Portraits and Miniatures Page 10

  The first elections in the late summer of 1949 produced a near equality of members for the CDU and the SPD, but with a slight edge for the former, and with an almost equal third being divided amongst a variety of other parties of which the FDP was the biggest. From this somewhat motley assembly Adenauer succeeded in getting an absolute majority of one - 202 out of 402 -for his election as the first Chancellor of the new Germany. One hundred and forty-two voted against, and fifty-eight, in one way or another, failed to cast a valid vote. He was nearly seventy-four years old, but he did not hesitate to vote for himself.

  That narrow victory gave him four years of coalition power, not a big coalition with the SPD, which much of the CDU favoured but which Adenauer firmly rejected, but a more limited one with the FDP and the German (or refugee) Party. During these four years he negotiated the effective return of German sovereignty with the three occupying western High Commissioners, turned Germany from a pariah amongst nations to a member of the Council of Europe and of the Coal and Steel Community, with membership of the European Defence Community and, through it, of NATO on the near horizon. In addition, the German economic miracle was already burgeoning although not yet in full bloom. On the other hand, German politics became rent with bitter division. The SPD, under the incorruptible intransigence of the war-crippled Kurt Schumacher, opposed all these developments and dug themselves into a bunker of resentment. ‘Federal Chancellor of the Allies’ was Schumacher’s Bundestag epithet for Adenauer. But this nationally divisive factor joined with the favourable ones to strengthen Adenauer’s political position. Schumacher was not only incorruptible but also unelectable. The result was that on a very high poll the CDU plurality of votes over the SPD moved up from 400,000 to 4½ million, and its strength in the Bundestag less dramatically went to a bare but absolute majority. Adenauer none the less continued the centre-right coalition.

  The first of the next four years was bad. The rejection of the European Defence Community by the French National Assembly in August 1954 was one of the two worst setbacks of Adenauer’s Chancellorship. It not only upset his central policy of rapprochement with France, but also temporarily blocked Germany’s route to full rehabilitation in the Western community. However, an alternative route for Germany’s entry into NATO was quickly found through the Western European Union treaty. The French Government made some amends by relaxing its grip on the Saarland and allowing that coal- and steel-rich territory to begin its return to Germany in late 1955. The European unity train was triumphantly put back on the rails at the Messina Conference in the summer of that same year, which led on to the signature of the Treaty of Rome and the inauguration of the EEC in 1957. The Wirtshaftswunder, which was a little too imbued with the Protestant ethic and the personality of Ludwig Erhard for Adenauer’s ideal taste, but which none the less greatly redounded to the credit of his Chancellorship, got fully into its stride. And Adenauer basked in the glow of easy transatlantic relations with Eisenhower, and shared with Dulles, then at the peak of his moralizing powers, a suspicion of all attempts to soften the asperities of the cold war. In 1955 Adenauer surrendered the foreign affairs portfolio, which he had carried jointly with the Chancellorship since 1949, but to a wholly pliant acolyte, Heinrich von Brentano. His government did not lack strong figures, however. Both Erhard and Gerhard Schröder, Interior Minister until he succeeded Brentano as Foreign Minister in 1961, were their own men.

  The 1957 elections were an even greater triumph for Adenauer than the 1953 ones had been. Schumacher had died and his angularities were replaced by the pedestrian fuzziness of Erich Ollenhauer, who made the SPD election slogan ‘Instead of Adenauer, Ollenhauer’ into a sad boomerang. The CDU vote rose by another 2½ million to over 50 per cent of the poll and their Bundestag representation to an absolute majority of forty-three. This time Adenauer dropped the FDP and continued only in alliance with the German Party which had become his creature. He was eighty-one.

