Abstract
Werner Abelshauser once remarked, “German history since 1945 has been above all economic history.” According to Abelshauser, nothing “shaped the West German state more than its economic development.” The East German state, too, linked “its fate from the very beginning to the promise of economic success.” Prosperity became “one of the most important criteria of success in the East-West competition.” For the contemporary history of the two German states, economic prosperity played the role of a “vehicle” of national identification and of the state’s self-understanding. “The economic success of the early years,” following this interpretation, served as the “material basis for the rich consensus that made balancing the interests of social groups possible.”1
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Notes
Werner Abelshauser, Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte seit 1945 (Munich, 2004), 11–12.
Gerold Ambrosius, “‘Sozialistische Planwirtschaft’ als Alternative und Variante in der Industriegesellschaft—die Wirtschaftsordnung,” in Überholen ohne einzuholen: Die DDR-Wirtschaft als Fußnote der deutschen Geschichte?, ed. André Steiner, 11–31 (Berlin, 2006), 26.
Alfred C. Mierzejewski, Erhard: A Biography (Princeton, 2005), 70.
Dirk Baecker, “Die Preisbildung an der Börse,” Soziale Systeme 5 (1999): 287–312, 287.
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© 2015 Malte Zierenberg
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Zierenberg, M. (2015). Conclusion: Black Market Trading as a Radical Experience of a Free Market. In: Berlin’s Black Market: 1939–1950. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-01775-8_7
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