Adenauer Studien, hrsg. v. Rudolf Morsey u. Konrad Repgen, Bd. I: Mit Beiträgen von Hans Maier, Rudolf Morsey, Eberhard Pikart u. Hans-Peter Schwarz, Mainz 1971

Adenauer Studien I, hrsg. v. Rudolf Morsey u. Konrad Repgen.

Since its inception in 1962, the mission of the »Kommission für Zeitgeschichte bei der katholischen Akademie in Bayern« (Commission for Contemporary History at the Catholic Academy in Bavaria) includes research into the period that followed 1945. This mission was inaugurated by the publication of four studies on the personality and politics of Konrad Adenauer, one of the central figures of the post-war epoch. As long as relevant files remain closed to researchers, any scholarship by historians or political scientists into the »Adenauer Era« necessarily represents only a momentary stock-taking. That understanding informs this publication, by which the Commission intends to contribute to the historiography on the most recent past. It is part of a series whose continuing installments will be published at irregular intervals and will include editions of historically relevant source materials.

In the present first volume, the Munich political scientist Hans Maier provides the first complete appreciation of Adenauer’s personality and politics. The historian Eberhard Pikart offers a comparative analysis of Adenauer’s and Theodor Heuss’s respective conceptions of politics, society, and democracy. These two studies build on previously unpublished materials, as does Rudolf Morsey’s examination of Adenauer’s political ascent in the period between 1945 to 1949. The volume closes with the Hamburg political scientist Hans-Peter Schwarz’s critical overview of Adenauer’s foreign policy, as reflected in the ex-chancellor’s four-volume memoirs. These constitute a first-rate source for understanding the foundations of present-day foreign policy, one that has as yet been only minimally exploited.