My German-English dictionary naturally doesn’t think that die Wirtschaft is untranslatable. It proposes: economy; industry and commerce; business world.

The third definition here hints at a dimension that is central to the German usage of the word yet lacking in the other English near-equivalents.

Take the sentence Das ist gut für die Wirtschaft, which could be translated as “That is good for business/the economy”. Yet where the English expressions are firmly grounded in the material world, die Wirtschaft carries the added connotation of a human collective.

This aspect is much more prominent in the next example, illustrating a very frequent usage: Die Wirtschaft fordert Investitionen in die Bildung (Business calls for investment in education); here, Die Wirtschaft clearly works as an abstract agent.

But who exactly forms this mysterious collective? The connotation is of a group of men (invariably men) in suits – business captains, yet also trade union leaders, who in consensual German fashion are both the opposition to and a sub-set of this group; industrial participation laws mean that union leaders are also board members of all big corporations.

When die Wirtschaft is well, Germany is well. This goes beyond simple economic affluence. The central role of die Wirtschaft in post-1945 Germany contains two different national narratives, and hints at the tentative possibility of a third.

After the war and the disaster of National Socialism, die Wirtschaft was the only thing (West) Germans could safely take pride in, apart from football and beer (whose own Wirtschaft connection appears below).

It was also what West Germans put their faith in. For a supposedly pragmatic and materalistic concept, die Wirtschaft has some curiously religious undertones. Die Wirtschaft, like a deity, is both concept and person; it comes complete with its own miracle (das Wirtschaftswunder, post-war German economic success), its apostles (die Wirtschaftsweisen, the economic wise men), and its hallowed symbol, the Deutsche Mark.

It also provided a certain absolution. Wirtschaftsmacht (economic power) somehow seemed to be a more acceptable and civilised version of power than its military equivalent. That die Wirtschaft was complicit in Nazi crimes such as forced labour was conveniently forgotten for a long time.

When the student protesters of 1968 opened that wound, it shook the foundations of West German society. The hysterical reaction by the authorities and the tabloid press went some way towards a radicalisation of politics that included the emergence of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in the early 1970s. When the RAF abducted and later killed Hanns-Martin Schleyer in 1977, they were targeting not only the leading Wirtschaftsfunktionär but also the former ardent SS officer. Only now, another generation later, are attempts being made seriously to investigate the crime of forced labour and to compensate the few remaining survivors.

Mostly, though, this dark shadow was suppressed in the national psyche of the 1949-89 Bundesrepublik that had die Wirtschaft at its core. Then, die Wirtschaft was a slightly stern, authoritative, paternalistic, but ultimately benevolent force with our national best interests at heart.

In the 1990s, this perception started to change. Reunification and worldwide economic forces rather brutally propelled Germany out of its comforts and into harsher social climes. In the age of globalisation and the Euro, die Wirtschaft and its leaders ceased to be solely national, and as a result they are regularly accused of a lack of patriotism – a word not easily employed in German – when (for example) they propose to outsource production to cheaper markets abroad.

From a West German perspective, the secure, rather parochial existence of the Bonn republic that could find its national identity in die Wirtschaftsmacht gave way to the exciting, confusing, febrile Berlin republic – where die Wirtschaft is in disarray and polarisation seems to be succeeding traditional consensus politics.

Die Wirtschaft still occupies a central place in German minds, precisely because the economy is faltering, but the reunited Germany needs to find fresh sources for its national identity.

Meanwhile, there is always football and beer. For die Wirtschaft can also describe the equivalent of the English pub or American saloon bar – a shortened form of die Gastwirtschaft (literally “guest business”, and a nice example of the German language’s capacity to join two words to make a new one with a different meaning).

The German Gastwirtschaft might be very different from its Anglo-American partners, but you can at least be sure that German beer far outperforms the current German economy. So for your next Wirtschaftswunder, go to die Wirtschaft.