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Recent military interventions by the West highlight persistent and unresolved problems regarding future foreign policy. Reconsidering the wider legacy and precedent of the British occupation of Germany from 1945 is critical in understanding these debates. Addressing a neglected topic, this article examines whether Britain reconciled its liberal democratic values as an occupying power, and in particular how its government tried to invoke the Christian ‘moral mandate’ of the British churches and voluntary organizations as an instrumental feature of policy, part of its civilizing mission in Germany. Central to this, however, were manifest contradictions between the churches’ rhetorical efforts to help the presentation of the moral case for military rule, and a policy vacuum that offered few practical measures to help German civilians, and especially expellees and refugees. Moreover, Britain's claims of moral leadership were at odds with its decision to delegate refugee matters to the German authorities. There were major differences in approach by church leaders, Whitehall ministers and civilian administrators in Germany in assessing how magnanimous to be in their treatment of Germany. With greater unanimity of purpose, humanitarian initiatives might have had greater success and become a more uniting symbol for reconciliation. The main failing was in the churches’ inability to modify government policy. Compassionate rhetoric and humanitarian relief efforts could not repair the damage caused by earlier political decisions to marginalize forced migrants that effectively punished them as Germans, a legacy of the occupation often sidestepped in order to focus on greater British achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The broadly held perception that Germany's 1950s economic regeneration was a catalyst for its cultural recovery has been reinforced unduly within a historiography emphasizing art's re-emergence after 1945 through the achievements of artists in the West at the expense of their eastern counterparts, whose contributions were seen as devalued by being politically compromised. Such narratives overshadow the achievements of German painters who tried to discover a renewed purpose for art by salvaging a humanist tradition from the moral and physical wreckage of Nazism. This revealed conflicts between those seeking to maintain continuities with Germany's past, and those viewing 1945 as a decisive break with history. This article suggests that the humanist themes they invoked provide another context for continuing debates around memory, suffering, guilt, blame and reconciliation. In that sense, humanism transcended the schisms that emerged over painting's form and content and whether to remould art along socialist lines or to restore more liberal and elitist principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]