Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Confidence
1: Laughing at the Raven
2: A Triumph of Diplomacy
3: 'Strong Cards to Play'
Indecision
4: Hitler's Victory
5: To the Brink and Back
6: 'The First Real Chancellor Since Bismarck'
Despair
7: Squaring the Circle
8: Help from Washington
9: Endgame
10: The Rise of Hitler
Epilogue
Sources
References
Notes
Index

About the Author

Tobias Straumann is an Associate Professor of Economic History at the University of Zurich. He is a member of the European Historical Economics Society and the academic council of the European Association for Banking and Financial History. Straumann has widely published in the area of twentieth-century European financial and monetary history, and is the author of Fixed Ideas of Money: Small States and Exchange Rate Regimes in Twentieth-Century Europe
(Cambridge University Press, 2010), and co-author of The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Reviews

[An] engaging book.
*Foreign Affairs*

The value of Swiss historian Tobias Straumann's book is that it focuses our attention squarely on the drama of that year, the moment when the fragile political and financial order restored after the first world war came apart ... a fast-paced and elegantly constructive narrative... If John Kenneth Galbraith forever etched the 1929 crash into historical consciousness, with his classic 1955 account, Straumann has given us the narrative of 1931 that every decision maker in Europe should read.
*Adam Tooze, Financial Times*

Tobias Straumann's book is a welcome addition ... Straumann ably shows the progress of the German crisis and how it was intertwined with the vexed issues or reparation ... Straumann relates [...] complex events with remarkable clarity, largely eschewing jargon and displaying considerable panache. Rarely has the dismal science been less dismally presented. Happily, for those wishing to write about Nazism's rise, there is now an accessible, non-specialist volume to explain the economic aspect.
*Roger Moorhouse, BBC History Magazine*

In this excellent book, Straumann narrates the German story of 1931 with clarity and authority.
*Max Harris, LSE Blogs*

A superbly researched and highly readable account of financial panic and democratic collapse in Weimar Germany.
*Srinath Raghavan, Open the Book, Best Books of 2019*

Tobias Straumann's 1931, is, like George Orwell's 1984, dour and disturbing; ironic and important.
*David Marx: Book Reviews*

A stunning, fast-paced and deeply researched narrative that accurately delineates the links between financial panic and political collapse in the most iconic case of all: the destruction of democracy in Weimar Germany.
*Harold James, Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies, Princeton University*

In this engaging book, Straumann, a leading Swiss economic historian, examines a critical factor in Adolf Hitler's rise to power.
*Foreign Affairs*