RECONSTRUCTION.

Nine million soldiers died in World War I, and some fifty-five million people perished in World War II, many of them civilians. Millions received physical and mental wounds that left permanent marks. The total wars of the twentieth century caused human suffering on an unprecedented scale, particularly in Europe. Reconstruction thus had to go far beyond repairing material damage; it had to encompass the societal fabric itself. This task could not be left to individuals alone. States had to accept new responsibilities as welfare states. International cooperation was to be the key to success.

While new countries were taking shape in Eastern Europe amid civil war and conflicts over borders and minority rights, reconstruction in Britain, France, and Germany after 1918 took place within a comparatively stable framework that rested on the cooperation of organized interests, among them the previously excluded trade unions. Their governments faced entirely new challenges as millions of returning soldiers had to find jobs; disabled veterans, war widows, and orphans needed financial support; and the debts that state budgets had incurred over the course of the war had to be brought under control. Absent functioning international cooperation, reconstruction ultimately remained shaky at best. After 1945 reconstruction took place against the backdrop of the emerging Cold War. Germany, heavily destroyed, politically powerless, and morally devastated, became the main site of the conflict between Western-style democracy and Soviet communism. As Europe west of the Iron Curtain, aided by the United States, developed much more successful mechanisms of economic growth and cooperation than its eastern counterpart, it entered an unprecedented era of stability and prosperity.

RECONSTRUCTION AFTER WORLD WAR I

Reintegrating the soldiers into the economy proceeded remarkably smoothly in Britain, France, and Germany. Within only half a year, six million German soldiers were back home and at work again. The disintegration of the German army in fall 1918 sped up the process, and employers were eager to provide returning soldiers with their previous jobs. The employers also accepted the new eight-hour day that created the demand for additional jobs, as did the expansion of the public sector. Preventing an overthrow of the newly established republic by a Bolshevik revolution was given priority over making profits. A staggered system of demobilization, in which older workers with special skills were demobilized first and younger ones were kept under military discipline longer, helped streamline the process and defuse radicalism in Britain. In France, the huge agricultural sector absorbed many returning soldiers and reduced the burden on industry. Demobilization's swift success was only possible, however, because most women left, more or less voluntarily, the factory jobs they had taken over after the outbreak of the war in 1914. This should not be construed, however, as rollback of an alleged emancipation during the war, as some scholars have argued. Recent studies have shown that, while the long-term trend of giving women more access to clerical and administrative jobs was, if anything, sped up by the war, women remained cast, during and after it, primarily as wives and mothers whose skills and virtues were different from and complementary to those of men.

More than half a million German women lost their husbands and 1.2 million children lost their fathers in the war. About 1.5 million German soldiers returned home with permanent disabilities; this was more than a tenth of all males drafted. The figures for Britain and France were similar. Because private charities alone could not provide the needed financial support, governments had to step in and shoulder a substantial burden for the foreseeable future. From the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, a fifth of Germany's national budget went into war pensions—far more than was spent on unemployment relief. However, recipients in all countries, particularly the disabled, regarded their benefits as insufficient. In Germany, where disability was determined as reduction of average earning capacity, special protection in the labor market was granted to the severely disabled and payments were higher than in the other two countries, but even those payments barely reached subsistence level. British legislation focused on the degree of disablement with little regard for previous occupation and social status but offered vocational training. These courses, however, were cut back substantially when the government drastically reduced its expenditures in 1921–1922. France, in line with its republican tradition, privileged disabled veterans politically by recognizing every wound received during the war without further examination but did not establish any protection in the labor market before 1923.

Under these circumstances, reducing public debts turned out to be a difficult task that was to have harsh social consequences. As governments had been forced to issue bonds and to use the printing press to cover unprecedented war expenses, inflation was rampant at the end of the war, but it eased the transition to a peacetime economy. In Britain, it fueled a speculative postwar boom that came to an abrupt end in 1920, with prices peaking at two and a half times their prewar levels. The return to the gold standard in 1925 kept inflation at bay, but, by overvaluing the pound sterling, it also held British exports down. Although newer industrial sectors such as the electrical supply and motor vehicle industries showed remarkable growth and put Britain in a better position overall than France and Germany, unemployment doubled compared to the prewar level.

