Exorcising Hitler (60 page)

Adhering to basic freedoms, but conservative, often socially intolerant, and nationalist within certain limits – this echoed the tone of the parliamentary-democratic restoration state ruled over by Konrad Adenauer between 1949 and 1963, when the ‘old fox’ finally (reluctantly) resigned as Chancellor at the age of eighty-eight.

Adenauer’s state may not have been what the more idealistic Allied planners dreamed of when they first brought their democratic ideas into occupied Germany, but it functioned, it prospered and it provided a protective environment for the first stage of West Germany’s healing process.

Adenauer himself devoted a great deal of attention to foreign policy. This was not unimportant. The new republic, isolated and still distrusted by its neighbours, and only incompletely sovereign, needed to find a way forward into a new Europe and a new world. Luckily, in the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman he found a partner not just willing but eager to create a peaceful, united Europe that included Germany.

Schuman was a perfect fit for Adenauer, a man with multiple cultural allegiances. A patriotic Frenchman who had risked his life in the wartime Resistance, Schuman was nevertheless no stranger to Germany and its people. He had been born in 1886 in Luxembourg, a German citizen (his French father came from Lorraine, which was part of Germany between 1871 and 1918), and grew up in the Grand Duchy, where he learned French and German as well as the local language. He completed his education at various German universities, but chose to become a French citizen when Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France in 1919, and was elected to the Paris Chamber of Deputies that same year. A member of Paul Reynaud’s wartime Cabinet in 1940, he later had an adventurous war with the French Resistance, which included imprisonment by the Gestapo.

In 1948, Schuman was serving as Foreign Minister in the post-Gaullist, post-communist government that negotiated the formation of Trizonia and acceded to the establishing of a West German state. Even before the foundation of the Federal Republic, Schuman declared France’s readiness to create a democratic European organisation of which a democratic, rehabilitated Germany could be a part. This represented a radical change from the ‘Divide and Rule’ principle that had dominated France’s obstructive attitude in Germany in the years immediately after 1945.

In May 1950, Schuman announced an offer to the Germans and other European countries to manage the sinews of Europe’s recovery, their iron and steel industries, in a collaborative and democratic fashion: a common market. It gave France a stake in the Ruhr, the guarantee of co-responsibility she had always hankered after, while leaving the industrial megalopolis in German hands. Adenauer was pleased to accept. He wanted what Schuman wanted, which was a Germany tied inside a peaceful European family and therefore unlikely to go rogue again.

Six countries – France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy – signed the Treaty of Paris in April 1951. From this came the European Community, which became the European Union, and, later, allowed for West Germany’s accession to the American–West European alliance system, NATO.

In the early 1950s, Adenauer, despite his initially lukewarm attitude towards compensation for Nazi crimes against the Jews – he habitually spoke of Jewish suffering, but hardly ever about German perpetrators – carried out negotiations with the Israeli government, mostly behind closed doors. In September 1952 he agreed to a deal that would, over years to come, compensate Jewish Holocaust survivors to the extent of some 100 billion Deutschmarks. The Chancellor’s difficulty came when he tried to get the settlement through the Bundestag in Bonn the following March. The deal was unpopular among many in the country at large.

A year earlier, only 5 per cent of Germans had admitted feeling guilty about the fate of the Jews. Although 29 per cent felt that some restitution was owed by Germany to the Jewish people, 40 per cent felt that any compensation should be paid for ‘by those responsible’, and 21 per cent felt that ‘the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich’. Many of Adenauer’s own party and of the CSU voted against it, the Free Democrats abstained and Adenauer had to rely on the social democratic opposition to get the bill through.
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It was a difficult and momentarily embarrassing beginning for a decades-long West German policy that was both morally right and diplomatically cunning – committed support of Israel in foreign policy and a determined philo-Semitism at home. Again this was reflected in the German press, including the Springer concern’s massively influential but otherwise strongly conservative newspapers.

Adenauer’s true personal feelings on this issue remain not entirely clear, except that his personal method of operating, according to Annan, was
do ut des
, Latin for ‘I give so that you give’. And as far as West Germany’s self-image and international reputation were concerned, the compensation bill was the gift that kept on giving.

Meanwhile, amid the nervous silence and the hard work and the quiet ‘restoration’ of those who had been punished after 1945, Germany began to prosper once more. Professor Erhard, who had been part of the clandestine wartime cabal preparing for the post-war crisis, was made economic director of the Bizone and pushed through price deregulation in 1948 against the advice of the Allied experts. He was right, as the rapid improvement showed. In September 1949, Erhard became Minister of Economics in Adenauer’s government, a post he would hold for fourteen years with huge success.

After January 1950, food was no longer rationed (in Britain, rationing did not finally end until mid-1954). A construction boom was under way. With the pump primed by the Marshall Plan and Europe eager to get back to work, the German ‘social market economy’ took off. The generation of young managers who had learned their skills in the Nazi armaments boom of the 1930s and early 1940s now turned to peaceful, export-led manufacturing in a post-war world crying out for machine tools and high-quality manufactured goods.

As one writer has recently noted, ‘The social market economy of Ludwig Erhard had its roots in the policies of Albert Speer’.
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And it did no harm that the bombing and the chaos of 1939–45 had swept away much old plant and factory space as well as rusting infrastructure. In contrast, Britain continued with antiquated industrial practices, factories and equipment. Its long decline as a manufacturing nation accelerated, at the same time as Germany’s revival went into overdrive.

