Konrad Adenauer

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Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Adenauer
In office
September 15, 1949 – October 16, 1963
Preceded by Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk (1945)
Succeeded by Ludwig Erhard
Born January 5, 1876(1876-01-05)
Cologne
Died April 19, 1967 (aged 91)
Bad Honnef
Political party Centre Party, CDU
Spouse Emma Weyer
Auguste (Gussie) Zinsser
Alma mater University of Freiburg
University of Munich
University of Bonn
Occupation Lawyer, Politician
Religion Roman Catholic

Konrad Hermann Josef Adenauer (IPA: [kɔnʁa:t hɛɐman jozef a:denaʊeɐ]), January 5, 1876 – April 19, 1967) was a German statesman. Although his political career spanned sixty years, beginning as early as 1906, he is most noted for his role as the first Chancellor of West Germany from 1949–1963 and chairman of the Christian Democratic Union from 1950 to 1966. He was the oldest chancellor ever to serve Germany, leaving at the age of eighty seven.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Konrad Adenauer was born as the third of five children of Johann Konrad Adenauer (1833-1906) and his wife Helene (1849-1919) (née Scharfenberg) in Cologne, Rhenish Prussia. His siblings were August (1872-1952), Johannes (1873-1937), Lilli (1879-1950) and Elisabeth, who died shortly after birth. In 1894, he completed his Abitur and started to study law and politics at the universities of Freiburg, Munich and Bonn. He was a member of several Roman Catholic students’ associations under the K.St.V. Arminia Bonn in Bonn. He finished his studies in 1901. Afterwards he worked as a lawyer at the court in Cologne.

[edit] Early political career

As a devout Roman Catholic, he joined the Centre Party in 1906 and was elected to Cologne’s city council in the same year. In 1909, he became Vice-Mayor of Cologne. From 1917 to 1933, he served as Mayor of Cologne. He had the unpleasant task of heading Cologne in the era of British occupation following the First World War and lasting until 1926. He managed to establish faithful relations with the British military authorities and flirted with Rhenish separatism (a Rhenish state as part of Germany, but outside Prussia). During the Weimar Republic, he was president of the Prussian State Council (Preußischer Staatsrat) from 1922 to 1933, which was the representative of the Prussian cities and provinces.

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When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Centre Party lost the “elections” in Cologne and Adenauer fled to the abbey of Maria Laach, threatened by the new government after he refused to shake hands with a local Nazi leader. The hosting of Adenauer for a year at this abbey was cited by its abbot after the war, when accused by Heinrich Böll and others of collaboration with the Nazis.

He was imprisoned briefly after the Night of the Long Knives. During the next two years, he changed residences often due to reprisals inflicted on him by the Nazis. In 1937, he was successful in claiming at least some compensation for his once confiscated house and managed to live in seclusion for some years.

According to Albert Speer in his book Spandau: The Secret Diaries, Hitler expressed admiration for Adenauer, noting his building of a road circling the city as a bypass, and of a “green belt” of parks. However, both Hitler and Speer felt due to Adenauer’s principal political views and general stubbornness, he couldn’t possibly play any role within their movement nor be helpful to the Nazi party in any way.

After the failed assassination attempt on Hitler, in 1944, he was imprisoned for the second time, being known as an opponent of the regime. But the Gestapo couldn't connect him to an active role in the plot and he was released some weeks later. Shortly after the war, the Americans installed him again as Mayor of Cologne, but the British administration dismissed him for his alleged incompetence.

[edit] Post World War II and the founding of the CDU

After his dismissal as Mayor of Cologne, Adenauer devoted himself to building a new political party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which hoped to embrace Protestants as well as Roman Catholics in a single party. In January 1946, Adenauer started a political meeting of the future CDU in the British zone as its doyen (the oldest man in attendance, Alterspräsident) and was informally accepted as its leader. Adenauer worked diligently at building up contacts and support in the CDU over the next few years, and he sought with varying success to impose his particular ideology on the party. His was an ideology at odds with many in the CDU who wished to unite socialism and Christianity; Adenauer preferred to stress the dignity of the individual, and he considered both communism and Nazism materialist world views that violated that dignity.

Adenauer’s leading role in the CDU of the British zone won him a position at the Parliamentary Council of 1948, called into existence by the Western Allies to draft a constitution for the three western zones of Germany. He was the chairman of this constitutional convention and, like George Washington in the United States, vaulted from this position to being chosen as the first head of government once the new “Basic Law” had been promulgated in May 1949.

