| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Henry Burke Wend. Recovery and Restoration: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Politics of Reconstruction of West Germany's Shipbuilding Industry, 1945–1955. (International History.) Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 2001. Pp. xxxii, 255. $70.00.

At the end of World War II, Germany's shipbuilding industry was all but ruined. Harbors were clogged with rubble and littered with mines, internal waterways were destroyed, and shipbuilding firms were scheduled for destruction. Yet barely ten years later, the Federal Republic's port cities, notably Hamburg and Bremen, were churning out merchant ships, freighters, oil tankers, and military vessels. By 1954, shipbuilding was one of West Germany's largest exporting industries, and Henry Burke Wend has written a meticulous study of its postwar revival. His book complements existing literature on postwar Germany by offering not a sweeping survey of the "Economic Miracle" but a careful study of one industry from the perspective of American and German policy makers. 1

To readers only generally familiar with postwar Germany, it may be surprising that the United States, and not Great Britain or the USSR, is the subject of Wend's study, given that the ports and coastal areas of northern Germany fell into the British and Soviet zones of occupation after World War II. Yet under the terms of a 1944 agreement, the United States was granted administrative control over the city and port of Bremen and, consequently, its largest shipbuilding firm A.G. Weser. By tracing the vicissitudes of American economic policy and A.G. Weser's rebirth after 1945, Wend hopes to redress what he sees as a weakness in American scholars' approach to international relations: namely their neglect of "local actors" in determining foreign policy. In the case of West Germany, Wend demonstrates how U.S. policy makers balanced the needs of German workers, industrial organizations, and politicians against the policy prescriptions coming from Washington, D.C. . . .

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