Konrad Adenauer Research Paper
Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Adenauer was born in Cologne, Rhenish Prussia on the 5th of January 1876. He was one of five children of Johann Konrad Adenauer, a Cologne civil servant and Helene Adenauer. Konrad grew up in a Roman Catholic family of simple means in which frugality, fulfilment of duty and religious dedication was stressed.
In 1894 he completed his Abitur and started to study law and political science at the universities of Freiburg, Munich and Bonn. Adenauer was also a member of several Roman Catholic students’ associations under the K.St.V Arminia Bonn in Bonn. Konrad finished his studies in 1901 and worked as a lawyer in the court of cologne.
As a devout Catholic, he joined the Centre Party in 1906. As well as being elected …show more content…
into Cologne’s city council in the same year. In 1909 he became the vice mayor of cologne. There we would avoid the extreme political movements by committing to diligence, order, Christian morals and values and rooting out disorder, inefficiency, irrationality and political immorality.
From the years 1917 to 1933 Konrad Adenauer held the position of mayor of Cologne. During World War II Konrad worked closely with the army to maximise the city’s role as a rear base of supply and transportation for the western front. He also paid attention to the civilian food supply by using the city to finance large warehouses of food, which enabled the residents to avoid the worst of severe shortages of the wartime. Adenauer set up giant kitchens in working class districts that would go on to supply 200 000 rations per day. During the collapse of the old regime, the threat of revolution and widespread disorder in 1918, Konrad managed to maintain control on Cologne by using his good working relationship with the Social Democrats. As a mayor during the post war British occupation, Konrad established good working relationships with the British military authorities. He then used them to neutralize the workers and soldiers council that had become an alternative base of power for the city’s left wing. During the Weimar republic Adenauer was the president of the Prussian State Council from 1922 to 1933. There he was a representative of the Prussian cities and provinces. Over his whole time as mayor Konrad also managed to create new port facilities, a greenbelt, sports grounds, and exhibition sites and in 1919 he sponsored the refounding of the University of Cologne.
When the Nazi’s came to power in 1933, the Centre Party lost elections in Cologne and was disbanded.
As Konrad was no longer mayor in 1933 he fled to the abbey of Maria Leach where he stayed for a year. Heinrich Böll and others of collaboration then accused Konrad with the Nazi’s. Adolf Hitler expressed admiration for Adenauer by his efforts of building a road circling the city as a bypass and a green belt of parks. He felt that Adenauer’s political views and principles made it impossible for him to play any role in Nazi Germany. Adenauer was then imprisoned briefly after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Over the next two years Konrad changed residences because of his fear of reprisals against him by the Nazis while living on his pension. In 1937 he claimed at least some compensation for his once confiscated house and managed to live in seclusion for some years. In 1944 after the failed assassination on Hitler, Adenauer was imprisoned a second time as an opponent of the regime. Konrad fell ill and credited Eugene Zander a communist Kapo of the camp near Bonn with saving his life by getting him transferred to a hospital. Afterwards he was re-arrested when absence of evidence against him was released in November. After the war ended, the American occupation force installed him as mayor of Cologne. But the British Director of Military Government in Germany, Gerald Templer, dismissed him for what he said was his alleged …show more content…
incompetence.
After Adenauer’s dismissal as mayor of Cologne, he devoted himself to building a new political party. He then established the Christian Democratic Union, which he hoped would embrace Protestants and Roman Catholics in a single party. In January 1946, Adenauer initiated a political meeting of the future CDU in the British zone in his role as doyen and was informally confirmed as its leader. Konrad then worked at building up contacts and support in the CDU over the next few years and sought with varying success to impose his particular ideal ology of the party. His ideal ology was at odds with many in the CDU who wished to unite Socialism and Christianity. Adenauer preferred to stress the dignity of the individual. Adenauer considered both Communism and Nazism materialist worldviews, which violated human dignity. Konrad’s leading role in the CDU of the British zone won him a position at the parliamentary council of 1948 called into existence by the Western allies to draft a constitution for the three Western zones of Germany. Adenauer was the chairman of his own constitutional convention. He valued from this position to being chosen as the first head of government once the new basic law had been put in place in May 1949.
