ABSTRACT
The success of the market economy has been one of the defining features of the Federal Republic almost from its inception. To the outside world German strength is economic strength, and German revival a paradigm of the transforming power of modern capitalism. The development of the economy of the Federal Republic after 1949 must be understood in the context of what went before. It has always been a temptation to argue that economic revival in the 1950s was the product of a new beginning, like the construction of an effective parliamentary democracy. Most historians are agreed that the revival of the post-war economy depended not on material conditions but on political and psychological adjustment. The promotion of trade became a government priority, ‘the highest and most fundamental concern of every German economic and trade policy’, as one Economics Ministry official put it in 1955.
