GERMANY.

The course of German history in the twentieth century was anything but smooth and predictable. For some decades the national state ceased to exist altogether so that the country was reduced to a geographical expression. Five times the regime changed fundamentally, oscillating between dictatorship and democracy. The territory also fluctuated widely, expanding to an area from the Alsace to Pozna? and contracting to a remnant between the Rhine and Oder rivers. Moreover time did not seem to progress in linear fashion, because traumatic memories of mass death and mass murder continued to intrude into the present. As a result, identities of belonging to or being excluded from Germanness varied greatly throughout the period. Because war and occupation involved many other countries, this history no longer concerned the Germans alone, but assumed a wider significance. Such turbulence makes it rather difficult to retell and interpret its trajectory.

Neither a purely positive nor an entirely negative rendition of the German story can do justice to the extremes of the last century. A Whiggish narrative, stressing the ineluctable progress of material prosperity and political liberty, runs head on into the National Socialist atrocities, which reveal the dark underside of modernity. Nationalist apologias that the Third Reich was merely an accident have been discredited by a broader understanding of the intellectual and structural roots of the Holocaust. But a strictly condemnatory account, favored by Western war propaganda that drew a straight line from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler, also seems unable to deal with the more positive developments in the second half of the century. The interpretative challenge therefore consists of drawing a more complex picture, encompassing both unspeakable horrors and the recovery of civility.

One effort to deal with such contradictions is the notion of a German deviation from a common pattern of Western civilization. During the 1940s émigrés created this interpretation by inverting arrogant claims of German superiority in World War I and asserting that the country had fallen prey to a new kind of barbarism that rejected civilized norms. In the 1960s a younger generation of critical German historians picked up this notion in order to unearth the underlying reasons for the Nazi dictatorship and developed it into the theory that Germany had taken a "special path" to modernity, a Sonderweg that set it apart from its Western neighbors. But more recent comparative studies have shown that referring to British or French development as normative might be problematic, because each country's transition to modernity was different and fraught with its own pathologies. Especially when looking from Eastern Europe, the German example seems not especially backward, but instead rather progressive.

The erosion of the nationalist, Marxist, and modernist "master narratives" suggests a more modest approach to German history. Rather than pretending to present a coherent picture, it would be better to reassemble the fragments of a "shattered past" in the form of a kaleidoscope that offers a different pattern, depending upon the respective perspective. In unraveling this tangled story, it is particularly important to pay attention to the tension between the frequent ruptures and the underlying continuities. This requires organizing the narrative in the categories of the dominant political regimes, but also discussing the longer-term developments that cut across them. Moreover, it is equally necessary to be sensitive to the discrepancy between individual memories and the collective-memory culture that determines their meaning. This calls for not just discussing selected events themselves, but also commenting briefly on their interpretation in scholarship.

THE SECOND REICH

The starting point for any reconstruction of twentieth-century development must be imperial Germany, the famous Kaiserreich. After the subsequent catastrophes, many contemporaries remembered it positively as die gute alte Zeit (the good old days), an era of stability, order, and predictability in their personal lives. This somewhat nostalgic recollection, of course, elided its many conflicts and unresolved problems, but did correctly emphasize the contemporary feeling of confidence and progress. Searching for the short-term causes of World War I as well as long-term antecedents of the Nazi debacle, critical historians have instead stressed the authoritarian and aggressive features of imperial Germany. But more discerning scholars have also pointed to the Second Reich's considerable achievements in urban reform or higher education, which made the German example a positive point of reference in international debates.

In spite of its neofeudal style, the Second Reich was a rather new state, because it was founded only in 1871 as a result of the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The accession of the southern German states to the North German Confederation made it the first German national state, which, however, excluded Austrians and other German-speaking minorities in east-central Europe. The success of unification from above rather than from below, attempted in the revolution of 1848, meant that the political system was a tenuous compromise between remnants of Hohenzollern autocracy and aspects of popular sovereignty. It might be called "semiconstitutional," because its parliament, the Reichstag, was elected by universal male suffrage, while the Crown retained command over the army and foreign affairs. The crucial office, invented by the empire's creator, Prince Otto von Bismarck, was therefore the chancellorship, which mediated between the Reichstag and the Crown.

One source of pride was the rapid growth of the economy, which made Germany into a leading industrial power around the turn of the twentieth century. Prefigured by the Prussian-led customs union of the Zollverein, the unification of weights and measures, the introduction of a common currency, and the establishment of a national railroad and postal service created a larger domestic market. Moreover, the technical universities and Kaiser Wilhelm institutes contributed scientific discoveries to propel the development of steel, chemical, and electrical industries. At the same time the improvement in products turned the label "made in Germany," which the British had imposed as discrimination, into a guarantor of quality. The involvement of the banks in financing new ventures as well as favorable governmental policies fostered so rapid an increase in trade that Germany began to outstrip the home of industrialization, Great Britain. No wonder that by 1913 leading financiers were able to point to a general rise in prosperity.

