The history of the old Federal Republic is generally acknowledged to be a success story, although it was fraught with conflict and crises. Not without reason did contemporaries repeatedly see the democratic order of the Federal Republic on the verge of breakdown. This striking discrepancy between interpretations is the starting point of Christian Schletter's study. He carries out for the first time quantitative and qualitative analyses of debates in the "Spiegel" and the "Rheinischen Merkur" in the period 1965-1985 on the failure of West German democracy.