Bilder aus Deutschland

[The Lawspeaker]

The early Bundeswehr: 1950s (West German - current German - defense force).













And today's army service uniform:

[The Lawspeaker]

[The Lawspeaker]

24 Beautiful Kodachrome Snapshots Captured the Life in Germany during the 1950s


These beautiful Kodachrome photos were taken in some cities in Germany by photographer Max Leonard that documented streets scenes during the 1950s.

After the Munich Fasching Parade, 1955

Arnulf Klett Platz, Stuttgart, 1951

At General Walker terrace in Obersalzberg, 1958

At the Tattersal in Wiesbaden, 1958

Bad Herrenalb, Germany, 1955

Blankenheim in 1957

German family in 1959

Girl at the Heidelberg River, 1955

Inside the castle at Bernkastle, 1956

Kurhaus at Night, Wiesbaden, 1958

Man in uniform, Stuttgart, 1952

Man pushing the stroller on street in Trier, 1955

Mothers with children in Bernkastel-Kues, Germany, ca. 1950s

Porsche 356 in Grainau in 1958

Porta Nigra in Trier, 1955

Schultheiss am Kureck in Wiesbaden with a Borgward Isabella Sedan and a Ford Fairlane, 1957

Street in Berchtesgaden, 1953

Street in Freiburg im Breisgau, 1955

Street in Mittenwald, ca. 1950s

Street in Rothenburg, Germany in 1955

Street in Wiesbaden, 1959

Street scene in Garmisch, 1952

The Autobahn North of Wiesbaden in 1958

Women and their children in Rothenburg, Germany in 1957

I removed one picture as it was an obvious mistake: it was clearly a street in Amsterdam and even the signs were in Dutch.

[The Lawspeaker]

Color Photos of Everyday Life in West Germany in the early 1950s

Jan 21, 2016 Ian Smith

West Germany is the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG, in the period between its creation on 23 May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990.


At the onset of the Cold War, Germany (and, indeed, Europe) was divided among the Western and Eastern blocs. Germany was de facto divided into two countries and two special territories, the Saarland and divided Berlin. The Federal Republic of Germany claimed an exclusive mandate for all of Germany, considering itself to be the democratically reorganised continuation of the 1871-1945 German Reich. It took the line that the GDR was an illegally constituted puppet state. Though the GDR did hold regular elections, these were not free and fair. For all practical purposes the GDR was a Soviet puppet state.From the West German perspective the GDR was therefore illegitimate.


The West German Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”, coined by The Times in 1950) was partly due to the economic aid provided by the United States and the Marshall Plan, but mainly due to the currency reform of 1948 which replaced the Reichsmark with theDeutsche Mark and halted rampant inflation. The Allied dismantling of the West German coal and steel industry finally ended in 1950.The Volkswagen Beetle – for many years the most successful car in the world – on the assembly line in Wolfsburg factory, 1973.






















In addition to the physical obstacles that had to be overcome for the German economic recovery (see the Morgenthau Plan) there were also intellectual challenges. The Allies confiscated intellectual privileges of huge value, such as all German patents, both in Germany and abroad, and used them to strengthen their own industrial competitiveness by licensing them to Allied companies.Meanwhile, some of the best German researchers were being put to work in the Soviet Union and in the USA.


Contrary to popular belief, the Marshall Plan, which was extended to include the newly formed West Germany in 1949, was not the main force behind the Wirtschaftswunder. Had that been the case, other countries such as the United Kingdom and France (which both received higher economic assistance from the plan than Germany) should have experienced the same phenomenon. In fact, the amount of monetary aid (which was in the form of loans) received by Germany through the Marshall Plan was far overshadowed by the amount the Germans had to pay back as war reparations and by the charges the Allies exacted from the Germans for the ongoing cost of occupation (about $2.4 billion per year). In 1953 it was decided that Germany was to repay $1.1 billion of the aid it had received. The last repayment was made in June 1971.























As demand for consumer goods increased after WWII, the resulting shortage helped overcome lingering resistance to the purchase of German products. At the time Germany had a large pool of skilled and cheap labour, partly as a result of the flight and expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe, which affected up to 16.5 million Germans. This helped Germany to more than double the value of its exports during the war. Apart from these factors, hard work and long hours at full capacity among the population and in the late 1950s and 1960s extra labour supplied by thousands of Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) provided a vital base for the economic upturn. This would have implications later on for successive German governments as they tried to assimilate this group of workers.


From the late 1950s onwards, West Germany had one of the strongest economies in the world, almost as strong as before the Second World War. The East German economy showed a certain growth, but not as much as in West Germany, partly because of continued reparations to the USSR in terms of resources.

Photos from Found Slides

[The Lawspeaker]

Ein Fernsehbericht aus der Abendschau des Hessischen Rundfunk von 1960. Originaltitel: Allweg oder Unterpflasterbahn

[PHDNM]

Thunderstorm over Marburg

[The Lawspeaker]

On a cold and miserable day in December, very close to Christmas, I stopped off at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof for my transfer to a French train to Paris Est. It was the middle of the afternoon, but I felt like it was 8 pm.

I had enough to time to make this short film about my stay in Frankfurt. Frankfurt (Main) Hauptbahnhof (German for Frankfurt (Main) main station), often abbreviated as Frankfurt (Main) Hbf and sometimes translated as Frankfurt central station,[2] is the busiest railway station in Frankfurt, Germany.[2] The name affix "Main" comes from the city's full name, Frankfurt am Main. In terms of railway traffic, Frankfurt (Main) Hauptbahnhof is the busiest railway station in Germany. With about 450,000 passengers per day the station is the most frequented railway station in Germany (together with Hamburg Hauptbahnhof) and one of the most frequented in Europe.

[The Lawspeaker]

This is a nine hour train ride that takes one from the center of the Swiss Alps to the Heart of Berlin. This train crossing almost all of Germany from the Southeast to the Northwest corner. It is an all day affair. One of the highlights of this trip is when in Frankfurt I got out to film and the train car door shut and the train started pulling out...I ran as fast as I could for the one car door that was open and was scared to death. The other big highlight was the Fresh and Warm Pretzel girl who served these tender morsels up and down the aisle. With the beer I was having...all was good.

[PHDNM]

Kreuzberg, Berlin

[The Lawspeaker]

1920s Berlin. Personally, I consider this period to be one of the most disturbing period's in Berlin's period of being Europe's most disturbing and decadent cities (surpassing even the likes of Amsterdam), but I sure like the aesthetics. The Hitler Regime (for all its evils) surely managed to clean up the city big time before the Allies bombed it to shreds and the city, that was once a Paris on the River Spree, was reduced to a half-communist, half capitalist Modernist hellhole.





Babylon Berlin (a new German series) also manages to show Berlin at its most unstable and decadent when it zooms into the Berlin of 1929 with an entirely made-up story but one that sounds, nonetheless, reasonably plausible: