Helmut Kohl

No other German politician has been as notoriously underestimated as Helmut Kohl. His talents as a rhetorician were limited, his powers of intellect were not obvious, and his provincialism struck many Germans as rather embarrassing when he made his cheerful entrance on to the world stage in 1982. Although Kohl drew ridicule and malice at first, he quickly schooled his opponents and won four national elections in a row, more than any other Chancellor of the Federal Republic. His reputation as both the “Chancellor of Unity” and a great European has secured his place in the history books. But what was Kohl’s secret and why did so many who felt superior to him end up yielding to him. Astute, perceptive, and unfailingly honest in his critical analysis, Patrick Bahners gets to the bottom of the Kohl phenomenon and finds a gifted yet inexorably power-hungry man who devours everything around him and equates his party’s interests with his own power. In sparkling prose, Bahners dissects the “essence of power” and shows how a master of adaptation and control made himself a part of history.