  In the next four years he had three major international developments to which to accommodate, one bed of nails which he made entirely for himself, but which, when he got up from it, left some nasty scars, and one hidden climacteric in his career to pass. To the first of the international developments he adjusted brilliantly, the second threw him considerably, and to the third he was curiously indifferent. The first was the replacement as his French opposite number of the transients of the Fourth Republic by the General de Gaulle of Verdun, of the Cross of Lorraine and of the Liberation. In six bilateral meetings the two old men (or so they seemed, although de Gaulle was a boy compared with Adenauer), beginning at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises within a few months of de Gaulle coming to power and including a triumphant tour of Germany by the General in 1962, surmounted strains to keep their two countries in a Carolingian direction. It showed a great sense of purpose and proportion on both their parts.

  The change that threw Adenauer was that from Eisenhower to Kennedy as the captain of the West. Neither the old Chancellor nor the young President appreciated the other. Perhaps the age gap was simply too large, particularly as the power discrepancy ran in the opposite direction. Even their common religious affiliation, because it sprang from such different traditions and left such different personal imprints, was more a barrier than a bond. Adenauer referred to Kennedy as ‘a mixture of a junior naval officer and a Roman Catholic boy-scout’. Kennedy thought Adenauer’s outlook on world affairs was sclerotic. Dulles’s death in May 1959 made the Atlantic prospect less bright for Adenauer. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961 made it positively uncomfortable.

  The third event was the return of Berlin to the centre of the cold war battlefront for the first time since the end of the blockade in 1949. This came with the erection of the Wall in August 1961. The reactions in Washington, London and Paris were greater than in the Bundeskanzlerei. Berlin was well beyond the Elbe, and Adenauer never took too much notice of what the Russians were up to. He was implacably opposed to them, he expected no good of dealings with them, he left it to the Allies to look after the security aspects, and he got on with his own job of making a success of the Federal Republic and tying it ever more firmly into the West. This bore several resemblances to his attitude to Nazism.

  The bed of nails was constructed out of his ambiguity as to whether to exchange the Chancellorship for the Federal Presidency in the spring of 1959. The term of President Heuss, a Free Democrat, was coming to an end. The SPD had a strong candidate in Professor Carlo Schmid, whom Adenauer was determined to stop. At first he tried to persuade Ludwig Erhard to provide the road block. But Erhard did not want to become President. He wanted to become Chancellor, and was supported in this desire by most CDU members of the Bundestag. Adenauer was then tempted himself, and was encouraged in this direction by most of his blood and official families. But they wanted him to make the move as a form of honourable semi-retirement. He wanted to make it in order to give himself at least half of de Gaulle’s powers, and in particular the right to nominate a Chancellor other than Erhard. Erhard and most of the CDU made it clear they would not have this. Adenauer then decided that he would rather remain as Chancellor, which meant that he made an ass of himself before the public, to whom he had announced his presidential intentions eighteen days earlier, and an affronted enemy of Erhard. His power and his prestige were never quite the same again.

  This was partly because he was approaching the most dangerous milestone in a democratic leader’s career. Three months after the presidential débâcle he began his second decade as Chancellor. There is now overwhelming evidence (more than there was at the time) that it is a mistake for any elected head of government (maybe any unelected one as well) to stay more than ten years in office. It has been so with Roosevelt, with de Gaulle, with Margaret Thatcher, with François Mitterrand. It was equally so with Adenauer. He did survive the 1961 election - up to a point - but the further two years of provisional power, like a prisoner on licence, which it gave to the Adenauer tenure were a sad travesty of his former glories.


  The 1961 election cost the CDU its absolute majority. Its vote fell by nearly a million and its number of seats declined from 277 to 241. The SPD under Brandt by contrast polled an additional 1½ million and went up from 181 to 198 seats. The FDP did proportionally even better, increased their vote by over 50 per cent and their number of seats from forty-three to sixty-six. Some form of coalition was essential. Erich Mende, the FDP leader, was perfectly prepared for one with the CDU, but he wanted it under Erhard not Adenauer. Erhard of course wanted the same, had nominally an impregnable position from which to get it and plenty of grievances against Adenauer. But, like R. A. Butler in Britain two years later, he did not have the cold steel to hold out for his own ends. Adenauer went through the motions of negotiating with SPD for a ‘grand coalition’ (which in fact came about under Kiesinger five years later), but in 1961 this was not a serious Adenauer intention but merely a ploy to frighten Mende and Erhard. At the price of some indignity and even dishonour he succeeded. Eventually he was elected Chancellor for the fourth time, but by a margin almost as small as in 1949. He was eighty-five, but age was still setting no limit to his appetite for office. What did set a term was a secret letter that he had been forced to write to Mende. In it he promised to resign after about two years, in any event in good time before the 1965 elections.

  In this twilight period he brought his great purpose of Franco-German reconciliation to a ceremonial conclusion with the signing of his treaty of friendship with de Gaulle, silently sustained the General in his rupture of negotiations for Britain’s entry into the European Community, and got badly stained by the fall-out of the Spiegel affair in 1962. (Franz-Josef Strauss, then Minister of Defence, was allowed to behave towards that not always admirable journal with a brutal intolerance which was alien to the whole spirit of the Federal Republic.) After this Adenauer made a last and fairly ludicrous attempt to block Erhard as his successor, wildly nominating almost any alternative whose name he could think of, until eventually even one of the most loyal and anonymous members of his government was reported to have cruelly said ‘don’t make me laugh’ to the hitherto intimidating face of the old statesman.

  He was at last forced to accept a date in October 1963 when he was removed from the Chancellery like a crustacean from a rock. He lived another three and a half years, discontented despite his vast achievements, and ungenerous towards his successor to whom he owed the solid economic base that was the foundation of his rehabilitation of Germany. This last phase brought him the irritation of seeing Erhard do much better in the 1965 elections than he himself had done in 1961, accompanied by the satisfaction of seeing Erhard’s Chancellorship collapse only a year after this.

  Adenauer’s gothic arches had proved themselves to have much more staying power than the baroque rotundity of his successor and junior by thirty-one years. But even Adenauer was not ultimately indestructible. He died in April 1967, aged ninety-one, a little younger than Macmillan, a little older than Churchill. He had accomplished much more than the former, almost as much as the latter, compared with whom, however, he had enjoyed his life much less. Triumph over despair, achieved by endurance and guile, was his motto for himself and his country. It was a recipe for quiet strength rather than for rumbustious joy.

  Charles de Gaulle

  Compared With his companions on the world stage, Charles de Gaulle had mostly to play a poor hand from a weak seat. He believed from an early age that he was a great man, and he always acted like one, often to the fury of those who thought he should have been a supplicant. He behaved in a way which, seeking grandeur, invited ridicule, yet always escaped it. He was the frog that puffed itself up but instead of bursting became almost as big as it wanted to be.

  Although indisputably a man of action, he was also a notable man of words, the story of whose life could be measured out in his own transfixing phrases. And the governing phrase, the one that most informed his whole career and best expressed his guiding purpose was ‘une certaine idée de la France’. He wrote it in the first volume of his memoirs (published in 1954) about his boyhood attitude, and defined it in terms at once romantic and impersonal. France to him was like ‘a princess in a fairy tale or a madonna in a fresco’. If France performed mediocrely then the fault must lie with the mistakes of the French people rather than with the genius of the land. But France could only fulfil itself through grandeur: ‘only great enterprises can neutralize the poisons of disunity which her people carry in their veins’. France must ‘hold itself erect and look to the heights if it is not to fall into mortal peril’.

