Adenauer, the German Disraeli

The story of postwar Germany is inextricably bound up with the figure of Konrad Adenauer, ‘the Federal Republic’s George Washington’, as Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer’s first major biographer, once called him. Adenauer has received particular attention this year, as 2026 marks the 150th anniversary of his birth. As is customary on such occasions, the German public has been inundated with a plethora of new books, including two major biographies, as well as documentaries, conference papers, and speeches by politicians eager to use such an anniversary for their own purposes.

Such acts of collective remembrance offer an opportunity to take stock. There is, much as there was at the time of his death in 1967, widespread consensus about Adenauer’s historical importance and about the fact that his legacy is the Federal Republic itself. That is to say: the establishment of democracy after the moral and physical ruin of the Third Reich; economic prosperity; the acceptance of West Germany as an equal partner among former foes, and its integration into the institutions of European and transatlantic cooperation. Yet today, much as at the time of his death, there remains a sizeable segment of German opinion, articulated through the writings of a coterie of academics and journalists and politically represented by the country’s left-of-centre parties, which holds that Adenauer’s accomplishments, while laudable, were only achieved in spite of his staunchly conservative politics.

The doyen of postwar German history, Heinrich August Winkler, writes in his great account of ‘Germany’s long road to the West’, that the early Federal Republic was the product of ‘a conservative democracy under the leadership of a “Tory Democrat” in the figure of Adenauer’. Yet, in truth, only a conservative could have transformed the decimated Germany of May 1945 into the unlikely success story it became. Moreover, it took a particular kind of conservative to accomplish that feat: a Tory democrat of the ‘One Nation’ variety, a German in the Disraelian mold. That, in the end, is what Adenauer was.

At first glance, that may seem an odd claim. Victorian England is a far cry from postwar Germany, and the figures of Benjamin Disraeli and Konrad Adenauer could hardly appear more different: Disraeli with his Jewish background, flamboyance and eccentricity; Adenauer, the staunch Catholic, known for his ascetic lifestyle and terse manner of speech. Yet Disraeli and Adenauer were not in fact so far apart. Indeed, their lifespans overlapped. Born in 1876, Adenauer came into the world while Disraeli was still prime minister. Moreover, in habit, outlook, and style Adenauer was very much a man of the Wilhelmine era, a product of the Second Reich founded by Bismarck in 1871, and thus someone with at least one foot in that pre-1914 world familiar to Disraeli.

More importantly, however, the real reason this unlikely comparison is worth pursuing is that both men, in their respective historical contexts, rebuilt conservative centre-right parties out of existential crises and, in doing so, helped unify nations.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, the Tory party was buffeted by the immense upheaval induced by the Industrial Revolution and wrestled with the question of how to maintain political predominance while the economic and social structure of the nation was shifting beneath its feet. Under the leadership of Robert Peel, this growing crisis of identity came to a head. The Corn Laws had long been defended by the landed interest at the core of the Tory Party as a necessary protection for agriculture and, with it, for the social order over which the landed classes presided. They had become symbolic of an entire conception of English society, one in which land, hierarchy and paternal authority retained political primacy against the advancing claims of commerce, industry and laissez-faire liberalism. When Peel, persuaded by economic arguments and driven to action by the catastrophe of the Irish famine, decided in 1846 to repeal the Corn Laws, he was repudiating the central article of faith of so many of his own backbenchers.

The consequences were devastating. Peel secured repeal, but only at the cost of shattering his party, as Peel and his followers moved gradually away from the main body of British conservatism. What remained behind was a protectionist party: angry, wounded and bent on revenge.

