ELI5-How did Germany go from losing two world wars to being the economic powerhouse of Europe?
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I’ll let others answer the post ww2 question but I think the question itself seems to hold some misconceptions?
The German-speaking area of Europe had been very wealthy and highly populated for hundreds of years before the wars. It didn’t unify as a single state until the late 1800’s. It benefited from being “slow” in industrializing so it could take advantage of developments elsewhere (the so called catch-up effect that China has benefited from – avoiding the mistakes of the pioneers).
By 1900 Germany was one of the economic powerhouses of Europe and a pioneer in chemistry for example. In fact it’s arguable that Germany’s unification and emergence as a political and economical powerhouse was one of the reasons for WW1.
WW1 left Germany largely unscathed “physically” – most of the fighting took place elsewhere.
My point here is that putting “losing 2 world wars” as the starting point for understanding the German economy is kind of misleading. Germany was perhaps the most powerful economy of the European mainland when WW1 started, continued to be so up until WW2 and was then bombed to shreds.
As a comparison – there were about as many people living in Germany as there were in France and the UK combined by the start of WW2 (excluding colonies, overseas territories etc). Point being that Germany was and is huge in comparison to its neighbors.
So the question that is interesting to ask is rather, how did a massive, wealthy, well-educated and industrialized country recover after a disastrous war? Then you can get into stuff like the Marshall plan, the cold war, coal+steel, the common market (EU).
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