ABSTRACT
The first time that Kurt Schumacher, the Social Democrat, ever encountered Konrad Adenauer, the Christian Democrat, was at a meeting of the German Advisory Council for the British Zone in March 1946. The one is believed to have said to the other, ‘Every objective observer will admit that the SPD is the largest party with the greatest future and will remain so.’ At the time the prognostication was made, most people in West Germany (though not Adenauer) would have agreed with it. Yet within four years Adenauer was to enter on a tenure of the Chancellorship lasting fourteen years, whereas Schumacher’s party was destined to wait seventeen years before taking office and do so only after he himself had been dead for fourteen.
