Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Fall 2014, 55
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Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 55 | Fall 2014 05 Preface FEATURES 09 What Crisis? Speculation, Corruption, and the State of Emergency during the Great Depression Martin H. Geyer FORUM: THE CHALLENGE OF BIOGRAPHY Edited by Atiba Pertilla and Uwe Spiekermann 39 The Challenges of Biography: European-American Refl ections Volker Depkat 49 Legitimizing Biography: Critical Approaches to Biographical Research Levke Harders 57 Counting Who Counts: Method and Findings of a Statistical Analysis of Economic Elites in the New York Region, 1947 Clifton Hood 69 Writing Biography as a History of Networks: Why the Story of J.P. Morgan needs Jacob H. Schiff Susie J. Pak 77 Living the American Dream? The Challenge of Writing Biographies of German-American Immigrant Entrepreneurs Atiba Pertilla and Uwe Spiekermann 91 Biography in the History Classroom: Challenges and Applications Isabelle Schmitz GHI RESEARCH 105 The Challenge and Promise of Girl Scout Internationalism: From Progressive-Era Roots to Cold War Fruit Emily Swafford CONFERENCE REPORTS 127 Obesity, Health, and the Liberal Self: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Late Nineteenth and Late Twentieth Centuries Uwe Spiekermann 135 Los Angeles as a Site of German-American Crossings Uwe Spiekermann 141 Histories of Humanitarianism: Religious, Philanthropic, and Political Practices in the Modernizing World Sonya Michel and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson 147 Migration during Economic Downturns: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession Elisa Minoff 153 A Hands-on Approach: The Do-It-Yourself Culture and Economy in the Twentieth Century Reinhild Kreis 157 Twentieth Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar: Nineteenth-Century German History Anna von der Goltz 163 War and Childhood in the Age of the World Wars: Local and Global Perspectives Mischa Honeck, Susanne Quitmann, and Stina Barrenscheen 169 Informal and Everyday Markets: Histories of Business and Entrepreneurship in India since the Nineteenth Century Christina Lubinski and Sebastian Schwecke 2 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 55 | FALL 2014 177 GHI NEWS New Publications Editorial Notice Staff Changes GHI Fellowships and Internships Recipients of GHI Fellowships GHI Research Seminar, Spring 2014 GHI Doctoral Seminar, Spring 2014 GHI Calendar of Events 2014/15 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 55 | FALL 2014 3 PREFACE This Bulletin begins with a thought-provoking article by Martin Geyer on “Speculation, Corruption, and the State of Emergency during the Great Depression.” Based on the Gerald Feldman Memorial Lecture that Geyer delivered at the GHI earlier this year, his article approaches the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the Great Depression from a new angle, by examining the nexus between the emerging discourse about speculation and the future of capitalism, on the one hand, and new forms of state intervention under “state of emergency” powers and debates about the proper role of the state, on the other hand. By probing the example of the Reichsfl uchtsteuer in some detail, Geyer is also able to illuminate the role of anti-Semitism as well as continuities between late Weimar and Nazi policies. The next section of the Bulletin is a special forum on “The Challenge of Biography,” edited by GHI Research Associate Atiba Pertilla and GHI Deputy Director Uwe Spiekermann, which resulted from a panel at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in Chicago that was organized and sponsored by the GHI’s Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project. The six articles in this section seek to pro- vide an overview of current state of biographical research since its rejuvenation by the “biographical turn” of the late 1990s. In doing so, the forum also seeks to assess the GHI’s Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project’s contribution to biographical research, to several sub- disciplines, and to public history. Volker Depkat’s article off ers a nuanced overview of the current state of biographical research in Germany and the United States. Next, Levke Harders makes a strong argument for using biographies as a tool to examine “marginalized lives” and broaden ethnocentric historical perspectives. While these two articles focus on the genre of biography, the following two articles off er case studies of biographical research beyond the analysis of an individual life and the epistemological problems related to this traditional form of biography. Clift on Hood uses biographical data to examine both the coherence and the transformation of the New York upper class in the 1940s. Susie Pak, drawing on her innovative book “Gentlemen Bankers,” analyzes the cultural and social milieu of the New York Banking House of J.P. Morgan and its interactions with German-Jewish bankers, especially Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Refl ecting on these diff erent forms of biographical research, Atiba Pertilla and Uwe Spiekermann discuss the specifi c biographical approach of the PREFACE 5 