The downfall and disappearance of the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, and the unification in 1990 of the two German states into the Federal Republic of Germany, the FRG, marked the end of an era. Forty years of divided and non-simultaneous German history had been brought to an end, and the national or German question had at last been solved. Since 1990 German history has continued as the history of the Federal Republic. From this perspective 1990 marked not an absolute end, but the continuity of the Federal Republic and to some degree even the triumph of the political, economic and social system of the FRG, as the inhabitants of the socialist GDR, when they had the opportunity, voted for joining the successful and wealthy West German state. The end of divided history, however, has had another consequence. Even if the era of the GDR, because of the very favourable archive situation, attracted great attention among historians, the focus of historical research has turned more and more to the history of the Federal Republic in order to analyse and explain why the FRG ended as a success, while the socialist GDR failed in its ambitions and aspirations as an alternative Germany. History demonstrated that the GDR was no German option, although for some time it was a German reality.Footnote ¹

The Federal Republic was or became the option. Viewed in historical perspective the Federal Republic, or West Germany, as a new Germany was a success, and it is undeniable that in many respects its history might be told as an unusual history of progress. From the installation of democracy in 1949 to the Modell Deutschland as a social market economy and welfare state, to the establishment of the European Economic Community, new Germany represented something positive. But as Hans Günter Hockerts, the German historian, points out, the concept of its history as success (Erfolgsgeschichte) gives too much emphasis to the unambiguous and the obvious, while neglecting shortcomings and opposition (p. ix).

The essential question is thus whether the Federal Republic in fact realised a new Germany. The background or context is well known: the Allied victors in the Second World War were determined to put an end to German militarism and power politics and to establish in their place a stable, peaceful and reliable German democracy. But being unable to agree on what this included or compounded, 1949 resulted in two political systems. The Soviets supported the German Democratic Republic in the East, while the Western powers established the Federal Republic. The two states each represented new beginnings, but in different shapes and with different ends: a liberal democracy in the FRG and a people's democracy in the GDR.

In a longer historical perspective and context the unification of the German Democratic Republic with the Federal Republic in October 1990 did not establish a new Germany. It augmented in terms of territory and numbers the new democratic and pluralistic FRG established in 1949, which could look back on a history which was successful in terms of politics, economics, welfare, culture and international relations. In his account of the history of the Federal Republic Edgar Wolfrum speaks of the ‘geglückte Demokratie’. This success of a democratic political system, different from the Weimar Republic, needs to be explained, not least because this development, given the legacy of Nazism, militarism, the breach of civilisation and the collapse of 1945, was anything other than obvious and not unqualified, as some of the trials related to the Nazi past did show. Bonn was not Weimar and it did not become Weimar; neither will Berlin ever become Weimar.

Wolfrum's account is a slightly modified and extended version of volume 23 in the new Gebhardt series,Footnote ² and it stands out as an analysis of the establishment and development of the democratic German state. Wolfrum has written a convincing and excellent synthesis. His narrative starts out by asking the Federal Republic ten questions, questions that represent historical interpretations such as modernisation and democracy, liberalisation, ‘Westernisation’ and civilising, and the history of normalisation. From there he proceeds chronologically to show the causal connections between different dimensions. The result is a very competent narrative of the successful democratisation of the Western state. Unlike the usual classification Wolfrum, probably correctly, divides his history into three different, chronological phases. He begins with the consolidation and stabilisation of the Federal Republic until the end of 1950s, then follows its new departure and pluralistic changes during the long 1960s, and finally describes its internationalisation since 1974. The phases express the dominant themes of the eras. This chronological structure makes it possible to give the long 1960s a weight of their own, which is legitimate since they brought about important social and cultural changes that contributed to the stabilisation of the new German democracy. In the 1960s the political and social tendencies of liberalisation prevailed. Society changed as a result of reforms that contributed to what has been called ‘internal democratisation’. It consisted among other things of changes in values, lifestyles and mentalities.

