Konrad Adenauer

The name giver of our foundation, Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), was the first German chancellor who set the agenda in the young Federal Republic of Germany. Both foreign and domestic policy decisions between 1949 and 1963 bear his hallmarks.

Konrad Adenauer was already an active political member of the Catholic Center Party during the Imperial Era and the Weimar Republic. Since 1917 he had been Lord Mayer of Cologne and in 1918 he became a lifelong member of the Prussian House of Lords. As a dedicated Republican, who embodied Christian social values and federal opinions, he soon became a target of the National Socialists, who deposed him from all his offices in 1933. He survived the National Socialist Regime and the Second World War living reclusively in his house in Röhndorf.

After being elected by the German Bundestag as the first German Chancellor on the 15. September 1949, his foreign policy emphasis was on West integration. Apart from achieving the membership of NATO, he aimed at deepening the European integration process. Being a Rhenisch Catholic and facing the Soviet claim of world leadership, he pursued a decisive policy of Anticommunism. He was, however, a political realist, who arranged the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and thus, essentially contributed to the return of the German prisoners of war.

Against strong resistance, including his own peers, he pushed through the concept of Social Market Economy. In 1957, for example, he transformed the legal pension fund by a share-in-costs-system. This allowed for a sudden and considerable increase of pensions and a following proportional elevation per year considering the development of gross salaries. The common old-age poverty which used to be the rule in those days as a result of a lift in prices and stagnating pensions disappeared for decades. Apart from his commitment for the share-in-costs-system, Adenauer tried everything to deal with the social consequences of war. The results were laws for the supply of war victims and surviving dependants, laws for the integration of displaced persons and refugees and the so called burden sharing. Furthermore, Adenauer wanted as many people as possible to take part in the German economic miracle and its successes.

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