Few generations, if any, have lived through as many traumatic changes in political systems, officially prevailing values, and social structures as has the generation of Germans born during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The tight class structure of the monarchical Wilhelminian Empire gave way, in 1918-1919, to the turmoil and democratic promise of the Weimar Republic only to be swept aside by the totalitarian Third Reich with its military expansionism, racist policies, and inhumane destructiveness, to be followed by total defeat, destruction, occupation, and a complete revaluation of values issuing eventually in two German states. Both of them were founded in 1947, based on starkly different principles and values resulting in the very separate societies and polities known as the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG, often referred to as the Bonn Republic, and the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, which in 1990 officially merged into the FRG.