Sering’s son died in the last week of the war. Following this, Sering asked to write the Reich Settlement Law (Reichssiedlungsgesetz), which covered plans to settle veterans and Freikorps. Sering fought the Diktat of Versailles. There were calls for plebiscite in Posen to divide Poles from Germans. Sering then spent the early, poor years of Weimar attacking Versailles treaty, setting up the Sering-Insitut, and training PhDs, before formally retiring in 1925. The chapter goes on to cover the rise of racial thinking among Sering’s inner colonial peers. Sering then returned to the USA in 1930 with his student Constantin von Dietze. During the rise of the Nazis, Hitler turned to the agrarian sector for votes. Chancellor Brüning was a big fan of Sering. Initially, in 1932, Sering seemed open to some of the more radical language.

In the interwar period, the issue of how much space capitalism left for human agency preoccupied many Germans. Would they be able to revolutionize or reform this economic order, or were they compelled to work and live within it? This chapter argues that capitalism proved remarkably capable of confining individual, collective, and governmental agency. Therefore, expectations of transformation were often disappointed or scaled back, as the first section shows. The second section examines more tacit ways of adapting to a capitalist logic, while the third turns to the attempts of Chancellor Hermann Brüning’s two cabinets to steer Germany through the economic depression. Brüning was caught between calls for decisive leadership, doubts about the effectiveness of government intervention, and a rapidly shifting situation. Adolf Hitler, by contrast, promised to restore human control over the economy. After 1933, his regime loudly claimed to have transcended capitalism while inconspicuously exploiting its logic.