In January 2017 we lost a great scholar who dedicated his last years to fostering the field of business history. Asking why someone entered a specific discipline sometimes leads to an answer consisting of impacts, events, socializations, etc. Sometimes these questions will remain unanswered and can be only explained by accident. But sometimes you can find a story. Things that were related to Chris Kobrak tended to have a great story. One such story was his choice of professional career and its subsequent trajectory. Chris did not enter the field of history by chance or at an early stage. First, he had a business career that took him around the world—not least, to Japan for a while.

His family roots drew him to Germany. His father, who was Jewish, left Germany just in time in the late 1930s, moving to New York City, where Chris was born in 1950. There, Chris grew up and studied; it was an environment that helped shape his personality. As a medical doctor, his father had his own career, and he had contacts with other Jewish emigrants from Germany. One of them was Albert Einstein, who contacted Chris’s father for medical reasons. This was just a small story behind a little letter hanging in Chris’s apartment in Toronto, glowing as an authentic historical document.

Unsurprisingly, Chris was attracted to German history. When thinking of a project for his dissertation, he decided to write on an old Berlin pharmaceutical company: Schering. When he published his dissertation, he dedicated this book to his father, Helmut, from whom “he acquired his love for Berlin and the German history.” ^{Footnote 1} The subject was not merely an objective. Chris had learned from his best friend, Christian von Rohrscheidt, about the lack of knowledge on the history of the Berlin company. For Chris, this would have not been enough of an argument in favor of a dissertation on the development of the firm. Like always, Chris looked for the big questions behind the basic story. He was less interested in case studies, and only pursued them if they could be used for understanding the bigger questions. He was curious about what Alfred C. Chandler described as a big chance for the business historian: that his subject was a first mover in comparison to other organizations. This was Chandler’s perspective, one Chris acknowledged in the preface to his book on Schering. So Chris dealt with the larger question of the development of corporate governance.

But Chris was never an orthodox theorist. Nonetheless, he was well aware of the ongoing development of theory and worried from the very beginning about the status of the field. On the one hand, looking to already well-established and influential business historians like Alfred Chandler, Mira Wilkins, and Geoffrey Jones, who in the 1990s had begun to address questions posed by economists by using historical data, Chris came to the conclusion that the field itself was marginalized in the two important disciplines to which it was related: history and economics. On the other hand, he could hardly believe or accept that business histories should not be standard sources for business leaders. Also, in choosing his professionals idols, Chris was very picky. At New York University, Fritz Stern and Volker Berghahn were his two most influential academic teachers.

Looking to those honorable scholars, he was also influenced by their choice in topics and dedicated himself to the questions of “political risk, the management of innovation, the internalization of market functions, reactions to changes in capital markets and how they internationalize.” ^{Footnote 2} Here, we can see the mix for his first research in business history, one in which he followed one of the strongest arguments of Gerald D. Feldman; namely, that context matters. Chris apologized that the book coming out from this dissertation was not focused only for a management audience but also addressed a wider group for whom he had to give more context to help this audience understand the stage on which his story of Schering was playing.

This first work on Schering was, on another level, very important to understanding Chris’s future research. He was confronted with the richness of a company archive. Of course, not all files of the company were still in existence; nonetheless, he could make use of 250 square meters of documents as basis for his analyses. Chris realized already at that time that he was in a privileged position, having gained access to a private company’s archive. Even though in the 1990s many German firms opened their archives, the opportunity Chris found at Schering was (and is still) not usual. I will come back to this issue a little later.

While Chris was working on his thesis, I had the privilege of meeting him for the first time, and we spent a certain period researching the same field. We became and stayed friends.

So what I wish to do here is to summarize Chris’s early findings from this research in the history of the period of National Socialism (NS) and to draw some of the lines connecting this work to his later activities. Since I had the honor in accompanying Chris in these developments, I hope to widen the understanding of his engagement and to explain his thinking.

