Talking about Efficiency: Politics and the Industrial Rationalization Movement in the Weimar Republic

At the end of 1918, Harry Graf Kessler, the astute German observer of domestic and international affairs, summarized the essential conflicts that Germany would face in the years following World War I. Considering the demands of the German revolution along with the urgency of economic recovery from the war, Kessler responded to his compatriot, Hermann Graf Keyserling, that “The crucial point is how we are to combine broad social measures without reducing production. If we can solve this problem, we really shall be ahead of the rest of the world. What Kessler perceptively anticipated in the dying days of the last year of the Great War would be Weimar's effort to create a social welfare state predicated on private sector economic recovery and prosperity. Germany after the First World War was the first industrial nation in the twentieth century to broach this agenda, one which would become more familiar and successful following the Second World War.