Obituary for Knut Borchardt

the most important economic historian of the Federal Republic died peacefully in Munich at the age of 93.He will be remembered for his very substantial academic contributions, as well as an inspiring teacher whose legacy has been carried on by a substantial number of pupils.Above all he is known to a wider public through his role in what became known as the "Borchardt-Kontroverse", the debate about the economic problems of the Weimar Republic, and in particular his pessimistic assessment of the possibilities for an effective counter-cyclical policy during the Great Depression, especially in the Chancellorship of Heinrich Brüning.But there was much more to Borchardt's work than that well-known academic controversy.Before that public controversy, he had emerged as a powerful interpreter of the broad sweep of German economic history, using then unusual measures, such as the density of medical doctors, as proxies for economic development, and looking at developments in the long term to assess the reasons for temporary deviations from the growth trend.He also provided a powerful counterargument to the then popular explanation of slow German industrialization as a consequence of capital scarcity. 1 The analysis set the tone -and provided questions -for a new generation of cliometric historians.The interpretation of the Great Depression, a sharp deviation from the norm of German growth, fits into that picture too.Its most important contribution was to force a rethinking of the role of economic policy, and the possibilities that policy can hold out to shape the course of development.There was a bridge between long-term development and policy choices in the inputs which Borchardt provided for almost 50 years in the Wissenschaftlicher Beirat des Bundeswirtschaftsministeriums, which he joined in 1970.When Borchardt set off the "Borchardt-Kontroverse" with his lecture to the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1978, the dominant interpretation held that the German economic collapse was the result simply of a mistaken || 1 His key contributions are collected in a volume of essays: