Germany as a laboratory of 'communism vs capitalism'

As every good European knows, the EU began life after the Second World War as the European Coal and Steel Community.

But within that small club of members, born out of the rubble of a continent, one country in particular, a big exporter of both steel and coal, offered an real-time, almost laboratory conditions, experiment through the post-war decades of what became the EEC (European Economic Community), then t...