enraged him. Crimes might have been committed during the war by individual Germans, but the greatest crime of all was that the criminals of other nations remained unpunished. How will a young man like this react to Soviet propaganda? He, too, is not exceptional.

It is understandably difficult for Germans to take a detached view of the past or develop a clear-sighted view of the future. Old enemies have become friends (with reservations); old ideals have been proclaimed chimeras; German history has been stood on its head. The German people today may not be capable of implementing an “Austrian solution” of their country’s problems — a solution which would require the same degree of resistance to external pressures which the Austrians are showing.

No effective opposition

The Democratic Party in America has shown how a government can be pressed and prodded effectively.

There is no parallel in West Germany. Nor is there likely to be as long as decent, ineffectual Erich Ollenhauer leads the Social Democratic Party. Since the death of Kurt Schumacher, the party has been managed by a junta. Its members have seen eye-to-eye on one question: their positions were assured as long as they maintained a mediocrity at the top. Ollenhauer has shown ability to reconcile warring factions, but he has given the party no new fighting spirit. Since 1949 it has driveled down its chosen road of sheer negation.

Can the Social Democrats shake themselves into shape in time? There are two men with the personality and fervor to enable them to do this. Willy Brandt, unfortunately, is largely isolated from West German politics in his post of mayor of Berlin. He has all the qualifications. But in Bonn, Herbert Wehner, fifty-two-year-old ex-Communist and a passionate apostle of social justice, has lately thrust himself to the fore. Wehner joined the Communist Party thirty-one years ago, left it in 1942 after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact turned him into a spiritual Titoist, before Tito.

Rejecting Communism is rejecting a religion. It is a big break. This is why Wehner took time to settle down in the manifestly moderate, peaceable, and pale-pink Social Democratic Party. But by 1953 he had become a member of the party executive. Then he was elected chairman of the Bundestag Committer’ for All-German Affairs. His voice was heard increasingly in debates, preaching an amalgam of wariness and initiative in foreign affairs, in soft, halting tones but with the occasional menacing rasp which betrays Moscow schooling.

Socialism for Germany?

Wehner believes that only a socially aware Germany can fight its way out of the pig-in-the-middle place between the world blocs. Capitalism based on self-interest, he thinks, is no answer to Communism.

It offers only the bourgeois comforts which good Communists despise.

Germany, Wehner thinks, should become the most enlightened socialist state of all. And while doing this, it could unite itself. For Wehner believes that the Ulbricht regime can only be undermined from within East Germany; it is protected from the dangers outside by the vigilant Big Brother in the Kremlin. On the home front, Wehner thinks West German Social Democracy should learn to be flexible and imaginative; it can defeat the Christian Democratic hegemony only by proposing real social ideals and substituting for Adenauer’s Roman discipline a hardy humanitarianism.

Like all German politicians save Adenauer, Wehner tends to overrate German interest in reunification (Adenauer admits that it is “not the decisive issue in Europe”). Nothing could have illustrated lackluster German attitudes better than the recent campaign, histrionically entitled “Open the Gate!” and organized by the all-party society for an “Indivisible Germany.” The society co-opted men like Axel Springer, owner of Die Welt, to collect money in the streets by selling Brandenburg Gate badges (the gate stands on the border between East and West Berlin). Eight hundred thousand badges were struck; they were, admittedly, all sold. But the average West German citizen bought one for ten pfennigs (two cents). With incredible ingenuousness, West German newspapers acclaimed that “some people actually insisted on contributing one Mark!” (twentyfour cents). But many citizens put more money into the Sunday-service offertory box.

The real mood of the West Germans is more aptly illustrated by the 2035 “festive occasions” at this year’s Munich Fasching or carnival, by the 25 per cent rise in sales of automobiles in 1958 and the 42 per cent rise in sales of TV sets.

The Krupps combine

The economic pattern of West Germany is equally well illustrated by the return of the former gunmaking firm of Friedrich Krupp to the leading position in the industrial scene. Krupps was to have been shorn of its coal and steel holdings; the present head of the family firm, Alfried Krupp, did indeed sign an agreement to do this by January 31, 1959. But, he claimed, no fair offer was made for the holdings. Now a four-power, seven-man committee has been set up to consider what should be done with them.

This is an unconvincing facesaver. In reality, the West German government wants Krupp to retain all his holdings. The American and French governments have no real objection. Nor has the British government, save that it must pay lip service to public opinion in Britain, whose people are notoriously slow to forget past wrongs (Krupps helped to finance Hitler, manufactured arms illegally between the world wars, and employed slave labor).

It is now certain that Krupps will keep its coal mines and steel mills (annual production 6 million and 4 million tons respectively). Along with immense engineering interests built up since the war, these should give the firm a 1959 turnover of 5 billion marks. Krupps has become the biggest heavy industrial concentration in Europe.

Krupp personally may not be the disaster for German democracy which European socialists proclaim him to be. He is a shy, saddish man with progressive ideas about investment in underdeveloped countries. German democracy may suffer more from the retirement this year of federal President Theodor Heuss. Heuss is seventy-five years old but still young in heart and physical vigor. He has an unimpeachable record in office, but the constitution allows him only two five-year terms.

The Christian Democratic candidate, Heinrich Krone, is worthy but dull. The Social Democratic choice, Professor Carlo Schmid, humanist and historian, is not dull at all. He has been one of the few orators in ten dreary years of Bundestag debates. West Germany does not require a mere figurehead as President; it must have a man with civic courage and a knack for saying an important word on moral issues. Heuss did this. Carlo Schmid can do it too, and his talents should be used for the further consolidation of German democracy.