The opening of various personal and party archives over the past few years has now made the entire Adenauer era accessible for historians. Using this material to re-examine existing conventional wisdom about the period, the text traces the roles of Adenauer and the CDU/CSU is shaping the Westbindung.

Konrad Adenauer was one of modern Germany's great statesmen and perhaps its most remarkable representative: his long life spanned all important epochs, ranging from Bismarckian Empire to the Federal Republic. We are therefore pleased to present the first volume of this major biography in English, written by one of Germany's most influential ......

Critical Acclaim for ADENAUER "A gripping narrative . . . brings to life an intriguing historical figure . . . an enthralling perspective on the processes that shaped the postwar world." --Daily Telegraph (London) "Charts the ironies of Adenauer's complicated life. This is the story of a marathon man, but it is narrated at the pace of a sprinter and with the elegance of a hurdler."--The Times (London) "Lucid and engaging. This is a well-researched and elegantly written volume which deserves a wider readership than the purely political."--The Herald (Glasgow) "A highly readable, thoroughly reliable, intelligently critical life-and-times. . . . This portrait does justice to a man who is often invoked as a prophet of a United States of Europe, but who was in truth the greatest of German patriots."--Literary Review (London) "Well-researched and admirably written . . . reveals Adenauer the man--with all his authority and strength, his persistence and endurance, and his streak of ruthlessness and political cunning."--The Independent (London) THE LAST GREAT FRENCHMAN "Knowledgeable, lucid . . . the best English biography of de Gaulle."--The New York Times Book Review "Charles Williams has matched a great subject by something near to a great book."--Daily Telegraph (London)

Of all the aspects of recovery in postwar Germany perhaps none was as critical or as complicated as the matter of dealing with Nazi criminals, and, more broadly, with the Nazi past. While on the international stage German officials spoke with contrition of their nation's burden of guilt, at home questions of responsibility and retribution were not so clear. In this masterful examination of Germany under Adenauer, Norbert Frei shows that, beginning in 1949, the West German government dramatically reversed the denazification policies of the immediate postwar period and initiated a new "Vergangenheitspolitik," or "policy for the past," which has had enormous consequences reaching into the present. Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past chronicles how amnesty laws for Nazi officials were passed unanimously and civil servants who had been dismissed in 1945 were reinstated liberally—and how a massive popular outcry led to the release of war criminals who had been condemned by the Allies. These measures and movements represented more than just the rehabilitation of particular individuals. Frei argues that the amnesty process delegitimized the previous political expurgation administered by the Allies and, on a deeper level, served to satisfy the collective psychic needs of a society longing for a clean break with the unparalleled political and moral catastrophe it had undergone in the 1940s. Thus the era of Adenauer devolved into a scandal-ridden period of reintegration at any cost. Frei's work brilliantly and chillingly explores how the collective will of the German people, expressed through mass allegiance to new consensus-oriented democratic parties, cast off responsibility for the horrors of the war and Holocaust, effectively silencing engagement with the enormities of the Nazi past.

In the early years of the Atlantic Alliance no bilateral relationship was more important than that between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the United States. Even so the West German-American alliance was taxing for both sides during much of the first two decades of the Cold War. Ultimately despite frequent signiicant challenges to the alliance from with out and within the two allies managed to achieve a positive and productive relationship and Eisenhower and Adenaver explains how they did so. In both capitals the top foreign policy makers were deeply involved in the conduct of what they viewed as a vital bilateral alliance with both President Dwight Eisenhower and Chancellor Korirad Adenauer taking the lead in his own government. For the Americans a rearmed FRG tightly bound to the West was the bedrock of any European security policy that could contain the Soviet Union for the long term. For the West German government their relationship with the United States was the bedrock of rehabilitation and indeed survival as an independent country. In this book their alliance is closely analyzed to offer a new understanding of the West German-American relationship during the Cold War. Book jacket.