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At the end of World War II, Germany lay devastated, the country divided and occupied by the victorious Allied powers. Ultimately the national scale would survive, but in altered form. Two distinct German nation-states, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), joined Austria and Switzerland, whose prewar borders were preserved. Both German states and Austria were subordinated in an international system marked by the rivalry of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In the postwar political order of central Europe, the international scale took on a new significance.

In the FRG, the basic structures of the liberal state and the market economy were firmly in place by 1949. The Allies, especially the Americans, repressed any radical plans for either social restructuring or widespread de-Nazification. Indeed, many old elites, businessmen, army officers, and state officials made an easy accommodation so long as they abandoned overt affection for Nazism. Through international monetary arrangements, the Marshall Plan and others, West Germany's ''social market economy'' became firmly integrated into the U.S.-led international system. The benefits of the ensuing economic boom trickled down by the late 1950s. West Germans largely retreated into the private realm, experienced as a refuge after the incessant claims of the Nazi state and the economic hardships from 1943 to 1949. West Germans worked hard, saved, and spent on consumer goods. The automobile became the symbol of the age, the icon for which they worked and which enabled them to vacation all over Europe. Probably more than anyplace else in Europe, Germany was becoming ''Americanized,'' even while many traditional features of German society remained strong. Social historians are devoting increasing attention to postwar Germany, finding some surprising continuities in social and gender structure into the 1950s, but afterward, in West Germany, more substantial change.

The West German postwar system, liberal and capitalist in its essentials, was marked by a higher quotient of welfare measures and more active labor union participation than many other Western societies. Social-welfare programs had survived through all the regime changes of the twentieth century, and benefits became more generous. The strictures of the programs continued to reinforce the gender hierarchy, as they had in the nineteenth century, with women disadvantaged and sometimes completely excluded from benefits. Despite the large number of households headed by single women, the nuclear family with the male breadwinner quickly reemerged as the norm. The formal labor participation rate of women remained low in comparison to other European countries, although it crept up throughout the 1950s.

A very different pattern developed in the GDR. While the Western Allies sought to reestablish elements of the pre-Nazi social structure in their area of influence, the Soviets pursued a radical transformation. Controlling the region of Junker estate agriculture, they quickly collectivized land, finally eliminating the social basis of noble power. State control of industry eliminated the powers of entrepreneurial and managerial classes. With an entirely new governmental and security apparatus in the East, the leading members were anything but old elites. As a self-proclaimed ''workers' and peasants' state,'' the GDR actively promoted social mobility. Thousands of citizens from lower-class backgrounds were given opportunities for advanced training and education, enabling them to move up the occupational ladder. Yet a kind of retreat to the private developed in the GDR as well, as many lives were structured by a determination to get ahead coupled with a feeling that the intimate world of family and friends was the only safe place, a refuge from the unceasing claims of the state. . . .

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