This thesis is a study of the socialist opposition in the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II. The first chapter develops a working definition of the Left and socialism as synonymous and, in the modern capitalist state, necessarily system-opposed. The substance deals with the forms which socialist opposition has evolved in its specific West German political, social and economic conditions, whereby the relationship between the Social Democratic Party and the capitalist state occupies the forefront. It is argued here that the various oppositional forms of the SPD have profoundly conditioned the forms of the independent left wing opposition. So long as the SPD represented a fundamental or basic opposition to, initially, the Allied Military Governments, and subsequently to the CDU/CSU-led government, the socialist Left was essentially an inner-SPD force. As German Social Democracy gradually became integrated into the capitalist state, in response to a number of crucial factors--the Cold War, the policies of the Occupation Powers, the successes of the bourgeois coalition, the ''Economic Miracle", the integration of the other labour organizations, etc.--the system-opposed Left tended increasingly to carry on its political activities from outside the SPD, and ultimately began to search for alternative political organizational forms and new socialist theories. The pivotal event in this development was the SPD's Bad Godesberg Programme of 1959, and its climax was attained with the formation of the Grand Coalition of 1966/67. Corresponding with each stage or pattern of left wing opposition between 1945-1967, this thesis attempts to examine the content and form of socialist theory and socialist praxis which have developed, and to evaluate these within their socio-economic context. It further considers the Left as a function of the existence and actions of the Right, and hence also examines the practice and ideology of the occupation powers, the ruling political parties, the upper classes, the churches, the trade unions--and, above all, the post-1952 Social Democratic Party, in the light of their determining influence upon the Left.

Building on a literature that identifies the technologies of liberal governance in the urban fabric of the nineteenth-century ‘liberal city’, my thesis explores the built environment of unified Berlin as a space within which power relations are performed and resisted. The original contribution to knowledge made by this thesis is through its contention that none of the forms of governmentality that have thus far been identified in the literature are adequate for an analysis of the Berlin Republic. To this end it posits the existence of a specifically post-authoritarian governmentality and uses the built environment of Berlin to explore its features and the ways in which it is continually (re)asserted, challenged and (re)negotiated in the German context. More specifically, it analyses post-1990 responses to National Socialist prestige buildings in Berlin which had also been incorporated into the highly politicised narratives of the Cold War: the former Aviation Ministry, the Olympic Stadium and the former Tempelhof Airport. Using these sites’ status as heterotopia, or ‘other spaces’, it highlights how the politics of the past inform the negotiation of the tensions between the celebration / delimitation of heterogeneity, the valorisation / instrumentalisation of ‘objective’ knowledge and the balance between freedom/ control. As well as uncovering evidence to support the idea of post-authoritarian governmentality, the thesis also finds indications that this is a transitional phase and that, in some respects, Germany can be seen to be moving towards the advanced liberal governance seen elsewhere in the western world.