Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface to the English edition
- Preface to the German edition
- List of original chapter titles and first places of publication
- Abbreviations
- 1 Protectionism in historical perspective
- 2 Was there a capital shortage in the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany?
- 3 Regional variations in growth in Germany in the nineteenth century with particular reference to the west—east developmental gradient
- 4 Investment in education and instruction in the nineteenth century
- 5 Changes in the phenomenon of the business cycle over the last hundred years
- 6 Trends, cycles, structural breaks, chance: what determines twentieth-century German economic history?
- 7 The Federal Republic of Germany in the secular trend of economic development
- 8 Germany's experience of inflation
- 9 Constraints and room for manoeuvre in the great depression of the early thirties: towards a revision of the received historical picture
- 10 Economic causes of the collapse of the Weimar Republic
- 11 Germany's exchange rate options during the great depression
- Notes
- Index
6 - Trends, cycles, structural breaks, chance: what determines twentieth-century German economic history?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface to the English edition
- Preface to the German edition
- List of original chapter titles and first places of publication
- Abbreviations
- 1 Protectionism in historical perspective
- 2 Was there a capital shortage in the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany?
- 3 Regional variations in growth in Germany in the nineteenth century with particular reference to the west—east developmental gradient
- 4 Investment in education and instruction in the nineteenth century
- 5 Changes in the phenomenon of the business cycle over the last hundred years
- 6 Trends, cycles, structural breaks, chance: what determines twentieth-century German economic history?
- 7 The Federal Republic of Germany in the secular trend of economic development
- 8 Germany's experience of inflation
- 9 Constraints and room for manoeuvre in the great depression of the early thirties: towards a revision of the received historical picture
- 10 Economic causes of the collapse of the Weimar Republic
- 11 Germany's exchange rate options during the great depression
- Notes
- Index
Summary
As one of the four speakers on the general theme ‘Historical Perspectives: Process and Plan, Event and Epoch?’, I have the task of examining, on the basis of German economic historical sources for the twentieth century, the difficulties in approaching history correctly.* I hope to be able to show that considerable differences in judgement of specific historical phenomena and events depend on the different perspectives with which even the same material is examined. In the course of doing this, individual questions are also discussed, but in the main we are concerned here with problems in ‘historical perspective’, and not with the depiction of German economic history for its own sake.
At the outset, a quotation will illuminate the difficulties facing an historian who wishes to describe and interpret economic development in the twentieth century. One could find many similar quotations. The one chosen is from the impressive work of David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus. Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Landes says:
It is not easy to write the economic history of the twentieth century. For one thing, it is too close to us; for another, it is messy by comparison with the halcyon nineteenth … The story of each [European economy of the nineteenth century, K.B.], mutatis mutandis, fits closely to a kind of ideal model of modernisation; the leitmotiv is the process of industrial revolution. […]
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- Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy , pp. 84 - 107Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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