Konrad Adenauer

Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949-1963)

• Born: January 5, 1876
• Birthplace: Cologne, Germany
• Died: April 19, 1967
• Place of death: Rhöndorf, West Germany

Between 1917 and 1933, Adenauer served as lord mayor of Cologne, becoming, after 1945, founder of the Federal Republic of Germany and its first chancellor. He proved decisively that civilian rule could lead effectively and provide economic success and societal well-being.

Early Life

Konrad Adenauer was born into a devoutly Roman Catholic family of modest means that had produced bakers, bricklayers, reserve army officers, and local officials. In short, he was imbued with the ideals of hard work, self-sacrifice, and persistence. Above all, his home was steeped in the Rhenish tradition of Roman Catholicism and moderately liberal social values. These characteristics informed Adenauer’s entire life, and, like his lifelong affection for the Rhineland’s hills and rivers, they never left him.

After receiving a classical Catholic education, Adenauer took a bank clerk’s job while preparing for university studies. These studies eventually took him to universities in Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich, and Bonn. Passing the bar in 1899, Adenauer entered civil service in the state prosecutor’s office in Cologne.

As a Catholic Rhinelander, Adenauer lived figuratively and literally on the periphery of the German Empire created in 1871 and was inherently suspicious of an imperial system dominated by Prussia’s Protestant elite. He treasured his region’s specific cultural identity and socioeconomic evolution, neither readily compatible with Prussia’s oftentimes autocratic and militarist virtues. While Adenauer’s Rhenish homeland was an integral part of Prussia, the Catholic western provinces had long resented distant Berlin’s domination.

Life’s Work

As with most politicians of stature, Adenauer’s career began locally. Establishing himself in Cologne, he joined the Center Party, a minority political party representing German Roman Catholics. Subsequently, Adenauer became administrative assistant to Cologne’s lord mayor in 1906. Hardworking and politically loyal, he became mayoral candidate in his own right in 1917, even as Germany collapsed at the end of World War I.

Adenauer’s steady pragmatism and determination to succeed allowed him not only to become lord mayor but also to execute numerous major civic improvements in the face of Germany’s defeat. In the process, Cologne became a European center of social and political progressivism. Adenauer soon built a solid base of political support, using his genuine gifts of persuasion “oversimplification,” his detractors said to help keep the Rhineland part of Germany at a time of rumored annexation by France or a separate Rhenish state. Expediently, Adenauer too flirted with separatism, but his political acumen cautioned that Rhenish independence was chimerical.

By 1919, Adenauer valued such caution. No longer merely lord mayor of Cologne, he had become a skilled and tenacious regional politician. Eliciting strong support from his followers and outwitting his less skilled opponents, he quickly established a reputation as an effective civilian leader in a country traditionally respecting only those in uniform. His reputation would carry him far in the post-1945 era.

During the interwar period, Adenauer devoted his energies to his beloved Cologne. One of Adenauer’s most important early tasks was the refounding of the city’s university. Utterly determined, Adenauer convinced the Prussian state government despite budgetary difficulties and strident opposition from the neighboring University of Bonn to reestablish the University of Cologne in 1919-1920. More immediately beneficial were Adenauer’s efforts to improve Cologne’s appearance and commercial accessibility. Between 1919 and 1929, he directed the razing of Cologne’s outmoded fortifications. He replaced them with an extensive ring of parks around the growing metropolis. Additionally, Adenauer greatly expanded Cologne’s commercial importance by modernizing the riverine harbor facilities in the city’s heart. Improving and rationalizing the living conditions of the metropolitan area’s population, he also directed the annexation of neighboring townships and oversaw the construction of numerous apartment projects. Adenauer greatly eased Cologne’s transition from large provincial city to conurbation. More important, the office of lord mayor sharply honed his administrative and political skills, which would serve him well after the war.

With the coming of the Nazi horror in 1933, Adenauer found himself, like so many others, unable to prevent the impending catastrophe. Depression-era economic chaos had vastly exacerbated the still-nagging shock of Germany’s loss of World War I and the revolution of 1918. Consequent political radicalization benefited extremists such as the Nazis and the communists. Feeding voraciously on the country’s discontent and privation, these groups completely paralyzed Germany’s democracy. The ultimate results were dictatorship and war.

On March 13, 1933, Adenauer was forced from his office as lord mayor. Failing to convince Berlin’s Nazi overlords to spare him and his family from persecution, Adenauer went into secret, self-imposed internal exile in the Catholic monastery of Maria Laach in northwestern Germany. Between 1934 and 1937, fearful sojourns followed in Berlin and at Rhöndorf on the Rhine near Bonn. In Rhöndorf, Adenauer eventually built a new home for his family; the Nazis had banned him from his native Cologne.

From 1937 to 1944, Adenauer and his family lived as normal an existence as the travail of dictatorship and war would allow. A devoted father and husband, Adenauer held such normality to be critically important. In 1944, however, this normality was shattered by his imprisonment following the failed attempt by German army officers to kill Adolf Hitler. Escaping with the help of a friend, Adenauer was later recaptured and sent to a Gestapo prison. By the end of 1944, however, he had been reunited with his family, surviving both the Nazi terror and the total defeat of Hitler’s Germany.

