ABSTRACT

For more than forty of those fifty years, the Bundesbank bore the primary responsibility for the stability of the D-Mark. The D-Mark now belongs to the past but the Bundesbank is still very much present – with good reason – and this is a subject to which I shall return later. I would like to start by retracing the Bank’s history. However, it is not my intention to give a detailed chronological account of the Bundesbank’s initial half-century. Instead, I would like to highlight five milestones that were of major importance for the central bank and the monetary history of post-war Germany and therefore for the first fifty years of the Bundesbank.