My book on Peter von Zahn has three subjects. The first is the journalist Peter von Zahn, who in the 1950s captivated West German audiences with his pioneering radio broadcasts and television documentaries about the United States. Before 1945 Zahn shared the militant and elitist ethos common among educated German young men, but the experience of the war – he spent the entirety of it in the German army – and the realities of postwar Germany led to a reorientation. Zahn became a cultural pillar of the Federal Republic. I seek to characterize and explain this change in the individual. The second subject is the transformation of West Germany, from a society riven by domestic conflicts and still in many respects authoritarian, to a stable republic integrated into West European and Atlantic alliances. Although Zahn’s American broadcasts explored the United States, often the issues on which they focused were those that divided West Germans. Zahn’s broadcasts were one important voice in West German debates that accompanied and in some measure helped bring about the postwar transformation of West Germany. The third subject is the United States, as seen by Zahn. Zahn wanted to know whether the United States would prove a strong and dependable Cold War ally. With this question as his starting point he conducted a probing and sustained examination of the workings of the federal government and of American society. I examine his arguments and his conclusions.  They remain relevant today.