Bonn, Moritz Julius

(1873-1965)

   financier; among the Republic's international economic advisors. Born in Frankfurt, he came from a banking family of assimilated Jews.* His chief influence was Lujo Brentano, Munich's esteemed economist, under whom he took a doctorate in 1895. His later life was shaped by broad international travels. Much of his early scholarship focused on British imperialism. He became a Privatdozent of economics in 1905 at Munich; in 1910 he was named rector of Munich's new Handelshochschule. Serving in the war's early years as a guest professor in the United States, he became an avid proponent of Wilsonian policies.

   Bonn experienced the full impact of revolutionary events in Bavaria.* His international experience and contacts, but above all his economic expertise, brought appointment in April 1919 to the peace delegation. Soon indispensable to both the Chancellor and the Foreign Office, he participated in the Spa* (1920) and Genoa* (1922) conferences as a reparations* expert; at the 1929 Paris meet-ing that spawned the Young Plan,* he was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht.* Supporting Schacht s economic policies, he was a critic of indiscriminate bor-rowing. During 1930-1932 he sat with the League of Nations Commission of Experts, a task force charged with preparing an international economic confer-ence.

   Although diplomatic commitments forced Bonn to resign his rectorship in 1920, he continued teaching, from 1922 at Berlin s Handelshochschule (in Oc-tober 1931 he was appointed Rector Magnificus). A classic liberal, Bonn cham-pioned the political centralization of the Republic and abhorred Marxism for its destruction of political liberty and its misinterpretation of economics. Because he hoped to counter the Dolchstosslegende,* his scholarship encompassed re-search on the economic causes for Germany's collapse in 1918. In 1933, under siege by Nazi students, he resigned his rectorship and moved to England. After teaching at the London School of Economics, he emigrated to the United States.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Bonn, Wandering Scholar.