Engineers in Germany: Social Situation, Mentalities and Politics 1890-1933 [1st ed. 2023] 365841796X, 9783658417963

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Tobias Sander

Engineers in Germany Social Situation, Mentalities and Politics 1890-1933

Engineers in Germany

Tobias Sander

Engineers in Germany Social Situation, Mentalities and Politics 1890-1933

Tobias Sander University of Applied Science and Arts Hildesheim/Holzminden/Göttingen, Germany

ISBN 978-3-658-41796-3 ISBN 978-3-658-41797-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0

(eBook)

This book is a translation of the original German edition „Die doppelte Defensive“ by Sander, Tobias, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH in 2021. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors. # The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Paper in this product is recyclable. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Contents

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Introduction: Social and Political Consequences of the Academization of German Engineers in the Nineteenth Century to 1933 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The German Engineering Boom – Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Numerical Development of the Engineering Profession in Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Causes of the German Engineering Boom: Dynamics of Economic Structural Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of German Engineers (Nineteenth Century to 1933) . . . 3.1 The Loss of the Academic Ideal: The Competition Between Two Educational Paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Change in the Educational Profile of German Engineers . 3.3 The Employment Profile: On the Way to the Late Industrial White-Collar Occupation of German Engineers . . . . . . . . . . . The Working Life of German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: From Universal Experts to Managed Specialists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 The Technical Experts as an Object of Industrial Dynamics: Bureaucratization and Aspirant System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Non-competition Clause and Inventor Protection . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Standardization Tendencies of Engineering Work . . . . . . . . .

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The Labour Market of German Engineers: Between Economic and Social Dynamics (Nineteenth Century to 1933) . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Allocation Patterns in Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Permanent Overcrowding Since 1902 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65 65 72

German Engineers in the Nineteenth Century to 1933: Salaries and Social Situation in Professional Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Salaries in Professional Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 The Social Situation of German Engineers: Summary . . . . . . .

79 79 89

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Critique of Technology and German Engineers in Modern Society 93 (Nineteenth Century to 1933) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Bourgeois Critique of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 7.2 German Engineers Between Cultural Milieus and Social Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

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Prevented Bourgeoisification: Lifestyles and Mentalities of German Engineers and Other Middle-Class Groups in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 8.1 The Everyday Life: Family as a Planning Task . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 8.2 Household Expenditure: New Middle-Class Hedonism . . . . . . 125

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Between Interest Policies and Right-Wing Utopia: German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century . . . . . . 141 9.1 Professional Politics 1870–1918: From “Gemeinschaftsarbeit” to Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 9.2 The Reorganization of the Technical Associations in Germany 1918/19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

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Variants of Academic Organization: Professional Core Strategies of German Engineers (1918–1930) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1 The Bargaining Machine: The Association of Employed Chemists and Engineers (Budaci) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 Between Conflict and Loyalty: The Association of Executive Employees (Vela) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.3 The Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI): Professional Status Instead of Collective Agreements . . . . . . 10.4 Comparison of Association Strategies: Social Foundations and Ideological Traditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ideology of Intellectual Work and Völkisch-Conservative Radicalization of German Engineers 1927–1933 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.1 Corporative Elites as a Compensation Strategy: The Three Associations in Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.2 The VDDI: At the Head of the “Volksgemeinschaft” . . . . . . . . 11.3 Crisis of the Elites and Right-Wing Conservative Conjuncture: Vela and Budaci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Social Situation, Mentalities and Politics of German Engineers 1890–1933: Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 List of Sources and Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Archives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Periodicals and Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

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Introduction: Social and Political Consequences of the Academization of German Engineers in the Nineteenth Century to 1933

“I am an engineer Herr Doktor” replied Hans Castorp with modest dignity. “Ah, engineer!” And Dr. Krokowski’s smile withdrew, as it were, forfeiting a little of its strength and cordiality for the moment: “That is valiant.” (Thomas Mann)1

With the turn of the twentieth century, engineers seemed to have arrived in the circle of the elites of bourgeois society, in a bourgeoisie in the narrower sense. From 1899 onwards, the Prussian technical universities awarded the academic title of “DiplomIngenieur” and at the same time conferred the right to confer the degree “Dr.-Ing.”2 The commercial career of industrial technical experts had thus reached the top of the academic sphere. In step with this formal-symbolic upgrading of the technical universities, the boom of the high and late industrial economy had made engineers one of, if not the key figure of contemporary modernity. At the turn of the twentieth century, academic engineers numbered almost as many heads as lawyers, doctors and grammar school teachers put together.3 Failed Professionalization This social advancement of engineers, which was on the one hand symbolic and on the other hand functional, was broken by two tendencies in the early twentieth century. Firstly, the professionalisation of the diploma engineers came to nothing: despite the aforementioned formal upgrading of the technical universities, their employment and income opportunities did not fundamentally differ from those of

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Der Zauberberg (Special Edition 1993), p. 27. However, the engineering doctorate was (and still is) to be written with a capital letter (Ing.), deviating from the titles of the classical four faculties. 3 Cf. Müller-Benedict, Karrieren. 2

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_1

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the graduates of technical secondary/middle schools.4 The latter were regarded on the industrial labour market as equal, equally fully-fledged engineers. The formally higher level of education was therefore not associated with a separate, let alone protected, segment of the labour market.5 Second, the entire profession found itself thrust into an ambivalent public role. During the further industrializationof the 1870s/1880s, the population at large had indeed shown a lively enthusiasm for technical excellence. However, the administrative and cultural elites associated the engineers increasingly with the frictions of industrial modernity. Industrial, and so far technical, progress was equated with social massification – with the control deficits of a society which, from its top, seemed to consist only of ostensibly soulless, materialistic conflicts of interest. This contrast between the neo-humanist ideal of education as the core of the bourgeois elite culture on the one hand and the ostensibly utilitarian economic and social reality on the other was to intensify in the 1920s and early 1930s. The professionalisation of diploma engineers – in the sense of exclusive labour market opportunities – was prevented above all by another educational policy decision. Around 1890, the older mechanical engineering and “Baugewerkschulen” were transformed into so-called technical secondary schools. From then on, this sub-academic training to become a technical expert respectively an engineer was expanded – analogously to the increasing industrial demand – at least as much as the technical universities. In the public educational hierarchy, the secondary schools were ranked below the universities in several respects: in terms of research mandate and scientific ideal, in terms of the scope of training and (stronger) practical orientation, as well as according to the so-called pre-education requirements. The technical secondary schools were based on the elementary school leaving certificate or the intermediate school leaving certificatewhereas the higher education institutions required the general qualification for university entrance (Abitur).6 With these two training paths to become a technical expert, the German Reich had taken a special path among industrialized societies. The same applied to the social irritations evoked by this.7

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Technische Mittel- und Fachschulen. With the exception of the civil service, which is of little numerical significance. On the concept of professionalisation, see Pfadenhauer/Sander, Professionssoziologie. 6 Cf. Lundgreen, Ausbildung; ders, Bildung; ders, Fachschulen; Grüner, Entwicklung; Schütte, Bildungswesen; Sander, Ingenieurwesen. 7 Cf. Meiksins/Smith, Perspective; id., Engineers; König, Staatdiener. 5

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Since the dominant industrial labour market did not distinguish between intermediate and university engineers, the system of entitlement often cited by contemporaries, according to which formally hierarchically differentiating educational titles were to be assigned to analogous professional positions, was reduced to absurdity.8 The protected labour markets of the established professions – of theologians, lawyers, doctors and senior teachers – thus remained an inaccessible foil of comparison for the diploma engineers. The clear hierarchical link between education and profession in the civil service, which had still been the inspiration for the creation of two hierarchically differentiated courses of education to become a technical expert, was simply not reflected in a capitalist labour market: One of many “simultaneities of the non-simultaneous”9 in the accelerated social change of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. This competitive situation was given an additional life-world explosiveness by the simultaneous crisis of the engineering labour market.10 Between the turn of the century and the mid-1930s, the work of technical experts was accompanied by an almost permanent oversupply of human means of production. With the consequence that the average income level of diploma engineers fell ever more markedly below the educated, classes level – what is the higher (academic) civil service.11 It was the academic engineers in whose shape the hitherto close “functional connection between education and bourgeoisie”12 began to dissolve. They found themselves in a “double defense”13: the less advantageous income conditions, untypical for academics, were accompanied by manifest public reservations about technology and the engineering profession. Political Protest of the Engineers: Academics on the Defensive Overall, the professional-social protest of the engineers fit seamlessly into the mood of crisis among many higher and academic professional groups in the Weimar era.14

8 Cf. beyond note 4: Mieg, Problematik; Rüschemeyer, Professionalisierung; Heidenreich, Berufskonstruktion; Lundgreen, Bildung; the latter, Berufskonstruktion; Sander, Professionalisierung. 9 Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Vol. 3), p. 41. 10 The Husserlian concept of lifeworld is used here, as is usual in social history, synonymously with the concept of everyday cultures, lifestyles, mentalities and milieus. 11 Cf. Sander, Krise. 12 Lundgreen, Bildung, p. 173. 13 Sander, defensive. 14 Cf. Ludwig, Technik; Sander, Defensive.

