This excellent little book is a collection of essays dedicated to the memory of Gerald Feldman, a distinguished American historian who specialized in modern German history. Its title is appropriate, since Feldman devoted almost all his work to the period from World War I to World War II—truly an “age of extremes”—and gave special attention to business enterprise and its leaders. Those interested in learning more about Feldman and his work should consult the book's appendix, where Jürgen Kocka offers a sympathetic and informative description of Feldman's career and contribution to the field.

The book opens with an introduction by the editors which places all of the essays in the context of Feldman's work. Its first set of essays covers the period from the late-nineteenth-century to the outbreak of the great depression, while the second set deals with the Nazi period and some of its effects. The essays discuss Austrian as well as German experience, reflecting Feldman's research which encompassed both countries. Even the themes and methodology of most of the essays seem “Feldman-like”: they offer an economic history in which careful description of interactions between business leaders and government policymakers dominates and in which individual personalities play a key role. It is not an economic history, however, that seeks to avoid the “big questions.” In Gerhard Ritter's opening essay, for example, it seems reasonable to see Germany's emergence as a major factor in international shipping at the end of the nineteenth century in the context of the careers of Albert Ballin, boss of the country's biggest shipping company, and Kaiser Wilhelm; but the political dangers that this development posed for global capitalism are also built into the argument. Similarly, the second essay depicts the head of Germany's top chemical firm (Bayer), Carl Duisberg, as a decisive figure in the forging of a cooperative agreement between industrial employers and the German trade unions in 1918, a cooperation which he —like many subsequent historians—saw as the only way to forestall the advent of Socialism and save German Capitalism. The essays on the N-S period focus largely on the response of private business to the restraints and opportunities of Nazi policies. Dieter Ziegler's review of the literature concludes that those policies—in spite of massive state intervention—left basic private incentives intact and produced what he calls “a regulated market economy.” The essays by Johannes Bähr and Ingo Köhler discuss the extent to which businessmen adhered to accepted principles in exploiting the opportunities offered by Nazi policies (especially “Aryanization”). None of the findings of these essays, however, seem as shocking as the revelations about German scientific research policy in these years presented by Reinhard Rürup (pp. 133–38). These should be required reading for German historians.

I suppose one should not expect too much from any book designed as a Festschrift, but this one does provoke a few critical comments. First, it has no chapter on the German inflation, though Feldman was co-organizer of a large-scale research program on the subject—the theme of the book that Jürgen Kocka has called his “magnum opus.” Second, it includes an interesting comparison of the difference between savings banks in the United States and in Germany which emerged in the interwar period, but its connection to Feldman's work is tenuous. Finally, economic historians who see the “Age of Extremes” in macroeconomic and global perspective will not find much to talk about here. It is only thanks to Harold James' brief (but well-argued) paper on the systemic financial crisis that began in Central Europe in 1931 that this link is not completely missing from the book. All in all, however, it is a book that does justice to Gerald Feldman's important contributions to the field.