It happened that we both entered the field of business history at the same time with a particular interest in the role of business during the NS period. While he was working in the archives for his dissertation, I myself began as managing director of the German Association for Business History (Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte, hereafter GUG). In 1997 the GUG started off with a symposium in which the most important scholars debated. These included Henry A. Turner on firms in general; Gerald D. Feldman on Hugo Stinnes; Harold James, Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, and Christopher Kopper on banks; Peter Hayes, Anthony Nicholls, and Avraham Barkei on I.G. Farben; Hans Mommsen, Manfred Grieger, Marie-Luise Recker, and Mark Spoerer on the automobile industry; and Klaus-Dieter Hildebrand on the railways. It was an impressive discussion that also gained a certain degree of public interest outside of the profession ^{Footnote 3} and led to the publication of a volume in the GUG series. ^{Footnote 4} In consequence, the GUG then set up a new working group—researchers from projects on firms in the NS period—chaired by Gerald D. Feldman, Christof Buchheim, and Dieter Ziegler.

Subsequently, the group held its first meeting in February 1998 to establish an overview of the current research and to formulate the basic research questions on the topic; and in a second meeting in September 1998, the first projects’ results were presented in a more classical academic way. I was one of those presenters, giving a summary on “Die VIAG und der Vierjahresplan.” ^{Footnote 5} Other speakers included Richard Overy (“The Four Year Plan”), Dieter Ziegler (“Das Bankhaus Arnhold”), Gerald D. Feldman (“The Private Insurance and the Four Year Plan”), and Joachim Scholtyseck (“Der Vierjahresplan und die Privatwirtschaft—Robert Bosch”). ^{Footnote 6} It was at this workshop at the American Academy in Berlin that I first met Chris. From that day onward, we never stopped discussing, or even debating, historical issues. The following years were an enormously intense period for German research on the actions of firms in the NS period. Chris presented his results to this working group two years later in 2000 (“The Foreign Exchange Dimension of Corporate Control in the Third Reich: The Case of Schering AG”). With the ongoing meetings of all those experts on companies in the Third Reich, a variety of new theories and advances in our knowledge arose. Through cooperation with other projects, in history and in other disciplines, the working group always opened a field for young scholars to present their work.

When approached by Dan Stone to contribute to a volume dedicated to the Holocaust, Chris invited me to coauthor a paper, “Big Business and the Third Reich.” ^{Footnote 7} We had to outline the field at its current status. In those days, it was already settled in Germany that the idea of understanding the room to maneuver available to business people meant lengthening the period of research to the Weimar Republic, as well as examining postwar Germany to provide the necessary context and to focus on the way business people were treated and acted for themselves. One result of this intense research inside Germany was that it revealed important questions about business and its actions in occupied countries, such as questions about cooperation, subordination, complicity, and expropriation. ^{Footnote 8} This research spurred on additional inquiries in the 1990s for neighboring countries like the Czech Republic, Denmark, and France as they began to investigate their own histories and their relations to the NS system. ^{Footnote 9}

From the mid-1990s onward, a great number of new studies were released in Germany. A wider range of companies opened their archives; some even created their own new and larger archives for this purpose, and an even greater number of companies committed themselves to writing histories to reveal their relationship to Nazi Germany. In those days, this trend tended to limit itself to big business, and everything started with the car industry. ^{Footnote 10} But soon after other big names in big business followed—for example, the analyses by Peter Hayes of I.G. Farben. ^{Footnote 11} In the mid-1990s, more and more companies followed. ^{Footnote 12} Whereas those first studies had started with revealing the abuse of slave labor and cooperation with the system, it was not long until the first specialized studies in more detailed—but no less important—topics appeared. ^{Footnote 13} Afterward, big business and banks moved the field forward.