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Membership in the NSDAP was no more common among technical experts in the last years of the Republic than among senior teachers, judges, lawyers, or doctors.15 Of course, the largely source-based focus on the NSDAP – and here on the particular motivational structure of party membership – cannot capture the full extent of nationalistic, “völkisch” protest in the Weimar Republic. Only since the 1980s we know that the higher, educated middle classes played an above-average role in the right-wing conservative radicalization of German society in the 1920s and early 1930s. As a result of this diagnosis, the political social history of the interwar period had to be rewritten.16 Until then, it had been assumed that there was a clear overrepresentation of the small business owners and – even more so – of the new class of employees among supporters and voters of the NSDAP. The “(lower) middle-class belly” of National Socialism had thus undergone an empirical slimming – and the NSDP, in view of its apparently cross-milieu appeal, was henceforth negotiated as the “people’s party of protest”.17 Among the technical experts, it was above all the diploma engineers who translated their social upgrading ambitions into right-wing conservative ideologies. Intentionally, in the form of their professional-political interest groups, they saw themselves as a traditional bourgeois professional group, a part of the higher, educated middle classes. The Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI) always liked to refer to the “numerous points of contact in professional and life views”18 with the established academic elites. The educated middle classes with its protected labour markets acted as a professional role model that had not yet been reached – i.e. the higher civil service and the liberal professions with (semi-) publicly regulated pay scales (doctors, lawyers). Finally, a meritocratic distinction opposite the middle school engineers was promised by the corporative social images of right-wing conservative parties and

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Cf. Ludwig, Technik, p. 106f.; Jarausch, Professions, p. 100. Cf. Falter, Wähler; Rohe, Wahlen; Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler?; Childers, Voter; Jarausch, Professions as well as on the older ‘(lower) middle class thesis’ Geiger, Panik (1930); Lipset, Faschismus (1959); Schweitzer, Nazifizierung (1970) and already critically on this from the 1970s: Winkler, Marx; v. Saldern, Sozialmilieus; v. Saldern, Mittelstand. With Bragg, Wars, we would have to speak here of the first interwar period in distinction to the period from 1945 to 1980. 17 Falter, Wähler, p. 13. 18 Lang, Ein Jahr, p. 334; cf. Die gesellschaftliche Stellung des Ingenieurs, in: ZVDDI 1 (1910), p. 372f. 16

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journalism. In order to enforce modern meritocracy, therefore, pre-modern ideas of social order were resorted to. With the founding of the VDDI in 1909, parts of the engineering graduates had separated themselves from the middle school engineers in terms of their interests. The unity of all technical experts, which had been valid for a long time and was mainly shaped by technical culture, had thus broken apart to a certain extent. This so-called technical community work was embodied above all by the Association of German Engineers (VDI), which, however, represented middle school engineers, diploma engineers and Entrepreneursin equal measure. In the Weimar Republic, the VDDI was joined by other professional associations that were also largely limited to academics: the Association of Executive Employees (Vela) and the Association of Employed Chemists and Engineers (Budaci) organized not only chemists (Budaci) and (graduate) merchants in higher management (Vela) but also a few thousand diploma engineers.19 These younger, hitherto largely unexplored, professional associations were also strongly oriented towards the protected labour markets and exclusive income conditions of the classical academic, thus bourgeoisprofessions –. Among these academic professional associations, the VDDI was the most radical.20 With its ideas of a corporative social order with the academic professions as the head of the “Volksgemeinschaft”, the Association of Diploma Engineers even surpassed the Reichsbund der höheren Beamten (RhB), which is otherwise rightly regarded as the extreme pole of professional association politics on the eve of the “Third Reich.”21 According to these explicitly political indications, the self-image of the diploma engineers was thus shaped by significant social frustrations. In their family socialisation, which was, incidentally, decidedly upper middle-class, as well as in their academic studies, graduate engineers had thus developed typical bourgeois expectations, which now came into conflict with their employment opportunities. In the mid-1920s, however, about one tenth of the academic engineers were members of professional organizations (VDDI, Budaci, Vela) – a relatively small number by contemporary standards. In this respect, it is by no means clear what significance the academic engineers actually attributed to the bourgeoisie as a subject of reference.

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Cf. Gispen, Interessenkonflikte; Roche, Engineers; Franz, Profession. In the latter study on Diplom-Kaufleute, the Vela is largely ignored. 20 Cf. Sander, Defensive. On the concept of radical conservatism. 21 On the RhB, cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger and, for the period up to 1930, also Föllmer, Verteidigung. On other academic professional associations, cf. McClelland, Experience; Jarausch, Professions; Siegrist, Advokat.

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Everyday Cultural Foundations of Political Behaviour Finally, politics follow particular social logics. In contrast to everyday, routinized action, political behavior can be understood, with Thomas Welskopp, as comparatively “intentional collective action.”22 After all, nothing was strategically more obvious to technical academics than to invoke the publicly recognized status source of academic education in demanding material improvements. Especially since the established educated professionals also equated formal academic status with correspondingly status-appropriate working and living conditions. Thus, as mentioned above, even the higher civil servants, with their decidedly status-appropriate incomes, stooped to radical ideologies at the end of the 1920s.23 In addition to the industrial employers, who admittedly did not want to accept such claims, the expectations of the academic engineers’ associations were directed not only at politics but also directly at the administrative elites – the higher officials in the trade administrations. Quite obviously, they were under the illusion that the executive authorities would intervene in industrial relations, qua a solidarity among academics – and without a political mandate, which was by no means to be expected in Weimar.24 The intentional, political demand for rigid class hierarchies thus does not mean that the graduate engineers also oriented themselves in everyday social terms to corresponding bourgeois models – or even worked off them in despair. The society of the late Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic must certainly be thought of in more complex terms: although the three-class scheme as the dominant frame of reference for social inequality did indeed provide for sharp material and everyday cultural boundaries between middle-class and bourgeois occupational groups, the bourgeoisie did in fact function as a socially and culturally dominant class.25 The bourgeoisie thus certainly functioned as a clearly identifiable, unambiguously demarcated upper sphere of the status pyramid. In the face of the ideational refraction of the working society by the first contours of a leisure society, however, engineers and other higher employees had furthersocial identification opportunities during the first third of the twentieth century.

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Welskopp, Klassenkonzept, p. 54. Cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger; Breuer, Ordnungen; McClelland, Experience. 24 Cf. Sander, Defensive; Jarausch, Professions. 25 On the contemporary meaning of the three-class schema, see Ritter/Tenfelde, Arbeiter, pp. 111–154. 23

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As an example of an at least gradually successful life-world mastering of occupational-social irritations, the commercial employees can be mentioned. In response to material losses and the increasing standardization of office work, there had been no significant radicalization of the professional articulation of interests among them in the first third of the twentieth century – at least in the means of the organized. After all, the decades-long self-image of even ordinary and middle-ranking, executive office workers as a quasi-entrepreneurial, middle-class functional elite had finally outlived its usefulness in Weimar.26 Instead, these whitecollar workers took refuge in the then novel entertainment options of vaudeville, cinema, and Sunday outings.27 On the basis of such alternative socialization options and their effects on political behavior, it becomes apparent that occupational interest politics in particular and political behavior in general say only a limited amount about the life plans of a social group. So how did the graduate engineers perceive their occupational-social situation in their everyday lives? And: did the political radicalization of a part of the technical academics feed on a general dissatisfaction in this (sub-)occupational group or are overarching political conjuncturesto be taken more into account? What is meant here are the insecurities of various social groups in the Weimar era, which on a large scale unquestionably evoked an upswing in right-wing conservative and ethnic social images and political content. Social Situation – Mentalities – Political Behaviour The heuristic starting point of the present study should already have become clear: at the centre is the systematic distinction between occupational-social situation and (everyday) behaviour, between (objective) living conditions and (subjective) everyday practice – i.e. the distinction between the conditions of action and action itself. Of course, it must be taken into account that (everyday) action itself produces its social frame of reference anew at the same moment: the structures are framing action in the form of scopes for action.28 Accordingly, the social situation – the relative position according to the criteria of education, occupation (working

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Cf. Winkler, Marx; v. Saldern, Sozialmilieus; v. Saldern, Mittelstand. Cf. Spree, Angestellte; Geiger, Schichtung. 28 On the duality of action and structure, cf. above all, of course, Giddens, Konstitution and Welskopp, Mensch. Here, of course, the ‘situation’ is only related to comparatively ‘external’ conditions of action, and consequently cannot be understood homologously with (internalized) ‘structure’, which is always brought to bear in action qua socialization. In this respect, social situation is not to be understood as a disposition or preference for action, but rather as a resource for action that remains relatively stable over the course of life. 27

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conditions) and income – of a certain group is also to be understood as a product of practice. More than a hundred years ago Max Weber presented a systematic distinction between situation and behaviour . However, everyday thought and action, lifestyles and mentalities, have only been taken seriously as a subject of the social sciences since the 1970s – in particular as a result of Pierre Bourdieu’s work.29 It was only through the empirical consideration of everyday thought and patterns of action, including the macrosociological perspective, that it became possible to explain e.g. the absence of political protest despite a massive deterioration in living conditions. For example, a deprivation that appears indisputable to the observer is not perceived as such by the actors. Or the relative inactivity is based on an unbridgeable affective distance to the usual forms of interest articulation, to the prevailing political culture including the political system, to politics and polity.30 This paradigm shift has not yet taken place in Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s encyclopaedic “German Social History”. Lucian Hölscher notes: Those who, like the educated bourgeoisie in the Weimar Republic, were in the majority in favour of the monarchy and did not, in Wehler’s view, come to terms with their economic decline; those who, like the new white-collar workers, benefited for a time from economic change are less likely to fall for the Hitler myth. This is probably too simplistic a picture. What remains undiscussed is whether cultural imprints would not have turned some into monarchists or republicans even in the face of economic success or failure.31

In the social context of social inequality, it can be assumed that there is initially a relationship between the social situation – defined along the three pillars of (1) education, (2) occupation (working conditions) and (3) income – and everyday cultures, mentalities and lifestyles. Living conditions shape certain attitudes and practices that become somewhat typical of a situation. But this imprinting is (of course) by no means all-encompassing. Otherwise we would not know the phenomenon of social mobility. This applies in particular to individual or collective upward mobility: in order to be able to leave one’s own situation, or rather one’s own milieu, the

In Weber (Wirtschaft, pp. 177–79 and 531f.), this is captured in the terms “class” (social situation) and “class” (mentalities), and largely analogously with the talk of “marketconditioned class” and “social class”. 30 Cf. Sider, Culture. 31 Hölscher, Sozialgeschichtep. 93. 29

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behavioural codes of the target group must be mastered at least in part. This is possible insofar as the actors naturally always have current life-world experiences that compete with the imprints of their social situation. Moreover, they are – and according to Bourdieu above all – carriers of socialisationally, in the family of origin, inscribed and biographically quite persistent mentality modules (habitus), which also do not have to correspond to their current social situation. Lifestyle formations, so-called (social) milieus, can therefore also only be partially congruent with social situations.32 If one now includes political behaviour, the intentional collective action, in the systematics, the relationships of the now three areas of reality present themselves as follows: The social situation partly determines mentalities and lifestyles. Only theseeveryday cultures, which include the collective mastery of the social situation, form certain dispositions for political behaviour.33 In Germany, it is precisely historical research on the upper middle classes that is distinguished by a systematic empirical focus on lifestyles and mentalities – which was – since the 1980s – groundbreaking for this discipline. Many studies of this provenance, however, stop at the exploration of the everyday cultures of special bourgeois groups. References to the social situation are hardly ever made. And even at the level of everyday cultures, questions of social inequality, such as the habitually internalized strategies of demarcation of the upper middle classes vis-à-vis upwardly mobile new middle-class groups, are not the focus of research interest. Urban subaltern civil servantsshould be mentioned here, as well as, since the end of the nineteenth century, various upper and higher white-collar categories – including, of course, engineers. Rather, the aim was to decipher the typical lifestyle of the bourgeoisie down to the depth of individual lifestyle components (e.g. educational styles) and to describe them in a typifying manner – or, on the other hand, to sound out the significance of bourgeois attitudinal patterns for the change in overall social

32 On the (naturally) controversial question of the extent to which ‘action’ and ‘behaviour’ are constituted independently of the imprints and resources in the area of social situation, cf. in summary the contributions in Hradil/Berger, Lebenslagen and Blasius/Dangschat, Lebensstile. 33 This heuristic framework is a systematisation of the approach of Sider, Culture, who for the first time tried to think all three areas of reality together. In contrast, modern sociology of lifestyle and inequality largely ignores political behaviour, and political sociology largely ignores everyday cultures. As exceptions, cf. Bittlingmayer/Bauer, Ungleichheit; Schmitt, Ungleichheit; Vester, Bewegungsanalyse.

