Emil Lederer · 1920
This recorded commission speaking turn examines who should establish and operate new coal enterprises. Lederer frames his intervention as a request for clarification, testing the coherence of arrangements under discussion rather than proposing a complete alternative.
He distinguishes two routes to new development: action by the Reich Coal Council, directly or through its organs, and expansion by an existing corporate group. The latter presents fewer fundamental difficulties because it enlarges an established enterprise through investment already covered by provision XII. Establishing a new private enterprise, however, raises a contradiction if provision IX is immediately applied:
Sie schaffen den Privatbetrieb und setzen ihn wieder auf den Aussterbeetat.
English translation: You create the private enterprise and put it back on the list for extinction.
The formulation exposes a tension between creating private productive capacity and simultaneously marking its private organizational form for disappearance. The extract does not reproduce provisions IX and XII, so their detailed mechanisms remain unspecified.
Lederer then considers direct operation by the Council. Existing authority to take control of an enterprise for direct management appears to him to concern cases where agreement with the private entrepreneur fails and a lessee is installed. Founding a new Council enterprise would be a different institutional step:
Aber grundsätzlich den Reichskohlenrat zum Subjekt eines neuen Unternehmens zu machen, während die andern privatwirtschaftlich bleiben, ist das nicht ein Konglomerat?
English translation: But to make the Reich Coal Council, as a matter of principle, the entity responsible for a new enterprise while the others remain privately operated—is that not a conglomerate?
His concluding question challenges the coherence of this mixed arrangement. The intervention’s central move is to distinguish corporate expansion, intervention in an existing business, and public creation of a new one: authority for one does not automatically resolve the organizational problems of another.
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