In any event, however cool their relations, no West German leader dared break with Washington for the sake of an illusory French alternative. Nonetheless, Adenauer’s foreign policy intrigues played to an underlying mood of resentment at Germany’s unavoidable subservience to the US. In retrospect we too readily assume that the post-war Federal Republic enthusiastically welcomed everything American; that the GIs spread across central and southern Germany in these years, with their military installations, bases, convoys, movies, music, food, clothes, chewing gum and
