Papers presented by Christoph Nitschke since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

"Dual-use Discount: What we can learn from yet another Nazi Germany company history?"

Abstract:

The NSU Vehicle Works in Neckarsulm, north of Stuttgart, was the world’s largest motorcycle maker by unit output in 1938/9. Such scale, at this point in time, was only possible by acquiescing to Germany’s ruling National Socialist Party. By weighing costs and benefits of managerial actions, we can surmise why and how the NSU corporation navigated the constraints and incentives of the “Third Reich’s” increasingly restrictive economic institutions. NSU managers, in deciding to work with the regime, seem to have enacted an entrepreneurial logic that generated considerable autonomy for the company. But that’s not really surprising. What can we learn from yet another company history in Nazi Germany? In the case of NSU, the dearth of sources that document internal decision-making is an advantage since it forces relating the company to the German motor vehicles market of c. 1928-1950, across traditional periodizations. In this light, long-run restrictions of relatively low German purchasing power and volatile but increasing state demand were the company’s main problems. NSU understood that the low-cost motorcycle was the true vehicle of popular motorization, but that it had limited utility to institutions like the military. The key strategic decision, then, was to construct something that could straddle both markets. The "Kettenkrad", one of the weirder vehicles in military history, did the trick. Developed since 1937/8, it grew to account for 60-90% of NSU’s production in 1942-5 and was the company’s first successful product directly after the war. Through the Kettenkrad, the company was able to maintain production capacities and configurations across massive disturbances. For NSU, this paper argues, a strategic embrace of dual-use products discounted the expected costs of the 1930s and 1940s – though dealing with the state also meant partaking in the exploitation of forced labor.

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2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"Investment standards in an imperial world: the case of the United States during Reconstruction"

Abstract:

The 1860s & 70s saw various nation-making processes globally, including Italy, the United States, Germany, & Japan. One priority for these incipient nation states was access to international financial markets for the financing of public debt, the adjustment of currency regimes, or the employment of investment capital for industry. These countries constructed newly capacious treasuries, instituted new currencies, & restructured their banking systems. I argue that this political-economic process, perhaps better understood as “financial reconstruction”, also included the conscious cultural signaling of creditworthiness in the international sphere. Using the case of the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction era in the 1860s and 70s, this paper traces networks and informal partnerships between Treasury agents, private bankers, foreign representatives, businessmen, and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic. It interrogates financial and diplomatic correspondence, newspaper articles, and cultural representations, filtered through the boom years 1870-72, about the non-financial factors of supposed creditworthiness in the first era of globalization. What boxes did contemporaries think their new nation and free-labor economy needed to check to attract the interest and confidence of investors? This paper hypothesizes that Americans & their European partners operated with broad assumptions about the standards to which their associated investment opportunities were held. These standards of economic development might have prescribed a gold currency, but also revealed a laundry list of other factors, some of which were increasingly being cast into supposedly quantifiable frameworks, while others remained intangible. Contemporaries communicated visions of reliability and growth in racialized and gendered categories of credit: national unity, territorial integrity and expansion, political stability and predictability, central state power, property rights, technological advancement, transportation infrastructure, resource extraction, global commercial connections, and, not least, racial composition and strength of ‘character’, were all touched upon.

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2022 Mexico City

"The Diplomacy of Investment Banking Wives: Social Intermediation and Transatlantic Creditworthiness in Victorian London"

Abstract:

On January 1, 1871, the American financial house of Cooke, McCulloch & Co. opened its doors in London. Hugh McCulloch, the high-profile former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, was the figurehead of the new investment bank, drawing a considerably higher salary and entertainment allowance than the U.S. minister to the Court of St James. His wife, Susan Man McCulloch, received no additional remuneration. Yet it was Susan who manufactured the real competitive advantage for the business. Public and private events were venues for assessing trustworthiness and standing, essential to the international ventures of an investment bank. This put the onus on sociability and household, which were invariably Susan’s domain. If the hosts showcased ”wealth, refinement and tact”, according to one observer, they could “command almost any society in London”. Susan thus also created and maintained the social ties that bound the overlapping worlds of finance and politics, and she fulfilled tasks consistent with those of a diplomatic wife. Brokering diplomatic and business relations alike relied on feminine intermediaries and their unpaid logistical, practical, and representational work of creating social arenas to determine credibility and generate goodwill. In the interconnection of public and private, socialising became negotiation and representation; a performance of trustworthiness which impacted the knowledge creation behind investment decisions. Through the story of Susan Man McCulloch, this paper investigates how the constitution of spaces of sociability mediated the intersection of politics and finance in mid-nineteenth-century London and, as venues of reputation-building, offered well-positioned actors a comparative advantage. The (re)presentation of investment opportunities within the right social circles and rituals exceeded mere branding and advertising efforts. Drawing from their own social credibility, female financial actors like Susan Man put themselves in position to project political backing onto the firm, producing and in some cases fabricating confidence in U.S. securities.

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