Germany’s Past Viewed after Fifty Years of Democracy

Abstract

If in 1945 anyone had predicted that in half a century Germany would be one of the most stable and peaceable democracies in the world, the response would have been disbelief, if not derision. After the Second World War not everyone agreed with the bleak verdict of the English historian A. J. P. Taylor, who concluded that ‘it was no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler than it is an accident when a river flows into the sea’.¹ Nevertheless its record was grim. What stood out in the wake of the Third Reich were a seemingly endemic tradition of militarism, the repeated failure of attempts at democratisation followed by authoritarian rule, and in recent times, three wars of nationalistic aggression, the last of which had been characterised by appalling violations of civilised behaviour. In short, German history seemed to offer few grounds for optimism about the future.