Ironically this material progress aggravated social tensions, because it widened the gap between an ostentatious upper class and a still suffering proletariat. Around 1900 parts of the nobility, nouveau-riche entrepreneurs, and leading members of the educated middle class coalesced into a Wilhelmian elite that built impressive mansions to show off its success. In spite of government efforts to provide some insurance and pensions through social policy, the lot of the working class improved only slowly, failing to keep up with people's rising expectations. Based on Karl Marx's inspiration, a strong trade union movement coalesced that used the weapon of strikes to wrest concessions from a paternalist management. But the Social Democratic Party, the largest labor party in the world, remained caught between its revolutionary rhetoric and its reformist practice. The Second Reich therefore witnessed a stark discrepancy between new wealth and abject poverty in the urban tenements.

As the contrasting novels of Thomas and Heinrich Mann suggest, Wilhelmine culture was a perplexing compound of traditionalist impulses and modernist experimentation. On the one hand, the newness of the state and the rapidity of industrialization produced a longing for historical reassurance through neo-medievalist forms in public buildings, constructed in a mélange of neo-Romanesque, neo-Gothic, or neo-Renaissance styles. On the other hand, the sterility of the academic canon stimulated an artistic avant-garde to revolt with new styles of impressionist or expressionist painting and to secede from the official salon. These contradictions also mark the post-Romantic speculations of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose texts show a restless search for creative genius. Because of their development of the research imperative, the German universities became the leading institutions in the world, producing such innovators as the playful physicist Albert Einstein and the rationalist founder of sociology Max Weber.

German foreign policy also vacillated unsteadily between expansionism and defensiveness, thereby confusing not just foreign observers. Confident of its growing power, Berlin tore Bismarck's web of alliances by letting the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapse. Rising aspirations also fostered the imperial dream of a "place in the sun," which propelled the turn away from continental policy toward Weltpolitik. In contrast, the effort to court England and to mediate in the Balkan conflicts derived from a defensive sense of limited resources in contrast to the British Empire and rising powers such as Russia or the United States. But an aggressive style, for instance in the Moroccan Crises, tended to overshadow the more cautious substance, making the kaiser appear as a troublemaker. These conflicting impulses led to a policy of increasing risks, which backed Austrian retaliation in the July crisis and thereby helped precipitate World War I.

In the gigantic military struggle ultimate victory continued to escape the Second Reich, though it appeared tantalizingly within reach. The initial western advance of the Schlieffen Plan was halted by the "miracle at the Marne," but not before the Germans had conquered most of Belgium and parts of northeastern France. After the defection of Italy from the Triple Alliance, the search for allies drew Berlin into the Balkans where the support of Turkey and Bulgaria facilitated the defeat of Serbia and Romania. In the west, the stalemate in the trenches produced a war of attrition, symbolized by Verdun. In the east, the battle of the Masurian Lakes turned the tide in a war of intermittent movement that resulted in victory over Russia, forced to abandon large territories in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But the kaiser's navy lost the struggle on the sea, the total mobilization of efforts led to a military quasi-dictatorship, and the escalation of the fighting through unrestricted submarine warfare precipitated the fatal entry of the United States.

The test of war proved to be the undoing of the Second Reich, because its authoritarianism lost the competition with democracy. In spite of the advantage of interior lines, in a war of attrition the Dual Alliance proved inferior to the Entente in manpower and natural resources. In the spring of 1918, the offensive launched by Erich Ludendorff gambled away the last reserves on a decisive victory, thereby hastening final defeat. In the contest for international opinion, German propaganda lacked a universally appealing idea, because Mitteleuropa failed to inspire most neutrals. In domestic politics, the vaunted unity of the "truce within the castle" shattered on the clash between the war aims movement and the peace party. In spite of some social concessions many workers eventually wanted to end the fighting with a peace "without annexations and indemnities." When disgruntled sailors rebelled at last, belated political reforms could not prevent a popular uprising that forced the empire to collapse.

THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

Born in defeat and revolution, the first German democracy has left an image of inevitable failure, sometimes expressed in the phrase "crippled at birth." In retrospect, the Weimar Republic appears as a fourteen-year period of endless crises, marked by civil war, hyperinflation, and international conflict that came to a disastrous end by allowing the Nazis to seize power. Left-wing historians accuse the Social Democratic and liberal leaders of the republic of timidity, because they did not go far enough to dismantle the imperial elites. In contrast, scholars interested in cultural innovation tend to celebrate "Weimar Culture" as the epitome of an experimental modernism that radiated abroad. Therefore interpretations face the challenge of balancing an appreciation for Weimar's creative potential with a more nuanced analysis of the reasons for its ultimate collapse.

In November 1918 Philipp Scheidemann's and Karl Liebknecht's competing proclamations of the republic announced a revolutionary contest for power between the provisional government and the council movement. Similar to the tsarist abdication in Russia, the last imperial cabinet handed the government over to the majority of the Social Democratic Party, led by Friedrich Ebert. At the same time, rebelling soldiers and workers followed the Soviet example by creating revolutionary councils that wanted to govern instead. But in Germany, the conflict had the opposite result, because army units and free corps suppressed the grassroots Räte (councils) of the left-socialists and communists in favor of a parliamentary republic. At the same time, the union leadership, to maintain production, struck an agreement with the leaders of business organizations. These initial decisions gave the discredited elites a chance to retain some of their power and to limit the changes to the political system.

