Adenauer’s Memoirs
Konrad Adenauer’s Memoirs 1945-53 (Regnery, $10) is a work that is best described by such adjectives as “dogged” and “slogging.” But if there is no genius in the telling of this story, there was genius in the way Adenauer, as the postwar leader of West Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, lived it. A seventy-year-old ex-Mayor of Cologne when the war was nearing its end, he was the figure on whom the history of West Germany — and therefore the entire West — was to pivot. His life since 1945, both as party leader and as his country’s Chancellor, may be taken as a virtually complete refutation of the materialist, or economic determinist, theory of history.
If it hadn’t been for his presence on the scene, West Germany would surely have returned to the so-called comity of nations as a Marxist state, or group of states, complete with nationalized industries, planning boards, directed labor, and all the rest of it. This is what Dr. Schumacher’s Social Democratic Party was proposing, and this is what the British, who were in charge of Adenauer’s state of North Rhine-Westphalia, were disposed to accept. After all, there was a labor government in London after Churchill’s dismissal in 1945, and “planning” was what Clement Attlee, Ernie Bevin, and Herbert Morrison, the British socialists, thought they understood.
As a party with a long German tradition, the Social Democrats should have walked away with the crucial election in 1949 that signaled the rebirth of a German nation. But Adenauer, the Rhinelander who had been thrown out of his job as Mayor of Cologne by the Nazis, tapped spiritual resources that had been dormant in Germany for well over a decade. He was not an economist himself, but, as a Christian philosopher, he believed in the primacy of the freely-choosing individual. He went up and down West Germany preaching that the sort of centralized economic control that was advocated by Dr. Schumacher’s socialists would not differ, in essence, from what the Germans had known under Hitler. It was his genius as a politician to recognize the voltage in the phrase, “the social market economy.” Erhard, the present Chancellor of West Germany, had brought this to him as a disciple of the Roepke school of neoliberal economics, and it was semantically right for the times. For, in its implicit assertion that the market creates social values out of individual and group competition, the new phrase challenged the Marxist shibboleths on a ground that could appeal to the Christian conscience.
The Market Economy
As Erhard, who was to become Adenauer’s Minister of Economics, put it, the social market economy would produce a maximum of well-being and social justice by letting free individuals make an efficient contribution to an order that embodies a social conscience. Where state welfare was necessary to sustain war cripples in their hospitals, and to provide for the stream of refugees and displaced persons from the Communist East, the affluence created by the market economy could be taxed. A government committed to social market competition would see to it that taxes were not levied in a way to discourage incentive, and it would also insist on an independent control of monopolies to safeguard genuine competition.
No doubt the coupling of the adjective “social” with the noun “market” could be utilized to justify the wildest aberrations of state welfarism. We in America are well aware of what can be done by canny manipulation of the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution. But the Christian Democratic Union governments of West Germany have not been sophistical in their application of the Roepke-Erhard theories. They have provided incentives to invest, they have steered clear of inflation, and they have done more than their part in the attempt to create a wide free-trade area in western Europe.
A Touchy Situation
Looking back on the history of 1945-53 which is covered in this most impersonal of autobiographies, the whole story may seem inevitable. The Soviet Russians, by their aggressive post-1945 behavior, forced the nations of the West to regard West Germany as their own particular buffer against communism. It would have been silly to pulverize a buffer by applying the Morgenthau plan for turning West Germany into a region without industry; this would have created such chaos that the Communists would have been able to take over from within. So the decision to rebuild the British, American, and French zones as a viable modern economic unit was made. The Marshall Plan took hold at the end of 1948, raw materials poured in, individuals were permitted to start their own businesses, and to support everything else there was a currency reform.
Yet it was actually touch and go when it came to creating a form for the first new national government in West Germany in 1949. After the Christian Democrats had won their surprising victory, many in Adenauer’s own party wished to form a coalition with the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats were willing, but they demanded the Ministry of Economics as their price for collaboration. After all, they held 131 seats in the new Bundestag as against the Christian Democrats’ 139. Potentially, this made them an extremely powerful opposition, and in a parliament in which ten separate parties were represented there was always a possibility that they might have their way. So they felt justified in wishing to have the power to create the industrial shape of the new nation.
