Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (115 page)

Adenauer was one of the most gifted statesmen of modern times; certainly the most wholly successful in recent German history. During his chancellorship, real incomes in Germany tripled. In 1953 he won a majority of seats in the Bundestag and in 1957, by which
time Germany’s currency was the strongest in Europe, an absolute majority of votes cast. He placed German democracy on an almost unassailable base and not only brought it back into the concert of civilized powers but made it a pillar of the legitimate establishment. He could not have achieved these things without both a strong streak of genuine idealism and ample reserves of cynical cunning. Erhard thought he had
Menschenverachtung
, a contempt for mankind. It was, rather, a vivid awareness of human weakness, and especially of German vices. In the new Bundestag, whose
décor
he supervised and made spectacular (’like a Max Reinhardt set for a production of
Julius Caesar’)
, the ink-wells and desk-tops were screwed down to prevent hooliganism. Even so the scenes were awful, enhancing by contrast Adenauer’s own imperturbability, dignity and maturity; though he shared with Calvin Coolidge a curious taste for practical jokes, which included hiding the block of wood on which the stocky Dr Eugen Gerstenmaier, President of the Bundestag, addressed the assembly. Adenauer did not think the Germans were a people to be trusted, either collectively or as individuals. He shadowed his ministers, tracking one down to a Paris brothel and accordingly ruling him out for the Foreign Ministry.
²⁷
He had little affection beyond his own family circle and his closest associate was Hans Globke, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, who ran the Chancellery and Adenauer’s private intelligence service. ‘And who knows’, Adenauer would smirk, ‘what Herr Globke may have in his safe?’
²⁸
He thought democratic statesmen ought to be smarter and better informed than their totalitarian rivals. Collectively, he felt the Germans could only be trusted within the iron framework of the absolute rule of law, overawing even the state; his establishment of this framework will in the long run prove, perhaps, his chief contribution to German political culture.

It was because the Soviet leaders, like Hitler, hated and ridiculed law that Adenauer set his face implacably against any deal with them which could not be guaranteed and supervised down to the smallest print. He used to say that the Soviet regime had appropriated during and since the war 500,000 square miles of territory, all of it in Europe; it was the only expansionist power left. Over forty years it had broken or revoked forty-five out of the fifty-eight treaties it had signed.
²⁹
By insisting on testing Soviet intentions, he exposed their ‘reunification’ proposals of 1952, 1955 and 1959 as fraudulent. He could not forget that 1,150,000 German prisoners of war had vanished into Soviet Russia, of whom only 9,628, classified as ‘war criminals’, had ever been accounted for.
³⁰
Hence he used every means to persuade Germans to seek refuge in the West, where he could give them law and freedom and work. After the East German
workers’ rising of June 1953, put down with great ferocity by the Red Army, the Soviet leaders turned Walter Ulbricht’s Communist regime into a complete satellite. It did not prosper, and Adenauer’s policy of encouraging refugees was bleeding it to death at the rate of 1,000 a day by July 1961. On 13 August Ulbricht, with Soviet permission, began building the Berlin Wall. It was illegal, and Truman and Eisenhower would certainly have knocked it down. But under a weak president, Jack Kennedy, the
fait accompli
was accepted. There was nothing Adenauer could do about it, for he had no jurisdiction in Berlin, which remained a four-power responsibility. He watched in sadness, in the last years of his life, while the flow of refugees was cut off, and the wall saved the East German economy, turning it from a crushing liability into a growing Soviet asset, the one reliable industrial workshop of
the
bloc.

