I was looking though the stacks at Borders Books some years ago. Remember Borders Books? I got to Germany in the history section. As you can imagine, there was a lot on Hitler and the Third Reich. That is appropriate, but in all the years of going to Borders, I only saw one biography of Konrad Adenauer. The events and personalities leading to Germany becoming a democratic, prosperous, and free state after World War II doesn’t seem to get enough attention. It is a very impressive political refounding and I’ve only seem Paul Johnson give a sense of the scale of the achievement.
It is the same thing with Italy. There was plenty on Mussolini, but nothing on the post-WWII Italian democratic politicians. The partial exception was Charles de Gaulle. He didn’t match Napoleon’s presence in the France section, but there was enough on de Gaulle that you had a sense of his importance.
