ELI5-How did Germany go from losing two world wars to being the economic powerhouse of Europe?
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Germany has been, if taken as a whole, the economic powerhouse of Europe since the age of Charlemagne, especially from a knowledge and artisanal pre-industrial standpoint. Printing press, newspaper and many early scientific mathematical and chemical discoveries were made within the hundreds of Germanic microstates that constituted the Holy Roman Empire yet were under intense competition with each other. Until its unification in mid late 19th century, Germany was a highly decentralized region, unlike rest of Europe, it only unified centuries after Britain, France or Russia estabilished powerful centralized empires . After unification, Germany had countless of generations of proven culture, localized social systems and a deep trove of knowledge and wisdom in its people built after centuries of slow and gradual growth, and despite the disasters and mistakes in the two world wars, most of this potential survived (vast majority of the people enslaved and sent to die were young, fresh male adults without higher education and below the age of 25, yet that were demographically in a rich enough supply to provide further population growth afterwards) yet it is possible that these two world wars made Germany so much more more powerful and resilient, especially from an evolutionary standpoint, where only the most important, efficient and resilient industries and services survived and suddenly found themselves in a power vacuum that is a big part of allowed Germany so massively economically expand from the 1930s to 1941, and then again throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Marshall plan helped Germany to rebuild much faster and without authoritarian means (unlike in the 1930s) and willingness of US and Europe to accept a new Germany again as an economic partner greatly helped to reintegrate Germany back into the West European socioeconomic system. Similar “miraculous” recovery after a period of total war was also seen in Japan that was demilitarized, occupied and then aided by the US, South Korea, as well as UK, France and US itself that found an amazing increase in productivity and living standards in the 1950s and 1960s.
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