Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Description

In Weimar and Nazi Germany, capitalism was hotly contested, discreetly practiced, and politically regulated. This volume shows how it adapted to fit a nation undergoing drastic changes following World War I. Through wide-ranging cultural histories, a transatlantic cast of historians probes the ways contemporaries debated, concealed, promoted, and racialized capitalism. They show how bankers and industrialists, storeowners and commercial designers, intellectuals and politicians reshaped a controversial economic order at a time of fundamental uncertainty and drastic rupture. The book thus sheds fresh light on the strategies used by Hitler and his followers to gain and maintain widespread support. The authors conclude that National Socialism succeeded in mobilizing capitalism's energies while at the same time claiming to have overcome a system they identified with pernicious Jewish influences. In so doing, the volume also speaks to the broader issue of how capitalism can adapt to new times.

Moritz Foellmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He has previously taught at the University Leeds, the Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Chicago. His publications on Weimar and Nazi Germany include Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge, 2013) and Culture in the Third Reich (2020). Moreover, he has published a range of articles and chapters, including in Past & Present, Historical Journal, Journal of Modern History, Central European History and German History, where he has also served as review editor. Pamela E. Swett is Professor of History at McMaster University. Her publications include Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin 1929-1933 (Cambridge, 2004), Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (2014), and, as co-editor,Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth Century Germany (2007) and Pleasure and Power in the Third Reich (2011) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is also the co-editor of the Nazi Germany section of the German Historical Institute's online portal, German History in Documents and Images.

'This pioneering collection sheds new light on how capitalism was lived, critiqued and imagined in this crucial period of German history, bringing social and cultural histories into dialogue with the politics and practices of business life to great effect.' Neil Gregor, University of Southampton, author of Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich 'None are so proficient at practicing capitalism yet as fiercely critical of it than the Germans. Reshaping Capitalism approaches the protean nature of commercial activity and the changing attitudes of Germans toward it from wholly new perspectives. This valuable collection forms an indispensable guide to market failure, cultural condemnation of capitalist excess, and the use of racism to legitimate plunder in a Germany poised between democracy and dictatorship.' Jonathan Zatlin, Boston University 'Showing the multiple challenges of the interwar economy at work in studies of the individual and corporate actors who had to respond to them, these chapters give life and breath to the familiar diagnosis of a crisis of capitalism and add new terms to the debate about continuity and change in 20th-century Germany.' Eve Rosenhaft, University of Liverpool