'Rough' Postwar Democracies: Violence in Everyday Political Life (1945–1960)

Funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2025–2028).

In recent years, historians have increasingly focused on the multifaceted nature of European postwar democracies (see, e.g., Conway 2020; Corduwener 2023). Almost unanimously, they have emphasized the “contained”, “controlled” nature of the first two decades after 1945, effectively declaring this period a sort of golden age of democratic stability. This project posits that postwar democracies during this period were not only “controlled” but also “rough” democracies (see also Nolte 2024 on this concept), in which physical violence remained a persistent feature of democratic conflict resolution. The project is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and is part of its historically oriented sub-program “Democracy as Utopia, Experience, and Threat”. The project is led by Petra Terhoeven (DHI Rome), Robert Kramm (University of Tübingen), and Sonja Levsen (University of Tübingen).

To gain a more precise understanding of the nature of postwar democracies and the spectrum of relationships between democracy and violence during this period, three sub-studies focus on the post-fascist postwar democracies of West Germany and Austria (Study 1), Japan (Study 2), and Italy (Study 3).
Despite their “controlled” forms of government, their political daily life – according to the basic hypothesis – was marked by a comparatively high presence of physical violence and a culture of intense conflict, in which the boundaries of what was democratically legitimate were often pushed far. This assumption contrasts with previous historiographical analyses, in which the various forms of violence during the period from 1945 to 1960 were either neglected or not systematically related to their consequences for the democracies in question. Transnational or comparative perspectives are almost entirely absent.
The sub-studies first examine the contexts and constellations, as well as the thresholds below which observers and actors assessed the use of violence as legitimate, “normal”, or unproblematic for democratic conflict resolution. Conversely, they investigate the conditions under which violence was marked as undemocratic or as a threat to democracy, and the consequences that ensued. Second, all sub-studies examine the role of various historical contexts – particularly fascism, imperialism, the interwar period, and the respective end of the war – as frameworks of experience and points of reference for the assessment and interpretation of violence. Furthermore, all studies examine the continuities of anti-communism, racism, and/or anti-Semitism, each of which had varying relevance to the occurrence of violence in the countries under investigation. Finally, the studies integrate their analysis with gender-historical perspectives and examine, in particular the role of conceptions of masculinity in the acceptance or legitimization of violent acts in post-1945 democracies. In doing so, the projects explicitly also focus on state violence.
The project is expected to result in the completion of two dissertations and several articles.

Projects

Germany/Austria

Violence and Its Limits in “Rough” Democracies: West Germany and Austria in the Postwardecade (1945/49–1956/59) - Amrei Kienle

The formative decades of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Second Republic of Austria are usually portrayed as a linear success story of stabilization and as a history of “controlled” or “self-disciplined” democracies (see Oliver Rathkolb and Jan-Werner Müller on these terms). These perspectives imply that political participation was primarily administered by the state and that citizens largely withdrew from democratic negotiation processes in favor of security and stability.

This subproject examines the dominant narrative of contained stability, as escalatory events such as the violent unrest surrounding the currency reform in Stuttgart (1948), the transnational ‘Anti-Harlan Movement’ (1951–1954), the so called ‘Essener Blutsonntag’ (1952) or the Munich ‘shop-closing war’ (1953/54) point to a conflictual facet of the postwar decades.

The analysis will focus on political violence in two specific contexts, which represent, as it were, two central arenas of public democratic negotiation: federal/National Council and state parliament election campaigns, as well as selected protest events during the extended postwar decade. The nearly 15-year period under study marks a phase of massive structural, institutional, and societal changes in both countries. These include the establishment of new constitutional orders, the holding of the first democratic elections after World War II, the withdrawal of the occupying powers, and finally the founding of sovereign states recognized by the international community. These profound upheavals not only provided the framework but also the fertile ground for democratizing societies, in which the boundaries of legitimate conflict resolution had to be constantly renegotiated.

