Adenauer was seventy-three when he became the first chancellor of the Federal Republic, and he governed for fourteen years in a manner that settled what kind of country West Germany would be.
Mayor of Cologne through the Weimar years, he was removed by the Nazis in 1933, twice imprisoned, and survived the war in internal retirement. That record gave him standing in 1945 that almost no German politician possessed.
His strategic choice was Westbindung: to bind the new state irreversibly into Western Europe and the Atlantic alliance, accepting the division of Germany for as long as that took, rather than pursue reunification through neutrality. It was bitterly contested — Schumacher's Social Democrats attacked him as the chancellor of the Allies — and it prevailed. Membership of NATO, the Coal and Steel Community, reconciliation with France through his partnership with de Gaulle, and reparations to Israel all follow from it. The last was deeply unpopular domestically and he pushed it through with opposition votes.
The Christian Democratic Union he built was a deliberate innovation: a party joining Catholics and Protestants, which German confessional politics had always kept apart, and standing on Christian social principles rather than clerical interest. Its economic policy was Erhard's social market, which gave the tradition its material success.
His domestic record has a darker side. Reconstruction was pursued with limited scrutiny of what officials had done before 1945, and his own chief of staff, Hans Globke, had written the official commentary on the Nuremberg race laws. Adenauer's judgment was that a functioning state could not be built without them, a trade later generations reopened.