GHI Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project. Finally, shift ing perspective from research to classroom, Isabelle Schmitz assesses the benefi ts and challenges of using biographies in teaching history at the high school and college level. The “GHI Research” section features an article by GHI Postdoctoral Fellow Emily Swaff ord, who examines the “internationalism” of the American Girl Scouts organization from the 1920s onward, with a special focus on the expansion of American Girl Scout troops overseas in the context of the stationing of U.S. troops in postwar Germany and Japan. The conference reports once again refl ect a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the history of obesity and health to the history of humanitarianism, from the history of the do-it-yourself movement to the history of Los Angeles as a site of German-American crossing, and from the history of childhood in wartime to the history of migration. The GHI has lined up a diverse and interesting program of lectures and conferences for this fall and next spring. Please consult the calendar of upcoming events in this issue’s “News” section and on our website. We very much hope to see you at one of these events in the coming year. Hartmut Berghoff (Director) and Richard F. Wetzell (Editor) 6 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 55 | FALL 2014 Features Features Forum GHI Research Conference Reports GHI News WHAT CRISIS? SPECULATION, CORRUPTION, AND THE STATE OF EMERGENCY DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION FIFTH GERALD D. FELDMAN MEMORIAL LECTURE, DELIVERED AT THE GHI WASHINGTON, MAY 29, 20141 Martin H. Geyer LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT, MUNICH I. The historiography on the Great Depression of the 1930s has lan- guished in the last two decades, at least in Germany. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the debate on Heinrich Brüning’s auster- ity policy and its possible alternatives, which fl ared up in the context of the debates on the crisis of Keynesianism in the late 1970s and 1 I am indebted to Dona 2 1980s, has for the most part been exhausted. Second, in Germany a Geyer and Richard Wetzell landscape of commissioned company studies has blossomed. Even for improving draft s of this published English version. though the Great Depression usually represents an important episode in the history of the fi rms being studied, this history usually pales 2 Albrecht Ritschel, Knut Borchardts, “Interpre- in comparison with the period of Nazi regime, given the evidence of tation der Weimarer a company’s entanglement with National Socialism.3 Third, unlike Wirtschaft . Zur Geschichte und Wirkung einer economic historians and economists who have used the depression wirtschaft shistorischen as an exercise in refl ecting on economic theories — much more so Kontroverse,” in Historische Debatten und Kontroversen in the United States than in Europe4 — cultural historians have not im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, seen this period as a stimulating challenge, quite unlike the preceding ed. Jürgen Elvert und Su- sanne Krauss (Wiesbaden, turbulent periods of the revolution, infl ation, and the “golden years” 2003), 234-244. of the Weimar Republic. A fourth reason for this relative neglect is 3 There are exceptions, see, that the Great Depression no longer holds a place of its own in what for instance, Gerald D. Feldman, “The Deutsche has become the common historical periodization. On the one side, Bank from World War to two decades divide the Great Depression from what is by now referred World Economic Crisis 1914-1933,” in Die Deut- to — somewhat exaltingly — as the “golden age” of “social demo- sche Bank 1870-1995, cratic consensus” (Eric Hobsbawn/Tony Judt) or the postwar period ed. Lothar Gall (London, 1995), 130-276. of “consensus liberalism” (Anselm Doering-Manteuff el), which plays such an important role, at least in German debates. On the other side, 4 Randall E. Parker, ed., The Economics of the Great De- two decades separate the Great Depression from the end of the “long pression: A Twenty-First nineteenth century” and the heyday of what Detlev Peukert has called Century Look Back at the Economics of the Interwar “classical modernity.” Although Peukert and other historians placed Era (Cheltenham, UK, great emphasis on the transformative years of the early 1930s, this 2007). 5 rather short period has become somewhat of a side story. The reason 5 Detlev Peukert, Die Wei- for this is quite clear: Grave as the political and economic crisis of marer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne the 1930s was, its impact can only be understood in the context of a (Frankfurt, 1987). GEYER | SPECULATION, CORRUPTION, AND THE STATE OF EMERGENCY 9 longue durée not only of mentalities and ideologies but also of social and political practices that precede the Great Depression. We will see whether the more recent worldwide fi nancial crisis will bring new impulses to historiography.6 What has become quite evident so far is a fl ourishing interest in the history of “capitalism” — which has always been, to a considerable extent, the history of its crises. Yet the question of which analogies or comparisons should and can be made remains controversial.