ADENAUER, KONRAD (1876–1967)

First chancellor of West Germany.

Konrad Herman Joseph Adenauer was twenty-two years old at the death of Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), sixty-nine at the death of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), and eighty-seven when he resigned from the chancellery. He was the youngest mayor of Cologne and the oldest chancellor of Germany. His role as patriarch indelibly stamped the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The third child of a large Rhineland family with western European leanings, Adenauer received a liberal, humanist Catholic education. His ideas of nation and state can probably be attributed to his father, a noncommissioned officer in the Prussian army. In spite of modest circumstances, Adenauer studied law and economics at Freiburg and Munich. He completed his studies in Bonn, where he was appointed a judge. His 1904 marriage to Emma Weyer, a Cologne socialite, ensured him a brilliant career as a public servant. From the position of deputy in 1906, he rose to become the mayor of Cologne in 1916 at the age of forty. With the addition of the Rhineland to western Prussia, Adenauer became a member of the Prussian administration. His ambition to turn Cologne into a metropolitan center of economic and cultural commerce with its neighbors was hampered by World War I and then by the seven-year-long British occupation. In opposition to separatist movements, he hoped to detach his Catholic Rhineland from the Prussian state while remaining within the German Reich. During the period between the wars, he attained national political status. He was president of the Prussian State Council (1920–1933), and he was one of the national leaders of the Zentrum (Center), the Roman Catholic party of which he had been a member since 1906. Within it, he represented the republican majority that supported the Weimar regime. A devout Catholic, he was an advocate of decentralization and a partisan of the moderate, interdenominational Liberal Party. As such, he was relieved of his duties as mayor by the Nazis in March of 1939, and he was interned several times from then until 1945.

After the war, Adenauer emerged as one of the principal figures of German reconstruction. (He was named mayor of Cologne by the U.S. government in 1945, but was removed by the British.) He devoted himself to the formation of an interdenominational party, the Christian Democratic Union, which was founded in June 1945. He was president of this party from 1950 until 1966, and he remained honorary president until the end of his life. Meanwhile, he participated in the legislative process of the new Germany. He was the first president of the Parliamentary Council in 1948 and a member of the Bundestag until his death. Through his role in the development of the Basic Law (8 May 1949) and in the choice of Bonn as the capital, followed by his election as the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on 15 September 1949, his own political career became indistinguishable from the postwar history of Germany itself.

Adenauer's first goal was to recover the sovereignty of the West German state and an equality of its rights in relation to the occupying powers. To accomplish this, he assumed the office of minister of foreign affairs from 1951 to 1955. The results of this aim quickly followed: in November 1949 the Petersburg Agreement with the occupying powers, which allowed for Germany to have an independent foreign policy; in 1951 the conclusion of the Ruhr Statute; in 1952 the lifting of the occupation statute with passage of the German Treaty (Deutschlandvertrag); and in 1957 the reintegration of the Saarland into the Federal Republic of Germany. This strategy entailed that the FRG should pay the debts of Nazi Germany. A reparations treaty with Israel was concluded in 1952. In 1953 the London Debt Agreement was signed, and laws were passed for the indemnification of victims of Nazism and the integration of German refugees. After the passage of amnesty laws, denazification passed into its second stage.

Adenauer's second aim was to position the new republic firmly within the "free world" and to ensure its security in the face of the Soviet threat (the Cold War). The war in Korea helped the "Allies' Chancellor" (according to his rival Kurt Schumacher [1895–1952]) to make Germany a military partner of the United States in spite of the public's reluctance. In addition, the FRG became a member of NATO in 1955. Adenauer refused any accommodation with the Soviet Union, even a 1952 proposal from Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) on the reunification of the two Germanys, but during his 1956 trip to the Soviet Union, he did reestablish diplomatic relations in exchange for the return of the remaining German POWs of World War II.

His third aim was to make the FRG an engine for the building of Europe as a means to international recognition, albeit at the cost of giving up any exclusive sovereignty. Adenauer advocated the participation of Germany in numerous European institutions (the Council of Europe, 1950; the European Coal and Steel Community, 1951; and the European Economic Community, 1957). He also worked toward the reconciliation of Germany with its traditional enemy, France. The warming of relations with France under Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) benefited greatly from a weakening of ties with the United States and led to the Elysée Treaty of 1963.

Adenauer's strategy was supported by the economic expansion of the 1950s (the Wunderwirtschaft) and social changes (such as the adoption in 1951 of the policy of codetermination, whereby union leaders sit on companies' boards of directors, and pension reform in 1957) that contributed to the creation of the German market economy, in large part the work of his finance minister, Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977). Thus Adenauer, the great tactician, accustomed to a petit bourgeois way of life and at times abrupt, became the incarnation of "chancellor democracy" (Kanzlerdemokratie).

His fourth aim concerned the solution to the delicate question of a divided Germany. Adenauer's project of creating a prosperous, secure, and integrated Germany capable of luring East Germany onto the path toward unification had failed. His only consolation was that the 1954 treaty did not make the separation official. This failure cast a shadow over the end of the "Adenauer era"; he was even sometimes accused of being a "traitor to the national cause." Moreover, his lack of reaction to the building of the Berlin wall (13 August 1961), his indecisive candidacy for the presidency of the republic (1959), and the Spiegel affair in 1962 (involving revelations of Germany's military unpreparedness) all eroded his popularity. The result was the formation of a coalition government with the Free Democrats and his resignation on 15 October 1963. He devoted himself to his memoirs until his death in 1967 at his Rhöndorf estate.

Even though Adenauer is considered the founding father of the German Republic, his role is still debated: Did he determine the fate of Germany or simply follow the course of history? Even though the Allies made the major decisions, Adenauer was able to alter the status of Germany that had been decreed at Yalta. For the first time in history, thanks to him, Germany was schooled in the effectiveness of the parliamentary system. But his intra-German policy also led to an impasse. Did he put in place a workable concept of unification that was not simply reducible to an all-or-nothing politics in regard the Soviet Union? He was more a founding father than a providential figure, and in the end he was unable to make his fellow citizens understand the conditions and limitations of the birth of the new Germany.

See alsoChristian Democracy; Economic Miracle; Germany.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Adenauer, Konrad. Memoirs. Translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen. Chicago, 1966.

Secondary Sources

Granieri, Ronald J. The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966. New York, 2003.

Krekel, Michael. Konrad Adenauer: Profiles of the Man and the Politician. Bad Honnef, Germany, 1999.

Schwarz, Hans-Peter. Konrad Adenauer: A German Politician and Statesman in a Period of War, Revolution, and Reconstruction. Translated by Louise Wilmot. Providence, R.I., 1995.

Williams, Charles. Adenauer: The Father of the New Germany. London, 2000.

Fabien ThÉofilakis