Adenauer

Adenauer Synopsis

A fascinating life of the father of the New Germany In an astonishing political career that spanned six decades including fourteen years as chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer (1876 - 1967) was instrumental in shaping the modern political landscape, both of his own country and of Europe. Charles Williams's monumental biography offers a welcome reappraisal of this influential statesman. It explores Adenauer's Catholic upbringing during the Kaiserreich and his early political career first as a deputy mayor and as Oberburgermeister of Cologne.

It shows his rise to national prominence in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, and his subsequent reversals: financially in the Wall Street Crash; politically by the growth of Nazism. Acclaimed for his remarkable portrait of Charles de Gaulle, Charles Williams draws on hitherto untapped sources for this biography from the former Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic. Adenauer is as much a book about the making of modern Germany as it is about one of the twentieth century's foremost statesmen.