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rfmcdonaldAlex Harrowell's review, at A Fistful of Euros, of Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction, is a must-read review of a must-read book aboiut the vissicitudes of the German economy under Naziism.
Tooze provides abundant evidence for his argument that Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, far from being a uniquely advanced economy full of V-2s and Volkswagens, actually lagged behind its competitors. The vast Fordist demi-continent of the United States was for many Germans, an obvious competitor and model, but so were Britain and France, with their vast empires, their high wages, and their relatively abundant agricultural land. Germany, in Tooze's convincing depiction, was a country with an economy that saw little to no net growth over the two decades that followed the First World War, with an urban working class that could barely afford to sustain itself and a peasantry forced to subsist on overcrowded land and little prospect of this changing. One response to the interwar conundrum--the respone, Tooze notes, that West Germany took after the Second World War--would have been for Germany to try to integrate itself into an integrated world and European economy, but the unsettled and unsettling tone of politics in interwar Europe kept that from being fulfilled. Harrowell points out that the Nazis responded by wanting to "shake the structure until it fell down; the economic history of the 30s in Germany is one of continuous foreign exchange crises, mitigated by a succession of increasingly inconsistent expedients." Indeed, "[b]y 1939, the Reichsbank was reduced to commissioning secret studies to estimate the mark’s exchange rate; the economists who carried them out concluded that the concept was now meaningless in the light of dozens of mutually incompatible side-deals with Germany’s trading partners."
The German economy fared worse in the Second World War. Nazi Germany's economic policy-making, rather than advancing beyond sustained inconsistently, devolved to the point of the wholesale pillage of conquered and satellite states. The sort of willing pan-European collaboration that could have made a difference, Tooze points out, was short-circuited not only by Nazi Germany's inability to treat other polities as its equals but by the economical unsustainability of a Europe deprived of extra-European trade. In the end, it all came crashing down.
Tooze's economic history is gripping, not only because it's an economic history that presents compelling arguments but because of its insights into Nazism. As the debate over at J. Bradford Delong's blog suggests, the long-standing debate as to whether the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities were planned by the Nazis in advance (intentionalism) or came about as an epiphenomenon of other Nazi policies (functionalism) seems to have been settled in favour of the intentionalists: An interwar Germany without Nazism might well have gone to war against most of Europe with the aim of securing economic hegemony, but without Nazism's influence on German policy-making (Heather Pringle's The Master Plan, among other books, provides an overview of some of Nazism's inherent irrationality) it seems quite unlikely whether a Nazi-less Germany would ever have come up with such manifestly counterproductive schemes as liquidating the populations of eastern Europe. Too, as Harrowell points out, images of the Americans' settlement of the west of their country and Britain's empire featured prominently as models for Germany's feature imperium, suggesting that Hannah Arendt was quite right to identify intimate links between 19th century European imperialisms and 20th century European wars and genocides. (Mamdami also seems to have been wrong to argue in his When Victims Become Killers that the Nazi Germany did not perceive itself to be a colonizing power in eastern Europe.)
Compelling, well-written, innovative, certainly a classic, The Wages of Destruction must be read by anyone interested in the economics of Nazism and interwar Europe. Tooze deserves a thank-you.
Tooze provides abundant evidence for his argument that Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, far from being a uniquely advanced economy full of V-2s and Volkswagens, actually lagged behind its competitors. The vast Fordist demi-continent of the United States was for many Germans, an obvious competitor and model, but so were Britain and France, with their vast empires, their high wages, and their relatively abundant agricultural land. Germany, in Tooze's convincing depiction, was a country with an economy that saw little to no net growth over the two decades that followed the First World War, with an urban working class that could barely afford to sustain itself and a peasantry forced to subsist on overcrowded land and little prospect of this changing. One response to the interwar conundrum--the respone, Tooze notes, that West Germany took after the Second World War--would have been for Germany to try to integrate itself into an integrated world and European economy, but the unsettled and unsettling tone of politics in interwar Europe kept that from being fulfilled. Harrowell points out that the Nazis responded by wanting to "shake the structure until it fell down; the economic history of the 30s in Germany is one of continuous foreign exchange crises, mitigated by a succession of increasingly inconsistent expedients." Indeed, "[b]y 1939, the Reichsbank was reduced to commissioning secret studies to estimate the mark’s exchange rate; the economists who carried them out concluded that the concept was now meaningless in the light of dozens of mutually incompatible side-deals with Germany’s trading partners."
The German economy fared worse in the Second World War. Nazi Germany's economic policy-making, rather than advancing beyond sustained inconsistently, devolved to the point of the wholesale pillage of conquered and satellite states. The sort of willing pan-European collaboration that could have made a difference, Tooze points out, was short-circuited not only by Nazi Germany's inability to treat other polities as its equals but by the economical unsustainability of a Europe deprived of extra-European trade. In the end, it all came crashing down.
Tooze's economic history is gripping, not only because it's an economic history that presents compelling arguments but because of its insights into Nazism. As the debate over at J. Bradford Delong's blog suggests, the long-standing debate as to whether the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities were planned by the Nazis in advance (intentionalism) or came about as an epiphenomenon of other Nazi policies (functionalism) seems to have been settled in favour of the intentionalists: An interwar Germany without Nazism might well have gone to war against most of Europe with the aim of securing economic hegemony, but without Nazism's influence on German policy-making (Heather Pringle's The Master Plan, among other books, provides an overview of some of Nazism's inherent irrationality) it seems quite unlikely whether a Nazi-less Germany would ever have come up with such manifestly counterproductive schemes as liquidating the populations of eastern Europe. Too, as Harrowell points out, images of the Americans' settlement of the west of their country and Britain's empire featured prominently as models for Germany's feature imperium, suggesting that Hannah Arendt was quite right to identify intimate links between 19th century European imperialisms and 20th century European wars and genocides. (Mamdami also seems to have been wrong to argue in his When Victims Become Killers that the Nazi Germany did not perceive itself to be a colonizing power in eastern Europe.)
Compelling, well-written, innovative, certainly a classic, The Wages of Destruction must be read by anyone interested in the economics of Nazism and interwar Europe. Tooze deserves a thank-you.
