1904: Offenbacher in Adenauer's shadow
When the former Federal Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano died of cancer in November 1964, many people still knew: "He was from Offenbach." This will no longer be very familiar. As a co-founder of the young Federal Republic of Germany, the Offenbach native with the melodious surname was all too much overshadowed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Moreover, he later saw himself more as a citizen of Darmstadt, where he had lived since the age of 17. But he was born in Offenbach on June 20, 1904, and this is where he grew up.
His parents' house was at Geleitsstraße 109, just a short walk from today's Leibnizschule, which he attended as a grammar school pupil. In 1957, he used an election campaign appearance in Offenbach to visit his school once again. He had himself photographed on the school bench in the old classroom alongside one of the principal Pauly's sons.
It was not until 1920 that the family moved to Darmstadt, the state capital at the time, where his father Otto von Brentano had become a full-time politician. In a coalition with the Social Democrats under Offenbach's Carl Ulrich, the centrist politician Brentano first took over the Ministry of Justice and then the Ministry of the Interior.
Father Brentano had set up as a lawyer in Offenbach in the 1880s, since 1900 in partnership with the later honorary Jewish citizen Siegfried Guggenheim. The Offenbach vernacular knew the partnership between the devout Jew and the devout Catholic as "Kanzlei Weihrauch und Knoblauch". It was later managed by the Hessian CDU politician Karl Kanka.
Even as a lawyer, father Otto distinguished himself through his political commitment. From 1897, he represented the Center Party in the Hessian state parliament, for many years as parliamentary group leader. In 1919, he was a member of the constituent Weimar National Assembly. His son Heinrich then followed in his footsteps. In 1946, he was one of the founders of the Hessian CDU. He was a member of the Parliamentary Council and became Chairman of the CDU parliamentary group in the first German Bundestag in 1949. In 1955, Konrad Adenauer handed him the Foreign Office, which the Chancellor had previously held himself.
Although not a compliant assistant to the first Chancellor of the Republic, Heinrich von Brentano was regarded as Adenauer's "faithful Eckehart". Despite his fundamental loyalty, his relationship with the Chancellor was not always free of tensions. In most cases, this concerned decisions that the Chancellor had made without the involvement of the parliamentary group and its chairman Brentano.
Brentano had survived the years of dictatorship as a lawyer in Darmstadt, but was watched with suspicion by the ruling regime. He was arrested several times. However, he only became politically active after the Second World War. He helped write the Hessian state constitution as well as the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. A draft for a politically united Europe presented by the CDU in 1954 bears his signature. Brentano had therefore already approached the current state of the European constitutional debate 50 years ago.
Brentano's time as minister saw the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1955, the resolution of the Saar question in 1956 and the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. During difficult coalition negotiations with the FDP, Brentano resigned as Foreign Minister in the fall of 1961 to enable Adenauer to take over the Chancellery once again. Once again, the CDU parliamentary group elected him as its chairman.
But the remaining years of his life were marked by the progression of oesophageal cancer. Brentano, who is remembered as a chain smoker and sensitive aesthete, was less and less able to perform his duties as chairman. "He was a loud man, a fighter, a silent sufferer," said Konrad Adenauer at the funeral service in the German Bundestag. On November 19, 1964, he was buried in a state funeral in the family crypt at Darmstadt Forest Cemetery.
A few weeks later, his brother Bernard, born in Offenbach in 1901, followed him in death. He had continued the literary tradition of the Brentano di Tremezzo family. His novel "Theodor Chindler", published in 1936 while he was emigrating to Switzerland, interweaves Offenbach local color with elements of family history to create a portrait of society that critics at the time placed alongside Theodor Fontane.
By Lothar R. B r a u n