Postwar

traditional ‘trickle down’ development of dress style, having trickled up from a genuine item of work clothing. They were also distinctively young: like many other form-fitting fashions imitated from the films of the late 1950s, they did not flatter the older figure.

Within a very short time, jeans—like motorbikes, Coca-Cola, big hair (male and female) and pop stars—had spawned locally adapted variations across western Europe (both the films and the products they flaunted were unavailable further east). This was part of a broader pattern. Stock American film themes—science-fiction, detective stories, Westerns—were domesticated in stylized European versions. Millions of West Germans learned about cowboys from paperback novels written by local authors who had never been to America; by 1960 German- language ‘Western’ novels were selling at the rate of ninety-one million a year in the Federal Republic alone. The second most popular European cartoon character after the Belgian boy-detective Tintin was another Belgian product: Lucky Luke, a hapless and appealing cowpoke featured weekly in French- and Dutch-language comics. America, real or imagined, was becoming the natural setting for light entertainment of all genres.

The American impact on young Europeans contributed directly to what was already being widely bemoaned as the ‘generation gap’. Their elders observed and regretted the propensity of young Europeans everywhere to pepper their conversations with real or imagined Americanisms. One study estimated that such ‘Americanisms’ increased fourteen-fold in the Austrian and German press over the course of the sixties; in 1964 the French critic Rene Etiemble published Parlez-vous Franglais?, an entertaining (and, as some might now say, prophetic) account of the damage being done to the French language by anglophone pollution.

Anti-Americanism—the principled distrust and dislike of American civilization and all its manifestations—was typically confined to cultural elites whose influence made it appear more widespread than it was. Cultural conservatives like Andre Siegfried in France—whose 1954 Tableau des Etats-Unis reprised all the resentments and some of the anti-semitism of inter-war polemics—agreed with cultural radicals like Jean-Paul Sartre (or Britain’s Harold Pinter in later decades): America was a land of hysterical puritans, given over to technology, standardization and conformism, bereft of originality of thought. Such cultural insecurities had more to do with the pace of change in Europe itself than with the challenge or threat posed by America. Just as European teenagers identified the future with an America they hardly knew, so their parents blamed America for the loss of a Europe that had never really been, a continent secure in its identity, its authority and its values, and impervious to the sirens of modernity and mass society.

These sentiments were not yet widely encountered in Germany or Austria, or even Italy, where many older people still regarded Americans as liberators. Conversely, anti-Americanism was more frequently espoused in England and France, the two former colonial powers directly displaced by the rise of the United States. As Maurice Duverger informed the readers of the French weekly L’Express in March 1964, Communism was no longer a threat: ‘There is only one immediate danger for Europe, and that is the American civilization’—‘a civilization of bathtubs and frigidaires’, as the poet Louis Aragon had dismissed it thirteen years before. But notwithstanding the haughty disdain of Parisian intellectuals, a civilization of bathtubs and frigidaires— and indoor plumbing and central heating and television and cars—was what most Europeans now wanted. And they wanted these commodities not because they were American but because they represented comfort and a degree of ease. For the first time in history, ease and comfort were now within the reach of most people in Europe.

POSTSCRIPT: A Tale of Two Economies

‘Germany is a land teeming with children. It is a terrifying thought that, in long range terms, the Germans may have won the war after all’.

Saul Padover, 1945

‘Of course, if we succeeded in losing two world wars, wrote off all our debts—instead of having nearly ?30 million in debts—got rid of all our foreign obligations, and kept no force overseas, then we might be as rich as the Germans’.

Harold Macmillan

‘The prosperity and strength of the British economy which [UK Chancellor of the Exchequer R.A.] Butler celebrated in several speeches in 1953 and 1954 was but the last wash of prosperity breaking on British shores from the wake of the German economy as it surged ahead, pulling its attendant European flotilla with it. In retrospect, 1954 looks like the last grand summer of illusion for the United Kingdom’.

Alan Milward

A striking feature of the history of post-war western Europe was the contrast between the economic performance of West Germany and Great Britain. For the second time in one generation, Germany was the defeated power—its cities shattered, its currency destroyed, its male workforce dead or in prison camps, its transportation and service infrastructure pulverized. Britain was the only European state to emerge unambiguously victorious from World War Two. Bomb damage and human losses aside, the fabric of the country—roads, railways, shipyards, factories and mines—had survived the war intact. Yet by the early 1960s, the Federal Republic was the booming, prosperous powerhouse of Europe, while Great Britain was an under-performing laggard, its growth rate far behind that of the rest of Western Europe.[140] Already by 1958 the West German economy was larger than that of Britain. In the eyes of many observers the UK was well on its way to becoming the sick man of Europe.

The sources of this ironic reversal of fate are instructive. The background to the German economic ‘miracle’ of the fifties was the recovery of the thirties. The investments of the Nazis—in communications, armaments and vehicle manufacture, optics, chemical and light engineering industries and non- ferrous metals—were undertaken for an economy geared to war; but their pay-off came twenty years later. The social market economy of Ludwig Erhard had its roots in the policies of Albert Speer—indeed, many of the young managers and planners who went on to high position in post-war West German business and government got their start under Hitler; they brought to the committees, planning authorities and firms of the Federal Republic policies and practices favored by Nazi bureaucrats.

The essential infrastructure of German business survived the war undamaged. Manufacturing firms, banks, insurance companies, distributors were all back in business by the early ’50s, supplying a voracious foreign market with their products and services. Even the increasingly high-valued Deutschmark did not impede German progress. It made imported raw materials cheap, without restricting foreign demand for German products—these were typically high-value and technically advanced, and they sold on quality, not price. In any case, during the first post-war decades there was little competition: if Swedish or French or Dutch firms wanted a certain sort of engineering product or tool, they had little option but to buy it from Germany, and at the asking price.

German business costs were kept down by sustained investment in new and efficient production methods —and by a compliant workforce. The Federal Republic benefited from a virtually inexhaustible supply of cheap labor—skilled young engineers fleeing East Germany, semi-skilled machine minders and assembly workers from the Balkans, unskilled laborers from Turkey, Italy and elsewhere. All of these were grateful for stable hard- currency wages in return for steady employment, and—like an un-protesting older generation of German workers inherited from the Thirties—they were not disposed to make trouble.

The results can be illustrated with reference to a single industry. By the 1960s German car manufacturers had successfully established a reputation for engineering quality and manufacturing reliability, such that companies like Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart and BMW in Munich could sell increasingly expensive cars to a near-captive market, first at home and increasingly overseas. The Bonn government unashamedly supported such ‘national