Examining these processes in the context of the issue of violence makes it possible to grasp the actual “roughness” of young democracies in greater detail and to analyze the tension between the normative ideal of nonviolence and actual practice. In the context of these two focal points, a selection of events will be made over the course of the research process, with a focus on exemplary individual cases and their key groups of actors. The transnational perspective offers the opportunity to examine national specificities and to explore, first, what role the various national histories played in the assessment and interpretation of political violence. Second, with regard to the different constellations of violence, the study will examine patterns of continuity in violence motivated by anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-communism. A third focus of the study is on contemporary conceptions of masculinity, with the aim of determining what role they played in the acceptance of acts of violence and to what extent gender-specific norms were negotiated in the respective debates.

Amrei Kienle

Japan

Political Violence and the Turn Away from Violence in Japan’s Postwar Democracy (1945–1960) - Daniel Wollnik

After the end of the Second World War, Japan underwent profound political and social changes under Allied occupation. Demilitarization, democratization, and the promulgation of the so-called “Peace Constitution” of 1947 laid the foundations of the postwar political order and shaped the state’s self-image as a peaceful democracy in which the violent past appeared to have been overcome and economic recovery moved to the forefront. This notion was also reflected in historical scholarship, where engagement with political violence and violent conflict in postwar Japan long remained overshadowed by narratives of democratization and economic reconstruction. Only more recently has this consolidated image of a largely harmonious and low-violence postwar society been critically questioned, with scholars pointing to the persistence of violent forms of conflict even after 1945, although political violence was increasingly publicly scandalized and lost legitimacy (Siniawer 2008).

Building on these insights, the project investigates the role violence played in the political confrontations of Japan’s early postwar democracy between 1945 and 1960, and the factors that contributed to its gradual delegitimization. At the center of the project is the concept of Gewaltabkehr (‘Turn away from violence’) (Schaarschmidt/Süß/Weiß 2018), which understands the decline of violence not as an abrupt phenomenon but as the outcome of a longer process of social negotiation. In particular, the project examines how, in the wake of experiences of war, domestic repression, and terror, new norms of nonviolent political contestation emerged and became established in Japan after 1945, and how state institutions, political parties, the media, and legal discourses contributed to the regulation and delegitimization of political violence. At the same time, the project asks by whom and in which contexts violence continued to be understood as a legitimate or necessary means of political practice.

Methodologically, the study combines political and cultural-historical perspectives. It analyzes legal texts and commentaries, parliamentary debates and government documents, as well as newspapers, journals, and materials produced by political organizations. On this basis, it seeks to reconstruct the legal, political, and discursive means through which political violence was constrained, as well as the interpretive patterns that continued to enable its occasional legitimation. Particular attention is also paid to the gendered dimension of political violence. The project examines the extent to which political violence was understood as a male-coded practice and how media representations and political discourses contributed to its gendering. At the same time, it asks what role women played as actors in political violence and how their participation was perceived and interpreted in the public sphere and in politics.

Daniel Wollnik

Italy

“The Weapons of Democracy”: Police Use of Firearms and the Rule of Law in Italy’s ‘Cold Civil War’ (1947–1960) - Christoph Ehlert

This subproject examines the police use of firearms in the context of social and political conflict in the early Italian Republic between 1947 and 1960. During these years, demonstrations, strikes and labour disputes repeatedly resulted in fatal police interventions against protesters.

This violence unfolded within a highly polarised political climate often described in the historiography as Italy’s ‘Cold Civil War’. The communist opponent appeared to many political actors as an ‘internal enemy’ against whom the state was expected to act decisively. The use of lethal police force was therefore frequently legitimised as a necessary defence of the democratic order and was closely associated with the policies of Christian Democratic Interior Minister Mario Scelba, which became known under the term scelbismo.

While the 1950s are today often remembered as a period of economic modernisation and political stabilisation, this dimension of state violence has tended to recede from view. A broader delegitimation of lethal police force only began to emerge during the course of the 1960s.

Against this backdrop, the project investigates how the police use of firearms was politically legitimised or contested, assessed within the legal system, and debated in the public sphere. At the heart of the project lies the question of the limits of state violence in a young democracy: How was the use of lethal force justified or criticised? What role did the press, parliamentary debates, court proceedings and local protest movements play? And under what conditions did attitudes towards such violence begin to change?

The project seeks to understand the role state violence played in the functioning and stabilisation of Italy’s post-war democracy and how, through these conflicts, the boundaries of legitimate violence in Italian society after 1945 were negotiated.

Christoph Ehlert