The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany

7. The CDU in Council: Forging Economic and Cultural Policy

152 Chapter 7 The CDU in Council: Forging Economic and Cultural Policy The year 1948 provided the CDU with both unprecedented opportunities to translate its ideological compact into policy and significant political challenges . The party entered the year in a sustained confrontation with the refounded Center Party and a pitched battle with the SPD for political leadership of the future Federal Republic. Christian Democrats had won the 1946 and 1947 elections in the future state of Baden-Württemberg, retained their dominant position in North Rhine-Westphalia’s April 1947 Landtag elections, and emerged victorious later that year in the Rhineland-Palatinate Landtag election . Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein, and Lower Saxony had all seen SPD victories in 1946 or 1947, however. Christian Democratic political hegemony was hardly self-evident. Even as the debate over Christian Socialism appeared largely resolved, confessional tension continued to permeate intraparty dynamics. That the transformation of political Catholicism remained incomplete was underscored by the continued appeal of the Center Party and Protestant apprehensions regarding its possible merger with the CDU. Cultural policy also highlighted the consequence of confession. As Protestants and Catholics cast back to a preNazi consensus on questions of family and gender, confessional schools divided them and forced a reckoning with the Catholic Church. Family and school policy would assume prominence in the Parliamentary Council, while Christian Democratic economic policy would be enacted in the Bizone’s Economic Council, where the CDU sought to implement policies codified in the North Rhine-Westphalian Landtag. It was also in the Bizone that the CDU and Ludwig Erhard forged an alliance with enormous effect. The association of Christian Democracy with social market economics in 1948 represented less a radical break in the party’s ideological or economic development than an expression of the compromise already reached within the The CDU in Council 153 western zones, especially the British. The affiliation with Erhard was a clear product of external as well as internal dynamics. As the Cold War’s rising hostilities cast a pall over parties and policies of the left across Western Europe, West Germans’ wartime and postwar experiences reinforced suspicion of a planned economy. Ludwig Erhard’s role within the CDU nevertheless tested the strength of the young party’s accord on ideology and economics and laid bare the confessional and class lines crisscrossing early Christian Democracy. Ludwig Erhard and Christian Democratic Confessionalism Even as he would come to symbolize the social market economy within and beyond West Germany, Erhard’s relationship to Christian Democracy was anything but straightforward. Erhard had played no role in the party’s founding or its earliest debates, and although party records backdated his membership to 1949 and he would represent Ulm-Heidenheim in the Bundestag from 1949 until 1977, Erhard officially joined the party only in 1963, just before he was elected chancellor.1 A Protestant Bavarian unpopular with the CSU, Erhard was hardly a likely candidate for Christian Democratic asendance. One historian described the process by which Erhard became the symbol of the CDU/ CSU/FDP coalition in 1949 as occurring “almost overnight and under curious circumstances.”2 For the CDU, alliance with Erhard would sharpen the emergent delineation of antimaterialism to stress antisocialism and the importance of the Persönlichkeit. At the same time, Erhard’s Lutheran upbringing and family’s politics located him firmly outside the Catholic milieu.3 Considering his pre1933 support for the DDP and his predominantly Protestant ministerial appointments , it is hardly surprising that many CDU Catholics observed the rise of this Kulturprotestant with deep skepticism.4 If not all Catholics regarded Erhard as the embodiment of “Protestant liberalism, economic materialism, and political secularism,”5 many detected underlying differences with their Protestant colleague on such fundamental questions as the relationship of the Persönlichkeit and the Gemeinschaft.6 In particular, Karl Arnold, Johannes Albers , and Jakob Kaiser would campaign in 1948 and 1949 to undermine Erhard ’s authority within the western zones and CDU. Nevertheless, Erhard’s economic training and thought help to explain why the overwhelming majority of CDU members recognized in the social market economy a model consistent with early CDU economic ideologies. Within these broad outlines, Erhard and the early CDU made common cause. 154 The Origins of Christian Democracy The Social Market Economy The roots of the social market economy reach back into the Weimar Republic, when economists including Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, and Alexander Rüstow advocated...