This broadly conceived introduction discusses recent approaches to the history of capitalism in the United States and Germany and relates them to the findings of economic and business historians of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. It identifies four key tensions between the prominence of Kapitalismuskritik and the tacit spread of capitalist practices and attitudes; a focus on capitalism’s concentrated and organized character and the experience of its bewildering complexity; state intervention and the dynamics of the market; and a national framework of viewing the economy and capitalism’s transnational entanglements. The overarching argument is that Nazism became attractive not least for promising to resolve these tensions. It professed to transcend capitalism while harnessing its energies for a racist and imperialist agenda. These and other aspects are treated in the volume’s four sections on debating, concealing, promoting, and racializing German capitalism between 1918 and 1945.

Did capitalism, including the ethics of some of its leaders, go astray as a result of the upheavals of World War I and democratic politics? Did one witness a new phase of “political capitalism,” a term sociologist Max Weber coined originally with respect to ancient and premodern forms of capitalism? These questions not only reflected anticapitalist resentments but were a way to describe the close cooperation of political and economic interests and some of the more excessive forms of “booty” and “adventure capitalism,” including political and economic corruption. They also addressed certain enterprises, social groups, and individuals. Although not outright antisemitic, “political capitalism” always provided a springboard for antisemitic agendas. With the onset of the Great Depression, the latter was to become crucially important in the context of efforts not just to restore forms of a “rational” neoliberal economic order but also to purge the excesses of the previous years, including the persons who appeared to represent this “political capitalism.” These purges lasted well into the National Socialist period, which at the same time witnessed new and excessive forms of booty capitalism directed against the “enemies” of the Volksgemeinschaft and later also the occupied countries.

In the interwar period, the issue of how much space capitalism left for human agency preoccupied many Germans. Would they be able to revolutionize or reform this economic order, or were they compelled to work and live within it? This chapter argues that capitalism proved remarkably capable of confining individual, collective, and governmental agency. Therefore, expectations of transformation were often disappointed or scaled back, as the first section shows. The second section examines more tacit ways of adapting to a capitalist logic, while the third turns to the attempts of Chancellor Hermann Brüning’s two cabinets to steer Germany through the economic depression. Brüning was caught between calls for decisive leadership, doubts about the effectiveness of government intervention, and a rapidly shifting situation. Adolf Hitler, by contrast, promised to restore human control over the economy. After 1933, his regime loudly claimed to have transcended capitalism while inconspicuously exploiting its logic.

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.

Germany’s Sparkassen (public savings banks) were vital to the national economy during the Second World War. They also held a special place in the cultural fabric, as particularly representative of perceived German virtues – hard work, thrift, community – the appraisal of which was heightened during the Third Reich. However, we don’t know much about this sector. How did these “most völkisch” institutions operate during the Nazi era? In particular, how were National Socialism and capitalism intertwined in Sparkassen decision-making and self-representation? This chapter demonstrates that the logics of capitalism remained paramount in the minds of savings bank managers. However, their faith in capitalist principles did not make them any less useful to (or supportive of) the regime. Instead, it allowed bank leaders to rationalize their own behavior and legitimize their support for the dictatorship as good for business.

The Verein der am Caffeehandel betheiligten Firmen, an association that grew to include all of Hamburg-based coffee traders, was established in May 1886. By 1939, the association was completely subjugated to the will of the Nazi regime, and it collapsed within the first few weeks of World War II. In the postwar period, the coffee traders of Hamburg were largely regulated by the Allied occupying forces, and this often led to undesirable circumstances, including internal competition. This chapter looks at the evolution of Hamburg coffee traders and how they functioned in the global market from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. It considers the history of the Hamburg coffee traders, from the turbulent life span of the association to the challenging relationship between the Hamburg coffee traders and the Allied forces in West Germany and the global coffee moguls of the 1980s. The chapter analyzes the factors that contributed to the association’s downfall, including shifting worldviews, international market upheavals, and strong state intervention. Primary sources consulted include meeting minutes, news articles, legal documents, annual reports, and commission transactions.

