Economic Boom, Workers’ Literature, and Morality in the West Germany of the 1960s and Early 1970s

Abstract

In West Germany and other Western European countries, ‘les trente glorieuses’ (1945–1975) rank as the period of an emergent affluent consumer society. Largely forgotten are contemporary narratives that called the success story of the ‘German economic miracle’ into question. It was a critique that crystallized in the output of West German workers’ literature, which called for the humanization of the industrialized world of work. Proponents of workers’ literature found themselves exposed to severe criticism in the public media and to legal and political attack. This chapter argues that even during the heyday of West Germany’s economic growth, ‘work’ and the ‘work regime’ were negotiated in moral terms and categories. Moral ideas and narratives about the ‘German economic miracle’ were linked to both political dispositions regarding Germany’s past and the competition between the East and West German systems during the Cold War. Thus, criticism as well as the emphatic affirmation of the narrative of the ‘economic miracle’ constitute specific West German forms of ‘moralizing capitalism’.