After the German Federal Election in 1949, Konrad Adenauer was elected the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II.
He managed to gain this position with the aid of The CDU and the Liberal Free Democrats Party. Konrad managed to hold the position from 1949 until 1963, which spanned a very important section of the Cold War. The post war division of Germany consolidated with the establishment of the two separate German States, The Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. The first elections of the Bundestag of West Germany on the 15th of August 1949 ended with the Christian Democrats emerging as the strongest party. Theodor Huess was elected as the first president of the Republic and Konrad was elected Chancellor on the 16th of September 1949. Adenauer now had a new provisional capital of the Federal Republic of Germany established at Bonn, which was 15km away from his hometown of Frankfurt. The Petersburg agreement in November 1949 achieved some of the first concessions granted by the allies. Some which were the decrease in the number of factories to be dismantled and the agreement to join the international authority of the Ruhr, which lead to heavy criticism. When the rebellion within the Soviet sector of Germany was unceremoniously and brutally suppressed by the Red Army in June 1953, Adenauer quickly appreciated that the event strengthened his electoral hand and he was handily re-elected to a second term as Chancellor.
The majority was large enough that his CDU/CSU party coalition could dispense with the FDP as a partner of the government. The election of 1957 dealt with the national matters and would revolve around the question of whether Germany and Europe remain Christian or become Communist. Adenauer managed to bring home the last of the Prisoner of War’s from the Soviet labour camps, which was greeted with jubilation. He also at the time had a recent accomplishment in pension reform, which turned out to be enormously popular as well as his new assurance of his ‘no experiments’ slogan, which gained him a re-election into his 3rd term as Chancellor, with the CDU/CSU winning convincingly. It was the first and only time that a single party had won an outright majority in German electoral history in a free election. From then on Konrad’s personal position would no longer be seriously challenged, at the age of 81 he was almost like the king of Germany. Although by the September elections of 1961 the temper had changed when Adenauer had tarnished his image when he announced he would run for the office of Federal President in 1959, but later pulled out when he came to the realisation that his vision of a much more powerful presidency conflicted with the basic law and the precedent established by the departing and respected Theodor Huess. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in August of 1961 and the sealing of the borders by East Germans, made his government look weak. Konrad then flew to Berlin but appeared to have lost his once instinctive ultra swift power of judgement. He then started to fail to keep the majority in the general election after the wall went up which led the CDU/CSU to have the need for the FDP to be included in a coalition government. Konrad in the end was forced to make two concessions. 1. Relinquish the Chancellorship before the end of the new term 2. Replace his foreign minister
The contemporary critics accused Konrad of cementing the division of Germany, sacrificing reunification and the recovery of territories lost in the westward shift of Poland and the Soviet Union. Adenauer thought that the full interrogation into Western Europe was a precondition of the reunification of Germany. During the Cold War the United States were aiming for a West German armed force after their costly experience in the Korean War. Adenauer then linked the rearmament concept to West German sovereignty and entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. In 1952 the Stalin Note caught everybody in the West by surprise. It offered to unify the two German entities into a single neutral state with its own non-aligned national army to affect superpower disengagement from Central Europe. Adenauer and his Cabinet then all agreed in their rejection of the Stalin overture, they shared the Western allies’ suspicion about the genuineness of the offer and supported the allies in their cautious replies. Konrad’s flat out rejection was very out of step with the public opinion and he began to realize his mistake and started to ask questions about that missed opportunity for reunification. All opportunity for initiative had now passed and out of his hands. The matter was put to rest then by the allies. Given the realities of the Cold War, German reunification and recovery of lost territories in the East were not realistic goals because both of Stalin’s notes specified the retention of the existing Potsdam – decreed boundaries of Germany. Adenauer was very culturally and politically conservative which was the base to the entire social and political make up of West Germany around the personal views of a single person, one who gave a certain amount of distrust towards his own people. As Chancellor Adenauer tended to arrogate most major decisions to himself. The West German student movement in the late 1960’s was mostly a protest against the conservatism Adenauer personified. Konrad’s commitment to reconciliation with France was in stark contrast to a certain indifference towards communist Poland. The CDU refused to recognise the annexation of former German territories given by the Soviets to Poland and openly talked about regaining these territories after strengthening West Germany’s position in Europe.
