Page 145 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

118 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY

and socialism and socialisation played a distinctive role in their campaign
for the forthcoming communal and state legislature elections in 1946.
The first communal elections, held in Gemeinden (communities) of less
than 20,000 inhabitants, were scheduled in Bavaria, Hesse and
Wuerttemberg-Baden for Sunday 20 January and Sunday 27 January 1946.
Free elections had returned to Germany and the majority of the Germans,
i.e. 82 per cent, proposed to use this first free exercise of the right to
ballot since Hitler’s rise to power. Finally, and despite the oft-heard
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charge of political apathy in post-war Germany, old and young, men and
women, the well and even the sick had turned out in cold winter weather
to record their votes; one contemporary witness even reported that her
sickened grandmother was carried to the polling station on a chair in order
not to lose a vote. Hence, in Hesse 85.1 per cent and in Wuerttemberg-
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Baden 86.1 per cent of the eligible voters in the smaller towns and villages
went to the polls to select their local councils; in Bavaria, the turnout of
voters was even 93.4 per cent. Similarly, the local elections held in
Landkreisen (rural counties) on 28 April, the municipal assembly elections
held in Stadkreisen (municipal counties) and in communities of more than
20,000 inhabitants on 26 May 1946, and also the constituent assembly
elections on 30 June 1946, drew between 61.6 and 86.3 per cent of the
eligible voters above the age of twenty-one in the American occupation
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zone to the polls. Final returns in the local elections taking place in
Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-
Holstein, Baden, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland Wuerttemberg-
Hohenzollern and Berlin on 15 September, 13 and 20 October 1946, also
showed an extraordinarily and ‘miraculously’ high percentage of voter
participation. The collapse of the system and the disintegration of the
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state were indeed accompanied by an intense regionalisation of opinion
and a shift of personal identification from the national to private
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interests. As Theodor Heuss (FDP), later to become the first President
of the Federal Republic of Germany, was to put it: ‘World catastrophes,
which vehemently shake a nation, have at first the strange effect of
decentralising the emotions. [...] People attempt to escape to fields where
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the [...] great political world is not felt so directly.’ While such a mood
was at best a transient phenomenon and one cannot necessarily refer to
political apathy per se, in fact there remained a fairly low interest in political
activity in the immediate post-war years. Over three-quarters were not and
did not intend to become members of a political party – and if they did,
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often did so because a party membership facilitated obtaining luncheon
vouchers and coupons for basic goods. In April 1946, 76 per cent flatly
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responded that, if they had a son leaving school, they would not like to see
him choose politics as a profession. Typical of the comments made by