Luxury or Public Investment? Productivity and Planning for Weimar Recovery

Abstract

The late Detlev Peukert noted that historians of the Weimar Republic have tended to devote their attention to the republic's first and last years. They have much to say about the Weimar Republic up to the end of the inflation in 1923 and 1924. However, they tend to jump from Weimar's troubled early years to its catastrophic disintegration between 1929 and 1933. Skirting the middle years, historians have generally overlooked the problem of recovery in Germany during the 1920s. In doing so, they have ignored a topic of central concern to Germans during the twenties.