Business in the Age of Extremes: Essays in Modern German and Austrian Economic History (Publications of the German Historical Institute)

Cambridge University Press, 1/28/2013
EAN 9781107016958, ISBN10: 1107016959

Hardcover, 260 pages, 23.4 x 15.6 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

This collection of essays explores the impact that nationalism, capitalism and socialism had on economics during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on Central Europe, contributors examine the role that businesspeople and enterprises played in Germany's and Austria's paths to the catastrophe of Nazism. Based on new archival research, the essays gathered here ask how the business community became involved in the political process and describes the consequences arising from that involvement. Particular attention is given to the responses of individual businesspeople to changing political circumstances and their efforts to balance the demands of their consciences with the pursuit for profit.

List of contributors
Introduction
business in the age of extremes in Central Europe Hartmut Berghoff, Jürgen Kocka and Dieter Ziegler
Part I. From the Late Wilhelmine Empire to the Great Depression
1. The Kaiser and his ship-owner
Albert Ballin, the HAPAG Shipping Company, and the relationship between industry and politics in imperial Germany and the Early Weimar Republic Gerhard A. Ritter
2. Carl Duisberg, the end of World War I, and the birth of social partnership from the spirit of defeat Werner Plumpe
3. Austrian reconstruction, 1920–1
a matter for private business or the League of Nations? Philip L. Cottrell
4. Rudolf Sieghart and the Austrian land credit institution
a case study of the Austrian banking crisis of the 1920s and 1930s Peter Eigner
5. Populism and political entrepreneurship
the universalization of German savings banks and the decline of American savings banks, 1908–34 Jeffrey Fear and R. Daniel Wadhwani
6. The 1931 Central European Banking Crisis revisited Harold James
Part II. National Socialism, War, and the Holocaust
7. Science and science policy during the Nazi era
the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft and the Deutsche Forzschungsgemeinschaft Reinhard Rürup
8. 'A regulated market economy'
new perspectives on the nature of the economic order of the Third Reich, 1933–9 Dieter Ziegler
9. The personal factor in business under National Socialism
the case of Paul Reusch and Friedrich Flick Johannes Bähr
10. Business as usual? Aryanization in practice, 1933–8 Ingo Köhler
11. The dispossession of the Jews and the Europeanization of the Holocaust Constantin Goschler
12. Managing the assets of the enemy in occupied France
the electrical industry Heidrun Homburg
Appendix
the historian Gerald D. Feldman, 1937–2007
a tribute Jürgen Kocka
Bibliography
the publications of Gerald D. Feldman
Index.