This book reflects an increased interest in establishing connections between the political history and the business history of Europe in the twentieth century. The book includes research on the interactions of politicians, businessmen and their institutions in eight countries, with particular focus on the highly charged inter-war period. Fourteen essays cover subjects under four main headings: the business - politics paradigm; banking finance; business and politics in the National Socialist period; and the business community and the state. Together they form a fitting tribute to the academic scholarship and inspiration offered by Alice Teichova. In her distinguished career, and in particular after the publication of her path-breaking book An Economic Background to Munich in 1974, she did much to stimulate a collaborative approach to international comparative work in the field of economic, political and business history. The case studies presented here demonstrate her considerable legacy to the subject.

Petroleum from Coal shows why and how Friedrich Bergius and Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in 1913-26 invented and developed synthetic fuel processes; explains why and how Matthias Pier at BASF- IG Farben and Otto Roelen at Ruhrchemie successfully industrialized the syntheses during the Nazi-World War II years; and analyzes the pre- and post-World War II vicissitudes of the synthetic fuel industry. The research of Germany’s scientists in the 1920s-40s made them world leaders in synthetic fuel studies. Information on the synthetic fuel processes has come from the Allied teams who went to Germany and Japan during World War II’s closing months and from British, American, and Canadian synthetic fuel investigations.

One of the most powerful nationalist ideas in modern Europe is the assertion that there is a link between people and their landscape. Focusing on the heart of German romanticism, the Rhineland, Thomas Lekan examines nature protection activities from Wilhelmine Germany through the end of the Nazi era to illuminate the relationship between environmental reform and the cultural construction of national identity. In the late nineteenth century, anxieties about national character infused ecological concerns about industrialization, spurring landscape preservationists to protect the natural environment. In the Rhineland's scenic rivers, forests, and natural landmarks, they saw Germany as a timeless and organic nation rather than a recently patchworked political construct. Landscape preservation also served conservative social ends during a period of rapid modernization, as outdoor pursuits were promoted to redirect class-conscious factory workers and unruly youth from "crass materialism" to the German homeland. Lekan's examination of Nazi environmental policy challenges recent work on the "green" Nazis by showing that the Third Reich systematically subordinated environmental concerns to war mobilization and racial hygiene. This book is an original contribution not only to studies of national identity in modern Germany but also to the growing field of European environmental history. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Nature's Homelands: The Origins of Landscape Preservation, 1885-1914 2. The Militarization of Nature and Heimat, 1914-1923 3. The Landscape of Modernity in theWeimar Era 4. From Landscape to Lebensraum: Race and Environment under Nazism 5. Constructing Nature in the Third Reich Conclusion Abbreviations Notes Sources Acknowledgments Index Writing squarely within the idiom of the 'invented tradition' and the 'imagined nation,' Thomas Lekan argues that in the wake of belated unification and at a time of rapid industrialization, the German landscape came to be seen as a touchstone of national identity. He questions the idea that those engaged in landscape preservation were simply 'antimodern,' and he challenges both scholars who have seen a straightforward continuity from pre-1933 preservationist sentiment to Nazism and those who have made exaggerated claims for the Third Reich as the progenitor of modern green politics. This is a welcome contribution to the literature on local and national identity, joining works by Celia Applegate and Alon Confino, and on the environmental history of modern Germany. Both scholarly and original, Imagining the Nation in Nature is an impressive achievement. --David Blackbourn, Harvard University This important and timely book contributes to our understanding of German identity as well as to modern concepts of environmentalism and nature. Lekan's valuable contribution elucidates the modern, technocratic, and therapeutic vision of preservation that linked Weimar and the Third Reich. His analysis of Nazi bio-nature is significant and thought-provoking. --Alon Confino, University of Virginia

Most studies on the spread of Nazism in German society before and after 1933 concentrate on the country's western parts. As a result, so the author claims, our overall picture of the situation has been distorted since the eastern areas contained a substantial portion of the population. Neglecting them means that all generalizations about the Nazi period require further testing. This first comprehensive study of Saxony therefore fills a large gap, also in light of the fact that Saxony was one of the most industrialized German regions. It deals with problems of continuity and change in German society during three distinct phases: constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, and dictatorship. The author shows convincingly that it was deep-rooted local traditions that determined the success or failure of Nazism among the local population.