Self-Help and State Rescue: The Raiffeisen Bank and Rationalization of the Cooperative Movement in Weimar Germany.

In 1930 Germany's vast and diverse network of agricultural cooperatives was unified in the world's largest cooperative organization. Unification was underwritten by the state in support of an agrarian sector in deep crisis. It was achieved under the banner of rationalization, the elimination of wasteful duplication of rural cooperatives. The focus of this article is how the Raiffeisen General Association, Germany's second-largest cooperative organization, exploited state interest in cooperative merger and the contemporary mantra of rationalization to leverage public aid to overcome a financial crisis in its central credit union, the Raiffeisen Bank. While asserting cooperative principles of mutual assistance and self-help, Raiffeisen pursued unification as a means to state rescue. It thereby re-framed the relationship between self-help and state aid that has been a central theme of scholarship on the German cooperative movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]