The Two Germanies: Recent Publications on the Federal Republic, The German Democratic Republic and the German Question

Abstract

At the time of their founding in I94,the two German states were perceived as provisional entities. Each regarded itself as the 'better Germany', the potential nucleus for a future reunified whole. By I 990, the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic could look back at more than forty years of existence as separate states, but also at forty years of a 'German question' which never went away and which since autumn I989 has shot with breathtaking speed to the top of the European agenda. These facts pose some difficulties for the writing of post-war German history. Even if the essence of the postI 949 situation can be summed up in the formula of 'two states, one nation', historians are still left with the problem of portraying that paradox. General histories may seek, by including both Germanies, to reflect a 'dialectical unity '1 which has endured despite forty years of division. But works which adopt a gesamtdeutsch approach have to take account of the fact that life in the two Germanies has developed under very different circumstances and in very different directions: the history of the two states cannot be written simply in terms of the German question. Nowadays, the gesamtdeutsch approach has become something of an exception: increasingly, each of the two Germanies is seen as meriting its own separate history, and all but one of the recently published general accounts reviewed below in this section concentrate on one or other of the two states. They can build upon a specialized literature on the political, economic and social developments which have shaped each state and can take up historical debates which have emerged concerning those developments. But the peculiar nature of post-war German history still remains a complicating factor: general accounts either of West or of East Germany cannot ignore the German-German relationship and the interaction which has taken place between the two states. Introductions to post-war German history in English which cover both German states are rare; in past years, new accounts have tended to concentrate on either West Germany or on the G.D.R.2 Henry Ashby Turner's The Two Germanies since I9453 therefore fills an obvious gap. The author justifies his gesamtdeutsch approach in terms