Read more
German unification evoked ambivalent reactions outside its borders: it revived disquietingmemories of attempts by German big business during the two world wars to build an economic empire in Europe in conjunction with the military and the government bureaucracy. But thereare also high hopes that German finance and industry will serve as the engine of reconstruction in eastern Europe, just as it played this role in the postwar unification of western Europe.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction: German Big Business and the Quest for a European Economic Empire in the Twentieth Century
Volker R. Berghahn
Chapter 1. Europe in the Strategies of Germany's Electrical Engineering and Chemicals Trusts, 1919-1929
Harm G. Schröter
Chapter 2. The European Strategies of IG Farben, 1925-45
Peter Hayes
Chapter 3. Fascism and the Structure of German Capitalism: The Case of the Automobile Industry
Simon Reich
Chapter 4. German Big Business and the Return to the World Market after World War II
Reinhard Neebe
Chapter 5. "Reconquering Our Old Position": West German Osthandel Strategies of the 1950s
Robert Mark Spaulding, Jr.
Chapter 6. Lowering Soviet Expectations" West German Industry and Osthandel during the Brandt Era
Volker R. Berghahn
Chapter 7. Strategies of German Big Business in their International Setting during the 1980s
Margit Köppen
Chapter 8. German Industry and the European Union in the 1990s
Jeffrey J. Anderson
Tables
List of Contributors
About the author
Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University where he moved in 1998 from Brown University, after a longer spell of teaching at the University of Warwick in England. The author of more than a dozen books, he has long been interested in the challenges of modern biography. In 1993, he published a study of the industrialist Otto A. Friedrich and his role in the reconstruction of West German industry after 1945. His America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe uses Shepard Stone—renowned journalist, Ford Foundation officer in charge of its European and international programs, and the first director of the Berlin Aspen Institute—as a window to the trans-Atlantic world of American and European intellectuals and scholars, many of whom were associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom during the Cold War.
Summary
German unification evoked ambivalent reactions outside its borders: it revived disquieting memories of attempts by German big business during the two world wars to build an economic empire in Europe in conjunction with the military and the government bureaucracy.
Additional text
"The collection of essays shows that the present drive by Germany to construct an integratedEuropean economy drives from several precedents in German economic thought, including theimperial and Nazi periods." · The Wall Street Journal Europe
"... a stimulating book ... [that] has much more unity than is often the case in collections ... Berghahn shows the way in which the complicated process of combining political, economic and business history with the history of mentalities can lead to interesting insights into the relationship between economic wealth and political power." · Business History