The Treaty of Versailles (1919) did not exactly enhance the prospects for democracy, as it was at once too harsh to be freely accepted and too soft to be imposed against the will of the defeated. For the public, kept in the dark about the military situation by censorship, the extent of the defeat came as a profound shock. The ill-advised procedure of limiting negotiations to the "Allied and Associated Powers" without consulting the Germans also made it easy for opponents to denounce the settlement as dictated (a Diktat). The punitive provisions of extensive territorial losses (including Alsace-Lorraine, West Prussia, Pozna?, and the colonies), the one-sided disarmament that limited German forces to one hundred thousand men, the imposition of a huge reparations bill, and the partial occupation did not make the treaty popular. Moreover, the attribution of "war guilt" to Germany alone seemed like a historical injustice. Because the nationalist majority rejected the "shameful peace," the democratic minority was at a continual disadvantage in justifying its fulfillment.

The constitution, worked out in 1919 in Weimar, the city of the writers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller, was nonetheless one of the most advanced democratic documents of its time. Its authors—Social Democrats, Catholics, and Liberals—drew on the heritage of local self-government and of the revolution of 1848 to constitute a parliamentary republic. Thus they insisted on a bill of rights, safeguarding the freedom of individual citizens. The constitution was also based on universal suffrage, granting women the vote, a generation before France. As in its imperial predecessor, the electoral procedure envisaged a combination of the single-member-district system and proportional representation, which gave both the big and small parties a chance. Though a powerful presidency was supposed to replace the dethroned kaiser, the actual government remained with the chancellor. A solid majority ratified the document, but sizable minorities remained opposed to its liberating thrust.

One impressive achievement of the Weimar Republic was the extension of the welfare state. In contrast to the paternalist beginnings in the empire, the first democracy based its legitimacy on guaranteeing "a comprehensive system of insurance." That meant not only compensating the victims of the war, such as mutilated veterans and widows, but also establishing an unemployment insurance against the vagaries of the economic cycles. The republic also launched a public health service that sought to prevent disease through social monitoring and improving the sanitary conditions of the poor. At the same time, the republic paid special attention to the needs of young people by trying to enlarge access to education for the underprivileged. This shift from charity to state provision also prompted the social work sector to professionalize. But at the same time, these initiatives required enormous financial expenditures that eventually outstripped the state's limited fiscal resources.

Another fascinating aspect of Weimar was its hothouse culture, which signaled the breakthrough of modernism. Emboldened by the lifting of Wilhelmian restrictions, avant-garde artists captured established cultural institutions, so that concert halls began to play Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, museums exhibited Wassily Kandinsky's abstract art, and theaters produced Bertolt Brecht's social-critical plays. This explosion of creativity drew artists from all over Europe to the capital, captured in Alfred Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). One center of experimentation was the Bauhaus, an art school in Dessau in which leading painters, architects, and furniture makers developed an international modernist style. At the same time an entertainment-centered mass culture coalesced that led German film to new artistic heights. But all this ferment produced an intense backlash against "Americanization," reinforcing Ernst Jünger's elitism and Oswald Spengler's "cultural pessimism."

Unfortunately, the Great Depression put an end to such progressive innovations. In the early 1920s the deficit financing of World War I had produced a hyperinflation that destroyed the savings of the middle class and reduced pensioners to poverty. The reparations struggle and the French occupation of the Ruhr further hindered recovery until the Dawes Plan produced an acceptable settlement in 1924. Thereafter the economy rebounded and optimism returned, only to be overshadowed by Fordist rationalization. Yet the withdrawal of U.S. loans after the stock market crash on Black Thursday in October 1929 triggered a massive industrial depression that reduced output to 53 percent of its previous level and swelled unemployment to more than six million, about one-quarter of the workforce. Because democratic cabinets found no convincing solution to this elemental crisis, many desperate citizens began to listen to the siren song of political extremists.

The republic's drawn-out agony failed, however, to prevent its ultimate collapse. From mid-1930 on, the disappearance of electoral support for democracy led to a series of minority governments, based only on presidential emergency decrees. While the Catholic Center Party leader Heinrich Brüning earned respect for his austerity program, his successors, the dilettante Franz von Papen and the intriguing Kurt von Schleicher, lacked any popular backing. Instead, on the extreme right an obscure Bavarian protest party named the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi Party) gained a stunning 107 Reichstag seats in the 1930 election, then doubled its total to 230 seats two years later. Masterminded by Joseph Goebbels, its propaganda appealed especially to Protestant men in small towns who resented Versailles and hated the Jews. At the same time mass unemployment swelled the ranks of the Communists. Having run out of options, the conservative president Paul von Hindenburg turned the government over to the Nazi leader, the naturalized Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, in January 1933.

THE THIRD REICH

Why did a civilized country follow such a barbaric leader who would unleash war and genocide? This question has troubled historians ever since. According to personal preference, explanations have ranged from apologetic references to "mass politics" or Marxist claims of "monopoly capitalism" to critical indictments of "eliminationist anti-Semitism." Some scholars tend to stress that only the breakdown of the Weimar Republic gave the Nazis a chance, whereas others focus instead on the dynamics of an extra-parliamentary movement, which thrived on the resentments against the dislocations of modernity. One recent approach that seeks to reconcile the views of ideological intentionalists with the perspective of structural functionalists stresses the charismatic relationship between the leader (Führer) and his followers, a form of irrational bonding that created something like a "consensus dictatorship."