France saw its budget particularly burdened by the need for material reconstruction in the areas that had been occupied by Germany and destroyed by fighting. French industrial production was down to only 60 percent of its prewar level when war ended; in the north, 220,000 houses as well as seventeen thousand miles of roads and railroad tracks had to be rebuilt. To speed up reconstruction, the French government borrowed more money from its citizens after 1918 than during the war. As a result, the franc kept tumbling. By 1926 it had fallen to less than one-tenth of its prewar value; at that point the government sharply raised taxes and drastically cut down its expenditures.

The Treaty of Versailles stipulated that Germany pay reparations to the victors for the costs of the war. This has often been described as the major reason why inflation in Germany, in contrast to Britain and France, ended in complete disaster. Moreover, it has been argued that reparations placed a huge economic and political burden on the German reconstruction effort that eventually resulted in the failure of the Weimar democracy. Historical research since the mid-1980s has cast doubt on this deterministic interpretation, however. While it is true that the Treaty of Versailles provided nationalist propaganda with a prime tool with which to discredit the republic, it did not prevent Germany from rising to the status of a major power again, as became painfully clear over the course of the 1930s. Employment and investments were held aloft until 1923 by an "inflationary consensus" that encompassed big business, labor, and the government. Due to differences among the Allies and German delaying tactics, a total was set on German reparations only in the spring of 1921.

When at an Allied conference in London it was finally announced that Germany had to pay 132 billion gold marks in annual installments of about three billion marks, the value of the currency began to decrease rapidly, falling to less than 1 percent of its prewar dollar value until the summer of 1922. The German government took steps to fulfill its obligations, only to state that full compliance was in fact impossible. Whether that was true remains an open question, but there is no doubt that making a sustained effort would have required the government to drastically raise taxes and cut public expenditures, thereby further undermining the shaky new republic. Such measures could no longer be avoided, however, after the collapse of the mark and German economy in the hyperinflation of 1923. This had come in the wake of Germany's announcement that it was suspending reparation payments, France's retaliatory occupation of the economically vital Ruhr region, and German resistance against that occupation.

The government reached a new agreement on reparations, drafted by a committee led by American expert Charles G. Dawes, that stipulated lower annual payments and provided Germany with an international loan of 800 million marks to get the economy started again. Although, in contrast to a widespread popular view, the German inflation did not wipe out the middle classes, since the inflationary effects on mortgages and bonds in many cases canceled each other out, its final stage left traumatic memories of a world turned upside down. That the consolidation of reparations should occur under American auspices demonstrated how dependent Germany as well as Britain and France had become on the United States as a result of the huge debts they had incurred during the war. This consolidation rested on shaky ground, however, as it was based on many short-term loans that flowed into Germany after 1924, comprising a large share of its foreign debt. When they were withdrawn in the wake of the "Black Friday" of 1929, it became apparent that economic reconstruction after World War I had been a hollow success.

Much less is known about how returning soldiers, their families, and the survivors of the fallen came to terms with the psychological turmoil of the war than about postwar social and economic policy. Fears that veterans would infect societies with violence proved, on the whole, to be unfounded. In Britain, violent crime actually declined after the war. Widespread violence was a feature of postwar politics in Germany and Italy, but those engaging in it made up only a minority of all veterans. Veterans' organizations, which attracted large followings in France and Germany, lobbied for higher pensions and broader political aims, but they may also have served as meeting grounds where veterans could converse about their war experiences and thereby cope with them more easily. Literature and movies about the war, regardless of their ideological messages, provided another medium for coming to terms with individual experiences, especially from the late 1920s on. The construction of thousands of war memorials in Britain, France, and Germany showed the need for public sites to mourn the dead and remember the war. Memorials in the two victorious countries emphasized the defensive aspects of their participation in the war, whereas German memorials often struck an aggressive posture. The inability of German politicians to agree on one concept for a national memorial demonstrated how deeply split Germans were over the meaning they should attribute to a war that had ended in defeat.

RECONSTRUCTION AFTER WORLD WAR II

In contrast to its hesitation after 1918, the United States took the lead in reconstructing Europe after 1945. During the final phase of the war it helped establish international agreements and agencies to guarantee the success of the reconstruction process and the stability of the international order. While the United Nations was to solve international political crises, the Bretton Woods agreement, along with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, was to create an international economic order based on free trade, with the U.S. dollar as leading currency. The underlying assumptions were that the Soviet Union as well as Britain and France would be cooperative and that international trade would pick up quickly after the end of the war. Within two years, however, it became clear that these assumptions had been too optimistic.

