Just Desserts

Virtue, Agency, and Property in

Mid-Twentieth-Century Germany

MICHAEL B. HUGHES

Entitlements, or Rechtsanspruche, have become central in both American and (West) German political discourse.

Developments in postwar West Germany suggest that demands for en­titlements also reflect more complex attitudes about individual rights, status, and agency. Operating in a culture of rights, twentieth-century German property holders believed that they had a right to their private property and personal status because both reflected their moral worth and efficacy as individuals. To preserve the moral order, they asserted, society must act to restore that property and status whenever human villainy or amoral material forces wiped them out. Doing so would reaffirm both the honor and the autonomy of individuals. Germans raised their claim of substantive rights for an inherently superior minority against two other discourses: laissez-faire liberalism, which recognized only economic neces­sity and formal rights, and the politics of victimization, which offered broad but demeaning claims for social assistance.

Although the conflict among these three discourses played itself out in various contexts, this chapter focuses on the struggle for recompense by the millions of Germans who lost most or all of their property between 1939 and 1948: The “bombed-out” had seen their businesses, homes, and personal possessions destroyed by Allied attacks; the “expelled” had been driven from their homes in Eastern Europe, usually with nothing but the clothes on their backs; and the “currency damaged” had lost their life savings in a necessary but draconian currency reform.

The German experience between 1914 and 1948 had called into question the assumption that the individual could be secure in the own­ership of private property. The German state, under three different polit­ical regimes, had created two massive bouts of inflation (1914-23 and 1935-48) that destroyed the value of people’s savings and paper invest­ments. Germany’s catastrophic economic collapse in the early 1930s had driven hundreds of thousands of lower middle- to upper middle-class Germans into penury. Further, wartime devastation and the expulsion of Germans from their homes had shown that anyone’s real property could be lost in an instant, leaving individuals and their families penniless. As an ad hoc group exploring a currency reform plan declared in 1947, “Experience has already taught us that the best real property can suffer just as much a disappearance of value as all other �values’ when an economy is ailing or collapses.” One could argue for a moral or natural right to property, but in practice, whenever the society could not or would not uphold that right, then the individual and his or her property were surrendered to the caprices of the more powerful or of material forces.^{[424] [425]}

Yet, if Germans had been deluding themselves in viewing individual property as the basis of security, they could only turn back to society (which had failed to protect their property in the first place) in search of security.

To support their demand for some socially guaranteed security, the war-damaged insisted that all Germans constituted a “community of risk” (Gefahrengemeinschaft) that had fought the war together, would have enjoyed the fruits of victory together, and should now bear the burdens of defeat together. Nazi rhetoric and wartime experience had strength­ened the long-standing sense of community among Germans scattered across Central Europe. Virtually all (politically active) Germans accepted that such a community existed and that it entitled all Germans to justice from the community, including the just redistribution of the war’s burdens among all Germans.^[427]

The war-damaged defined justice as treating equals equally. Yet, as Aristotle recognized 2,300 years ago, people disagree about what consti­tutes equal: “For the one party, if they are unequal in one respect, for example, wealth, consider themselves to be unequal in all; and the other party, if they are equal in one respect, for example, free birth, consider them­selves to be equal in all.” Not surprisingly,West Germans disagreed about what “equal” meant for the purposes of a Lastenausgleich - equal as Germans or unequal as Germans of varying status, wealth, and experience.^[428]

For East Germany’s communist rulers (who had no desire to recreate capitalist private property in any event) the key criterion was that all Germans were human beings.

Most West Germans agreed that all Germans were entitled (Anspruch) to an existence worthy of human beings, but many, including the left wing of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), favored a separate social Lastenausgleich. They believed all war-damaged had suffered an unusual, “undeserved” blow, so that they were equal among themselves but dif­ferent from, and implicitly superior to, “typical” welfare recipients. The war-damaged therefore deserved special treatment, although the guiding principle would be current need as human beings, not past wealth. As the Social Democratic Party (SPD) argued, “Therefore, the first goal of the Lastenausgleich is to provide a new securing of their livelihood through a [monthly] payment for all who cannot support themselves from their own work. From this perspective all are equally entitled - regardless of whether they formerly had only the subsistence minimum or more.” The focus here was on the 70 percent of the war-damaged who had lost household goods, a rented dwelling, or a job - not productive assets. Indeed, sup­porters of a social Lastenausgleich usually considered the loss of a job as deserving of recompense, even if people in market economies do not normally think of workers’ jobs as part of their capital.⁷

Supporters of a social Lastenausgleich argued only in part from a culture of rights.They seldom asserted that war-damaged had a pre-existing “right” or “entitlement” to a Lastenausgleich. Instead, they argued that the commu­nity had a “duty” to provide all its members a humane existence or an opportunity to earn a livelihood, or that “social justice” required some assistance for “fellow human beings who had fallen into need through no

uber einen Allgemeinen Lastenausgleich,” Mar.

