Comp. by: PG2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001249596 Date:3/2/11 Time:11:14:26 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001249596.3D CHAPTER 27 ............................................................................................... DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP IN THE COLD WAR : THE TWO GERMANIES , 1949 – 1961 ............................................................................................... ANDREW I . PORT The ‘long 1950s’ was a decade of conspicuous contrasts: a time of dismantling and reconstruction, both economic and political, as well as cultural and moral; a time of Americanization and Sovietization; a time of upheaval amid a desperate search for stability.1 But above all, it was a time for both forgetting and coming to terms with the recent past. It could be argued, in fact, that no subsequent period witnessed as much Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung as the early years of the two new German states—depending, of course, on how one defines that term: although a public preoccupation with the Holocaust would not come until almost two decades after the Berlin Wall had been built, almost every aspect of public and private life in the 1950s was, directly or indirectly, a reckoning with the tumultuous events of the two previous decades. The parallels between the two states in this respect, as well as in many others, were as important as the obvious differences. In terms of the purely political, the long 1950s began with the official founding of the two German states in the fall of 1949 and climaxed with the erection of the Wall in August 1961. These were the years that cemented the division of the former Reich, both literally and figuratively. As such, it was a time in which the concept and meaning of the nation state were reappraised, as both halves of Germany inexorably drifted away from each other and became integrated—politically, economically, militarily, socially, and culturally—into two hostile camps, the capitalist West and the communist East. Yet, there was never a complete separation and certainly no ‘zero hour:’ The continui- ties were as many, and as important, as the obvious ruptures, making it perhaps more appropriate to speak of a ‘fresh start’—for Germany itself, a state that no longer existed, OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 3/2/2011, SPi