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value orientations, educational perception and participation, the concept of nation and political styles, especially for the nineteenth century, the bourgeois century.34 In this way, the socio-historical foundations of a German Sonderweg were to be elucidated. After all, since the early 1980s it has been possible – at least hypothetically – to attribute the assertion of National Socialism quite substantially to a deficient anchoring of liberalist political attitudes in the bourgeoisie. Henceforth, the task was to illuminate the previous history, i.e. the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, which in fact lasted until the First World War.35 In terms of research programme, therefore, the conclusion was drawn vice-versa – from politics to mentalities. The explanation of political behaviour by means of the now researched everyday cultures, however, remained an exception. Meanwhile the classic short-circuit from social situations to political thought and action also remained relevant in the context of research on the middle classes. Thus, the studies on the professional associations of senior teachers, lawyers, engineers, and higher civil servants by Konrad H. Jarausch and Rainer Fattmann linearly attribute the völkische political radicalization of these academic professional groups to material processes of decline and further frictions in their social situations. Everyday cultures and corresponding pre-political expectations remain completely unconsidered here.36 A heuristic instrument with which the sometimes considerable political attitude differences between the academic groups – the income losses in the crisis-ridden republic affected all of them in roughly the same way – could admittedly not be exhaustively explained.37 To sum up: everyday cultures, mentalities and lifestyles have thus been studied in isolation from social situations on the one hand and political behaviour on the other, or political behaviour has been derived directly from social situations. Within the framework of a (everyday) culturally expanded social history, however, the illumination of the border area between affective mentalities and intended political strategies has proven fruitful in individual studies. Michael Schäfer, for example, has reconstructed how the urban middle classes dealt with material losses after the

34

Cf. Budde, Bürgerleben; Habermas, Frauen; Vogel, Nationen; Tanner, Patrioten as well as the contributions in Kocka, Bildungsbürgertum; Kocka, Bürgertum; Tenfelde/Wehler, Wege and Lundgreen, Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte. Berghoff, Unternehmer; Brakensiek, Fürstendiener and Hettling, Bürgerlichkeit at least mention social positions. 35 Cf. Kocka, Ursachen; Kocka, Bürgertum. 36 Quite in contrast to the exemplary study of the (lesser) nobility in this respect: Malinowski, König. 37 Cf. Jarausch, Professions; Fattmann, Bildungsbürger. This also applies, with slight reservations, to McClelland, Experience.

1

Introduction: Social and Political Consequences of the. . .

11

First World War in the form of patronage and local political networks. Moritz Föllmer filtered out from professional and private correspondence the ideas of entrepreneurs and senior civil servants about the so-called borders of the nation – and also about the inner borders, concerning the demarcation needs and strategies of these upper-class and educated citizens vis-à-vis subaltern social groups. In this context, the popular ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft, which was staged as integrative but strategically concealed inequalities, should be mentioned in particular.38 On the micro-political level of investigation, in the connection between everyday-routine and intentional-public-related actions, historical scholarship can certainly find approaches to place social situations, mentalities and politics in an explanatory connection. Research Question and Procedure In what follows, (1) social situations, (2) mentalities and lifestyles, and (3) political behavior of engineers, with special attention to diploma engineers, are each negotiated in separate sections. These dimensions are held together by the following question: Is the political radicalization of at least a noteworthy part of the academic engineers actually due to theirmentality-historically filtered professional-social situation, in particular to the misguided professional demarcation of the middleschool engineers as well as the just not bourgois-like incomes? Or did the technical academics come to terms with this situation in their everyday lives and develop a self-image in their jobs, families and leisure time in which traditional academic status expectations possibly receded into the background? The time span of more than a generation, between the establishment of a sub-academic engineering education on the labour market around 1900 and the neuralgic political profiling of graduate engineers in the late phase of the Weimar Republic makes such processes of adjustment in the history of mentalities seem quite possible. In this case, political radicalization would have to be discussed primarily as a self-dynamic with only limited feedback from the life-world. However, the present study is also intended to provide information about the policy, the political content and its references. Engineering Profession and Employee History: Previous Approaches to the Social Situation of Engineers Situated at the intersection of the history ofeconomics, technology, education and professions research on engineers for the nineteenth and early twentieth century can

38

Cf. Schäfer, Bürgertum; Föllmer, Verteidigung.

12

1

Introduction: Social and Political Consequences of the. . .

be described as quite extensive.39 Apart from an independent micro-historical perspective, which Wolfgang König in particular has adopted with his meticulous research to the work cultures of designing engineers, the research interest has so far developed very closely along the lines of the informativeness of the sources.40 Thus, above all, the training at secondary and higher education institutions – documented in official literature with great precision, also in statistical terms – can be described as quite well researched.41 The state of research can therefore be expanded at present, above all with company source inventories as well as recodations of the Reich’s statistical office occupational census.42 Certainly the best researched is the history of the Association of German Engineers (VDI). However, neither the dense historical tradition nor the then or current level of awareness of this technical “Großverein”43 are primarily responsible for that. Rather, the subject of the VDI could be used to bundle research interests in the history of professions, education, technology and economics like a burning glass. In contrast, the fact that the engineering profession is characterized by the status of salaried employees makes it difficult to determine central social indicators of the occupational group. In macro-historical sources, i.e. in statistics of public and private provenance, white-collar workers were hardly differentiated internally. There is no complete occupational statistics, as is the case for the classical, stateregulated academic professions. This is evident, for example, in the fact that the numerical size of the subgroup of architects and civil engineers, which can actually be easily isolated, is the subject of strikingly divergent values in the more recent research literature.44 With regard to the central historical characteristic of german engineers, the largely equal professional opportunities of academics and non-academics, one has so farrelied on the judgement of contemporaries.

39

Cf. for an overview the contributions in Lundgreen/Grelon, Ingenieure; König/Kaiser, Geschichte; Ludwig/König, Technik. 40 Cf. König, Künstler; ibid., Technikwissenschaften. 41 Cf. Lexis, Fachschulen; Grüner, Entwicklung; Lundgreen, Ausbildung; ders, Education; ders, Techniker; Scholl, Ingenieure; Gispen, Profession; Albrecht, Bildung; Schütte, Bildungswesen; Sander, Ingenieurwesen. 42 Cf. Sander, Krise. 43 König, Ingenieure, p. 235. 44 Bolenz (Baubeamten, p. 414) puts this sub-occupational group for 1933 at 22,816, while Jarausch (Professions, p. 242) counts 78,868, with both authors referring to the occupational censuses of the Reich’s Statistical Office.

1

Introduction: Social and Political Consequences of the. . .

13

This veritable lack of “consistent empirical material on the social situation of engineers”45 is to be remedied in the present context by the acces to new as well as the re-evaluation and synopsis of known sources. This concerns, among other things, hitherto unnoticed surveys of the Reich Labour Office as well as various meso-historical, association as well as company-based sources. In this way, it is possible to reconstruct not only the internal profile of the engineering profession according to training, operational fields, working conditions and income. At the same time, the stratificational outer boundaries of the engineering profession can be traced with some precision – both the boundaries downwards, to the large social formation of middle, mostly commercial employees, and those upwards, to the leading formation of higher civil servants and academic freelancers. Thus, an investigation of the social situation of engineers is essentially tantamount to an attempt to write a macro-historical social history of a larger subgroup of white-collar workers for the first time. The fact that white-collar workers have so far appeared primarily as a historical monolith for the period before the Second World War can ultimately be attributed to a remarkable conflation of political conjunctures and epistemological interests. The contemporary economic and educational bourgeois elites regarded white-collar workers as a political buffer against the labour movement under the label new middle class, which was supposed to symbolise a sharp demarcation from the working class: a social ascription that was not to remain without consequences for the questions posed by official statistics and a sociology of white-collar workers that was already emerging at the time.46 But even in modern socio-historical research, white-collar workers often appear as a homogeneous group. On the one hand, this can be traced back to the aforementioned legacy of the early sociology of white-collar workers, the view of contemporary observers. On the other hand, the post-industrial tendency to downgrade the operational functionof white-collar work in almost all areas and hierarchical levels brought white-collar workers as a whole into the focus of research in social and economic history. In addition, since the 1980s there has been significant historical electoral research, in the context of which white-collar workers could not even be differentiated internally for source-related reasons.47

45

König, Verein, p. 309. Cf. Mangold, Angestelltengeschichte. 47 On the (limited) approaches to internal differentiation by historical labour market research, cf. especially Pierenkemper, Arbeitsmarkt, on election research Falter, Wähler; Childers, Voter; Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? 46

14

1

Introduction: Social and Political Consequences of the. . .

Mentalities and Lifestyles Compared to the social situation of the engineers, the density of information on mentalities and lifestyles can be described as weak. With regard to the present research interest, an evaluation of private and professional correspondence as a place of representation of affective self-attributions and attributions of others, and thus an important component of mentality, had to be dispensed with due to a lack of sufficient density of tradition. The investigation of everyday cultures therefore concentrates here on four empirical paths: 1. the (semi-)public debate about the role of technology and engineers in (bourgeois) society, in the course of which some engineers also addressed everydaybased affiliations and demarcations; 2. the social background, which can provide initial indications of everyday cultural affiliation with middle-class or bourgeois milieus; 3. personal networks in the form of membership in associations and as the analytical core of this chapter: 4. Family planning and consumption. A new count of the raw data of the statistical Reichsamt’s so-called household accounts, i.e. household books or expenditure documentations of private households, shows the comsum patterns of a total of 39 engineer families. These can be contrasted with various relevant neighbouring social formations – e.g., the middle commercial employees and the higher civil servants.48 In the form of a pecuniary abstraction of everyday preferences, these household accounts allow quite precise statements to be made about the relative importance of central areas of life within the respective pattern of life.49 Political Behaviour Although the political behaviour of engineers – or rather the politics of theirprofessional associations – has so far played a major role in the historical study of engineers, this can still be considered as a blind spot. This concerns in particular the differentiation of the technical professional association system into associations of middle school engineers on the one hand, and of the academic

48

These data sets have so far only been evaluated with a focus on the major groups of bluecollar workers and white-collar workers/officials Cf. Triebel, Zwei Klassen; Coyner, Patterns; Spree, Angestellte. 49 Cf. ibid. and especially Kaelble, Besonderheiten; the contributions in Pierenkemper, Haushalt and Pierenkemper, Ökonomik.

