Report: German Studies Association Session Nr. 10: "Foundations of the
Bundesrepublik: New Perspectives"


Panelists and Papers:

Moderator: Ronald Shearer

"Water in the Desert? The Influence of Wilhelm Roepke on Ludwig Erhard and
the Social Market Economy," Alfred Mierzejewski, Athens State University

"Building a New Luftwaffe: The US Air Force and the Bundeswehr Planning for
Rearmament, 1950-1960," James C. Corum, USAF School of Advanced Airpower
Studies

"Auschwitz and the Nuclear Sonderweg: The Debate over Nuclear Weapons and
the Shadow of the Nazi Past," Susanna Schrafstetter, University of Glamorgan

Commentator: S. Jonathan Wiesen, Southern Illinois University


This panel was not primarily about revealing hidden voices and unknown
actors in West German history.  Rather it concerned the country's
foundations -- its social, military, economic, and ideological structures.
The panel's success lay in its introduction of new research projects that
broaden and add nuance to our understanding of the social market economy,
rearmament, debates over nuclear weapons in Germany, and the country's
relationship to its National Socialist past. The panel was largely
successful and indeed provocative in showing how West Germany tried
consistently to assert itself and its own traditions while remaining
committed to NATO and to Allied patronage.  From the FRG's inception in
1949, West Germans have strived to create their own modest Sonderweg in
their prescriptions for a postwar society.  Throughout this process, the
legacy of Nazism has been central, influencing not only public debates over
Holocaust reparations, but also the hard work of building an economy and a
military defense.  In exposing how the FRG negotiated its relationship with
its allies (particularly the United States) and with its own past, the panel
challenged any notions that the FRG had been simply a pliant and passive
Atlantic partner.

Alfred Mierzejewski began with a paper about Wilhelm Roepke, the influential
economist linked so closely to Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard's social
market economy.  Mierzejewski set out to judge the actual influence Roepke
had on Erhard.  He argued that while Erhard, like Roepke, opposed
collectivism, state planning, and monopolistic combinations, he did not
share Roepke's suspicion of big business, technological change, and the
American consumerist model.  If Roepke was a man of the eighteenth century,
Erhard was rooted squarely in the twentieth century, presiding over the
FRG's "third way" between the seemingly cutthroat laissez faire capitalism
of the U.S. and the state planning of the Soviet Union.  Ultimately,
Mierzejewski argued, "Roepke exerted only limited influence on Erhard."

Mierzejewski's paper was fascinating in its ability to distill the multiple
social, economic, and cultural ideas that went into shaping the German
economy during its first decade.  Roepke and Erhard drew upon Catholic
social teachings, classical liberalism, longstanding cultural critiques, and
Germany's handicraft traditions, and shaped them into coherent
socio-economic doctrines.  Indeed what is intriguing about this period is
this very ability of the Bundesrepublik's founding elites to school
themselves in a broad range of social and economic theories, in service of a
new German democracy.  Mierzejewski's juxtaposition of Erhard's and Roepke's
visions laid bare the diverse ideological landscape of the early FRG.
Roepke's romantic, pro-Mittelstand capitalism existed side by side with
Erhard's more modern, "prosperity for all" visions.

Largely absent from Mierzejewski's presentation was the legacy of National
Socialism. Recent historiography has taken us well beyond the notion of the
"silent 1950s," and Mierzejewski was encouraged to address more directly how
rearmament, autarky, and total war under Hitler influenced the building of
the social market economy.  In the postwar struggle against state
intervention and collectivism, National Socialism always loomed large, and
it took on implicit and explicit forms in the debates over the Cold War, the
equalization of burdens, the banning of the communist party, and a host of
other social, political, and economic discussions.

While Mierzejewski's paper focused on the ideological foundations of the
FRG's economy, James S. Corum's paper on the West German Luftwaffe exposed
some of the practical dynamics that went into creating a new military future
for the country.  Corum's paper highlighted the striking difference in
German attitudes toward the United States present in the German army and the
air force.  If on the one hand, army officers were dismissive of American
army tactics and equipment, the West German air force embraced the American
model wholeheartedly.  The Adenauer administration put everything into the
army and navy, leaving the air force almost entirely in a state of neglect
until the United States built, trained, and Americanized the
Bundesluftwaffe.  Corum attributed this in part to the ineptitude of
Adenauer's Defense Minister Theodor Blank, as well as to the inability of
Adenauer's early ministers and the French to understand the military
necessity of a flexible and independent air force.

Corum's paper was an illuminating study in contrasts, revealing how
selective and pragmatic the FRG's relationship with the United States was.
If the Bundeswehr officers could critique their counterparts in the American
army, there was no room for anti-Americanism in the air force.  While in
World War II, the German air force had been thoroughly neutralized by the
Allies by 1943, the Wehrmacht was still the source of some fascination on
the part of U.S. army officers, who commissioned studies by former Wehrmacht
officers and even admired their tactics and tenacity in fighting a two front
war.

