Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

In this chapter, Kissinger focuses on German political figure Konrad Adenauer. In 1945, Germany was in ruins, the Nazi empire having collapsed and the population at the mercy of the occupying Allied forces. Germany would have to take on the incredibly difficult task of rebuilding not only its infrastructure but a sense of national self, while atoning for the horrors of its recent past. The leader of this project would be Konrad Adenauer. Adenauer had been mayor of Cologne, and at 69 years old he had witnessed the convulsions of Germany’s bloody 20th century. His great hope, Kissinger states, was that Germany “would become a normal country, though always, he knew, with an abnormal memory” (5). The son of an army officer, he developed a reputation as a capable, nonpartisan bureaucrat, but his opposition to the Nazis stalled his career when Hitler became chancellor in 1933. He and his family lived out the Nazi era in relative quiet, until he was imprisoned toward the end of the Second World War. When US forces liberated Cologne, they reinstated Adenauer as mayor, and along with many who had opposed Hitler, helped form the Christian Democratic Union, which embraced democracy and fiercely repudiated the Nazi legacy.