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Vati. Adenauer takes his autocratic manners home from the office. His seven children are all grown, but they still understand that Vati (Daddy) knows best. "He rules our family with a strong hand," son Paul once explained. "If a rose tree must be transplanted, he decides when and where. If my sister wants to bake a cake, he must say yes or no. This is not unusual in Germany, you know. This is how it should be."
The Chancellor gets up at 6 a.m. and shuffles into the bathroom with note pad and pencil. "I get some of my best ideas when I am shaving." he explains. By the time daughter Lotte, 27, leaves for the village school where she teaches German, Vati is at work, dictating—in his flat, high-pitched voice—to a private secretary. It is a rigid schedule: the conferences with subordinates in the elegant Schaumburg Palais, the dictated memoranda, the noon nap, the evenings listening to recordings of Haydn, Mozart and Schubert.
Giving up his evenings to race about Germany, making speeches and pumping hands, wrenches the schedule-minded Chancellor more than he cares to admit. Asked how he manages to keep going, the old man replied: "First, one must be of good stock. Second, one must have great patience. There is also a third necessity. One must do everything in one's power for an ideal that one believes in. In my case, it is the ideal of saving Christian civilization ..."
Great Decision. All last week Adenauer preached his great idea to the German electorate. His biggest rally was at Frankfurt (pop. 524,000), a Socialist stronghold where he drew a Saturday afternoon crowd of 15,000. He was solemn, cool and didactic (and he reminded an American, seeing him for the first time, of Robert A. Taft). "Our country," said Adenauer, "is the point of tension between two world blocs . . . Long ago I made a great decision: we belong to the West, and not to the East . . . [German] isolation is an idea created by fools. It would mean that the U.S. would withdraw its troops from Europe. Meine Herren und Damen" the Chancellor said gravely, "the moment that happens, Germany will become a satellite . . ."
He was getting the biggest crowds, and was supremely confident of victory. U.S. officials in Germany, who want him to win but don't want to hurt his chances by saying so, wash he were more inclined to "run scared." It is not his nature.
In Germany's cluttered political landscape, Adenauer does not risk defeat by one strong opposing candidate (as would be the case in a two-party system). His danger is that votes will be dispersed so widely from left to right that he would have difficulty reassembling his coalition.
Half-Moon Chamber. Adenauer's Christian Democrats occupy the center aisles in the half-moon Bundestag chamber. Their opponents sit all around them. The present composition of the Bundestag: