Emil Lederer · 1925
Emil Lederer’s short review commends Guggenheim’s thorough account of the Reich’s industrial holdings and their consolidation under the »Vereinigte Industrie-Unternehmungen A.-G.« (Viag). Moving from their contingent origins to their organizational form and subsequent strategy, the review presents state ownership as compatible with industrial flexibility, provided that public enterprises adopt commercial accountability and purposeful entrepreneurial direction.
The conglomerate emerged from wartime necessities, postwar conversion, and inflation rather than from a comprehensive founding plan. Electrical, aluminium, and calcium-cyanamide enterprises had entered Reich ownership during the war; their continued operation served broader economic interests. Converting armaments factories to peacetime production also answered social needs, while inflation added miscellaneous holdings through the flight from paper currency into tangible assets. This history explains why mere preservation of the inherited portfolio could not supply a coherent industrial strategy.
Competition with private firms, both domestically and internationally, required a departure from traditional state administration:
Die Beweglichkeit der privaten Wirtschaft verbunden mit der sich aus einwandfreier Bilanzierung ergebenden Erfolgskontrolle mußte erstrebt werden.
English translation: The flexibility of private enterprise, combined with the control of results arising from impeccable accounting, had to be striven for.
The joint-stock company, with the Reich as principal shareholder, and Viag as the holding company for its shares supplied the organizational response. The passage links flexibility to reliable balance-sheet assessment: commercial methods matter not simply as legal forms, but as means of judging performance.
Lederer then follows Guggenheim beyond organizational description to the condition of effective direction. Viag had to become more than an administrative office incorporated as a company:
Wenn es gelingen soll, die Reichsunternehmungen als Teil der Gesamtwirtschaft weiter zu entwickeln, so muß der nun einmal jede industrielle Entwicklung letzten Endes treibende Unternehmerwille einen Ausdruck auch in den staatskapitalistischen Unternehmen finden.
English translation: If it is to succeed in developing the Reich enterprises further as a part of the economy as a whole, then the entrepreneurial will which, after all, ultimately drives every industrial development must find expression in the state-capitalist enterprises as well.
Entrepreneurial will is thus treated as a function that state-capitalist enterprises must embody, rather than as an exclusive attribute of private ownership. The review finds its practical expression in Viag’s concentration on electrical enterprises and related electrometallurgical and electrochemical industries. Specializing converted military factories and disposing of peripheral inflation-era holdings transformed an accidental accumulation of assets into a production-centered industrial grouping.
The closing assessment remains measured: modern organization and the overcoming of administrative inertia had avoided several disadvantages of older public enterprises. Lederer endorses Guggenheim’s primarily descriptive approach while drawing out the review’s wider relevance—the distinction between owning industrial assets and organizing them into a strategically directed economic enterprise.
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