Dr. Adenauer, a personal recollection

THREE YEARS ago, when Dr. Adenauer was 88, I went to his formal birthday reception in the Redoute at Bad Godesberg. Cockahoop, I told the grave ex-Chancellor 1 had a special reason for congratulating him.
My youngest daughter and fifth child, I said, was born while he was attending his birthday Mass, celebrated by Mgr. Paul Adenauer, in the same hospital, St. Elisabeth's, run by the Franciscan nuns in Bonn. A few minutes later, while I was sharing a bottle of Rhine wine behind the scenes with Fri. Poppinga, Dr. Adenauer's faithful secretary, I was summoned to his presence again.
There, to my delighted astonishment, I was presented with a bouquet of 88 roses to take with Dr. Adenauer's best wishes to my wife. The story of this gesture went round the world.
Later that year. after our eldest child, my son, was killed in Bad Godesberg, I received a note of three sentences from Dr. Adenauer. After expressing his shock and sympathy, he added: "Your Faith will help you to bear the incomprehensible."
It was all that needed to be said, but it was often in my thoughts, and how true it proved. Soon afterwards. I was host to Dr. Adenauer at a large, international gathering. It was a great ordeal. Over lunch, Dr. Adenauer gave me further wise and kindly advice, drawn from his own two bereavements. "Never give up however hard it seems," he said.
When I commented how hard was the prospect of carrying on for another 30 years, he replied, with infinite weariness, "Thirty years? My friend, perhaps forty or fifty years."
For the first time. I realised how hard it must be to survive to a great age, outliving one's family and friends and, in the case of Dr. Adenauer and similar figures, fulfilling a great destiny.
Now Dr. Adenauer himself is at rest. Countless people who knew him, if only, like myself, through periodic contacts, will fell saddened. Bonn was never the same once he retired from the Chancellorship, and none knew it better than journalists, for whom he was a never-failing source of news.
But although Dr. Adenauer may have seemed a stern, statesmanlike figure abroad, he had many other facets. Prominent among them was his habitual wit and humour. Another key characteristic was his Catholicism.
Dr. Adenauer came from a respectable, devoutly Catholic home, where money was not plentiful, but the children were given the best possible education. His father was an official, who had been commissioned on the field of Koniggratz for gallantry.
Dr. Adenauer, who never performed military service, has described how, as a child, he had a strict, simple upbringing, surrounded by "warm love." His father laid the greatest value on fulfilment of duty, his mother was thrifty and hardworking.
"We were brought up to fear God. There was genuine piety
in the family. Father and Mother set a good example in everything." It was a deep familial piety still to be found in the Rhineland. Later, Dr. Adenauer attended a Catholic grammar school, the Apostelgymnasium in Cologne.
In his subsequent career in local and national government, Dr. Adenauer, though devout, was never one to carry his faith on his sleeve. Rather it was something taken for granted, yet permeating all his longterm thinking and action.
This sketch is. in no way an assessment of Dr. Adenauer as a statesman. But the key to all his political action, reflecting his Catholic faith, was his conviction that a united Christian Europe must be built as a bulwark against the advance of atheistic Communism. Once Dr. Adenauer described to me his fears of President de Gaulle, another Catholic statesman, flirting with Moscow.
Essentially a man of action, who loved the cut-and-thrust of politics, whose acute political
cunning earned him the title of "Rhenish Fox" and able to "take it" as well as "hand it out," Dr. Adenauer never showed doubt in the correctness of his actions. But he remained God-fearing, and a constant theme of his Christmas broadcasts was the dependence of all achievement on God.
Doubtlessly, Dr. Adenauer's faith was tempered by the loss of his first wife after 12 years marriage in 1917, leaving him with three young children, which he described as a "severe blow,", and the death of his devoted second wife in 1948 at the outset of his great Chancellorship.
