Conclusion

This concluding chapter argues that Germans themselves imagined the framework for a more stable political structure before the arrival of American troops. The reconstruction of post-Nazi Germany relied so much on the reconciliation of previously conflicting groups that “partnership” became its foundational ideology. The Germans who rebuilt the educational system in the Federal Republic, West Germany's intelligentsia, were the lions and lambs of the Weimar Republic in their youth. They lived through and participated in the social, economic, political, and cultural conflicts that tore apart German society before Hitler's rise. They also witnessed the Nazi attempt to overcome those conflicts, and some supported Hitler publicly before opposing him as he led Europe and the world into a catastrophic war. When this generation of Germans designed courses of education for the rising post-Nazi generations, they celebrated the ideal of partnership precisely to avoid the earlier conflicts.

Sectarian Visions of the Economy

This chapter examines the failure of elites to build consensus on a proper policy response to the onset of worldwide economic depression after the crash of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. Economic crisis overwhelmed all other public discussion in the early spring of 1930, when the Social Democratic chancellor Hermann Müller and his cabinet were forced to resign. In this potentially dire situation, Paul von Hindenburg decided to use his constitutional prerogative as president to declare a national emergency. In Hindenburg's eyes, not only had the Müller regime failed to formulate a response to the downturn, but more fundamentally, they had divided the national community, stoking class conflict and alienating the religious communities by advocating a complete separation of church and state. Thus, Hindenburg appointed Heinrich Brüning as chancellor, a policy expert from the country's Center Party, which represents the interests of Germany's Catholic population and was still strongly affiliated with the Catholic Church.

The Constitutional Crisis

This chapter explores both sides of the country's deep-seated class conflict, which revealed itself in a public debate about constitutional democracy between the highest levels of the judiciary and the leaders of Germany's powerful labor unions. Legal theorists often emphasize the importance of reaching consensus on moral principles for the stability of a constitutional system. In Germany, that consensus did not exist. The political representatives whom Germans elected after the Great War to draft a constitution could agree that the new German state should be a republic as opposed to a monarchy. However, they could not find common ground regarding as foundational a question as the authority of the three branches of government and their proper relationship to one another. Most important, minds diverged on whether the state should embrace parliamentary supremacy: the idea that the legislative branch, not the judicial or executive, should enjoy final authority in national decision making.

The Culture of Christian Partnership

This chapter discusses the creation of a post-Nazi state whose leaders celebrated cultural pluralism instead of uniformity, focusing particularly on the remarkable public campaign of the late 1950s to reintegrate Jews into German culture. Scholars of German history have often argued that the country's transformation from a society that valued cultural uniformity in the beginning of the twentieth century to one that valued cultural plurality by the end of the century resulted from the rise of a new post-Nazi generation. They argue that this generational cohort, whose formative experience was the fall of Hitler in 1945, was able to face Germany's genocidal past in a way the older generation could not, and in the process opened up society to cultural diversity. It was under this generation's leadership that German politicians began using the term “multiculturalism” and built a Holocaust memorial in the heart of the nation's capital.

Two Competing Ideals for a Third Reich

This chapter examines the radical efforts of National Socialists and their supporters to create order out of the “chaos” of Weimar-era dissensus, as well as the difficulty they faced because of a fundamental internal conflict within the movement itself. The project to create a common German way of life out of the “worldview chaos” of Weimar was hampered by the persistence of competing visions of Germany's future among the younger generation of Nazis and conservatives. In particular, minds divided on the question of the Christianization of the state. The clash of visions became more apparent when the nation's economic situation revealed itself as less sustainable than previously thought. At that point, it became clear that the leaders of the Nazi regime, despite running a dictatorship, were not necessarily better equipped to bridge the deep divisions among Germans than the founders of the liberal democracy in Weimar had been.

Living with Liberal Democracy

This chapter looks at the rise in prominence of the Institute for Social Research, a small academic center whose work became a lodestar for left-wing politics among secular West Germans in the 1960s. That an institution which had previously been forced into exile because of its Marxist politics had returned in the form of a quasi-state agency in an age of extreme anticommunism was remarkable in itself. Still more impressive, perhaps, is the fact that the Institute for Social Research has come to represent West Germany's shift from the Christian conservatism of the Adenauer era into the multicultural era of present-day Germany. The chapter then examines the institute's role as a left-wing entity whose members were deeply disappointed with how the constitutional, economic, educational, and cultural reconstruction had played out in West Germany, and yet accepted the new liberal democracy's legitimacy, actively endorsing it against the alternative of the communist German Democratic Republic.

The Education of Western Europeans

This chapter focuses on the Social Democrats and the compromises on values they felt forced to make—particularly the abandonment of their previous platforms of pacifism and internationalism—in order to resonate with West German voters in the climate of the Cold War. In the years after 1953, as the Western Allies turned over sovereign decision-making power over foreign relations to the Federal Republic's government, Germans showed signs of coming to agreement on precisely the issue of values and “ideals” for the German youth that had caused such crisis during Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The common ideal that bound them together was twofold: the value of “Europe” and the foreign policy of “binding to the West.” In the years leading up to 1953, Germans from across the Federal Republic's political spectrum participated in the creation of educational institutions designed to shape a generation of young people capable of overcoming centuries of conflict in a common “European” identity.

Christian Economics?

This chapter explores how German elites molded a bare majority to support a “Christian” policy to respond to the dire economic situation still facing the country, under the leadership of the first post-Nazi chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. The first advocates of the “social market economy” argued that the policies underpinning it reflected “our Christian way of thinking”: principles ultimately rooted in Christian scripture. Their party affiliation was either the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) or the Christian Social Union (CSU), whose leaderships ran their campaigns in conjunction with each other and together formed a bloc (CDU/CSU) in national legislative bodies. The last time German politicians had attempted to forge an interconfessional “Christian” economic policy, Protestant liberals and Catholics had infamously failed in their charge. Twenty years later, however, the attempts met with more success.

The Problem of Culture

This chapter addresses the question of cultural identity and cultural minorities, particularly the state's proper relationship to the values associated with Christianity and Judaism—the two main religions represented among the nation's population. As a precondition of entry to the League of Nations, the governments of new states in central and eastern Europe with a regional history of ethnic strife were required to negotiate treaties guaranteeing specific rights for people who did not identify as the national majority and thus faced a danger of discrimination. The League Council's commission on minorities had not, however, required the German government to sign any special protection treaty regarding Jews. Leaders of the central Jewish organizations in Germany had never sought a legal minority status. On the contrary, they claimed to be an integral part of the German cultural community, a religious faith group just like Protestants or Catholics whose members were inseparable from and contributed actively to German culture as Jews.

The Creation of Constitutional Consensus

This chapter demonstrates how, over the following decade, leaders of the old judiciary and the old labor unions attempted to find resolution to the class conflict that had pitched their forces against each other during the Weimar years, ultimately laying the foundation for the constitutional consensus of a post-Nazi, Western Germany in 1948. This constitutional consensus enabled partnership between the two largest political parties in Western-occupied Germany: the rebranded Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the new Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which together received the vast majority of votes in the elections for a constitutional convention in Bonn. Despite their bitter differences on questions of economic and cultural policy, the leaders of these two parties were in near unanimous agreement that the will of the people as represented in a democratic parliament should not be sovereign, and that an unelected, elite judiciary should be able to review and strike down legislation whenever found to be unconstitutional.