West German Research Articles

Legal and Epic Alienation. Fritz Bauer’s Critique of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-1965) and Peter Weiss’s Dramatic Treatment of the Trial in the Investigation. Oratorio in 11 Cantos (1965)

Beginning with the influences of Schiller’s humanist ideals on Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer’s expectations of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial as a legal working through of the past, this article compares the Holocaust narrative created by the West German criminal trial to Peter Weiss’s reworking of the transcripts, The Investigation. Oratorio in 11 Cantos. The article aims to show that literature is able to convey and commemorate aspects of the Holocaust that German criminal law misrepresents and omits.

Energy, Ecology, and the Remaking of West German Politics in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract This article traces the transformation of West Germany's political system during the 1970s and 1980s, when an extra-parliamentary ecological opposition emerged to challenge the governing Social Democratic Party (SPD). Demographic, economic, and structural features in West Germany's political system created the space for this opposition, eventually leading to the formation of the Green Party. This article argues that ideas about energy were crucial to the movement's success, providing a focal point for reform that aimed to spur an energy transition. This movement of experts and activists pulled West Germany's political system in an ecological direction, forcing the SPD to become green itself. The transformation of West Germany's political system, in turn, set the Federal Republic on a different energy trajectory than the United States, Great Britain, and France.

Introduction

For many decades, stability and predictability were the defining features of German party competition. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, West German politics was dominated by the well-known two-and-a-half party system, which later expanded with the rise of the Greens in the 1980s and the addition of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) after German reunification.1 Despite the expanding party system, party competition continued to be anchored by the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union) on the center-right and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) on the center-left, such that government coalitions at the federal and state level could typically be formed by two coalition partners, while ideologically coherent coalitions among parties on the left or the right were the norm.

Postcommunist Germany

Abstract This article situates Germany within postcommunist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to explain current political outcomes, particularly, the disproportionate success of the AfD in eastern Germany. Similar to CEE, politics in eastern Germany is fragmented and volatile compared to western Germany; the political system in the east reflects conservative social values; and east German patterns of discontent are similar to CEE. However, in CEE, party systems were new and thus volatile and susceptible to populist mobilization from both mainstream and radical parties. Conversely, East Germany integrated into the developed West German party system and adopted its traditional parties, lowering the east's potential for volatility and polarization. Moreover, since the east is a minority within Germany, its relative volatility has limited impact on the German system.

Immigration, Female Labour Supply and Local Cultural Norms

Abstract We study the local evolution of female labour supply and cultural norms in West Germany in reaction to the sudden presence of East Germans who migrated to the West after reunification. These migrants grew up with high rates of maternal employment, whereas West German families mostly followed the traditional breadwinner-housewife model. We find that West German women increase their labour supply and that this holds within households. We provide additional evidence on stated gender norms, West-East friendships, intermarriage and child care infrastructure. The dynamic evolution of the effects on labour supply is best explained by local cultural learning.

After the Genocide: Proximity to Victims and Support for Punishing Ingroup Crimes

What explains divergent transitional justice preferences among political elites after genocide? We argue that elite preferences vary with their proximity to the victimized group. Individuals who know the victims personally and/or have witnessed violence against them may be more likely to support punishing the perpetrators, possibly because they experience collective guilt. We support this argument using an original biographical dataset on the members of the West German parliament, linking their location and experiences during the Third Reich to free roll-call votes on extending the statute of limitations for murder in 1965–69. We find that proximity to synagogues, particularly those attacked in November 1938, predicts support for extending the statute, conditional on party, state, mandate type, denomination, and a host of personal attributes. We also find significantly lower support for extending the statute among former NSDAP members. Our findings highlight the importance of bystander experiences in shaping support for retributive justice.

Reparations and Oil in the Cold War: British Perspectives on the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952

This article analyses the British perspectives on the Luxembourg Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany from 1952. Short-term economic interests were of central importance when it came to assessing the consequences of this deal for the United Kingdom. Her Majesty's Government welcomed West German reparations as a means of securing Israel's ability to pay for oil supplied by British companies, but at the same time saw them as a threat to its economic and political interests in the Middle East. British diplomats underestimated the long-term political value of the Luxembourg Agreement precisely because they read it verbatim. They recognized the reservations on both sides but did not expect that working relations between Israel and the Federal Republic would improve rapidly after the Agreement was ratified, limiting in turn the UK's political and economic room for manoeuvre in the region. By examining a hitherto little-noticed chapter of British foreign policy in the postwar years, the article foregrounds the commercial aspects of diplomacy in the early 1950s and contributes to a better understanding of international relations in the Cold War.

Riconversione e Ricostruzione

Abstract This article focuses on German-Vatican debates on the Reichskonkordat after 1945. For this purpose, it explores newly available documents in the Vatican Apostolic Archive from the West German Nunciature in Bonn. Thereby, this essay retraces how the Catholic Church followed German political discourses and how it sought to influence public debates. While Konrad Adenauer and the Christian-Democratic Party aimed to preserve the Reichskonkordat, which had been negotiated by Eugenio Pacelli in 1933, an inner-German opposition began to question the role that the Church had played in the Nazi regime. Already in the 1950s, a diverse alliance of Social Democrats, liberals and Protestant intellectuals accused both the Vatican and members of Adenauer’s government to have supported Nazism in order to establish a form of ‚clerical fascism‘. While these accusations were often of polemical nature, they initiated a profound re-calibration of church-state relations, showing the limits of both Adenauer’s political ambitions and the visions of Pius XII to re-establish a Catholic dominance in postwar culture.

Lockvogelangebote und Rabattschlachten: Der Bierverkauf des Lebensmitteleinzelhandels in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren

Abstract Previously undiscovered market studies show that the sale of beer as a loss-leader offer was already used as a competitive tool in food retailing in the 1970s and became an important feature of aggressive competition among retailers in the 1980s. The article illustrates the specific assortment and pricing policies in beer retailing and makes clear that increasing beer sales at low dumping prices led to profit losses for the stores. This highlights another facet in the development of the West German mass consumer society and the structural change in food retailing: the hallmarks of the growth and concentration process were not only the procurement and financing advantages of the large retailers, but also loss-leader offers and price undercutting in certain product groups, of which beer was demonstrably one.

A Lost Game of Bank Bargains: West Germany and International Banking Regulation between Bretton Woods and Basel I (1972–1988)

Abstract Current theories of financial regulation suggest expanding rules-based formal state intervention to promote international banking stability. Such policy solutions should then be global in scope. This article instead argues that principles-based informal co- and self-regulation through domestic (gentlemen’s) agreements underpinned West German bank internationalisation until the 1980s. The analytic narrative approach allows the tracing of the social dynamics of the German politics of regulation, drawing on unused primary sources: Coalitions between the German regulating and regulated actors were bolstered by a liberal domestic framework and bespoke national policies. In contrast, regulatory harmonisation through international prudential standards came with high domestic adjustment costs for the German banking sector. Thus, domestic makeshift solutions to deal with and internalise cross-border financial risks proved most workable.

From the Berlin Wall to the Great Wall: Payment Transactions and Financing of Business between West Germany and Communist China, 1949 to 1972

Abstract Over two decades from 1949 until the resumption of the diplomatic relations between these two countries in 1972, West German companies never gave up on the Chinese market despite substantial difficulties caused by Cold War frictions. This paper exams the payment transactions and terms of credits for financing industrial projects between the PRC and West German companies.

Sonderzahlungen: Wer bekommt sie in welchem Umfang?

Abstract The receipt of special payments and their amount varies greatly with individual and company characteristics as well as with the level of the hourly wage. There are large di~erences between women and men, between East and West Germany, and de-pending on company size and sector. Special payments are rare in the low-wage sector and among marginal employees and, those that exist are very low. Looking at the 10% of employees with the highest hourly wages, special payments are wide-spread and by far the highest, especially among West German men.

Adjectival intensification in West German

Abstract This article investigates the forms and functions of adjectival intensification in West Germanic. With corpus data from different discourse types, we challenge claims that German tends to use synthetic means and Dutch is between German and English but more like English in its preference for analytic ones. Our results show that all three languages, and Afrikaans too, favor analytic intensifiers but also that only English employs synthetic ones to a lesser extent. The other languages are found to use synthetic forms more especially in literature. The study also offers corpus-based support for an earlier hypothesis that both English and German prefer amplifying to downtoning adjectives. We show that this tendency exists more pronouncedly in Afrikaans and Dutch too and that English speech stands out with more functionally ambiguous intensifiers. The article also explores possible explanations for its findings in (dis)similarities in word formation, discourse types’ linguistic potential and politeness

German in East Lorraine? Reflections on the status of the autochthonous varieties in Northeast France based on the character of near-standard speech

Sometimes a change of a language border is linked to a change in language status of a group of diatopic varieties. The assessment of language status relates, among other things, to the existence of a common norm (standard variety) and the language community members’ adherence to it. For the germanophone varieties in East Lorraine (France), the status is unclear. Structurally, these varieties belong to the West Middle German dialect continuum. However, since the Second World War, the political and identificatory relations to the German language have been difficult. This article examines whether dialect proficient speakers from East Lorraine can (still) speak Standard German and, if so, how it can be characterised. The study is based on recorded interviews. Interviewees were asked to speak (Standard) German. The analysis of the speech data reveals demerging from the German language. Although being competent in the local dialect, only a minority belonging to the older generation can speak a variety that can be considered endoglossic and near-standard. One third speaks clearly regionally bound varieties, approximately 50% speak German just like a language learner (on various levels of proficiency). Interpreted within the framework of macrosynchronisation (Schmidt & Herrgen 2011), the classification of East Lorraine as belonging to the German-speaking area appears even more uncertain as the Lorrain people no longer align themselves with the common norm of the German-speaking area.

Psychosocial predictors of distress in East and West Germans during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background Psychological (meaning in life, science attitude, internal locus of control, religiosity), and social factors (social support, cohesion) can counteract stressor-related distress. We investigated these factors’ links with peri-pandemic distress (depression, anxiety, intrusions) and whether they weakened the impact of being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We compared prior East and West Germans on predictors and distress to investigate if their different backgrounds created lasting differences. Methods A population-representative German sample aged 45 to 70 (N = 380) in terms of age, sex, and school education completed online questionnaires in May–July 2020 and June–July 2021. We examined the predictive relations with correlation, forward inclusion regression, and moderation analyses. Results Social support predicted lower distress, also prospectively. Meaning in life predicted lower distress cross-sectionally. Religiosity predicted greater distress. Life meaning and social support partly weakened the link between being affected by the pandemic and distress, religiosity and science attitude strengthened this link. The only significant East/West difference was in religiosity, which was higher in the West. Conclusion Social resources appeared particularly important in adjusting to the pandemic. The identified predictors may inform interventions. East and West Germans’ similarity might indicate that their post-war separation did not create lasting differences in the investigated factors.

‘Doomed to Fail’: Dutch and West German Consulates Warning Against Mixed Marriages, 1950s–70s

This article demonstrates how official discourses in Western Europe warning against mixed marriages were built on colonial continuities as part of shared European heritage, as well as the importance of race and gender ideologies in those discourses. It addresses the exchange across borders of approaches to regulating ‘mixed’ marriages among Dutch and German consular officials, strongly advising European White women not to emigrate and not to marry Muslim men. Based on research in the archives of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs as well as newspaper archives in the Netherlands and West Germany, this article demonstrates the central role that consulates of both countries played in developing these official discourses. This study contributes to literature on female (e)migration as well as literature on present-day restrictive migration control practices by demonstrating the historical and colonial roots that still serve to justify state practices of regulating mixed intimacies in surveilling women's partner choice.

Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture by Lynette Widder (review)

Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture by Lynette Widder (review)

Complex Possessive Pronouns in West Flemish and German

In this article we discuss a contrastive, morphological agreement pattern exhibited by singular possessive pronouns in West Flemish and German. While West Flemish zen (‘his’) and eur (‘her’) require a suffix -en to mark masculine agreement, they are unmarked for feminine agreement. Conversely, German sein (‘his’) and ihr (‘her’) require a suffix -e to mark feminine agreement, but they are unmarked for masculine agreement. Put differently, in both languages only one gender is marked for agreement, and West Flemish marks a different gender than German. To account for this intra- and cross-linguistic variation, we argue for a fine-grained analysis, couched in Nanosyntax (Starke 2009 et seq.), of the possessive pronouns and their agreement markers.

Must watch propaganda: the marginal treatment effect of foreign media among always-takers

Abstract Studies of political persuasion often use an exogenous encouragement as an instrument for persuasive messaging. However, for some people, such encouragement is insufficient, while for others, it is unnecessary. These individuals are excluded from methods that only estimate a treatment effect among compliers. Using the marginal treatment effect framework, we extend research finding that exposure to West German television increases support for communism. We find that, because of self-selection, for those who watch West German TV regardless of signal quality, i.e. always-takers, cutting off West German television would have increased support for communism. Our extrapolation shows that media choices reinforce, rather than mollify, political preferences.

Seeing Like a Market: to the Question of the Ethical Assessment of the Privatization of East German Companies in 1990–1994

The article deals with the problem of ethical assessment of the liquidation of the GDR as a state structure and its integration into the political and economic space of the FRG. According to a number of historical and sociological sources, “reunification” was not the reason for the search and finding of a common language between West and East Germans, but, on the contrary, the reasons for discord and deep mutual distrust and rejection. On this basis, the work analyzes the views of both sides, and also conducts a philosophical reflection on the value bases (ethical axioms) of the key evaluative positions of both East and West Germans regarding the actions of the West German government, the conditions for concluding a monetary union of the two Germanys, as well as in relation to privatizations East German companies.