In contrast to the Beer Hall Putsch (1923), the Nazi seizure of power a decade later was formally legal and thus harder to resist. Although Hitler had viciously attacked the republic, he became chancellor as the head of the largest party in hopes of thereby restoring parliamentary government! The small conservative German National People's Party offered to enter a coalition with the rabble of the Nazi mass movement, because the traditional landed and administrative elites hoped to ride the populist tiger. Because the Nazi Party had lost some of its appeal in the second 1932 election, Hitler's initial cabinet represented only a minority—slightly more than two-fifths of the German electorate. But the liberal and democratic parties had already collapsed, and neither the Communists nor the Social Democrats dared unleash a general strike that might fail. Ironically, this initial legality was the springboard for subsequent illegality.

Hitler's first priority was therefore the transformation of his limited power into a full-blown dictatorship. While a victory parade of his followers in Berlin sought to impress the masses, the storm troopers of the SA (Sturmabteilung) brutally intimidated the critics. When the fortuitous Reichstag fire (February 1933) gave the Nazis a chance to throw most Communist and some Social Democratic leaders in jail, the no longer free elections produced a slim majority of popular votes for the government. Then Hitler coerced the Reichstag into passing the Enabling Law, which suspended civil rights and gave him dictatorial command. The partly voluntary, partly coerced "coordination" of organizations and interest groups put Nazis in control everywhere, while censorship silenced the independent voice of civil society. Finally, the civil service purge of presumed radicals and Jews created a pliable instrument for implementing Nazi policies. The speed and ruthlessness of the "national revolution" rendered its opponents helpless.

The growing popularity of the Nazi regime rested largely on the recovery of the economy and on the claim of a "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft). Borrowing massively, the Nazis reduced unemployment by instituting a national service year, restoring the draft, initiating public works such as superhighways (Autobahnen), and, most importantly, starting a clandestine rearmament program. Though wages remained frozen, the return of full employment did increase family incomes and restored hope. After breaking the power of the trade unions, the regime proclaimed an ideal Volksgemeinschaft in which all racial comrades would be equal, thereby leveling traditional social hierarchies. The Labor Front also offered new services, such as the vacation travel of the "Strength through Joy" program. While opponents derided these policies as "socialism of the fools," new consumption chances helped cement popular support for the Nazi regime.

Culturally speaking, the Third Reich was rather a desert, because the "flight of the muses" had robbed Germany of most of its creative talent. An artistic dilettante and lover of Wagnerian operas, Hitler loathed modernism and sought to purge culture of "degenerate art" or critical literature. Thus his ideology, presented in Mein Kampf, was a murky mélange of resentments against urban life, capitalism, Marxism, or the Jews. In painting, the Nazis returned to a pastoral realism with scenes of happy blue-eyed and blond-haired maidens, working in fields. Literature produced nothing better than the turgid novels of Hans Grimm, while theater was limited to presenting the expressionist plays of the aging Gerhart Hauptmann. In propaganda alone did the Nazis excel by staging the party rallies in Nuremberg and producing Leni Riefenstahl's films. Thus hopes for a more humane Germany could survive only in exile, the concentration camps, or the Resistance.

In foreign policy Nazi Germany followed a revisionist course so as to overthrow the restrictions of the Versailles treaty. To shield rearmament, Hitler initially pursued "bread, peace, and freedom," even reassuring Poland with a nonaggression treaty. But he also reintroduced the draft, remilitarized the Rhineland, and built a diplomatic "Axis" with Benito Mussolini's Italy and Tojo Hideki's Japan. His first success was the Anschluss of Austria in the spring of 1938, which incorporated the German-speaking remnant of the Habsburg Empire. Next he inflated the Sudeten German wish for autonomy into a demand for returning "home to the Reich," granted by a harassed Neville Chamberlain at the Munich conference (September 1938). But Hitler underestimated the moral outrage caused by his cynical annexation of the rest of Czechoslovakia and was surprised that the West thereafter resisted his demands for concessions in the Polish Corridor and the return of Danzig. In contrast to 1914, there was no doubt that it was the Nazis who unleashed war in September 1939.

In the first half of World War II the Germans won stunning victories, surpassing anything that they had achieved a quarter century before. Nazi military strategy rested on the concept of the blitzkrieg, a mechanized lightning strike of heavy armor with mobile artillery and tactical air support that slashed through enemy lines, surrounded entire armies of defenders, and forced their surrender by spreading confusion. Because of Hitler's personal fear of a two-front war, the Wehrmacht proceeded against one enemy at a time so as to achieve tactical superiority and use the resources of the defeated country to carry the war effort further. In this fashion he defeated Poland in September 1939, captured Scandinavia in the spring of 1940, beat France in the summer of that year, overran the Balkans in the spring of 1941, and invaded the Soviet Union thereafter. The only country able to repulse this massive onslaught was Great Britain.

