ABSTRACT
No one could have foreseen the remarkable transformation undergone by a defeated Germany in just one decade. Two Germanies had emerged by the 1950s, military allies of their former enemies, Russia, Britain, the US and France. Germans in the West were no longer treated with contempt and condescension but were admired for the discipline and hard work that had restored their prosperity. Not that both halves of Germany prospered equally. The free-market economy in the Western part proved itself to be far more efficient in the production of wealth than the stateplanned economy of the Eastern third. The Democratic Republic was a truncated state: the former German agricultural and industrial territories east of the Oder-Neisse had been lost to Poland and the Soviet Union. In 1945 some 17 million Germans lived in the Soviet zone, the later Democratic Republic, and nearly 44 million in the Western zones. Twenty years later, together with their respective parts of Berlin, the preponderance of West Germany over East had become even greater; almost 60 million were living in the Federal Republic and West Berlin, and 17 million in the DDR including East Berlin. The two Germanies provided something like a test of the relative efficiency of the Western economies and the command economies of the East, given that both of these new states were starting from much the same base in 1945.
