The collapse of the German economy in the interwar years provides the most dramatic case-study of a democracy faced with the major economic problems--world recession, instability in international finance, management and labor problems, and unemployment--which resulted in the advent of Nazism. This is the first survey of the German "slump" in English and the first in any language since important archives became available. Arguing that long-term weaknesses caused by structural rigidity, increasingly conservative investment choices, poor labor relations, high taxation, and an inefficient agrarian sector led to economic and political instability, James here shows the connections between long-term weaknesses and particular policy responses in a crucial period of 20th-century European history.