  His eighty years of life in the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics gave him a full experience of the poisons of disunity, of mediocre performances and of mortal perils. He was born in 1890, when France was at once a defeated and defensive power and the centre of world civilization. He spent most of his childhood in the Paris of la belle époque, la ville lumière and the mixture of cultural flowering and uninspiring politics that marked the midstream years between the two wars against Wilhelmine Germany. Yet he never seemed very Parisian. Proust’s world of Swann searching frantically for Odette in the cafés of the grands boulevards, or of Gilberte and Marcel playing in the gardens of the Champs Elysées, or of the Guermantes or Verdurin salons, or even of Saint-Loup’s smart cavalry barracks at Doncières all seem very remote from him. He described himself as un petit Lillois de Paris, for although his father taught at the Jesuit school of the Immaculate Conception near the Luxembourg Gardens he had been born at his maternal grandparents’ house in the dour northern industrial city of Lille, and always carried a whiff of the more austere and enclosed parts of France about him. His father’s family were petite noblesse de province before the Revolution. They lost their property then but kept themselves on the edge of gentility for the next hundred years. His mother’s (and indeed his maternal grandmother’s) family were of bourgeois substance in Dunkirk.

  When the Jesuits were expelled from France at the height of Third Republican anti-clericalism in 1905, Henri de Gaulle established his own Paris school, but Charles de Gaulle went with the Society to Antoing, just over the Belgian frontier and in the purlieus of the forbidding round towers of Tournai Cathedral. When he joined the army in 1909 it was at Arras for a year of non-commissioned service in that hard landscape of the Pas-de-Calais. St Cyr provided two years in the softer surroundings of the Ile-de-France, but then it was back to Arras. His World War I service (three wounds, two in the first six months, the third at Verdun in March 1916, which led him to his spending the rest of the war as a prisoner) was all in the north-eastern approaches. When he married Yvonne Vendroux in 1921 it was in NotreDame de Calais. His wife’s family were biscuit makers in the port which faced but did not emulate England. When he acquired a modest country property in 1934 it was in the Haute Marne on the western edge of Lorraine at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises (of which one was missing) a thousand feet up and 140 miles from Paris in a lonely forest landscape uniquely far from even a one-starred Michelin restaurant. There were very few beakerfuls of the warm south, or even of the cosseting countryside of the core of France in this experience.

  Between the wars Captain de Gaulle, as he was in 1919, or Colonel de Gaulle, as he became in 1937, had an interesting career for a professional soldier grinding through the slow process of promotion in a peacetime army. He was a dedicated officer but an awkward one. He was an intellectual who devoted much of his interest to the four books, admittedly on military topics, that he produced during these years, and he positively enjoyed standing alone against the conventional wisdom. They were neither of them qualities that naturally eased his progress up the military ladder. The fact that they did not do his career more harm was largely because he had a most powerful patron in the surprising shape of Marshal Philippe Pétain.

  Pétain had been his battalion commander at Arras. When de Gaulle was wounded and captured at Verdun Pétain was his commanding general and signed the citation that led to his decoration. Then in 1925 Pétain had de Gaulle re
called to work under him at the Supreme War Council from a dreary quartermaster staff job with the occupying forces in Germany to which he had been assigned after two not very successful years at the École Supérieure de Guerre. By then de Gaulle had already published his first book, La Discorde Chez l’Ennemi, a study of German military errors in 1914-18, and it was this that commended him to Pétain. In a very French way Pétain wished to sustain his then superb military reputation with an equivalent intellectual distinction, and in particular to surpass the literary output of Marshal Foch. De Gaulle he believed was the best writer in the army. He wanted him on his staff for this reason, and set him to work on a series of studies of the history of the French army with which the Marshal had been toying since 1921.

  At first Pétain’s appreciation of de Gaulle’s literary talents brought mutual satisfaction. He even avenged de Gaulle’s semi-humiliation at the École Supérieure by arranging for him, still only a captain, to give three compulsorily attended lectures to the whole École with himself presiding over the first. These were to form the core of de Gaulle’s second book, Le Fil de l’Epée (The Sword’s Edge), which was published in 1932, and set out the qualities, many of which bore a flattering resemblance to those of Marshal Pétain, that would be required in a great captain general who could save France in a war of the future. The lectures were a plea, presented with much historical allusion and some shafts of iconoclastic wit, for the training of élite commanders disposed to improvisation as opposed to the doctrine of defence by the book which was then favoured by the French High Command. They caused considerable offence amongst the many officers far senior to himself who were forced to listen.