Page 59 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

32 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY

members of the Freiburg School only the founders Walter Eucken and
Franz Böhm belonged to the Freiburg Circles and, conversely, no member
of the Freiburg Circles can be attributed to the Freiburg School which
partly advocated different economic objectives. It was not until the
publications by Christine Blumenberg-Lampe, that the differences in
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conception and communication became clear. According to recent
research, it was precisely the Freiburg Circles subsuming three initially
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religiously-motivated working groups whose memberships overlapped,
namely the Freiburger Konzil, the Bonhoeffer Kreis, and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft
Erwin von Beckerath (AG EvB), that provided the platform for the renaissance
of liberal political and economic thinking in post-war Germany.
In particular the latter working group, presided over by Erwin von
Beckerath, as a private continuation of the former Arbeitsgemeinschaft
Volkswirtschaftslehre (AG VWL) (Working Committee of Political Economy),
which was established within the Akademie für Deutsches Recht (AfDR)
(Academy for German Law) in 1940 but suspended on 1 March 1943, was
concerned with the transformation of a wartime economy into a
peacetime one and finding an order to govern it. To the first meeting in
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Freiburg im Breisgau on 21 March 1943, the eponym of the consortium,
Erwin von Beckerath, invited the economists Constantin von Dietze,
Walter Eucken, Adolf Lampe, and Clemens Bauer from the University of
Freiburg, Jens Jessen and Heinrich von Stackelberg from the University of
Berlin, Günter Schmölders and Theodor Wessels from Cologne
University, as well as Erich Preiser and the jurist Franz Böhm from the
University of Jena. For further meetings, the former chief editor of the
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Industrie- und Handelszeitung, Hans Gestrich, received invitations;
unfortunately, he unexpectedly died in November 1943. Additionally, the
social policy specialist at University of Marburg, Gerhard Albrecht, and
the editor of the business section of the Kölnische Zeitung, Fritz Hauenstein,
joined the working group pursuing a new liberal and social economic
order. It is in this context of the rehabilitation of classical economics in
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the face of the Nazis’ plans for an autarkic economic system, but even
more due to its submitting reports directly to the political leader of the
anti-Hitler resistance, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, that the AG EvB has
predominantly been viewed as an opposition circle to National Socialism.
The group’s advocacy of a neo-liberal economic policy also accounts for
the conceptual development of the Social Market Economy and its
eventual acceptance in academia, politics and among the public. In
examining the means by which the AG EvB conveyed its economic and
socio-political concept to experts and the general public, this analysis also
reveals important conceptual differences between the Freiburg Circles and
the Freiburg School.