Seminar Questions:

• How was the political stability of the FDR linked to economic prosperity?

• What was the economic miracle?

• How did West Germany become integrated into the Western world?

• What was the West Germany's relationship to the past, to previous regimes and to the Nazis?

Reading List:

Required Reading

• Mary Fulbrook, A concise history of Germany (2004), Chapter 7
• Robert Moeller, ‘Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims,’ in Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton UP, 2001), pp. 83-109.
• J. Schutts, ‘Born Again in the Gospel of Refreshment? Coca-Colonization and the Remaking of Postwar German Identity’, in D. Crew (ed.), Consuming Germany in the Cold War(Berg, 2003), pp. 121-143.

Primary Sources:

• Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949)
• Principles of the "Social Market Economy" (December 19, 1962)
• "The Foreign Workers and Us," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (June 3, 1961)
• Rock 'n' Roll and German Teenagers (Retrospective Account, 1980)

Further Reading:

Politics:

• Christoph Bluth, "Nuclear Weapons and British-German Relations" in Beatrice Heuser & Robert O'Neill (eds.), Securing Peace in Europe, 1945-62 (1992)
• Michael Geyer, 'Cold War Angst: The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons', in Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton UP, 2001), pp. 376-408
• Michael R. Hayse, Recasting West German elites : higher civil servants, business leaders, and physicians in Hesse between Nazism and democracy, 1945-1955 (2003)
• Michael L. Hughes, "Reason, Emotion, Pressure, Violence: Modes of Demonstration as Conceptions of Citizenship in 1960s West Germany, German History, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2012), pp. 222-246
• Joost Kleuters, Reunification in West German Party Politics From Westbindung to Ostpolitik (2012)
• Eva Kolinsky, Parties, Opposition and Society in West Germany (Croom Helm, 1984).
• Barbara Marshall, Willy Brandt (1991)
• Alfred C. Mierzejewski, Ludwig Erhard: A Biography (2004)
• Eric Weitz, "The Ever-Present Other: Communism in the Making of West Germany", in Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton UP, 2001), pp. 219-232.
• Charles Williams, Adenauer: The Father of the New Germany (2003)

The Economic Miracle:

• Donna Hirsch, 'Industrialization, Mass Consumption, Post-industrial Society' in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (OUP, 2012)
• Armin Grünbacher, West German industrialists and the making of the economic miracle: a history of mentality and recovery (Bloomsbury, 2019)
• Stefan Grüner, 'Ensuring Economic Growth and Socioeconomic Stabilization: Industrial Policy in West Germany, 1950–1975' in Christian Grabas and Alexander Nützenadel (eds.), Industrial Policy in Europe after 1945 (Palgrave, 2014)
• Tamas Vonyo, The Economic Consequences of the War: West Germany's Growth Miracle after 1945 (Cambridge, 2018)
• James Van Hook, Rebuilding Germany: the creation of the social market economy, 1945-1957 (Cambridge, 2004)

Social and Cultural History:

• Friederike Brühöfener, 'Sex and the Soldier: The Discourse about the Moral Conduct of Bundeswehr Soldiers and Officers during the Adenauer Era', Central European History, Volume 48 / Issue 04 / December 2015, pp 523-540
• Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany, 1918-2008: The Divided Nation (Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 113-267
• Philipp Gassert, 'The Spectre of Americanization: Western Europe in the American Century' in Dan Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (2012) - Places the West German experience in the wider European context
• Atina Grossman, ‘Abortion and Birth Control in Postwar Germany’, in Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control & Abortion Reform 1920-1950 (Oxford UP, 1995).
• Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make (Univ. of California Press, 1999), chs. 4, 5.
• Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton UP, 2005).
• Gesa Kordes, "Darmstadt, Postwar Experimentation, adn the West German Search for a New Musical Identity," in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and National Identity (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 205-217.
• Edward Larkey, "Postwar German Popular Music: Americanization, the Cold War, and the Post-Nazi Heimat," in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and National Identity (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 234-250.
• Manfred Malzahn, Germany 1945-1949: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 1991), especially Chapters 5 and 11
• Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women in the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Univ. of California Press, 1993).
• Robert Moeller, "The Third Reich in Post-War German Memory" in Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany (OUP, 2008), pp. 246-266
• Robert Moeller, War stories: the search for a usable past in the Federal Republic of Germany (University of California Press, 2001)
• Samuel Moyn, 'Intellectuals and Nazism' in Dan Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (2012)
• Uta G. Poiger, "American Jazz in the German Cold War," in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and National Identity (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 218-233
• Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (2000) Princeton University Press
• Patrick Tobin, “No Time for ‘Old Fighters’: Postwar West Germany and the Origins of the 1958 Ulm Einsatzkommando Trial,” Central European History (Dec. 2011), pp. 684-710.

• Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger, Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies (Berghahn Books, 2012).

• S.J. Wiesen, ‘Miracles for Sale: Consumer Displays and Advertising in Postwar West Germany’, in Consuming Germany in the Cold War, pp. 151-170.