An economic historiography of Germany, 1918–1931: How inflation and foreign capital inflows allowed the Weimar Republic to survive.Giovanni B.Pittaluga and ElenaSeghezza (Eds.), (Springer. 2024. Pp. 261. ISBN 9783031703461. Hbk £109.99).

An apt summary of this book is given by its subtitle: How Inflation and Foreign Capital Inflows Allowed the Weimar Republic to Survive.Inflation was the outcome of, as well as the solution to, the post-war struggle between capital and labour.The first routinely defended profit margins with price increases, whilst the latter successfully protected real wages by demanding higher nominal wages.Rentiers and pensioners lost out.Inflation was then not 'due to the fact that it allowed the government to exploit forms of monetary "illusion", but rather that powerful organized interest groups, namely industrialists and trade unions, benefited from inflation' (p.41).Inflation, however, pacified society only temporarily.Soon inflation gave way to hyperinflation: May 1922-September 1923 saw an unimaginable inflation of almost 370,000 per cent.The Dawes plan (1924) facilitated a pivot to foreign debt as the second social pacifier.It contained a clause that 'gave de facto higher seniority to commercial loans than to Reparations' (p.144), with the aim to 'meet the needs of the US banking community to re-open the German financial market to foreign investors' (p.155).To that end, the Allies also demanded a central bank completely independent from the government, whilst 50 per cent of members of its newly formed governance board were to be non-German.Germany effectively lost its monetary independence, and in return, it received loans.Thus, nothing stood in the way of the Goldene Zwanziger in 1925-9.Economic growth was led by increasing domestic demand.Public finance and the current accounts showed deficits, but that did not matter, as debt covered the difference, conveniently sufficing to meet reparations repayments as well.Of course, one day creditors have to be repaid -and when that day of reckoning arrives is for the creditors to decide.The question of by whom the bill would then be footed -by capital or labour -became pressing in 1929, when capital inflows dried up, starting a recession that in turn triggered a devastating deflation cycle, in which debt had to be repaid with incomes that, however, could not be earned now that unemployment soared.The authors ultimately do not address the political question: who pays?The answer to that question and the violent alliances that undergirded it, however, go a long way in explaining the downfall of liberal democracy.The merit of this book -a meticulous, informed, and thoughtful account