The Insider-Outsider of Early 20th-Century German Industry: Gunter Henle and the Klockner Steel Conglomerate, 1899-1955

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Using the life and work of Gnter Henle, Volker R. Berghahn examines the postwar West German approach to labour relations and European integration. The study of Henle simultaneously allows Berghahn to reflect on the unique insights into German Jewish life before and during the Nazi dictatorship that his story provides. The book looks at how Henle suffered from Nazi persecution, but was ultimately protected by the Establishment he had married into. It then charts how, reinstated after 1945, he involved himself not only in the reconstruction of his Klockner industrial enterprise, but also in the rebuilding of the West German economy and society, and the development of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) - the embryo of what was ultimately to become the European Union. The Insider-Outsider of Early 20th-Century German Industry discusses West European and American strategies to complement NATO as the political and military counter to the perceived threat of the Soviet Bloc with the creation of institutions for economic cooperation. It is a timely analysis which stresses the importance of cooperation between employers, trade unions and government in securing compromise, social peace and economic stability in trans-Atlantic perspective at a time when the neo-liberal axioms of Thatcherite and Reaganite shareholder societies are again being held against the strengths of the managed stakeholder societies of the early post-war decades.

Author Bio

Volker R. Berghahn is Seth Low Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia University, USA. His publications include: America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001); Quest for Economic Empire (ed., 1996); Imperial Germany (1995); The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (1986); Modern Germany (1982); Der Tirpitz-Plan (1971); Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006); and most recently Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer (2018). Professor Berghahn is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UK.