Hitler's war aims envisaged a German hegemony over Europe beyond the wildest dreams of previous nationalists. First of all, the Nazis reannexed to the Reich disputed provinces such as Alsace-Lorraine in the west and West Prussia, Pozna?, and other territories in the east. Second, they created a belt of occupied areas such as Bohemia and the Polish government general, run by military governors and mercilessly exploited for the war effort. Third, Hitler's power fantasies focused on the conquest of German Lebensraum in the east in a primitive notion that national strength rested on living space for agrarian settlements. As the "general plan east" stipulated, his colonial territory could be found only in Poland and Ukraine—but it needed to be cleansed of its inhabitants so that ethnic Germans could be resettled there. Finally, in reconstructing Europe the Nazis were aided by allies such as Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and Romania and abetted by friendly neutrals such as Vichy France and Francisco Franco's Spain.

This expansionism was inspired by a biological racism that precipitated an unprecedented genocide, now called according to biblical references "the Holocaust." So as to reduce the local population to serfdom, the Slavic elite was sent to concentration camps and killed by slave labor. More radical yet was the murder of the Jews, because it sought to eradicate an entire people. In Vienna Hitler had imbibed a deep-seated racial anti-Semitism that led him from discrimination of the German Jews in the Nuremberg Laws (1935) to their persecution in the pogrom of November 1938. But only eastern victories and dreams of Lebensraum made for the quantum leap to the complete annihilation of all European Jews. Pioneered through euthanasia on the handicapped, the mass killing first proceeded through mobile death squads but was subsequently perfected through the industrial method of gassing in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, where four million people died. Though communism might have claimed more deaths, this Nazi genocide is uniquely abhorrent because of its systematic and bureaucratic character that will darken the German name forever.

After six years of struggle, the Third Reich and its allies were finally defeated. In the long run the Nazis had no way of countering the superior manpower and industrial strength of the grand alliance between Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. In the west, victory in the war at sea, the liberation of North Africa, and the landing in Italy were important, but not decisive. The brunt of the land fighting took place in the east, where "general winter" helped the Soviet Union to survive in 1941, the ferocious defense of Stalingrad in late 1942 turned the tide, and the tank battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 established Soviet superiority. The Allied landing in Normandy (June 1944) and the air bombardment also contributed to weakening German defenses. Hitler's fabled "miracle weapons" such as jet fighters and rockets and his experiments with a small atomic bomb came too late. With Berlin surrounded, the Führer committed suicide, and the Reich surrendered in May 1945.

THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC

In contrast to the destructive drama of the Nazi regime, the postwar history of West Germany unfolded more peacefully and constructively. Five decades of democratic stability, economic prosperity, social concord, and cultural modernization made the Federal Republic of Germany seem like a success story. Only inveterate critics still bemoan "missed opportunities" for more radical changes, but most domestic observers and foreign commentators are impressed by the positive outcome. Instead, arguments tend to revolve around such issues as who should get the credit, the Allies or the Germans, or when things really improved, during the chancellorship of Konrad Adenauer or that of Willy Brandt. With so little to disagree about, it remains nonetheless necessary to explain why Germans were able to seize "their second chance."

Perhaps the new beginning after 1945 was more successful because conditions were much worse than in 1919, making it clear that a drastic change was necessary. This time the whole country was occupied by the victors, including the French, and eventually divided into two ideologically competing states by the Cold War. Moreover, the caretaker government of Admiral Karl Dönitz was dissolved and sovereignty assumed by the Allied Control Council. Also much more territory was lost by returning Nazi annexations to their previous owners and turning the entire eastern part of the country over to the Soviet Union (Kaliningrad Oblast) and Poland (East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, etc.). Moreover, the program agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference (July–August 1945) imposed a rigorous demilitarization, denazification, and decartelization on the defeated so as to prevent World War III. Finally, the Nuremberg trials (1945–1946) indicted the entire Nazi elite and Reich leadership for waging war of aggression as well as committing "crimes against humanity."

The minority of German democrats who drew up the Basic Law (1949) as a provisional constitution sought to learn from Weimar's fatal mistakes. Emerging out of the local and regional efforts to restore self-government, the leaders of the postwar parties tried to recover positive traditions from the Nazi rubble and find more stable institutional arrangements for a renewed attempt at democracy. Allied advisors also sought to share constructive precedents from their own traditions, but the Germans themselves made the ultimate decisions. The new constitution restored a bill of rights as well as federalism and a mixed electoral system, but weakened the presidency, instituted a 5 percent hurdle for representation, and abolished emergency decrees. The resulting representative system put its faith in parliament instead of direct participation. In time, the new system's success in solving problems overcame the widespread skepticism toward democracy.

The rapid revival of the West German economy, known as the "economic miracle," helped reinforce positive attitudes toward the new political system. Because the initial postwar controls produced stagnation, the Economic Council under the leadership of the neoliberal Ludwig Erhard was willing to gamble on restoring free competition. The success of the currency reform of 1948 has become legendary, because almost overnight shop windows began to fill with previously scarce goods, and the public, though losing its paper savings, found hard work once again worthwhile. Moreover, the credits of the Marshall Plan also helped revive production, because U.S. aid reintegrated German industry into a wider European context. This reliberalization of the economy led to annual growth rates of 5 to 7 percent over a couple of decades and dramatically improved living conditions by offering coveted consumer goods to the masses. Thus the new deutsche mark (DM) quickly became the symbol of recovery and a source of German pride.

