On the back cover of this biography of Hans Luther the publisher notes that this is the first full-scale account of the German statesman in any language. There may be a good reason for this. Varying slightly the caption of an old New Yorker cartoon, Luther may have been important, but he wasn't very interesting.
Luther certainly had a varied and long public career. He served in a variety of positions at all levels of German public administration from the municipal to the federal level. At various points in his life he was a mayor of a major city (Essen), Reich chancellor, president of the Reichsbank, German ambassador in Washington, and after World War II, he headed yet another unsuccessful effort to revise the German Länder boundaries. In these offices he served competently, if unspectacularly.
The author does his best to bring some drama into Luther's rather pedestrian life. He suggests that Luther and Gustav Stresemann were bitter rivals and that Luther played a crucial and underrated role in negotiating the Treaties of Locarno. Rivalry also marked the relations between Konrad Adenauer and Luther, and the author contends that Adenauer was instrumental in preventing Luther from playing a major public role after 1945. In the most dramatic “it might have been scenario,” Clingan throws out the idea that Luther had a realistic chance of becoming Reich president in 1932. The only evidence that the author cites, however, is the opinion of a periodical called Das Kleine Journal.
I am not sure that this is very convincing, particularly since Luther had embroiled himself in the quagmire of German territorial reform after he left the cabinet. As head of what soon came to be called the Luther-Bund, the former chancellor and his associates attempted to bring some rationale into the hodgepodge of the German Länder sizes. The effort failed miserably; German particularism was alive, well, and victorious.
Not surprisingly, since the author has previously written on Weimar financial history, the most detailed chapter deals with Luther's tenure as president of the Reichsbank. This part of the book bristles with statistics and technical terms, but the central thesis seems to be that Luther should not be blamed for the disastrous financial polices of the Brüning regime.
Luther's financial expertise was also the primary reason for his appointment as Hitler's first ambassador in Washington. The new government expected Luther to be able to negotiate better terms for Germany's public debt, and while the ambassador tried his best, his efforts were undermined by the Nazis' policies in Germany, which put him increasingly on the defensive with the American negotiators.
The author does his best to provide some information about Luther's private life, and he had full access to Luther's Nachlass and a variety of other primary sources, but there does not seem to be much to tell. He was married twice, widowed once, and he had two children. He had an affair with an American woman, but she seems to have been more passionate about the relationship than Luther.
After World War II Luther came out of retirement to head yet another commission on territorial reform. This effort was as unsuccessful as its Weimar counterpart. Despite numerous complaints that Länder such as North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate were artificial constructs imposed by the occupation authorities, the new Länder were accepted very quickly. There was no desire to implement the recommendations of the Luther commission (which the author lists in pedantic detail).
I am afraid political history is not the author's strong suit. Aside from some awkward translations (the rendering of the Prussian provincial Oberpräsident as High President is not very felicitous), there are a number of mistakes in the narrative. William II did not inaugurate the 1918 constitutional reforms, Friedrich Ebert did not order Scheidemann to proclaim the republic, and Konrad Adenauer was never in a concentration camp. He spent part of the war years out of sight at the convent of Maria Laach. There are also some jarring editorial problems. What in the world is an Oberlieutenant? It is either an Oberleutnant or a First Lieutenant.
In his conclusion the author attempts a sort of psycho-philosophical assessment of “Luther's lives” and the statesman's place in German history. Clingan suggests that Luther's “tragic flaw” was “a hollowness in his soul.” He had no passions, and this “mirrored the troubled lives of adolescent Germany itself.” I am not sure how far this gets us. Aside from the vagueness of the term adolescent Germany, it seems to me that during Luther's life, Germany had rather too many people with the wrong kind of passions. Still, the book is an important contribution, especially to the history of public finances in Weimar Germany. Unfortunately, the narrative is jarred by a number of factual errors and a rather pedestrian style.
