Word: old
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Credo. At first sight, 73-year-old Konrad Adenauer does not look like the man for this staggering task. A smalltown lawyer, he became an able mayor of Cologne and an effective figure in the pre-Hitler Catholic Center Party, but he has no experience in national administration. He has often been accused of being provincial, and he makes no secret of the fact that he prefers his native Rhineland to the raw, "uncivilized" Prussians; once he cracked to a Berlin friend: "Why do you go on living in a town where the monkeys still swing from the trees?" With...
This spiteful fracas would only deepen the skepticism with which most Germans regard parliamentary government. But the incident could not obscure the fact that the Paris and Bonn agreements had added greatly to the prestige of the West German Republic, just three months old. For his critics who said he had bargained away too much, Adenauer had a stinging retort -one which only a German of political courage would dare to make in 1949. Snapped Adenauer: "Who do they think lost the war, anyway...
Partly Whipped Cream. Most West Germans live only about half as well as they did in 1936; most refugees live half as well as the West Germans. Old residents and refugees alike are incited by the spectacle of a few rich postwar profiteers who careen about the countryside in fine American cars and gorge on expensive delicacies. Said one German publisher as he watched a group of such well-fed Burger in a garish Frankfurt cafe: "This country is partly a whipped-cream paradise, but mostly a poor farm...
...ablest men in Adenauer's own party is Ludwig Erhard, Minister of Economics, who in the past two years has helped guide West Germany back to a relatively free economy. Generally considered a man to watch is 48-year-old Karl Arnold, president of Bonn's Bundesrat (Upper House), a hard-hitting Catholic trade-union leader who frequently acts as spokesman for the workers in his native Ruhr. No friend of Adenauer's, whom he considers too conservative, Arnold may some day be his rival for party leadership...
...whom Adenauer really relies for advice have no official rank. One is Robert Pferdmenges, partner in the Cologne banking firm of Salomon Oppenheim & Co., and, unlike many a Ruhr magnate, no Nazi supporter; he acts as Adenauer's economic counsel. The other is boyish-looking, 45-year-old Herbert Blankenhorn, a former German diplomat who served in the prewar German embassy in Washington; his task is to smooth Adenauer's relations with the Allies...