Kurt Schumacher - Postwar Politics

Postwar Politics

Schumacher wanted to lead the SPD and bring Germany to socialism. By May he was already reorganising the SPD in Hanover, without the permission of the occupation authorities. He soon found himself in a battle with Otto Grotewohl, the leader of the SPD in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, who was arguing that the SPD should merge with the Communists to form a united socialist party. Schumacher rejected Grotewohl's plan. In August he called an SPD convention in Hanover, which elected him as "western leader" of the party.

In January 1946 the British and Americans allowed the SPD to reform itself as a national party, with Schumacher as leader. As the only SPD leader who had spent the whole Nazi period in Germany, without collaborating, he had enormous prestige. He was certain that his right to lead Germany would be recognised both by the Allies and by the German electorate.

But Schumacher met his match in Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne, whom the Americans, not wanting to see socialism of any kind in Germany, were grooming for leadership. Adenauer united most of the prewar German conservatives into a new party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Schumacher campaigned through 1948 and 1949 for a united socialist Germany, and particularly for the nationalisation of heavy industry, whose owners he blamed for funding the Nazis' rise to power. When the occupying powers opposed his ideas, he denounced them. Adenauer opposed socialism on principle, and also argued that the quickest way to get the Allies to restore self-government to Germany was to co-operate with them.

Schumacher wanted a new constitution with a strong national presidency, confident that he would occupy that post. But the first draft of the 1949 Grundgesetz provided for a federal system with a weak national government, as favoured both by the Allies and the CDU. Schumacher refused to give way on this, and eventually the Allies, keen to get the new German state functioning in the face of the Soviet challenge, conceded some of what Schumacher wanted. The new federal government would be dominant over the states, although the president would be weak.