Trust in Providence was deepened by his 12 years in the wilderness after being dismissed from the powerful burgomastership of Cologne by the Nazis. These years Dr. Adenauer spent in seclusion at his villa in Rhondorf, raising his seven children, tending his roses, studying and clarifying his thoughts as he gazed towards the distant Belgian frontier.
He kept in touch through B.B.C. broadcasts and preserved contacts so far as con stant observation allowed. But he avoided links with "resistance circles," whom he could only endanger, and vice-versa. Twice Dr. Adenauer was arrested by the Gestapo, as was his wife after the July 20 plot, and he was lucky to survive. Essentially, he spent the Nazi years waiting.
Those who see the hand of Providence in the lives of saints and great men will recognise it in the life of Adenauer. Offered the Chancellorship in 1926, he rejected it, only to become Germany's greatest Chancellor 21 years later. Like Churchill and others, his whole life may be seen as a preparation for his final, great role.
But while Dr. Adenauer was an honoured guest of all three post-war Popes, he made plain he was not subservient to clerical domination. This was important if he was to retain the confidence of the Protestant half of the population.
It inspired some characteristic anecdotes. Cardinal Frings, a close friend and associate for several decades, once said to R obert Pferdmenges, Dr. Adenauer's oldest, though Protestant friend: "Won't you appeal to his conscience? After all, you're his friend, and he won't listen to me."
Dr. Adenauer is also said to have once shocked a convert French Ambassador by saying he had never knelt to kiss a bishop's ring. His rather unconvincing reason was that it was "unhygienic."
After disclosing he once ordered three million litres of schnapps to be poured in the Rhine without the owners' permission, he added: "And I never confessed that to Frings either." When I once told him the sermons in the Bonn Miinster were good. but too long, he exclaimed: "Twenty-five minutes! How long do you think I have to sit through? And sometimes so boring!"
Magnanimously, Dr. Adenauer once conceded: "Luther was a good man. If I'd been Pope, I'd have sent for him, and none of that trouble would have happened."
But often Cardinal Frings would be seen, resplendent in purple in the back of his black
Mercedes, speeding back to Cologne after seeing Dr. Adenauer at the Palais Schaumburg. Every Sunday morning, Dr. Adenauer's walk to Mass in the village church in Rhondorf was a tourist attraction. Once a good lady exclaimed loudly: "This is the loveliest day of my life!" Momentarily nonplussed, "Der Alte" recovered his wit and commented to a companion, "Poor woman! She must have lived modestly."
It was Dr. Adenauer's mischievous Rhineland humour which, belying his stern appearance, endeared him to millions and inspired countless anecdotes. Coupled with a blunt way of hitting his Socialist or Communist targets with a rhetorical hammer, and a remarkable gift for repartee, it made him an outstanding platform speaker and master of Press conferences.
With Adenauer, audiences waited, chuckling, in delighted anticipation for the next sally. He was a reporter's delight, a man who spoke in "straight quotes," expressing himself clearly and simply, and always newsworthy.
In 1963, he told his party congress the heraldic beast of the Opposition should be the "earth-lion." Mystified, delegates began to chuckle. The "earth-lion," he added sanctimoniously, was a remarkable animal. Now it was black, now white, sometimes it was scarlet, som e times pale-pink. And sometimes, he added in a gale of laughter in an allusion to Socialist ogling of the Vatican, it was even Cardinal-red.
Q uizzed afterwards, Dr. Adenauer said with a straight face that during etymological research, he had found "earthlion" was old German for chameleon. But of course, "chameleon" would not have brought the house down.
Returning hobbling from holiday, he told solicitous colleagues: "Yes, gentlemen, I fell—but on my knee, not on my head." Asked where to file numerous marriage proposals from female admirers, he replied laconically: "Under nonaggression pacts." Told by a young colleague he wanted the Cabinet to say "Yes" and "Amen" to everything, Dr. Adenauer replied: "It's enough if you say `Yes'."
