The economic policy the United States pursued in occupied Germany combined politically motivated security considerations with the provision of humanitarian aid. This duality accounted for its often striking inconsistency. Both aspects, however, had evolved unavoidably from a single cause: Hitler's aggression. That seemed to have stemmed from a peculiarly German mind-set and a corresponding set of political, social, and economic conditions that had to be fundamentally changed if mankind were to be spared yet another outbreak of German aggression. At the same time, the war Hitler unleashed had recoiled on Germany itself, leaving the country in ruins and inhabited by a population incapable of supporting itself. The Allies, therefore, confronted the problem of having to provide the German people with the means of subsistence while destroying the economic base of Germany's potential for war. The Americans, moreover, were determined not to let either of these imperatives become a long-term obstacle to the liberalization of world trade, the foundations of which were laid at Bretton Woods in 1944.

From European Economic Revolution to the Reconstruction of Traditional Trade Patterns

Germany was nonetheless the principal reason for the initial failure of American plans for a multilateral world economic system. Before the war, Germany had been the workshop of Europe, exporting finished products and capital goods while providing a market for food, raw materials, and semifinished products from other European countries. In 1938, 69.7 percent of all German exports went to other European countries, which in turn supplied 54.5 percent of Germany’s imports. Even after the aggressive intentions of Hitler’s Germany had long been apparent,Western Europeans were still spending twice as much on capital goods from Germany as from the United States. American postwar planners initially hesitated to tamper with these traditional flows of trade – which, indeed, they regarded as an important prerequisite for a swift reconstruction of Europe.

Wars are undeniable events in history, and - as constantly reported in the daily news - they still occur all over the world, even in an age that has produced more legal and political mechanisms to avoid war and has drafted more manifestos to decry violent conflict than any other epoch in history. As soon as we embark on scrutinizing the meaning of wars more closely, questions arise that trigger heated disputes: Why are wars fought? What reasons justify the conduct of war? In which military, political, and ideological categories do belligerents couch their strategies and experiences? What impact does war have on the politics, societies, and cultures of combatants and noncombatants? How do wars affect the international community and international relations beyond the immediate events on the battlefields? Why do we label some military conflicts wars but not others?

The answers to these questions are highly contested; this holds especially true for one of the most dramatic conflicts in modern history: the American war in Vietnam, as it took shape with the deployment of U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam and the bombing of North Vietnam in the mid-1960s, and concluded with the Paris agreements between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1973. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the shelves of libraries and bookstores groan under the weight of a burgeoning literature on the topic. There can be no doubt that the Vietnam War is one of the most widely discussed, researched, and documented events in recent history

Thomas Nipperdey, in an ironic twist on Leopold von Ranke's famous dictum, once remarked that “All of German history is intermediate to Hitler.” The 1960s certainly were. In West Germany, public discourse throughout the decade was imbued with references to the country's troubled past. Nearly every important event in the Federal Republic's political, social, and cultural life was discussed against the background of National Socialism. Although some issues grew immediately out of this period, like the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials or the suspension of the statute of limitations with regard to atrocities committed during the Third Reich, others did not, like the Spiegel affair, the Multilateral Nuclear Force (MLF), the Emergency Laws, and - last but not least - the Vietnam War.

This chapter will show how the Vietnam War was perceived in the Federal Republic, given the atmosphere, and how the war in turn became a symbolic weapon in an assault on the collective identity of West Germans. In other words, and more provocatively: This chapter's premise is that West German students were protesting not so much against the current American actions in Southeast Asia as against past German atrocities in Europe. For them, Vietnam represented an opportunity to break away from their parents' generation of perpetrators and assuage their inherited national guilt.

It is obvious, then, that I am concerned more with the specifics of the West German protest movement than with its similarities to other social movements that had sprung up worldwide during the 1960s. There was, to be sure, extensive cross-fertilization across national boundaries.