ABSTRACT
With the foundation of the Federal Republic as a capitalist state which encompassed only a part of the German nation, many writers began, as has been noted, to speak of ‘restoration’, the term being used negatively as the antithesis of their hopes for a new united socialist Germany. It is of course possible to produce counter-arguments against the blanket term ‘restoration’ to describe the first years of the Federal Republic. With the foundation of the West German army in the mid-1950s, many active officers from its precursor, Hitler’s Wehrmacht, also returned to important positions of command. The area that was of prime concern to writers for most of the 1950s was that of the military, initially the creation of a West German army and subsequently the possibility that it might be equipped with atomic weapons. In general, the 1950s did not favour the raising of awkward questions.
