GERMANY IN THE POST-WAR WORLD

[This is the fourth of six articles I am writing on the respective positions of Britain, the US, France, Germany, Russia and China in the Post-War World]

1945-49 Allied Control Commission

Chancellors of the Federal Republic of Germany

1949-63 Konrad Adenauer   1974-82 Helmut Schmidt

1963-66 Ludwig Erhard       1982- 98 Helmut Kohl 

1966-69 Kurt Kiesinger        1998 – 2005 Gerhard Schroeder

1969-74 Willy Brandt           2005 -      Angela Merkel

Leaders of the German Democratic Republic

1949-50 Wilhelm Pieck          1973-89 Erich Honecker       

1950-73 Walter Ulbricht        1989      Egon Krenz

Germany in Defeat

In May 1945 Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. She was leaderless, her economy had ceased to function, her cities had been devastated, hunger was widespread and she was occupied by foreign armies whose attitude towards the native German population was at best unsympathetic and at worst brutally vengeful. Divided into 4 zones, British in the North, US in the South, Soviet in the East and a rather nominal French zone in the West, Germany was run by a Control Commission established by the 3-power Potsdam Conference (France excluded) of July-August 1945.

Cologne in 1945

Germany lost 25% of its territory – East and West Prussia, Upper Silesia and two-thirds of Pomerania including the great historic cities of Koenigsberg, Danzig and Breslau - as the Polish and Soviet borders moved sharply west. About 4m Germans fled from these areas and entered East Germany, many soon to defect to the less desolate West.

A further 3-4m ethnic Germans (the statistics are controversial) left Eastern Europe in 1945-50 where they had lived in scattered pockets for many generations, especially Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia, others from Poland, Hungary, Romania and Croatia. Most were brutally uprooted, often the elderly, women and children carrying the war-guilt of the Nazis. At least 500,000 died during this period of local atrocity and forced repatriation while others were traumatised.

The Germans had become pariahs in their own country. The American Army initially had a strict non-fraternisation policy forbidding any but official conversations with the natives. An early policy, known as the Morgenthau Plan, proposed the “pastoralisation” of Germany, dismantling its heavy industries and concentrating on agriculture. In the Russian zone, wholesale industrial dismantling took place in the name of reparations as plant was shipped to the USSR. Some food aid was delivered but priority was given to “displaced persons”- refugee Poles, Jews and others – with Germans at the end of a long queue. The misery was made worse by a severe winter in 1946-7, with fuel unobtainable by civilians, the Reichsmark currency worthless and US cigarettes being the key bartering commodity.

Seeds of Revival

Before the future could be built, the past had to be faced. Belsen had been liberated by the British, Dachau by the Americans, Auschwitz by the Soviets. Inevitably feelings ran high against the Germans. The main Nuremberg Trial of 1945-6, illuminated by the eloquence of US prosecutor Robert Jackson and the penetrating cross-examinations of Briton Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, resulted in the death sentence for 12 leading surviving Nazis, long prison sentences for 7 more and acquittal for 3. The US continued with further tribunals until 1949, convicting lesser figures while a de-Nazification programme was applied throughout West Germany until 1951, seeking past political details of all citizens. In time, some kind of a line was drawn under the Nazi era, although inevitably most people had been compromised in some way.

The Western Allies perceived that they were under threat from the Soviets. It was not in their interest that Germany should remain a burden – a functioning German economy became a priority and all thoughts of de-industrialising Germany were dropped. The 3 Western zones were united under a common Allied regime and in 1948 a new currency was introduced, the D-Mark replacing the discredited Reichsmark. This angered the Soviets, who used it as a pretext to withdraw from the Control Commission and blockade Berlin. The famous Anglo-American Berlin Airlift of 1948-9 defied the Soviets and heartened the Germans. The Cold War had begun.

German local government was allowed to function and among the more capable and clean politicians was the ex-mayor of Cologne Konrad Adenauer. Soon after the Airlift, West Germany (the FRG), with its capital at Bonn, was created although extensive Allied controls remained. In free elections Adenauer’s CDU party won and the 73 year-old Adenauer became her first Chancellor. In the East the Russians created the GDR, a Soviet satellite state, effectively run by the communist party leader Walter Ulbricht, with its capital in East Berlin.

 Recovery

The creation of East and West Germany was seen in Bonn as a temporary arrangement pending a proper re-unification. The Basic Law (Grundgesetz) set out the machinery of the FRG government but it was never called “a Constitution” as that would imply a permanent arrangement. The FRG did not recognise the GDR and promulgated the Hallstein Doctrine whereby it would not recognise any other country (apart from the USSR) which did. This effectively isolated East Germany and the policy lasted until 1969. Labour unrest in East Berlin resulted in rioting in June 1953, harshly repressed by Soviet troops and persecution by the all-pervading Stasi secret police, greatly damaging the international image of East Germany.