[edit] First Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany

At the German federal election, 1949, Adenauer became the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (Ger. Bundeskanzler) after World War II. He held this position from 1949 to 1963, a period which spans most of the preliminary phase of the Cold War. During this period, the post-war division of Germany was consolidated with the establishment of two separate German states, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The first elections to the Bundestag of West Germany were held on August 15, 1949, with the Christian Democrats emerging as the strongest party. Theodor Heuss was elected first President of the Republic, and Adenauer was elected Chancellor on September 16, 1949.

Adenauer’s achievements include the establishment of a stable democracy in defeated Germany, a lasting reconciliation with France, a general political reorientation towards the West, recovering limited but far-reaching sovereignty for West Germany by firmly integrating it with the emerging Euro-Atlantic community (NATO and the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation). Adenauer is associated with establishing an efficient pension system, which ensured unparalleled prosperity for retired persons, and - along with his Minister for Economic Affairs and successor, Ludwig Erhard - with the West German model of a “social market economy” (a mixed economy with capitalism moderated by elements of social welfare and Catholic social teaching), which allowed for the boom period known as the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”) and produced broad prosperity. Thus, Adenauer ensured a truly free and democratic society which had been almost unknown to the German people before - notwithstanding that more or less hopeless attempt between 1919 and 1933 (the Weimar Republic) - and which is today not just normal but also deeply integrated into modern German society. He thereby laid the groundwork for the Western world to trust Germany again. Precisely because of Adenauer’s former policy, a later reunification of both German states was possible. A unified Germany remained part of the European Union and NATO.

Plaque commemorating the restoration of relations between Germany and France, showing Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle.
Plaque commemorating the restoration of relations between Germany and France, showing Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle.

However, contemporary critics accused Adenauer of cementing the division of Germany, sacrificing reunification and the recovery of territories lost to Poland and the Soviet Union for the sake of speedy integration into the West. During the Cold War, he advocated West German rearmament and mandatory conscription as an answer to a similar development in East Germany. The 1952 Stalin Note offered to unify the two German states into a single, neutral, disarmed Germany to effect superpower disengagement from Central Europe. Adenauer shared the Western Allies’ suspicion about the genuineness of that offer and supported the Allies in their cautious replies. Adenauer’s critics, especially on the nationalist side, denounced him for having missed an opportunity for early German reunification. Adenauer’s defenders claimed, and continue to argue, that given the realities of the Cold War, reunification and the recovery of lost territories were not realistic goals.

Others criticize his era as culturally and politically conservative, which sought to base the entire social and political make-up of West Germany around the personal views of a single individual, one who bore a certain amount of mistrust towards his own people.

The West German student movement of the late 1960s was essentially a protest against the conservatism Adenauer had personified. Another point of criticism was that Adenauer’s commitment to reconciliation with France was in stark contrast to a certain indifference towards Communist Poland. Like all other major West German political parties of the time, the CDU refused to recognize the annexation of former German territories given by the Soviets to Poland, and openly talked about regaining these territories after strengthening West Germany’s position in Europe.

In retrospect, mainly positive assessments of his chancellorship prevail, not only with the German public, which voted him the “greatest German of all time” in a 2003 television poll, but even with some of today’s left-wing intellectuals, who praise his unconditional commitment to western-style democracy and European integration.

[edit] Additional actions as Chancellor

  • Made a historic speech to the Bundestag in September 1951 in which he recognized the obligation of the German government to compensate Israel, as the representative of the Jewish people, for the Holocaust. This started a process which led to the Bundestag approving a pact between Israel and Germany in 1953 outlining the reparations Germany would pay to Israel.
  • Helped secure the release of the last German prisoners of war in 1955, a decade after the end of the war.
  • Opened diplomatic relations with the USSR and other Eastern bloc nations, but refused to recognise East Germany.
  • Reached an agreement with the USA in 1957 that gave West Germany possession of weapons capable of transporting nuclear warheads. Furthermore, Adenauer pursued nuclear cooperation with other countries with a goal of Germany being able to produce its own nuclear armament.
  • Oversaw the reintegration of Saarland with West Germany in 1957.
  • Briefly considered running for the office of President in 1959. However, he instead chose a candidate (Heinrich Lübke) whom he believed weak enough not to disturb his affairs as Chancellor.

For all of his efforts as West Germany’s leader, Adenauer was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1953. In 1954, he received the Karlspreis (English: Charlemagne Award), an Award by the German city of Aachen to people who contributed to the European idea and European peace.

Adenauer found relaxation and great enjoyment in the Italian game of Bocce and spent a great deal of his post political career playing the game. Video footage of his games can be seen in various footage segments from the German Festival Documentary and from the History Channel special about Adenauer.

When, in 1967, after his death at the age of 91, Germans were asked what they admired most about Adenauer, the majority responded that he had brought home the last German prisoners of war from the USSR, which had become known as the “Return of the 10,000”.