Throughout his time as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer managed to:
Establish a stable democracy in defeated Germany
Hold a lasting reconciliation with France
Hold a political reorientation towards the West
Recover limited but far reaching sovereignty for West Germany by firmly interrogating the country with the emerging Euro Atlantic community
Closely link to the implementation of an enhanced pension system that ensured unparalleled prosperity for retired persons
The Minister for economic affairs and successor Ludwig Erhard the West German model of a social market economy allowed for the broom period known as the Witchcrafts wonder that produced broad prosperity.
Cause a dramatic rise in the standard living of average Germans with:
Real wages doubling between 1950 and 1963
Accompanied by a 20% fall in working hours during that same period
Fall in unemployment and rate from 8% in 1950 to 0.4% in 1965
Ensure a truly free and democratic society, which had almost been unknown to the German people before and in today, is not just normal but also deeply integrated into modern German society
Lay the groundwork for Germany to re enter the community of nations and to evolve as a dependable member of the Western Wold
Hold policies to enable the country to later reunify and eventually have Germany as a solid partner in NATO.
In 2003 on a TV poll Adenauer was named the greatest German of all time.
Left wing intellectuals now praise his unconditional commitment to Western style democracy and European interrogation.
Additional achievements also made by Adenauer were:
Konrad made a historic speech to the Bundestag in September 1951 in which he recognized the obligation of the German government to compensate Israel as the main representative of the Jewish people for the holocaust. This started, as a process, which led to the Bundestag approving a pact between Israel and Germany in 1953, outlining the reparations Germany, would pay to Israel.
He opened diplomatic relations with the USSR but refused to recognise East Germany and broke off diplomatic relations with countries that established relations with the East German regime.
Adenauer oversaw the reintegration of the Saarland into West Germany in 1957
He briefly considered running for the office of Federal president of West Germany, but instead chose a candidate he believed was weak enough not to interfere with his actions as Federal Chancellor of West Germany.
In 1953 he was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year for all his efforts as West Germany’s leader.
On the 7th of March 1952, a packaged address to the Chancellor exploded in the Munich Police HQ, killing a Bavarian police officer. Two boys had been paid to send the package by mail brought it to the attention of the police. Investigations then led people closely related to the Herut Party and the former Irgun armed organisation. The West German government kept all of the proof under seal in order to prevent anti-Semitic responses from the German public. French then identified five Israel suspects and German investigators were allowed to return to Israel. One of the participants, Eliezer Sudit revealed that the alleged mastermind behind the assassination attempt was Menachem Begin who would later became PM of Israel. Begin was the former commander of Irgun, and at the time headed Herut and was a member of Knesset. His goal was to put pressure on the relationship between the two new states.
In 1962, a scandal appeared when police under cabinet orders arrested five Spiegel journalists, charging them with high treason for publishing a memo detailing alleged weaknesses in the West German armed forces. The cabinet members belonging to the Free Democratic Party left their positions in November 1962. Defence minister Fraz Josef Strauss the chairman of the CSU was dismissed, followed by the remaining CDU cabinet members. Adenauer managed to remain in office for almost another year, but the scandal increased the pressure he was under pressure to fulfil his promise to resign before the end of the term. Ludwig Erhard then succeeded Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor in October 1963. Konrad managed to remain chairman of the CDU until his resignation from that position in December 1966.
Konrad Adenauer died on the 19th of April 1967 in his family home at Rhöndorf. His last words were “There’s nothin’ to weep about!” His funeral was held in the Cologne Cathedral, and was attended by a large number of world leaders such as the US President Lyndon B Johnson. His remains were brought upstream to Rhöndorf on the Rhine River.
