Chapter 6: Balanced-SBLR in Germany

The foundations of SBLR in the third biggest economy of the world was laid in the aftermath of the Second World War. These were the same years that witnessed the birth of the European economic miracle in the western part of Germany that evolved from the ruins and the devastation of the war that had wiped out cities, factories, the infrastructure, and manpower. Yet, despite the devastation, the war permitted a social restructuring of the country by crushing the old elites and breaking up with many institutions of the past.¹ Those old institutions were not simply those that developed during the dozen years of National Socialism, but others that had made the previous democratic experience of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) unsuccessful and had permitted the rise of the Nazis to power before their demise because of the forceful external effect of the war.