While Corum brought out this stark contrast between the fate of the
Bundeswehr and the Bundesluftwaffe, the commentator was eager to hear more
about why Americans like General Lauris Norstad, the commander of U.S. and
Central European NATO air forces from 1950 to 1956, exerted such efforts to
build a modern German air force, while Germans themselves were less
interested.  Did the Americans' unquestioning support of the Luftwaffe
bespeak deeper issues that went beyond strategy -- perhaps a sense of
transatlantic camaraderie among air force officers, perhaps even a touch of
American sympathy for the hapless Luftwaffe during the last war?  Why did
the U.S. tolerate such an un-Americanized Bundeswehr while pushing so hard
for an Americanized Luftwaffe? What do Corum's revelations indicate about
America's willingness to overlook the horrors of World War II in the 1950s?
Professor Corum was encouraged to tease out these issues of historical
memory more explicitly, as well as to highlight any skeptical American
voices, which may not have embraced a new Luftwaffe -- or German rearmament
altogether--so wholeheartedly.

This issue of the Nazi legacy was central to Susanna Schrafstetter's
fascinating paper on nuclear weapons and the non-proliferation debate.
Schrafstetter revealed a rich mine of material about the contested past in
the 1960s. While today we are tempted to see Germany as a staunchly
"no-nukes" country, particularly after the protests of the 1980s,
Schrafstetter demonstrated the collective sense of injury and the wounded
pride nursed by many German leaders, who felt that the country was being
treated unfairly by being asked to abstain from obtaining a nuclear arsenal.
If the 1960s is often portrayed as a decade of "coming to terms" with the
past and with Germany's own, limited place within the Western Alliance,
Schrafstetter demonstrated instead how leaders drew upon previous slights to
assert Germany's rights as a sovereign nation.  The Non Proliferation Treaty
of 1968 was portrayed as another example of victimization by the Allies,
following in the footsteps of Versailles and the Morgenthau plan.  Defense
minister Franz Josef Strauss even made the astounding claim that if Germany
were again subject to special restrictions, the Allies risked breeding the
same kind of resentment that brought about an Adolf Hitler. Schrafstetter's
ability to reveal these disgruntled voices will undoubtedly force future
scholars to offer a more nuanced picture of memory in the 1960s, when
Betroffenheit over the Holocaust existed side by side with a continuing
self-pity about the country's supposedly second-class status.

Despite these exciting findings, Schrafstetter was at pains to clarify that
debates about non-proliferation and "coming to terms with the past" were
only marginally related; open invocations of National Socialism in the
nuclear discussion were "few and limited to private talks." This disclaimer
notwithstanding, Schrafstetter's own findings demonstrated very well how
Holocaust memory and the nuclear discussion were more than just
contemporaneous debates.  That fears about the damning legacy of Nazism, or
Strauss's threats of a new fascism, could be utilized as a weapon against
their Allies, reveal an intriguing combination of resignation and defiance.
Schrafstetter correctly suggests that this invocation of National Socialism
was far from a mournful Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung.  But it does indicate
how present the legacy of National Socialist aggression was in the nuclear
debates.  Schrafstetter's project will ultimately shed light on the multiple
"pasts" being invoked in the 1960s.  The legacy of Germany's supposed
victimhood, the legacy of Auschwitz, the legacy of military defeat - all of
these commingled in the discourses of the 1960s.

In assessing the panel more generally, we must ultimately return to the
relationship between the Federal Republic and its Allies, particularly the
United States. All three papers illuminated a dialectic between cooperation
and independence within the Western Alliance -between the desire for a
special German path, or at least some semblance of equality in military,
political, and economic matters, and deference to Allied foreign policy aims
and ideological prescriptions.  Historians are already well aware of West
Germans' ambivalence vis-a-vis the U.S, but these papers point to the
necessity of exploring the range of sentiments with more case studies, and
with a broader reach into the 1960s and 1970s.  Each paper presented West
Germany as struggling to renounce a fascist past, maintain cordial relations
with its former enemies, and assert some independence as a new democracy.
One cannot help but think of Chancellor Schroeder's recent victory, which
was dependent to a great measure on his vocal hostility to Bush's "go it
alone" policy toward Iraq.  In the name of a peaceful, post-Holocaust
diplomacy, Schroeder was able to stir up in Germans a sense of their
country's uniqueness, diverging from the dictates of the United States.
Ultimately, whether it was Erhard's or Roepke's "Third Way," or the contrary
attitudes of the army and air force toward America, or the tortured debate
over Germany's nuclear status, this combination of humility, pride, and
defiance presented in these papers leaves us with a wonderful picture of the
ideological ferment that marked the Bundesrepublik from its inception.

S. Jonathan Wiesen
History Department
Southern Illinois University


For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2002 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit www.g-s-a.org/.

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