Democratic Angst

Abstract

This chapter shifts the focus from economic fears as analyzed in Chapter 4 to political fears regarding the future of postwar democracy. After the Federal Republic had gained sovereignty and accomplished a basic political stabilization, commentators continued to discuss the basic contours of West German democracy. They articulated intense fears of a possible authoritarian transformation (on the Left) or of a weakness of state authority (on the Right). Both political fears dialectically reinforced each other during the 1960s. A renewed presence of the Nazi past as a result of a series of trials of Nazi perpetrators also sensitized the West German public to the lingering effects of the Nazi dictatorship in postwar West Germany. The chapter then analyzes the emergence and functioning of democratic fears with respect to the debate over the planned “emergency laws” in the 1960s.