4 - Hugo Stinnes and the Prospect of War Before 1914

Summary

Very little has been written about preparations in the private economy in Germany for World War I. There is a good reason for this. There were scarcely any preparations in the German private economy for the war, and neither the German government nor the German military called on the private economy to make much preparation for the short war they were anticipating, let alone for the “total war” that was quite beyond their imaginations. Indeed, as I tried to show in a book written some years ago, both the military and civilian authorities and the business community were very slow in and very reluctant about coming to terms with the economic requirements of a long war even after they were in it. Strictly speaking, therefore, the question of the German business community's preparations for World War I is a very thin subject. Current historiographical trends notwithstanding, it is difficult to write about what did not happen or to try to make what is marginal significant out of the conviction that it should be significant. The constraints of mortality being what they are, it is best to concentrate on what matters. I will attempt to do so here by examining the behavior of a major industrialist, Hugo Stinnes (1870-1924), in an effort to understand why there was so little preparation for the war or serious engagement with the dangers of war on the part of German businessmen, to explore how they thought about war, insofar as they thought about it at all, and then to use this case study to make some speculative remarks about the implications of this for the grande histoire of prewar German capitalism and international relations, and for the truly significant problem of the political behavior of leading German businessmen during and after the war.