Konrad Adenauer

From 1949 onwards, the German economy took off with an astonishing average 8% annual growth rate in the 1950s and a very creditable 4.6% in the 1960s. Germany had a number of positive advantages. Despite Allied bombing only 6% of plant had been destroyed: most of the remaining 94% was less than 10 years old. A reservoir of skilled labour existed as up to 1961 some 3m East Germans fled to the West. Anyhow labour relations were good leading to the early settlement of disputes, unlike strike-bound Britain and France. The economy benefited from Marshall Aid but the main stimulus was Western rearmament following the outbreak of the Korean War, where German engineering expertise and spare capacity were at a premium.  Germany’s own defence budget was modest, only being allowed to form the Bundeswehr in 1955 when it also joined NATO. Unlike Britain and France, Germany had no onerous and expensive colonial obligations.

Adenauer entrusted economic matters to Ludwig Erhard who had courageously abolished price controls in 1948; he diligently steered the growth of Germany for 14 years and got much of the credit for the Wirtschaftswunder (the economic miracle). Erhard was a believer in free markets and worried about the expense of welfare legislation, but ultimately supported it.

Germany and European cooperation

Adenauer wanted Germany to be re-admitted to the family of democratic nations. When France proposed the pooling of the iron and steel resources of France, Germany, Italy and Benelux, he readily joined the European Iron and Steel Community in 1950, a forerunner of the EEC. The underlying agenda was French fear of Germany’s powerful industries on the Ruhr. An ambitious French proposal in 1951 for a European Defence Community was finally voted down by the French Assembly of a different political complexion in 1954. A huge step forward was made in 1957 when the seminal Treaty of Rome was signed establishing the EEC with Germany a founder member.

In the early 1950s Germany made overtures to the new State of Israel, recognized its right to represent the victims of the Holocaust and paid out large reparations. Bi-lateral agreements with other nations saw Germany try to make some amends for the past. With its long borders to the East, Germany was seen as the potential battleground of any conventional war with the Soviet bloc. She became a key member of NATO, contributing financially for years to the deployment on her soil of large US forces and the British Army of the Rhine. Although the West did little to assist the Hungarians when they revolted in 1956, the military threat from the Soviets in Europe receded as Khrushchev embraced a policy of “peaceful coexistence”.

While the border between West and East Germany was closely guarded, 4-power Berlin was a loophole and finally, to stabilise its limping economy, the GDR erected the notorious Berlin Wall in 1961 to stop its haemorrhage of skilled workers. It cruelly divided families and became a symbol of the repressive communist regime.

The Brandenburg Gate after the Building of the Wall

Adenauer continued to act as the good European, striking up a good relationship with de Gaulle and deferring to French diplomatic and administrative expertise, although the German economy was now much the stronger. Having won 4 consecutive terms in office Der Alte was reluctantly persuaded to retire in 1963 at the ripe old age of 87. He had served his country with great distinction.

 Life in Germany

The early post-war years were mainly devoted to grim survival; it is not surprising that “a German comedian” is almost a contradiction in terms. Germany was always proud of her culture, much of it high-minded. As early as 1946, novelist Hermann Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize. Best known for Steppenwolf, Hesse’s wide popularity was largely posthumous. Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass (The Tin Drum) were admired too, although not much known outside the German-speaking world.

Bertolt Brecht had completed his main dramas by 1945 but his Berliner Ensemble touring company electrified the theatre. His The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was written in 1941 but only first produced in 1957, most strikingly at the TNP in Paris in 1961 with Jean Vilar in the lead role. Music retained its hold as ever with the distinguished tenures of Herbert von Karajan and Sir Simon Rattle at the Berlin Philharmonic. Otto Klemperer heavily illuminated the profundities of Beethoven. Lovers of modern music could enjoy the atonal offerings of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Hans Zimmer followed in the steps of Erich Korngold composing rousing film and TV music while the late-developing German pop scene spawned Tangerine Dream’s electronic innovations and a genre known as Krautrock.

The German cinema appealed to an art-house audience although Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, shot in Peru, won international interest. Prolific directors Rainer Fassbinder and Wim Winders are representative figures. German pulchritude was demonstrated by Romy Schneider in her 1955 Sissy trilogy, by smouldering Elke Sommer, by the singing and dancing Kessler Twins but most of all by lovely, bubbly model Claudia Schiffer whose face adorned every magazine front page.