By then, however, Adenauer’s work was complete, for he had tied the West Germans, economically, militarily and politically, to Western culture and legitimacy as tightly and as permanently as human ingenuity could devise. Therein lay the real idealism which balanced his Realpolitik. He was the first German statesman to put European before German interests. It may be true, as one of his critics put it, that he was ‘a good European but a bad German’.
³¹
In that sense he wanted to be a ‘bad’ German; he hated Professor Kallmann’s portrait of him because it made him, he said, ‘look just like a Hun’. He thought that German reunification was not available at a price Germany or the West could afford to pay. That he was right was amply demonstrated by the failure of his successors, over twenty years, to obtain any other result. By contrast, integration with the West was a realizable object, and he realized it. But here again he was fortunate. Adenauer grasped, intellectually rather than emotionally, that Germany’s future lay with France. He had no feelings for France; no French tastes; knew very little about the country, and up to the age of seventy had only once visited it, for a two-day conference. Yet, as always, he saw political facts realistically: ‘There is no European policy without France or against France, just as there can be no European policy without or against Germany.’
³²

The partner Adenauer hoped to work with in France, Robert Schuman, had much in common with de Gasperi and himself. He came from Lorraine; German was his native tongue. Until 1919, when he was already middle-aged, he was not even a French citizen. Adenauer saw him as a citizen of the Kingdom of Lothar, Charlemagne’s grandson, the so-called ‘Middle Kingdom’, to which both Lorraine and Cologne had belonged. On 9 May 1950 he sold Schuman the idea of a European coal—steel pool, which became the germ of the European Economic Community, and it was largely
thanks to Schuman that the marginal but emotionally vital problem of the Saar was finally resolved in October 1955. But Schuman was too unrepresentative a Frenchman to ‘deliver’ France for the more grandiose project Adenauer had in mind. Schuman had been a sergeant in the German army in 1914–18. The French argued that for a Lorrainer to be a German private or even an officer was excusable as an accident of birth; but to rise to be a senior
NCO
implied enthusiasm. In any case the Fourth Republic itself could not deliver France; it was too weak to deliver anything permanently. For France to embrace Germany it required the self-confidence born of renewed strength; and a man and a regime which embodied that confidence. It was Adenauer’s great fortune that he survived long enough to capitalize on de Gaulle’s triumphant return to power and the birth of the Fifth Republic.

The recovery of France in the 1960s and 1970s is one of the most striking phenomena of modern times. In the 1930s, as we have seen, it would have appeared inconceivable. And the road which led to it is complex and paradoxical. The Third Republic in its last phase had been the embodiment of the notion ‘small is beautiful’: declining population, low production, productivity, investment, wages and consumption; the cult—the exaltation almost—of the ‘little man’, the small factory, the small farm, the small town. It was dead even before the Germans defeated it, and collapsed into a heap of dust in the summer of 1940. It is important to grasp that Vichy was the beginning of the recovery, because it was created not only by French fascists and collaborators but by all those who deplored the rottenness and inadequacy of its predecessor. Pétain himself may have leaned to archaism, as he indicated when he said: ‘France will never be great again until the wolves are howling round the doors of her villages.’
³³
But many of those who held key posts in the regime were radical modernizers. Under the guidance of Jean Coutrot, founder in 1930 of the Polytechnique’s Centre for Economic Studies, a new generation of technocrats came to the fore under Vichy. They included the Minister of Industrial Production, Bichelonne, Henri Culman, Vichy’s chief economic theorist, Jacques Rueff, Laval’s adviser in 1934 and later de Gaulle’s, Roland Boris, who also was to be influential with de Gaulle (and Pierre Mendès-France) and Pierre Massé, later Commissioner for Planning in the Fifth Republic.
³⁴

Indeed, amidst its extraordinary confusions, contradictions and treachery, Vichy, by the mere fact of overthrowing the existing order, was a time of experiment and risk. One of its beneficiaries was the go-ahead younger French peasant, prototype of the new farmers who were later to do so well out of the
EEC.
For the first time peasants became interested in modernization, machinery and productivity.
³⁵
A system of quasi-voluntary planning (’indicative planning’), the embryo of the
Commissariat général du Plan
, came into existence. It was Vichy which first put into effect the idea of tax-funded Family Allowances, conceived in 1932 by the demographer Adolphe Landry to raise the birth-rate; and under Vichy, for the first time in more than a century, the French birth-rate actually began to increase again. The psychological effect was profound. Vichy was devoted to youth, a craze it caught from the Germans. It spent far more on education than the Third Republic. It was Vichy which effectively created popular sport in France, especially football: there were only thirty professional footballers in France in 1939, ten times as many by 1943.
³⁶
One of the most striking features of Vichy were the ‘Youth Workshops’ or
Chantiers de la Jeunesse
(literally ‘shipyards’), with a stress on technical education which had hitherto been lacking. The aim was a rejuvenation of France. As Pétain’s Minister of Information, Paul Marion, put it, ‘Thanks to us, the France of camping, of sports, of dances, of travel and group hikes will sweep away the France of aperitifs, of tobacco dens, of party congresses and long digestions.’
³⁷
To a great extent this prophecy was fulfilled.

