To order an untidy past, historians identify and interpret significant pivots in the development of nations. One such pivot in the fractured history of twentieth-century Germany was the period between 1945 and 1949. In these brief postwar years, a remarkable “mutation” of German politics and society began under Allied tutelage. In this interregnum between Hitler and Adenauer, a war-devastated West Germany started on the path “from shadow to substance.” As the Bonn Republic endured, historians started to trace its origins back to certain political and economic structures first erected in the postwar years. Increasingly, they emphasized postwar Weichenstellungen, or turning points, which influenced later events. By the 1980s, this structuralist view strongly suggested that contemporaries of the years 1945–1949 had actually lived through the Vorgeschichte, or prehistory, of the Federal Republic, and of affluence.

In the longer continuity of German history, the year 1945 will always, in part, represent the “Stunde Null” (zero hour), of catastrophic military defeat and complete moral disgrace and bankruptcy following Nazism and the Holocaust.1 The term “Stunde Null” evokes the need for a new beginning, a moral and political break with disastrous and ultimately criminal national traditions. Yet, because the Third Reich lasted only twelve years, and because there were non- and anti-Nazi traditions and leaders that survived in inner and external emigration, the postwar rejection of Nazism took the form of multiple restorations of these still extant German political traditions. In the first postwar years, the turn away from Nazism in both Germanies, as well as the break with totalitarian dictatorship in general in Western Germany, was taken by political leaders who had been active in Weimar politics and who returned to take center stage in German politics after 1945.2 To be sure, they were all deeply affected in their lives and thinking by the Third Reich. But what changes it did bring about in their political views amounted to rearrangements and different emphases of long-held convictions rather than to wholly new beginnings.

Defeat after the Second World War was complete for Germany, and life for the civilian population was grim. In one of Erich Kästner's poems, read at a 1947 theater production, a war widow laments that “ganz Deutschland ist ein Wartesaal mit Millionen von Frauen.” Indeed, in 1945 there were approximately seven million more women in Germany than men. More than three million German soldiers were killed in the war. Seven million German soldiers were still prisoners of war, leaving their wives and families to fend for themselves in the rubble heaps of the German cities. Adding to the hardship of the rural areas were the twelve million refugees who had been expelled from the territories conquered by the Soviet army and then had streamed into the American and British zones of occupation to resettle. Defeated Germany was split into four zones of occupation ruled by military governments. German men who had been promised the conquest of the world returned from the war and found their treasured patriarchy undermined in the home and in the state.

In the opening lines of his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx writes: The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes on order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.