[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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Schauble and Merkel plan the Future |
SMD
15.09.12
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2012.
