After Germany's defeat in 1945, West German chemical firms made the transition from traditional coal-based chemistry to modern petrochemical technology, thus ensuring their long-term competitiveness. This book investigates the causes, course, and consequences of that major change in West German chemical technology.

In seeking to explain the actual process of that transition and its broader cultural implications, the author examines the factors that led key chemical firms to pursue petrochemical production, the basis on which the chemical industrialists chose among the competing technologies, the process of technology transfer (primarily from the United States and Great Britain to Germany, but also the reverse), and the trends in German research, production, investment, and marketing after the war.

Using approaches drawn from the history of technology, business history, and political and economic history, and taking advantage of material from a broad range of public and private archives, this study argues that it is impossible to explain the technological developments in the chemical industry from the end of the war until 1961 without exploring a number of other areas, including corresponding changes in the West German and worldwide political economies during the same period, as well as German traditions regarding technological change.