Although composed of thirteen authors' essays, nearly all of them originally delivered at a workshop in Mannheim in 2002, this volume is more consistent in quality than most such works, and it comes closer to covering its title topic than conference volumes usually do. The contributors range from young researchers variously associated with the University of Mannheim (Michael Ebi, Ulrich Hensler, Gerd Höschle, and Jonas Scherner) to established figures in the field of German business or economic history (Johannes Bähr, Frank Bajohr, Rüdiger Hachtmann, Andre Steiner, Raymond Stokes, Jochen Streb, and Adam Tooze) to recently deceased scholars of great eminence (Christoph Buchheim and Gerald Feldman). Because many of the chapters introduce or summarize monographs that the contributors published during the interval between their gathering and the appearance of this book, it will prove especially valuable to graduate students and nonspecialists seeking a convenient way to keep up with a burgeoning literature.

Like Adam Tooze's brilliant study, The Wages of Destruction, many of the essays here identify the central challenge and constraint of the Nazi economy as a chronic foreign exchange shortage, exacerbated by the regime's refusal to devalue the Reichsmark. This is what propelled the interventionist spiral detailed and outlined in the first seven chapters, as each patchwork government “fix” led to more such, culminating by the late 1930s in a completely distorted price structure within Germany and the onset of rationing of both labor and raw materials. Indeed, the first two-thirds of the book constitutes something of an “own goal,” since these chapters largely contradict the view of the Nazi economy that the editor embraced in his final years, which stressed the regime's almost exclusive reliance on lucrative incentives to get producers to do as it wished. Only chapter eight by Buchheim's former doctoral student Jonas Scherner buttresses this argument, but its treatment of the financing of IG Farben's synthetic rubber factories (pp. 127-28) is misleading on the first round of negotiations between that firm and the state (see my own Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era, 2nd ed., 2001, pp. 188-91). One after another, the essays tell a story of a mounting and increasingly confining network of controls on economic activity erected by the German state. To be sure, these never were coordinated in such a way as to create a centrally planned economy, but they composed a labyrinth that channeled commercial conduct in the sometimes contradictory directions the Nazi Reich favored (i.e., toward increasing arms production, substitution for imported raw materials, and export sales).

The last third of the book shifts from a predominantly macroeconomic to a primarily microeconomic focus, and the subjects are, respectively, an entrepreneur (Phillipp Reemtsma and his political donations), two banks (the Kreditanstalt of Vienna after the Anschluss and the Dresdner of Berlin in the 1930s), and two corporate activities (knowledge transfer among plastics firms and industrial research and development). A collective message is harder to discern in these contributions, but the first three vividly illustrate how tricky, expensive, and corrupting adaptation to political and economic conditions could be for commercially conspicuous individuals and institutions in 1933-45. The final two essays are more forward-looking, in that Jochen Streb seeks to gauge the impact of economic structures during the Third Reich on the postwar success of German plastics producers, and Raymond Stokes points scholars toward new sources and approaches that will illuminate the state of industrial innovation in Nazi Germany.

Grateful as one should be to the editor and contributors for going to the trouble of producing this collection in English, the effort is not altogether successful. Germanisms remain abundant (e.g., “overtaken” when “taken over” is meant, the use of infinitives in place of gerunds, and commas placed or omitted according to German rules rather than English or American ones). Spelling lapses are not uncommon (e.g., “principle” for “principal” and the like). In some passages, the translation is simply unintelligible (e.g., p. 129 at the top of the page). These are minor—but also needless—distractions in an otherwise useful volume.