Konrad Adenauer was born in Cologne, Rhenish Prussia on the 5th of January 1876. He was one of five children of Johann Konrad Adenauer, a Cologne civil servant and Helene Adenauer. Konrad grew up in a Roman Catholic family of simple means in which frugality, fulfilment of duty and religious dedication was stressed.
In 1894 he completed his Abitur and started to study law and political science at the universities of Freiburg, Munich and Bonn. Adenauer was also a member of several Roman Catholic students’ associations under the K.St.V Arminia Bonn in Bonn. Konrad finished his studies in 1901 and worked as a lawyer in the court of cologne.
As a devout Catholic, he joined the Centre Party in 1906. As well as being elected …show more content…
into Cologne’s city council in the same year. In 1909 he became the vice mayor of cologne. There we would avoid the extreme political movements by committing to diligence, order, Christian morals and values and rooting out disorder, inefficiency, irrationality and political immorality.
From the years 1917 to 1933 Konrad Adenauer held the position of mayor of Cologne. During World War II Konrad worked closely with the army to maximise the city’s role as a rear base of supply and transportation for the western front. He also paid attention to the civilian food supply by using the city to finance large warehouses of food, which enabled the residents to avoid the worst of severe shortages of the wartime. Adenauer set up giant kitchens in working class districts that would go on to supply 200 000 rations per day. During the collapse of the old regime, the threat of revolution and widespread disorder in 1918, Konrad managed to maintain control on Cologne by using his good working relationship with the Social Democrats. As a mayor during the post war British occupation, Konrad established good working relationships with the British military authorities. He then used them to neutralize the workers and soldiers council that had become an alternative base of power for the city’s left wing. During the Weimar republic Adenauer was the president of the Prussian State Council from 1922 to 1933. There he was a representative of the Prussian cities and provinces. Over his whole time as mayor Konrad also managed to create new port facilities, a greenbelt, sports grounds, and exhibition sites and in 1919 he sponsored the refounding of the University of Cologne.
When the Nazi’s came to power in 1933, the Centre Party lost elections in Cologne and was disbanded.
As Konrad was no longer mayor in 1933 he fled to the abbey of Maria Leach where he stayed for a year. Heinrich Böll and others of collaboration then accused Konrad with the Nazi’s. Adolf Hitler expressed admiration for Adenauer by his efforts of building a road circling the city as a bypass and a green belt of parks. He felt that Adenauer’s political views and principles made it impossible for him to play any role in Nazi Germany. Adenauer was then imprisoned briefly after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Over the next two years Konrad changed residences because of his fear of reprisals against him by the Nazis while living on his pension. In 1937 he claimed at least some compensation for his once confiscated house and managed to live in seclusion for some years. In 1944 after the failed assassination on Hitler, Adenauer was imprisoned a second time as an opponent of the regime. Konrad fell ill and credited Eugene Zander a communist Kapo of the camp near Bonn with saving his life by getting him transferred to a hospital. Afterwards he was re-arrested when absence of evidence against him was released in November. After the war ended, the American occupation force installed him as mayor of Cologne. But the British Director of Military Government in Germany, Gerald Templer, dismissed him for what he said was his alleged …show more content…
incompetence.
After Adenauer’s dismissal as mayor of Cologne, he devoted himself to building a new political party. He then established the Christian Democratic Union, which he hoped would embrace Protestants and Roman Catholics in a single party. In January 1946, Adenauer initiated a political meeting of the future CDU in the British zone in his role as doyen and was informally confirmed as its leader. Konrad then worked at building up contacts and support in the CDU over the next few years and sought with varying success to impose his particular ideal ology of the party. His ideal ology was at odds with many in the CDU who wished to unite Socialism and Christianity. Adenauer preferred to stress the dignity of the individual. Adenauer considered both Communism and Nazism materialist worldviews, which violated human dignity. Konrad’s leading role in the CDU of the British zone won him a position at the parliamentary council of 1948 called into existence by the Western allies to draft a constitution for the three Western zones of Germany. Adenauer was the chairman of his own constitutional convention. He valued from this position to being chosen as the first head of government once the new basic law had been put in place in May 1949.