The acceptance of parliamentary government was also facilitated by the emergence of a "chancellor democracy" under Adenauer. Surviving the Third Reich in inner exile, the former mayor of Cologne helped create a new conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union, by appealing not only to Catholics but also to Protestants. As a septuagenarian, he represented continuity going back to the empire and used his seniority to cement his ascendancy within his party and parliament. In the first free postwar election in 1949, he barely managed to defeat the Social Democratic war veteran Kurt Schumacher and to assume the chancellorship of a coalition government with other middle-class parties. Once in power, he affected an authoritarian style that tried to control everything. While leftist critics sometimes ridiculed him as "Ersatz kaiser," his personal integrity and competence won him great respect at home and abroad.

The establishment of the Federal Republic in 1949 with its capital in the Rhenish university town Bonn facilitated the westernization of German culture and society. The loss of the eastern territories and the separation of central Germany through the Iron Curtain shifted the center of gravity westward, rebuilding politics on more liberal foundations. Postwar encounters with the Western occupiers also tended to be more pleasant than dealings with the Stalinist Soviets. Because the Cold War rendered a neutralist course illusory, Adenauer committed himself to improving relations with France, fostering European integration (the European Coal and Steel Community and the Common Market), and participating in transatlantic defense (NATO membership). Aided by cultural exchanges, intellectuals rediscovered Western modernism, developing a critical stance toward their own society in the novels of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. Through the spread of Hollywood films and rock music, popular culture also Americanized, embracing U.S. models of consumption.

During the mid-1960s satisfied West Germans were nonetheless rocked by a generational revolt of unexpected scope and intensity. Young people found the bourgeois order and respectability, restored under Adenauer, too confining. They drew on the example of protests against rearmament and on the inspiration of a New Left, such as the Frankfurt school, which propagated an unorthodox Marxism. Spurred on by resentment against authoritarian structures in the university, worldwide demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and adult silence about participation in Nazi crimes, rebellious students such as Rudi Dutschke provoked the authorities with nonviolent sit-ins and teach-ins. In 1967 and 1968 police brutality and biased reporting by the Springer press created a mass movement, ready to launch a revolution. But Brandt's resolve "to dare more democracy" took the wind out of the protesters' sails. Their legacy was an impulse to grassroots democracy, a change in values and lifestyles, and a propensity for terrorist violence in the Red Army Faction.

In the early 1970s the social-liberal coalition attempted to remove the obstacles to reconciliation with the eastern neighbors by a more constructive Ostpolitik. Bonn's Hallstein Doctrine had refused to recognize the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a separate state, because it did not rest on "free elections." Moreover the refugee organizations, formed by about ten million expellees from East Germany, had insisted on their "right to a homeland." Chancellor Brandt first tried to reassure the Soviet Union and its satellites that Germans harbored no revanchism by signing a series of nonaggression treaties. Then long negotiations with East Germany produced the Basic Treaty (1972), which recognized the GDR de facto so as to settle practical problems, but held out the possibility of later unity. Finally the four occupation powers agreed to a treaty concerning Berlin to clarify access rights. Instead of confrontation, this policy of "change through closeness" sought to overcome division by cooperation.

At the same time, the "German model" of the social market economy came under increasing pressure from global competition. Under Brandt expectations of continued growth had led to huge wage increases and a further extension of social benefits. But the oil shock of 1973 and the collapse of the Bretton Woods exchange rate system increased the costs of exports, because the country had few domestic energy sources and the deutsche mark was revalued upward. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt met this challenge with a combination of austerity and pump priming so that growth once again resumed. But the second oil crisis of 1979 triggered another recession, which was overcome only by his successor, Helmut Kohl. Accustomed to the superior performance of "Rhenish capitalism" during the past decades, German leaders failed to understand that they were facing a structural transition to postindustrialism and global competition that would overtax their welfare state by creating long-term unemployment and regional deindustrialization.

The transformation of political culture after 1945 was largely driven by an effort to distance Germany from the dark shadows of the Nazi past. During the occupation, the Allies forced a reluctant population to confront its crimes through reeducation. Although Adenauer did push through restitution to the state of Israel, the majority of the public would rather forget its complicity in Nazi crimes. Only in the 1960s did the voices of the minority become amplified through the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz-Prozess in Frankfurt, critical television coverage, and changed teaching guidelines. While the antifascism of the student radicals oversimplified matters, scandalizing the Nazi past of public officials did have an effect. During subsequent decades local initiatives created memorials in former camps, and intellectuals embraced "a Holocaust identity." Hence public memory culture gradually assumed an astonishingly self-critical tone.

THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

The collapse of communism in 1989 and 1990 has doubled the burden of dealing with the dictatorial past, because it created a similar need to confront GDR crimes. Through opening secret archives, instituting judicial proceedings, and holding parliamentary hearings with witnesses and experts, the German government sought to enlighten its citizens about the misdeeds of the toppled communist regime. Eastern victims and western Cold Warriors thus denounced the GDR as an illegitimate system (Unrechtstaat) that rested on repression. In contrast, former regime members and some sympathizers in West Germany claimed that East Germany was "a noble experiment" that somehow failed to live up to its ideals. Between these extremes the intellectual task is instead to explore the contradictions between the dictatorial character of the regime and the relative normalcy of daily lives within it.