Afterwards, businesses’ role in occupied countries, ^{Footnote 14} as well as in the “neutral” country of Switzerland, led to the creation of a commission; and a short while later, Austria also created a commission. ^{Footnote 15} We observed interesting developments in those different countries. In Germany, for example, some of the first movers of the companies that dealt with their NS past were not publicly forced to do so. In the second wave of research, however, some—especially those who wanted to do business in the United States—did see themselves forced to answer the question of what they did during the Third Reich. It became clear, after this immense and intense wave of research beginning in the 1990s, that the topic of National Socialism is an unquestionable part of each company history, commissioned or not. In Germany, there is a strict benchmark now for dealing with German company histories. It is impossible to overlook those twelve years, as had usually been the case in company histories until the end of 1980s. Now, if this element is missing, a company would face a deep public discussion. In Switzerland and Austria, each state implemented commissions that were granted access to all companies. Unfortunately, after the commissions ended their work and published their reports on most companies, the archives were closed again, and still today it is not easy, or may even be impossible, to get access to those files. In Germany, however, there has never been a state-induced research project. ^{Footnote 16} Nonetheless, a great number of companies commissioned research or integrated the history of the NS period into broader projects. In that way, they generated a sort of normality toward opening research into their companies’ pasts, and especially in regard to their activities in the Third Reich.

Aside from opening up single firm’s or bank’s complicity in the crimes of the Nazi system, we have perhaps reached the point where more investigations may not help further to improve the understanding of the discipline. We have a large number of case studies, and later industry or branch studies, and our understanding of collaboration and of how the Holocaust could happen has grown enormously. When Chris and I published a piece in 2004, it was already clear that the idea that big business in general financed Hitler, and his party was far too simplistic to describe what really happened. With a mixture of political agreement, semi-congruent goals of business and politics, and a wish to stay onboard to avoid an accelerating involvement in the NS system, some measures of resistance or dissent were discovered, but even within those categories the variety of individual behavior pattern was large. One can illustrate this complexity with the discovery that some individuals could at the same time support Jewish friends yet also order the mistreatment of slave labor. ^{Footnote 17} Some processes, investments, and innovations in firms did provide a foundation for their success after World War II, but other firms’ investments or actions might also have led to their failure.

We are now in the midst of a third wave of research in which we can see in Germany a growing number of family-owned firms facing their history in the NS period. With the latest research on German society in general, the understanding of the years 1933–1945 as “Hitler-Germany,” in which a small group of people surrounded Hitler, and even the idea that a larger group from administration, politics, and industries were involved, is not what made the Holocaust possible.

In fact, we now know that the range of cooperation was much wider, deeper, and reached out to most families, and to both private and public large and small businesses. Of course, there was resistance to the Third Reich, and some brave people who risked much, but the majority participated quietly or actively in this system. But that does not necessarily mean that they were acting in a criminal or immoral way; it does, however, mean that they found their own way in those years in accepting, observing, anticipating, denying, resisting, or supporting the Third Reich; or seeking gain or outright profiting with and from the regime. To date, historians have discovered that the room to maneuver in the NS system was much larger than assumed prior to this research. Those early arguments that businesses were forced into action, which was an underlying assumption of de-Nazification efforts by the United States in the late 1940s, which attempted to separate the “good” from the “bad” guys of those days, have been largely overturned.

These are complicated issues that each case study needs to examine with close attention to the contexts that business leaders faced to evaluate their actions appropriately. However, all of these complex and multilayered structures can only be reconstructed and revealed by a dense study of written records that, furthermore, need to derive from various sources, such as private business archives, state records, newspapers, private diaries, and other accounts. Those materials enable us to gain a differentiated view and a balanced appraisal.

For Chris, this experience of the special requirements—and the special responsibility—for analyzing the NS period led to the conclusion that it is through making intense use of primary sources, combined with deep discussions with other historians, especially in dedicated workshops like the GUG provided, that the historical discipline can become path-breaking. He appreciated the GUG format of conferences and meetings, in which he participated whenever it was possible for him. In 2002 he gave the keynote of our conference comparing German and U.S. cultures, and with his growing interest in banking history, he joined the working group for banking history of the GUG. He also began to orient himself more toward family companies of the German Mittelstand, and again he participated in a working group on family companies.