After the German Federal Election in 1949, Konrad Adenauer was elected the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II.
He managed to gain this position with the aid of The CDU and the Liberal Free Democrats Party. Konrad managed to hold the position from 1949 until 1963, which spanned a very important section of the Cold War. The post war division of Germany consolidated with the establishment of the two separate German States, The Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. The first elections of the Bundestag of West Germany on the 15th of August 1949 ended with the Christian Democrats emerging as the strongest party. Theodor Huess was elected as the first president of the Republic and Konrad was elected Chancellor on the 16th of September 1949. Adenauer now had a new provisional capital of the Federal Republic of Germany established at Bonn, which was 15km away from his hometown of Frankfurt. The Petersburg agreement in November 1949 achieved some of the first concessions granted by the allies. Some which were the decrease in the number of factories to be dismantled and the agreement to join the international authority of the Ruhr, which lead to heavy criticism. When the rebellion within the Soviet sector of Germany was unceremoniously and brutally suppressed by the Red Army in June 1953, Adenauer quickly appreciated that the event strengthened his electoral hand and he was handily re-elected to a second term as Chancellor.
The majority was large enough that his CDU/CSU party coalition could dispense with the FDP as a partner of the government. The election of 1957 dealt with the national matters and would revolve around the question of whether Germany and Europe remain Christian or become Communist. Adenauer managed to bring home the last of the Prisoner of War’s from the Soviet labour camps, which was greeted with jubilation. He also at the time had a recent accomplishment in pension reform, which turned out to be enormously popular as well as his new assurance of his ‘no experiments’ slogan, which gained him a re-election into his 3rd term as Chancellor, with the CDU/CSU winning convincingly. It was the first and only time that a single party had won an outright majority in German electoral history in a free election. From then on Konrad’s personal position would no longer be seriously challenged, at the age of 81 he was almost like the king of Germany. Although by the September elections of 1961 the temper had changed when Adenauer had tarnished his image when he announced he would run for the office of Federal President in 1959, but later pulled out when he came to the realisation that his vision of a much more powerful presidency conflicted with the basic law and the precedent established by the departing and respected Theodor Huess. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in August of 1961 and the sealing of the borders by East Germans, made his government look weak. Konrad then flew to Berlin but appeared to have lost his once instinctive ultra swift power of judgement. He then started to fail to keep the majority in the general election after the wall went up which led the CDU/CSU to have the need for the FDP to be included in a coalition government. Konrad in the end was forced to make two concessions. 1. Relinquish the Chancellorship before the end of the new term 2. Replace his foreign minister
The contemporary critics accused Konrad of cementing the division of Germany, sacrificing reunification and the recovery of territories lost in the westward shift of Poland and the Soviet Union. Adenauer thought that the full interrogation into Western Europe was a precondition of the reunification of Germany. During the Cold War the United States were aiming for a West German armed force after their costly experience in the Korean War. Adenauer then linked the rearmament concept to West German sovereignty and entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. In 1952 the Stalin Note caught everybody in the West by surprise. It offered to unify the two German entities into a single neutral state with its own non-aligned national army to affect superpower disengagement from Central Europe. Adenauer and his Cabinet then all agreed in their rejection of the Stalin overture, they shared the Western allies’ suspicion about the genuineness of the offer and supported the allies in their cautious replies. Konrad’s flat out rejection was very out of step with the public opinion and he began to realize his mistake and started to ask questions about that missed opportunity for reunification. All opportunity for initiative had now passed and out of his hands. The matter was put to rest then by the allies. Given the realities of the Cold War, German reunification and recovery of lost territories in the East were not realistic goals because both of Stalin’s notes specified the retention of the existing Potsdam – decreed boundaries of Germany. Adenauer was very culturally and politically conservative which was the base to the entire social and political make up of West Germany around the personal views of a single person, one who gave a certain amount of distrust towards his own people. As Chancellor Adenauer tended to arrogate most major decisions to himself. The West German student movement in the late 1960’s was mostly a protest against the conservatism Adenauer personified. Konrad’s commitment to reconciliation with France was in stark contrast to a certain indifference towards communist Poland. The CDU refused to recognise the annexation of former German territories given by the Soviets to Poland and openly talked about regaining these territories after strengthening West Germany’s position in Europe.
