Banking Policy and Economic Order in the Weimar Republic: The Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft 1919-1931

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The proposed research project intends to examine whether in Germany the intensified war economy, originally initiated by the Hindenburg program of 1916, also marked a watershed in banking legislation which continued after the end of World War I and which became part and parcel of the economic order of the Weimar Republic. The project asks to what extent structural changes in finance and banking in the Weimar Republic rooted in the legislation und economic policy of the war economy. The different stages of structural change will be examined for the most important public financial institution, the Reich-owned Reichskreditgesellschaft mbH and the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft AG (as it was named after its reconstruction in 1923) respectively. The research strategy will therefore focus on the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschafts business strategies and its competition (or cooperation) with the private sector banks, the private Berlin great banks in particular, from the end of World War I until the collapse of the German banking system in summer 1931. During the last ten to twenty years German banking historiography has confined itself almost exclusively to the role of financial institutions in the Third Reich. This projects, however, intends to analyze the structural changes and the problems typical of the time in German banking, caused by the demobilization after the First World War, the post-war inflation and the monetary reforms aiming at currency stabilization thereafter and finally the debt crisis in connection with reparations and foreign indebtedness. The empirical basis for this study are the records of the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft which became one of the German great banks after the currency reforms and which performed an important function not only for the state and the state-owned industry, but also for the private sector during the Golden Age of the Weimar Republic. These records are deposited in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. The period of investigation will therefore have a focus from the end of the hyperinflation until the banking crisis of 1931. In this respect the project will deliver substantial data and interpretations on German banking policy in the Weimar Republic. But moreover, it will also be important for the German banking historiography of the Nazi period, as the project will clarify the preconditions of Nazi banking policy by an institution that was not only just nationalized, but by a state owned institution that had performed its tasks for years under a democratic government. The history of the Reichskreditgesellschaft mbH and the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft AG respectively during the Weimar Republic is thus a necessary precondition for understanding the history of this bank during the Nazi period which has already been examined by a recent research project the results of which have already partly been published in a number of articles by the researcher in charge.