T H E T A B L E T , M a y 26th, 1951
THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW
PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA
VOL. 197, No. 5792 -
FOUNDED IN 1840
LONDON, MAY 26th, 1951
SIXPENCE
PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER
ELECTORATES ENTHRONED The Present Embarrassment of the French AT THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE Days of Indecision at Strasbourg. By Christopher Hollis, M .P .
PREOCCUPATIONS IN SPAIN I : The Background to some Present Discontents
BEHIND THE DOCK STRIKES The Ministry o f Labour Report. By John Fitzsimons
“ENTHUSIASTIC TRAVELLER” GRAHAM GREENE’S OPTIMISM
By Bela Menczer
By Anthony Bertram
MR. MORRISON LEARNS M . SPAAK, addressing the Bundestag at Bonn immediately after the departure of Mr. Morrison, and regretting the detached attitude of Britain towards Europe, will have offset among the Germans something of their satisfaction that a British Foreign Secretary should have come to Germany at all, for the first time since the end of the war. Dr. Adenauer is coming to London, but only after his visit to Rome, at some date not yet decided ; he has already been to Paris, and the sequence of his invitations reflects the order in which the Western European Powers attach importance to their relations with Germany. Yet it is in Germany that many of the keys to the future lie, whether we like it or not, and it is a pity that Mr. Morrison was not able to acquaint himself more thoroughly with that country, or to see more of the Federal Republic than its artificial centre at Bonn.
to Protestants,” and that he is “ absolutely opposed to working with” the Social Democrats. But “clericalism” is a charge we believe the writer would find it very hard to substantiate. What is true is that in Lower Saxony the Christians are predominantly Lutheran, and do not like the Catholics being predominant in the CDU for Western Germany as a whole. The Christian Democrats have made, and are making, a genuine attempt to escape the partisan spirit o f German political life, and to follow the example of other European countries in rallying the moderate elements of the nation to the defence of Christian principles in politics. They are much more free of clericalism than the German Socialists are of Marxism.
The Rise of the Neo-Nazis
It is ironic, after all the enthusiasm which the British Labour Government has shown since 1945 for what it took to be its opposite number in Germany, the Social Democratic Party of Dr. Schumacher, that one of Mr. Morrison’s chief tasks should have been to endeavour to restrain that Party, by explaining the responsibility that rests no less upon Oppositions than upon Governments, to be constructive and positive in their arguments and policies, and by asking it to give Dr. Adenauer a better chance. Dr. Schumacher is undoubtedly one of the greater among the personalities in German postwar politics, but he has offered nothing but obstruction at every turn to the Bonn Government, in internal affairs as much as in the questions of the Schuman Plan and European unity. He is obsessed with the past, and with apprehension of a repetition of the history of the Weimar Republic, fearing that the Social Democrats will come to be held responsible for the military defeat which they inherited unless they cry patriotism and nationalism more loudly than anyone else. As the Frankfurter Hefte puts it,
“Because Stresemann and Severing proved to be weaker than Hugenberg and Hitler, he talks of the Schuman Plan as Hugenberg talked of the Young Plan, and has no idea how different everything is today.” It is in the logic of Socialism to transfer to the State the functions that should be exercised by individuals and groups, and at the same time to stir up popular support for nationalist ends. There is no far cry from Mr. Aneurin Bevan’s antiAmericanism to Dr. Schumacher’s identification of M. Schuman’s German policy with that of Cardinal Richelieu. This form of national Socialism is particularly dangerous in the political and social instability of the present-day Federal Republic. The Manchester Guardian last Tuesday repeated its opinion that “Dr. Adenauer is deliberately narrowing his party into a Roman Catholic mould which makes it unpopular
The vacuum on the right in German post-war politics, as well as the chauvinism displayed by the SPD, has had two results. It has pulled the CDU away from its policy of reform and induced it to make alliances with right-wing parties, such as the Deutsche Partei, in the recent elections in Lower Saxony, which accounts for its heavy losses. The second consequence has been the rise of neo-Nazism. This movement found indeed a fruitful ground among the small farmers of Lower Saxony, but it is not confined to that area, where it scored a further success on May 18th, when the SRP obtained sixteen out of nineteen seats on the Works Council of the Hanomag motor works, which are working for the British authorities. In other parts of the Federal Republic branch movements have sprung up, sometimes .under different names, but all with the same aims.
There is as yet none of Dr. Goebbels’ single-mindedness about his present successors. General Remer copies the jackboots and the slogans, and adds the contemporary dose of neutralism ; others, like the Bruderschaft movement, show a predilection for the mystique of the military and ideological traditions of the Third Reich. In Frankfurt a “European Social Movement” has just been founded, under the chairmanship of Karl-Heinz Priester, and a t its first meeting a number of delegates wore the ribbon of the Iron Cross of the Second World War. Connected with this movement is a curious journal, called Nation Europa, which names among its collaborators Hans Grimm, Guido Erwin Kolbenheyer, Sir Oswald Mosley and Heinrich Zillich, who writes in a recent number that the Third Reich was fighting for European unity, that only after its collapse did Western civilization become the playball of foreign Powers, and that the German people, by remaining true to the Hitlerite traditions, are, in fact, the destined guardians of the Christian world. It is surely without their knowledge that several leading European figures like
