Economic and political life in the Western Zones of Occupation

When the Second World War finally ended at the beginning of May 1945, the nations of Europe began to take stock of five years of unprecedented bloodshed and destruction. As far as the Germans were concerned, the balance-sheet, though not as catastrophic as that of some of their neighbours, above all Poland and Russia, was depressing enough. An estimated seven million of them had been killed, or were presumed dead, of whom 3.2 millions were civilians. Some of the soldiers who had been reported missing later re-emerged from POW camps, many of them after ten years. But as late as 1962, the Red Cross and other agencies were still trying to clear up the fate of some 1.3 million former soldiers. At least one million ex-servicemen had suffered severe injuries and were disabled. Civilian health was also badly shaken.

Large parts of the country's major cities had been reduced to piles of rubble. Overall, some 3.4 million flats and houses out of a total of 17.1 million had been completely destroyed. A further 30 per cent had been severely damaged. Where possible those who had been bombed-out had built make-shift shelters in which they lived like cavemen. Others had been rehoused in undamaged accommodation, often five or six people to a room. The desperate shortage of housing was worsened by the influx of some 10 million refugees and expellees from the eastern parts of the former Reich and the German-occupied territories.

If, as has been argued in the preceding chapter, Germany had effectively become divided into two separate countries with very different socioeconomic and political structures by the late 1950s, the question arises as to the most sensible way of covering the most recent period of Central European history. It was difficult enough to condense the gradual division of Germany and the development of the two emergent states into the space of the preceding chapter. Logically, the rest of this book should devote two chapters to the 1960s and 1970s – one to East Germany and the other to the Federal Republic. Lack of space prevents the addition of another one hundred or so pages, and there is room only for one chapter divided into five sections. The first two sections will deal with East Germany up to the early 1980s. Given the larger size and greater economic and political weight of the Federal Republic, it seemed justified to use the three sections remaining thereafter for a discussion of West German society in its economic and political context.

The development of the East German economy, 1960–1980

From the point of view of the East German government, the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and the closing of the country's border with West Germany between Travemünde on the Baltic Sea and Hof in Upper Franconia were vital for the economy and, inseparable from this, for the political survival of the regime.

The face of the Nazi dictatorship

The first point to be made about the Nazi dictatorship is that it was much worse in human terms than can ever be expressed in words. One can merely try to analyse some of its more salient structural and developmental features. The second point is that the attitudes and experiences of those Germans who lived through the Third Reich differed widely and depended to a considerable extent on a person's sodoeconomic position. Just as it is untenable to say that ‘the Germans’ brought Hitler to power, sociological accuracy also helps us to understand who fared well and who fared badly after 1933 and hence to illuminate the basic character of the regime.

As to the proclaimed enemies of the new regime, the Nazis had never made a secret of their uncompromising and fundamental hostility to Communism and Social Democracy. Both had been built up into a major threat to law and order and the NSDAP had always promised to those frightened Germans who had voted for the Party that this ‘threat’ would be dealt with as soon as power had been achieved. Having taken control of both the Reich Ministry of the Interior and the Prussian Interior Ministry in January 1933 – a move which in itself demonstrated a shrewd appreciation of which posts were important and more important than possessing an overall majority of Cabinet seats – known left-wingers of the Weimar days were among the first to be rounded up.

Rapid industrialisation and its impact on society

The development of modern Germany is best understood against the background of the Industrial Revolution which affected Central Europe with full force in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Britain had experienced the blessings and traumas of industrialisation earlier and more slowly, but nowhere else in Europe did the transition from an economy based on agriculture to one dominated by industry occur with the same rapidity as in Germany. Inevitably, the Industrial Revolution also had a profound effect on social structures, on the life-styles and political behaviour of people as well as on their perceptions of the world around them. These, too, changed more rapidly in Germany than in other European countries. Seen from the perspective of the late twentieth century, the links between economic, social and political transformation may seem obvious enough. While it is not easy fully to appreciate the highly dynamic situation which had developed in Germany by the turn of the century, it is nonetheless fundamental to an understanding of the subsequent course of the country's history, and this is why these changes require brief discussion here.

