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The more Kurt Schumacher's body failed, the stronger grew his will. From his bed, as from a throne, he dispatched lieutenants, issued orders, and whipped the Socialists into the most militant and best organized party in West Germany. He rose from his sickbed in time to campaign —workers wheeled him into meetings and carried him to the rostrum on their shoulders. His physical courage inspired his followers; his violence inflamed them. The Socialists polled nearly 7,000,000 votes. But it was not quite enough. The Christian Democrats polled slightly more. Not to Kurt Schumacher, the fierce and dedicated Socialist, but to slow, methodical Konrad Adenauer, the 73-year-old conservative Catholic from Cologne, fell the task of organizing the new West German state, Schumacher gave battle from the start.
A sympathetic correspondent watched Schumacher address a party meeting in Hannover and took away a frightening mental snapshot. "[When] he started to speak I could hardly believe my senses," wrote Leo Lania in the United Nations World. "Suddenly I felt as though I were back again in the late '205 in Berlin, at a Nazi meeting. It was not the content of Schumacher's speech that startled me. I had no objection to what he had to say . . . but the way he spoke was simply quite frightening. Unconsciously, he seemed to have acquired Hitler's terminology, his screeching mode of speech, his gestures and histrionic intonations . . . He barked like an SS sergeant."
On the floor of the Bundestag, where he deftly maneuvers a bloc of 130 Socialist Deputies (against some 200 who normally stand by Adenauer), Schumacher evokes the same feelings. With painful-looking gestures, hissing sentences, here a lightning jab and there a sour sarcasm, he seems—whether he means to or not— the reincarnation of the rabble-rousers who all but destroyed his own body and led Germany down to catastrophe.
"No to All." One day, attacking Adenauer's cooperation with the occupiers, Schumacher looked at the Chancellor and growled: "Federal Chancellor of the Allies!" For that, he was suspended for 20 sessions (later reduced to four) and forced to make an apology which he obviously did not mean. To Adenauer's first proposal to bring together Germany and her Western neighbors, Schumacher replied: "No! to all [such] conservative, clerical, capitalist, cartelist attempts." The Schuman Plan is a near-relative of a proposal Kurt Schumacher has long urged, "socialized integration" of Western Europe's industry, but Schumacher issued a steely nein to the Schuman Plan because there was no socialism in it. "Federation," he argued, "must not be confused with a syndicate of private interests."
German rearmament seemed to horrify him at first, until he saw that it might be used as a bargaining weapon against the West. The European Army repels him because it confines Germany to military forces inside an international body. Proved anti-Nazi though he is, he talks like any Nazi general in his scorn of the French and Italians as soldiers. "The concept of a European army," says Schumacher, "is a fallacy, because six invalids cannot combine to make one athlete."