Word: straussed
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Wily Sioux. The Free Democrats rejoice at having forced the resignation of Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, the man blamed for the ham-handed arrests of Der Spiegel executives (see below) but regret the price they had to pay: the replacement of the Ministers for Justice and Finance. Only the Socialists, as usual frozen out of the government, seem in a position to gain at the polls from the public disgust at the Spiegel affair...
Adenauer won bitter laughter from his own Deputies by remarking that the opposition played an "important role'' in government. He thanked all the departing ministers, specifying Strauss by name ("Treachery!" barked a Socialist backbencher), and brought roars from the house by stating, with a straight face: ''Anyone knows what it means to form a coalition government...
There was some truth to the accusation, but the Chancellor had to ignore the personal insult since his chief concern at the moment was to preserve the voting balance of his regime in the Bundestag. Strauss's own C.S.U. had 50 seats, and might withdraw its support if Bavaria's favorite son was fired. For two days, Adenauer delayed a decision while his agents buttonholed the C.S.U. Bundestag members to see how many were willing to follow Strauss out of the coalition. To der Alte's glee, word came back that, in fact, most would abandon...
...Adenauer's troubles were far from over. Though Strauss was out of the way, the political repercussions over Publisher Augstein's arrest now had blossomed into what newspapers were calling a "Chancellor crisis." To der Alte's chagrin, even his own C.D.U. colleagues had begun to raise the leadership issue. Everyone, it seemed, felt it was about time for Adenauer to step down. In a heated meeting, they asked him insistently to declare his intention to resign by next fall, so that the party might groom a successor in time for the 1965 general elections. Adenauer...
...ever Wagner without a sneer. Commenting on the characters in Parsifal, he called Amfortas "that melancholy knight of the Grail, who whines like a shopgirl and whimpers like a baby." Yet traces of the Wagnerian influence remained. "But that's the whole of Parsifal,'' muttered Richard Strauss after hearing a particular passage from Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande...