Adenauer's heirs : the CDU/CSU from ďetente to reunification /
Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, led the Christian Democratic Union and its sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, to two decades of political dominance in the postwar Bonn Republic. By the mid-1960s, as Adenauer retired from active politics, howe...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2025]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, led the Christian Democratic Union and its sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, to two decades of political dominance in the postwar Bonn Republic. By the mid-1960s, as Adenauer retired from active politics, however, the CDU and CSU (like many of their fellow Christian Democratic parties across Europe) 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 both Bavaria's Franz Josef Straub and the "Chancellor of Unity," Helmut Kohl, struggled to adapt to a history that was itself in flux: first 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. The answers that emerged from this struggle reflected the complexity of balancing national and European ideals and providing a coherent definition of Christian Democracy as a political movement in a secular age. This history from the age of détente to the beginning of the twenty-first century raises questions of political identity that have lost none of their urgency and remain unanswered to the present day. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource |
| Audience: | Specialized. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780199378173 9780197841334 0199378177 0197841333 |