Miracles in the Shadow of the Economic Miracle: The “Supernatural '50s” in West Germany

2012 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 833-860 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Black
Keyword(s):  
West Germany ◽  
Economic Miracle

scholarly journals John Lennon, autograph hound: The fan-musician community in Hamburg's early rock-and-roll scene, 1960–65

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sneeringer
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Space ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the Beat music scene in Hamburg, West Germany, in the early 1960s. This scene became famous for its role in incubating the Beatles, who played over 250 nights there in 1960–62, but this article focuses on the prominent role of fans in this scene. Here fans were welcomed by bands and club owners as cocreators of a scene that offered respite from the prevailing conformism of West Germany during the Economic Miracle. This scene, born at the confluence of commercial and subcultural impulses, was also instrumental in transforming rock and roll from a working-class niche product to a cross-class lingua franca for youth. It was also a key element in West Germany's broader processes of democratization during the 1960s, opening up social space in which the meanings of authority, respectability, and democracy itself could be questioned and reworked.

Between Consequential Memory and Destruction: Karl Jaspers, Jean Améry, and the Intellectual History of Postwar West Germany

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Amir Engel
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Historical Trajectory

Abstract This article reconstructs two “modes of memory” in postwar West Germany and explores an underappreciated historical trajectory. These two modes offer radically different ideas about why Germany should remember its past. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Karl Jaspers called on Germany’s citizens to remember the atrocities of the Nazi past so they could open a new chapter in the nation’s history. Twenty years later, at the zenith of the economic miracle, Jean Améry made a similar demand. His, however, was not a constructive call for responsibility and improvement, like Jaspers’s call, but one of anger and resentment. Juxtaposing these two calls for memory shows that, against every intuition, the immediate postwar period, defined by unprecedented human loss and physical devastation, was also a moment of energy and hope, while the height of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) was also one of melancholy and discontent.

scholarly journals Development of Transport as a Factor of the Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) of West Germany

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-215
Author(s):  
Janusz Myszczyszyn
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Unit Root Test ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
Econometric Methods ◽  
Research Procedure ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Post War

Abstract The post-war economic policy of West Germany (FRG) is largely associated with the so-called economic miracle (German: Wirtschaftswunder) and therefore its causes are the subject of many different analyzes. They include the correlation between the rate of economic growth in Germany and the development and transport potential of transport, including rail and road-car transport. This position prompted the author to try to search for long-term interdependencies and thus verify the thesis using the analysis of time series (1950–1989) available for West Germany and using original econometric methods in this field, e.g. unit root test to determine the stationarity and the Engle-Granger cointegration test. In addition to the introduction, the article consists of three parts and conclusions. The broadest one includes the description of the assumptions and stages of the research procedure and its results, both on the empirical and methodological level. It is based on synthetic theoretical foundations presented on the basis of a review of international literature on the subject and review of the essence of the German economic miracle and the main trends in changes in the field of economic growth and transport development in Germany after World War II. The research presented in this way fits into the principles of the new economic history paradigm, which is still not very popular in Europe.

scholarly journals Two or Three Things I Know about Harun Farocki

October ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 151 ◽  
pp. 151-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora M. Alter
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
West Berlin ◽  
The 1950S

I last saw my friend Harun Farocki a few days before the opening of his exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in late January 2014. Astonishingly, this was his first major one-person show in Berlin, a city that he called home and that had shaped his intellectual and artistic sensibility for over half a century. “I should have been born in Berlin,” he muses in his autobiographical “Written Trailers” (2009). Farocki was initially drawn to West Berlin in the early 1960s because the island city had been spared the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the 1950s that had reshaped the rest of West Germany. It retained a forlorn rawness, a sense of bohemia, and a countercultural public sphere that attracted hippies, draft dodgers, political outcasts, and artists of all kinds. Farocki was a member of the first Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie (Berlin Film Academy) class, along with Helke Sander, Holger Meins, and Wolfgang Petersen. He lived in a commune, wrote criticism, and produced relatively obscure agitprop films such as Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails (How to Make a Molotov Cocktail) (1968), Anleitung, Polizisten den Helm abzurissen (How to Remove a Police Helmet) (1969), and the better-known Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire) (1969). As Berlin changed over the years, however, so, too, did Farocki and his filmmaking practice.

Selling the Economic Miracle: Public-Opinion Research, Economic Reconstruction, and Politics in West Germany, 1949-1957

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark E. Spicka
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Social Democratic Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Christian Social Union

Perhaps the most remarkable development in the Federal Republicof Germany since World War II has been the creation of its stabledemocracy. Already by the second half of the 1950s, political commentatorsproclaimed that “Bonn is not Weimar.” Whereas theWeimar Republic faced the proliferation of splinter parties, the riseof extremist parties, and the fragmentation of support for liberal andconservative parties—conditions that led to its ultimate collapse—theFederal Republic witnessed the blossoming of moderate, broadbasedparties.1 By the end of the 1950s the Christian DemocraticUnion/Christian Social Union (CDU), Social Democratic Party(SPD) and Free Democratic Party (FDP) had formed the basis of astable party system that would continue through the 1980s.

Showcasing Cold War Germany in Cairo: 1954 and 1957 Industrial Exhibitions and the Competition for Arab Partners

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Pence
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Arab World ◽  
East Germany ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Socialist Economic ◽  
East German

East Germany staged two successful industrial exhibitions in Cairo in 1954 and 1957 in an effort to gain Egypt as a trading and eventually diplomatic partner. These displays of East German products and political culture challenged West Germany, which similarly courted Egypt and presented a rival exhibition in Cairo in 1957. They showcased industrial goods from the socialist ‘economic miracle,’ but also revealed German lack of understanding of the Egyptian market and its culture. These exhibitions also showed how Cold War competition between the two Germanys was intertwined with decolonization in Africa and the Arab world, especially when the 1954 show coincided with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. East Germany could circumvent West Germany’s Hallstein Doctrine’s goal of diplomatically isolating the socialist state by fostering anti-imperialist solidarity with Arab nations.

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