1

Introduction: Social and Political Consequences of the. . .

15

diploma engineers on the other. Thus, the three central interest associations for employed diploma engineers in the interwar period, namely the Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI), the Association of Executive Employees (Vela) and the Association of Employed Chemists and Engineers (Budaci), have so far remained almost completely unexplored.50 The comparative study of these three associations aims to identify a possibly overarching pattern of political orientation among technical experts. This pattern is then to be correlated with the findings on the social situation, but above all with the findings on mentalities and lifestyles. Moreover, a review of the politics – and policies – of VDDI, Vela and Budaci allowsto contrast the political superstructure of different social situations and milieus. In addition to the everyday action patterns, resp. mentalities and lifestyles, as a place where, let’s say, external social developments are mastered, the present study thus also deals with the particular structural conditions and dynamics of the political field as an explanatory variable of political behaviour. The present version of the double defense, which certainly turns out to be in part a triple defensive – encompassing social situations, mentalities and politics – is the third, revised edition, which I dedicate to Paul and Anne. Tobias Sander, 2023.

50

For the period before 1914, see Gispen, Profession. With regard to the Weimar Republic, there are brief outlines of the VDDI and Budaci (Gispen, Interessenkonflikte; Roche, Ingenieure). However, these are to be understood more as research assignments than as detailed investigations.

2

The German Engineering Boom – Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century

In private industry, skill, as well as knowledge, tips the scales; technical and general education come second. We often meet the former technical student [middle school] as the superior of the academic. The latter, in turn, is usually forced to compete with the middle school graduate and to work shoulder to shoulder with him. (Wilhelm Mertens 1907)1

2.1

The Numerical Development of the Engineering Profession in Germany

For the period of early and high industrialization (about 1840–1900), the number of employed engineers can only be estimated. Until the founding of the German Empire in 1871, the total of about three to five thousand government building councillors, municipal building officials and surveyors was probably matched by a scarcely larger number of employed technical experts in industry. In addition, a few hundred freelancers, i.e. individual self-employed persons, can be identified in the semi-state-organized steam boiler supervision. On the other hand, the number of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, who – mostly following a tradition of craftsmanship – can be described as commercial and technical managers in one person, are estimated in the range of several thousand persons and can thus be counted among the professional group of engineers.2

1 2

Mertens, Bewegung, p. 656. Cf. Scholl, Ingenieure, pp. 297–414; Lundgreen, Techniker, pp. 228–233.

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_2

17

18

2 The German Engineering Boom – Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century

These relations changed fundamentally in the coming decades of the high industrial change in economic structure. Around 1880, it can be assumed that industrial employees outnumbered civil servants on the one hand and the selfemployed on the other for the first time. In addition, from this time onwards a slight majority of industrially employed engineers had an engineering-specific, formal school education that went beyond craft apprenticeships and pure learning on the job. Thus, based on the student numbers of the technical universities as well as their predecessor institutions, the polytechnics, it can be extrapolated for the 1870s that there must have been at least 10,000 formally educated technical experts on the labor market. Thus, even without taking into account the still numerous autodidacts, engineers had already caught up in terms of numbers with the traditional academic expert occupational groups of theologians, higher teachers, lawyers and doctors. More precise information on the numerical scope of the occupational group has only been available since the 1895 edition of the Occupational and Establishment Census of the Reich’s Statistical Office (Statistisches Reichsamt). According to this, engineers comprised 25,650 persons in that year – including the group of “technicians”, which is to be understood synonymously in this case.”3 The census criteria of this and the following occupational censuses reproduced in Table 2.1 are, however, unclear in many areas. Apparently, until 1907, civil servants and employees at public corporations were predominantly not included.4 The later editions of 1925 and 1933 also seem to underestimate the total size of the occupational group – despite the enormous growth rates that can be seen here. At any rate, this is suggested by the educational achievements of the technical universities (TH) and the technical middle schools.5 By 1895, these secondary schools alone had already released more than 30,000 graduates to the labour market.6 Including the middle schools, there were over 120,000 formally educated technical experts in working life in 1907, when the autodidacts had largely been pushed out of the

3

For the history of the term. Cf. Günther, Techniker, pp. 11–14. 5 Cf. Fig. A.2 Analogous to the elementary secondary schools, the higher engineering schools operated as secondary/middle schools. The lower engineering schools took on the formal status of technical schools, which also included the craft schools, i.e. elementary vocational schools. In keeping with contemporary usage, the term “middle school” is used here as a bracket for both forms. 6 Calculated according to Table A.1 as well as a professional duration of 32 years and a study duration of eight semesters (4 years). The guest students and guest lecturers were taken into account, since their study achievements were considered adequate on the labour market. Cf. UArch Chemnitz, 302/IV/1577. 4

17,610 19,677 38,585 44,471

Selfemployed 2

From (1)

32,803

Officials 3

126,993

40,659

Architects and civil engineers/technicians 4

55,466

7859

Electrical engineers/ technicians 5

7328

4778

Mining and metallurgical engineers/technicians 6

Own calculations according to: Statistisches Reichsamt, (recoded) occupational and establishment censuses

1895 1907 1925 1933 1939

Engineers and technicians 1 25,650 100,528 141,606 243,934 390,724

Table 2.1 Engineers and technicians by occupational status, subject classification and gender, German Empire 1895–1939

2 226 618 307

Female 7

2.1 The Numerical Development of the Engineering Profession in Germany 19

20

2 The German Engineering Boom – Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century

labour market. In 1925, the figure was already around 300,000, and in the following reference years 1933 and 1939, almost 400,000 in each case.7 Although the number of formally qualified professionals can only be determined by means of multi-stage extrapolations, these figures can be regarded as at least as reliable as the official figures, with their survey criteria (occupational titles, consideration of educational qualifications), which were unclearly defined from the outset – at the time of the survey – and highly inconsistent over time. Thus in the 1925 edition, where the Reichsamtliche raw data show only 94,167 “engineers, architects and master builders”, the technicians were quite obviously not taken into account. These had always been included before in a sensible way. The contemporary published value of 141,605 persons thus seems much more plausible in view of the control value of 300,000 formally trained engineers of working age.8 According to the occupational censuses, the size of the occupational group eventually rose to 390,724 persons by the eve of World War II.9 Comparison with the training data now suggests that the official censuses provide a fairly valid record. At the same time, the participation in training, which had fallen sharply in the early 1930s, had risen again significantly towards the middle of the decade. An important background to this was the massive advertising of technical training courses by the National Socialist regime. After all, the direct (armaments industry) and indirect economic management (deficit spending) were not to be jeopardised by a shortage of labour.

2.2

Causes of the German Engineering Boom: Dynamics of Economic Structural Change

Basically, technical experts, engineers and technicians, can be understood as those professionals whose job profiles are essentially based on the understanding of central components of technical processes in industrial companies, their development and/or a corresponding problem-solving competence. The increase in the level of complexity of the industrial mode of production since early industrialisation – and thus the growth of the engineering profession – can be traced back to two bundles of causes. First, there is technical progress in the narrower sense. Such

7 Based on Table A.1., a study duration of 5 (middle schools) or 8 (universities) semesters and a working life of 32 years. 8 Cf. StatDR, Vol. 408, pp. 34–50. For the concepts of technician and engineer. 9 On the deviations from the data in Jarausch, Professions, p. 242, cf. Sander, Krise, p. 424.

2.2 Causes of the German Engineering Boom: Dynamics of Economic. . .

21

innovations usually affect manufactured goods and reified means of production (workshops, machines) to a similar extent. Secondly, changes in corporate cultures, in the organisation of production sites and in company sizes must be taken into account. Companies with complex commercial control were able to maintain a more complex, increasingly standardised and thus more cost-effective production in larger workshops. Both aspects – technicaland social innovations – were in a possibly particularly close interrelationship in the late industrial epoch of interest here; their dynamics were mutually dependent. In the 1850s, it was above all the steam boilers that required a workforce with a knowledge base that went beyond basic manual training just to keep the plant running. In the following decades, the synthetic fibre, the electric motor, the repeatedly revolutionised smelting processes in the steel industry and, in the years before the First World War, so-called assembly-friendly design were added as key innovations.10 A long-term planning, scientifically tested and managementcontrolled production design had gained the upper hand over the hitherto dominant approach of trial and error, also in production planning. Among engineers in development departments, the mode of trial and error continued to function as the ideal mode of gaining knowledge for a few decades longer, in some cases until today.11 The rapid growth of the engineering profession since 1890 can be explained in more detail beyond this trend. Finally, three partially interlocking developments can be identified for the industrial sector. Modernization on Three Levels: Sectors, Industries and Companies The expansion of demand for the highest, engineering technical expertise was due, firstly, to the growth of the secondary sector of industry and crafts. The contribution of manufacturing to the value added of all three sectors rose from 40% in 1900 to 48.5% in 1925.12 However, this only captures the somewhat slowed growth of an industrial economy that was already assuming late-industrial traits. In the preceding highly industrial epoch, the share of the secondary sector in the total economy had admittedly risen even faster. On this basis, the above-average growth of the contemporary high-tech sectors of metal processing, chemicals and electrical engineering was particularly significant. On the one hand, a development and, above all,

10

Cf. König/Weber, Netzwerke; Welskopp, Arbeit; Kleinschmidt, Rationalisierung. On the following, cf. also König, Künstler. 11 Cf. Sander, Ingenieurberuf; on this veritable cult of practice. 12 Cf. Hoffmann, Wachstum, p. 454 f. (net national product at factor costs).

22

2 The German Engineering Boom – Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century

a production effort was required here which, in terms of technical complexity, went beyond the usual level – with corresponding effects on the required workforce in the technical expert rank. This increased the (relative) importance of these industries within the industrial sector. It was not only the less meaningful number of chemical and electrical engineering companies that increased. The individual companies in these sectors also expanded disproportionately, and with them the sector’s share of economic output. In comparison to this economic-historical success story of mechanical engineering, electrical and chemical industry, the importance of mining and metallurgy shrank. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, the sales opportunities of the local companies decreased. The markets had become internationalized and thus homogenized. In the interwar period, however, the return on equity of the machinery and vehicle manufacturing sector also fell behind the secondary sector on average for the first time.13 However, this did not change the contribution of the metalworking industry to the overall economic performance. Despite declining returns, investment apparently continued on a large scale. At just under 17% of the economy’s value added, the relative importance of metalworking companies in 1933 was similar to that in 1907. By contrast, the chemical industry’s contribution to domestic production rose from 5.8% to 8.4% in the same period; no corresponding figures are available for the electrical industry, which is difficult to delineate in any case.14 However, the development dynamics of this branch of industry seem to have been particularly striking for contemporaries. Positive forecasts for the engineering labour market, which were generally based on economic indicators rather than labour market data, were made almost exclusively for electrical engineering in the 1920s.15 Secondly, in the course of the advancing industrialisation process, not only the activities initiating and utilising production processes, i.e. administrative activities, expanded, but also the tasks directly related to production. The reason for this was the growing importance of production plants – as the level of technology increased – and the decreasing importance of human labour. As a result, the proportion of

13

Cf. Metz, Innovationsindikatoren, p. 103 (data for the period between 1925 and 1930). Cf. Hoffmann, Wachstum, pp. 390–393. However, these net production values are de facto merely employment trends converted into production indices on the basis of industry-specific per capita productivity in 1936. On industry development, see Chandler, Scale; Plumpe, I.G. Farbenindustrie A.G.; Czada, Elektroindustrie. 15 Reichsarbeitsverwaltung, Handbuch, pp. 52–55. 14

2.2 Causes of the German Engineering Boom: Dynamics of Economic. . .

23

engineers in the workforce also increased at the level of individual companies. At Siemens & Halske in Berlin-Charlottenburg, the proportion of engineers, which had still been 2.1% in 1890, had already reached 4.9% by 1910.16 At the same time, however, cross-company innovation processes played an increasingly important role. With the increasing scientification of social subsystems, the time intervals of technical innovation and the corresponding pressure to adapt at the level of (individual) companies became shorter.17 Even if, as Toni Pierenkemper points out, the development of new products and manufacturing processes came to a large extent from within the companies themselves and can still comparatively rarely be understood as the adaptation of overarching (basic) innovations during this period.18 In any case, the extent of the information transfer between the companies, where a good part of the fundamental research also took place, and the technical training institutions can hardly be overestimated. This is particularly true of the comparatively young field of electrical engineering, which Wolfgang König describes as an “industry-based science.”19 Between 1880 and 1900, the electrical engineering chairs were filled with industrial practitioners to such an extent that the Siemens Works in Berlin were nicknamed the “professors’ forge.”20 Thirdly, a characteristic feature of economic structural change in the early twentieth century was the change in entrepreneurial models and the corresponding corporate cultures. Just as the late nineteenth century was characterised by the loss of importance of patriarchal management styles, the rationalisation movement left its mark on the early twentieth century. Unlike corporate management styles, whose transformation took place predominantly behind the backs of the actors involved,

16 Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, pp. 280, 470, 563, 574 (own calculation; as Table 3.1). The interpretation of Laer, Arbeitsmarkt, p. 161, who assumes that the growth of the engineering labour market was limited by the increasing degree of mechanisation, seems strange. According to this, engineers were substituted by machines! The data for Siemens refer to Siemens & Halske (1890: Charlottenburg plant; 1910: entire company). Sp. 4: The data for G. Fischer include the foremen. 17 Cf. Metz, Innovationsindikatoren, pp. 29–41 and 107–125, for an international comparison Murmann, Knowledge. It should be noted that it is problematic to use patent applications as the primary or even sole indicator of innovation. The scope of the respective patent is not taken into account, nor is the propensity or culture to apply. 18 Cf. Pierenkemper, Unternehmensgeschichte, p. 145. On the iron and steel industry as a corresponding research focus, cf. Kleinschmidt, Rationalisierung and Welskopp, Arbeit. 19 König, Industrie. 20 König, Technikwissenschaften, p. 3. Cf. in detail König/Weber; Netzwerke, pp. 400–404; Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 277 f.; Knost, Interessenpolitik, pp. 86–96; Hoepke, 100 Jahre.

24

2 The German Engineering Boom – Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century

such rationalisation efforts, from manufacturing set-up to office organisation, were of course based on explicit and stated agendas. The Rationalization Efforts of the 1920s The term rationalisation covers all those methods of cost reduction which go beyond the substitution of human labour by mechanical equipment. These are approaches that were first distinguished from previous business management concepts (Taylorism) in the academic debate as well as in entrepreneurial linguistic usage in the years after the turn of the century. The increasing willingness to subject the goods produced to a technical-organisational revision (e.g. assembly-friendly design) naturally led to an above-average growth in the demand for engineers in companies. These organizational developments must therefore be added to the trends to the secondary sector and to the general mechanisation described above. Empirically, it is difficult to determine the reasons for the search for new types of cost-cutting potential. They are likely to have been primarily in the area of the expansion and homogenisation of markets, in the course of which, of course, companies operating supraregionally in particular were exposed to growing competitive pressure. The decisive factor for this transregionalisation and internationalisation was the leap in transport performance, above all in the form of the fundamental expansion of the western and central European railway network since 1880.21 The long-term, structurally increasing market price pressure was finally joined in Germany by the conversion from a wartime to a peacetime economy and politically induced foreign trade restrictions.22 Causes of the Rationalization Euphoria In practice, technical investments and rationalisation efforts are mostly interlocked: rationalisation measures always require a reasonably favourable investment culture. On the other hand, fixed asset investments require a readjustment of production design. Against this background, the progressive growth of the engineering labour market cannot be easily explained. While the ratio of investment to total economic output had risen from just under 10% at the time of the founding of the Reich (1871) to an average of around 15% between 1900 and 1914, it fell back to an annual

21 22

Cf. König/Weber, Netzwerke, pp. 171–201, esp. 196. Cf. Borchardt, Wachstum; Feldman, Weltkrieg; Petzina, Wirtschaft.

2.2 Causes of the German Engineering Boom: Dynamics of Economic. . .

25

average of around 10% after currency stabilisation at the end of 1923.23 At the same time, the increased inflow of international capital merely prevented a complete collapse of investment. Finally, the long-term stagnation of the investment ratio cannot be explained by the – inflation-related – favourable investment culture in the early 1920s. It is true that companies had taken refuge in tangible assets, i.e. had used the ubiquitous capital to renew and expand their facilities. But this tendency was reversed as early as the end of 1922, with the transition to hyperinflation. Under the conditions that now prevailed, the expected future depreciation of money could hardly be taken into account in the nominal interest rates (Fischer effect), so that one must assume a marked decline in private and institutional investment activity in the course of the last year of inflation.24 In short, the investment boom phase was so short that the machinery and equipment renewed during this period are unlikely to have lasted for a decade. From a longer perspective of economic history, the 1920s are thus to be understood primarily as a phase of clearly slowed, almost completely stagnant growth. The economic indicators were also reflected – how could it be otherwise – at the micro level. In the 1920s, for example, the attitudes of management were determined by defensive objectives to such an extent that the optimisation of the cost side moved to the top of the agenda rather than the expansion of market presence. It is, of course, difficult to decide to what extent the perception of narrowed room for manoeuvre and thus the respective target definitions corresponded to the real change in the situation. After all, it was the prosperous pre-war years that (still) formed the background of entrepreneurial activity in this period.25 The economic stagnation was thus perceived as particularly drastic, creating enormous pressure to act, which at least goes some way towards explaining the verve of the veritable rationalisation movement that was now burgeoning.

23

Cf. Hoffmann, Wachstum, p. 104 f. (in each case net investment as a share of net national product). In the course of this, the (absolute) capital stock naturally continued to rise. In the contemporary debate, too, a connection was already established between the scarcity of capital and the growing entrepreneurial rationalisation efforts. Cf. v. Holzer, Beitrag zu einer Systematik der Rationalisierung von Fabriken, in: Maschinenbau 6 (1927), pp. 15–17, as well as a contribution by the leading cost accounting scientist Eugen Schmalenbach, in: ibid., pp. 503–509. 24 Cf. Kiehling, Funktionsverlust. On the global economic context now Balderston, Economics. 25 Cf. Maschinenbau – Wirtschaft 3 (1924), p. 44 f. and the references in Spoerer, Scheingewinn.

26

2 The German Engineering Boom – Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century

Objectives and Objects of Rationalisation As Christian Kleinschmidt has shown in detail, the rationalization efforts of the 1920s – in contrast to the pre-war period – did not stop at mechanical equipment and workshop organization. Finally, it can be regarded as a special characteristic of the so-called rationalization movement of the 1920s to have identified, with regard to the operational-organizational optimization, subject areas that went beyond this.26 After all, the contemporary symbolic concepts of flow and assembly line production describe only a small section of the measures taken on a supra-company scale.27 It is true that medium-sized and larger companies had initially concentrated on dovetailing the individual stages of production more closely with one another in the sense of flow production, whereby new types of statistical methods had also been used to identify marginal utility areas.28 Subsequently, however, areas such as energy management, the standardisation of workpieces and products within and across companies, workplace design and so-called social rationalisation, especially in the form of performance-related wages, were also included in the agenda.29 In summary, the two decades before the First World War can thus be characterized as a phase of offensive economic modernization, while the 1920s can be characterized as a phase of defensive economic modernization. For both types of economic structural change, however, an enormous, historically unprecedented expansion of the demand for technical expert labor was characteristic.30 The demand for commercial employees, which was also growing considerably at the same time, represented a somewhat different trend in industrial structural change, because it was less directly related to production. Between 1882 and

26

Cf. Kleinschmidt, Rationalisierung, pp. 234–364; Freyerberg, Rationalisierung; Welskopp, Arbeit; Brady, Movement, and of the more recent company studies: Feldenkirchen, Siemens, pp. 224–231 and Pierenkemper, Krise, pp. 218–234. 27 On Ford’s reception until 1925, see Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, Fordismus. Paradoxically, the interwar period was simultaneously marked by manifest aversions to American corporate cultures. Cf. Flik, Ford as well as ZUG 49 (2004), p. 242 f. 28 Consequently, contemporaries also spoke of a scientification of production. Cf. Braun/ Kaiser, Energiewirtschaft, pp. 52–60; Bönig, Fließbandarbeit, pp. 96–175; Kleinschmidt/ Welskopp, Amerika. 29 On the cross-company standardization of workpieces and the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) founded in 1917, cf. in summary NZI 21 (1927), p. 71. On the nationaleconomic argumentation relevant here, cf. Föllmer, Verteidigung, pp. 196–228. 30 Admittedly, both phases resulted in productivity increases, which, however, cannot be validly compared with each other due to the data situation.

