ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the value changes in the Federal Republic of Germany from the angle of the relation of “Western” and “non-Western” elements in its culture. Germany, thrown back in its economic and social development by the Thirty Years’ War and retarded in the growth of its middle class, continued to make major contributions to Western culture by its music, poetry and philosophy. If German culture may thus be said to have been in a peculiar fringe situation within the Western fold by the time of the French political and the British industrial revolutions, a more and more divergent emphasis led to its increasingly separate development in the course of the 19th century. In the circumstances, that decision implied the partition of Germany, as the Soviets were clearly unwilling to permit democratic institutions of the Western type in their zone. Germany therefore also shared in the unique dynamic potential of Western civilization based on its pluralistic structures and cultural values.
