No one could have foreseen the remarkable trans-
formation undergone by a defeated Germany in
just one decade. Two Germanies had emerged by
the 1950s, military allies of their former enemies,
Russia, Britain, the US and France. Germans in
the West were no longer treated with contempt
and condescension but were admired for the dis-
cipline and hard work that had restored their
prosperity. Not that both halves of Germany
prospered equally. The free-market economy in
the Western part proved itself to be far more effi-
cient in the production of wealth than the state-
planned economy of the Eastern third. The
Democratic Republic was a truncated state: the
former German agricultural and industrial terri-
tories east of the Oder–Neisse had been lost to
Poland and the Soviet Union. In 1945 some 17
million Germans lived in the Soviet zone, the later
Democratic Republic, and nearly 44 million in
the Western zones. Twenty years later, together
with their respective parts of Berlin, the prepon-
derance of West Germany over East had become
even greater; almost 60 million were living in the
Federal Republic and West Berlin, and 17 million
in the DDR including East Berlin. The two
Germanies provided something like a test of the
relative efficiency of the Western economies and
the command economies of the East, given that
both of these new states were starting from much
the same base in 1945.
The results were little short of astonishing.
Progress was certainly made in the East, but thedisparity in wealth, let alone liberty and quality of
life, between the countries grew with every
passing year. Just how backward the DDR had
become was hidden from the West until the
collapse of the East German state in 1990.
Before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 mil-
lions had walked to the freedom of the West.
They tended to be young, more active and more
enterprising. With barbed wire, control towers
and orders to shoot, the East German regime sur-
vived almost another three decades. It is possible
that without the fortified barrier between East
and West the DDR would have collapsed before
from a haemorrhage of its active population
seeking a better life in the West.
The transition to parliamentary democracy in
the West seemed smooth, the path almost too
easy. In the early years of occupation the Allied
authorities still had much suspicion of German
grass-roots revanchism. At least one generation
had to pass before support for the democratic
institutions of the Federal Republic became
something more than opportunism for the major-
ity and turned into a conviction that democratic
values were worth defending. The concerns of the
adult population in the immediate post-war years
were necessarily materialistic: to put together the
bare necessities for family life and after that to
gain a share of the good things – a home, furni-
ture, enough to eat, a refrigerator, a car.
The Germans were also asked in the 1950s to
help defend the West. The sudden change in(^1) Chapter 46
WEST GERMANY
ECONOMIC GROWTH AND POLITICAL
STABILITY