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At 77, Adenauer is stiff and unbending, a man of the old school who thinks children—and cabinet officers—should be seen and not heard. Age has not mellowed him, it has made him wise; power has not wearied him, but it has made him as hard as nails.
Opponents call Adenauer foxy, and he is cunning. A more important characteristic is his stonewall immovability, once he is convinced. By refusing to budge an inch in argument, the stonewall Chancellor has worn out general after general of the Allied occupation armies, and sometimes as many as two or three High Commissioners at a time. Adenauer's guiding light is what he calls "the dynamic spiritual force that outlives all politics"—Christian humanism. "Christianity," he says, "is the answer to all ideologies."
Restoration. Firm in this faith, Roman Catholic Adenauer has led his conquered nation, which had been both monster and 'genius, insane destroyer and industrious creator, back into the society of free nations. This is his greatest claim on the German electorate.
Eight years after the Götterdämmerung of 1945, the Western half of Germany is rapidly becoming the most powerful nation in Europe. U.S. aid got the wheels of industry turning; German hard work turned revival into boom. Last week Chancellor Adenauer, touring his busy nation, watched farmers getting in what looked like the biggest harvest since World War II. Franconia's hop fields promised all the beer Germans could drink; the sunny Moselle Valley flowed with good white wine. So fatly prosperous was the countryside that one small town ordered all its councilmen's chairs to be taken out and widened.
Last week the Ruhr's industrial workers were returning from paid vacations. Half a million Germans traveled outside their country in the first six months of 1953, many of them in the humpbacked little Volkswagen that are driving British cars off Central Europe's roads. Millions more camped by picture-postcard rivers or along the Baltic shores. Germans pointed Leicas at Rome's Colosseum, Istanbul's bazaars, Granada's Alhambra. Their wives thumbed the lingerie in the Faubourg St. Honoré, where Parisian shopkeepers endured the hated language for the sake of the Deutsche mark. Richer folk drove to Greece by way of Yugoslavia, and one of them reminded his host that he had passed this way before—in 1941, in a tank.
Home again in Germany, the vacationists got down to work with the special "Teutonic fury" that is the pride of Germandom and the despair of all its neighbors. August's steel production equaled Britain's (or a rate of 17 million tons a year). Unemployment fell below the 1,000,000 mark for the first time since the war. In Stuttgart, five industrialists formed a new "Aero Union" that would leap into production as soon as the Allies remove controls from German aircraft industry—some time next year. The names of their firms: Messerschmitt, Dornier, Heinkel, Focke-Wulf and Daimler-Benz.
New Marks for Old. Not all the outward plenty has spread to the German people. Since the war, 200 new millionaires have risen up; but 10 million Germans are desperately poor. Two million new dwelling units have been built since 1945, but 4,000,000 more are needed.