[edit] Assassination attempt

On March 27, 1952, a package addressed to Chancellor Adenauer exploded in the Munich Police Headquarters, killing one police officer. Two boys who had been paid to send this package by mail had brought it to the attention of the police. Investigations led to people closely related to the Herut Party and the former Irgun organization. The German government kept all proof under seal. Five Israeli suspects identified by French and German investigators were allowed to return to Israel.

One of the participants, Eliezer Sudit, later indicated that the mastermind behind the attempt was Menachem Begin who would later become the Prime Minister of Israel.[1] Begin had been the former commander of Irgun and at that time headed Herut and was a member of the Knesset. His goal was to undermine the attempts of the German government to seek friendly relations with Israel.[2]

David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, appreciated Adenauer’s response in playing down the affair and not pursuing it further, as it would have burdened the relationship between the two new states.

In June 2006 a slightly different version of this story appeared in Germany’s leading newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, quoted by The Guardian. Begin had offered to sell his gold watch as the conspirators ran out of money. The bomb was hidden in an encyclopaedia and it killed a bomb-disposal expert, injuring two others. Adenauer was targeted because he was sending Holocaust reparations to the Israeli government, whereas Begin felt passionately that the money should go to the individual victims. Sudit, the story’s source, explained that the “intent was not to hit Adenauer but to rouse the international media. It was clear to all of us there was no chance the package would reach Adenauer.” The five conspirators were arrested by the French police, in Paris. They “were [former] members of the ... Irgun” (the organisation had been disbanded in 1948, 4 years earlier).[3]

[edit] Political scandals

Main article: Spiegel scandal

In 1962, a scandal erupted when police under cabinet orders arrested five Der Spiegel journalists, charging them with high treason, specifically for publishing a memo detailing alleged weaknesses in West German armed forces. The cabinet members, belonging to the Free Democratic Party, left their positions in November 1962, and Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, himself the chairman of the Christian Social Union, was dismissed, followed by the remaining Christian Democratic Union cabinet members. Adenauer managed to remain in office for almost another year, but was eventually forced to resign and was succeeded as Chancellor by Ludwig Erhard. He did remain chairman of the CDU until 1966.

[edit] Adenauer ministries

[edit] First ministry

Changes

[edit] Second ministry

Changes

[edit] Third ministry

Changes

[edit] Fourth ministry

Changes

[edit] References

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
  1. ^ Interview with H. Sietz, investigator (German)
  2. ^ Background history of assassination attempt (German)
  3. ^ Menachem Begin 'plotted to kill German chancellor' | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

[edit] External links

Political offices
Preceded by
Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk
(as Reichskanzler)		 Chancellor of Germany
1949–1963		 Succeeded by
Ludwig Erhard
Preceded by
Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk		 Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs
1951–1955		 Succeeded by
Heinrich von Brentano di Tremezzo
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Time Persons of the Year

Mohammed Mosaddeq (1951) · Elizabeth II (1952) · Konrad Adenauer (1953) · John Foster Dulles (1954) · Harlow Curtice (1955) · Hungarian Freedom Fighter (1956) · Nikita Khrushchev (1957) · Charles de Gaulle (1958) · Dwight D. Eisenhower (1959) · U.S. Scientists: George Beadle / Charles Draper / John Enders / Donald A. Glaser / Joshua Lederberg / Willard Libby / Linus Pauling / Edward Purcell / Isidor Rabi / Emilio Segrè / William Shockley / Edward Teller / Charles Townes / James Van Allen / Robert Woodward (1960) · John F. Kennedy (1961) · Pope John XXIII (1962) · Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963) · Lyndon B. Johnson (1964) · William Westmoreland (1965) · The Generation Twenty-Five and Under (1966) · Lyndon B. Johnson (1967) · The Apollo 8 Astronauts: William Anders / Frank Borman / Jim Lovell (1968) · The Middle Americans (1969) · Willy Brandt (1970) · Richard Nixon (1971) · Henry Kissinger / Richard Nixon (1972) · John Sirica (1973) · King Faisal (1974) · American Women: Susan Brownmiller / Kathleen Byerly / Alison Cheek / Jill Conway / Betty Ford / Ella Grasso / Carla Hills / Barbara Jordan / Billie Jean King / Carol Sutton / Susie Sharp / Addie L. Wyatt (1975)
Complete roster · 1927–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present
Persondata
NAME Adenauer, Konrad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Konrad Hermann Josef Adenauer
SHORT DESCRIPTION Chancellor of Germany
DATE OF BIRTH January 5, 1876(1876-01-05)
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne, Germany
DATE OF DEATH April 19, 1967
PLACE OF DEATH Bad Honnef
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer"
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