2.2 Causes of the German Engineering Boom: Dynamics of Economic. . .

27

1907, the share of all white-collar workers, i.e. including the technical ones, in the industrial and craft workforce grew from 1.6% to 6.1%. In 1933, the share finally amounted to 10.3%.31 In contrast to the commercial employees, the higher technical employees, especially the engineers, were not simply added to the workforce in the secondary sector. Under the general conditions of a rising degree of mechanization as well as increasing rationalization efforts, the engineering boom clearly outstripped employment growth in industry. The Economic Nature of Social Modernisation If these trends are placed in a broader, cross-sectoral economic context, it can be summarised that the expansion of engineering job profiles and qualification requirements was (even) more dynamic than the overarching economic and social modernisation during the period under review.32 First of all, the change in occupational structure must be taken into account. Thus, the above-average growth in the broader sense of higher occupational functional profiles can be traced back: firstly, to the functional differentiation of private and state economic organisation(s), to the tendency towards an “administered world”33, which was eyed sensitively by contemporaries. Secondly, this occupational-functional upgrading is reciprocally rooted in the quantitative and qualitative increase in the supply of goods and services. This structural change in society as a whole in the first third of the twentieth century can be seen in the rise in the standard of living and the expansion of statehood, especially social state activity.34 The – socially admittedly heterogeneous – demand for legal representation and medical care in the form of the people who were involved in these activities on a full-time basis (Fig. 2.1) is also able to reflect in part the depths of the lifeworld of the emerging modern age. Thus, the so-called liberal academic professions of doctors and lawyers were no longer subject to admission restrictions during the period in question: unlike the civil service professions (Fig. 2.1), which also reflect moments of administrative differentiation and social statehood, they were thus able to expand in line with demand. Meanwhile, the demand for production and consumption goods, or rather

31

Cf. Hohorst/Kocka/Ritter, Arbeitsbuch II, p. 69; Petzina/Abelshauser/Faust, Arbeitsbuch III, p. 57; AfA-Bund, p. 26 and also Priamus, Angestellte, pp. 11–15. 32 Modernization is understood here as an approximation to a condition that subsequently exists in a purer form. 33 DtA 9 (1927), p. 79. 34 Cf. Ullmann, Kaiserreich; Peukert, Repulik.

28

2 The German Engineering Boom – Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century Higher officials ((judges, public prosecutors, senior teachers, pastors) Freelance academics (lawyers, doctors) Employed academic technical experts (chemists)

Fig. 2.1 Numerical development of academic occupations by occupational status, Prussia and German Empire 1885–1937, standardized. (Own calculations according to: MüllerBenedict, Karrieren). (All cases linearly interpolated. In order to obtain continuous time series, the higher technical occupations are shown here using the example of employed chemists. Cf. e.g. Social History Workbook, vol. 2, p. 67 f. and vol. 3, p. 57 f)

the highly skilled human effort to produce them (technical experts), the cumulative demand for the semi-public goods of legal representation and medical care (freelance academics) developed even more volatile. According to these indicators, the overarching modernization process of interwar German society thus showed primarily an economic, partly technical face. If one summarises all the economic-social tendencies mentioned so far, it can be said: in addition to the obvious shifts in economic structure (sectors, mechanisation, rationalisation), to explain the remarkable growth of the engineering labour market, the change in social demand or need profiles reflected in it must also be taken into account. In short, production and consumption had an even stronger dynamics than services, even as semi-public, (social) state service sectors, which would eventually characterize a post-industrial development phase of modern societies. Universal Experts: Engineers in Administrative Functional Areas This general increase in the functional importance of technical expert activities in late industrialisation was also based (to a small extent) on a trend in personnel management. Thus, the cost control of production steps, personnel planning in workshops as well as other rationalization-evoked non-technical tasks, which

2.2 Causes of the German Engineering Boom: Dynamics of Economic. . .

29

were increasingly pursued since the turn of the century, were primarily entrusted to engineers rather than merchants.35 The expansion of the fields of activity as well as the expansion of the closely related profession-specific knowledge stocks thus extended beyond the increase in technical complexity per se. However, this did not necessarily make the knowledgtypical of engineering more exclusive or even easier for the engineers themselves to control. After all, the corresponding knowledge and competences were not acquired at school, but in the – occupationally and socially much more permeable – company practice. The introduction of the interdisciplinary technical university (TH) courses of study for administrative engineers (since 1906) and industrial engineers (since 1922) initially seemed to correspond perfectly to such a diffusion of engineering activities into business administration areas. From the point of view of the companies, however, these interdisciplinary educational models were clearly too far removed from practice. Some influential university lecturers even concurred with this view. In fact, the non-technical curriculum components mostly taught very general subjects. For example, compulsory lectures in national economics and philosophy imitated university ideals of education. In contrast to the middle schools, there were no courses in accounting or cost accounting at the TH.36 However, since the commercial components at the middle schools were naturally smaller than at the TH Wirtschaftsingenieur, the diploma engineers originally had great professional hopes for this prototype of a truly interdisciplinary course of study.37 Whether it was the remoteness from practice or the labour market was simply not yet prepared for such complex qualifications: in any case, even the Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI), always on the lookout for positive news about the DiplomIngenieur, could only report a very moderate acceptance of industrial engineers on the labour market.38 In the first third of the twentieth century, however, the engineering profession was also accompanied by (slight) functional downgrading tendencies. Engineers were not only assigned the original tasks of middle management, which had a similar hierarchical structure. In some places, the former areas of responsibility of

35

Cf. Kleinschmidt, Rationalisierung; König, Ingenieure; Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, esp. p. 255 f. 36 Cf. Lexis, Unterrichtswesen Vol. IV, Part 3, pp. 47–52, 91 f. and 124 f.; Grüner, Entwicklung, pp. 64 and 74. 37 Cf. ibid. and Rürup, Wissenschaft and Sodann, Fachhochschule. 38 Cf. TuK 19 (1928), p. 50; TuK 22 (1931), pp. 118–122; Ebert, Wirtschaftsingenieur.

30

2 The German Engineering Boom – Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth-Century

the subaltern foremen were also transferred to engineering status groups from 1900 onwards. For example, in the iron and steel industry of the Ruhr area, the so-called first foremen were partly replaced by technical employees of engineering rank and education.39 Against the background of a steadily increasing degree of mechanization, functional aspects certainly played a role in this process. At the same time, however, the effects of the contemporary expansion of education can also be seen here. This upgrading of the qualifications of an entire functional area was also based on the noticeable increase in the salaries of master craftsmen in the previous decade. The growth of the engineering labour market can thus primarily be attributed to the economic and social modernisation trends described above. On the other hand, however, the engineering boom was also due to the overcrowding in this occupational segment, with correspondingly falling labour costs.

39

Cf. Welskopp, Arbeit, p. 553; König/Weber, Netzwerke, p. 435.

3

Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of German Engineers (Nineteenth Century to 1933)

3.1

The Loss of the Academic Ideal: The Competition Between Two Educational Paths

The Competition Between Two Educational Paths of German Engineers As can be seen, the functional side of the engineering profession developed in a slightly Janus-faced manner in the early twentieth century: the veritable boom in the functional role of technical experts in the economy as a whole, including in the form of the adoption of new fields of activity (cost accounting), contrasted with the downgrading of individual engineering batches to originally subaltern functional areas in production. The expert level of engineers and technicians had, after all, only become distinguishable from less specialised and lower-paid technical salaried jobs since the 1880s: At this time, the functional area of foremen as a hinge between the workers’ workforces on the one hand and senior commercial employees as well as engineers on the other had acquired sharp contours in larger companies.1 The general company evaluation criterias and language regulations soon adapted to this incipient functional separation. The function became a materially and symbolically overformed position. From then on, engineers and technicians differed from foremen not only in terms of salary, work content and working conditions, but also in terms of company symbols, such as dress code and forms of address (such as Lord Engineer).2 1

Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, pp. 118–123. Cf. also Lundgreen, Techniker, pp. 268–271. 2 Cf. Ritter/Tenfelde, Arbeiter; Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, pp. 220–233. # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_3

31

32

3 Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of. . .

At the turn of the century, the differentiation of technical staff into master craftsmen and engineers took on even sharper contours. This was not about the actual engineers, but about the aspirants – concerning the access to the profession. As a criterion for entry or advancement to the engineer rank, formal, school-based qualifications finally and comprehensively prevailed over the self-taught apprenticeship of craftsmen and competent workers. In the 1870s, learning on the job had still provided the professional basis for around half of industrial engineers. Now it was almost impossible to reach an engineering position without graduating from a mechanical engineering or building trades school (both: middle schools). A survey of Berlin industry in 1907 revealed a proportion of only 4% of engineers and technicians who had neither a university nor a middle school education.3 Thus the “school culture”4 (Lundgreen) had finally prevailed for the higher technical professions as well. It must be remembered, however, that the displacement of the autodidacts was accelerated by the enormous increase in the number of graduates from middle schools and universities, which exceeded demand. However, the long customary career-long advancement from the position of a master or selftaught draftsman to anengineers rank by no means completely lost its significance during this period. With evening and weekend courses, some mechanical engineering schools finally provided a suitable offer for this clientele. Between 1900 and 1914, the number of participants in these further education courses rose even more sharply than in the full-time classes, which were also expanding rapidly.5

Critical Competition: The Equal Treatment of Middle School and University Graduates in Companies With the numerical and functional expansion, the engineering profession naturally also became more diverse in itself. The range of status and salaries extended from the simple plant engineer, who had to supervise the production processes and, as the direct superior of the foremen, also had to perform coordinating, people-managing tasks to a large extent, on the one hand to the head of a design office in large

3

Cf. Jäckel, Statistics, p. 26 f. Due to the focus on large-scale industry, autodidacts are presumably underweighted here. Moreover, for Berlin’s highly developed industrial profile, which was characterized by the electrical companies Siemens and AEG, a further aboveaverage qualification profile can be assumed. 4 Lundgreen, Education. 5 Cf. Sander, Ingenieurwesen,.

3.1 The Loss of the Academic Ideal: The Competition Between Two. . .

33

companies on the other. Often with a share in the profits as well as procuration, this elite of employed engineers achieved about ten times the average engineer’s salary. Finally, the most important professional characteristic of the engineering profession in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth-century was the low importance of meritocratic criteria. Thus, the level of formal education, the status as a middle school or university graduate was irrelevant for access to the engineering profession. As in senior commercial positions, promotion prospects continued to be based on a biographically downstream, professional-practical evaluation procedure. This primacy of practice, which already preoccupied contemporaries, can be demonstrated in broad terms for the first time on the basis of a sample of the six most important job markets of engineering journals from the years 1906–1930. Here, the proportion of advertisements explicitly seeking diploma engineers was in the per mille range. But even the formal qualifications – although a mechanical engineering diploma or middle school graduation was now a prerequisite in all places – were rarely mentioned.6 In addition to the scope of previous practical experience, the central quality criteria were the technical focus in a particular industry and the technological reputation and market position of the previous employer. For example, advertisers expected “extensive experience in the automotive industry, proof of success with a well-known company.”7 Middle school and university graduates thus competed on an equal footing. This constellation had emerged in the 1890s, when the first graduates of the middle schools, which firmed as “Höhere and Niedere Maschinenbauschulen”, had entered the labour market. Within the engineering community, the competition between the two groups of graduates was, as mentioned, well known. According to this, academics and non-academics were, in the judgment of a contemporary, “judged solely by their ability to perform, that is, by their value to the company; and in this judgment previous education plays no part.”8 This remained almost unknown in the

6

In addition to the Zeitschrift des Verbandes Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure (Journal of the Association of German Diploma Engineers) and the German Technicians’Journal (Deutsche Techniker Zeitung), the Norddeutsche Zeitschrift für die gesamte technische Industrie (NZI, since 1906), the VDI-Nachrichten (since 1921), Stahl und Eisen (since 1881), Maschinenbau – der Betrieb/Wirtschaft (since 1921/1922), as well as the job index for scientific and technical academics, which has been in print since 1922, were reviewed. The VDDI also had to admit to its members that “there is complete uncertainity as to whether an academic is wanted or not.” K. Friedrich, Der Verband und seine Arbeit, in: TuK 15 (1925), pp. 99–101, here 99. 7 TuK 18 (1927), issue 9, p. IX. and Berndt, Not, p. 11 f. 8 Czwalina, Lage, p. 219.

