Enterprise and State in the West German Wirtschaftswunder: Volkswagen and the Automobile Industry, 1939–1962

Analysts of the post-war German “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) have diverged sharply over its origins and dynamic. The well-known Olson thesis stresses the importance of a radical break in institutions and interests, while other historians have recently posited the centrality of continuities from the fascist era to the Bonn republic. This article examines the history of Volkswagen, the largest firm in the crucial automobile industry, to understand the balance between continuity and change and systemic and conjunctural factors in the impressive success of this firm. Tolliday rejects the Olsonian notion of institutional “cleansing” and argues that the legacies of both fascism and the British Occupation were vital but that during the 1950s overlapping institutional structures, argumentative interest groups and rival political coalitions at VW could well have choked off growth in the absence of quite favorable circumstances.