MAKING SENSE OF MAKING SENSE 277lay a sacred duty upon us: never to slack off in our work, never to exhaust our patience, and
always to remain true to the task which God has given to us. That applies to us, to the CDU
and CSU in Germany, above all, because we see ourselves also as the guardians of the
Christian-Western spirit. [christlich-abendländischen Geistes] (Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
1975, 351)Adenauer suggested that only a certain kind of Europe would do: a Christian-Western one. But
Adenauer did not stop merely with Europe:
The West [Abendland], the Christian West, is no geographical concept: it is a spiritual and
historical concept that also encompasses America. It is this Christian West that we want to
try to save. We will do everything in our power, in the hope and with the conviction that God
will not abandon the German people. (Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung 1975, 351)Several things are notable about this specification tactic: the prominent use of the term
“Abendland”;^23 the definition of “the West” as something out of the history of the spirit (invoking
Hegel and his successors); the explicit inclusion of America as a part of a larger “Abendland”
community of which Germany is also a part; and the portrayal of the stakes as the very survival of
“the West.” From these notions Adenauer drew his policy recommendations: an embrace of the
aid offered by the Americans under the auspices of the European Recovery Program, cooperation
with the occupying Allies as a way of enhancing what might be called “civilizational defense,”
and a general tempering of his public criticisms of occupation policy on most occasions.
Adenauer’s “Western” strategy also provided the grounds for an impressive critique of
Schumacher’s more nationalist and oppositional stance—a critique that combined the breaking
and joining of connections between commonplaces. Exploiting Schumacher’s anticommunism,
Adenauer often argued that one could not consistently oppose political and institutional coopera-
tion with the occupying Allies while claiming to be a staunch opponent of Russia and commu-
nism. Adenauer thus used his specification of the “Western Civilization” commonplace (and
Schumacher’s ready assent that Germany belonged culturally to “Western Civilization”) in an
effort to break anticommunism away from the SPD and attract anticommunists to his side by
joining anticommunism to Adenauer’s own version of “Western Civilization.” True to form,
Schumacher’s rebuttals took the shape of a more and more explicit embrace of nationalist lan-
guage, as he attempted to use his specification of that commonplace as the grounds upon which to
oppose both communism and the Allied occupation policy.
The debate on November 24 and 25, 1949, was particularly charged, since Germany’s pro-
posed joining of the Ruhr Authority would also be accompanied by the authority’s seating of a
representative from the Saar—a territory claimed by Germany but treated by the occupying French
as an independent country. So joining the Ruhr Authority might be tantamount to recognizing the
separation of the Saar from the new Federal Republic as well as consenting to the international
administration of Germany’s industrial resources. If one maintained that Germany and the occu-
pying Allies were part of a single civilizational community, this turn of events appeared more
palatable, but to Schumacher’s combination of commonplaces it must have seemed like high
treason. Hence his accusing cry against Adenauer, which can be seen as a sharp effort to specify
the commonplace of “the German nation” and turn it against Adenauer’s actions. Hence also the
irony of Schumacher’s subsequent suspension from the Bundestag for several days on the grounds
that he had impugned the good name of the German government—hardly the sort of action that
would be expected of a firm nationalist.