Liberating Cologne, United States forces immediately reinstated Adenauer as lord mayor. He was summarily dismissed, however, as British units assumed control of the city. Ironically, this dismissal freed Adenauer for a major role in the larger, tortured process of Germany’s reconstruction. A new political party, Christian Democratic Union (CDU), served as Adenauer’s vehicle. Absorbing the old Catholic Center Party, it united the middle class, a German tradition of social progressivism, and moderate political values. Skillfully outmaneuvering his Berlin rivals, Adenauer became the dominant personality of the new party by 1947. Artfully exploiting the simultaneous rift between the superpowers, he also helped to convince the United States, Great Britain, and France by 1948 that an entirely new, democratic German state should be created: the Federal Republic of Germany.

Adenauer was absolutely convinced that a Western-oriented, federated republic was Germany’s sole hope for the postwar world. As head of one of the two strongest West German political parties, Adenauer assumed that he should play a leading role in that republic’s formation. Throughout the difficult formative process in 1948-1949, Adenauer pursued a dual objective: to make the state-in-being acceptable to the Western allies and simultaneously to foil proposals from his domestic opposition, principally in the Social Democratic Party.

Born in May, 1949, the new German republic possessed an unmistakable Western alignment, enjoyed genuine democratic government, and operated, in nascent form, the socially responsive free-market system, which helped make the Federal Republic of Germany the economic miracle of the 1950’s. As the republic’s first chancellor, Adenauer would hold the office until his retirement in 1963.

Almost alone among German statesmen to 1949, Adenauer held that any new Germany must renounce nationalism for Europe’s sake. Underlying the foreign policy he directed in his dual role as chancellor and foreign minister, this idea earned for Adenauer the sharp domestic criticism that such policies doomed Germany’s reunification. Adenauer countered that only a federal republic, firmly anchored in a united, militarily strong Western Europe, could compel the Soviet Union to surrender its European satellites. In any case, Adenauer’s anti-Prussian sentiments made accepting a supposedly temporary German division all the easier. Though this division has proven much longer-lived than Adenauer ever anticipated, his policies eliminated Germany’s ancient enmity toward France and incorporated the federal republic’s enormous economic potential into the growing European community. In the process, Adenauer oversaw the transformation of his country from ruined enemy of the Western world to self-assertive ally and valued friend.

Significance

Throughout his long and remarkably productive career, Adenauer maintained that the Western world is a cultural and historical community possessing fundamental and unique values not common to the East. No great theorist, he nevertheless consistently attempted, as lord mayor of Cologne and as chancellor and foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany, to realize these values daily for his countryfolk. Though often haughty and imperious, he possessed the unique ability to transform himself from local politician to international statesman. In doing so, he steadfastly opposed all tyrannies, even at the cost of his personal safety. Intolerant of incompetence, he earned the respect of both supporters and opponents and led much of Germany through one of its most trying periods.

While absorbed in his beloved Cologne before 1933, Adenauer transferred his public devotion to a larger cause after 1945: that of helping Germany recover from the Nazi era’s shame and criminality. Shepherding the young Federal Republic of Germany through the pain of occupation and reconstruction, Adenauer saw his country reacquire full sovereignty in 1955. Furthermore, he demonstrated that the German people could successfully overcome past mistakes to become respected and valued allies. Though never mastering Germany’s division, Adenauer’s reconciliation of the federal republic with the West must be recognized as a historic achievement.

Less tangible but equally important, Adenauer represented an often overlooked German tradition of social responsibility and middle-class, liberal democracy. He guided this tradition to an unparalleled degree of popular acceptance in Germany. In a society traditionally too ready to glorify things martial, Adenauer proved decisively that civilian rule could lead effectively and provide economic success and societal well-being. In the final analysis, that accomplishment stands as his enduring legacy.

Bibliography

Alexander, Edgar. Adenauer and the New Germany: The Chancellor of the Vanquished. Translated by Thomas E. Goldstein. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957. In this early and enthusiastic biography, Alexander attempts to show, on two levels, Germany’s objective achievements under Adenauer and Adenauer’s personal development. Alexander presents an extensive section on German reunification and an epilogue by Adenauer himself.

Augstein, Rudolf. Konrad Adenauer. Translated by Walter Wallich. London: Secker & Warburg, 1964. Augstein presents a sometimes unflattering picture of Adenauer, and he faults particularly Adenauer’s acceptance of Germany’s postwar division.

Craig, Gordon. From Bismarck to Adenauer: Aspects of German Statecraft. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. A great American historian of Germany depicts Adenauer’s statecraft in the diplomatic context, reaching back to Otto von Bismarck. In a brief, excellent account, Craig stresses the role played by Adenauer’s personal characteristics in policy formulation.

Granieri, Ronald J. The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Recounts how Adenauer worked to solidly integrate the newly created Federal Republic of Germany with Western nations.

Hiscocks, Richard. The Adenauer Era. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1966. Hiscocks presents a rather straightforward biography of Adenauer. The work is fairly evenly divided between treatments of Adenauer’s accomplishments after 1945 and a general examination of postwar Western German society and politics. Hiscocks includes a short introduction on the historical setting surrounding Adenauer’s post-1945 achievements.

Prittie, Terence. Konrad Adenauer, 1876-1967. Chicago: Cowles, 1971. Prittie’s work provides a well-written, balanced, and thorough examination of Adenauer’s life and work. Adenauer’s early life and services to Cologne receive fair treatment as do Adenauer’s experiences during the Nazi period. A solid investigation of Adenauer’s postwar career follows. Includes numerous representative illustrations.

Williams, Charles. Adenauer: The Father of the New Germany. New York: Wiley, 2000. In this readable, intelligent biography, Williams describes how Adenauer’s chancellorship laid the foundations for a new Germany and Europe by creating economic prosperity, political democracy, and improved relations with France.