Economics and Politics in the Weimar Republic

by Theo Balderston

• ISBN13: 9780521777605
• ISBN10: 0521777607
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is a succinct overview of the turbulent economic history of the Weimar Republic. Theo Balderston, an experienced teacher of economic history, summarises the wealth of recent research on the subject, and presents it in lucid, accessible form. He offers new perspectives on the economic effects of the Reparations conflict and of domestic political struggles for postwar inflation and the slump. Controversial analyses of the slow economic growth of even the Republic's best years have implications for the instability or otherwise of its political economy. Recent globalisation and global debt crises throw new light on the foreign debt burden with which Germans saddled themselves in the later 1920s, and the fateful financial crisis of 1931. Theo Balderston explains new analyses of the role of economic policy in worsening the slump and thus paving the way for Hitler.

Table of Contents

Preface	vi
List of abbreviations	vii
Demobilisation and revolution, 1918--1919	1	(9)
Treaty, reparations and `capacity to pay'	10	(24)
Inflation, 1918--1923	34	(27)
Normalisation and stagnation? 1924--1929	61	(16)
The slump	77	(23)
Epilogue	100	(2)
Glossary of economic and political terms	102	(5)
Bibliography	107	(13)
Index	120