6 Peter-Heinz Seraphim, Die Heimatvertriebenen in der Sowjetzone (Berlin, 1954), 32-9, 67.

7 For the quotation by the SPD, see “Lastenausgleich! Grunde und Gegengrunde der Sozialde- mokratie,” ca. Dec. 1950, 4-5, in Archiv der Sozialen Demokratie (hereafter ASD), NL Weisser, no. 1080; Karl Albrecht, “Nicht Lastenausgleich - Gerechte Sozialhilfe!” Nov. 3, 1948, in ACDP, NL Binder 013 B I.1; Rudolf Gerstung,“Der Lastenausgleich ist kein Konkursverfahren,” Sozialde- mokratischer Pressedienst, July 19, 1948.

fault of their own,” or that the society must provide some assistance to the war-damaged to prevent their radicalization. When they did acknowledge an “inalienable right,” it was to some indeterminate “aid.” Because the root of the claim to assistance was not any specific individual right, society would have broad discretion in deciding how and to whom to provide assistance, leaving the individual in a dependent position.^[429]

Demands for a social Lastenausgleich fit nicely into the politics of victimization that had been developing in Germany (and elsewhere) since the nineteenth century. Already by the 1920s, as Greg Eghigian has argued, “The German social state... witnessed a proliferation of demands made on it by increasing numbers of individuals and groups all claiming the status of a deserving victim.” Deserving victims were innocent victims who could show that they were not responsible for their own misery. They could claim no natural or constitutional right to restitution, but they could appeal to their fellow citizens for some assistance to prevent abject misery. The more victimized they could claim to be, the better their case in the competition among different groups of disadvantaged for a share of the limited social resources available for redress.

Yet the supporters of a social Lastenausgleich did not want the war­damaged left dependent on the whims of others. Even those who did not admit a pre-existing right to a Lastenausgleich usually insisted that society must grant the war-damaged an entitlement to whatever Lastenausgleich aid it chose to offer. The war-damaged thereby would not be degraded to supplicants and would feel confident that they would continue to receive their recompense or assistance as long as they needed it. The pol­itics of victimization has tended to merge (albeit not seamlessly) into a culture of rights.^[431]

Those war-damaged citizens who had formerly owned income-earning property or homes wanted equals treated equally, too, but they consid­ered themselves inherently superior to unpropertied Germans. They assumed that because they were unequal in wealth, they must be unequal in other key ways - particularly in degree of virtue - and deserving of unequal, that is, superior treatment. For these formerly propertied war­damaged, the equals who needed to be treated equally were the (for­merly) propertied damaged and the (still) propertied undamaged. They defined justice as just desserts, an unequal distribution of rights and burdens among the community’s members proportional to their differing inherent value.¹¹

These formerly propertied appealed not to human sympathy but to a culture of natural, individual rights. As expellee leader and Bundestag delegate Linus Kather (CDU) asserted, the war-damaged believed “that a claim [to a Lastenausgleich] is given as a result of natural law on the basis of the collective liability of a people for a war that was fought and lost in common.” Kather had to acknowledge some role for community in grounding even a natural-law claim, but he and the formerly propertied war-damaged derived therefrom an inalienable right to a social guarantee for his or her virtuously acquired property against any undeserved loss. Because they saw human communities as naturally articulated according to the varying virtue of individuals, they argued that Germans could recreate the moral order only if they restored, as much as possible, a socially just inequality reflected in the lost property, autonomy, and status of the formerly propertied. They, and most undamaged propertied, hence supported an individual Lastenausgleich, one devoted solely to proportion­ally recompensing individual capital losses. The formerly unpropertied and thus relatively unvirtuous war-damaged should expect only social aid from general government revenues, not a Lastenausgleich.^{[432] [433]}

