Wiesen, Jonathan

Part III, The Industry Since 1945, opens with Jonathan Wiesen s examination of a heated debate that arose in the early 1950s around a remark by Richard Willstatter, a Nobel Prize winning German Jewish chemist, suggesting that Carl Duisberg, a leader of Bayer and founder of LG. Farben, was anti-Semitic. Wiesen interprets the content and course of the debate as indicators of the crosscurrents of the early Adenauer years, as West Germans simultaneously struggled to come to terms with the Nazi period, to pursue economic recovery, and to revive an alternative, honorable past that could be joined to the present. 

See Jonathan Wiesen, "Overcoming Nazism Big business, public relations, and the politics of memory, 1945-50," Central European history, 29 (1996), 201-226 Rainer Karlsch, "Von der Schering AG zum VEB Berlin Chemie," Johannes Baehr and Wolfram Fischer, eds., Wirtschaft im geteilten Berlin (Berlin, 1995) and their respective contributions in this volume. 

Jonathan Wiesen, "The Richard Willstatter controversy The legacy of anti-Semitism in the West German chemical industry in this volume. 

Finally, a number of papers take up issues related to industry and ethics, especially with regard to the Jewish question in Nazi Germany. Peter Hayes s work in general deals with this issue, as does his opening lecture. Lohnert and Gill s paper examines experiences at the local, factory level, while Jonathan Wiesen s paper deals more generally with the processing of this experience in the post-war period. 

---