Undoubtedly the German Democratic Republic was a Soviet protectorate, because without Moscow's military support it simply ceased to exist. But the brutality of the so-called liberation in 1945 with its random killing, mass rape, and general pillaging also made "the Russians" unpopular in most circles, thereby handicapping their rule. For Joseph Stalin the conquered heart of Germany was the key prize of victory and the linchpin of his empire in Eastern Europe, secured by the stationing of about 450,000 soldiers there. Initially he wavered between using this area as a springboard for spreading communism to Western Europe or as a possible incentive for neutralizing a united German state. Eventually Walter Ulbricht persuaded him to opt for establishing an independent client state of his own in order to establish communism on German soil. But his radical measures remained so unpopular that the East German regime had to be rescued from the wrath of its own workers by Soviet tanks in June 1953.

The GDR was, nonetheless, also a product of indigenous traditions of Marxism and the labor movement. Because the Social Democrats had been the mainstay of Weimar, the Communists denounced them as "social fascists" and fought vigorously against the republic. But common suppression by the Nazis forced both rivals to understand that they needed to overcome their divisions in antifascist cooperation; therefore the Communist Party of Germany had to use only moderate force to compel the East German Social Democratic Party to join it in a Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the spring of 1946. West German Social Democrats denounced the move as "compulsory fusion," and East German moderates soon found out that they had been duped, because the Communists mercilessly purged the united party of all suspected deviants. Similarly, the SED captured the independent trade unions and turned them into transmission belts for its commands. Conscious of being a small minority, East German Communists increasingly relied on secret service surveillance and brute force.

To create a lasting basis for its rule the SED attempted to transform East Germany into a state of "workers and peasants," supported by a new socialist intelligentsia. This goal involved breaking the back of the bourgeois "class enemy" by confiscating all land of more than 100 hectares (250 acres) and redistributing it to landless laborers, as well as by nationalizing large industries and turning them into state-run enterprises. At the same time, it meant transforming the educational system, especially the universities, from training grounds for neutral experts into producers of loyal socialist cadres. The planned economy that resulted from subsequent collectivization and socialization of all businesses was run by these technical specialists, beholden to the party. On the one hand, this "real existing socialism" did subsidize food, housing, transportation, and health care. But on the other, its egalitarian aspirations were belied by the privileges of a new political "nomenklatura" elite.

Among many intellectuals, the radical distancing of the eastern leaders from the Nazi past fed the hope that the GDR would turn out to be the "better Germany." Strong antifascist rhetoric induced even the liberal Jewish survivor Victor Klemperer to join the SED. Such well-known émigrés as the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the novelist Stefan Heym, the composer Kurt Eisler, and the historian Jürgen Kuczynski were happy to return to the east. With reforms such as opening higher education to the workers, the party seemed to be fulfilling the hopes for a new beginning. But soon artists found themselves constrained by a primitive "socialist realism" whose pictures of blond tractor-drivers in wheat fields resembled Nazi examples. With the "Bitterfeld way," literature was dedicated to the class struggle, celebrating the advances of the proletariat. Creative writers such as Christa Wolf had a hard time reconciling their aversion to censorship with continued socialist loyalty.

The imprisonment of the East Germans by the Berlin Wall revealed the full repressiveness of the SED dictatorship. Before its construction about 3.5 million East Germans had gone to West Germany, but only half a million moved the other way. The exodus of farmers, managers, professionals and skilled workers created manpower shortages for the planned economy. Hence during the night preceding 13 August 1961 Ulbricht had barbed wire strung across the heart of Berlin and reinforced with concrete slabs in order to end the continual population drain. The elaborate system of electrified fences, minefields, trained dogs, jeep paths, guard towers, and cement barriers that is commonly known as the Berlin Wall sealed the western part of the former capital off from the eastern half of the city and from the surrounding countryside. Costing several hundred lives during desperate attempts at flight, the "antifascist protection wall" forced the public to come to terms with the system, but it thereby also became a central symbol of the inhumanity of the communist regime.

Ironically, the planned economy of the GDR lost the competition of living standards with the social market economy of the FRG. No doubt, its starting conditions for rebuilding were more difficult, because East Germany had to bear the brunt of industrial dismantling and pay a ten billion mark reparations bill to the Soviet Union. But central planning also contributed to the problem, because it succeeded only in organizing the rebuilding and in promoting smokestack industrialization with coal and steel, but not in providing sufficient consumer goods. Ulbricht's limited effort to restore competition with his "New Economic System" was too timid to spur sustained growth. Erich Honecker's Keynesianism of "the unity of social and economic policy" seemed more promising, because it tried to motivate workers by raising living standards. But it used Western loans to satisfy consumer needs rather than to make investments. Though claiming to be the tenth-largest industrial power, the GDR economy stagnated in the 1980s and approached bankruptcy.

At the same time, the return of elements of civil society began to challenge the SED regime from within. The brutal repression of all anticommunist resistance allowed dissent only to emerge on the basis of socialism. During the 1970s the physicist Robert Havemann was the first to promote a more democratic form of Marxism, and his example was soon followed by the poet Wolf Biermann and others. During the early 1980s an independent peace movement emerged under the protection of the Protestant Church that called for turning "swords into plowshares." Secret police (Stasi) persecution of pacifists, ecologists, and feminists led to the founding of a group dedicated to human rights (Initiative for Peace and Human Rights), which hed been written in the constitution but not observed in practice. Spreading its message through samizdat and Western journalists, an internal opposition, composed of a loose network of local groups, gradually began to form.

