The consolidation process of democracy in West Germany in the Fifties and Sixties has been the subject of intensive historical study over the past decades. Two factors have featured prominently in recent explanations. Historians have stressed that National Socialism's catastrophic collapse not only initiated the demise of long-standing dreams of national power but also discredited a host of political and cultural traditions that had fuelled these dreams. The fall of National Socialism led to a lasting rejection of central aspects of the national past, or so the argument runs. Moreover, since the late Fifties West Germany witnessed the gradual re-establishment of a civil society that brought the Federal Republic politically and culturally in tune with dominant Western norms. Drawn-out processes of Westernization and Americanization, then, complemented the rejection of the past and underpinned the consolidation of civil society. In short, a great transformation brought into existence a country that shared many features with the West but had little in common with Germany in 1930 or 1950.

This interpretation only captures part of the picture. After all, numerous examples stand in the way of assertions that a fundamental break occurred some time in the Fifties and the Sixties. The influential idea of the "social market economy" provides a case in point. Does the concept offer an instance of Westernization or a reformulation of domestic traditions of political and economic thought? Similar questions can be asked in the context of the numerous models of consensus- or the search for such models - that characterized West German public life. Finally, the emergence of social history offers an important scholarly practice that can be read as an instance of Westernization but also possesses (rather disturbing) national origins. All of these examples suggest that a stock of national traditions facilitated developments in the Federal Republic that are normally viewed as quintessentially "Western". From this perspective, positing a fundamental break some time in the late Fifties or in the Sixties poses the risk of insulating West German history by linking it to Western trends but severing its roots from domestic traditions. The comforting tale of the arrival in the West may well be a sedative that allows the society of the Federal Republic to shed a bad conscience.

Against this background, the proposed conference will move beyond current modes of inquiry. While Western models undoubtedly played important roles, it should not be overlooked that contemporaries also reshaped and reclaimed domestic traditions to further acceptance for a democratic and liberal culture. An analysis of the tensions between rejection and re-appropriation of domestic political traditions advances our understanding of how democratic and liberal concepts came to figure prominently in an evolving collective identity with distinctly West German contours. Furthermore, while an extensive literature analyzes the politics of the past on a federal level, much less is known about how West Germans positioned themselves vis-à-vis National Socialism's legacy in everyday life. This aspect will provide a central line of investigation, moving the research agenda from federal politics to local contexts and individuals to grasp the "micropolitics" of the past. Finally, the focus on Westernization has largely eclipsed trends of a more far-reaching internationalization of West Germany in the Fifties and Sixties. Although the Federal Republic counted among the prime beneficiaries of the dynamic world economy after 1945, the cultural ramifications of globalization for West German collective identities have remained largely unexplored. Examining the cultural impact of an expanding international commodity culture, tourism and migration - to name but three fruitful fields of inquiry - will allow for an exploration of the relationship between internationalization and Westernization.

Moving beyond established scholarly paradigms, the conference will consider the Fifties and Sixties as an orientation period during which West Germans hammered out new individual and collective identities drawing on compromised national traditions and international cultural trends.