West Germany

• 1. Introduction

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  West Germany was born on the 23rd of May 1949, carved from the ruins of a country that had just fought and lost the most destructive war in history. A nation divided, a capital city split in two, and a people who had to decide what kind of country they wanted to become. The formal name was the Federal Republic of Germany, but the world quickly settled on something simpler: West Germany. What followed was a story of astonishing reinvention. How did a country emerging from moral catastrophe become the second-largest economy in the world? How did its politicians hold together a fractured society through student uprisings, terrorism, and the constant pressure of Cold War confrontation? And how, in the end, did it simply absorb its eastern half and stop being called West Germany at all?

• 2. A Country Assembled from Zones

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  At the Yalta Conference, held between the 4th and the 11th of February 1945, the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union agreed to divide post-war Germany into four occupation zones. A French zone in the far west, a British zone in the northwest, an American zone in the south, and a Soviet zone in the east. Berlin itself was cut into four separate sectors. These divisions were never meant to be permanent. They were zones of administration, not national borders.

  Between 1946 and 1949 the three western zones began fusing together. The British and American zones merged first into a body called Bizonia, and then France joined to form Trizonia. The Soviet zone moved in the opposite direction and eventually became East Germany. Out of the western patchwork, twelve states were shaped into a new political entity, and the Federal Republic was declared.

  Eight million German expellees and refugees, displaced from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary under the Potsdam Protocols, eventually settled in the new West Germany. Their arrival swelled the labour pool at precisely the moment the country needed workers most.

• 3. The Economic Miracle

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  The term Wirtschaftswunder, economic miracle, was coined by The Times and came to describe what West Germany achieved beginning in 1950. The foundation was laid by the currency reform of 1948, which replaced the Reichsmark with the Deutsche Mark and ended the rampant inflation that had made economic life impossible. Allied dismantling of the West German coal and steel industry finally ended in 1950, releasing industrial capacity just as global demand for goods was surging.

  Germany at that moment had a large pool of skilled and inexpensive labour, swelled in part by the millions of expellees who had arrived from the east. The Marshall Plan provided additional stimulus. Allied reparations were dropped. German intellectual property was freed. With those constraints lifted, West Germany rebuilt with a speed that startled observers.

  By 1973, West Germany, home to roughly 1.26% of the world's population, held the world's fourth-highest GDP at 814,796 million international dollars, compared to East Germany's 129,969 million. In the late 1950s and 1960s, thousands of Gastarbeiter, or guest workers, supplied extra labour that sustained the boom. In 1976, West Germany became one of the founding nations of the Group of Six, the forerunner of today's G7, and by 1987 the Federal Republic held a 7.4% share of total world production.

• 4. Adenauer and the Architecture of Stability

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  Konrad Adenauer was 73 years old when he became the first Chancellor of West Germany in 1949. Many observers assumed he would be a caretaker. He ruled for 14 years. Adenauer pursued full alignment with NATO rather than neutrality, secured membership in the military alliance, and championed the agreements that would eventually develop into the present-day European Union. When West Germany was declared to have the full authority of a sovereign state on the 5th of May 1955, it joined NATO just four days later on the 9th of May.

  Adenauer's long tenure left deep marks, but it ended badly. In October 1962, the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel published an analysis of weaknesses in the West German military defence. Ten days after publication, police raided the magazine's offices in Hamburg and seized documents. Adenauer told the Bundestag the article amounted to high treason. The magazine's editor and owner, Rudolf Augstein, was jailed before the public outcry over press freedom grew too loud to ignore. The FDP members of Adenauer's coalition resigned, demanding the dismissal of Defence Minister Franz Josef Strauss for overstepping his authority. Adenauer announced he would step down in the autumn of 1963. Ludwig Erhard was named his successor.

  Political life under the Federal Republic's structure was notably stable. The Chancellor was elected by the legislature for a four-year term and could not be removed during that term unless the Bundestag had already selected a replacement. The Bundesrat had 45 members, chosen by the state governments. The Bundestag started with 402 voting members in 1949 and reached a peak of 499 in 1961.