In the fall of 1989 the SED dictatorship crumbled as part of the general collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc. Among the long-term factors undermining its power were economic stagnation, erosion of faith in the socialist utopia, and the loss of Soviet support due to Mikhail Gorbachev's détente. The short-term causes involved the mass exodus of citizens who streamed across the Hungarian border and occupied the West German embassy in Prague, precipitating a reconsideration of travel policy that culminated in the breaching of the Berlin Wall on 9 November. Similarly important were the mass demonstrations that began with small Monday eve vigils at the Nikolai Church in Leipzig and eventually mobilized more than half a million people on Berlin's Alexander Square. This dual pressure finally led to the overthrow of the aging Honecker, his replacement by the younger Egon Krenz, and the creation of a Round Table with dissident groups, dedicated to reforming the GDR.

Instead of fostering the renewal of socialism, the democratic awakening led to the self-dissolution of the GDR and its unification with the Federal Republic. East Germans turned to West Germany for help, because Bonn had appealed to the eastern "brothers and sisters" as the true representative of the nation during the division. Chancellor Kohl's ten-point plan ended the cooperation with the SED regime, demanded drastic reforms in exchange for aid, and proposed the restoration of unity. In the first free election in March 1990, about three-quarters of the East Germans voted for parties favoring quick unification. To stop mass migration, Kohl offered to create a "currency, economic, and social union" with East Germany, introducing the Western deutsche mark to the East. In complicated "two-plus-four" negotiations the German states and the victorious powers of World War II hammered out an international settlement that recognized the eastern frontiers. The domestic transition was regulated by a unification treaty so that the new states could join the Federal Republic on 3 October 1990.

INTERPRETING GERMAN HISTORY

How is anyone to make sense of this chaotic course of German history in the twentieth century? The return of a shrunken and chastened nation-state, the extension of its stable democracy to the eastern Länder, and the country's firm anchoring in European and transatlantic ties suggest a happy ending for the narrative. But ought this encouraging outcome erase the ruptures, the instability, or the suffering associated with prior Central European developments? The human cost was too high simply to forget the havoc wrought by the succession of one belligerent empire, one failed republic, two murderous dictatorships, and finally one successful democracy. Any reconsideration therefore has to begin by taking this turbulence seriously. Only then might one suggest that if there is a pattern at all, it is a descent into catastrophe followed by gradual redemption.

For all those affected by it, this extraordinary history has left a trail of widely disparate, but generally troubling memories. Because perpetrators prefer to remain silent and collaborators tend to offer embarrassed rationalizations, it is the pained voices of the political and racial victims of the Nazis or Communists that clamor for sympathy. But some German authors are starting to ask: can maimed veterans, civilians terrorized by bombing, and refugees forced into flight not also claim some status of victimhood? The world wars and Hitler's genocide have connected countless lives in other countries with this murderous history, spreading its nightmares far and wide. In contrast, the more stable periods of "good times" that allowed recovery and reconciliation somehow seem less salient, although they are essential for going on living after mass murder and mass death. Because they contain so much suffering, these conflicting memories can hardly be brought into harmony—but they might be eased symbolically by accepting the pain of others.

In the popular imagination as well as in academic analysis, the catastrophic part of twentieth-century German history remains most prominent. Some of the attention is no doubt due to commercial catering to a voyeurism that exploits the fascination with the forbidden. More laudable is the construction of the Holocaust as ultimate evil, because it provides a telling example of the exact opposite of what a humane civilization ought to be. Racism, sexism, ethnic cleansing, unleashing of war, bureaucratic mass murder—the litany of Nazi crimes is as long as it is despicable. In reinforcing the identity of Western intellectuals, the Third Reich has come to serve as a metahistorical example of what can go wrong, whether it is considered an atavistic survival of primitivism or a consequence of the pathologies of modernity. But a ritualization of such a reading runs the risk of decontextualization, stylization, and moralization, which inhibit a rational analysis of the causes and consequences of genocide.

More neglected but equally important is the subsequent story of recovery, because it offers an encouraging example of rehabilitation from the worst of crimes. The administration of George W. Bush liked to cite the German success in recivilizing after 1945 as a justification for U.S. nation-building abroad. But it tended to forget that it took the military effort of a grand coalition to topple the Nazi dictatorship and the Germans' political distancing from Hitler to give the new beginning a chance. It required a fortuitous mixture of Allied compulsion and cooperation by a progressive minority of the defeated for democracy to have a second chance. It needed greater initial destruction and favorable conditions such as the Cold War and the postwar boom to rebuild the shattered society in a different image. Even if the reasons for success remain misunderstood, the second half of the century presents a more hopeful tale that suggests the possibility of learning from past mistakes.

See alsoAdenauer, Konrad; Bretton Woods Agreement; Ebert, Friedrich; Economic Miracle; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust; Nazism; Reparations; Versailles, Treaty of; World War I; World War II.

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Konrad H. Jarausch