Political consolidation and economic growth, 1949–69

The government that emerged from the Federal Republic’s first general election in August 1949 represented a coalition of the Christian Democrats with the Free Democrats. Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union, a veteran Roman Catholic politician from the Rhineland, was elected the country’s first chancellor by a narrow margin in the Bundestag. Because of his advanced age of 73, Adenauer was expected by many to serve only as an interim officeholder, but in fact he retained the chancellorship for 14 years. Theodor Heuss of the Free Democratic Party was elected as West Germany’s first president. As economics minister in the Adenauer cabinet, Ludwig Erhard launched the Federal Republic on a phenomenally successful course of revival as a social market economy. His policies left the means of production mainly in private hands and allowed market mechanisms to set price and wage levels. The government promoted social justice with measures designed to ensure an equitable distribution of the wealth generated by the pursuit of profit. Under these policies, industrial output rapidly recovered, living standards steadily rose, the government soon abolished all rationing, and West Germany became renowned for its Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle.”

One of the most urgent internal problems for Adenauer’s first administration was the resettlement of refugees. By 1950 West Germany had become the new home of 4.5 million Germans from the territory east of the Oder-Neisse line; 3.4 million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, prewar Poland, and other eastern European countries; and 1.5 million from East Germany. The presence of these refugees put a heavy social burden on West Germany, but their assimilation proved surprisingly easy. Many of the refugees were skilled, enterprising, and adaptable, and their labour proved an important contributor to West Germany’s economic recovery.

In East Germany the SED regime concentrated on building a viable economy in a territory that lacked rich natural resources, was less than one-half the size of the Federal Republic, and had a population (17 million) only one-third as large. The regime used its centralized control over a planned economy to invest heavily in the construction of basic industries at the expense of the production of consumer goods. Moreover, war reparations required that much productive capacity be diverted to Soviet needs. Despite an impressive rate of industrial growth, the standard of living remained low, lagging far behind that of West Germany. Even food was a problem, as thousands of farmers fled to West Germany each year rather than give in to mounting pressure to merge their land (which many had only recently obtained through the postwar agrarian reform) into the collective farms favoured by the communist regime. Food rationing had to be continued long after it had ended in West Germany. The resulting material hardships, along with relentless ideological indoctrination, repression of dissent, and harassment of churches by a militantly atheistic regime, prompted many thousands of East Germans to flee to West Germany every year. In 1952 East Germany sealed its borders with West Germany, but East Germans continued to leave through Berlin, where free movement still prevailed between the Soviet and Western sectors of the city.

In West Germany Adenauer followed a resolute policy of linking the new state closely with the Western democracies, even at the cost of perpetuating Germany’s division for the time being. In 1951 the chancellor succeeded in gaining membership for West Germany in the European Coal and Steel Community, which later served as the core of the European Economic Community, the precursor of the European Union. In that same year the Americans, British, and French agreed to a revision of the Occupation Statute that substantially increased the internal authority of the Federal Republic. Skillfully exploiting the Western fears of a communist assault on Europe, which had been awakened by the Korean War, Adenauer gained further concessions from the Western occupying powers in return for his agreement to rearm West Germany within the context of a western European defense system. In 1955 West Germany became a full member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and gained sovereignty over its foreign relations as the Occupation Statute expired.

With West Germany’s impressive economic recovery continuing, the voters confirmed the policies of the Adenauer government. In 1953 the coalition of the Christian and Free Democrats increased its previously thin majority. In 1957 the chancellor’s party achieved the first and only absolute majority ever recorded by a German party in a free general election. The FDP, who had left the government in 1956 over policy disputes, remained in opposition, along with the SPD.

Mounting dissatisfaction with the SED regime in East Germany led to the first popular uprising in the postwar Soviet bloc when workers in East Berlin, the seat of government, went on strike on June 17, 1953, to protest against increased production quotas. When the regime failed to respond, the workers took to the streets and demanded a change in government. The rebellion quickly spread throughout East Germany and was quelled only when Soviet troops intervened, killing at least 21 people and wounding hundreds of others. In the wave of retribution that followed, some 1,300 were sentenced to prison for taking part in the uprising, which the East German government portrayed as a plot by West Germany and the United States.

In the wake of the uprising, Stalin’s successors in the leadership of the Soviet Union upgraded the status of the German Democratic Republic. In 1954 Moscow ceased to demand reparations and proclaimed East Germany a sovereign state. In 1955 it became a charter member of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet bloc’s military alliance. The SED leadership loosened ideological controls on artistic and intellectual activities somewhat, increased the production of consumer goods, and relaxed pressure on farmers to enter collective farms. Agricultural yields improved, and the last food rationing ended in 1958. Within a few years, however, the government resumed its repressive measures and again shifted its economic priorities to favour the collectivization of agriculture and investment in heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods. The flight of refugees through Berlin continued, with a high proportion of technicians, managers, and professionals among them.

In 1961 the flow of refugees to West Germany through Berlin increased dramatically, bringing the total number of East Germans who had fled since the war to some three million. On August 13, 1961, the East German government surprised the world by sealing off West Berlin from East Berlin and surrounding areas of East Germany, first with barbed wire and later by construction of a concrete wall through the middle of the city and around the periphery of West Berlin. East Germans could no longer go to the West through the tightly guarded crossing points without official permission, which was rarely granted. East Germans who sought to escape by climbing over the wall risked being shot by East German guards under orders to kill, if need be, to prevent the crime of “flight from the republic.” By thus imprisoning the population, the SED regime stabilized the economy of East Germany, which eventually became the most prosperous of the Soviet bloc but which nevertheless continued to lag behind that of West Germany in both the quantity and quality of its consumer goods. Under party boss Ulbricht, the East German government also tightened the repressive policies of what had become a totalitarian communist dictatorship. Upon the death of President Pieck in 1960, Ulbricht had assumed the powers of the presidency as head of a newly created Council of State. In 1968 he imposed a new constitution on East Germany that sharply curtailed civil and political rights.

In West Germany’s national election in 1961 the Christian Democrats suffered losses for the first time. The SPD, which had broadened its appeal by jettisoning the last remnants of its Marxist past and accepting the existing economic system in its Bad Godesberg program of 1959, scored impressive gains. Adenauer managed to retain the chancellorship by forming another coalition with the Free Democrats, but his position was weakened. He had tarnished his image in 1959 when he announced his candidacy for the presidency only to withdraw in favour of a lacklustre party colleague, Heinrich Lübke, when he realized that under the Basic Law the president had little power. The elderly chancellor was further weakened when in 1962 his defense minister, Franz Josef Strauss of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, adopted high-handed methods in bringing about the arrest of the editors of the popular weekly news magazine Der Spiegel—which had been critical of Strauss—in connection with an alleged security leak. At the insistence of the Free Democrats, Adenauer relinquished the chancellorship in October 1963 to Erhard. Although the Erhard cabinet held its own in the election of 1965, the architect of the “economic miracle” himself fell from power in November 1966 when the Free Democrats withdrew their support because of disagreements over how to respond to a recession. For the next three years the Federal Republic was governed by a grand coalition of the two largest parties, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, with Christian Democrat Kurt Georg Kiesinger as chancellor and Social Democrat Willy Brandt as foreign minister.