Claudia Schiffer - a German Treasure

Sport remains an obsession with West German World Cup football success in 1954, 1974 and 1990 being high-spots. East Germany performed surprisingly well in Olympic athletics, later exposed as fuelled by illegal steroids, although beautiful Katerina Witt won two figure skating Golds by fair competition. Record-breaking Michael Schumacher brilliantly dominated Formula One motor-racing from 1994 to 2006.

From the mid-1950s onwards West Germany was a pre-eminent consumer society with its citizens spending lavishly on every modern gadget, eating and drinking well, buying fine cars and taking Mediterranean holidays. The economically mismanaged East lagged far behind; while it may have been the richest Eastern bloc state, that is not saying much.

Post-Adenauer Germany

Germany started to change. The building of the Wall cut off a vital supply of labour and the Guest Worker (Gastarbeiter) programme was initiated attracting many supposedly temporary single workers from Spain, Italy, Greece and above all from Turkey. Inevitably many took their families and settled – mosques, kebab houses and exotic restaurants proliferated.

The CDU political dominance faded and in 1969 Willy Brandt became the first Social Democratic Chancellor. He introduced a policy known as Ostpolitik, easing relations and freeing trade with East Germany and recognising the Eastern bloc countries. The danger of conceding de facto acceptance of partition was recognised but Eastern Europe perceptibly melted with much freer travel and communication.

Gradually the conventional Allied military presence in Germany was scaled down as ICBMs became the most likely weapon of war; any residual fear of German revanchism diminished when the loss of the old eastern territories to Poland was formally acknowledged in 1990.

As West Germany settled down to a prosperous bourgeois existence, under the long and successful chancellorships of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, she was plagued from 1970-98 by the activities of the Red Army Faction (originally the Baader-Meinhof Gang). These extremists represented the Anarchist-Marxist viewpoint, hating the West German state as the heir of Fascism, murdering 34 people, some prominent bankers and businessmen, and in 1977 cooperating with Arab terrorists in a hi-jacking ending bloodily in Mogadishu, Somalia. There were three waves of activity; many of the protagonists committed suicide in prison. The RAF finally dissolved itself in 1998 after much mayhem.

Re-unification

In the 1980s the Russian economy was in trouble, unable to compete with NATO in the ruinously expensive arms race. Mikhail Gorbachev was the prophet of change and put pressure on old-time Stalinist Erich Honecker to stand down; Honecker refused and Gorbachev left East Germany to its fate. When Hungary opened its borders to the West in 1989, a flood of East Germans set out for freedom. Unable to contain the situation in Berlin, the Wall was breached and joy was unconfined as at last Germans could intermingle without restriction. Free elections followed in 1990, the East German state was dissolved and absorbed into the West under the Basic Law, with no new constitution deemed necessary. A series of treaties finally recognised the full sovereignty of Germany, residual Allied powers in Berlin ended and the 1945 borders of Germany were confirmed. Communist regimes collapsed in the East and finally the USSR itself disintegrated in 1991. This victory in the Cold War was a triumph for the West in which the FRG had played a notable part.

Joy at the Fall of the Wall 1989

Rebuilding and absorbing East Germany has proved an expensive process and 20 years later there still exists a significant gap in living standards between the old two Germanies; there are differences in attitudes too with the Ossies thought less enterprising and more welfare dependent, if less acquisitive.

The Euro crisis and German dominance

The Economic Crisis from 2007 placed an unwelcome burden on Germany. As the richest state in the Eurozone by some margin, she was crucial to any agreement on assistance for struggling members. By 2009 Greece was in dire trouble, revealing her mismanagement and past doctored statistics; her remedies were feebly incompetent. The European Union leaders in Brussels, van Rompuy, Barroso, Juncker and Rehn were ineffective and slow and the ECB unhelpful. It took Chancellor Angela Merkel to knock EU/IMF rescue packages into shape for Greece (twice), Portugal and Ireland and to push forward measures to assist Spain and Italy.

Angela Merkel, daughter of a Lutheran pastor in East Germany, is a highly capable politician but possibly lacks any appreciation of the merits, but is well aware of the shortcomings, of Mediterranean Europe. Along with her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble, she has been rather self-righteous in her criticism and looks upon the solidarity of the Eurozone as a sacred cause, in the face of ample evidence that Greece at least must manage her own exit.

The countries of the Mediterranean periphery easily blame Germany for their self-inflicted troubles and Germany is uncomfortable being at the centre of affairs; the establishment of German hegemony over Europe is an unwanted, unplanned but perhaps inevitable outcome.

The Future

Germany has atoned for the grievous horrors of the past. She is democratic, generous and highly prosperous. Her people have admirable qualities and she carries an enviable artistic and cultural heritage. She has yet to demonstrate universally recognised political leadership abilities and this is the challenge facing re-united Germany.

Schauble and Merkel plan the Future

SMD

15.09.12

Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2012.