ABSTRACT
During his long political career Konrad Adenauer guided West Germany into the post-World War II era, creating a stable, democratic West German republic and promoting European unity. Adenauer was born on January 5, 1876, in Cologne, then in the German Empire, which had only become a unified nation-state in 1871. He entered the University of Freiburg in 1894, studied law, received a degree in 1900, and joined a law firm in Cologne shortly thereafter. In 1917, during World War I, Adenauer was appointed mayor of Cologne by the city council, making him, at 41, the youngest mayor in the territories of the state of Prussia. Adenauer cooperated with the Allies, and Germany joined NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in 1955. In 1963 he signed a “treaty of friendship” with France, a step toward cooperation with Germany's longtime enemy. Adenauer pushed for German integration into the European Community that was forming in the late 1940s.
