Adam Tooze: belief

Transcript context

…It is an actual democracy. So even if the United States has checked out, why don’t German voters opt for something semi-sane? Instead, you get a hyperinflation well past an optimal rate of seigniorage extraction. That just seems irrational by any standard. So, culturally, what went wrong in Weimar that so many people made what seemed to be nonoptimizing, nonrational decisions? Because, really, that can’t be the fault of the US. Well, no. But in 1928, in the last, as it were, pre–Great Depression elections in the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s party gains 1.5 percent of the vote. The Communists are doing badly, and the centrist parties — the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, various shades of liberals — have a vast majority of the German vote, and a center-left government is formed. So after the Weimar Republic had survived that initial shock that you’re talking about — the hyperinflation of the early 1920s — exactly as you’re suggesting, Germans can quite reasonably see that there is the prospect, if not for glory and national self-assertion, then at least for prosperity and a functioning politics in the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s. What we’ve got to explain is why that is broken apart. And I don’t, by any means, want to say that this is all down to the United States. Of course, German political elites have choices to make, and a large fraction of them are obviously responsible for having made choices which turned out to be absolutely disastrous for their own country and for the rest of the world. But if you’re asking me, as it were, to say what I would argue personally, what my distinctive contribution to the debate has been is to show the way in which the collapse of the financial structures of the ’20s — which did indeed pivot on the United States — in the early ’30s shifted the terms of the debate within Germany and several other potential challenger, if you’d like, insurgent countries. We don’t just see this in Germany. There is a factor which goes beyond the particularities of German politics or Japanese politics or Italian politics or, indeed, even British politics or Soviet politics, which is this broader question about the viability, really, of the liberal order. And when that liberal order becomes less plausible, it changes the parameters of everyone’s decision-making. Then, of course, it’s up to local forces. And as you’re stressing, of course, in Germany, there is a powerful militarist group, conservative group, which is willing to gamble on Hitler to provide them with a democratic base, and that turns out to be an epic historical miscalculation. Speaking of Hitler, was Hitler, in fact, the Keynesian?…

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