After the Reich (103 page)

Chaos reigned too when it came to currency, with German Reichsmarks, Occupation Schillings and Austrian National Schillings all in circulation. None had any real purchasing power - for that you needed cigarettes. The Schilling had been re-established in 1945, but its value plummeted and in December 1947 a ‘new Schilling’ replaced it, at a value of three old ones. Meanwhile the Allies continued to bleed the stricken state. In 1945 the Allied armies of occupation absorbed 35 per cent of the Austrian budget. With difficulty this was reduced to 15 in 1947. That year the Americans dispensed with their share, but it was not until 1953 that the other powers decided they could pay their own way.
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The Federal Republic

On 7 April 1948 General Robertson told the members of the Nordrein-Westfalen Landtag that they were to make the best of the western part of Germany for the time being; ‘the rest will come in time. We offer you our good will and co-operation.’ The effect of the speech was to hearten the Germans.
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Adenauer was in on the European movement from the start. In May 1948 he was one of 800 delegates at the United Europe Congress in The Hague. His adviser Herbert Blankenhorn would have carried with him some of the ideas current at meetings of the Kreisau Circle during the war, when the notion of removing borders was seen as a means of preventing future wars. Sovereignty was also to be played down - as Adenauer himself put it, ‘to secure common political and economic action’.
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Churchill delivered a speech at the conference and received Adenauer personally. Adenauer had sent a message to Churchill via Frank Pakenham: ‘We were Hitler’s prisoners and but for Mr Churchill we would not be alive today.’ He was playing the victim card again.
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The London Conference of the Western Allies published the London Agreements on 7 June. It proposed the setting up of a constituent assembly, the defining of an Occupation Statute for the Allied armies and the creation of a Ruhr authority to allocate coal and steel production. It was typical of Adenauer that he was unconcerned about events in Berlin. The man of the moment was Reuter. Adenauer was chiefly concerned with the Ruhr authority, which he interpreted as an affront to German dignity. The Versailles Treaty was ‘a bed of roses by comparison’.
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As a recent biographer has written, given the situation in Berlin, Adenauer’s protestations sounded like ‘complaints about the functioning of the parish pump’.
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More important were the meetings to decide the form of the future constitution. Documents were issued to the minister presidents of the three Western zones. The Länder called a conference in Koblenz on 8 July which was followed by another at Frankfurt that began on 20 July. On 10 August they met again on the Herreninsel in Lake Chiemsee. There was little agreement between the CDU and the Bavarian CSU, and Adenauer disliked the Bavarian party chairman, Josef ‘Ochsensepp’ Müller.

On 26 July the minister presidents agreed to summon a constituent assembly to be called the Parliamentary Council in Bonn on 1 September. It was to be a conference of party officials, arranged proportionate to seats in the three Landtags. Bonn was not Adenauer’s idea. He would have preferred Koblenz, which was in the French Zone.
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It was in Bonn that one of the architects of the
Grundgesetz
or basic law came to the fore - Dr Carlo Schmid. Schmid was the SPD’s constitutional expert and it was the job of his committee to produce the legal foundations for post-war Germany. The SPD scored a small victory over Adenauer, who was anxious to prevent them from constituting a majority in the new Bundesrat, or upper house (the lower house was to be the Bundestag). He was trying to exclude Berlin from the body, both because of his animus against the city and because its inclusion would mean that the SPD carried the day. The SPD, however, succeeded in establishing that the size of the Land’s population would decide how many delegates would go to the Bundesrat.

It was at this time that Blankenhorn entered the stage. He had been a colleague and friend of Adam von Trott’s in the German Foreign Office, and was well aware of the aims and ideologies of the Kreisauer. He was an Anglophile, and fell out with Adenauer only when the latter opposed British membership of the Common Market. Blankenhorn could do what Adenauer could not: he could charm Allied generals and talk to journalists. Adenauer was too much of a stuffed shirt to appeal to them.

The French were distressed to see the progress being made towards a German government under the lead of Adenauer. Work was proceeding at such a lick that the minister presidents of the Länder were worried about taking the responsibility of splitting Germany in two. Not so Adenauer. He thought Germany’s future lay in the west in the defence of Romano-Christian culture. He knew that his bread was buttered in Paris. The French nonetheless wanted him to slow down, and confine his attentions to the basic law. When Clay and Robertson issued Bizonia Law 75 giving the Germans the cue to decide the future of the Ruhr, the French uttered a last gasp of fury embodied in a formal complaint from Schuman.
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Despite this, Adenauer was still flirting with the French. One of the contacts he made at the time was with Schuman. They met first in October 1948 at Bassenheim in the French-administered Pfalz, in the residence of the governor, Hettier de Boislambert. Adenauer had no desire to let the Anglo-Americans know of his talks and travelled to the meeting wrapped in a blanket with his Homburg pulled down over his eyes. The Ruhr was still a sticking point. Schuman had to go carefully. Even after 1949 the Saar was the cause of frequent friction between the French and Adenauer.
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The parliamentary capital had yet to be decided. Berlin was out, not just because of Adenauer’s loathing of Prussia, but because it was behind Russian lines and increasingly prone to Soviet intimidation. The natural capital was Frankfurt, in that it had been a semi-independent imperial, coronation city before 1806, and it was also the scene of the abortive German parliament of 1848. After 1848, German liberals believed the country had taken the wrong path - the path that led to the First World War and the Second. It was also famously the birthplace of Goethe. Frankfurt was the choice of the SPD. The CDU was for Bonn, a small city associated with the archbishop of Cologne, and with the Prussian university founded there in 1815. Bonn was the birthplace of Beethoven. The British decided in Bonn’s favour by offering to make it autonomous and free from their control. Frankfurt was administratively too important for the Americans to relinquish it. The Germans could finally be masters in their small house.

