Corporate networks are, alongside markets and business hierarchies, another form of economic organization. The study traces the interconnections of German large corporations through shared supervisory boards from the late German Empire to the fall of the Weimar Republic and documents the formation process of the Deutschland AG using empirical data. The analysis focuses on banks, whose presence in industrial supervisory boards has long been interpreted as a sign of unilateral corporate control. However, the data does not support this finding; rather, it shows that the uniqueness of the network, contrary to a general evolutionary trend of social change towards functional differentiation and specialization, lies precisely in its functional nonspecificity.