Fungibility and Authenticity

The end of the Weimar Republic was marked by a series of increasingly severe and devastating financial crises. The Berlin stock exchange crash – Schwarz Freitag – Friday, May 13, 1927 marked the beginning of the end of Weimar Republic's most stable period and ended its only true stock market boom. Just over two years later, on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the panic at the New York stock exchange marked the beginning of the Weltwirtschaftskrise (‘Great Depression’ – literally ‘Global Economic Crisis’). For German liberals like Gustav Stresemann, the former Reichskanzler (1923) and highly influential foreign minister (1923–29), who had placed their faith in the world economy, this was a devastating blow. The brief economic boom of the period of stabilization was entirely ‘dependent on Germany's integration into the world economy.’ Any possibility of recovery was rapidly destroyed in May 1931 when the Austrian Creditanstalt and German Danat Bank collapsed, leading to a run on banks in Berlin and long lines of people in the streets hurrying to withdraw their savings. These banking collapses were connected to the wider European banking crisis of 1931 that exacerbated the global crisis and led to the closure of the Berliner Borse in September of that year (see cover image). The collapse of the world economy led to the ‘disastrous mass unemployment between 1930 and 1933’ that was so clearly captured in Kuhle Wampe. The Weimar Republic would not recover from this combination of economic collapse and crisis of political legitimacy.

The rise of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (‘National Socialist German Workers's Party’) at this time was characterized by a superficial performance of suspicion towards finance capital as inherently ‘parasitical’ and ‘Jewish,’ however, the fascist realpolitik made the Nazis friendly to German big business when it suited their purposes. While there are many examples of representations of finance and ‘non-productive’ capital in the cinema of the Third Reich, an examination of them is beyond the scope of this study. Instead, I would like to return to the central question of the idea of ‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’ capital in order to discuss how this prevalent binary informs the discourse on authenticity that marked this period.