introduction:

Since the mid-nineteenth century the study of crises and economic fluctuations became an important issue in German economics. This holds for the German Historical School, as can be illustrated by Wilhelm Roscher’s influential essay “Production crises with particular consideration of recent decades” (1849), as well as for Karl Marx for whom crises and cycles were the very essence of the evolution of capitalist economies. Entries on crises and cycles remained major topics in economic dictionaries and encyclopaedias until World War II. This is also indicated by the cluster of German economists, such as Roscher, Adolf Wagner, Heinrich Herkner, Wilhelm Lexis and Arthur Spiethoff in Daniele Besomi’s recent collection (Besomi 2012). However, despite recurrent economic crises, and numerous theoretical and empirical studies on economic fluctuations, the idea of a long-run decline of the economy was widely absent before World War I. On the contrary, the catching-up process of the German economy accelerated remarkably after the end of the French-German war in 1871. The German economy took the leadership in new industries such as the chemical industry at the end of the 19th century but, with regard to real income per capita, was forging ahead of the British economy only in the 1960s (Kindleberger 1975). The situation changed completely after the catastrophe of the First World War. The new Weimar Republic was confronted with the most severe economic problems from the beginning in November 1918 until the Great Depression which contributed to her end in early 1933.