Königswintermen (and women)

Older even than the Anglo-German Association was its "cousin", the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft, founded in Düsseldorf in 1949, at a time when many Germans, trying to build up their new democracy, were anxious to establish closer links with Britain. One of the founders of the Gesellschaft was the remarkable Lilo Milchsack who, with the help of Sir Robert Birley, promoted the idea of annual conferences and exchanges of Anglo-German views. It proved an imaginative enterprise and took its name from Königswinter, the small town near Bonn on the opposite side of the Rhine where these conferences of Anglo-German parliamentarians, journalists and businessmen were held.

Indeed, a new species arose -- "Königswinter Man" -- as the Sunday Telegraph once christened him in a somewhat jaundiced political portrait, seeing him symbolised by the late Lord Jenkins, the former Labour Cabinet Minister and President of the European Commission, Chancellor of Oxford University, and Shirley Williams, his fellow-founder of the SDP, taking the dance-floor together at the Silver Jubilee anniversary of Königswinter. The point of the satirical newspaper piece was that "Königswinterians" were "political middle-of-the-roaders and supporters of Konsenspolitik" which, in the past, was more popular in the Federal Republic than in Thatcherite Britain, though John Major and Neil Kinnock, each in his own way, seemed to have developed a taste for it. There is usually a strong Foreign Office element at the Königswinter Conferences. Stalwarts on the British side were Sir Frank Roberts, Sir Con O'Neil, Sir Nicholas Henderson. The former Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan saluted Königswinter as having started a new tradition in international relations with "offsprings" of similar "Königswinters" intended to promote British relations with other countries such as Poland, France, Italy, Japan, India. Popular and active attenders at the Anglo-German Königswinter have been Edward Heath and Willy Brandt, the former Ambassadors Hans von Herwarth and Karl-Günther von Hase, Walter Scheel, Helmut Schmidt, the Federal President Dr. Richard von Weizsäcker, Sir Ralf Dahrendorf who figures as a symbolical Anglo-German, and among "Königswinter"-ladies the late Countess Marion Dönhoff and Dr. Katharina Focke.

There is the obvious danger that institutions like Königswinter that have been successful for decades become set in their ways and turn into mutual admiration societies. New generations of Anglo-Germans have long since taken over from these pioneers. The common search for light in the dark and troubled world of  seems no less necessary today than it was for the Anglo-German pioneers of the 1950s.