The propertied war-damaged emphasized that superior abilities and, especially, virtuousness had enabled them to secure the lost assets they now wanted restored to them through a Lastenausgleich. Those who had accumulated a nest egg against disability or old age emphasized their thrift and self-sacrifice. They had chosen to forgo consumption, often at considerable discomfort, so as not to burden the community when they no longer could work. People bombed out of their homes and expellees emphasized their diligence and foresight in building up productive assets and their social contributions in generating jobs and tax revenue. A former farmer, whom the Nazis had forced to sell out and whose assets currency reform had then destroyed, wrote, “That is the result of 42 years of greatest diligence and thrift, that I stand today without liveli­hood, home, and (nearly) assets, and all through no fault of my own.” Some war-damaged could even refer to themselves as just generally vir­tuous. One of them, for example, referred to “the elevated and socially valuable strata of the formerly self-supporting.” Moreover, the war­damaged complained bitterly that they were being punished for their hard work and self-sacrifice through the loss of hard-earned property, while the lazy and spendthrifts might be rewarded. As one protested, “It is indeed not right to give him who produced and saved nothing at all the same [Lastenausgleich benefits] as him who in a long life has resolutely and soberly secured for himself what was necessary for his business and social honor.”^[434]

Significantly, the war-damaged contended that they had a property right in their social status as well as in their material possessions. Expellee leader Oskar Wackerzapp wrote,“The war-damaged have a claim to a bal­ancing out that opens to them the way to their earlier social distinction in the Volksgemeinschaft.” Expellee Ministry civil servant Dr. Hinz asserted that a Lastenausgleich should “end social declassing resulting from war damages and re-establish social livelihoods with reference to the earlier livelihood.” The war-damaged frequently asserted the need for a Lasten- ausgleich that would provide them “furnishings corresponding to their cultural level.” As one bombed-out individual wrote, former businessmen had “honor” and standards to maintain; he saw being able to keep those standards as his right, one that society needed to recognize and protect - and that the government needed to recreate if society failed to protect it in the first place. Such claims echoed the centuries-old German notion that upstanding members of the middle classes were entitled to a burger- liche Nahrung, a livelihood appropriate to an honorable citizen.^[435]

Many of the war-damaged rooted their very sense of self in their formerly superior positions in a hierarchical social order. A regional group representing expelled Gymnasium teachers (a high-status group in Germany) complained that its members had to take low-status positions in the school hierarchy in their new homes, thus suffering not merely material losses but a “devaluation of their person.” A civil servant com­mented, “[T]he war-damaged do not want to be considered and treated as a homogeneous mass but rather just like the portion of the population that has been spared, to be integrated again into the social order as per­sonalities.” Indeed, as Walter Seuffert (SPD) noted during a public debate, some apparently wanted their property losses legally confirmed, even if they secured no compensation, “with the sole purpose of wanting to be able to prove, because of one’s honor, how rich one had once been.” Such attitudes reflected broader concerns among West Germany’s middle and upper classes about the loss of hierarchy, individuality, and virtue in modern mass society.^[436]

Wartime calls for shared patriotic sacrifice had strengthened a long­standing mistrust of middlemen and profit. The war-damaged found it particularly odious that they - the virtuous - had lost all while other, nefarious individuals had “profiteered” in the midst of the German people’s war or postwar misery. Some Germans, especially military con­tractors, had enriched themselves enormously. Even worse in most Germans’ eyes were the sharp operators who had made fortunes in the black market by speculating in desperately needed but scarce goods. Attacks on profiteering and demands that its beneficiaries be made to pay their “immoral” profits into the Lastenausgleich fund were ubiquitous. “It may never be allowed,” one person wrote indignantly, “that, for example, some kind of racketeer, speculator, or human question mark, who lived high on the hog at the expense of his fellow humans” should get to enjoy his ill-gotten gains. He contrasted his compatriots, “the solid [citizens], those who through physical or mental activity... stood positively in life, the savers and those who used their strength and health honorably, labo­riously, and true to their personal, communal, and general principles,” with the “speculators, racketeers, and economic hyenas.”^{[437] [438]}

The war-damaged had a vision of a hierarchical, morally charged social order. In that order, which implicitly corresponded with the uni­versal moral order, modest property ownership was both the result and the sign of inherent virtue - although large-scale property owner­ship might well reflect greed, profiteering, or other illicit activities. The middle classes thus could feel morally superior to both the poor and the rich. A leveling of society would call this moral order into question. Not only would it suggest that virtue might not be rewarded, it would actu­ally punish the virtuous for their self-renunciation by depriving them of the fruits of that restraint - while forcing them to see the feckless rewarded with the enjoyment of both consumption in the past and social 17

assistance now.

