This chapter tells the tragic tale of the Weimar Republic. It begins with a description of the political violence that was typical of its early years, based on the half-forgotten book by the socialist statistician Emil Julius Gumbel. It then moves on to observe the double message of the new republic to the Jews. As everyone was suffering the consequences of one economic or political crisis after another, and the endless social strife and political disagreements, Jews had to confront antisemitism too, and that just as they learned to enjoy their final and complete equality. From the tale of the “stab in the back” till the rise of the Nazi Party, Jews were targets of hate and repeated public attacks. Three women represent here three generations of Jews living under these conditions: the social activist Bertha Pappenheim, the socialist physician Käte Frankenthal, and the young Hannah Arendt. Their life-stories allow us to glimpse the social-work efforts of the older Jewish community, the attraction of the socialist vision for Jewish men and women of the middle generation, and the creative intellectual work of some members of the younger generation.

The four years after World War I proved disastrous to the grand hotels of Berlin. There were threats from the left in the form of revolution, the January Uprising, and strikes, and there were threats from the right in the form of vandalism, looting, atrocity, and an unsuccessful coup d’état. Then there were the threats that originated neither on the right nor on the left: material and labor shortages, high crime, inflation, hyperinflation, and rising taxes. Between 1918 and 1923, hoteliers began blaming the left and the state for all these misfortunes – a tendency that pushed them into the camp of the anti-republican right, Weimar’s enemies. With the hyperinflation of 1923, an unmitigated disaster for Berlin’s grand hotels, that tendency became the rule. The republic, Berlin’s grand hoteliers had come to believe, was bad for business. Their efforts to manage the crisis of the postwar era, 1918–23, reveal the links between quotidian struggles and political decisions – decisions against the republic in favor of more authoritarian solutions to Germany’s problems.

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marxism emerged as a major rival to both economic liberalism and neomercantilism in debates about the international dimensions of political economy around the world. With their focus on ending class inequality and exploitation by challenging capitalism, Marxists put prioritized distinctive goals from those prioritized by economic liberals and neomercantilists in the pre-1945 years. This chapter examines Karl Marx’s ideas about the world economy as well as those of a number of his influential European (including Russian) followers. The latter include thinkers commonly discussed in IPE textbooks, such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, but also other thinkers who usually receive less attention, such as Carl Ballod, Rudolph Hilferding, Henry Hyndman, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and Georg Vollmar. The chapter highlights important disagreements among these various Marxist thinkers on issues such as free trade, imperialism, multilateral cooperation, strategies for challenging capitalism, the prospects for socialism in one country, and the relationship between capitalism and war.

This essay’s re-reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s international thought reintroduces us to a canonical thinker whose contributions have not yet received the recognition they deserve. Instead, Luxemburg has been infantilized by both Marxist and liberal traditions, traditions that she challenged for their exalting of national self-determination. Her most important contribution, however, relates to capitalism’s reliance on tapping into non-capitalist modes of production and exchange. This was central to her sophisticated understanding of imperialism. As Hutchings explains, to Luxemburg it would have been unsurprising that the world economy today continues to rely on bonded labor. But Luxemburg’s positionality as an international thinker is also relevant to histories of international thought. Hers was a life steeped in political activism within the imperialist core, and her analysis of international politics contended with the religious, class, ethnic and racial hierarchies of the land-based empires of pre-World War I Eastern and Central Europe.