Dreihundert Männer: Aufstieg und Fall der Deutschland AG — Konstantin Richter

A work of nonfiction that asks what might be the most German question of all: who actually runs the country’s economy? The title comes from a famous remark by the industrialist Walther Rathenau — that “three hundred men, all of whom know each other, steer the economic fate of the continent.” Richter takes that remark literally and tells the story of those very men: the bankers, industrial titans, and lobbyists who sat together on boards and in private clubs, locked in a closed circle of mutual acquaintance and mutual protection.

This web of figures — soon nicknamed the “Deutschland AG” — shaped Germany’s economy and corporate culture for well over a century. Born on the rise of Allianz, Krupp, and Siemens, it stayed effective right up until the 1990s. The book profiles the movers behind it: a small, tightly interwoven elite that held the strings of German industry while largely keeping itself off the public ledger.

The structure is chronological — three acts plus an epilogue:

1870–1914 — the founding years: the birth of the industrial aristocracy, the “social question,” invention, and early globalization. 1914–1945 — war, revolution, Hitler: how that elite moved through armament and barbarism — complicity included. 1945–2000 — the “wonderful years,” the ‘68 generation, and the decline of the old boys’ network in the age of the New Economy. Epilogue — the new millennium: does the Deutschland AG finally fall apart?

After the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen in 1989, the Deutsche Bank’s turn toward investment banking, and finally Vodafone’s hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 — the moment German industrial self-sufficiency gave way to globalized financial markets

The strength of the book lies in its portraits of the name-giving industrialists — and in what became of their companies after they left them.

The best part is the industrial age; the most confusing is the modern one. The book addresses this itself in the epilogue, blaming it on the confusion of the times and, I suspect, we genuinely know more about the backroom deals of the Kaiserzeit than we do about our own age.

What Richter does well is put names to people. He tells their story through their ties and their friendships, their rivalries so creating the network which feels lived in rather than diagrammed.

The later part can’t hold up against the first, because the connections untangle. As the Deutschland AG falls apart, so does the book; it unravels and leaves us with a scattered text.