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West Germany
The Federal Republic of Bonn, from postwar ruins to economic miracle and unification
West Germany rose from a country in ruins in 1945 to the largest economy in Europe within two decades, a transformation Germans called the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle. The Federal Republic of Germany, founded in 1949 from the American, British, and French occupation zones, built a stable parliamentary democracy under its Basic Law, anchored itself in NATO and the European Economic Community, and governed from the modest Rhineland city of Bonn, which it treated as a provisional capital. Its name lives on: legally, the Federal Republic did not end in 1990 but grew, absorbing East Germany. What disappeared was the divided western state that had stood on the Cold War frontier for 41 years.
West Germany covered about 248,700 square kilometers, roughly 70 percent of today's Germany, running from the Danish border and the North Sea coast to the Alps. The northern lowlands around Hamburg and Bremen gave way to the uplands of Hesse and the Rhineland, cut by the Rhine gorge with its castles and vineyards. The Ruhr basin, built on coal and steel, was the industrial heart, and Frankfurt grew into the financial center. In the south, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg stretched to Lake Constance and the Bavarian Alps, where the Zugspitze reaches 2,962 meters. West Berlin, an enclave deep inside East Germany, was closely tied to the Federal Republic, though the Western Allies kept final authority there. Its territory now forms the ten western states of Germany plus western Berlin.
The Basic Law took effect on May 23, 1949, and Konrad Adenauer became the first chancellor. Currency reform in 1948 and market-oriented policies set off rapid growth, and millions of Germans expelled from the east, followed by guest workers from southern Europe and Turkey, helped rebuild the country. The Federal Republic joined NATO in 1955 and was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957. In the 1970s Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik eased relations with the Soviet bloc and accepted East Germany as a separate state, though never as a foreign country. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Two Plus Four Treaty with the four wartime Allies cleared the way, and on October 3, 1990, East Germany joined the Federal Republic. Berlin became the capital of the united country.