Word: heinemann
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...their plan to convene the Federal Republic's electoral college in the western half of the divided former German cap ital. Last week, as 1,023 West German electors met in West Berlin's cavernous East Prussia Hall and by a narrow margin selected Socialist Gustav Heinemann to succeed retiring President Heinrich Lübke as West German head of state, the Communist response was relatively mild and constrained...
Power Shift. As the crisis evaporated, West Germans had an opportunity to assess the significance of the presidential election. Though he edged out the Christian Democrats' candidate, Defense Minister Gerhard Schroder, by only six votes, Heinemann scored a symbolically important victory for the Socialists, who have been perennial runners-up in postwar German elections. The presidency is mainly a ceremonial office, but Heinemann's victory encouraged them to hope that they can do as well or better in next year's national elections...
...Socialist victory signaled what could become a crucial shift in the balance of power between West Germany's two major parties. Heinemann was put over the top only because the Free Democrats gave him nearly all their 83 electoral votes and then resisted enticements to defect through three rounds of tension-filled balloting...
...Gustav Heinemann, 69, has regularly taken such a liberal stand on many issues that West German conservatives find him distinctly alarming. A founding member of the Christian Democratic Party who became Interior Minister in Konrad Adenauer's first Cabinet, Heinemann quit the post in 1950 over der Alte's plan to rearm West Germany. Though no pacifist, Heinemann, who is a prominent Evangelical layman, felt that rearmament would nullify the salutary lesson of two lost wars. As he put it, West Germany was like a recently cured alcoholic to whom one offered a bottle of booze and said...
...Heinemann formed his own small party to fight against German rearmament, but West German crowds hooted him down, because of the suspicion that his movement was being subverted by Communists. In 1958, just as the West German Socialists were in the process of dropping their Marxist dogma in order to become a more broadly based party, Heinemann joined up. Winning a seat from Essen in the Bundestag, he concentrated on social issues...