Faith: Giving thanks for reconciliation

GURAT, France, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- To those old enough to remember the last fratricidal war between France and Germany, the photograph of two old men kneeling side-by-side in Reims Cathedral was one of those defining images they won't forget as long as they live.

These two men, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, 86, and French President Charles de Gaulle, 71, were both ardent Catholics. A fraternal kiss between them sealed the reconciliation between the two neighboring nations that for three centuries considered each other hereditary enemies.

The following year, Jan. 22, 1963, de Gaulle and Adenauer signed in Paris the Elysée Treaty formalizing this momentous accomplishment, which ended the seemingly endless cycle of mutual invasions, bloodbaths and hatred. This Wednesday, the entire German Bundestag flew in Luftwaffe planes to Paris to celebrate this event's 40th anniversary with its French counterpart, the National Assembly.

One of the venues of the festivities was of great symbolic significance. That place was the Versailles Palace, whose name had been linked with two particularly ignoble acts in recent history -- the insensitive crowning of German Kaiser Wilhelm I after France's defeat in the 1870-71 war, and the vengeful 1918 Versailles Treaty whose harsh conditions on vanquished Germany planted the seeds for the ghastliest global conflict ever, World War II.

I have personal reasons to be thankful for what de Gaulle and Adenauer have done, doubtless because it made political sense, but chiefly because it corresponded to their mutual Christian faith. Both my grandfathers were wounded in France in World War I, and my father was blinded there as a young lieutenant at age 19.

I was raised in Hitler's Germany in the perverse situation where we were ordered at school to hate the French, while at home a French nanny nurtured me and taught me her language, which both my parents loved and practiced, in addition to their native German. At home I was told that we Saxons where France's traditional friends, while the Nazis insisted that the French were Germany's eternal foes.

Then, when our home in Leipzig burned down during an air raid and my mother was trapped in fire and temporarily blinded by smoke, six Frenchmen, forced laborers all, braved the flames, rescued her and carried her to my grandmother's place. Nobody had commanded them to do this; they did so as an act of basic humanity.

Later I was to learn that the Franco-German reconciliation really commenced then in the middle of the war when German and French civilians recognized each other as fellow sufferers and treated each other as such -- as humans, regardless of what Hitler and his Nazi goons thought and said.

The story of Franco-German reconciliation is first and foremost a tale of ordinary people still conscious of their Christian roots. But while the fighting was still going on, Adenauer and de Gaulle knew well that the two antagonistic neighbors were destined to overcome their mutual hostility.

When they finally met face-to-face they realized that they not only shared the same faith but also spoke each other's language. This showed the whole irony of what had happened to two nations that long ago were one -- and belonged together, in the minds of these two Catholic statesmen. Educated Germans spoke Baudelaire's language, and educated Frenchmen mastered what they called "la langue de Goethe."

We were civilized then, yet at each other's throats.

It was Max Weber, the father of sociology, who discovered that internalized religious doctrines shape the behavior and attitudes of individuals and communities, even when their faith has weakened or actually gone.

Doubtless, the Christian convictions of de Gaulle's and Adenauer's successors were not always as strong as those of these two giants. Yet some of them did develop deep affinities rooted in their common Christian traditions. Take odd couples such as Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who could only communicate in English, or François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, who needed interpreters but were profoundly attached to one another.

However, this is only the official side of the Franco-German miracle. Think of the twinning between French and German towns and regions, a brilliant idea going back to 1950 when most of Germany's cities were still in ruins, German soldiers were still in POW camps, and France was only just recovering from the trauma of the German occupation.

In many cases, little towns more than 600 miles apart became so involved with each other that its burghers are now constantly traveling back and forth. Joint city council meetings have long become routine. Local soccer or hunting clubs have merged. There have been many marriages between young inhabitants of twinned communities, and many Germans now have French Godparents -- or vice versa.

If you think that the army of Louis XIV laid waste to the Palatinate, locked women and children into churches and burned them alive; if you think that the Nazis reciprocated 200 years later by doing exactly the same in Oradour, you'll appreciate the beauty of the recent liberation from what seemed to many a curse.

I for one am still speechless every time I read opinion polls proving how incredibly close the Germans and French have become in my own lifetime. One poll conducted for Le Figaro newspaper on the occasion of Wednesday's anniversary shows that 57 percent of the French consider Germany the one country with which their own nation should have a privileged relationship inside the European Union, and 58 percent of the Germans think the same about France. By comparison, only 8 percent of the French and 6 percent of the Germans feel that way about Britain.

You have to be German or French of a certain age to marvel at these results.

The Catholic Bishops Conferences of France and Germany were right to praise their nations' reconciliation "with joy and profound gratitude." As the two countries move ever closer, maybe even to the point of eventually reunifying what used to be Charlemagne's realm 1,200 years ago, some Christians wonder, though, at whom the young German and the French laity direct their gratitude, if they feel it at all.

At the insistence of the past Socialist government of France, God must not be mentioned in the European constitution, which is currently being drafted. But the mood is changing in Europe. There is a new government in France, and so perhaps -- perhaps -- this document will include a grateful bow to the Transcendent.

Given what this writer has witnessed over the last 60 years, this would only be fair.