Introduction -- The "missing link": the role of chambers of industry and commerce for entrepreneurial self-perception in the immediate post-war period -- Ways of redemption: public relations, the IHG and the DII -- The new "entrepreneur" -- "Americanization" leadership recruitment and training -- Bürgerlichkeit: culture and honour, upstarts and old elites -- Politics: business, association and the state -- Living with the "enemy": trade unions, worker representation and communists -- Osthandel: trading with the "enemy" -- Conclusion.
"This reader deals with post-war (West) Germany. The sources, which include official Allied and German documents, parliamentary debates, contemporary newspaper articles, diaries and a large number of previously unpublished archival materials, allow a source-based study of post-war Germany for non-German speakers."--Back cover
AbstractThis article argues that traditional conceptions of honour and the social practices based on them were both persistent yet at the same time very fragile and changeable amongst post-war German steel industrialists. After a brief overview of how bourgeois honour developed up to the early 1950s, a study of the honour court case of one of the leading men of heavy industry, Hermann Reusch of Gutehoffnungshütte, which ran from 1947 to 1949, will be presented. This is followed by a description of the ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Wirtschaftsvereinigung Eisen und Stahl to establish honour councils to enforce a price policy across the association. Both cases highlight the rapidly changing social and economic culture in West Germany in the early 1960s.
The originally propagated view that the Marshall Plan was an altruistic endeavor through which the U.S. saved Europe from collapse and starvation has long been dismissed and replaced with a more realistic approach to international affairs. Whereas Realpolitik and the perception of the evermore menacing Cold War made it inevitable that Marshall Plan aid and its counterpart funds would become a weapon in the ideological conflict of the two political ideologies, the overwhelming body of literature looks at the Marshall Plan either from a political and diplomatic or from an economic viewpoint. Beyond general statements that the Marshall Plan was used as a weapon in the Cold War, relatively little research has been carried out into how this weapon was wielded. This is even truer for the counterpart funds, which are usually only mentioned in passing in the literature, if at all. This is despite the fact that Marshall Aid in general and the counterpart funds in particular had actually quite a significant impact in Cold-War propaganda and economic matters in Western Europe, which most likely contributed to the declining appeal of communism. This article will look at the specific action of American and, after September 1949, German authorities in the use of counterpart funds to demonstrate their significance.
