Edward A. Tenenbaum and the Deutschmark

How an American Jew Became the Father of Germany's Postwar Economic Revival

By: Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich

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Paperback | 31 October 2024

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796 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24 x 4.47

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German industry had survived Allied bombing largely unscathed. Currency reform was necessary to provide incentives for capital owners and labor to produce. The abundance of old Reichsmarks had to be curtailed to a scarce supply of Deutschmarks that users would expect to retain value. It was Edward A. Tenenbaum, currency expert of US military government in Berlin since 1946, who managed the exceptionally successful currency reform in West Germany 1948, which was implemented by the legislative powers of the three Western Allies against opposition from West German financial experts. It was the foundation of West Germany's 'economic miracle.' The West German currency conversion is part of the founding myth of the Federal Republic of Germany. Yet Tenenbaum's pivotal role is largely unknown among the German public. Besides providing a full-blown biography of the true father of the currency reform, this book elevates Tenenbaum to his proper place in German history.

Industry Reviews

'Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich has provided a remarkable biography of both an economist and a currency. The deutschmark is rightly remembered for providing post-World War II Germany with rock-solid economic and financial stability. Edward Tenenbaum, its architect, is rather less well remembered. Holtfrerich, in this remarkable book featuring cameo appearances by everyone from US General Omar Bradley to German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, fills in this gap in the historical record.' Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley
'An amazing, revelatory biography that uncovers in lovingly pointillist, forensic detail a radically new history of the 1948 German currency reform, but also of the German social market economy, and in general of US occupation policy and the men and women who made it. Unputdownable history, the historical detective work of a master.' Harold James, author of Seven Crashes
'The introduction of the German Mark was the beginning of the West German postwar economic miracle. Its intellectual father was not Ludwig Erhard, but an American of Jewish-Polish decent, Edward Tenenbaum. Carl Holtfrerich's masterful biography finally does justice to the role of a man who deserves a monument in German economic history.' Moritz Schularick, President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy

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