Coupling Geometry Case Study XXII: The Federal Republic of Germany, 1949–Present

This case study applies Coupling Geometry to the Federal Republic of Germany from its founding to the present, as the designed companion to the Weimar study (Pepper 2026, Case Study XXI): the same nation, the same century, two republics with opposite architectures. Its thesis is stated against the redemption narrative rather than through it. Denazification failed: the tribunals collapsed into a follower-certification machine, the 1949 and 1954 amnesties and the Article 131 law reinstated the displaced administrative class, more than half of the Justice Ministry’s senior officials into the 1970s were former NSDAP members and a fifth had come from the SA, the Foreign Office showed the same profile, no judge of the National Socialist judiciary was ever convicted for judicial murder, and the reckoning that eventually occurred was late, partial, and forced from below — by prosecutors working against their own apparatus and by the generational revolt of 1968 — against sustained institutional resistance. What the 1949 settlement changed was not the personnel but the architecture: substantive decoupling — federal dispersal with a genuine second chamber, the constructive vote of no confidence, a constitutional court with teeth, an autonomous central bank, ordoliberal de-cartelisation, broadcasting dispersed to the Länder — assembled under an occupation buffer, external basin depth, and a borrowed frontier arrangement. The result is the portfolio’s cleanest architecture-versus-personnel experiment: Weimar ran formal dispersal with old-regime personnel and fell in fourteen years; Bonn ran substantive dispersal with heavily continuous personnel and has held for seventy-five. Because both republics ran on unconverted staffing layers, the personnel variable is substantially controlled, and architecture is isolated as what differed. Seven structured retrodictions are examined, including the demonstrated functioning of the specific anti-Weimar devices (1962, 1972, 1982), the East–West asymmetry the taxonomy predicts for imposed doctrine versus contested reckoning, and the layered erosion of the elite non-cooperation convention — programme adoption, municipal cooperation, parliamentary vote reliance, elite renunciation — that the study substitutes for the emic “firewall”. A new v3 coding is proposed: the Berlin Republic of 2026 at C = 4.3, drifted from the Bonn-era 3.2 into the cusp band as the borrowed external elements — the American umbrella, cheap imported energy, the open trade frontier — are withdrawn and the debt brake is pierced for the largest rearmament since 1945. A prospective marker set is stated for forward evaluation, with formal registration in the programme’s pre-registration format committed as the study’s next step. The analysis is retrodictive, claims no sequestration, and its codings are single-analyst first passes; adversarial examination is invited. Case Study XXI: Weimar Germany, 1918–1933 – Case Study XXIII: The European Union, 1951–Present