Much of the achievement of Vichy was thrown away in its own débâcle and in the division of the nation which followed. About 170,000 French worked in the Resistance; more – 190,000 – were accused of collaboration, and about 100,000 sent to gaol. Nobody to this day knows how many were murdered in 1944: about 4,500 cases were authenticated.
³⁸
The Communists, who had actually opposed the war in 1939–40, were the great beneficiaries of 1944, when they were able to murder most of their enemies. They claimed the title of the
parti des fusillés
, claiming 75,000 ‘Communist patriots’ had been shot by the Nazis and Vichy. But at the Nuremberg trials the official French figure of the total killed under the Occupation was only 29,660, and the Communists never produced the actual names of more than 176
CP
‘heroes’.
³⁹
In fact leading Communists offered to give evidence against Socialist leaders at the Riom trial, and the party newspaper l
‘Humanité
protested when Vichy released anti-Nazis from jail.
⁴⁰
Unlike other parties, it never purged collaborators, who would have included its leader, Maurice Thorez; the only people it got rid of in 1944–5 were those who disobeyed the Stalin line in 1939–40 and fought the Nazis. Yet the
CP
emerged from the war, because of its belated Resistance enthusiasm, by far the richest and best-organized, and in many respects the biggest, of the French parties. It pushed its vote from 1.5 million in 1936 to over 5 million in 1945 and 5.5 million in 1946; the total went on rising until 1949, and in the late-1940s the
CP
had around 900,000 paid-up members. The French
CP
was wholly Stalinist, and remained so after Stalin’s death; it was systematically corrupted,
intellectually and morally, by Thorez, an archetype of the twentieth-century professional politician, who became a full-time party functionary at the age of twenty-three and never did anything else – was, in effect, a Moscow civil servant all his life.
⁴¹
He ghettoized the party vote, erecting little iron curtains round its enclaves, so that the
CP
became a society within France, with its own newspapers, plays, novels, poems, women’s magazines, children’s comics, cookery books and farmers’ almanacs.
⁴²

The existence of this huge, intransigent party, which owed its primary allegiance to a foreign power, posed almost insuperable problems of governing France. De Gaulle, who had (as he put it) ‘picked the Republic out of the gutter’, found that he could not in practice entrust the ‘big three’ ministries to Communist members of his coalition. He could not, he said on the radio, ‘concede to them any of the three posts which determine foreign policy: diplomacy, which expresses it; the army, which supports it; and the police, which covers it’.
⁴³
The inability to secure a national, as opposed to a party-ideological, approach to defence led to his resignation in January 1946. As a result he played no direct part in shaping the new constitution, which was primarily the work of Communists and Socialists. The consequences were tragic. Ever since the end of its divine-right monarchy, France had found it impossible to devise a constitution which reconciled the demands of central authority and the rights of representation; it veered between dictatorship and chaos, according as the constitution pushed the balance one way or the other. The first twelve constitutions were failures. That of the Third Republic, in 1875, was passed by one vote in an Assembly which in fact had a majority of monarchists but could not agree on a particular king. It lasted, shakily, for sixty-five years, but it ended in complete failure and half the nation had never accepted it in spirit – one reason why Vichy was greeted with such rapture. Pétain had been entrusted with devising a new constitution but (like Hitler) had never done so. De Gaulle had his own ideas, based upon a strong presidency, which he outlined in a speech at Bayeux (’the Bayeux constitution’) in June 1946. But this was never put to the vote.