ABSTRACT
In 1956 the political scientist Fritz René Allemann published a book entitled Bonn ist nicht Weimar. The implication of this title is that the Federal Republic of Germany, as constituted in 1949 with Bonn as its capital, had attained the stability that had been denied to the post-1919 Weimar Republic. This first attempt to create a democratic republic in Germany collapsed in ignominy on Hitler’s coming to power in 1933. Whether Allemann’s thesis can now be regarded as proven is a moot point; it depends on whether the unified German state of 1990 is regarded as a new entity whose future, like anything else, cannot be entirely predicted or whether it is merely a continuation of the post-1949 Federal Republic. If, however, the period 1949 to 1990 is regarded as a discrete era, it is self-evident that Allemann’s statement has proved to be correct. Not only did the Bonn Republic survive almost three times as long as Weimar (and more than three times as long as Hitler’s ‘Thousand year Reich’), it proved to be, as its political leaders were wont to point out, the most liberal and democratic state that had ever existed on German soil. Cynics might argue that it had little competition, given its historical predecessors; nevertheless, this chapter hopes to show that the Federal Republic of 1949 to 1990, if not utopia, was a highly successful state and, as the 1970s slogan of the then ruling SPD, Modell Deutschland, implied, in many ways exemplary.
