What Kleedehn offers here is workmanlike and unspectacular—more of an “Untersuchung” than a clear narrative. The book is structured as an exercise in management studies, using the “eclectic paradigm” of John Dunning as a framework for analyzing Bayer's decision-making. As Kleedehn observes, export-oriented firms face three basic options in pursuing overseas markets: should they (a) manufacture in Germany and export finished products, (b) license their technology to external producers, or (c) build their own production sites overseas in connection with foreign partners? Using case studies in four countries (Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and France), Kleedehn seeks to evaluate why Bayer made the investment choices it did in bringing a range of products to market from ca. 1948–61.

The book might well have been titled “The View from Leverkusen,” for the company archive is the only one consulted by Kleedehn. To be sure, the author makes effective use of Bayer's archival holdings, from directors' conferences to personnel files to reports on sticky lawsuits. Yet the picture of Bayer's overseas activities would surely have been enriched by the use of reports from the Auswärtiges Amt and the Bundeswirtschaftsministerium (and conceivably records from the “host” countries as well). As things stand, Kleedehn is a little too close to his sources. That does not rule out a critical evaluation of Bayer's failed strategies, such as an ill-advised pharmaceutical agreement concluded in 1949 with Schenley, an American whiskey producer. But there is little effort here to evaluate the broader ethos and values of the Bayer board room. Meanwhile, the depth of the detail presented varies unpredictably from section to section. The reader is treated to a surprisingly thorough recounting of the firm's regulations for overseas personnel, but only four pages on the role of Ulrich Haberland as the head of the concern from the war's end to his untimely death in 1961.

Despite the book's considerable narrative weaknesses, a significant story does emerge here of a global firm attempting for a second time to recover its international position. Some fifty pages are devoted to the resumption of production in Leverkusen in the late 1940s and the refounding of Bayer AG following the disaggregation of I. G. Farben in 1951. Kleedehn observes that despite a near-total continuity of management personnel, Bayer's priorities had changed in dramatic ways since the interwar years. Whereas research in pharmaceuticals was neglected, investment in petrochemicals was redoubled; this bore fruit in the form of several new plastics and synthetic fibers. As a result, Bayer was no passive recipient of “Americanization.” The firm brought its own products to the table in a trans-Atlantic pooling of technology with North American partners in the 1950s. South American markets were unsuited for such high-end products, however, and there Bayer focused more on manufacturing older dyes, medications, and raw chemicals.

The four case studies do not make for vivid reading; in each country, much of Bayer's energy was devoted to tedious wrangling over property, patents, and trademarks confiscated during World War II. Nevertheless, Kleedehn's patient exposition of conditions in these four markets represents a useful complement to the more policy-oriented perspective found in Reinhard Neebe's authoritative study of the same period, Weichenstellung für die Globalisierung (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004). Where Neebe highlights Bonn's efforts to negotiate a world of ever-lowering trade barriers, Kleedehn shows just how difficult Bayer found it to export finished products in the 1950s. Tariffs were still extremely high in the United States and France, and economic policy was so erratic in Brazil and especially Argentina that Bayer had no choice but to build local production sites as soon as it was feasible. Ironically, this high degree of foreign direct investment tended to turn Bayer's affiliates in South America into advocates of tariff protection in their own right, as they sought to fend off intense external competition from American and Swiss firms.

Kleedehn's study serves as a reminder that one-dimensional statistics such as export volume are incapable of capturing the full extent of corporate Germany's global engagement. It takes considerable sleuthing to uncover the complex investments and production arrangements made by a single concern in just a handful of countries. (Kleedehn has compiled nineteen tables and fifty-nine charts to convey his story.) Moving from grand debates about “globalization” to empirical research on the international reach of European firms, particularly in the years since 1945, will demand considerable effort in the years to come.