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

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.

Hartmut Berghoff is Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen. A specialist in business history, Berghoff has published extensively on the intersection of economic and cultural history. His research includes studies of firms and businesspeople as social actors, and he has also worked on the politics of consumption in twentieth-century Germany.
Jürgen Kocka is Permanent Fellow of the Center 'Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History' at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and is currently Visiting Professor of History at University of California, Los Angeles. He has received honorary degrees from several European universities, as well as the 2011 Holberg Prize. He is the author of Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German History (2010) and Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society: Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany (1999).
Dieter Ziegler holds the chair in Economic and Business History at the Ruhr University, Bochum. His numerous publications include studies of European industrialization during the nineteenth century, of the banking industry and of business elites in modern Germany. The Nazi era and the economic disenfranchisement of the German Jews is another focal point of Ziegler's research.