In the spring of 1972, 50 years ago, I held my high school diploma in my hand.

This July weekend 2022 our class meets in Stuttgart.

It all starts in the old school, which has since become much fancier with an assembly hall, a swimming pool and Spanish on offer.

Then a guided tour through the city, which has also become fancier, fortunately the hideous Kleiner Schloßplatz has been blown away.

Afterwards celebration in the inn, with Maultaschen and such.

Rainer Hank

Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Our feelings back then weren't much different from those of today's high school graduates: the world is open, life can be lived to the fullest.

What we didn't notice was that the year 1972 marked a turning point, if not the decisive one, in post-war history.

The "golden years" came to an end;

the economic miracle said goodbye - not only in this country, but in the entire western world.

If we had noticed, we would not have let our optimism about the future irritate us.

But as a contemporary one is anyway a bad interpreter of his present.

The historians can do better afterwards.

The Club of Rome and Oil

The American economist Paul Krugman (he's my year, a month younger) regularly gets enthusiastic when he talks about the "glorious years" after the Second World War.

Last week he did it particularly effusively in his column in the New York Times: capitalism had had its rough edges smoothed out by strong trade unions, governments acknowledged their responsibility as welfare states, inflation was low, that High growth, low inequality.

In this country, this arrangement was called the “social market economy”.

Krugman speaks of the "most decent societies that mankind has ever seen".

As you get older, you tend to glorify your youth.

Here in Germany, the 1950s and 1960s tended to be known as the “bourgeois Adenauer era” for a long time.

But Krugman, citing his colleague Brad DeLong, argues that apart from a brief spell in Ancient Rome, there were only two periods in history when economic growth was coupled with increases in human happiness and contentment.

First, it was the four decades after 1870 when the progress of the industrial revolution arrived in the western world and was not immediately eaten up by population growth.

This phase ended abruptly in 1914 with what was then known as the Great War.

The second phase of happiness began after World War II and ended, not quite so abruptly, in the years following 1972.

Then the “oil price shock”

What happened?

In the spring of 1972, the Club of Rome warned that growth would not be limitless and that oil would not last forever for heating.

That sounded dangerous.

Since the 1950s, Germany had increasingly switched from domestic hard coal to oil from North America, Russia and the Middle East.

Even back then, it had made itself dependent on foreign oil and the power of the OPEC cartel.

At the same time, nuclear energy, which had been celebrated until then, came under fundamental criticism.

In 1972 the "Federal Association of Citizens' Initiatives for Environmental Protection (BBU)" was founded, followed by Greenpeace a year earlier.

In Wyhl am Kaiserstuhl, the winegrowers allied with the new green anti-nuclear movement to prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant.