Page 63 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

36 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY

Another opportunity to present the conceptions of the Freiburg
economists to a broader audience was the symposium for professors in
Rothenburg ob der Tauber between 27 and 29 September 1947. Here,
Adolf Lampe and the initiator of the conference, Gerhard Albrecht, who
aimed to revive the Verein für Socialpolitik, planned to formulate a common
experts’ report, the Rothenburger Thesen, intended to stimulate and to
influence the political discussion. When no agreement among the 60
conferees was achieved and no result presented, the four attendant
members of the AG EvB, Albrecht, Lampe, Weiser, Wessels, were
disappointed. So they decided to discuss their ideas further in order to
present them to the institutions responsible for economic policy. Finally,
in December 1947, the Rothenburger Thesen, signed by 48 professors, among
them Walter Eucken, Leonhard Miksch and Alfred Müller-Armack, were
submitted to the then Chairman of the Sonderstelle Geld und Kredit (SGK)
(Special Bureau for Money and Credit) within the Administration for
Finance, i.e. an expert commission preparing the currency reform in the
Anglo-American Bizone, Ludwig Erhard. The recapitulatory reports of the
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symposium were published by the Verein für Socialpolitik in 1948.
The successful transmission of their economic and socio-political ideas
raised the hopes of the working group that they would be able to have an
active influence on political decision-making. Although the former AG EvB
was not reactivated, the Freiburg economists considered the
Wissenschaftliche Beirat bei der Verwaltung für Wirtschaft (WB VfW), i.e. the
Advisory Council on Economic Affairs within the Administration for
Economics formed on 23/24 January 1948 in Königstein im Taunus, the
appropriate platform to express their views. Among the 17 participants
nominated by the then State Secretary in the bizonal Administration for
Economics, Walter Strauß, who had been informed about the activities of
the working group by Franz Böhm, were the following members of the
AGEvB: Lampe, Böhm, Eucken, Preiser, Wessels and von Beckerath.
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When Böhm became chairman and von Beckerath his deputy, the
Freiburg economists saw their hopes reaffirmed. Indeed, this progenitor
of today’s Council of Economic Advisors at the Federal Ministry of
Economics and Labour became the first independent panel of academics
to advise policy-makers. Furthermore, the then Director of the
Administration for Economics in the Bizonal Economic Council,
Johannes Semler, encouraged the members of the WBVfW to criticise
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policies freely and comment publicly. This invitation, and the fact that
the reports were published, provided the Freiburg economists with the
opportunity to address both political elites and the general public.
Conversely, however, this also meant that the experts were subject to
political and public criticism. This prominent position of the WB VfW