Business in the Age of Extremes: Essays in Modern German and Austrian Economic History

Description

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.

Hartmut Berghoff is Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Goettingen. 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. Jurgen 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.