Word: german
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that the way to save Germany from itself was to forge strong ties with the U.S., to end the ancient animosity between Germany and France and to so tie Germany to a larger united Europe that it could never again turn to its dark past. He understood the German character and the nation's need in the dire days after the war for an authoritarian father figure, which he provided. He did not allow notions of guilt to cripple his actions, but he unflinchingly accepted German guilt for the war and the Nazi atrocities and unhesitatingly made massive reparations...
...Thick Skin. Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876, when Bismarck was governing a recently united German nation. At 29, he was refused a life insurance policy as a bad risk because of weak lungs; at 68, his Gestapo jailers feared that he might commit suicide because, they reasoned, at that age, he "had nothing more to expect from life." He grew up in the Rhineland, with a Rhenish and Roman Catholic German's lifelong distaste for Berliners and Prussians. His weak lungs also kept him out of World War I; by 1917, he was Lord Mayor of Cologne...
...conviction in the Tightness of democratic ways and a shrewd political gift for manipulating men. He thought out his strategies well in advance, reducing alternatives to their simplest dimensions, and he dealt with problems according to his maxim that "a thick skin is a gift from God." When the German public grumbled about the slowness of Allied decontrol, he replied: "Who do you think...
Distasteful though it was, Adenauer journeyed to Moscow in 1955 to see whether any hope could be found in the Kremlin for German reunification. There was none, except in the form of "some very unchaste offers" from Khrushchev. Even though European unity was set back by the ascendancy of Charles de Gaulle, and specifically by De Gaulle's veto of British Common Market membership on Jan. 14, 1963, Adenauer a scant week later concluded a perpetual Treaty of Friendship with France, to much dismay in the West...
...telltale rash of German measles (rubella) can come and go unseen during a night's sleep. In fact, the disease is generally so mild that a nationwide epidemic of it three years ago caused no panic. An estimated 30,000 pregnant women were among those infected, however, and rubella can wreak tragic damage in unborn children. For one of every two rubella babies, that damage includes at least a partial loss of hearing. "The deafness we are seeing now-the aftermath of the epidemic-is more severe than anyone anticipated," says Dr. Fred Linthicum Jr. of the children...