ABSTRACT
The Third Reich, divided into four sectors at the end of the war by the allied powers (USA, GB, France, and the Soviet Union), was transformed into two diametrically opposed states in 1949 – the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (FRG) and the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR). The FRG was founded on the territories of the Western allies, resuscitated by their generous aid packages (e.g. Marshall Plan) to the point of the Wirtschaftswunder in the 1950s, and allowed to follow them into Western alliances such as NATO (1958) and the EEC (1957). The GDR, a oneparty state led by Moscow-trained German communists exiled under the fascists (such as Walter Ulbricht, first leader of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), was locked into the trading and defence systems of the Eastern Bloc (e.g. Warsaw Pact, 1956). Whilst the FRG became the very model of a thriving capitalist society, the individual in the GDR ‘was subordinate to the whole: in very altered forms, and under different political colours, the notion of a Volksgemeinschaft (note use of the term Volk (s-) in A below), a collective entity and common good to which all individual aspirations and attributes must be subordinated, survived the transition from the Nazi dictatorship to the communist dictatorship surprisingly intact’ (Fulbrook 1995: 19).