The war-damaged hence asserted a contingent notion of property ownership. Mere possession of property was not sufficient. One had to have deserved it, that is, to have acquired it virtuously. The Central Asso­ciation of Bomb Damaged, for example, justified confiscating wartime capital gains outright because their possessors had “no moral claim to compensation.” It wanted a “sifting out... to allow compensation to come only to that circle of persons who from the standpoint of justice really have a claim to compensation,” and this could only be done by excluding those whose claims were from “easily earned rearmament profits and wartime capital gains.”^[439]

The war-damaged also called the postwar property distribution into question because the capricious operation of material forces, as opposed to individual virtue, determined whose property would survive. They emphasized repeatedly the capriciousnes of war damages. Pure chance decided whether bombs would destroy Herr Schmidt’s house or Frau Meyer’s, and it was more or less arbitrary that those who lived in East Prussia suffered expulsion whereas those who lived in Westphalia escaped it. The war-damaged almost universally insisted that they should not have to bear their individual losses because they had suffered them “without any personal culpability,” especially compared to the undamaged. For example, Adolf Bauser, the leader of the bombed-out, complained, “I would like to state, from the deepest conviction, that it is impossible and unbearable to demand of someone that they should have to do without all that they possessed, while others get to keep all they had, indeed might increase their wealth, without any fault having characterized the former or any merit being ascribable to the latter.” By arguing that unculpable losses deserved recompense at the expense of unearned preservation of assets, the war-damaged reasserted the principle that moral equals needed to be treated equally and that outcomes had to depend on the relative virtue or villainy of an individual’s actions, not on the capricious opera­tion of material forces. Indeed, individuals were entitled to state inter­vention to assure those morally appropriate outcomes.^[440]

Determined to defend their moral superiority, the war-damaged vocif­erously rejected any assistance that smacked of welfare or charity. They demanded superior assistance administered separately from welfare or, in the case of formerly propertied citizens, individual restitution for prop­erty losses. They insisted that they deserved more than welfare because they were more virtuous than the “typical” welfare recipient or charity case. “Everyone must see,” expellee leader and Bundestag delegate Kather asserted, “that one cannot offer to the farmer who lost a farmstead, to the artisan or businessman deprived of his shop, and thereby, as a rule, of the results of a long and strenuous life’s work, a so-called full support payment that was scarcely more than welfare.”The German Federation of Pensioners complained that “compensation [for savers ruined by currency reform] scarcely exceeds the welfare payments for those who did not save through self-renunciation and are rewarded for that behavior.”^[441]

The formerly propertied war-damaged insisted not only that they were more virtuous than the unpropertied but also that they had been and should continue to be efficacious agents. Their property could be an expression of their virtue only if they had been able to affect the exter­nal world by exercising that virtue. Moreover, they could only be sure of some control over their own lives, could only regain some of the secu­rity they had lost, if they could continue to act efficaciously in the future. This desire to establish agency for themselves, to be subjects, not objects, expressed itself in their claim that they had a right to Lastenausgleich and in their resistance to being considered victims.

Crucially, as long as the war-damaged had no right to restitution, they were obviously objects of forces beyond their control. As the Protestant journal Christ und Welt explained, the war had shattered the “normal course of things,” so that many of the formerly self-reliant

no longer could pluck up their courage and make their way with their own strength. For every clever, active, and diligent person it means a deep humilia­tion to have to recognize this fact. For he must out of necessity grant the state rights where formerly he knew how to help himself; he must submit to com­munal regulation where earlier he decided alone and was also ready to bear the responsibility.

