William Smyser, a participant in and observer of the process, lived in Hitler's Germany, served with the United States forces in Germany in the 1950s, worked under General Lucius Clay in Berlin during the 1960s and was the political counsellor at the American embassy in Bonn during the decade that followed.

ECONOMIST: The cold war

He emerges from these pages as Germany's equivalent of America's Thomas Jefferson or Britain's William Ewart Gladstone: a polymath of prodigious energy and formidable intellectual power.

ECONOMIST: Historical biography