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Five Theses on German Everyday Life after World War II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Manfred J. Enssle
Affiliation:
Colorado State University Fort Collins

Extract

To order an untidy past, historians identify and interpret significant pivots in the development of nations. One such pivot in the fractured history of twentieth-century Germany was the period between 1945 and 1949. In these brief postwar years, a remarkable “mutation” of German politics and society began under Allied tutelage. In this interregnum between Hitler and Adenauer, a war-devastated West Germany started on the path “from shadow to substance.” As the Bonn Republic endured, historians started to trace its origins back to certain political and economic structures first erected in the postwar years. Increasingly, they emphasized postwar Weichenstellungen, or turning points, which influenced later events. By the 1980s, this structuralist view strongly suggested that contemporaries of the years 1945–1949 had actually lived through the Vorgeschichte, or prehistory, of the Federal Republic, and of affluence.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1993

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References

A Shorter version of this article was presented at a session of the German Studies Association annual meeting in Minneapolis, MN, on 4 October 1992. The session commemorated the life and work of John Gimbel, to whom I am also indebted. This article is dedicated to my mentor and friend, Willard Allen Fletcher. In addition, I would like to thank David W. Allen, Mark T. Gilderhus, Thomas J. Knight, and Ronald G. Williams.Google Scholar

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17. ibid., 328 and 345.

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21. ibid., 39.

22. ibid., 65.

23. ibid., 86–87; 190–91.

24. ibid., 90–91.

25. ibid., 113–14.

26. ibid., 118.

27. ibid., 171–72.

28. ibid., 203–4.

29. ibid., 236–37.

30. Abelshauser, , Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 44. For a similar but more differentiated view see also Kramer, The West German Economy, 130 and 172–73.Google Scholar

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73. A solid beginning has been made by Dominick, Raymond H. III, The Environmental Movement in Germany. Prophets & Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington, 1992).Google Scholar