8The Afterlife of a Multinational Enterprise
The Case of Siemens’ Subsidiary in Hungary After the Second World War
Introduction1
In the history of Siemens as a multinational enterprise, on several occasions the company was faced with non-market forces or effects. According to W. Feldenkirchen (the ‘official’ historian of Siemens), for example, the attempt to establish a workshop in Paris in 1878 was a failure because of ‘the intensity of anti-German sentiment’ after the Franco-Prussian War.2 Similarly, during the First World War, Britain confiscated the Siemens plants in England,3 and the new boundaries of the successor states in Central Europe (including Hungary) after the war also compelled the Siemens subsidiaries to ...