34

3 Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of. . .

public career guidance offices. And even many national economists concerned with the subject took it for granted that diploma engineers would end up at different levels of the professional hierarchy than middle school graduates.9 Thus it was a pioneering achievement when Ottoheinz von der Gablentz attempted to communicate the competition of educational levels on the engineering job market to a primarily scientific public in the series Deutsche Berufskunde (german occupational guidelines) in 1930.10 The representatives of the diploma engineers, on the other hand, ignored the “educational question of engineers” for tactical reasons. At the beginning of the 1920s, the Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI) conceded for the first time that in the case of special requirements for a position, only “special practice”11 and not academic training was in demand. The members were probably already sufficiently aware of this. In sharp contrast to meritocratic ideas, practical experience in the workplace thus overrode formal school qualifications. To a certain extent, even formal school education was affected by this primacy of practice. Thus, even those who had been enrolled at a technical university for a few semesters were considered (fully) trained engineers.12 Against this background, many TH students refrained from taking the (diploma) examination. In the longer term, however, the importance of the Diplom title increased – not on the part of employers, but on the part of students. After just under 30% in the pre-war period, the proportion of graduates with a diploma arised to 70% by the end of the 1920s.13 However, equal opportunities for university (TH) graduates on the one hand and middle school graduates on the other did not apply to all segments of the industrial labour market. In the field service of large companies, for example, value was placed on the status of a diploma engineer. It has been handed down from Werner von Siemens that he sent only university graduates to negotiations on the construction of electricity plants, which were conducted with the academic government building officers.14 Similar evidence can be found for individual large chemical

9

Cf. Reichsarbeitsverwaltung, Handbuch; Strater, Arbeitsämter; Anonymous, Untersuchungen. 10 Cf. Gablentz, Industrie, p. 145; NZI 21 (1927), p. 45. 11 TuK 18 (1927), p. 188. 12 Cf. Czwalina, Lage, p. 214 f.; Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 273 f. 13 Cf. Table A.2 and Sander, Ingenieurwesen, Tab. 5.1.2.1 (diploma examinations). 14 Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 256 f.

3.1 The Loss of the Academic Ideal: The Competition Between Two. . .

35

companies.15 In the personal contact between negotiating partners, the high symbolic value was evidently attributed to educational titles. In addition, the university graduates certainly benefited from their often upper middle-class origins, which may have ensured an even closer, more everyday cultural fit in contact with the higher officials.16 In addition to these generally senior positions in the field, an academic title was also required for certain, albeit even rarer, internal management positions. These were mainly engineers as members of the management and the heads of design offices, positions that were also of particular importance for the external image of the company.

Dominance of Business Rationalities The present findings on status assignment cultures in the engineering profession also allow connections to more recent theoretical developments in economic and business history research. New institutional economics, for example, emphasizes the social, interaction-generated character of organizations. The interest here is directed in particular at “management deficits,”17 which can arise from the everyday cultural dispositions of the actors. On the other hand, this New Institutionalism has drawn attention to the tendency towards isomorphism with regard to organizations that are exposed to similar environmental conditions. Finally, the mass data on the labour market, income, etc., show no evidence of particular aversions or coalitions between individual groups in the engineers’ environment.18 The non-differentiation between the two engineering qualification levels points to the strict approach of management according to functional usability. The advertisements in the job markets show that there were virtually no ‘deviants’ in this respect. Furthermore, the managements utilized established status constructions in the right places from an economic point of view: in the case of the engineers in the field service mentioned above, the representative character of the job simply justified the preference for academics from an economic point of view. In the end, there was no social pact between the ruling classes – i.e. between

15

Cf. König/Weber, Netzwerke, p. 407. In 1875, Siemens and Halske employed as many as three of these so-called technical correspondents. Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 141 f. 17 Welskopp, Unternehmenskulturen, p. 265. Cf. also the other contributions in Berghoff/ Vogel, Wirtschaftsgeschichte. 18 Cf. in particular the companies listed in Table 3.1 and the associated studies. 16

36

3 Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of. . .

bourgeois entrepreneurs and just nominally bourgeois diploma engineers, who often came from entrepreneurial families. This would have been the only way in which the diploma engineers could have achieved advantages of opportunity over the middle classes. Finally, it is striking that the way in which the increasingly important key group of engineers is dealt with is very similar across companies – possibly a consequence of isomorphic effects in this late industrial capitalism.

Technical Universities: Questionable Practical Relevance In the vast majority of company fields of employment, professional opportunities were thus determined by practical experience. To be sure, no one questioned the greater extent of theoretical knowledge possessed by university students. This was especially true of higher mathematics, where the school administrations of the federal states were sensitive to maintaining the gap between educational levels – and until 1930 had simply forbidden the middle schools to teach differential and integral calculus.19 In parallel, the practical relevance of university studies was always doubted by almost all stakeholders. In 1908, the German Committee for Technical Education (Datsch) – a committee made up of representatives of engineering associations, universities, industry and ministerial administrations – recommended for the first time that universities appoint professors with industrial experience wherever possible.20 However, the practical cult of engineering, which actually also shaped the TH, was hardly reflected in the curricula and teaching methods there: the lecture still dominated.21 Thus even the most influential advocate of diploma engineers, the Berlin mechanical engineering professor Alois Riedler, had to concede the advantage to middle schools that the education there consisted to a much greater extent of practical “laboratory courses.”22

19

Cf. Grüner, Entwicklung, p. 63. Cf. Deutscher Ausschuss für Technisches Schulwesen, Abhandlungen, vol. 4, pp. 35–52. 21 König, Ingenieure, p. 237 f. Cf. ZVDI 58 (1914), p. 768. 22 Cf. ZVDI 52 (1908), pp. 702–721, here 703 f. Riedler’s fundamental argumentation in favor of academic engineering education met with considerable opposition. Among others, he was insulted as a “reactionary” by the VDI chairman Theodor Peters ibid., for which he “thanked him warmly.” 20

3.1 The Loss of the Academic Ideal: The Competition Between Two. . .

37

Criticism of the practical relevance of TH education remained virulent until the mid-1930s.23 This was probably also due to the fact that the company internship, which had been obligatory since 1902 as a component of technical university studies, had developed into a veritable farce. After massive complaints that their operational processes were being impaired by the instruction of interns, the companies had switched to charging an apprenticeship fee and teaching the university students in separate school-based courses outside the workshops. Even various attempts at study reform had not been able to change this obvious mismatch of formal education and professional requirements. After all, beyond the industrial engineering courses, the normal engineering courses had also been enriched with “elements of economics.”24 A precise analysis of the debate shows, however, that this did not refer to practical business skills. Rather, it was about the “humanistically”25 educated engineer – for reasons of social valorisation. The technical universities, i.e. their professors as almost the only advocates of the diploma engineers, were thus literally torn between industrial practice and academic status ambitions. Due to the low acceptance of the comparatively young academic discipline by the established bourgeois elites, engineering representatives and educational politicians repeatedly gave priority to strengthening the academic profile. The middle schools did not have to cope with a comparable conflict of goals. Co-directed by the business associations and financially supported by industry, a practical engineering education was almost bound to succeed here.26

Engineers and Technicians Different terms for university and middle school graduates hardly became established during this period. In this respect, the contemporary terminology of technical experts also took account of the limited distinction between the formal educational paths. Thus, until the 1880s, the term “technician” was used almost exclusively. The Association of German Engineers (VDI), founded in 1856, thus 23

Accordingly, the National Socialists primarily promoted the middle schools. For the following, cf. König, Ingenieure, p. 237 f.; ZVDI 58 (1914), p. 768 (report by Datsch). 24 Thus the editor-in-chief of the journal Maschinenbau, Adolf Schilling in: DATSCH, Stimmen, p. 46 f. Cf. also ZVDI 64 (1920), pp. 154–157. 25 Walter Franz, Unstimmigkeiten im Zielgedanken der Hochschulreform, in: TuK 16 (1925), p. 1. 26 Cf. Lundgreen, Ausbildung; Sander, Ingenieurwesen. Technical education usually fell under the jurisdiction of the trade ministries of the Länder.

