“Born in 1876 – only five years after German unification under Bismarck – Adenauer was for the rest of his life associated with his native city of Cologne, with its towering Gothic cathedral overlooking the Rhine and its history as an important locus in the Hanseatic constellation of mercantile city-states. As an adult, Adenauer had experienced the unified German state’s three post-Bismarck configurations: its truculence under the Kaiser, domestic upheavals under the Weimar Republic, and adventurism under Hitler, culminating in self-destruction and disintegration. In striving to remake a place for his country in a legitimate postwar order, he faced a legacy of global resentment and, at home, the disorientation of a public battered by the long sequence of revolution, world war, genocide, defeat, partition, economic collapse and loss of moral integrity. He chose a course both humble and daring: to confess German iniquities; accept the penalties of defeat and impotence, including the partition of his country; allow the dismantling of its industrial base as war reparations; and seek through submission to build a new European structure within which Germany could become a trusted partner. Germany, he hoped, would become a normal country, though always, he knew, with an abnormal memory.”
“We will never forget. If it takes us five or ten or twenty years, we will never rest until we get our revenge.”
Konrad Adenauer
“I wish that an English statesman might once have spoken of us as Western Europeans.”
Konrad Adenauer
“The Soviet Government and the Soviet people should not lend themselves to co-operating in the conversion into a concentration camp of part of a large neighbouring country against the will of its inhab...”
Konrad Adenauer
“A reformation of relations between the Soviet people and the German people is not possible along the lines pursued by the authorities of the Soviet zone of Germany. The Germans in that zone have come ...”
Konrad Adenauer
“The Federal Government and with it all Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany feel in these days particularly close to the Germans in the Soviet-occupied zone. We are all aware of the obligation t...”
Konrad Adenauer