ABSTRACT
Within twenty-five years of defeat in the Second World War the two Germanies had become the most successful post-industrial societies in their respective halves of Europe. West Germany became by far the largest economy in Western Europe, the fourth largest in the world after the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, and the model of a democratic, prosperous ‘social market economy’ uniting the free market with a generous, caring welfare state. East Germany became the most stable and productive member of the communist bloc, ostensibly (according to its own unreliable statistics) the eighth largest economy in the world and, in theory at least, an egalitarian meritocracy which catered for its citizens’ every need. Situated on either side of the front line of the Cold War in political and military confrontation with each other, they constituted the most objective test of the competition between the two rival versions of professional society, the libertarian, democratic capitalist free market and the totalitarian socialist command economy. Both claimed of course to be democracies, the West of the traditional, pluralist, multi-party kind, the East of the collectivist, single-party variety in which freedom lay in obedience to the historical will of the working class, as interpreted by its self-chosen vanguard, the Socialist Unity Party. (In fact, since the Communist Party could never achieve a majority, there were four parties but they were totally submerged in the Socialist Unity Party, which the minority Communist Party used as its instrument of domination.) Both, in practice, were dominated by ruling elites who in their different ways contrived to extract an exceptionally good living from their societies.
