Der Alte
'ER DICKE MUSS WEG. (Fatty must go) was the slogan under which the pro-German parties campaigned in the Saar against the French puppet, Hoffman, Now, helm ins Reich, it is the turn of Der Alte. Dr. Adenauer is as wily a fox as has ever been chased down one end of a rabbit-hole and emerged safely at the other, but this time it does look as if his long hard run is over. Dr. Mende's Free Democrats may yet go back on their sworn refusal to serve in a coalition under Dr. Adenauer, but there will probably be enough of Dr. Adenauer's own-loyal supporters in the Christian Democrats to murmur that he is the best Chancellor they have and opt for Dr. Erhard. Since a Social Democrat/Free Democrat coalition is quite out of the question,, and an all- party grouping hardly less so, it looks as though Federal Germany will be governed either by a minority CDU Government with tacit Free Democrat support, or by a CDU /Free Democrat coalition. Either way, Der Alte must go. Already, the crocodile tears of pleasure are be- ing shed by the Left. True. Dr. Adenauer's con- duct of the election campaign was wretched, and blotted by one or two stains that were worse than wretched. But the debt which free Europe owes to him, within the limits of his German priorities, is immense. (The debt which free Germany owes him is of course incalculably great.) It is not just that, with inevitable lapses, he has brought Ger- many back from the abyss of Nazi wickedness, without either crushing the Germans beneath a literally unbearable load of guilt or shuffling off too easily and quickly the guilt they must very properly bear; nor is it only that he has in so feu years led his country firmly into seemingly per- manent democratic paths; nor even that he has brought her into the Western alliance and enabled her to play such a notable part in it. His greatest achievement has been to achieve the cosmic irony of a situation in which Germany be- came the truest standard of freedom on the Con- tinent. Dr. Adenauer's dream (he will never realise it) has been a free and reunited Germany. Short of this, it has been his goal to make the world remember that the slave-state across the border had no right whatever to respect or recog- nition from the free world; like the Holy Roman Empire, it was and is neither German, nor Demo- cratic, nor a Republic.
Now, force Inajeure has won, not least because others in the West were not as firm in their determination to resist tyranny as Dr. Adenauer. Germany will be neither free nor united in the foreseeable future, let alone both; and some form of recognition is going to be accorded to the pup- pets of Pankow. But none of this detracts from Dr. Adenauer's achievement. The accidents of history drew the frontier between freedom and slavery along Western Germany's frontier; the Germans were flung instantly into the front line. It was to a very great extent due to Der Alte that the line was held, and that the nation which held it managed in so short a time to grow to the stature required.
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