Yet such dependence on the assessments and power, the whims, of others was dangerous. As one expellee wrote, expellees rejected a social Lasten- ausgleich (based on civil servants’ assessments of current need) because “thereby, however, every objective basis for calculation would be lost, so that the amount of the compensation would in the end depend on the subjective discretion of the Welfare Office.”^[442]

To evade such a surrender of control to the state and its minions, the war-damaged claimed entitlement to Lastenausgleich and asserted their agency as protectors of their own rights. In campaign literature the expellee political party’s leaders emphasized its significance as an expres­sion of the expellees taking charge of their lives and fighting for their rights. As party head Waldemar Kraft wrote, “The expellees are not sup­plicants and are not willing to be charity recipients. They are creditors and demand their rights, and their elected leaders are the guarantors that the struggle for [their] rights will be conducted unyieldingly and without compromise.” By asserting their legal claim the war-damaged sought to reassert their status as subject as opposed to object. They were not asking the state to bestow a gift but were fighting to compel it to acknowledge a pre-existing entitlement.^[443]

Because formerly propertied war-damaged emphasized their autonomy and moral superiority, they resisted being labeled as victims. The term war-damaged does denote victim: someone who has suffered an injury. But victimization rests on the common vulnerability of human beings as the potential object of forces beyond their control. Such a focus was risky for individuals who based their claims to privileged recompense, and their self-image, on uncommon virtue and efficacy. Yet by 1948 victim status had become so vital a weapon in the struggle for recompense that the war-damaged grudgingly began to refer to themselves as victims.^[444]

Formerly propertied war-damaged, though, still preferred to emphasize their efficaciousness. Expellee Erich Dederra, for example, characterized expellees as victims, but he also emphasized their previous self-reliance, their noble efforts at overcoming despair, and their desire to be “active again in the interests of the whole people as they once were.” Also, his­torian Albrecht Lehmann notes of expellee memories of the postwar years: “A typical mode of narration: Alongside the recounting of the random allocation of a domicile... a further pattern is a self-conscious presentation of individual initiative, of the tricks and the dissimulation” that enabled the clever war-damaged to overcome their miserable fate.^[445]

Contradicting their own assertions of efficacy, the war-damaged dis­tanced themselves from any responsibility for Nazism - and from any political efficacy before 1945. People do like their victims innocent, and any who contribute to their own problems (Mitverschuldung in German law) can expect to find any compensation claims reduced or nullified. A few West Germans did argue that the millions of war-damaged who had supported Nazism (to varying degrees) deserved no recompense. The war­damaged hence strove to mask any responsibility for their own losses con­sequent to their earlier, often ardent, support for Hitler and his war. In the process they implicitly declared themselves to have been ineffective politically, even while insisting they had been efficacious economically.^[446]

The moral views that drove the formerly propertied war-damaged had deep roots in German culture. To demonstrate superior virtue, lower- middle- and middle-class Germans had long striven to secure enough capital so they would not fall prey to the humiliation of having to accept charity or welfare. Scarcely a generation before, though, the impact of World War I and inflation had victimized a million formerly self­sufficient Germans, leaving them dependent on charity or welfare. Like the post-World War II war-damaged, these individuals had protested, “We pensioners have been swindled in an unprecedented manner, in that we have a life of toil behind us [and] have secured through diligence and thrift enough that we would be supported in old age and would fall as a burden on no one.” They, too, demanded privileged compensation on the grounds that they were not “typical” welfare recipients and did not deserve to be treated as such.^[447]

These moral views were widely shared throughout German society. Significantly, very few postwar West Germans openly questioned the pretensions of the war-damaged. Indeed, in a 1948 poll conducted by American occupation authorities, 74 percent of respondents (91 percent in Berlin and 89 percent in Bremen) explicitly favored a Lastenausgleich. Moreover, undamaged Germans from all social backgrounds and from across the political spectrum could accept such arguments. In the Amer­ican poll, 82 percent of those who expected to be unaffected, and even 51 percent of those who expected to have to finance a Lastenausgleich, favored it.^[448]

The undamaged agreed, often explicitly, that property ownership did reflect the inherent virtue of the owner and that the (formerly proper­tied) war-damaged were notably virtuous. The chemical industry interest group, for example, whose members would have to help finance any Las- tenausgleich, agreed that “no one will want to deny that in the majority of cases property and wealth rest on virtue, not on unearned luck or dishonest machinations.” Finance Ministry officials acknowledged that one must at least partially restore the prewar property distribution, even if at a lower level, because otherwise one would be treating the virtuous worse than the unvirtuous. The undamaged could also agree that the erratic nature of war damages made the existing property distribution illegiti­mate. Already in 1943-4 the neoliberal future economics minister and federal chancellor Ludwig Erhard (CDU) had written, “If one part of the German people has lost all through no fault of their own, it cannot be countenanced that other individuals, favored without having merited it, should preserve perhaps their whole capital through the war.”^[449]

