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worked for the emancipation of serfs and had been responsible for a currency reform in Den-
mark in the late eighteenth century. But the family fortunes had declined over the years, leav-
ing young Constanze von Eggers without any inheritance. She had met Wilhelm Schacht,
then a penniless student, in 1869 and followed him to the United States, where they were
married three years later.
Hjalmar Schacht himself was born in 1877, a few months after his family returned to Ger-
many, in the small town of Tingleff in North Schleswig. He was christened with the unusual
names Horace Greeley Hjalmar in a typically impractical gesture, his father had chosen his
first two names as a tribute to the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, whom he had
admired while living in Brooklyn. His grandmother had insisted, however, that he have at least
one conventional German or Danish name, and the young Schacht grew up as Hjalmar. Later
in his life, though, some of his English friends and associates would use the name Horace.
During his early childhood, the family moved frequently as Wilhelm Schacht bounced from
job to job, but in 1883, they finally settled in Hamburg. Germany in the last few years of the
nineteenth century was a country of contradictions. Gripped by the most rigid class system in
Europe in fact almost a caste system and governed by an autocratic constitution that still
vested most of the power in the monarch and in the Junker military cadre surrounding him, it
simultaneously offered Europe s most meritocratic educational system. But for that, Schacht
might have been condemned to the narrow confines of lower-middle-class existence as a
clerk or perhaps a teacher. Instead, in 1886, at the age of nine, he was accepted into the Jo-
hanneum, one of the finest gymnasia in Hamburg, where he received a rigorous classical
education, emphasizing Latin, Greek, and mathematics.
He could not completely escape the constrictions of his class-ridden society. Life at school
was full of petty humiliations stemming from his family s poverty: taunts at his living in a ratty
tenement district, mockery of the cheap cloth of his trousers, sharing a graduation gown be-
cause he could not afford to buy one for himself. Cold-shouldered by the richer students, he
was solitary, obsessively hardworking, and conscientious.
In 1895, Schacht graduated from the Johanneum and entered a university. Finally liber-
ated, over the next few years he actually seemed to enjoy himself. He wrote poetry; joined a
literary society; worked as a stringer for the Kleines Journal, a gossipy Berlin tabloid; and
even composed the libretto for an operetta.4 While he initially enrolled at the University of
Kiel, he followed the German practice of transferring from one university to another, spending
semesters in Berlin, Munich, Leipzig, and in 1897, the winter semester in Paris. He began as
a medical student, tried his hand at literature and philology, and eventually graduated with a
major in political economy, going on to write a doctoral thesis on the foundations of English
mercantilism in the eighteenth century.
Doctorate in hand, Schacht began a career in public relations, initially at an export trade
association, writing economic commentary for a Prussian journal on the side. Diligent and reli-
able, eager to impress the bankers and business magnates whom he was now beginning to
meet, in 1902, he finally caught the attention of a board member of the Dresdner Bank and
was offered a job. He rose quickly and, by 1914, was a well-established middle-level officer of
one of the powerful banks in Berlin.
In imperial Germany, a man of Schacht s background would have found his opportunities
for advancement in the military or the civil service limited. But in the years leading up to the
war, Germany had gone from being an agrarian backwater at the edge of Western Europe, to
becoming its leading industrial power, overtaking even Britain an economic surge that had
thrown open enormous opportunities in business to ambitious men. It was a particularly good
time to be a banker, for in no other European country were banks quite so powerful. While
Berlin still could not compete with either London or even Paris as an international financial
center, the large German houses dominated the domestic economic landscape as the main
suppliers of long-term capital to industry.
Disguising his social insecurities behind a stiffly formal exterior, Schacht seemed to pos-
sess a natural ability to get himself noticed. In 1905, his fluency in English got him sent with a
member of the Dresdner s board to the United States, where they met with President
Theodore Roosevelt, and more important for a young banker, were invited to lunch in the
partners dining room at J. P. Morgan & Co.
He also married well to the daughter of a Prussian police officer who had been assigned
to the imperial court. By 1914, they had two children, the eleven-year-old Lisa and the four-
year-old Jens, and were living in a small villa in the western garden suburb of Zehlendorf,
from which Schacht commuted to and from work into the Potsdammerplatz station on one of
the modern electric trains that now linked all of Berlin.
As SCHACHT WATCHED the international crisis grow, he continued to hope, even until
the end of July, for a last-minute diplomatic solution. Though he insisted that it would never
come to war, this assertion stemmed primarily from wishful thinking. He had done well for
himself in imperial Germany, had much to lose, and found it difficult to look at his own country
dispassionately. For despite his liberal family background, he was a typical product of the
Kaiserreich conformist, unquestioningly nationalistic, and fiercely proud of his country and
its material and intellectual achievements.
Like most other German bankers and businessmen, he believed that the villain of the
piece was a fading Britain conspiring to deny Germany its rightful place among the Great
Powers. As he later wrote,  Germany s steady advance in the world s markets had aroused
the antagonism of those older industrial countries, who felt their chances in the markets were
being threatened. England in particular had  engaged in creating a strong network of alli-
ances and agreements directed against Germany, designed to encircle it.
That last few days of July 1914 constituted a whispering gallery of rumors and counterru-
mors. Berlin was gripped by alternating waves of war hysteria and anxiety. From the Dresdner
Bank s headquarters next to the Opera House on the Bebelplatz, Schacht had a ringside seat
at the epic drama being enacted in the streets below. Daily, huge crowds of people paraded
under the great limes of Unter den Linden, singing  Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles
and other patriotic songs. Several times that week angry mobs attempted to storm the Russi-
an embassy, only a few blocks away from his office.
Finally, on Friday, July 31, at 5:00 p.m. a lone lieutenant of the Grenadier Guards climbed
up on the base of the giant equestrian statue of Frederick the Great, which divided Unter den
Linden just outside the Dresdner s offices, to read a proclamation in the emperor s name. The [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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