The West German Democracy
German Democracy at Work. A selective study
by James K. Pollock, Henry L. Bretton, Frank Grace, Daniel S. Mchargue; ed. James K. Pollock.
University of Michigan Press. 202 pp. $4.50.

The authors of this study traveled to West Germany in the summer of 1953 “to observe the German political scene in the period of its greatest activity,” on the eve of the Federal elections in September of that year. Their purpose was to investigate how the electoral system was operating, and more generally how the West Germans were taking to their brand-new Federal institutions. From internal evidence it appears that they were also concerned to gauge the true strength of Dr. Adenauer’s party in relation to the Social Democrats, and to assess the significance of neutralist and “anti-American” sentiment. By contrast, they do not seem to have regarded the strength of nationalist and neo-Nazi tendencies as worth investigating. Remarks on this topic are brief and cursory, and there is no discussion of the extent to which the Federal bureaucracy has been staffed with former National Socialists.

On its purely documentary side, the study bears the marks of careful investigation and patient attention to detail. Four of the eight chapters are devoted to analysis of election machinery, national and regional close-ups of the September 1953 poll, discussion of party electoral strategy, etc. There are some useful annexes which will save students the bother of wading through Federal German election statistics for 1949 and 1953. There is a diagram showing the respective strengths of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in relation to the Catholic vote in twenty-five cities and communities; a sketch map of Federal institutions; and a profusion of notes displaying the authors’ familiarity with election literature in the summer of 1953. The volume is printed and produced in accordance with academic standards; anyone wishing to discover how the German Federal elections of 1953 were organized, how the votes were cast, and how they were distributed, can do no better than consult it.

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It is when one comes to the chapters dealing with German history and present-day politics that doubts begin to stir. The authors have indeed tried to play fair. Their wholehearted admiration for Dr. Adenauer is qualified by recognition that he has no monopoly of virtue. Repeatedly the reader is assured that the Social Democrats are really quite sound on the Communist issue, though lamentably inclined to flirt with nationalist and neutralist sentiment. Yet the total impression is that the SPD has “failed to adjust itself to political reality.” In particular, it is blamed for being anti-European: “Although still an opposition party, the SPD has accumulated enough of a vested interest—especially at the state level—to be unable to fit itself into the framework of present Western European integration.”

The preface to the volume is dated February 1955. Eight months after these words were printed, the German Socialist leaders formally associated themselves with M. Jean Monnet’s “Action Committee” for a United States of Europe. In doing so they aligned themselves with the other Socialist parties of Western Europe, and of course with the leading influences among European Liberals and Christian Democrats. It is arguable that this apparent conversion could not have been foreseen, although in fact it merely formalized what better informed observers knew to be the basic orientation of the SPD since the death of Schumacher and the gradual discomfiture of those among his disciples who thought the party could ride to power on the back of the nationalist wave. In any case the incident shows how difficult it is to understand the politics of a foreign country.

There is less justification for the inadequacy (to put it mildly) of the historical introduction. This takes the form of a naive eulogy of the CDU, a party apparently dedicated to the realization of Christian ideals, and an equally naive disparagement of the SPD. Political Catholicism in Germany since 1848 gets an elaborate whitewash. Thus while the failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in the 70’s is duly noted, there is no hint that during the Wilhelminian epoch the Catholic Center party became the mainstay of the Imperial government which dragged Germany into war in 1914; nor is there any reference to the sinister role played by the party’s Bavarian allies in undermining the Weimar Republic and giving Hitler his first big opportunity. With equal lack of critical balance, the history of the CDU in the Federal Republic is described as a process of Catholic-Protestant cooperation to realize the principles of “Social Christianity” (a term not further defined), and there is a delicious passage extolling the growth of inter-confessional harmony (p. 46) which would certainly come as a surprise to leaders and followers on both sides of the denominational gulf. For good measure, a vaguely pro-Socialist editorial in the totally unrepresentative monthly Frankfurter Hefte is gravely noted as evidence that “In Greater Hesse, in other words, the CDU stands for Christian Socialism in the tradition of Bishop Ketteler, the Rerum Novarum, and the Quadragesimo Anno.” This will be news to the party leaders. But the two “political” authors, Mr. Grace and Mr. Bretton, are altogether too much given to taking appearances for reality:

The West Germans are of course fully cognizant of the dangers which threaten their national existence. They see and fear the specter of an Anglo-French-Russian understanding at their expense and consequently move closer to the United States. Thus, whatever the disposition of France and Britain may be, the realities of Soviet pressure may soon force a showdown and may bring to an end the period of procrastination and diplomatic hedging. Neither the Adenauer government nor the United States will placidly accept a development which must result in the crippling of the free world’s efforts to strengthen itself against Soviet aggression. If Germany cannot be rearmed within the framework of the Western European Union, then ways must be found to utilize German troops within the area of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in some other manner.

