1931 by Tobias Straumann — how things fall apart. The story of the end of Weimar Germany
The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931
With hindsight we date the onset of the Great Depression back to the Wall Street crash of October 1929. But that was not obvious at the time. At first it seemed the world economy might merely be entering a normal cyclical downturn.
It was in 1931 with the sequence of the Austrian banking crisis, the shutdown of the German financial system and then Britain’s departure from the gold standard that it became clear that this recession was, indeed, a major turning point in world history.
To win support for his deeply unpopular austerity measures, Brüning chose to parade his nationalist colours
Adam Tooze FT 5 July 2019
Adam Tooze is the author of ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’
With hindsight we date the onset of the Great Depression back to the Wall Street crash of October 1929. But that was not obvious at the time. At first it seemed the world economy might merely be entering a normal cyclical downturn.
It was in 1931 with the sequence of the Austrian banking crisis, the shutdown of the German financial system and then Britain’s departure from the gold standard that it became clear that this recession was, indeed, a major turning point in world history.
To win support for his deeply unpopular austerity measures, Brüning chose to parade his nationalist colours
Adam Tooze FT 5 July 2019
Adam Tooze is the author of ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’
Popular mythology in Germany has it that the Weimar hyperinflation of 1922-23 led directly to the rise of Hitler. This is not true.
1929
1929
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