Conclusion

The policy of constraint applied by the victors brings only fragile and misleading solutions . . . For as long as there is reason for revenge, there will be a renewed risk of war. Germany was never as dangerous as when she was isolated.

Robert Schuman, Pour l’Europe, 2nd edn, Paris 1964, 107, 110

That means the old borders must fall and be replaced by new alliances, and a new, bigger empire must unite the nations . . . That is the only way to end the feud properly to everybody’s advantage.

Ernst Jünger, Der Friede, Vienna 1949, 31

T
he Soviets had failed. They had failed twice: they had neither pushed the Western Allies out of Berlin nor forestalled the creation of a Western German state. The stage was now set for the division of Germany into two camps, each with its own ideologically orientated government. On 8 April 1949 the Allies in Washington decided to transform their Military Government into an Allied High Commission, and the French agreed to join Bizonia, briefly to be called Trizonia. On 23 May 1949 the basic law or
Grundgesetz
was signed in the presence of the three Western Allied governors. The Federal Republic was waiting in the wings. Adenauer claimed that the
Grundgesetz
constituted ‘a major contribution to the reunification of the German people’.
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This was clearly untrue, and it is interesting to speculate today how much Adenauer ever genuinely desired to see the family reunited. Some maintain that Adenauer was biding his time, waiting for the East to fall into his hands. For the time being, however, Germany east of the Elbe was cast adrift and would not come back into harbour until 1989, twenty-two years after Adenauer’s death.

Some would argue that Adenauer - indeed the West - was powerless to alleviate the plight of those Germans caught behind the Iron Curtain, but this is only true up to a point. There was another way: it was the solution which, after 250 days of negotiation, resulted in the Austrian State Treaty in 1955. The Allies then packed their bags and went home. That solution was presented to Germany too. On 10 March 1952 Stalin made Adenauer an offer of an armed and unified Germany. The only condition he sought to impose was that Germany - like Austria after 1955 - should not belong to any military alliance. Stalin was still worried about security. Adenauer pocketed the note. He said it contained nothing new. He thought it more important to integrate his West German state with the West than to unite with his brothers across the Elbe.
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The rest may be summarised. Elections in West Germany were set for 14 August 1949. Adenauer went into the lists claiming that the British were funding the socialists, which made him more sour than ever, even if he didn’t actually believe a word of it. The result was a hung parliament, with the CDU/CSU winning 31 per cent of the vote and the SPD 29.2 per cent. A coalition was inevitable. On 21 August Adenauer held a CDU coffee party at his home in Rhöndorf. The leader of the FDP, or Free Democrats, Theodor Heuss, was to be fobbed off with the ceremonial presidency. Adenauer pushed the CSU aside to clasp the chancellor’s role for himself. On 15 September it was put to a vote among the members of the Bundestag. Adenauer secured the Chancellery by one vote - his own. Kurt Schumacher dubbed him ‘the Allies’ Chancellor’.
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The new Germany could now start work. The adoption of the basic law that month ended the military occupation of Germany.

Adenauer’s election prompted an equal and opposite move in the East. On 16 September a SED delegation arrived in Moscow to receive instructions from the Politburo on how to cope with the creation of a ‘West German imperialist state’ and to plan the creation of the German Democratic Republic. It was much the same crew: Pieck, Grotewohl, Ulbricht and Fred Oelssner on the German side, and Malenkov, Molotov, Mikoyan and Kaganovitch on the Soviet. America was cast in the light of a colonising power. The West German regime was to be unmasked as the organ of the Western powers.
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The GDR was created on 7 October not only as a response to the FRG, but also as a result of East Germany’s abandonment by West. At the end of 1949 the Soviet regime made promises that it did not keep, among which was an agreement to release all German POWs, and to close the camps in Germany. At the outset there had been eleven such establishments, but this number was now reduced to just three. At their peak the camps had contained 158,000 Germans. There were still 16,000 as 1949 turned into 1950, and the camps did not finally close until after Stalin’s death. As a special treat the German delegation had asked for some translations of Stalin’s speeches. The incentive was to be rid of the SBZ, which with time the East Germans were, although no one can argue that Moscow failed to keep them on a tight leash.

Adenauer’s courting of the French not only ensured their eventual support, it had one lasting benefit: it laid the foundations for the Common Market, or European Union as it has now become. The idea has its precursors. Emperor William II of Germany made frequent references to the subject and voiced a hope that it would come to fruition. It apparently derived from his chancellor Caprivi.
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Aristide Briand had proposed a European Federation in 1929-30 as a means of matching the might of the United States after 1918, but the suggestion was put aside by the slump that followed the Wall Street Crash. Robert Schuman became interested at that time as a deputy for Lorraine in the French Assembly.
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During the war the notion of European unity surfaced on both sides of the Rhine. In Germany it tended to be the left who took it up, especially some of the intellectuals in the Kreisau Circle. Adam von Trott, for example, was keen to revive a ‘Carolingian’ Europe and it was a conception that found echoes in the Quai d’Orsay at the end of the war.
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In France a union of Europe was more popular with the right, often as an unlikely benefit that had accrued with defeat. Ernst Jünger, who must have encountered its champions on both sides of the Rhine, thought it a lost opportunity that the French and Germans were not brought together on an equal footing after the Fall of France. Writing in the middle of the war, he saw the forging of a new ‘empire’ to be a task for the peace: ‘Can someone like an Alsatian live as a German or a Frenchman without being forced to turn from one to the other?’ Jünger was also swayed by the Carolingian idea - to build a new empire that would be as strong as its rivals.
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His thoughts were not far from those of Schuman.