In 1945, Germany was an outcast nation. Nazi genocide and Hitler's war had killed millions. Most of Europe lay in ruins. Yet by 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, West Germany enjoyed a well-earned reputation as a stable European democracy. How did this remarkable transformation take place? Konrad Jarausch's outstanding new book answers this question with a compelling investigation of the “recivilizing” of Germans after 1945 and the slow development of a post-war “civil society.” Central to Jarausch's story is the protracted “learning process” that anchored democracy and civil society in the “hearts and minds” of post-war Germans and made the formal political institutions established by the Basic Law of 1949 actually work. Jarausch divides this “learning process” into three stages: (1) the years immediately after 1945, when the top priority was elimination of Nazi influences on German society; (2) the 1960s, after the relative stabilization of the Adenauer period, when it finally became possible to make the “breakthrough to a modern civil society”(p. 16); and (3) the still incomplete process of unification set in motion by the “civic revolution” in the GDR and the fall of the wall in 1989–1990. During the first phase, “the victorious allies promoted the learning process from the outside through a mixture of interventions and incentives, which left the defeated little choice but to comply” (p. 273). Even in this earliest stage, however, Germans did play an active role in their own transformation. Mental and cultural demilitarization, reflected, for example, in the considerable popular opposition to rearmament in the 1950s, was an authentic German response to the disastrous military collapse experienced at the end of World War Two.

The second major lesson the Germans learned after 1945 was to renounce the radical nationalism that the Nazis had so disastrously exploited. Here again, Allied policies set the process in motion by occupying and dividing Germany, thereby “robbing nationalism of its political stage” (p. 56). Yet, as with the turn away from militarism, “autonomous learning processes” (p. 58) also played an important role. Germans did not forget their fellow Germans on the other side of the Iron Curtain, nor did they necessarily reconcile themselves to the loss of the eastern territories from which so many millions had fled or been expelled. Yet, these feelings of loss generally assumed the form of “a defensive, residual sense of nationality” (p. 62) which in any case had no power to alter the outcome of the war. What it meant to be a German in the post-war world remained unclear—at most it might be defined as a kind of post-national identity (p. 68).

The third component of the learning process was economic. In the west, market economy was soon reintroduced, albeit with specifically German intonations—the “social market” economy that combined private property and market competition with extensive state welfare provision. Different learning processes led East German leaders to embrace a planned economy. Until fairly recently, Jarausch observes, most West German governments have quite successfully managed to combine steady economic growth with continued expansion of the welfare state. In stark contrast, the East German economy had already reached a dead end well before 1989.

Jarausch argues that the “actual breakthrough of Germany's recivilization did not occur until the middle of the 1960s” (p. 99). In this second stage, “internal democratization” moved hand in hand with “cultural westernization,” which affected popular culture and consumption as well as political attitudes. The 1968 student revolt was a short-term failure (it did not produce the revolution it proclaimed) but a long-term success. The radical youth politics of the 1960s generated “profound consequences for political participation, social behavior, and cultural styles” (p. 173) which promoted a fundamental liberalization of the Federal Republic.

In less capable hands, the paradigm of a “learning process” might degenerate into a simplified celebration of West German success, the benefits of which were transferred to the territory of that other, failed post-war German state, the GDR, only after it disappeared in 1990. But this is not Jarausch's story. Post-war learning processes followed complicated trajectories that do not allow us to speak simply of unqualified success in the west or abject failure in the east. It is true that by the 1970s, the SED regime had dismantled most forms of civic culture in East Germany. Yet, beginning in the 1980s, dissidents began to form peace groups and to protest environmental pollution. Despite persecution by the Stasi, these dissident groups had already begun to take important steps toward the reconstruction of a civil society in East Germany that erupted onto the political stage in the “civic revolution” of 1989 that toppled the SED regime (p. 212).

Nor does Jarausch depict the history of West Germany as an unproblematic success story. He argues, for example, that the social contract that worked so well for so many years has now “become a barrier to further economic dynamism” (p. 94). He also suggests that some Germans, especially intellectuals, suffer from “excessive learning” with regard to militarism and nationalism. Despite all the talk since 1990 of Germany becoming once again a “normal” nation, these Germans are still reluctant to see Germany play the role in world politics that the size and importance of the unified nation would seem to warrant. Other important lessons have not been learned as well as they should be; hostility to foreigners and racism persist in western as well as in eastern Germany.

Jarausch does not believe that “the civil society that has evolved over the last five decades is … an irreversible achievement but, rather, an ever-changing challenge for the future” (p. 187). How well the post-1990 Berlin Republic meets this challenge will depend not only on the lessons it has learned from the past, but also upon its ability to respond to the novel conditions created in the early twenty-first century by globalization, post-industrialism, and the threat of terror.