• 5. The Protest Generation

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  In the early 1960s, West Germany's economic growth slowed sharply. The growth rate in 1962 was 4.7%, and fell to 2.0% the following year. After a brief recovery, the economy slid into a recession with no growth recorded in 1967. Ludwig Erhard stepped down in 1966, replaced by Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who led a grand coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD. The coalition's two-thirds majority allowed it to pass controversial emergency acts that could limit basic constitutional rights including freedom of movement.

  Opposition to those laws helped ignite a broader social movement. A key flashpoint came in 1967, when the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, visited West Berlin. Several thousand protesters gathered outside the Opera House. Supporters of the Shah attacked demonstrators with staves and bricks while police stood by. During a dispersal in the city centre, a bystander named Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the head and killed by a plainclothes policeman. It has since been established that the policeman, Kurras, was a paid spy for the East German security forces.

  The killing of Ohnesorg and the near-fatal shooting of student activist Rudi Dutschke, attacked as he cycled to the student union just before Easter 1968, pushed the movement toward confrontation. The tabloid Bild-Zeitung ran campaigns against protesters. In May 1968, three young people set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt, telling the court they considered it a legitimate act against imperialism. Out of this unrest grew the Red Army Faction, which carried out bank raids, killings, and hostage-takings across the 1970s. State Counsel Siegfried Buback was shot by RAF members in 1977. The group announced it was ceasing activities in 1998, with its last action in 1993.

  The same period brought the Auschwitz trials, which opened in Frankfurt in 1963, with the attorney Fritz Bauer gathering evidence on the camp guards. Daily newspaper reports and school visits to the proceedings revealed the full scale of the Shoah to a West German public that had underestimated its dimensions. The word Holocaust entered West German usage in 1979, when a 1978 American television mini-series of that name was broadcast on West German television.

• 6. Ostpolitik and the Question of Two Germanies

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  Willy Brandt became Chancellor in October 1969 and introduced what he called Neue Ostpolitik, a new eastern policy aimed at normalising relations with the Soviet bloc. In 1970, while visiting a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Brandt unexpectedly knelt and remained in silence. The gesture, remembered as the Kniefall von Warschau, was unscripted and became one of the most reproduced images of post-war European politics.

  A series of treaties followed: the Treaty of Moscow in August 1970, the Treaty of Warsaw in December 1970, the Four Power Agreement on Berlin in September 1971, the Transit Agreement in May 1972, and the Basic Treaty in December 1972. These agreements normalised relations between the two German states and led to both joining the United Nations. West Germany ceased to claim an exclusive mandate for all of Germany, giving up the Hallstein Doctrine under which it had refused diplomatic relations with any country that recognised East Germany.

  Brandt resigned in 1974 after one of his closest aides, Gunter Guillaume, was exposed as a Stasi agent. Brandt himself later said, "I was exhausted, for reasons which had nothing to do with the process going on at the time." Finance Minister Helmut Schmidt then formed a government. Schmidt and French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing jointly launched the European Monetary System in April 1978. Helmut Kohl replaced Schmidt in October 1982 after the FDP switched coalition partners in a constructive vote of no confidence. In the January 1987 elections, Kohl's CDU and CSU slipped from 48.8% to 44.3% of the vote, while the Greens, who had first broken the 5% threshold in the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen provincial election in 1979, rose to 8.3%.

• 7. Reunification

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  The collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, marked by the opening of the Berlin Wall, accelerated a process that was complete within a year. East Germany voted to dissolve and accede to the Federal Republic under Article 23 of the Basic Law, with the formal accession set for the 3rd of October 1990. The Unification Treaty of the 31st of August 1990 set the specific terms, and it was passed by two-thirds majorities in both the Volkskammer and the Bundestag on the 20th of September 1990.

  On the 3rd of October 1990, the five reconstituted East German states and a reunited Berlin joined the Federal Republic, raising the total number of states from ten to sixteen. The official ceremony was held at the Reichstag building, attended by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, President Richard von Weizsacker, and former Chancellor Willy Brandt among others. One day later, the parliament of united Germany assembled in the Reichstag in a symbolic act.

  Reunified Germany was legally a continuation of the Federal Republic, not a new state. It retained West Germany's memberships in the United Nations, NATO, the OECD, and the European Economic Community. The question of where to seat the government was settled only after what many considered the most memorable parliamentary session of the new republic: on the 20th of June 1991, the Bundestag voted by a slim majority to move both government and parliament from Bonn to Berlin.