Why did women and men want more stuff? What did such goods mean to those who produced, marketed, purchased, and used them? This chapter examines the social and cultural context of the consumer revolution. Borrowing from sociologists Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and Norbert Elias, historians have long explained the rise of consumption in terms of social emulation. According to this theory, lower social groups imitated higher social groups, spreading new practices of consumption down the social hierarchy. However, while social emulation did occur, it does not explain everything. Patterns of consumption did not always reflect traditional social hierarchies. Examining eighteenth-century material culture, this chapter suggests an alternative approach, which considers how producers, retailers, commentators, and consumers attached meanings to consumer goods and creating a host of new consumer values, including novelty, fashion, selfhood, domesticity, comfort, simplicity, authenticity, cleanliness, health, and exoticism. Such values reflected the development of a modern Enlightenment consumer culture that valorized the present over the past. The social ramifications of eighteenth-century consumer culture were complex. Rising consumption was accompanied by egalitarian ideas, but it did not always promote social mobility. Many consumers bought into the world of goods to reinforce horizontal claims of respectability, not to leap into a new class. Poor laborers who could ill afford to express new consumer values through consumption were marginalized.

Jurists played a key role in shaping Germany’s political economy in the first half of the twentieth century. Used to thinking in terms of power and its checks and balances, these lawyers contributed to a drawn-out debate about the relationship between state and markets, private business and public interest. Faced with repeated economic crises and political turmoil, they came to agree that corporate power had reached a level undermining economic liberty and the political sovereign charged with its protection. Walking a fine line between liberal thinking and a preference for regulative state power to protect capitalism from itself, these jurists – here exemplified by Franz Böhm and Heinrich Kronstein – identified with the Republic although political loyalties proved changeable. While Böhm remained in Nazi Germany, rephrasing his thinking in line with the regime’s preferences, Kronstein went into exile, where he found a receptive audience among American trustbusters. Yet, on his return to postwar Germany he teamed up with Böhm once again, thereby boosting the political legitimacy of the emerging ordoliberal school and helping bring the long quest for a tamed capitalism to its conclusion.

Historians have been slow to examine the political ramifications of the consumer revolution. Europe and the Americas experienced intense political strife in the eighteenth century, culminating in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Latin American revolutions. Did the consumer revolution (lowercase “r”) have anything to do with these political Revolutions (uppercase “R”)? This chapter provides a framework for understanding how consumer goods became implicated in revolutionary movements. It argues that activists during the age of Revolution politicized consumer goods in three ways. First, by protesting against the “despotic” commercial regulations and consumption taxes at the heart of imperial political economies, activists politicized colonial goods, such as tea and tobacco. They demanded that such “necessities” circulate freely and at low cost. Second, citizens imbued everyday objects with revolutionary meaning. Material objects like the tricolor cockade mediated revolutionary ideas and aspirations, enabling citizens to participate in and express their allegiance to (or rejection of) evolving political projects. Finally, consumer activism shaped debates on slavery. The enslaved of Haiti launched the era’s greatest attack on slavery, overthrowing a brutal system of production that provided Europeans with large quantities of colonial products. Further, abolitionists in Europe and North America protested slavery by abstaining from slave-produced sugar. They argued that consumers had the power to effect large-scale change through a new mode of collective action: the boycott.

An emerging group of marketing experts strove to manage the apparent contradictions of interwar German capitalism with consumer markets that seemed increasingly rationalized yet at the same time highly volatile and emotional. This chapter explores the professional and intellectual debates surrounding consumer capitalism during the 1920s and early 1930s. I ask about the professional perceptions especially among market researchers as well as among product designers and graphic artists. In trade journals and professional publications of the era, we find contradictory analyses of the nature of consumer markets and divergent opinions over what type of expert was best suited to managing them – engineers, psychologists, or even artists? Whereas interwar designers frequently stressed the importance of functionality and standardization, market researchers emphasized the emotional side of modern consumption. They all shared, however, a common belief in the growing importance of consumers as actors in interwar capitalism.