"Michael Hughes offers the first comprehensive study of West Germany's efforts to balance the costs of war and defeat among its citizenry. Seeking to rebuild a private property-based socioeconomic order, West Germans struggled for years to construct a system of recompense that would reconcile the rights of former and current property holders, meet the hopes and needs of individual Germans, and prove compatible with a social-market economy.

In the process, Hughes notes, they were forced to articulate what they meant by social justice, why they believed in private property, how the economy should operate, who should foot the bill for Germany's aggressive war, and how liberal democracy could produce legitimate outcomes from vehement political conflicts."--BOOK JACKET.

"Because Germans had debated similar issues of recompense after World War I - with strikingly different results - Hughes is able to trace important changes in German society since 1918, illuminating the process by which West Germans came to accept free-market economics and liberal democracy."--BOOK JACKET.