This vivid portrait of Konrad Adenauer, published in the year Germany's capital returned to Berlin, is a timely assessment of the first post-war chancellor (1949-1963) and the man who created the Bonn Republic.
Adenauer was born in 1876, only five years after Bismarck's creation of the Wilhelmine Empire and he died in 1967, living long into the age of Germany's post-war division. Throughout that time he scarcely travelled outside its frontiers. His experience of foreigners was largely confined to dealing with the British forces which after the first world war occupied Cologne, of which he was mayor. The only significant non-German influence on him was the Catholic church to which he was devoutly committed. The Nazis sacked him from Cologne and subjected him to periodic persecution. He took refuge in a monastery where he studied the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. As a long-serving, big-city, governing mayor, politics to him was about successful administration and about the creation of infrastructure and institutions which would deliver prosperity and civic order over the long term. He was twice offered the chance to become chancellor in the 1920s, but preferred the local fief to the transient glory of national leadership in the Weimar Republic.
Besides being "the father of the New Germany," Adenauer is bracketed with Monnet, Schuman and de Gasperi as one of the fathers of the EU. He deserves the accolade for the way in which he committed the young Federal Republic to the treaties of Paris and Rome, rather than pursuing what was then the chimera of a united Germany. But, as Williams shows, he was quite different from the other founding fathers.
Monnet was a widely travelled internationalist with experience of Britain and the US. Schuman, as an Alsatian, had been an unwilling German citizen before becoming a willing French one. De Gasperi had been a member of the Austro-Hungarian parliament before the Italian acquisition of Trento gave him Italian nationality. They wanted to create over-arching political structures that would unite Europeans of all nations, prevent war and in time create a new European identity. Adenauer, by contrast, was above all a German who wanted his native Rhineland to be the flywheel of an economic region embracing Germany, France and the Benelux countries. He saw Franco-German rivalry as the cause of what had gone wrong for Germany, and his region in particular. Hence his affinity with de Gaulle and his view of Europe as a means of furthering German interests and Franco-German reconciliation within a framework which would reassure their smaller neighbours. In the cold war context, he saw the US and Britain as vital to the defence of Berlin and West Germany but peripheral to the European enterprise.
Both in Germany and Europe the lines he laid down endure. Notwithstanding the immense contribution of individual Britons and Americans to West Germany's post-war constitution, it was Adenauer who gave them their enduring characteristics and established the precedents which still govern the relationship between the component parts. In particular, he established the precedent that however much power is diffused among the Lÿnder-and such independent bodies as the Bundesbank and the constitutional court-on great matters central to the interests of the state, it is the elected chancellor, with a majority in the Bundestag, who carries the day. He defied great swathes of public opinion and the deepest feelings of many of his fellow citizens when he tied West Germany firmly into the western system of alliances, instead of venturing down the primrose path of a united Germany held out by the Soviet Union. Helmut Schmidt built on that precedent when he deployed US Cruise missiles in the teeth of public opinion. Helmut Kohl did so again when he rejected Bundesbank advice on the appropriate parity of the old Deutschmark and Ostmark and when he led Germany into Emu. In all these cases the chancellor was subsequently vindicated at the polls. It is hard to think of any other democracy with such a consistent record of strong and successful personal leadership.
The economic and political balance between France and Germany has now shifted sharply in Germany's favour. The personalities of the two countries' leaders change with each change of government, but the Treaty of Friendship which Adenauer and de Gaulle signed remains the rock on which the most remarkable and productive special relationship of modern times is built. The fears of Germany's smaller western neighbours have long since been laid to rest-or largely so-within the context of the EU. Now European rhetoric, ideals and projects are invoked to provide the reassurance that its eastern neighbours need against their historic memories of German aggression. The experience of the successful reconciliation with France is being drawn on to create a new relationship with Poland.
As Williams makes clear, Adenauer was a disagreeable, grasping, overbearing, cynical man. But during his long life, and while excluded from public life by the Nazis, he had the opportunity to reflect on and learn from the lessons of history. Unlike most old men, he then had the opportunity to put his conclusions into effect. The realpolitik he pursued was designed to avoid the errors of the past and to enable Germans and their neighbours to live in peace and prosperity with each other. No European country has more neighbours with whom it has fought more wars than Germany and its predecessor states, above all Prussia. Adenauer's clear-sightedness and experience, reinforced by his cynicism, enabled him to put his country's relationship with those neighbours on a new footing, to the immense benefit of all concerned. Because it was based on real interests and underpinned by institutional structures capable of outliving their creators, it has become part of the German psyche. For that we should all remember him with gratitude.