Principle Prevailed
Adenauer, however, was convinced that the election constituted a mandate for a generally free economy. The Social Democrats and the Communists had polled eight million votes, which, presumably, had been cast for socialism of one kind or another. But thirteen million votes had been cast for the antisocialist parties. The CDU’s Minister President Altmeier of the Rhineland-Palatinate spoke plausibly for a coalition with the Social Democrats, and his words were greeted with applause. He raised the fear that a strong Social Democratic opposition in the Bundestag would use nationalist arguments to attack every effort at understanding with the occupying powers.
But Adenauer insisted that a coalition would be taken as a breach of faith by a vast majority of the voters if the Social Democrats were to get the Ministry of Economics as their share of the bargain. “There is a great difference,” he said, “between ourselves and the Social Democrats regarding the principles of Christian conviction. Moreover, there is an unbridgeable gap between ourselves and the Social Democrats in the matter of economic structure. There can only be either a planned economy or a social market economy. The two will not mix. In view of these differences it would not even be possible to have a Christian Democrat as Minister of Economics and a Social Democrat as Under-secretary of State. We could never get things moving.”
The words of Der Alte Adenauer were convincing, and a coalition of anti-Marxist parties followed. So it was Erhard, and not the Social Democrats’ Professor Nolting, who took charge of West Germany’s economic future. The German “miracle” followed. And when relative stagnation and inflation continued to dog the efforts at recovery in “Keynesian” nations such as Britain, the Erhard-supported economies of Roepke—and, incidentally, the Mt. Pelerin Society—began to take on a luster which nobody save a few FEE diehards would have deemed possible.
Adenauer’s reconstitution of far-off things and battles long ago lack Churchillian sparkle. But the events create their own drama. This is a document for FEE-ers to read with pride.
THE INTEMPERATE PROFESSOR AND OTHER CULTURAL SPLENETICS by Russell Kirk. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965. 163 pp. $5.00.)
Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton
Russell Kirk’s credentials as a critic of higher education are impeccable. A well-educated, widely-traveled man of letters, he has observed at first hand teachers and students and administrators on the 200 or more campuses where he has lectured in the past dozen years. He does not like what he sees.
Many professors are more interested in indoctrinating those sitting under them than in developing a disinterested love of truth. Embracing relativism and/ or nihilism, some teachers are eager to upset whatever ideals and convictions their students bring with them from home. Students should learn to think for themselves, but our institutions of learning were founded to conserve and extend the nation’s heritage, not to destroy it.
Dr. Kirk, unlike many today who write on the subject, understands education to be, not the pouring of facts or techniques into a young person’s head, but a spiritual and the object of their studies. This being the case, the remedy for the ills of education is not more money, bigger plants, or more classroom gimmicks; and definitely not more funds from Washington which will be followed, quite naturally, by Federal controls.
The most provocative essay in this collection of fourteen is, in my opinion, “The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man.” We like to be told that God is love, a “Chum, never to be dreaded because He is indiscriminately affectionate.” This notion would have scandalized the tough-fibered Calvinist who settled our land and developed its institutions. Such a man, “knowing that divine love and divine wrath are but different aspects of a unity, is sustained against the worst this world can do to him; while the good-natured unambitious man, lacking religion, fearing no ultimate judgment, denying that he is made for eternity, has in him no iron to maintain order and justice and freedom…. If the fear of God is obscured,” Kirk continues, “then obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and sickness will come to the front; or if a well-cushioned state keeps most of these worries at bay, then the tormenting neuroses of modern man, under the labels of `insecurity’ and ‘anxiety’ and ‘constitutional inferiority,’ will be the dominant mode of fear.” This is spiritual bondage, and once it settles in, political and economic enslavement are not far behind.
