At the end of the war, according to the British Labour politician Hugh Dalton, Winston Churchill had expressed the wish that Germany might grow ‘fat but impotent’. And so it did, faster and to greater effect than Churchill could have dared to hope. The attention of West Germans in the two decades after Hitler’s defeat did not need to be diverted away from politics and towards producing and consuming: it moved wholeheartedly and single-mindedly in that direction. Making, saving, getting and spending became not just the primary activity of most West Germans, but also the publicly affirmed and
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