25th anniversary of death of Konrad Adenauer - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1992 - 100 Pfennig

Konrad Adenauer was born on January 5, 1876 in Cologne. After graduating from high school, a Cologne citizenship scholarship enabled him to study law. The origin and education of the Rhenish Catholics Adenauer in the center, the party of political Catholicism, was obvious. His political run began after he had married the twenty-four-year-old Emma Weyer in 1904. Through this marriage he came in contact with the socially and politically leading Rhenish bourgeoisie. The election of the first alderman of the city made him in 1909 the deputy of the Lord Mayor Max Wallraf, whose successor he was in 1917. The professional success faced fatal blows in the personal area. In 1916, his wife died, giving birth to three children. In the Weimar Republic Adenauer was one of the strongest political figures in Germany. He made himself by a progressive expansion of Cologne a "metropolis of the West" a name. The re-founding of the university in 1919, the transformation of the former fortress grounds to the green belt, the revival of the Cologne Fair, the expansion of the Rhine port, the construction of another bridge over the Rhine and the settlement of industrial enterprises fell into his tenure. Of supraregional importance was his influence in the office of a President of the Prussian State Council, which he held from 1921 to 1933. When the Nazis came to the government in 1933, he was relieved of his post as Lord Mayor of Cologne and banished from his hometown. The years of Nazi tyranny and war survived Adenauer with his family in Rhöndorf, temporarily in Gestapo. The American winners made the 69-year-old again Cologne Mayor. But after only a few months, the now competent British military government dismissed him after he had criticized their occupation policy. As a result, the now 70-year-old concentrated fully on the work in the CDU, which he had joined shortly after its founding. Already in March 1946 Adenauer was elected chairman of the CDU of the British zone. The decisive step on his way to the top of the emerging West German state was his election as President of the Parliamentary Council. In this position, he became the "Spokesman for the Federal Republic of the Future" (Heuss) and thus gained public fame. The 73 year old was elected Federal Chancellor by the first German Bundestag on 15 September 1949. The governments he led justified the successful construction of the new democracy: in foreign policy, the achievement of state sovereignty, the close attachment to the free West, reconciliation with France and European unification, in domestic policy the integration of displaced persons and refugees and the Expansion of the social market economy as a novel economic system. At the end of the third chancery Adenauer, however, dominated the uncertainties. The change in the global political situation aggravated the Soviet pressure on Berlin (Berlin ultimatum and three-state theory). Domestic politics came under the influence of the personal struggle for the succession of the "old". As the generations of the world wars gave way to the children of reconstruction, Adenauer lost its attraction. His last political success in 1963 was the signing of the Franco-German treaty, which pointed to Europe as a major objective of Adenauer's policy beyond concentrating on cooperation between the two neighboring states. When he died on 19 April 1967 - 91 years old - he was recognized as a statesman, to whom the Germans in the Federal Republic owed freedom, prosperity and social security, worldwide. (Text: Archive for Christian Democratic Politics of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Sankt Augustin)