The long sixties were successful in complementing the institutional democratisation of the West German state. From the end of the 1950s the demand for a democratic society – that is, for the extension of political democracy to society – had been growing. One factor in this process was the German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf's celebrated 1965 volume on society and democracy in Germany, which described the conflict and antagonism between state and society.Footnote ³ He pointed out the need for the democratising and liberalising society, if the new democracy were to succeed in the long run. To Dahrendorf this even constituted the so-called German question: ‘The German question is the question of the restraints on liberal democracy in Germany.’Footnote ⁴ The German question was not national, it was social and cultural; since it was about debate and conflict in society, it was about altitude.

The reconstruction of the defeated Germany, above all in politics, economics and production had been finished by the end of the 1950s, and the West Germans were materially and socially well off. The 1960s, with the breakthrough of civilian society, thus became a turning point. This becomes clear from two important anthologies, edited respectively by Ulrich Herbert and by Matthias Frese, Julia Paulus and Karl Teppe. The question of how the Federal Republic, despite the still existing strains from National Socialism, could transform itself into a liberal and pluralistic society, is the topic of the collection edited by Ulrich Herbert. In his deliberate and contextualising introduction, ‘Liberalisierung als Lernprozess’, he underlines the fact that the transformation process was not merely a history of success; the modernisation and liberalisation of West German society was troubled and hampered by many factors, historical, social and psychological, and not least by the fact that National Socialism was deeply rooted and that its legacy went much deeper than imagined: ‘It is only when one really takes the measure and intensity of the social continuities from National Socialism in the early Federal Republic into account . . . that the development of the Federal Republic to a liberal and democratic society within a generation . . . is seen as an achievement’ (p. 19).

In his overview Herbert shows that from the end of the 1950s the old orientations in society and mentality came under pressure. The collection consists of thematically organised contributions from the Freiburg Forschungsgruppe zur Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Freiburg Research Group on the History of the Federal Republic). In the first section, under the heading ‘Prevention [Abwehr] and legitimation’, they deal with collective guilt and the murder of the Jews and the role of the Nazi past. The second section covers continuity and integration with regard to the resocialisation of members of the Nazi regime. The next section takes up political reorientation in the form of the search for a democratic society, and last but not least the section on deviation and norms focuses on liberalisation and democratisation in controversial social themes such as homosexuality, youth crime and children born outside marriage. The collection presents a view of the 1960s which is much more dramatic and controversial than was hitherto thought to be the case. It suffices to mention a few examples to illustrate the urge for change, but also the restraining power of old structures. Moritz Scheibe describes the intellectual search for a democratic society as it presented itself in the controversies between liberal sociologists such as Dahrendorf and Jürgen Habermas on one side and conservatives such as Helmut Schelsky on the other. These were controversies that made the epoch a turning point in intellectual history. Christine von Hodenberg examines in her chapter on the development of journalism and journalists why the emergence of a critical public (Öffentlichkeit) happened only in the 1960s: ‘The power of the occupying powers had not been sufficient to install and guarantee a political Öffentlichkeit that fulfilled democratic functions.’ Only at the end of the 50s do we see a departure and a generational shift among the journalists in the most prominent media (p. 309 f).

The voluminous collection edited by Matthias Frese, Julia Paulus and Karl Teppe takes up some of the same issues. With a regional focus on North Rhine-Westphalia, the authors ask what the 1960s in fact meant for the history of the Federal Republic. In their introduction Frese and Paulus characterise the 1960s as the ‘Wendezeit [turning point] der Bundesrepublik’. Like the German historian Manfred GörtemakerFootnote ⁵ they even speak of ‘Umgründung’ (re-establishment) of a society which found itself at the point of a new departure. The collection is based on a conference held in Münster, Westphalia, in 2000. All thirty-four contributions focus on the many political, social, cultural and intellectual streams that contributed to the process of change and renewal. They illuminate various developments and tendencies in society, politics, planning and administration, and in lifestyle and forms of interpretation. They deal with family, gender and sex, and with Öffentlichkeit and historical pictures. Some of this has already been described at a general national level, but many new aspects are revealed, and they are supplemented with regional details. In the section on politics and Öffentlichkeit two important tendencies are dealt with: Julia Angster describes how Americanisation affected West German election campaigns and led to a shift in the understanding of politics, while Christina von Hodenberg deals with the departure that the 1960s represented to West German political culture, for instance in relation to the sexes. Of particularly striking interest are the contributions dealing with political planning, a field that experienced a boom in the 1960s. Although planning existed in the fifties, it had a negative connotation in the context of the Cold War, and reminded many of the planned economy of the GDR not the social market economy of the FRG. But from the middle of the 1960s political planning played a greater role, sometimes seen as a more scientific approach to the making of politics, and reflecting faith in modernity and progress. The articles on planning show how it had a growing influence in education, in labour market policy and not least with regard to the environment, which from the 1960s began to present a challenge to growth in economics and society.

