one of the most extraordinary aspects of modern Germany is that so many of its greatest enterprises have managed to survive the misadventures of its political history. Of the five political systems that have held sway on German soil since 1870, four have suffered an ignominious demise, and a goodly number of the street names that were identified with those regimes have disappeared with them. Not so with a host of German companies and corporations founded in the nineteenth century. Siemens, Krupp, Thyssen, Bosch, Degussa, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, and the MAN are still with us; though changing modes of production and globalization are creating fusions of and transformations in these companies that may more profoundly affect their futures than two world wars, they still have kept their identification as German companies with a continuous tradition for a remarkably long period of time. This also holds true for many of the leading enterprises in the German insurance field, one of the most neglected areas of German business history despite its lengthy development over time and extraordinary importance to the German economy. It holds true also for the largest among the leading insurance companies and the subject of this book, the Allianz.

As indicated in the Preface, this study cannot and is not intended to remedy the absence of full historical accounts that might do justice to Allianz and the important branch of the German economy in which it is embedded, although one may hope that other historians will be encouraged to address happier periods in the growth and development of Allianz and the German insurance business.