Der Alte Returns

Shortly Before his seventieth birthday Konrad Adenauer emerged from obscurity to lead his country into peace. At 89, his is the only voice to warn of dangers ahead

In a few months he will be ninety years old; and his vocabulary, as every overeducated ass in Germany will unfailingly point out, compromises, at most, a thousand words. Yet when Konrad Adenauer speaks, Germans hear the voice of history. And not only the Germans. I dare predict that Adenauer’s speech of August 23, 1965 will soon be considered about as formative for our comprehension of the world as Churchill’s Fulton speech (in which the British Adenauer issued his declaration of the Cold War).

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William S. Schlamm

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Shortly Before his seventieth birthday Konrad Adenauer emerged from obscurity to lead his country into peace. At 89, his is the only voice to warn of dangers ahead

In a few months he will be ninety years old; and his vocabulary, as every overeducated ass in Germany will unfailingly point out, compromises, at most, a thousand words. Yet when Konrad Adenauer speaks, Germans hear the voice of history. And not only the Germans. I dare predict that Adenauer’s speech of August 23, 1965 will soon be considered about as formative for our comprehension of the world as Churchill’s Fulton speech (in which the British Adenauer issued his declaration of the Cold War).