RED PIGS AND DOG-COLLARS
By V. W. KITZINGER Munich
HERE in Catholic southern Bavaria the favourite time for meetings of Herr Adenauer's Bavarian CSU Party is straight after mass on a Sunday, or after the episcopal blessing on popular pilgrimages to some local shrine. CSU platforms bristle with dog-collars, and candidates of other parties are interrogated and reproved at their own meetings by priests in the audience. Now that various bishops have declared it impossible for a good Catholic to vote for a Liberal or a Socialist Party, Adenauer's slogan of the choice between Christianity and Com- munism is bearing strange fruit. One Bavarian Sunday sermon called Ale Social Democrats 'red pigs,' red devils' and 'red bloodhounds'—perhaps an isolated instance, but only an extreme form of what is more effectively done with subtler means : as one Jesuit told me, 'We may not be members of the party, but we are doing what we can to lend it a hand.' With 45 per cent. of West Germans Catholic, and half of them at mass regu- larly on Sundays, the help of the Church is of immense political importance.
But Adenauer also has other cards to play and it is on his record as much as on his religion that he hopes to be judged. The record, of course, is phenomenal. Never in history has Germary been so prosperous—and that only nine years after the end of barter and near-starvation. Never in history has Germany had such powerful allies—and they the victors in the unconditional surrender of only twelve years ago. With such a record before them, why should anyone think it time for a change?
The Social Democrats, with their prophecies of doom confounded, can only desperately plead `me too.' Rejecting nationalisation 'of the English model' as outmoded, 011enhauer pledged himself before 20,000 adherents in Dortmund that even 'price control is not a method of Socialist economic policy:In foreign affairs he charges Adenauer with inflexibility in relations with Russia; but, as one party agent after another sadly reports, the reunification issue is recognised as bogus. The 'sated bourgeoisie,' they complain, listen politely; but there is no question of s crusade for a reunited Germany in which many fear they would be less well off than today.
The heat of the campaign is in fact mostly pro- vided by the twin issues of atomic weapons and conscription. Yet even there the SPD appears to have discontinued the use of its horrific poster with the face of a corpse disfigured by radiation: 'Vote for the CDU and this!'; and conscription, once the law was passed, has evoked surprisingly little hostility.
Most election meetings are orderly and in. tensely serious. Dehler boasted the other day of being induced by his audience to speak for three hours at a meeting in Amberg; four-hour meet- ings are nothing out of the ordinary; and cer- tainly less than an hour-and-a-half's harangue appears to be regarded as a sign of frivolity on the part of a major speaker. One is left more surprised at the good attendance at such sessions than at the very enterprising attempts that must be made to reach those whose appetite for beer and speeches is less developed. The most interest- ing technical features of the campaign are, in fact, to be found in its circenses methods. Some dozen party cabarets are touring the country playing to packed houses every night, with candi• dates introducing themselves in the interval of themselves appearing as comic turns in light- hearted interviews with the compere. Hundreds of open-air film trucks, with programmes such as 'A Visit to the Peacock Throne,' insist in tech- nicolor ('excursions into the realm of a thousand and one nights') that whoever loves Soraya votes for Adenauer. Campaign literature is dressed up to look like the illustrated weeklies beloved by the German public, and the SPD is offering a free holiday in Marrakesh for the nearest guess of the votes it receives on September 15. It is early yet to send in one's postcard; but on the score just now only the most optimistic of its adherents will Plump for even 40 per cent.
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