This chapter examines the resurgence and reinvention of antisemitism in Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II. To understand why anti-antisemitism became a distinctive philosophical, theological, and political project requires attention to the resilience of Judeophobia in the late 1940s and 1950s. Although unrepentant Nazis, former pro-German collaborators, or traditionalist Catholics transgressed the taboo, the delegitimation of antisemitism in the public arena also forced Judeophobia to take cover behind favorable views of Jews: Tactical philosemitism in occupied Germany and the early Federal Republic is a case in point.

In the confessional conflict in Italy, neither the liberal anticlerical nation-builders nor the Vatican could gain the upper hand. In this stalemate situation, Italian liberals, after having experienced social liberal welfare ideas in the second half of the nineteenth century, fell back on laissez-faire ideas from the beginning of the nineteenth century. They wanted to see the state confined to a residual role in welfare. This stance created a perverted match with the subsidiarity ideas of Italian Catholicism. By agreeing with the liberals on keeping the state out of welfare, the Vatican saw a chance to hold on to its millennia-old poor relief empire.

Many Jews coming from various parts of Eastern Europe found refuge in Germany, of all places, in huge “displaced-persons camps.” They made up as many Jews as had lived in the country before the war, only they were younger and unexpectedly active. While few German Jews returned to the “land of the murderers,” the new migrants took their place. This chapter tells the tale of their settlement in Germany, parallel to the building up the Federal Republic, especially under the the US military occupation. They could only observe with unease the signs of antisemitism in the new German state, and support the early acts of restitution as well as the financial agreement with Israel signed in 1952. They were also the first to demand some sort of confrontation with the Nazi past. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish jurist who fled to Denmark and later to Sweden during the war and finally returned to Germany afterwards, took it upon himself, as the Prosecutor of the State of Hessen, to organize and then serve as prosecutor in the so-called Auschwitz trials. The chapter ends with his life-story.

Having delineated the core constitutive elements of the Christian Democratic ideology in Part I of the book, Part II examines its historical instantiations and prospects for the future. Thus, whereas in the first part the approach was largely synchronic, here we look at the Christian Democratic ideology from a more diachronic perspective. This will also allow for greater attention to the internal heterogeneity of the various manifestations of the Christian Democratic ideology over time, which is something that had previously been somewhat obscured by the intention of reconstructing this ideology’s conceptual unity. I begin by discussing Christian Democracy’s historical trajectory in its primary context of origin, that is, continental Europe, focusing in particular on three national experiences: those of Italian, German and French Christian Democratic parties. The ensuing chapters broaden the focus, discussing the European Union as a whole, Latin America and the question of Christian Democracy’s lingering normative potential.

This chapter examines the world in which the BdL was established. It centres on the period 1948–51, the latter being the year when monetary sovereignty was transferred by the Allies to the West Germans. The chapter documents the opinions of West German elites in the lead-up to the creation of the BdL, noting that they were split on the question of central bank independence. It argues that a political struggle surrounding the future of the central bank incentivised a variety of West German elites to confront their inter-war monetary history. The chapter then shows how the BdL adopted an active press policy in the effort to influence the Bundesbank Law. Such efforts failed to prove effective during this period, however. Other events, such as the Allied decision to transfer monetary sovereignty to West Germany in 1951, proved more decisive. But it was in this very period that the central bank established a workable framework of historical narratives that could be applied for political ends.

This chapter examines the final years of the Bundesbank Law debate. It devotes particular attention to a 1956 public attack launched by the chancellor, Adenauer, on the central bank. The chapter argues that the crucial consequence of the ‘Gürzenich affair’ was the narrowing of the parameters of monetary debate through which West Germans interpreted the inter-war era. It argues that the provisions outlined in the Bundesbank Law reconfirmed an institutional conflict between Bonn and Frankfurt, one that was originally left behind by the Allied authorities. In providing no formal process through which conflicts between the federal government and the central bank could be solved quietly, the Bundesbank Law increased the likelihood that such disagreements would become ‘dramatised’ and spill into the public sphere. These disagreements gave rise to public controversies surrounding central bank independence, and in turn, provided further instances in which inflation narratives could be geared in support of the Bundesbank. It explains West Germany’s cultural preoccupation with inflation in institutional terms.