Adenauer Book

Alongside Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer was one of the big three leaders who helped rebuild Europe from the ashes of the Second World War. Charles Williams, the Labour politician, has already written an acclaimed biography of de Gaulle; now he has turned his attention to Adenauer, surely the greatest political survivor of 20th-century history. A second-rate Catholic lawyer, Adenauer owed his rapid advancement to the office of Mayor of Cologne in the 1920s to the influence of his first wife's family and to his own crafty opportunism. Under him millions were spent redeveloping the city, and his own rather shady investment portfolio expanded too. Driven from power by the Nazis, Adenauer spent the years of the Third Reich dodging the Gestapo, but remaining aloof from conspiracies bent on destroying Hitler. One of the few clean, if not honest, senior German politicians left after 1945, he not surprisingly became Chancellor of the new Federal Republic, finally bowing out in 1963 a few years short of his 90th birthday. All sides of Adenaeur--family patriarch, horse-trading politician, devout Catholic, rose-gardener, amateur inventor and shuttle-diplomat--are covered in this likeable biography of an unlikeable man.--Miles TaylorRead More