Cold War
At any rate, these problems were embedded in a growing East-West conflict that was escalated into the «Cold War» in Europe which made the problems easier for Germany to bear. The two German states were practically wooed as the respective front states of their alliances. In addition, the renewal of political life took place under the interventional guidelines of the occupying powers USA, England and France on the one hand, and the USSR on the other hand.
The currency reform of 1948 and the Marshall Plan of 1947 brought the FRG a rapid economical upsurge, already described in 1950 as the «German economic miracle.» The «authoritative democracy» of Konrad Adenauer, who ruled the FRG as Chancellor in 1949-1963, ensured a reliable, predictable political continuity and trust in the parliamentary democracy. At the same time, the close involvement of the two German states in their confederacies and their readiness to be integrated into supranational communities distracted from their guilt-ridden national identity. Whilst the FRG was practically Americanised, the GDR adopted Soviet Stalinism.
The other side of the coin of this development was the complete suppression of the most recent past. The victorious powers put the leading Nazis on trial, but the middle leadership level of National Socialist Germany survived almost unchecked in the FRG, which it loyally served and with which it identified. The GDR, which was in fact governed largely by Die DDR, Communist resistance fighters, disavowed any responsibility for the Nazi crimes. If anti-communism was the foundation of the FRG during the period of the Cold War, anti-fascism was that of the GDR, which accused the FRG of fascist traits.
There arose an atmosphere of political apathy, a consumer-orientated withdrawal into the idyllic in which, for example, returning emigrants were now suspected as «troublemakers.» The intellectual stagnation of this period, which was only overcome in the late 1960s, was especially manifested in a historically-removed, emotionally ascetic and abstract artistic «avant-gardism» sufficient only unto itself.