Policymakers generally agreed when the war-damaged rejected wel­fare as a humiliation inappropriate to those who had fallen into misery “through no fault of their own.” Even those on the Left perceived the war-damaged as different from “normal” recipients of public assistance and as deserving of more respectful treatment. A writer in an SPD pub­lication could state, “The expellees are not objects of general welfare provisions; they are rather subjects in the construction of the necessary reordering of social relations in Germany.” Implicitly, for the party of social equality, welfare recipients were objects, not subjects, and were qual­itatively different from and implicitly inferior to the war-damaged.^[450]

This general acceptance of the self-characterization of the war­damaged reflected the shared conviction that society had an interest in convincing the mass of Germans that playing by the rules - working hard, saving, being self-reliant - would be rewarded, not punished. Christ und Welt, for example, rejected consigning the war-damaged to welfare because “The Lastenausgleich would be the highest injustice if it should once again make the provident, clever, and diligent into the simpletons, and the prodigal, stupid, and lazy into the winners.” Attacking SPD calls for a social Lastenausgleich and celebrating the socially virtuous property owners, a writer for the Industrie-Kurier argued, “People are different. The one prefers to spend his income and enjoy the day; the other squirrels his money away, through self-denial, dime for dime, to become proper­tied and not to be dependent on the state in his old age. Such civil virtues are unfortunately never properly honored by the state, although without their cultivation it can scarcely endure.”^[451]

These arguments for virtue, agency, and property, for entitlement and victimhood, were rooted in historically recent, and not entirely congru­ous, assumptions. The culture of rights and the politics of victimization seem on a fundamental level contradictory, the former emphasizing individual efficacy, the latter recognizing the uncontrollable forces that can lead to unjustified misery. Yet they share the belief, or delusion, that human action is neither divinely determined nor morally meaningless, that some connection not only ought to but does exist between virtuous action (or at least intent) and just outcome, that people ought to and somehow ultimately do deserve their fate.

Traditionally, human existence was so tenuous that people could not hope to control their environment. They assumed that they must accept whatever fate or the divine laid on them. That view offered them little control over their lives but could imply some larger meaning to human experience, particularly in the Christian context of the Divine Providence of a just God. Job, who ultimately submits to a God who has devastated his life as part of a wager with Satan, is exemplary of such resignation. But as one of the few open opponents of a Lastenausgleich complained, in recent centuries “the notion of a fate that could be laid upon one as a personal task seemed shaken,” replaced by “the materialistic and areli- gious concept of a self-evident right to restitution for material losses.”^[452]

The intellectual roots of both the culture of rights and the politics of victimhood lie in the Enlightenment. Some Europeans (the Philosophes) began to doubt that each event reflected God’s active intervention in the world. This meant that human misery was not the inevitable result of divine will - but also that such misery as did occur no longer was suf­fused with divine meaning, leaving Europeans (and Americans) living in a desacralized world. The Philosophes did offer moral hope by arguing that a benevolent God had created a beneficent universe in which people, as formally equal, autonomous, and efficacious individuals, could estab­lish justice and meaning if they tried. Many Europeans therefore began actively to pursue happiness as something attainable by and reflective of individual human effort. Increasingly, any human misery that did not result from individual fault came to seem unreasonable and unjust. It was also frightening because it suggested that the desacralized universe might in fact contain no moral order.^[453]

One reflection of this new worldview was the politics of victimization that arose in the nineteenth century. Romanticism put a premium on sensitivity to and sympathy with others. Meanwhile, greater material security increased people’s expectations and society’s ability to compen­sate individuals for the consequences of life’s disasters. Security came to seem the norm: and something to be valued.Yet if security was the norm, one should only lose it for good reason. To be punished undeservedly by forces beyond one’s control seemed a betrayal of the new faith in indi­vidual efficacy and resulting moral order. One expression of the desire for moral meaning was therefore a conviction that an expanding list of “inno­cent” victims must not be left prey to amoral material forces.^[454]

