From the wheelbarrows of money needed to purchase a loaf of bread in 1923 to the long queues of the unemployed during the Depression, Weimar Germany is mainly remembered for industrial-strength economic disasters and political instability. Ever since Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, economists, historians, and political scientists have pored over Germany's first, brief experiment with democracy, producing study after study on economic and social policy, productivity performance, management of the currency, and the reparations issue.

Theo Balderston's brief text is a heroic attempt to survey and summarize this vast literature, and to highlight key areas of debate. By and large, it succeeds admirably—the book is ideal classroom material for a short course on interwar German economic history. In little more than 100 pages of chronologically organized text, Balderston covers the period from demobilization to the slump's end in 1933/34. Except for the editorial sloppiness that has become commonplace, the text is highly readable throughout. A glossary of key economic terms and concepts nicely complements a well-chosen bibliography. Balderston, who himself has made important contributions to some of the debates, begins his chapters with an overview of key facts and figures, and then moves on to a summary of controversies in the literature. The discussion is often scrupulously even-handed, sometimes to the point of sitting on the fence as a matter of principle—Balderston often presents all sides of an argument, and then leaves the reader to reach his own conclusions. Graduate students may appreciate such an approach, but most undergraduates would probably prefer more guidance and considered judgment. Students can quickly gain an overview of crucial issues, but Balderston's approach misses important opportunities to summarize where the scholarly debate now stands—the text often breaks off so abruptly that this reader sometimes wondered if a page was missing from his copy. The section on the inflation, for example, gives good summaries of the various theories that have been advanced—from the quantity theory to the balance-of-payments approach, from structural interpretations to expectational models. Yet after having been treated to a mouth-watering selection of appetizers, this reader felt that the main course was not being served—there is no compelling summary of what, in Balderston's view, is well explained by existing interpretations and what remains to be done.

In contrast, the discussion of Weimar's growth record during the late 1920s does not suffer from such defects. During the brief interlude between the currency's stabilization in 1923 and the outbreak of the crisis in 1930, output, productivity, and employment were all more or less rising in tandem. Nonetheless, many scholars from Knut Borchardt to Harold James and Albrecht Ritschl have detected signs of imminent collapse and underlying economic malaise—principally because profits and investment did not revive as much as one might have expected, given the empire's splendid record before 1914. Balderston sides with these authors and accepts that profligate spending, over-generous pay deals, and inept economic policy had already undermined Weimar's political and economic system before 1929.

Balderston also accepts that much of the criticism normally leveled against Heinrich Brüning, the “hunger chancellor” in charge during the Great Depression, has been misguided. The policy of brutal pay- and price-cuts, pushed through with emergency decrees, was largely without alternative because the Reich could not borrow and default was the only alternative. In this section in particular, Balderston makes an impressive effort to incorporate the latest research findings, citing numerous unpublished papers as well as Ritschl's important revisions of national statistics. Yet some readers may well remain unconvinced that austerity policies were essentially without alternative.

Although the text works hard to make economic history accessible to history undergraduates, it highlights the difficulties that the field has had to contend with in recent decades—economic models and terminology are hard to explain in layman's language and many of the key research issues are difficult to describe verbally. Harold James's The German Slump and Holtfrerich's book on the inflation are the model texts in this literature. Balderston's text does well even compared to such an elevated standard. Yet despite exemplary texts such as this one, it appears that economic history by and for historians is slowly turning into an academic no man's land. In the intellectual marketplace, this particular brand has not done well. Economists, when they deign to deal with historical evidence, normally insist on the rigor of explicit theoretical models and the systematic analysis of quantitative evidence; historians influenced by the linguistic turn and by history from below have largely turned their backs on macroeconomic concepts such as “growth,” “inflation,” and “unemployment,” using economic “terms” only in “inverted” commas to “make” points. In order to reclaim its niche in history departments, the field needs more undergraduate courses taught on the basis of books like this one.