Our work and discussions together about our experiences with the NS research led us to a common understanding that provoked us to write an article in the journal Business History, titled “Varieties of Business History.” ^{Footnote 18} The idea was born from a session for the annual conference of the European Business History Association (EBHA) in Copenhagen in 2006, where Gerald D. Feldman, Chris, and I discussed this topic in three papers. While Chris and I started working on this article, our common mentor and friend, Gerald Feldman, died in 2007. Three major points drove the article. The first was Feldman’s idea that any historical research question should be linked to the present by answering questions that drive the present, not by transferring the present to the past. Explaining the past in its context may help in understanding how the present evolves. The second was the discussion between the two basic setups for business historians—general or economic history at universities or economics at business schools—each with implications for the use of sources. We argued for a single united business history that has a strong narrative resting on an analytical basis that should answer questions important for the present. The main part of the argument was Chris’s strong belief that history has the power to make a worthy contribution to business. As business historians, we should, first, not marginalize ourselves, and, second, we should do what I heard later so well described by Ray Stokes: use our unique scholarly approach to observe cases over time in a changing context and with changing variables. And we suggested in our third point that there are cases of fruitful cooperation between business and academia without “sacrificing their scientific ethics” when implementing guidelines and establishing mutual trust. ^{Footnote 19}

In conclusion, I come to the last years of Chris’s life, when these convictions and logic helped to establish the Canadian Business History Association (CBHA). It was my pleasure, and the GUG’s honor, that Chris decided to design this association according to the basics of the GUG. The difference with other business history associations is that the GUG combines both academic scholars and business people. For a business historian like myself, who is convinced, like Chris, that business history has an important place in the world of business and should be made meaningful for business leaders of the present, this combination was a perfect platform. The GUG attempts to create a deep trust and close working cooperation between business and researchers to provide access to primary sources in exceptional ways. ^{Footnote 20} With such cooperation, on the one hand, board minutes up until the most recent years and other highly confidential materials that otherwise would be inaccessible are often opened for historians. On the other hand, the research and conclusions of historians are then brought to the world of business. Chris copied this model to help the Canadian community in establishing what he thought was, and is, a fruitful cooperation. ^{Footnote 21}

With Chris Kobrak’s passing, the discipline has lost one of its strongest supporters of a close cooperation between business and academia. He never felt that he could or would become “corrupted” by being close to business. Anyone who knew Chris would ever doubt this, as he maintained a highly critical stance toward the actions of individuals who led companies (they had choices) and a highly refined stance about business ethics—another research field in which he engaged. Moreover, with the loss of Chris, the field of business history has lost one of its best networkers. He was a friend to a great many people all over the world. He was a colleague who regularly cooperated with others. Joint projects or articles were his daily business. He had strong convictions, but at the same time he loved to debate those as assumptions rather than as assertions. Working with him on a paper was not always easy. The opposite: it was tasking, long, and hard, but it included strong debates that were never unfair. Sometimes debates lasted hours—but never without a good glass of wine and always in deep friendship.

When Chris joined the EBHA council during my presidency, I was the luckiest member of the association, having someone on the team who was perfect at networking, who always worked hard without question, and who dedicated himself to the field and its duties, no matter how heavy the workload became. But Chris also always took care of the real side of life. He was generous like nobody else, he was entertaining in a wonderful way, and he was the most reliable friend. I was a lucky person in having had the chance to walk alongside him on his way for a while; we worked together on numerous occasions and fought for the same aims. ^{Footnote 22} His legacy will continue: bringing together scholars from all over the world, enjoying the good tradition of debate, being altruistic enough to support people and associations, and never forgetting to live.