The United States responded in June 1947 by offering the European Recovery Program. This package of material and financial aid was proposed for countries in both Western and Eastern Europe, but those in the east were forced by Joseph Stalin to reject the offer. Devised and announced by U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall, it came soon to be known as the Marshall Plan and has been the subject of considerable discussion. Until the 1980s the prevailing view was that the Marshall Plan saved a Western Europe on the brink of total collapse and put it on a path of steady growth, thereby consolidating a benign American hegemony that had been emerging since 1944–1945. Subsequent research has substantially modified this interpretation, however. It has shown that Europe—west and east—experienced strong domestic growth as early as in 1947. Imports to Western Europe, however, were severely hampered by the lack of dollars, and it was here, in averting a dangerous monetary crisis, that the Marshall Plan had its greatest economic impact. Equally important was its psychological impact, reassuring Western Europeans of U.S. support and giving them confidence in the future. Research since the mid-1980s has also demonstrated that Britain and France pursued nationalist agendas of European economic cooperation reminiscent of those after 1918. This cooperation eventually came in the form of agreements between a small number of states, beginning with France and Germany. The two countries approached each other and established a joint control body for coal and steel production in 1951 after French attempts to gain control over Germany's heavy industry had been met with stiff American and British resistance. Hence, contrary to American objectives, state planning, not the free market, became the founding principle of what would develop into the European Community over the next decade.

Inflation was again a problem in the immediate postwar years, particularly for France and even more so for Germany, but its negative effects were soon superseded by the unprecedented growth rates of the 1950s—around 4 percent annually—that paved the way for full employment and mass consumption at the end of the decade. In 1948 West Germany had introduced the new "Deutsche Mark," which was to become the symbol of its postwar prosperity. Reparations did not become a major political issue after 1945, nor did they slow down economic recovery for an extended period. They widened the economic gap, however, between West Germany and East Germany. Whereas West Germany was allowed to terminate its payments to the western Allies in 1952, East Germany had to provide reparations equal to a much higher share of its GDP (roughly 25 percent) to the Soviet Union until 1954. Economic reconstruction was furthermore facilitated by the fact that the aerial war had done less damage than it seemed. It had mainly affected housing and infrastructure but had left three-quarters of Germany's production capacity intact.

Immediately after the war, Europeans widely agreed that unfettered prewar capitalism had been a catastrophic failure and should be replaced by a combination of state ownership of key industries, central economic planning, and a comprehensive welfare system. As the oppressive consequences of the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe became apparent and the economic recovery attributed to the Marshall Plan began to show its luster, Western Europeans turned to conservative leaders, while remaining committed to the expansion of state functions. This was most notable in Britain, where Winston Churchill, after his return to power in 1951, kept key legislation enacted by the previous Labour government such as the nationalization of the coal mines and the tax-financed National Health Service. In France, which emerged from a four-year-long German occupation with a worn-down production apparatus, the state took control of 20 percent of the economy and used central planning to modernize the steel industry as well as electricity and the railroads. The social policy of Christian conservative Konrad Adenauer in West Germany started with housing construction, family allowances, and payments for the eight million expellees and refugees from the east; it was ambitiously expanded in 1957, when old age pensions were raised substantially and were tied to the rise of wages and salaries.

The reconstruction of European political systems began with the punishment of those deemed key figures, supporters, and collaborators of the Nazi regime. More brutal and pervasive in the east, where they turned into purges of all opponents of the newly emerging Communist order, these measures treated societal elites rather leniently in the west, sparing many civil servants, most notably the police. In West Germany, where particularly comprehensive efforts at denazification were made in the American zone of occupation, top members of the Nazi party were successfully excluded from further political influence, yet many less prominent figures escaped punishment. While this made it easier to integrate former Nazi supporters in the new democracy, it postponed a thorough reckoning with the crimes of the Nazi regime.

