Page 150 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

1947 – DISILLUSION AND DISAPPOINTMENT 123

considered a state-controlled and planned economy necessary to cope
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with the misery that presented itself in spring 1947. Moreover, many
Germans still saw capitalism as largely responsible for the soulless
materialism of the modern age and for the alienation of man from his
spiritual beliefs and from true religious values. This materialism and this
alienation were, according to this view, the main reason for the success of
National Socialism. The command economy, unfair, inadequate, and
regrettable though it might be, was considered the last bulwark against
total chaos.
Due to these realities, and considerations, the SPD was confident about
the outcome of both the upcoming state legislature elections and the
petition for a referendum on the socialisation debate to be held in the
British occupation zone on 20 April 1947. Nevertheless, the public
opinion poll was dismissed and it was only in the elections in Lower
Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein that the Social Democrats had success.
There, however, the SPD’s victory was not attributed to its programme
for socialisation and a planned economy but mainly to the large number of
newly-arrived refugees, who made up nearly 40 per cent of the population
and who saw in it their best hope for a redistribution of wealth as a means
of compensation for their losses in the East. In all other four states, the
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Christian Democrats proved to be the most successful party; often by a
clear margin, such as in Baden and Wuerttemberg-Hohenzollern. Thus
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once more after the local and state legislature elections in 1946, the newly
established conservative party, whose ideological basis proved broad
enough to integrate successfully the variety of political positions to the
right of Social Democracy, did surprisingly well in elections which were
indeed about economic concerns but not (yet) about economic concepts.
Despite their mediocre performance in the local and Landtag elections,
the Social Democrats managed to attain the post of Prime Minister in five
out of eleven Länder parliaments and additionally occupied eight ministries
of economics. Thus, the CDU and the CSU, which had both arrived at a
common economic programme, i.e. the Ahlener Programm, and committed
themselves to a joint group in the first post-war parliament, demanded the
decisive post of the Director of the Administration for Economics. In the
Economic Council constituted on 25 June 1947, the 20 representatives of
the Union faced 20 delegates of the SPD and the two different economic
agendas of a socialist state-run economy and the more market-oriented
Gemeinwirtschaft competed in an official and decision-making political body
for the first time in post-war West Germany. The Allies considered the
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ensuing confrontation and conflict of competence between the two major
political parties at the start of the Economic Council as a fiasco. In view
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of the disappointing experiences with the previous bizonal administrations