Corporate History and National Socialism. Studies on the Handling of their Nazi Past by German Enterprises

Sebastian Brünger

Completed associated PhD project
Funded by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom

This PhD project examined continuities and discontinuities in how German enterprises dealt with the past after 1945 and attempts in this way to extend the perspective of the history of memory regarding German commemorational culture to the dimension of corporate history and to conceive of economic enterprises as protagonists of cultural memory.

At the heart of the survey were questions of narratives, strategies and forms of dealing with the past, with a particular emphasis on shifts since the late 1980s. As availability and access to sources in the case of many companies impede the detailed reconstruction of concrete firm decisions regarding their own Nazi history, the project uses entrepreneurial self-descriptions with regard to the Nazi period (i.e. firm chronicles or anniversary speeches) as a first starting point in order to discursively embed interpretative models, rhetorical styles and reconstructions of past in their own time and to analyse entrepreneurial handling of the Nazi past in the context of the public sphere, politics and science.

 

Publication:
Sebastian Brünger, Geschichte und Gewinn. Der Umgang deutscher Konzerne mit ihrer NS-Vergangenheit, Göttingen 2017.

Forschung

Corporate History and National Socialism. Studies on the Handling of their Nazi Past by German Enterprises

Sebastian Brünger

Completed associated PhD project
Funded by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom

This PhD project examined continuities and discontinuities in how German enterprises dealt with the past after 1945 and attempts in this way to extend the perspective of the history of memory regarding German commemorational culture to the dimension of corporate history and to conceive of economic enterprises as protagonists of cultural memory.

At the heart of the survey were questions of narratives, strategies and forms of dealing with the past, with a particular emphasis on shifts since the late 1980s. As availability and access to sources in the case of many companies impede the detailed reconstruction of concrete firm decisions regarding their own Nazi history, the project uses entrepreneurial self-descriptions with regard to the Nazi period (i.e. firm chronicles or anniversary speeches) as a first starting point in order to discursively embed interpretative models, rhetorical styles and reconstructions of past in their own time and to analyse entrepreneurial handling of the Nazi past in the context of the public sphere, politics and science.

 

Publication:
Sebastian Brünger, Geschichte und Gewinn. Der Umgang deutscher Konzerne mit ihrer NS-Vergangenheit, Göttingen 2017.

Forschung