Besides providing deeper insights into many aspects of the 1960s, and counterbalancing the importance of the year 1968, both volumes underline how the Federal Republic separated itself in many fields from the internal development in the GDR. This made the systemic conflict between the two states, which had played a predominant role in the 1950s, look out of fashion. The successful Modell Deutschland manifested itself in the Federal Republic, while the GDR no longer appeared synchronous and stagnated politically and socially. Thus the usual comparisons between the two states are lacking in both volumes.

Though both volumes take up important aspects of the internal social and cultural changes since 1960 one interesting aspect is missing: the place and role of the German military, which, after its re-establishment as the Bundeswehr in 1955, was intended to constitute a new type of army and create a new type of soldier, the so-called citizen in uniform. The German military had lost its traditional position in state and society, and it had to grapple with the consequences of democracy and liberalisation within the army. It would therefore have been of interest to see what this meant for the Bundeswehr. Was it also a mirror of a changing society?

The divided and at the same time ‘doubled’ history of Germany since 1949 remains, however, a central theme in historiography. The downfall of the GDR allowed historians to regard German post-war history not only as a history of two separate states, but also as a common history of division which makes it possible to pose the same questions vis-à-vis both German states. The co-ordinates of German history during the Cold War were the topic for a colloquium of the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, held in 2000. The contributions have now been edited by Hans Günter Hockerts from the University of Munich, and published. The outcome is an inspiring collection that takes up aspects of the so-called twofold post-war history of Germany and its mutual integrating perspectives. The volume is based on the assumption that a divided Germany was for decades linked by many different threads, international as well as internal and national. The book does not deal only with the global and international aspects of the division of Germany and its dependence on the East–West confrontation. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel shows in his incisive analysis how the ideas of ‘peace’ (East) and ‘freedom’ (West) were used rhetorically not only in the global confrontation, but also in the intra-German contest between the two systems and in their propaganda and self-representation. Other interesting contributions deal with the division of Germany in relation to science (Margit Szöllösi-Janze) and religion (Karl Gabriel), with the links between the two states in the area of nationhood (Horst Möller), and how the history of both states was interrelated without becoming similar. This is done, for instance, by focusing on related problems that were common to both German states. Thus Detlef Pollack asks how modern the GDR was in reality, and his answer is that, although it had modernised, the process was characterised by striking delays due to its lack of democracy. Hannes Siegrist investigates how bourgeois (bürgerlich) the FRG was, and shows that the same theme is also relevant for the GDR, that even East German society underwent systematic Entbürgerlichung. And Dietmar Willoweit asks whether contrasting Unrechtsstaat (non-constitutional state) with Rechtsstaat (constitutional state) is a sufficient way of characterising the essential differences between the two states. For him the answer is not clear, because Unrechtsstaat has no juridical meaning and as a juridical notion is not legitimate. Finally, Martin Sabrow in his fine overview of the ‘Diktatur des Paradoxons’ illustrates the place of the GDR in German history and its character as Teilungsstaat in a bipolar world.

