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Since Twitter has become the preferred tool for ongoing election campaigns, morals have become brutal.
Or so it is often said.
But is that also true?
Certainly, no German politician could ever keep up with the verbal derailments of the last US president.
But it was still heavily reached, and that right before the first federal election in mid-August 1949.
More than 31 million eligible voters were called to cast their votes on August 14, 1949.
In contrast to all later federal elections, there was only one vote.
There were 19 parties to choose from, including the traditional SPD, the revolutionary-minded KPD, various liberal groups - and the CDU as a union of Christian-bourgeois politicians of both denominations.
The “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” reported that campaigners from all parties tried to “portray their opponents as notorious liars and villains”.
That was a very clear judgment for the notoriously cautious Swiss newspaper.
Both Konrad Adenauer and Kurt Schuhmacher were able to hand out
Source: picture alliance / Georg Brock, picture-alliance / dpa
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The militant SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher ventured the furthest.
Badly injured by the First World War and marked by ten years of imprisonment in a concentration camp, he claimed to be the real leader of free Germany.
On July 24, 1949, his pent-up anger burst out of him.
During an election campaign appearance in front of the destroyed Cologne City Hall, he found that an equally hearty speech by the CDU top candidate a few days earlier entitled “to change the name Adenauer to Lügenauer”.
Once in motion, Schumacher continued to distribute: The CDU is the “most pagan of all parties”, a representation of the interests of “Mammons” and the “war profiteers”, and anyway just a “gathered bunch”.
That was, of course, an allusion to the fact that Catholic and Protestant politicians had united for the first time in the Union.
Kurt Schumacher was an ardent anti-communist
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
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But that's not all - Schumacher, who was always critical of religion, attacked the churches themselves in another speech in Gelsenkirchen: “We want peace and cooperation with all church institutions.
But we are not even thinking of submitting the German people to a fifth occupying power. "
The “Neue Züricher Zeitung” characterized this and similar failures by Schumacher during an election campaign in Hamburg as a “rampage against all those who think differently”.
The “fanatical socialist leader” had “hardly any time left to develop constructive and programmatic ideas” in addition to the insults in his speeches.
Adenauer, who normally liked to use personal insults and general suspicions himself, was on the other hand statesmanlike, relaxed and funny.
He liked to start his appearances with the sentence: "Now let's talk to each other very seriously." That was how he scored.
CDU election poster for the 1949 federal election
Source: picture alliance / United Archive
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Nonetheless, the strong man of the CDU also distributed vigorously - but he did it more skillfully than Schumacher with his angry tirades.
Adenauer succeeded in giving the electorate the impression that the SPD was working closely with the Labor government in London to bring about a preliminary decision on the elections: “An absolutely deliberate game between the British government and the German Social Democrats in order to In this way, to give the German Social Democrats the nimbus of being the national party par excellence. ”That was pretty perfidious, because in reality the British military government in Germany supported the CDU, while London largely stayed out of it.
But Adenauer could also be tougher.
He insinuated that the SPD had massively violated German interests: “If it had been up to the wishes of the Allies and their German helpers, then a viable German state would have been made impossible.” The “German helpers” should of course be the Social Democrats.
The CDU chairman of the British zone (there was no federal party yet) also turned Schumacher's anti-Christian attacks against the SPD: “The church is and will remain the strongest enemy of this party!” In his typical way, he then exaggerated his statement: “ What is the world like?
On the one hand Soviet Russia, which is to be equated with Asia and which has now increased its power through a large part of China.
That power is consciously an enemy of Christianity, an enemy of God;
it wants to kill Christianity and the concept of God in people. "
A group of cyclists promotes the SPD on Frankfurt's Römerberg
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
On the other hand, Adenauer continued, “I tell you, we can only save Europe and our beloved fatherland for Christianity if those parties that have taken the protection and upkeep of Christianity on their banner participate in it Fight to win the Bundestag. "
That was pretty close to the famous election poster of the CDU from the next federal election campaign in 1953, which said: "All roads of Marxism lead to Moscow."
It was somewhat bold to associate the avowed anti-communist Kurt Schumacher with the Soviet Union.
After all, he had vehemently opposed the KPD's bid for a merger of the two workers' parties and thus accepted the split into the West and East SPD - the latter then immediately disappeared into the SED.
Election rally of the KPD in August 1949 in Hamburg
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
At the beginning of August 1949 the result was still completely open.
Kurt Schumacher expected a turnout of 80 percent - a good estimate, because in the end it was 78.5 percent.
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His prediction of the result was less accurate.
"If Berlin voted, he would be sure of an SPD majority," he said at a press conference shortly before election Sunday.
But Berlin, the four-power city, was not allowed to vote: "This way, the predominantly agrarian-Catholic French zone would be added for the first time, and nothing could be predicted here." In addition, the refugees' voices are still completely uncertain.
It stayed exciting.
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This article was first published in August 2019.