Research on the history, culture and society of the Weimar Republic
Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931 has been included in the Financial Time‘s Books of 2014: ‘Tooze’s book […] possesses the virtue of analysing the 1920s not as a prelude to the Great Depression, the rise of the dictators and another global conflict, but as a decade worthy of study in its own right.’
Reviews:
Financial Times
The Guardian
Foreign Affairs
Sehepunkte
In the current issue of the Journal of Modern European History, Dominik Geppert, Harold James, Hans Kundnani, Jakob Tanner, Peer Vries and Andreas Wirsching are analyzing ‘The European Debt Crisis in Historical Perspectives’. Weimar hyperinflation and the Great Depression of course feature heavily in these articles.
The current issue of Mittelweg 36, the journal published by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, features an insightful article on the reception of Keynes’ work in the Weimar Republic:
Roman Köster: Vor der Krise. Die Keynes-Rezeption in der Weimarer Republik:
The financial crisis, and Germany’s subsequent role as a reluctant ‘saviour of the eurozone’, has given rise to a renewed discussion of the country’s historical role in Europe. In the UK, this debate has borne especially strange fruit. At the beginning of the crisis, the supposed ‘national trauma’ of the Weimar hyperinflation has been used to explain Germany’s alleged reluctance to enter a more active role. Now the tone has changed to a fear of a too powerful Germany: the Daily Mail recently predicted another war started by Germany, while the cover of the current edition of the New Statesman talks of a ‘German problem’, depicting Angela Merkel and Helmut Kohl alongside Bismarck and Hitler. In the accompanying article, historian Brendan Simms describes the long way towards German democracy, all the way from the 15th century, but goes on to argue that it only took the last five years to put it all in danger again.
One of our members, Emma Anderson, has found this fascinating analysis of Germany’s political situation at the dawn of the Third Reich. The author, Moritz Julius Bonn, was an internationally respected Jewish economist who had to leave Germany in 1933. It’s available for free download from the archive of The Political Quarterly.
For obvious reasons, the comparison of the current financial crisis with the Great Depression has become a staple in public debate. Especially the economic development of the Weimar Republic has been used as an example and ‘worst case scenario’, from the 1923 hyperinflation to Brüning’s deflationary politics of the 1930s.
Now historians are starting to add much-needed expertise to the discussion. The first lesson is that, in the German case, the significant year was 1931 – and not 1929. In their new comparative study, Johannes Bähr and Bernd Rudolph find more differences than similarities between the two crises. With this, they confirm Albrecht Ritschl’s findings, who came to the same conclusion in an early overview already published in 2009.
Johannes Bähr, Bern Rudolph: Finanzkrisen: 1931, 2008 (>> review, in German)
Albrecht Ritschl: War 2008 das neue 1931? (in German)
In the new Oxford Handbook of Modern German History the Weimar Republic is not treated as a discrete era, but is incorporated into longer periods from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich. This certainly helps to highlight continuities, but is this a step back to treating Weimar merely as a ‘transition period’ (Übergangszeit)? Continue reading “A new approach to Weimar?”
In this article in Der Spiegel, Wolfgang Münchau, associate editor of the Financial Times, compares the situation after the general election in Greece with Weimar Germany in 1930. Paul Krugman echoed Münchau’s comments in the New York Times a while later. Since 2008, Weimar has been a staple in the analysis of the financial crisis, as a symbol for political and economic crises and a touchstone for commentators of all camps.
German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of primary source material documenting Germany’s political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present, created by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. in cooperation with the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and IEG-MAPS (Institute for European History, Mainz). It comprises original German texts, all of which are accompanied by new English translations, and a wide range of visual imagery, including maps.
The section on Weimar Germany has been curated by Eric Weitz and Eric Roubinek and is divided into 14 categories, including Politics, Economics and Society, Architecture and Urban Life and Bodies and Sex. Featured documents include the Stinnes-Legien Agreement of 1918, Walter Gropius’ Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar (1919), data on regional secondary school enrollment (1911, 1926/27, and 1938) and George Grosz’s painting ‘Pillars of Society’ (1926).
25 – 27 April 2013, at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz
In the first half of the 20th century, but especially during the 1920s, the publisher Ullstein occupied a central role in German print media. With its innovative business methods, modern printing technology and American-style advertising methods, Ullstein became a dominant force in German culture.
The conference “Der ganze Verlag ist einfach eine Bonbonniere.” Der Ullstein Verlag in der ersten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts aims to bring together research on inividual Ullstein publications, significant journalists, editors, authors and publicists working for the company, and its wide social, cultural, political and economic role in history.
Proposals for papers of thirty minutes are invited on any of the above-mentioned topics. Proposals should be no longer than 3,500 characters long.
Offers of papers should be sent by 30 May 2012 to David Oels (oels[at]uni‐mainz.de) or Ute Schneider (uschneid[at]uni‐mainz.de)
Martin Lutz’s study retraces the history of German-Russian business relations from the Russian Revolution to the end of the Weimar Republic, using the example of German electronics firm Siemens. Lutz has used original material not only from the Siemens vaults, but also the Russian State Economic Archive (RGAE), and offers a fascinating angle on Russian as well as German economic history of the interwar years.
Hannah Ahlheim’s new study on National-Socialist attacks against Jewish shops between 1924 and 1935 sheds some new light on the economic aspects of antisemitism and manages to find some new and interesting aspects of this (relatively) well-researched topic.
In recent years, the political and social role of the consumer has taken centre stage in historical research. Claudius Torp’s new study on Consumption and Politics in the Weimar Republic builds on this trend by shedding new light on the role of ‘Konsumvereine’ (consumer cooperatives) and the changing patterns of consumption in the first German democracy.
Nationalist Economy. On the introduction of racist parameters in economies in Europe between the wars 1918-1939
When Werner Sombart published his study “Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben” 100 years ago, he paved the way for an anti-Semitic tendency towards viewing Jews as a distinct, peculiar group within the German economy. A short time later, with the outbreak of the First World War, the liberal global economic system which was based on principles of free trade and most favoured nation treatment and negotiated in gold parities finally collapsed. In its place, economic regimes were installed in Europe which not only jealously guarded their borders by means of customs duties and currency and transfer restrictions but also increasingly sought to reserve trade, industry and agriculture for certain sections of the population, defined by their social or ethnic identity.
Continue reading “CfP: Nationalist Economy. Racism and Economy 1918-1939”
In The Guardian, Jochen Hung examines the continuing use of 1920s hyperinflation by British journalists for explaining contemporary German fiscal politics: ‘German aversion to the ECB printing money isn’t about the ‘national psyche’. To understand German fiscal policy, it is necessary to look beyond the cod psychology about a fear of 1920s hyperinflation.’
