Business in the Age of Extremes: Essays in Modern German and Austrian Economic History ed. by Hartmut Berghoff, Jürgen Kocka, and Dieter Ziegler (review)

This book is derived from a symposium held in Berlin in 2008 to commemorate the life and work of Gerald D. Feldman, the eminent historian of Weimar and Nazi Germany, who had died the year before. It consists of twelve essays, plus the editors’ introduction and, in an appendix, the warm and eloquent tribute paid to Feldman at the symposium by Jürgen Kocka. Most of this volume was first published in German in 2010, which makes one wonder about its intended audience. Nevertheless, this English translation is excellent (though the same cannot be said of the proofreading).

Six essays examine aspects of business and economic policy in Germany and Austria from the late Wilhelmine era to the Great Depression. Three focus on individual businessmen, their firms, and their relationships with the state. Gerhard Ritter recounts the career of Albert Ballin, the Jewish leader of the Hamburg-Amerika Shipping Company (HAPAG), and his successful efforts, which involved much politicking in the highest circles, to sustain HAPAG against domestic and foreign competition. Werner Plumpe examines the Leverkusen industrialist Carl Duisberg, another businessman virulently hostile to the labor movement. At the end of the First World War, Duisberg undertook a political U-turn and reconciled himself to working with the socialist unions in a new “social partnership” at his Bayer works. This was no Pauline conversion. Indeed, he was quite explicit about his opportunism. Peter Eigner examines Rudolf Sieghart, president of the Austrian Boden-Credit Anstalt (BCA) until its collapse in 1929. Eigner concludes that Sieghart and his fellow executives were substantially to blame for the disastrous policy of overextended lending and hiding balance sheet losses.

The remaining three essays in this section move beyond the individual and his firm. Harold James agrees with recent scholarship that the German and Austrian bank crisis of 1931 was the result of a twin liquidity-and-currency crisis. Philip Cottrell recounts Montague Norman’s failed attempt to secure international agreement over the finance of Austrian reconstruction in 1920–1921. Jeffrey Fear and Daniel Wadhwani find that US and German savings banks developed in very different directions. While those in the United States remained tied to their local communities and traditional products, German savings banks were able to diversify and become more competitive as universal banks. Regulation explains some of the differences, but there was also a lack of innovative drive among US managers, who proved unable to “think around” their own assumptions about the purpose of a savings bank.

The second group of essays concerns business under National Socialism. Reinhard Rürup provides a short summary of the massive projects on the history of two of Germany’s premier research foundations, the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Dieter Ziegler describes the Nazi economy as a “regulated market economy.” The regulatory framework made space for market principles, profit, and self-interest to operate, and state coercion had recognized limits. Johannes Bähr compares the careers of two captains of German heavy industry, Paul Reusch and Friedrich Flick. Both supported the Nazis, yet both responded to their governments in different ways. Flick sought to use his party connections to expand his business empire. Reusch, in contrast, was more concerned about the encroachment of the state on private property rights, even to the extent of showing reluctance to “aryanize” his enterprises. Ingo Köhler examines the expropriation of Jewish assets between 1933 and 1938 and concludes that this developed behind a façade of normal commercial dealings in which persecution was factored into purchase values. Constantine Goschler argues that the outright plunder of Jewish property after 1938 did nothing to weaken private property rights, because it was justified as a means of “liberating” property from the supposed profanation of Jewish ownership. Heidrun Homburg concludes...