Adenauer’s Heirs: The Cdu/CSU from Détente to Reunification

The 1960s in Europe saw the emergence of social protest, newly confident center-left parties, Cold War détente, and frustrations with the pace and direction of European integration. The Federal Republic of Germany experienced these upheavals from a special position: on the front line of the Cold War, occupying a key position in both the European and Atlantic communities, and haunted by Nazi-era crimes. The parties that had governed West Germany since its founding in 1949-the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU)-underwent an especially intense identity crisis. European integration and the social market economy were essential to Christian Democratic political identity, but both faced challenges from right and left. The CDU/CSU was torn between market liberalism and social solidarity, and between nationalist conservatism and European enthusiasm.

Konrad Adenauer, the first West German Chancellor, led the CDU and CSU to two decades of political dominance. As Adenauer retired from active politics, however, the parties gradually lost their grip on national power and had to reorient themselves in a rapidly changing domestic and international political environment. Aspiring to appeal to the broad political center, and to advocate both for German reunification and European cooperation, both parties and their leaders, including Franz Josef Strau and Helmut Kohl, struggled to stabilize the provisional Federal Republic within a divided Germany and a divided Europe, then to react to the challenges of détente between East and West, and finally to develop a coherent response to the revolutions of 1989 in which those divisions were swept away.

Among the first books to place the development of the CDU/CSU within the larger context of West German politics and international relations during the late Cold War, Adenauer’s Heirs explores still potent questions of political identity from the age of détente to the present day.

Ronald J. Granieri is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College, as well as Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966 and the co-editor of The Bondian Cold War: The Transnational Legacy of a Cultural Icon.