Industrialists, Bankers, and the Problem of Unemployment in the Weimar Republic

Abstract

During the past decade and a half there has been considerable interest shown by economic and social historians in the problems of unemployment in the Weimar Republic, although we still await a work with the comprehensiveness and mastery of W. R. Garside'sBritish Unemployment 1919–1939. Much of the literature on Germany has been devoted to the controversy over government studies of unemployment insurance and business and trade union attitudes toward work creation schemes. Social historians have engaged in a good deal of history from below and history of everyday life dealing with the unemployed themselves and have demonstrated, among other things, the devastating consequences of long-term unemployment and the welfare system on labor solidarity. Such historians are understandably more inclined to work on, and sympathize with, those who are fired rather than with those who do the firing, and are unlikely to lose much sleep about the effects of bad business conditions on capitalist behavior and solidarity. Nevertheless, I would argue that the everyday problems and decisions of Germany's bankers and industrialists have suffered from undeserved neglect.