In the light of Dr. Adenauer’s recent voyage to Moscow and Bonn’s current toying with the idea of watering the NATO wine sufficiently to make reunification possible, this passage has a rather dim look today. Mr. Bretton is no more fortunate as a historian:

Since its organization in 1869, the SPD appears to have been destined to play the role of a loyal and permanent opposition party in German politics. Of radical-Marxist origin, it opposed the nationalist-conservative regime of the Empire and was banned in 1878 for two years under the anti-socialist legislation of Chancellor Bismarck. It managed to grow and expand, however, in spite of all oppression and adversities to the point where it became strong enough to take over the reigns [sic] of government following the collapse of 1918. By 1919 it polled 45 per cent of the total vote and exceeded all other parties in terms of enrolled membership, and ideological as well as organizational cohesiveness.

Every single statement in this passage is demonstrably inaccurate. The SPD was not founded in 1869 (Bebel and Liebknecht organized a congress in that year, but they had to reckon with the rival organization of Lassalle’s followers which had been operating since 1863), nor did it have a “radical-Marxist” orientation either then or later; the 1875 program was violently denounced by Marx, and it was only in 1891 that the party adopted a watered-down version of Marxian socialism. Bismarck’s suppression law of 1878 lasted for twelve years, not two, and although ostensibly anti-socialist was in fact aimed at the National Liberals and parliamentarianism generally. The party did not “grow and expand in spite of all oppression and adversities.” It was defeated in 1907, stagnated for years thereafter, and as a result of its electoral débâcle in that year came increasingly under the influence of the conservative trade union leaders, who dissuaded it from conducting a more energetic campaign for a broader franchise, and in general prepared the way for its pro-war enthusiasm and political subservience in 1914 (cf. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905-1917, Harvard University Press, 1955). So far from gaming 45 per cent of the vote in 1919, it had to share it with the left-wing USPD, with whom it was then engaged in something tantamount to civil war. The “reins of government” meantime were firmly held (as they are today) by the old bureaucracy and the “bourgeois” parties, who had an absolute majority in the National Assembly of 1919, although the Monarchist-Republican split disabled them from working together. In this respect the Bonn Republic is certainly an improvement on its predecessor: the split having been healed, there is no need now to conceal the basically conservative character of the regime.

After this display of historical scholarship it is scarcely surprising to find that for Mr. Bret-ton, as for Mr. Grace, the political struggle in West Germany since 1949 reduced itself to the “great debate” between the Federal Chancellor and his misguided Socialist opponents. Mr. Pollock and Mr. McHargue keep closer to electoral realities, but it seems regrettable that they have not made much use of the excellent public-opinion surveys conducted by the non-partisan Institut fuer Demoskopie, although a “Note on Public Opinion Polls” (pp. 176/8) draws attention to their findings. An analysis of the latest of these surveys might have done something to qualify the more optimistic conclusions of this study regarding the stability of German democracy. While the polls naturally do not disclose the proportion of Federal ministers and key officials with former Nazi party or SS affiliations (their identity is anyhow no secret in Bonn), they show that, for example, until quite recently a substantial minority of Germans (around one-third) were favorably disposed to at least some aspects of the Hitler regime. As late as 1952,10 per cent of those polled considered Hitler “the greatest statesman of the century,” and another 22 per cent held that “while he made some mistakes, he was certainly a head of state worthy of admiration (vorbildlicher Staatsfuehrer). Even the 40 percent who thought his negative traits were dominant, allowed that he had “done some good.” Only 28 per cent wanted no part of him. This breakdown certainly does not support the belief that most West Germans then had become fully converted to democracy. Yet the same people a year later gave Adenauer his majority. Is it altogether fanciful to suppose that the 28 per cent who in that election voted for the Social Democrats were identical with the 28 per cent whom the poll a year earlier found to have rejected Hitlerism in toto, and that Dr. Adenauer’s following comprised most of the lukewarm and a proportion of the unregenerate? It is at any rate a possibility worth considering.

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