The Democratization Paradox: Ordinary Germans, Allied Occupation, and the Built Democracy of Postwar Germany

For many years, the Allied occupation of West Germany was seen as an unqualified success. Although in recent years scholars have cast a more critical glance at denazification practices, the country's transformation into a liberal, parliamentary democracy continues to be viewed as nothing short of a miracle. But histories of the period tend to focus on elite policymakers: Allied officers, American experts, and German politicians. The views of ordinary Germans are put to one side, as is the fundamental paradox of democratization, namely that democratization is necessarily an undemocratic policy. This paper relies on a host of different sources, from Allied polling to oral histories to German government memoranda, to analyze how and why ordinary Germans engaged with practices of democratization in the postwar years. It hypothesizes that democracy came to mean a hollow set of political rituals to ordinary Germans. While Germans did develop democratic habits, those habits were not filled with democratic meaning, which would take much longer to develop. Ultimately, this article contends that ordinary Germans were content with a ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ approach to democratization, bootstrapping themselves into a democratic habitus in the years after the Second World War.