Similarly, Dr. Adenauer once said he was never "pingelich" in the use of power—a word unknown to most Germans. It might be translated as "niggly." In one minor scandal, he exchanged some homely, but unflattering comments on Cabinet colleagues in a radio studio with Felix von Eckardt, his Press chief and intimus, without knowing microphones were "livf. "
On occasion, Dr. Adenauer could be ruthless, as in his moves against Dr. Erhard. Yet his judgment usually proved right. He could inspire violent antagonisms as well as devotion, like Churchill. He was accused of contemptuous disregard for his fellow-men, a result of the impassive, cool Distanz which normally characterised him. This impassive composure was based on an unswerving will and enormous personal authority.
Yet Dr. Audenauer was capable of great loyalty, as to Dr. Hans Globke, his controversial Catholic state secretary, and of private generosity and kindliness. He loved to relax with journalists and indulged in astonishing confidences with
them. , Again, Dr. Adenauer did more than probably any other German to restore relations with the Jews, never attempted to minimise the shame of German persecution and was a welcome guest in Israel. On the other hand, and apart from practical considerations he also refused to condemn out of
hand those myriad fellowtravellers who went along with Nazism for social or material gain, preferring to rehabilitate them.
At home in his big villa, Zennigsweg 8a, at the foot of the Drachenfels, Dr. Adenauer followed a little-changing routine. Rising before 6 a.m., he would work in his dressinggown for two hours on his papers. After breakfast, his car and white police Porsche escort would be waiting at the bottom of the 60. steep steps.
Blue light flashing, he would race to the Chancellery, being briefed on the way by Felix von Eckardt. Despite a bad smash in 1917 which gave him his "Red Indian" appearance, Dr. Adenauer loved high speed. "Step on it, Klockner" was a frequent exhortation. When one passenger protested, "But Herr Bundeskanzler, we're doing 75 mph" Dr. Adenauer replied smirking: "Yes, I'm in no hurry today."
After a working day broken by an afternoon nap, he would return, often late, to his fine paintings to listen to good music and read an Agatha Christie. Whenever possible, he liked to play boccia, an Italian bowls game, with his son Mgr. Paul Adenauer under floodlights in the garden.
On Sundays, the Chancellor, a veritable patriarch, received his seven children and more than 20 grandchildren, whom he said kept him young. In later years, Dr. Adenauer spent his holidays, accompanied by staff and a daughter, at Gadenabbia on Lake Como, writing much of his memoirs there.
Dr. Adenauer was widely assumed to have chosen Bonn, rather than Frankfurt, as the provisional capital because of its proximity to Rhondorf and because he was its Member. But at his retirement reception, he told myself and other journalists the true reasons. Already, he was thinking of a United Europe, and Bonn lay towards France and Belgium. Decisive was the British and Belgian offer to clear the town of occupation troops if selected, whereas Frankfurt was under American domination.
Despite his great age, Dr. Adenauer never became senile. Always ramrod straight, he needed no spectacles, showed no grey hair and generally appeared 20 years younger. He denied the stories of "youth injections." His mind remained acute, never missing a nuance or chance of advantage.
When I was once presented to him with a Dutch attaché, at the time Holland was promoting British entry to Europe, he murmured smiling: "Both to be enjoyed with caution." Dr. Adenader's attitude to Britain was ambivalent with a considerable latent distrust of "perfide Albion." He never really overcame the misguided post-war dismissal of him as re-instated burgomaster of Cologne, for which he held the Labour Party responsible. nor the shabby treatment of his secretary. But he greatly admired Churchill. He mistrusted Mr. Wilson, but once told me of his regard for George Brown.
History will pronounce on Dr. Adenauer's true achievements as a statesman. Germans already regard him as their greatest countryman, even above Bismarck. Personally, I think Europe owes an enormous debt to him.
But as a man, Dr. Adenauer was not only great but inteniely human, with incorrigible traits which both endeared and infuriated. His loyalty to the Church and the Faith never wavered. Assuredly, he was a toiler in the vineyard who will be given his greatly merited reward.