Germany in the 1950s, like America and Britain and other Western countries during this decade, experienced a conservative interlude, where relations between the sexes appeared to retreat to something like their pre-war shape. Women had worked in factories and offices during wartime, and experienced financial as well as sexual freedom. Now, in most cases, they returned to home and children. German men had suffered the humiliation of defeat, the frustration and deprivation of long periods in Allied prison camps – the last, weary German POWs were not repatriated from the Soviet Union until 1955 – and many also experienced the shock of returning home to see that ‘their’ women seemed to prefer occupation soldiers.

Adenauer’s Christian-conservative government, eager to turn the clock back to social ‘normality’, got the vote of the majority. The complaining rebels, pointing to society’s amnesia about the Nazi past, got little attention. The magazines were full of domestic bliss, sanitised war stories, consumer desire and portraits of Germans as victims led astray by the Nazi leadership. One of the runaway bestsellers in the Germany of the early 1950s was Ernst von Salomon’s brilliant
Der Fragebogen
(1951), an autobiographical novel and
apologia pro vita sua
, satirising the Allied denazification questionnaire and thereby the victors’ right to rule and judge Germany. Von Salomon, although a former far-right-wing activist convicted in his youth for involvement in the murder of Weimar Finance Minister Walther Rathenau, was a curious political beast. Although sympathising with many of Hitler’s aims, he had never joined the Nazi Party – for whose leaders he expressed an open, fastidious contempt – and had lived openly throughout the war with his Jewish female companion.
Time
magazine’s reviewer expressed the revulsion of many when he described the book’s American translation as redolent of ‘self-pity mixed with arrogant self-righteousness’. Distaste for
Der Fragebogen
was widespread in liberal circles in Germany and throughout the former Allied countries, but others in Germany and elsewhere applauded this conservative intellectual’s hard-headed, even cynical analysis of why Hitler had come to power and its exposure of alleged Allied hypocrisies.
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This was literature for the new post-Hitler German right.

The government itself spent some time dealing with the past – but this mostly in the form of lengthy and thorough reports, based on the collation of hundreds of eyewitness reports, enumerating the sufferings and injustices suffered by Germans expelled from the eastern territories and from the Sudetenland during the brutal twilight of the Third Reich. It was mostly true, of course, but only one part of the past.

As for Adenauer, his slogan during his successful re-election campaign in 1957 was: ‘No experiments!’ The double-edged meaning again expressed the spirit of the time. Nothing radical to the left – or right. The new West German state, under the Adenauer–Erhard duopoly that lasted until 1963, made a bargain with its citizens: we provide prosperity and social stability, and you accept democracy. And why shouldn’t you? Things are good.

The price for this longed-for normality was conformity. Not the kind of draconian conformity demanded by the Nazis, but more like the Eisenhower-era, socially encouraged conformity in America – except with added Jesuits, given the clerical influence in the Adenauer government. And Axel Springer.

Into the 1960s, members of the West German government still at times behaved, if not like Nazis, then in a way reminiscent of the authoritarian acolytes of the old ‘deep state’, who had undermined Germany’s last attempt at democracy during the Weimar Republic. The social and cultural focus of West Germany for the first fifteen years or so of its existence was deeply, at times oppressively, conservative. This manifested itself most notoriously in the 1962 ‘
Spiegel
Affair’, in the final months of Adenauer’s chancellorship. In October of that year, Rudolf Augstein, now a middle-aged, wealthy rebel but on this occasion no less a hero for all that, was arrested along with several of his
Spiegel
colleagues on possible treason charges. Their ‘crime’ was to have published a damning critique of the
Bundeswehr
’s ability to defend the country against a Russian attack, based on leaked documents originating from a recent NATO exercise.

Augstein spent 103 days in custody, released only after press and popular outrage – and revelations of ministerial high-handedness – caused the near-collapse of Adenauer’s governing coalition. The price for the government was the resignation of Bavarian CSU politician Franz-Josef Strauss, the dynamic, ultra-conservative forty-seven-year-old Defence Minister, who, despite his initial denials, was proved to have been the driving force behind the prosecution and to have wildly exceeded his powers in the process. Strauss remained an important figure, but he never fulfilled his ambition of becoming Chancellor. The price for Augstein? Naturally, the uncomfortable days in a prison cell in Hamburg, but also the consolation of hearing large crowds gathering outside the jail every day to demand his release (and the prosecution of Minister Strauss). So embarrassed was the government that it felt forced to move Augstein to Koblenz to get him away from the sympathetic crowds.
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The press campaign on his behalf, and the widespread demonstrations and protests, were something new in post-war Germany. And there was a further consolation for Augstein the magazine proprietor –
Spiegel
’s circulation, already half a million, doubled. In 1965, the Federal Constitutional Court absolved Augstein and his colleagues of any guilt.

There was a phenomenon in West Germany during the 1950s, after the abolition of the ration system at the very beginning of the decade, called the
Fresswelle
, the ‘eat wave’. After the near-starvation of the immediate post-war period, West Germans went crazy for food. Suddenly they could eat their fill, and then maybe some. And they did. This eat wave went on through the 1950s and into the 1960s.

The playwright Berthold Brecht has a saying in his
Threepenny Opera
:
‘
Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral’
– ‘First comes filling your belly
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, then morality’. In other words, those with a full stomach find it easier to be good. By the 1960s, Germans had full stomachs. And some of them wanted very badly to be good. The mobilisation of public outrage over the ‘
Spiegel
Affair’ – sometimes described as ‘the beginning of [post-war] German democracy’ – was one indication, perhaps the greatest, that things were changing.