Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The institutions of post-war Germany were deliberately shaped so as to minimize the risk of a re-run of Weimar. Government was decentralized: primary responsibility for administration and the provision of services was devolved upon the Länder, the regional units into which the country was divided. Some of these, like Bavaria or Schleswig-Holstein, corresponded to once-independent German states that had been absorbed into Imperial Germany in the course of the nineteenth century. Others, like Rhineland-Westphalia in the north-west, were administrative conveniences that combined or bisected older territorial units. West Berlin became a Land in 1955 and was duly represented in the Bundesrat, the Upper House where the regions’ delegates sat (although its deputies in the directly elected Lower House, the Bundestag, could not vote in plenary sessions). The powers of the central government were on the one hand considerably restricted when compared to those of its predecessors—the Western Allies blamed the rise of Hitler upon the Prussian tradition of authoritarian government and set out to prevent any recurrence. On the other hand, the Bundestag could not casually unseat a Chancellor and his government once elected; to do so they were obliged to have ready in advance a candidate for the succession with sufficient parliamentary votes to assure his success. The purpose of this constraint was to prevent the kind of serial political instability and weak government that had characteriz...