In her fascinating book “Fiction in the archives”, Natalie Zemon Davis traces how “… sixteenth century people told stories …, what they thought a good story was, how they accounted for motive, and how through narrative they made sense of the unexpected and built coherence into immediate experience.” There is a long way from the 16th century to the financial crisis of 1931, but Davis’s question how actors make sense of the unexpected and build a coherent narrative from their immediate experience is also pertinent in the case of the 1931 crisis.
As the summer of 1931 turned into fall, the reconstructed monetary and financial system re-established with so much sacrifice after World War One had ended abruptly. Capitalism seemed more challenged than ever before as the Great Depression wreaked havoc to the economic, political and social fabric of western societies. Central bankers around the world struggled to make sense of the events, and of their own role in the European crisis and of the future implications.
In this paper, I trace these early attempts inside and outside of central banks to shape the understanding and memory of the failure of the Austrian Credit Anstalt, the German Danatbank and the UK’s exit from Gold in September 1931. I analyze how these early efforts of writing the history of and learning from the crisis came to shape the memory and perception of the 1931 crisis in the postwar period. By tracing these stories, and how historians and economists picked up from these narratives of the crisis, this paper contributes with a novel perspective of one of the most important financial crises in the history of capitalism.