Yet abandoning oneself to the kindness of strangers seemed risky and weak, leading to the alternative emphasis on rights as the basis of human security. In Germany this emphasis reflected Kantian and Hegelian notions of property as the basis of independence and (self-) mastery. It also reflected a strong tradition, identified with the Rechtsstaat, of legal for­malism as the most reliable basis of human freedom and security. Many Germans argued that the individual could best secure freedom and the opportunity for self-actualization if society implemented a comprehen­sive, consistent system of formal rights guaranteed by a neutral judiciary. Individuals would then face a knowable system within which they could structure their actions to achieve their freely chosen ends. Any inequality would presumably be the consequence of unequal endowments, so that, as Dieter Grimm writes, “these inequalities... no longer appeared as externally imposed but as ascribable to the individual and hence not unjust.” Legal formalism proved unable, however, to assure morally accept­able outcomes, given the fundamental inequalities of a market society, and it certainly could not protect one against currency fluctuations, falling bombs, or expulsions. Many Germans therefore sought to assert a sub­stantive, rather than a merely formal, right to their earlier property and position: If they lost their wealth for any reason beyond their control, society must act to restore their lost property and its value. They sought to establish a concrete right that would enable them to coerce society into securing their ends. The claim to rights by the war-damaged was, as it had been for nineteenth-century proponents of the Rechtsstaat, a means to assert control over the power of others and material forces.^[455]

Even though the attempts of the war-damaged to morally ground property rights was deeply rooted and widely shared, it has seemed, even on its own terms, problematic. One would be hard pressed to deny that accumulating assets or preserving them in a competitive, temptation-filled world requires some degree of “virtue.” Nonetheless, moral philosophers have been loathe to seek to legitimate private property by appealing to the property holder’s putative virtue. Too many morally dubious individ­uals often own vast amounts of property. Also, if the moral basis of property is the exercise of virtue necessary to obtain it, then any prop­erty obtained through unearned fortune (for example, inheritance, gam­bling) would presumably be illegitimate. The wealthy are often just lucky; welfare recipients or the working poor are sometimes just unfortunate - but honorable.^[456]

More important in the context of the Lastenausgleich, those whose char­acter we most admire might in fact not be those able to use valuable eco­nomic resources most efficiently. The virtues that the formerly propertied claimed for themselves seem admirable enough. But in the rough and tumble of the marketplace, they may pale beside other “virtues,” such as rationality, technical competence, administrative ability - or even greed and ruthlessness. The community may be better served if the nasty but efficient hold property rather than the nice but ineffective. Moreover, in a market economy success is its own justification: The accumulation of wealth is considered prima facie evidence that one knows how to use society’s resources most efficiently in response to market forces.³⁶

Crucially, postwar West Germans came to accept such an “achievement society,” where income and honor were to be proportional to perfor­mance. The logic of industrial-technological competitive economies had, since the early nineteenth century, tended to privilege instrumental rationality, practical competence, and entrepreneurship. But most Germans had resisted such “virtues,” dismissing them as materialistic or selfishly pushy (often with an anti-Semitic thrust). The Nazis, though, had promoted these pragmatic virtues with their social-Darwinist call for an achievement community in which status derived from concrete achieve­ments on behalf of the Volk. The chaos of war and defeat had strength­ened the appeal of these virtues because Germans had to scramble desperately to “organize” sufficient resources to survive - by exercising practical efficiency and, often, a certain devious cleverness. As the eco­nomic miracle of the 1950s offered a new, widely admired identity based on economic success, West Germans began to glory in their achieve­ment society. Social worth was now measured not so much in terms of permanent character (thrift, diligence, foresight) as according to current performance.³⁷

Not surprisingly, then, the undamaged sought to limit the Lastenaus- gleich less by touting their own rights as property owners than by appeal­ing to economic necessity. The chemical industry group that had praised the virtue and entitlement of individual property holders defended cor­porate property on the basis of its national-economic utility. The undam­aged (including businesses, the trade unions, and the Social Democrats) supported a Lastenausgleich for the war-damaged and even a 50 percent capital levy on surviving property, but they argued that the levy’s payment

36 Ibid., 81-3. See also John W, Chapman, “Justice, Freedom, and Property,” Nomos 22 (1980): 313.

Grimm, “Burgerlichkeit im Recht,” 168, notes that legally in a bourgeois order the law asks only after the “formal correctness” of individual acts and ignores “within the most extreme limits of immorality [Sittenwidrigkeit] all motives... conditions... and consequences.”