Throughout his time as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer managed to:
Establish a stable democracy in defeated Germany
Hold a lasting reconciliation with France
Hold a political reorientation towards the West
Recover limited but far reaching sovereignty for West Germany by firmly interrogating the country with the emerging Euro Atlantic community
Closely link to the implementation of an enhanced pension system that ensured unparalleled prosperity for retired persons
The Minister for economic affairs and successor Ludwig Erhard the West German model of a social market economy allowed for the broom period known as the Witchcrafts wonder that produced broad prosperity.
Cause a dramatic rise in the standard living of average Germans with:
Real wages doubling between 1950 and 1963
Accompanied by a 20% fall in working hours during that same period
Fall in unemployment and rate from 8% in 1950 to 0.4% in 1965
Ensure a truly free and democratic society, which had almost been unknown to the German people before and in today, is not just normal but also deeply integrated into modern German society
Lay the groundwork for Germany to re enter the community of nations and to evolve as a dependable member of the Western Wold
Hold policies to enable the country to later reunify and eventually have Germany as a solid partner in NATO.
In 2003 on a TV poll Adenauer was named the greatest German of all time.
Left wing intellectuals now praise his unconditional commitment to Western style democracy and European interrogation.
Additional achievements also made by Adenauer were:
Konrad made a historic speech to the Bundestag in September 1951 in which he recognized the obligation of the German government to compensate Israel as the main representative of the Jewish people for the holocaust. This started, as a process, which led to the Bundestag approving a pact between Israel and Germany in 1953, outlining the reparations Germany, would pay to Israel.
He opened diplomatic relations with the USSR but refused to recognise East Germany and broke off diplomatic relations with countries that established relations with the East German regime.
Adenauer oversaw the reintegration of the Saarland into West Germany in 1957
He briefly considered running for the office of Federal president of West Germany, but instead chose a candidate he believed was weak enough not to interfere with his actions as Federal Chancellor of West Germany.
In 1953 he was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year for all his efforts as West Germany’s leader.
On the 7th of March 1952, a packaged address to the Chancellor exploded in the Munich Police HQ, killing a Bavarian police officer. Two boys had been paid to send the package by mail brought it to the attention of the police. Investigations then led people closely related to the Herut Party and the former Irgun armed organisation. The West German government kept all of the proof under seal in order to prevent anti-Semitic responses from the German public. French then identified five Israel suspects and German investigators were allowed to return to Israel. One of the participants, Eliezer Sudit revealed that the alleged mastermind behind the assassination attempt was Menachem Begin who would later became PM of Israel. Begin was the former commander of Irgun, and at the time headed Herut and was a member of Knesset. His goal was to put pressure on the relationship between the two new states.
In 1962, a scandal appeared when police under cabinet orders arrested five Spiegel journalists, charging them with high treason for publishing a memo detailing alleged weaknesses in the West German armed forces. The cabinet members belonging to the Free Democratic Party left their positions in November 1962. Defence minister Fraz Josef Strauss the chairman of the CSU was dismissed, followed by the remaining CDU cabinet members. Adenauer managed to remain in office for almost another year, but the scandal increased the pressure he was under pressure to fulfil his promise to resign before the end of the term. Ludwig Erhard then succeeded Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor in October 1963. Konrad managed to remain chairman of the CDU until his resignation from that position in December 1966.
Konrad Adenauer died on the 19th of April 1967 in his family home at Rhöndorf. His last words were “There’s nothin’ to weep about!” His funeral was held in the Cologne Cathedral, and was attended by a large number of world leaders such as the US President Lyndon B Johnson. His remains were brought upstream to Rhöndorf on the Rhine River.