Word: konrads
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Along with the pleasures and some of the problems of the good life, West Germany must face a number of other realities. Konrad Adenauer tried to shape reality into what he wanted, and by sheer will and political genius he usually had his way. Under the softer, more flexible and more amiable leader ship of Ludwig Erhard, some long dammed-up changes are bound to burst forth. One of them is the feeling...
...Middle Way. It was a great moment for der Dicke (the Fat One). For 14 years, as economics minister, he had struggled alongside crusty old Konrad Adenauer to build a new nation out of war's rubble, and he had succeeded beyond all expectation: today West Germany has the strongest economy in all Europe and can boast a healthy growth of democratic roots. At 66, Ludwig Erhard is also by far the country's most popular politician. Meritably, the Bundestag gave him a whopping majority approval to take over from the retiring Adenauer...
...declared, making clear that he planned no major departures in West Germany's domestic or foreign affairs. To the U.S., he gave assurance of the closest friendship. To Europe, he promised his strongest efforts to strengthen the budding ties of integration. There would be no disavowal of Konrad Adenauer's Franco-German pact, and he hoped Bonn would remain on warm terms with Paris. But, he added emphatically, "we must also cultivate relations with other European states, especially with Great Britain." It was hint enough that Bonn wanted no part of Charles de Gaulle's narrow concept...
What will remain, for a while, is the memory of a crusty, highhanded octogenarian who clung pathetically to power well beyond the moment when he should have relinquished it. Ultimately, however, Konrad Adenauer can only be remembered as the German whose idealism and hardheaded grasp of reality in one decade transformed the nature and condition of 20th century Germany. Winston Churchill accurately called him "the greatest German statesman since Bismarck," but even Bismarck's Germany did not rise from the rubble and bitterness of defeat to the position of respect and responsibility that West Germany enjoys today...
...Germans doubt that Konrad Adenauer will achieve his own ultimate request of history. "My wish," he said ten years ago, "is that some time in the future, when mankind looks beyond the clouds and dust of our times, it can be said of me that I have done my duty...