Page 125 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

98 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY

propaganda committee to avoid any technical jargon regarding the
intricacies of economics, stressing, ‘one must speak simply to the public,
not too much, with a few thoughts and large ideas simply represented.’
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Thus the polarising slogan ‘Social Market Economy or Socialisation and
Controlled Economy?’ was to become the all-dominant question in the
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election campaign of summer 1949. While the CDU/CSU had chosen a
number of different and contrasting central themes in the immediately
preceding years – Christian Socialism had been central to the campaigns in
1946, the concept of a Gemeinwirtschaft for the Landtag elections in 1947,
and free enterprise and a market economy in 1948 – henceforth, they
centred the Social Market Economy and referred to Ludwig Erhard’s
success record.
Along with the Union im Wahlkampf that introduced Erhard as an
economic expert and stressed his instrumental role in the rebirth of
Germany to rank-and-file party activists, political posters and leaflets
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were the chosen means to disseminate the ideas of the Social Market
Economy to the electorate. Although these publications indeed addressed
a variety of issues such as culture, refugees or the restoration of German
unity, most of the propaganda committee’s posters and pamphlets
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concentrated on economic issues. These mass communication media – for
the 1949 election campaign the central committee produced around 1.7
million posters, and several hundred thousand broadsheets were
reproduced by the regional organisations – were also seen as the most
uniform sort of propaganda that the party employed, with the press and
propaganda committee producing the same posters and leaflets for use
throughout West Germany, thereby creating a unified and coherent party
image that transcended local interests. In presenting themselves as a
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political union with a determination to construct a social and equally free
German economy and community, the CDU/CSU encouraged the notion
that it was the more competent and responsible party to safeguard West
Germans from the threats from within, such as economic hardship, as well
as from outside, namely the ever present Asiatic, Bolshevik threat. This
image of a politically strong and economically successful Union was
cultivated by a variety of political posters and leaflets; most emphatically
perhaps in the poster series 1947-1949 which sharply contrasted the dire
conditions from the immediate post-war years to the improved situation
of 1949.
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While the CDU/CSU propaganda did not appeal to potential voters in
terms of their class or profession but instead played on widely held
perceptions that all in society had suffered equally in the post-1945 rubble
economy and secondly that the monetary reform had alleviated class
differences, it was nonetheless deliberately directed towards refugees and