Compared with these collections the monographs reviewed here take up more limited themes. One of the fields in which political and social pluralism manifested itself most distinctly was in the shape of the protest movements. In his slim volume, the British historian Nick Thomas gives us an account of the various protest movements in the 1960s. His narrative begins with the movements' roots in the 1950s, when West Germans took to the streets in protest against the rearmament policy of the Adenauer government. He shows the shift in the 1960s, when protest movements arose not only against the Vietnam War and the Notstandsgesetzgebung (emergency laws) but also in support of democratic reforms in the university system and the rights of women. The shift to questioning the meaning of the actual West German democracy even presented itself in the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (extra-parliamentary opposition) which emerged during the first Grand Coalition between the Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). The book ends with the emergence of terrorism in the 1970s. There is, however, not much that is new. It offers a good overview of the rise of, in particular, the younger parts of civic society that should contribute to the democratisation and liberalisation of West Germany. But it fails to contextualise the protest movements in terms of the overall changes taking place.

The 1960s not only witnessed thoroughgoing social and cultural changes in the Federal Republic; the long-postponed political and judicial settlement with the National Socialist regime and its function holders and perpetrators became pre-eminent. The central event was the so-called Auschwitz trial of twenty former guardsmen and functionaries from the extermination camp, held in Frankfurt am Main in 1963–5. Among those tried were the two deputy camp commanders, Robert Mulka and Karl Höcker. It was the largest, most public and most important trial of Nazi perpetrators in West Germany before a West German court and under West German law. Because of the amount of information it presented, the Auschwitz trial more than anything else brought Auschwitz and the crimes of the National Socialist regime to the knowledge of the German and international public.Footnote ⁶ The concept of Auschwitz on trial was meant to form the core of the West German public confrontation with the Nazi past. The trial was thus a ‘historic watershed’ (Wittmann, p. 5). Of course the public trial had an importance of its own, but it was above all significant because of what it represented. In what is the first historical account of the trial, the Canadian historian Rebecca Wittmann gives a very concise and striking narrative. Using the transcribed tapes of the hearings before the court she analyses the preparations for the trial, and describes the indictment and the proceedings in court, before ending with a commentary on the final outcome. She describes the discrepancy between the efforts of the prosecution, especially Fritz Bauer, to put the whole Auschwitz complex – that is, the mass murder of the Jews, the Holocaust – on trial, while the defence tried to have the accused individually charged for violations of law. Although much was disclosed through witnesses and documents about what went on in Auschwitz, the accused were judged in accordance with West German penal law, not with the parameters of the Nuremberg trial. In Wittmann's view the effort to indict Auschwitz and what it represented was hindered by the law as it was defined. Thus she concludes that, in focusing on the crimes and atrocities of individual former guardsmen and perpetrators, the trial failed to do justice to the complex history of Auschwitz and to what the extermination camp represented.

It is often claimed that since the 1960s West Germany has gone through a process of secularisation. This process affected Catholicism and Catholic society and its many organisations. At the same time the Catholic Church, through the CDU and the CSU, played a leading role in West German politics in the post-war period. The American historian Mark Edward Ruff has tried, in The Wayward Flock, to describe and explain this apparent paradox, analysing Catholic and political youth organisations in post-war Germany. The relevance of the topic stems from the fact that the Catholic subculture, which had evolved since the nineteenth century and had survived the totalitarian National Socialist regime and its persecution, was unable to withstand the new challenges of the post-war period, for instance in the form of the consumer culture. Ruff shows how the youth organisations tried after the war to return to and uphold a traditional Catholic identity that historically had to some degree been hostile to modernity, and how it fought to maintain its role in the face of a secular youth culture. But they did not succeed in the rapidly changing social and material milieu of the Federal Republic, where mass culture became predominant. The Catholic youth movement lost members throughout the post-war period; young women, in particular, left the organisation. Ruff shows in his interesting social historical investigation how the Catholic milieu eroded significantly after the war, underlining the radical and dramatic changes in society that could not be met with traditional answers. Even the Catholic Church had to try to adapt to a more secularized time.

The new historical books on the 1960s under review underline the view that the so-called long 1960s were decisive for the solid foundation of the new and liberal German democracy. Until 1958 that outcome had perhaps been more uncertain.