37 Klaus Latzel, “�Freie Bahn dem Tuchtigen!' Kriegserfahrung und Perspektiven fur die Nachkriegszeit in Feldpostbriefen aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,”in Gottfried Niedhart and Dieter Riesenberger, eds., Lernen aus dem Krieg? Deutsche Nachkriegszeiten 1918/1945 (Munich, 1992), 340-1; Karl Martin Bolte, Leistung und Leistungsprinzip: Zur Konzeption, Wirklichkeit und Moglichkeit eines gesellschaftlichen Gestaltungsprinzip (Opladen, 1979), passim. provisions must be moderate enough to protect the national economy on which everyone’s economic well-being depended. Current property owners could not be forced to transfer real assets immediately or to sell substantial shares of their property because that would break up “organic” production units and would “overburden” the weak post-defeat economy. Moreover, within West Germany’s social-market economy one could not resort to government intervention to make drastic levies feasible because that would disturb the natural operation of market forces.^[457]

Electoral calculation and political fears about the reactions of the 17 million war-damaged made some form of Lastenausgleich inevitable, but conceptions of social justice helped determine the form of Lastenaus- gleich legislation. Responding to the conflicting voices on the issue, the right-of-center government parties in 1952 promulgated a Lastenausgleich law that bolstered the market economy and the achievement society while acknowledging the claims of virtue.The law established a 50 percent levy on real assets but allowed obligors to pay it in installments over 30 years, making it a modest property tax. It devoted 50 percent of Lastenausgleich funds to productive economic integration measures and social-support payments that promoted economic growth while ensuring for all war­damaged, including many expelled workers, an existence worthy of a human being - but superior to welfare. To reaffirm a virtue/property connection, however, and the claim of formerly propertied war-damaged citizens to superior status and entitlement, it provided supplements for the formerly propertied within the social-support payment system and devoted 50 percent of Lastenausgleich funds to a privileged entitlement to compensate for material war losses.^[458]

The war-damaged came to terms with the social-market economy after 1952. The expellees’ political party attracted less than 6 percent of the vote in the 1953 federal elections, and most war-damaged citizens obvi­ously preferred immediate assistance to the restoration of past wealth. The leadership of the war-damaged realized it could never secure the indi­vidual Lastenausgleich that the formerly propertied had wanted. By the mid-1950s it was comparing the war-damaged with other war victims to justify demands for increased compensation for formerly propertied and unpropertied war-damaged. Yet it continued to assert the putative virtue of the formerly propertied to maximize their recompense. Nonetheless, in the long run, 75 percent of Lastenausgleich expenditures have gone to economic and social assistance and only 25 percent to restitution for material losses. In the Lastenausgleich, the social-market economy and the politics of victimization have predominated over, while not completely displacing, the culture of rights.^[459]

The culture of rights is about status, control, and meaning. The world is a dangerous place, and life is an uncertain business. The individual’s status is always at risk from human or natural forces in ways that chal­lenge human hopes for security and moral meaning. In the last two cen­turies many people have thought that the best strategy to minimize or eliminate that risk was to insist on their rights. These would give them a certain (more or less honorable) social position, a lever with which to coerce society into guaranteeing their security and status, and a discourse within which to argue that life makes sense. Unfortunately, Germany’s recent history called the efficacy of that strategy into question. Inflation, depression, persecution, war, and defeat battered millions of Germans, seemingly at random, as formal rights proved inadequate or society proved unwilling or unable to protect individual rights and the moral status they affirmed. The politics of victimization did offer the unfortunate a basis for some minimal assistance, but most Germans perceived such aid as degrading and unreliable. The desire for superior status and effective control drove many postwar (West) Germans to struggle to re-establish their old substantive, individual property rights - even in part by an appeal to collective liability. Yet even those who unabashedly derived claims for assistance from communal obligations or social justice argued for new entitlements for the unfortunate. The culture of (individual) rights may have proved a weak reed, but it has still seemed to many the best one to lean on.

In comparing the American and German social states, commentators rightly emphasize the relative weakness of the American social state and the greater German commitment to communal action under state spon­sorship. The experiences and attitudes discussed here help make clear why Germans have been less confident that private property and initiative alone could ensure security. Entitlements continue to enjoy widespread support among Americans, even after decades of relative economic sta­bility. That support suggests that anxieties over certainty, status, and agency may operate in the United States as well, despite the greater expressed faith in individual initiative in what Germans call the land of “unlimited” opportunity.