Faktor Öl: die Mineralölwirtschaft in Deutschland von 1859 bis 1974

English abstract: This book is the first comprehensive history of the oil industry in Germany between 1859 and 1974. Although the German area was one of the first to discover oil (at about the same time as the United States), the country proved to have very little petroleum under its soil, in spite of extensive attempts to discover it. With limited (and after 1918 no) colonies, it was thus one of the few industrialised countries in the 20th century with virtually no direct access to crude petroleum reserves. This is thus a story of attempts, sometimes disastrous, as in the Third Reich, and sometimes generally successful, as in West Germany, to overcome this deficit in a world increasingly dependent on this resource. The two authors wrote the introduction and the conclusion together. Karlsch wrote the section on the period 1859-1945, considering the role of oil in German foreign and domestic policy and economic development during a period in which petroleum became increasingly important for reasons of military and economic security. Stokes deals with the period 1945-1974, addressing the political economy of the oil industry in reconstruction and economic growth in both East and West Germany. The book considers not only the relatively small German-owned section of the industry, but also the role of multinationals. It uses a mixture of primary printed sources, but also sources from government and company archives

Understanding West German economic growth in the 1950s

We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the post-war shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than neoclassical convergence and structural change in explaining the rapid growth of the West German economy in the 1950s. We find little support for the hypothesis of institutional shakeup. This suggests a different interpretation of post-World War II German economic growth than features in much of the literature