The Road to Upward Mobility
In the years after World War II, West Germany (after 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG) experienced a severe housing shortage coupled with a demand—unambiguously conveyed by the occupying powers—to “modernize” and socially restructure. With war-torn cities needing extensive repair, politicians and planners made choices that affected not only the physical but also the social landscape, with the federal government ultimately using urban policy in an attempt to redefine identity and help shape a new middle class. This article traces this process by examining three postwar policy directions—suburbanization, urban high-rise housing, and automobile ownership—both as an economic driver and as a first toehold on the ladder to upward mobility. I argue that not only did these policy foci fundamentally change the FRG’s urban landscape, their physical manifestations became central to the nation’s often-acrimonious debate over societal modernization.
The Americanisation of West German Industry, 1945–1973 . By Volker R. Berghahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. viii, 344. $29.50.
although not the mainspring of Nazi expansionism, Germany's producers willingly assumed increased power and responsibility for the conduct of the war as the material requirements of waging it increased. Thus they did take over the management of industry in the occupied territories and they did help administer the slave-labor program. The big businessmen of the Reich even developed plans for economic collaboration with the conquered and dependent nations of German-dominated Europe which, if pursued vigorously from the outset of the war, might well have made an Allied victory more costly and time-consuming. This massive work contains nothing startling. In spite of a disdain for "bourgeois scholarship," Eichholtz depends heavily on the archival resources of the German Federal Republic, the writings of West German, British, and American historians, and such standard technical and statistical publications as the memoirs of the OKW's (Oberste Kriegsfiihrung der Wehrmacht) Gen. Georg Thomas, the summary report compiled at the end of the war by the economist Rolf Wagenfuhr, and the studies of the US Strategic Bombing Survey. The author supplements his account with material from Reich ministries deposed at the Zentrales Staatsarchiv in Potsdam and from the records of formerly private firms such as Carl Zeiss now located in the German Democratic Republic. The best chapters of this book describe the transformation that came over the economy after the appointment of Albert Speer as Minister of Armaments and Munitions in February 1942. This, the most thorough of many available accounts, conclusively refutes two ideas in common currency. It is wrong, Eichholtz shows, to speak of a Nazi Party dictatorship over industry after 1942. He documents in painstaking detail how Speer reduced its satraps, the Gauleiter, to useful local auxiliaries in the production effort. Eichholtz deals no less harshly with the idea, propagated in Speer's memoirs, that the SS and big business were joined in a titanic struggle over the future of the German economy; he marshalls overpowering evidence to prove that the two enjoyed an essentially cooperative relationship based on reciprocal self-restraint. This book suffers substantially from being bound by a doctrinaire point of view and covers few important topics that have not been discussed more cogently elsewhere. Yet it demonstrates with greater thoroughness than any other single work that by the time the war entered its final phase neither the Party and its ancillaries nor the SS, but big business was running the Third Reich on behalf of Hitler.
The Soviet Home Front, 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II
List of tables and maps Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations and technical terms Part 1: On the Eve 1. Building Socialism 2. The Great Patriotic War 3. The State in Wartime Part 2: Soviet Society at War 4. Mobilisation 5. Subsistence and Survival 6. The Social Order Part 3: The Productive Effort 7. Fortress of the Rear 8. Labour: The 'Ultimate Bottleneck' 9. 'In Labour as in Combat' 10. Production: The Power of Victory 11. Planning: 'The Military-Economic Staff' Epilogue Tables Important dates References Maps Index