At the end of 1918, Harry Graf Kessler, the astute German observer of domestic and international affairs, summarized the essential conflicts that Germany would face in the years following World War I. Considering the demands of the German revolution along with the urgency of economic recovery from the war, Kessler responded to his compatriot, Hermann Graf Keyserling, that “The crucial point is how we are to combine broad social measures without reducing production. If we can solve this problem, we really shall be ahead of the rest of the world. What Kessler perceptively anticipated in the dying days of the last year of the Great War would be Weimar's effort to create a social welfare state predicated on private sector economic recovery and prosperity. Germany after the First World War was the first industrial nation in the twentieth century to broach this agenda, one which would become more familiar and successful following the Second World War.

The Reichskuratorium (RKW) was founded in 1921 by Carl Friedrich von Siemens and his subalternate, Carl Köttgen. The organization strove to implement measures of industrial and organizational efficiency in Germany in the interwar era following the American models of Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Ford. This study uses the organization as a vehicle to evaluate varieties of organized capitalism in German business and industrial history since the late nineteenth century. Most recent research has identified forms of organized capitalism that include significant input from organized labor along with state and industry as the most “modern” forms. While these efforts stagnated and eventually failed in Germany's interwar Weimar Republic, they are still seen as the origin of a characteristic and successful postwar model of organized capitalism. Acknowledging that this view is accurate, this study draws attention to the alternate model of the RKW which strove to implement technical and organizational measures of industrial and economic efficiency using state funding but avoiding significant input from organized labor. This variation of German organized capitalism emerged from the more traditional, self-regulating patterns of the late nineteenth century. It persisted through the Weimar Republic, through World War II, and into the postwar era. Less fruitful for understanding the character of the RKW are models from the 1970s Cold War era which elaborated a strongly symbiotic version of organized capitalism between state and big business, which allegedly subordinated efforts of big business to state interests.

Apart from an adequate food supply, the most pressing of Germany's social problems following its defeat in 1918 was adequate housing, especially for its lower classes. The crush of soldiers pouring back from the front, the bursting dam of delayed new marriages and family formation due to the war, and the ravenous manpower needs of German industry in the face of the postwar economic crisis strained Germany's existing housing stock to the limit. 1 This was especially true in the Ruhr industrial region.Yet housing was not just a social problem. It became tied to the postwar conflicts between organized labour and large industrial interests, especially in the Ruhr coal region. As social and economic conditions worsened in the aftermath of the war, housing developed into a severe political problem. In the years immediately after the war, Germany was beset by social and political unrest and near revolution. A provisional Social Democratic regime in Berlin struggled to draw a balance between syndicalist movements of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, right-wing paramilitary threats, and the Spartakus communists. In the Ruhr, as elsewhere, conflicts arose around the issues of a shorter work shift, higher wages, industrial abuse of authority, and how best to nationalize the coal industry. 2 Yet most of the working and middle classes simply sought to solve the basic everyday problems of food, shelter and

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