The Tory party, through whose ranks Disraeli climbed ‘the greasy pole’ in the mid-19th century, was thus a party in dire straits. Disraeli’s answer was to reimagine conservatism as something broader than protectionism. The old Tory Party had been too closely bound to the landed interest and too narrow in its social reach. If conservatism was to survive, it had to become national in a fuller sense. It had to speak not only for one class or estate, but for the unity and continuity of the nation as a whole. That did not mean abandoning hierarchy, monarchy, church or inherited authority. On the contrary, Disraeli sought to preserve them by enlarging their social basis and moral claim. He grasped that institutions could no longer be defended merely as privileges; they had to be justified as instruments of cohesion and obligation in an age of mounting social division.

Disraeli was troubled by the prospect of England dividing into ‘two nations’, rich and poor. Conservatism, as he came to conceive of it, had to resist that fracture by presenting itself as the party not merely of property but of national cohesion. By the time he led the party to victory in 1874, the Conservatives had been remade into a national party capable of winning support beyond their old landed bastions. What became Disraeli’s One Nation brand of Toryism was, at its core, a politics of integration.

Whittaker Chambers once wrote that ‘a conservatism that cannot face the facts of the machine and mass production… is foredoomed to futility’. Only ‘a conservatism that allows’ for these forces had, in his view, ‘an eleventh-hour chance of rallying’. This, he concluded, was in effect ‘the Beaconsfield position’, centred on the decision to be ‘a Tory, who means to live.’ ‘And to live’, Chambers declared, ‘is not to hold the lost redoubt. To live is to manoeuvre.’

Even if he was not in a direct Disraelian lineage, Adenauer was an heir to the ‘Beaconsfield position’. In 1945 he confronted a conservatism in Germany that was utterly discredited. Franz von Papen’s remark in January 1933 that ‘in two months, we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak’ has become infamous as the ultimate expression of conservative naivety.

More consequential were the deeper structural weaknesses of the prewar conservative camp in Germany. It was crippled by internal division. Socio-economic cleavages, and, above all, religious ones, prevented it from congealing into the kind of electoral bulwark that would have been necessary to hold off extremist challengers. Adenauer’s answer was the Christian Democratic Union, a party that practised a politics of integration reminiscent of Disraeli’s One Nation Toryism. He overcame the party-political fragmentation of the Weimar Republic, attenuated the confessional antagonism, and, with Ludwig Erhard’s help, he secured the breakthrough of a liberal economic order in Germany.

At the same time, Adenauer pursued the social integration necessary to render such an order politically stable. He introduced co-determination for trade unions in the coal and steel industries, and he championed the ‘dynamische Rente’, the pension reform of 1957.

The historian Golo Mann remarked that with Adenauer the West German Bürgertum, equivalent to the bourgeoisie or middle class, had, for the first time, truly come to power. Out of the ruins of the old order there arose a new centre-right constellation. This dovetailed with Adenauer’s policy of Westbindung, which firmly anchored the Federal Republic in the American-led postwar West. Adenauer did not feel sympathy for Germany’s feudal or militarist past. In that sense, he represented a new kind of bourgeois authority: self-confident, practical and unencumbered by nostalgia.

As is often the case, great historical feats are paradoxically achieved by those who appear least likely to accomplish them. Disraeli was an unlikely figure to refashion conservatism after the crisis of 1846. Yet this proved to be his strength. Adenauer, if anything, seemed too much of an insider. Yet it was his experience of the Weimar Republic and its failures that allowed him to draw the necessary lessons for the Federal Republic’s future. He was a Catholic who had made his career in the Centre Party; but his devout Catholicism meant that he had remained at a distance from Nazism and possessed the credibility after 1945 to lead a truly national centre-right party.

Adenauer’s feat, like Disraeli’s, demonstrates the importance of conservative parties at ease with modernity as stabilisers of democratic order. Had Disraeli failed to remould the angered party of resentment, British liberal democracy would have been destabilised by a profoundly unsettling force. Likewise, Adenauer’s success in reconciling Germany’s conservatives with postwar German democracy laid the basis for the success of the Federal Republic, whose stability and prosperity stand in such contrast with the tortured story of the Weimar Republic.