Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University where he moved in 1998 from Brown University, after a longer spell of teaching at the University of Warwick in England. The author of more than a dozen books, he has long been interested in the challenges of modern biography. In 1993, he published a study of the industrialist Otto A. Friedrich and his role in the reconstruction of West German industry after 1945. His America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe uses Shepard Stone-renowned journalist, Ford Foundation officer in charge of its European and international programs, and the first director of the Berlin Aspen Institute-as a window to the trans-Atlantic world of American and European intellectuals and scholars, many of whom were associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom during the Cold War.

Preface

Introduction: German Big Business and the Quest for a European Economic Empire in the Twentieth Century
Volker R. Berghahn

Chapter 1. Europe in the Strategies of Germany's Electrical Engineering and Chemicals Trusts, 1919-1929
Harm G. Schröter

Chapter 2. The European Strategies of IG Farben, 1925-45
Peter Hayes

Chapter 3. Fascism and the Structure of German Capitalism: The Case of the Automobile Industry
Simon Reich

Chapter 4. German Big Business and the Return to the World Market after World War II
Reinhard Neebe

Chapter 5. "Reconquering Our Old Position": West German Osthandel Strategies of the 1950s
Robert Mark Spaulding, Jr.

Chapter 6. Lowering Soviet Expectations" West German Industry and Osthandel during the Brandt Era
Volker R. Berghahn

Chapter 7. Strategies of German Big Business in their International Setting during the 1980s
Margit Köppen

Chapter 8. German Industry and the European Union in the 1990s
Jeffrey J. Anderson

Tables
List of Contributors

German unification evoked ambivalent reactions outside its borders: it revived disquietingmemories of attempts by German big business during the two world wars to build an economic empire in Europe in conjunction with the military and the government bureaucracy. But thereare also high hopes that German finance and industry will serve as the engine of reconstruction in eastern Europe, just as it played this role in the postwar unification of western Europe.