In Memoriam: Gerald Feldman, 1937–2007

Gerald Feldman was a very distinguished historian, whose work blended in a unique way analyses drawn from historical, biographical, and political economy traditions. He began his career as a scholar of the First World War, with a book on the emergence of a labor-business corporatism in Germany, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (1966). Moving to the Great Inflation of the Weimar Republic, he drew on a substantial contemporary literature of the 1970s that examined the connections between political structure, the organization of interests, and economic decision-making. Two decades of research culminated in The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (1993). A unique feature of Feldman’s work in the 1970s was the extent to which it relied on rather large collective research efforts with colleagues from Europe, including Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard A. Ritter, and Peter Christian Witt, as well as many graduate students from Berkeley. Feldman thus was instrumental in training a whole generation of researchers interested in German political economy. At this time, most historians regarded their work as a rather solitary discipline.

But Feldman was not just a trainer or organizer. Rather, he built scholarly communities with passion, energy, but also conviviality and good humor. In consequence of his passionate commitment, he did an enormous amount to bring American and German scholars and scholarly traditions into a fruitful collaboration.

The emphases of the work on inflation and the early history of the Weimar Republic, and Feldman’s skill in handling large cooperative projects were crucial to his engagement when his own historical inquiry took quite a new turn in the late 1990s. He viewed the sudden interest in the connections between the economic aspects of Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Nazi genocide as a vindication of his lifelong interest in how business history connected with broader political and moral issues. Before the 1990s, he complained about how business history had been marginalized or had marginalized itself into a self-satisfied producer of celebratory histories. He was suspicious of approaches that saw business history simply in terms of an internal logic, whether this analysis came from a Marxist or from a neo-liberal perspective; and he always insisted on the importance of a wide-ranging political economy approach that was sensitive to the multiple possibilities for choice and action. Feldman also saw a moral responsibility in his new field of investigation of the intertwining of businesses in the development of Nazi barbarism both as a historian and also as a Jew.

The most important results of Feldman’s new investigations were two vast studies of important German and Austrian financial enterprises. The first was entitled Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945 (2001). Here he described in great detail the “cynical opportunism” of the major executives of the largest German insurance company, one of whom served as Hitler’s minister of economics for a brief time. Allianz participated in the expropriation of Jews (“Aryanization”) and turned over the assets of Jewish life insurance holders to the Nazi state. He also demonstrated how a “business as usual” mentality led the company to insure concentration camps including Auschwitz. In the course of an extensive analytical narrative, Feldman never lost sight of the individual—either as perpetrator or as victim. The book is replete with fascinating but also deeply moving case studies. The history was not told as a simple exercise of business logic, but at each stage and in each case the choices and possibilities were carefully laid out. Only on such a basis was it possible to reach moral verdicts.

The history of Allianz was followed by an even more ambitious and comprehensive history of the Austrian bank Creditanstalt and the other Austrian banks that subsequently merged with it. These banks were critical levers in transferring control of Austrian industrial assets to Germany after the 1938 Anschluss. They also played an important part in the reordering of central and south-eastern Europe.

Both of these histories would have been impossible without the international political discussion of Holocaust assets in the late 1990s. Indeed Feldman...