From Adenauer to Spahn: The Unraveling of Germany’s Christian Democratic Tradition

he recent controversy surrounding German politician Jens Spahn, until recently the parliamentary leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the Bundestag and long regarded as a potential future chancellor, was revealing. Spahn resigned after it emerged that he and his same-sex partner had commissioned an American surrogate mother, despite belonging to a party that has long opposed the encroachment of the market into one of the most fundamental of human relationships: that between a mother and her unborn child. Most commentators treated the affair as a straightforward case of political hypocrisy, while other more opportunistic actors hoped to seize upon it as an opportunity to argue for the liberalization of Germany’s laws governing assisted reproduction. Yet the deeper significance of the episode lies elsewhere.

The Spahn affair is symptomatic of a Christian Democratic tradition that is now Christian largely in name alone. The party founded by Konrad Adenauer sought to rebuild Germany on the moral and spiritual foundations of Christian civilization after the catastrophic rupture that was National Socialism. Over time, however, the CDU has gradually surrendered that inheritance. It has exchanged a confident vision of redemption and renewal for the cautious respectability of a bourgeois party whose primary ambition is the acquisition and preservation of political power. At worst, it risks becoming defined not by resistance but by accommodation—a Vichy-like surrender to the very forces that Pope Benedict XVI, a proud son of Bavaria, warned against as the “dictatorship of relativism.” 

In channeling our inner La Bouche and invoking the question posed by the band’s 1995 Eurodance hit “Where Do You Go,” we must first examine the genius of postwar Christian Democracy. This was a distinctly Teutonic project, and its architect was a single towering figure: Konrad Adenauer — not unlike the way Frank Farian stood behind La Bouche’s success. At first, Adenauer was regarded with deep suspicion by the British military government. He appeared to them as a parochial Catholic Rhinelander whose earlier flirtations with regional separatism belonged to the fractured politics of the Weimar era. But Adenauer proved remarkably adaptable. He emerged in Allied eyes as an elder statesman capable of carrying out the formidable task of restoring Germany to the community of civilized nations, beginning with the creation of the CDU in the British-occupied zone in 1946.