All over Western Europe parliamentary democracy was now successfully revived. Coalition building overcame the bitter cleavages between Left and Right that had torn apart countries in the interwar period, as the Cold War drew Social Democrats and their allies in the trade unions steadily away from the communists. France's Fourth Republic, shaky from the start, did not survive the turmoil of decolonization and gave way to a presidential system tailored to General Charles de Gaulle at the end of the 1950s. In West Germany, the three Allies supervised the creation of a viable democratic system that deviated from the Weimar Republic in crucial respects. It shifted power to the parliament and joined political Catholicism with conservative Protestantism and free market liberalism in the new and moderate Christian Democratic Union, which was to become the leading party on the right.

The mental wounds that World War II inflicted were much more diverse than those of World War I. In addition to the experiences of the returning soldiers there were those of the survivors of the death and the concentration camps, the former slave laborers, the civilians who had survived the bombardment of their cities, the expellees and refugees, and the many women who had been raped by enemy soldiers, particularly in eastern Germany. One reaction to this multitude of horrors was silence and the attempt to move on. World War II did not spawn a new generation of war memorials, writers did not produce literary accounts as powerful as the ones published after 1918, and veterans' organizations did not become a prominent feature of the postwar public sphere. Another reaction was the construction of national memories of the war that portrayed the nation as a community in suffering and resistance, thereby neglecting the extent of collaboration and active participation in the crimes of the Nazi regime. In particular, this reconstruction of national communities in many countries failed to explicitly include the Jews. Moreover, the Holocaust became the subject of public debate only after more than a decade of silence.

CONCLUSION

The collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s enabled Eastern Europeans to eventually revive parliamentary democracy themselves and, by entering the European Union, take the creation of a supranational Europe a crucial step further. But the end of the Cold War also spawned a new violent conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Atrocities against civilians in this war made postwar reconstruction a difficult endeavor that required tight international supervision akin to that imposed on Germany after 1945. In 2005, reconstruction was still an ongoing process there. Also, in the 1990s, Europeans began debating World War II and the Holocaust with renewed intensity, focusing on issues that immediately after the war had been treated either with silence or in a self-serving way. While Germans engaged in controversial discussions about the conduct of the Wehrmacht, slave labor, the air war, and a Holocaust memorial, in other countries collaboration with the Nazi regime and its share of responsibility for the Holocaust became the subjects of heated debates. Almost two generations after a successful material reconstruction, healing the mental wounds of World War II remained a painful and open-ended undertaking.

See alsoMarshall Plan; Versailles, Treaty of; World War I; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. 1920. With a new introduction by David Felix. New Brunswick, N.J., 2003. Highly influential critique of the Treaty of Versailles, especially of reparations, by one of the key economic theorists of the twentieth century.

Secondary Sources

Bessel, Richard. Germany after the First World War. Oxford, U.K., 1993. Comprehensive account of demobilization and its social and cultural ramifications.

Bessel, Richard, and Dirk Schumann, eds. Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s. Cambridge, U.K., 2003.

Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male. Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War. Chicago, 1996. Original study of masculinity and gender relations during and after the war.

Cohen, Deborah. The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939. Berkeley, Calif., 2001.

Downs, Laura Lee. Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914–1939. Ithaca, N.Y., 1995.

Ellwood, David W. Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar Reconstruction. London, 1992. Overview of reconstruction after 1945 with particular focus on economic issues.

Feldman, Gerald D. The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924. New York, 1993. Magisterial and detailed account of the German inflation, centered on the decision-making among the political and economic elites.

Geppert, Dominik, ed. The Postwar Challenge: Cultural, Social, and Political Change in Western Europe, 1945–58. Oxford, U.K., 2003.

Grayzel, Susan. Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999. Shows the continuity between wartime and postwar debates.

Kuisel, Richard F. Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley, Calif., 1996. On economy and society after World War II.

Lagrou, Pieter. The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.

Maier, Charles S. Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I. Princeton, N.J., 1975. Describes "corporatist" reconstruction based on agreements between state, capital, and labor.

Moeller, Robert G., ed. West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997.

Pedersen, Susan. Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.

Roberts, Marie-Louise. Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago, 1994. Analyzes the fears of national decline attributed to women's emancipation.

Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.

Wirsching, Andreas, and Dirk Schumann, eds. Violence and Society after the First World War. Munich, 2003. First issue of Journal of Modern European History. Compares key countries in Western and Eastern Europe.

Dirk Schumann