This biography differs from others in that the author concentrates on Brüning's years in exile and has relatively little to say about Brüning's term as Reich Chancellor (March 30, 1930, to May 30, 1932). Brüning's earlier life—his years as an infantry officer during World War I, his activities as a member and deputy of the Center Party during the 1920s, and his tenure as Chancellor—are examined from the perspective of the political émigré. Brüning's life up to the mid-1930s is thus presented primarily through the lens of his correspondence and private papers from his years in exile.

The center part of the book deals with Brüning's first exile in the United States between the late 1930s and 1951, when he returned to Germany to accept a professorship in Cologne, located in convenient proximity to the West German capital Bonn. Disillusioned by the post-war German political scene and Adenauer's policies, Brüning returned to New England in 1955. Eventually he settled in Norwich, Vermont, where he spent his remaining years in relative seclusion until his death on March 30, 1970.

Given its focus, the archival material for this study is based mainly on Brüning's “general correspondence and papers,” located since 1990 at Harvard (where he taught at the School of Public Administration); his correspondence with Claire Nix, his closest collaborator at Harvard and in later years; the memoranda Brüning wrote for American politicians during and after the war; materials from his public lectures; and lecture manuscripts from his time as a professor in Cologne. In addition, the author used a good many literary bequests (from, among others, Arnold Brecht, Hermann Dietrich, Hans Luther, Martin Spahn, Wilhelm Hoegner, and Hans Schäffer) that are indispensable for an understanding of Brüning's years in office. Here, Volkmann is to be commended for his thoroughness, having consulted primary materials drawn not only from German archives (Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, and the Political Archives of the German Foreign Office), but also from U.S. public and university archives, including the National Archives and those at Harvard, Notre Dame, Delaware, and Swarthmore. Praise is equally due for his diligent and exhaustive usage of the published primary and secondary literature.

Issues that received scant attention in Brüning's writings and correspondence during exile, such as the rationale underlying the economic and financial policies of his chancellorship, are only treated cursorily. The book's strength lies in the enormous wealth of detail with which it deals with Brüning's activities during his years in exile, especially World War II and the immediate post-war years: his contacts with members of the German resistance, his efforts on behalf of German political refugees caught in a trap after the sudden collapse of France, his political activities in America, and the memoranda and political analyses he wrote during the war on the war-time administration in Germany and Great Britain and the reconstruction of Germany. Volkmann highlights the ex-chancellor's critical attitude toward the treatment of Nazi war criminals (whom he wanted to see tried by German courts) and his post-war memoranda on how to treat defeated Germany.

Even though the central historiographical issue regarding Brüning lies outside the focus of analysis, the author addresses it indirectly. In the 1960s, Werner Conze and Karl-Dietrich Bracher debated the overall nature of Brüning's chancellorship, whereby Conze saw Brüning as the chancellor above party strife and argued that the crisis of the parliamentarian system rendered the transition to an authoritarian presidential cabinet virtually inevitable, while Bracher interpreted Brüning's time in office as the first fateful stage in the process of the dissolution of the republic. Volkmann rejects Conze's arguments, depicting Brüning as a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Brüning's “religiös geprägtes, national-konservatives und preußisches Gesellschaftsbild” (p. 34) which, according to the author, was firmly molded even before Brüning attended university, remained rigidly unaltered throughout his life. Facts that lend support to the alleged deep-seated conservatism of Brüning, such as his association with Eduard Stadtler in the conservative “Juni-Club,” his participation in drafting the conservative “Essener Programm,” and his relationship with German National leaders such as Count Westarp and Oskar Hergt are overemphasized, whereas countervailing evidence, such as the two years Brüning spent at the London School of Economics and his close association with individual Social Democrats and the help he extended to them during the war, are barely mentioned or not properly appreciated. The author's one-sided value judgments often get the better of him, especially in the book's concluding chapter, where Brüning is deluged by pejorative attributes: the “Herzensmonarchist” who joined the “patriarchic-hierarchically structured Center Party” (p. 756), “admirer of the “Prussian-German military tradition” (p. 758), the “run-away Catholic nationalist” (p. 769), “Prussian traditionalist” (p. 772), the “national-conservative Catholic” (pp. 759, 768, and 780) or “national-conservative émigré” (p. 780), the “Weimarer Revisionspolitiker” (pp. 782 and 789), the “Francophobe Brüning” (p. 792), the “nationalist and unmarried Catholic” who had been pervaded by a “massive denominational inferiority complex” (pp. 793-4), and—in a variation of the theme—the “self-righteous and exculpating memoirs of the ‘vain and dogmatic’ Altreichskanzler” (p. 795) who had a “pathological” relationship to Germany. Pejorative epithets are equally bestowed on Brüning's mentors and ministers, from the “monarchist” Stegerwald (p. 776) and the “national-minded exponent” of the Center Party's left wing Joseph Wirth to the “enthusiastic Bismarck admirer” Hermann Dietrich. Potential achievements are belittled even if criticism is based on mere speculation, as in the following: “Contrary to the interpretation of Brüning biographer William Patch, Jr., Brüning's memoranda of fall 1944 can hardly have had any bearing [“dürften kaum einen Einfluß gehabt haben”] on American occupation policy” (p. 787).

Volkmann evinces no understanding for the “enemy alien” Brüning, who indeed was occasionally too generous in defending the indefensible and often overstated what he saw as the innate positive qualities of the country he had been forced to quit, an instinctive counterreaction to the rampant (and equally understandable) anti-German feeling of war-time America. Not only does the author ignore the political circumstances of the war years, but he also seems unaware of Brüning's courageous and determined (albeit in the end futile) struggle against the rise of Nazism during his chancellorship and the often favorable contemporary comments Brüning's policies elicited in the Anglo-American press of the early 1930s.

Volkmann offers the reader a great deal of valuable information and worthwhile detail in 800 pages of clearly written text, supported by more than 3,000 often very substantial footnotes. Unfortunately, the accumulation of one-sided value judgments and exaggerated invective, which seek to discredit Brüning not by argument but by insinuation, and the relentless single-mindedness with which he pursues the former Reich chancellor detract from the book's overall value.