Although the economic, social and political factors which generated these energies must be perceived as being in constant interaction with one another, it is convenient to start with the purely economic aspects of German industrialisation. A first, very general impression of dramatic economic transformation may be obtained from a glance at the output of coal between 1880 and 1913 which rose more than fourfold and has to be set against the British figures for the same period (Table 9).

The political and military situation at the beginning of the war

The declaration of war on France and Russia in August 1914 was greeted with immense enthusiasm throughout Germany. Thousands of men spontaneously flocked to the nearest assembly points to board the trains to the front. They were seen off by their wives and girl-friends – some of them apprehensive, no doubt, but also carried away by the wave of patriotic fervour. Meanwhile the parties in the Reichstag voted almost unanimously for the hastily introduced war credits in an atmosphere of elation. Most Social Democrats, hitherto the alleged ‘enemies of the State’, supported the government's request for funds; and many soldiers who were going off to the trenches belonged to the class which fellow-Germans thought to lack patriotism. No one was more surprised by the attitude of the SPD leadership and its supporters than the military. For many years they had prepared the Army not merely for a foreign conflagration, but also for civil war. The officer corps represented the most hardline conservatism among the Wilhelmine elites, viewing itself as the main pillar of the monarchical system in a sea of revolutionary ferment and as the last bastion of the existing order, should the Left ever dare to challenge it directly.

It was this mentality which had produced on various occasions suggestions of preventive action against the working-class movement as long as the risks were still supposed to be calculable.

Intellectual and cultural activity

The picture which has been painted so far of German history in the early twentieth century is one of a society racked by social tensions and violent political conflicts. It was a development which cannot be separated from the experience of rapid economic change since the late nineteenth century, followed by total war, defeat and civil war. What exacerbated these tensions and the violence which accompanied them was the inflexible conservatism of the country's agrarian, industrial and educated elites. Time and time again they thwarted even moderate reformist change and frustrated the aspirations of a growing number of working-class Germans. It was a conservatism which stemmed not merely from a perceived threat to established social, political and economic positions from below, but a more general obsession with an alleged undermining of accepted values and social morality resulting from the advent of ‘mass society’. Invariably, the cities were identified as the main source of moral corruption and decay, not only because they were seen as seedbeds of socialism and ‘low culture’, but also because they had become, already before 1914, centres of alternative life-styles, artistic experimentation and radical debate among coffee-house intellectuals.

It is not easy to describe how hostile and philistine were the reactions of the upper classes, and also of many petty bourgeois Stammtisch politicians in the provinces to these tendencies. Literary movements or avantgarde artistic activity provoked almost universal indignation. Long before 1914 Reich Chancellor Hohenlohe gave telling expression to this in his diary after viewing Gerhart Hauptmann's Hannele's Himmelfahrt.

The first edition of this volume contained rather a brief preface in which, in the limited space that was then available to me, I tried to bring out some of the salient features of my attempt to make sense of the confused and confusing history of modern Germany and to delineate how this study differed from other, older textbooks of this kind. This second edition provides me with an opportunity not only of expanding and updating Chapter 6, the Statistical Tables and the Select Bibliography, but also of elaborating on the perspectives I am trying to offer.

As I argued in the first edition, all textbooks tend to have a framework and to operate with broader underlying hypotheses. Their main themes reflect, in different ways, the authors' overall views of recent German history. Seen in this light, it seems fair to say that the books listed in my bibliography were written essentially in a ‘failure-of-liberalism’ mould. This was clearly also the perspective of Gordon Craig's Germany, which, conceived twenty years earlier, was finally published in 1978 and which, significantly, took the year 1866 as its starting point, later ending with the following ‘message’: