Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany ed. by Moritz Föllmer and Pamela E. Swett (review)

Reviewed by: Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany ed. by Moritz Föllmer and Pamela E. Swett Paul Lerner Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Edited by Moritz Föllmer and Pamela E. Swett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 316. Cloth 107. 87. ISBN 9781108833547. How capitalistic were the Nazis? Interwar fascists often claimed to be pioneering a third way between a Soviet-style planned economy and Anglo-American liberal capitalism, but that rhetoric scarcely translated into economic reality. Frankfurt School theorists framed Nazism as a kind of crisis capitalism, and several notable Marxist historians controversially blamed the leaders of German big business for the Nazis' rise to power. After years of strident debate around this cluster of issues, the field has reached a sort of consensus that the Nazi regime did not depart significantly from capitalist principles or economic liberalism—at least for those included in the Volksgemeinschaft (national community), even as the state intervened to dictate production priorities, expropriate Jewish-owned assets, and fully exploit an unfree labor pool. But how does the Nazi economy fit into broader histories of economic thought and twentieth-century capitalism? And how unique was the German case in a century marked—as historians Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer observed in their 2009 book Shattered Past—by periodic and drastic swings between hunger and affluence? These and related questions have produced a sizable historical literature, one that has grown with particular intensity since the 2008 crash and the increased scholarly interest in capitalism, its histories, and its global dimensions. What has received insufficient and unsatisfactory historiographic attention until recently, as the editors of this rich and nuanced volume argue in their comprehensive introduction, are the cultural dimensions of capitalism and the interactions between culture and economy in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Föllmer and Swett use this lens to explore capitalism and its cultural resonances from a variety of angles, emphasizing such key issues as continuities between the Weimar and the Nazi periods, the place of the Jews in German discourses on capitalism, tensions between state control and market freedom, and the persistent sense of crisis that pervaded discourses around capitalism from the early twentieth century on. The volume's eleven essays bring together recent and current scholarship on a range of topics at the seams of cultural, economic, and business history, and the most successful ones illustrate the (often surprising) symbioses of Nazi ideologies and capitalist practices and the long-term consequences of those interactions. The chapters in part one revolve around Kapitalismuskritik (critical perspectives on capitalism) in the period following World War I, a time when capitalism itself was a question, and indeed when the state had begun to play a pronounced role in German economic life. In these years, thinkers across the political spectrum debated the relationship between state power, industry, and the market, searching for ways to tame capitalism's powers and harness them for the national good. Each essay in this section shows End Page 351 how Nazi ideas and antisemitic constructions infused German economic ideas well before 1933, producing a kind of authoritarian capitalism (Martin Geyer) that was coded as "productive" and community-oriented as opposed to the alleged greed and rapaciousness of "Jewish capitalism. " Part two provocatively introduces secrecy as a category of analysis, shedding light on the concealment of wealth and hidden capitalist activity from a transnational perspective. In essays on the Thyssen family, German and American entrepreneurs Friedrich Flick and Henry J. Kaiser, respectively, and Hamburg's coffee industry, the authors show the discursive and narrative construction of capitalist success and the silencing and erasing of problematic pasts after 1945. The chapters in part three move from coffee to beer and use advertising, public relations, and Germany's Tumultgesetz (tumult law, or property damage guarantees) to explore ways in which businesses promoted themselves and their products as vital to the citizenry and the state. Here, we are introduced to Weimar- and Nazi-era consumers and conflicting ideas of the market as both a rational machine and a mercurial arena demanding fine-tuned psychological approaches and artistic nuance (Jan Logemann). The two contributions to part four turn. . .