Der Konflikt um den Kredit

In July 1931, the major banks in Berlin were only solvent to a limited extent. The German banking sector collapsed, further fuelling the economic crisis. Falk Liedtke examines the origins, course and consequences of the banking crisis based on the business developments at Commerzbank, Dresdner Bank, Darmstädter and Nationalbank since the 1920s. He describes how the liquidity problems of the major banks in 1931 developed largely from the structures of the customer credit business and sheds light on the hitherto little-researched role of the credit business in the bank branches. Using extensive sources on the customer lending business in over 50 stores of the three major Berlin banks, Liedtke analyses risky business practices in the granting and servicing of loans. He shows how the major banks increasingly lost control over the actions of their stores in this business area in the 1920s. He also traces the conflict between the major banks and their stores over the organisation of the customer lending business, which developed from the 1910s onwards as a side effect of the banks' expansion strategies and weakened them economically.