38

3 Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of. . .

represented a nominal exception. From the late nineteenth century onwards, both terms, technician and engineer, were used side by side.27 Some companies consistently referred to their technical experts as technicians, but the majority as engineers, so that the term increasingly gained the upper hand in the public sphere.28 Meanwhile, the Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI), founded in 1909, attempted to enforce protection of the engineering title for university graduates even before World War I. However, the association failed not only because of the liberal economic, anti-regulatory culture in the Prussian Ministry of Trade, but also because of the influential VDI. After all, only a minority of VDI members had an academic education; in 1917, the figure was exactly 24%.29 The Federation of Technical-Industrial Employees (Butib), which was founded in 1904 and had a large membership, had actually accommodated the VDDI on this issue. The entire membership base – predominantly university graduates – was referred to by the association leadership as technicians. The only association in the Germanspeaking world that was able to obtain protection of the title before the Second World War thus remained the Austrian Association of Architects and Engineers (ÖAIV). Since 1917, the title of engineer had been reserved here for university graduates.30

3.2

The Change in the Educational Profile of German Engineers

Compared to their significantly lower educational expenditure, middle school graduates thus enjoyed a comparatively advantageous labour market situation. As a result, the student numbers of the mechanical engineering and building trade schools increased more strongly than those of the TH. Already at the turn of the century, the student numbers of the technical universities (TH) were surpassed, although about half of the middle schools had only entered the technical training

27

Cf. Freytag, Laufbahn; Gispen, New Profession; id., Quest. Cf. Gispen, Quest; K. Friedrich, Der Verband und seine Arbeit, in: TuK 15 (1925), pp. 99–101. 29 Cf. Neufeld, Academics. 30 Cf. ZVDI 61 (1917), p. 503. Although already tackled in the early 1950s, it was not until 1971 that a so-called engineering law was finally passed in the Federal Republic. However, with far-reaching exceptions for practitioners in professional life (Ing. grad.), the use of the title of engineer was limited to university and middle schoolgraduates. 28

3.2 The Change in the Educational Profile of German Engineers

39

market in 1890.31 In terms of the annual number of graduates, the lead of the middle schools was even greater. While the duration of training at the TH was at least eight semesters, it averaged five semesters at the middle schools. Also due to the shorter duration of training, the higher, lower mechanical engineering schools and building trade schools had overtaken the TH in terms of graduates for the first time in the winter semester of 1897/1898. This development was of course only very slightly reflected in the composition of the professional workforce. The output of the education system, for example, naturally only covers those entering the profession, i.e. a small proportion of the engineers as a whole. By means of extrapolations it can be said that of the approximately 100,000 engineers in the 1907 occupational census (Table 2.1), about half had acquired their qualifications at the TH.32 In 1925 and 1933, the figure was about one third in each case. The stable proportions in the census years 1925 and 1933 testify to the late boom in technical university education. Figure 3.1 shows the annual numbers of graduates as shares of the total training performance of both levels of education. The favourable employment prospects of middle school graduates and the associated long-term increase in the importance of this type of school can also be seen at the company level (Table 3.1). Reinhold Jäckel’s survey of the Berlin electrical and metalworking industry in 1907, which attracted a great deal of attention at the time, had already produced a ratio of two to one in favour of middle school pupils – and thus provided the first representative indication of the importance of middle school pupils – even in high-tech companies.33 In general, the data provided by personnel administrations on the formal qualifications of their employees should be treated with caution or are often missing completely – precisely because they attached little importance to this fact. The fact that, on the other hand, practical work experience was often listed in great detail in the personnel files is a further indication of the low significance of formal qualifications.34 The qualification profiles of various personnel groups in Table 3.1 initially reveal the later addition of middle schools to the technical training system, which gained momentum from 1890 onwards. The figure for MAN, which employed four

31

Cf. Sander, Ingenieurwesen; Lundgreen, Education. Calculated on the basis of the data in Table A.2 and a working life of 32 years. 33 Cf. Jäckel, Statistics, pp. 26–34. 34 Cf. Berghoff, Kleinstadt; Schulz, Ausbildung, p. 157, as well as the survey conducted specifically for this purpose by MAN General Director Carl von Bach in UArch Chemnitz, 302/IV/1577. 32

3 Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of. . .

40 100 90 80 70

Middle schools

60 50 40 30 20 10

Technical universities

0 percent 1898 1900 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1922 1925 1931

Fig. 3.1 Graduates of technical middle schools as shares of total educational attainment, German Reich/Empire 1898–1931 (percentages). (Source: as in Table A.2.1. Note: The calculation of the number of graduates is based on an average training period of 2.5 years at (higher and lower) middle schools and of 4 years at universities)

times as many middle school graduates as university graduates in 1898, testifies to the immediate acceptance of the comparatively new mechanical engineering schools and their graduates.35 Even in the 1920s, those middle school graduates were still welcome: In other words, at a time when a growing number of university graduates were crowding the already oversaturated labor market. This is illustrated by the case of Georg Fischer Stahlwerke. The cut-throat competition of the 1920s had apparently not given university students any significant advantages either.

Special Case: Chemical Industry and Chemists The high proportion of academics in BASF’s workforce reflects the special role of the chemical industry and chemists in the industrial context. Not only in terms of employment opportunities did technical academics – mechanical and electrical engineers were also employed here – enjoy advantages in this industry. In marked

35

The middle school graduates reported for Siemens in 1876 were graduates of the ProvinzialGewerbeschulen, a Prussian predecessor of the Höhere Maschinenbauschulen (technical middle schools, higher branch).

16 95 62 1295 61 69 31

41

24

150

743

13

15

9

0.29

0.22

0.21

0.57

2.42

0.25

2.56

University per middlegraduates 3 4.25

61

155

151

– –

–

–

41,536

233

191

1334

120

– 336

–

–

133

6360

2737

70

–

Total workforce 6 ca. 1140

Commercial clerk 5 13

Reference groups Technical employees with other training 4 –

Sources: Hippel, Weltunternehmen, p. 106; Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, pp. 280, 470, 563, and 574; Jäckel, Statistik; Siegrist, Familienbetrieb, pp. 173 and 177; UArch Chemnitz, 302/IV/1577 (estate of Carl von Bach, Lehrlingsausbildung und Fortbildungsschulwesen)

BASF 1876 Siemens 1890 MAN 1898 BASF 1899 Siemens 1910 G. Fisher 1920 G. Fisher 1929 G. Fisher 1941

Engineers and technicians University Middle school graduates graduates 1 2 17 4

Table 3.1 Salaried technical experts by qualification compared with other workforce groups 1876–1941

3.2 The Change in the Educational Profile of German Engineers 41

42

3 Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of. . .

contrast to other branches, they also earned considerably more here than their colleagues from secondary schools.36 For the nineteenth century, this constellation can still obviously be traced back to what the education system had to offer. Only one middle school trained chemical engineers; therefore almost all chemists therefore came from universities or the technical universities (TH).37 “Unlike the chemist, who is generally a university graduate, the graduate engineer has to share the field with a much larger number of non-academics.”38 However, the monopoly of supply of academic chemists described here still does not explain the significantly higher salary level of all technical graduates in the chemical industry – and this in comparison (1) to middle school graduates employed in this industry, and (2) to diploma engineers in all branches. Apparently, there was a renumeration spin-off from the chemists to all technical experts in the chemical industry. First of all, the professional imbalance between chemists and diploma engineers can actually be traced back to functional industry differences. This refers to the special development and production effort in the enormously expanding chemical industry.39 As a result of this special technological level, theoretical knowledge gained greater importance than in other branches of industry. Autodidacts were also pushed out of the access to the technical expert level much earlier – at the latest in the 1880s. At this time, the majority of chemists were still educated at classical universities, usually had a doctorate and had spent several years as an assistant at a university department.40 From this monopoly on the supply of formally highly qualified chemists, which was determined by the history of education, a special, structurally consolidated employment culture was to develop in the chemical industry in the following period. The middle school chemists who joined later were not (or no longer) able to penetrate this structure. Finally, the diploma engineers employed in the chemical

36

In the quite extensive historical research on chemical industrial companies, the professional circumstances of chemists are hardly taken into account: Cf. Hippel, Weg; Johnson, Macht; Plumpe, I.G Farbenindustrie; Gartmayer, Angestellte. Hardly any more on this can be found in Johnson, Academic. 37 Cf. Sander, Ingenieurwesen, Table 5.1.1.1; Titze, Hochschulstudium, p. 152 f. 38 BL 1 (1919), P. 33. 39 Up to this point, the older attempt at explanation by Burchardt, Professionalisierung and ders, Zusammenarbeit, is more or less sufficient. 40 Chemists were only trained in comparable numbers at technical universities from the 1880s onwards. Cf. König/Weber, Netzwerke, pp. 126–133 and 393–413, Janßen, Chemie.

3.2 The Change in the Educational Profile of German Engineers

43

industry also benefited from such an academic culture.41 Thus the chemical industry formed the only industrial sector in which employed technical academics were distinguished from non-academics according to meritocratic criteria. The chemical industry thus formed a professional enclave in the labour market of technical experts.42

Doctorate as a Career Factor? In view of the less than favourable employment opportunities for university engineers, it seems reasonable to assume that the doctorate of Dr.-Ing. introduced in 1899 was seen as a tried and tested means of improving one’s own chances on the labour market. The number of annual Dr.-Ing. doctorates, which rose from 120 (1905) to 270 (1912) and 458 (1925) to 543 (1930), initially seems to confirm this.43 A closer look at the technical disciplines, however, puts this statement into perspective. Thus, about half of the above-mentioned increase was accounted for by TH doctoral students in chemistry. For chemists, however, the doctorate did not mean an additional qualification, but merely an adaptation to the well-rehearsed cultures of the chemists’ labour market. Since no public examination below the doctorate could be taken at universities, the doctorate had become the usual form of degree. Similar to medicine, this special cultural feature is still visible today – in form of extraordinarily high doctoral rates.

Two Qualification Paths: One Competence Profile Between the 1890s and the First World War, middle school graduates had thus to a certain extent taken the place of the autodidacts. This not only reflects the general increase in the importance of formal education. At the same time, the engineering profession was thus definitively fixed on qualification heterogeneity. The two levels of engineering education were not the result of any specific labour market 41

However, chemists made up the largest proportion of technical experts overall. Cf. ZaCh 34 (1921), p. 195 f.; ZaCh 49 (1936), p. 522. A cross-check of various surveys reveals 727 non-academic chemical technicians, 2875 engineers and around 5500 chemists in the chemical industry in the mid-1920s. 42 For a comparison with the classical academic professions, cf. lSander, Professionalisierung. 43 Cf. ZVDI 45 (1900) – 62 (1917) as well as Mitteilungen des Verbandes Deutscher Hochschulen 1 (1924/1925) – 5 (1930/1931).

44

3 Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of. . .

requirements, but were rather based on the established formal hierarchical structure of the public education system. Companies were looking for theoretically sound school-leavers who wareshaped into practical engineers in the company anyway. The school level of the middle schools was quite obviously sufficient for this. Even after the fundamental implementation of school-based vocational qualification towards the end of the nineteenth century, learning on the job continued to characterise the engineering profession.

3.3

The Employment Profile: On the Way to the Late Industrial White-Collar Occupation of German Engineers

The change in employment conditions had a greater impact on the social situation of engineers than the shifts in the educational profile. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a modern prototype of technical professionalism based on school education had already emerged in the form of higher building officials. Thus, the state building administration in particular had benefited from the process of development and penetration of the economy and society by the early modern feudalistic state system. This dynamic continued in the early nineteenth century, when an early liberal state activity began to take hold and it was no longer just a matter of public infrastructure development, but also of supervising a growing private building activity.44 Economic-social change and the political conjuncture were thus favourable for technical experts for a long time. Thus, construction officials had moved into the sovereign sphere of the highest level of civil service at a time when this area was still occupied exclusively by lawyers. After judges and public prosecutors, building officials were the second group of senior civil servants whose careers had been comprehensively formalized in Prussia: since 1831, two state examinations with an intervening candidate phase had been obligatory.45 Until the 1870s, the engineering profession was (still) dominated by civil service. At the same time, the volume of higher technical civil service at the middle of the nineteenth century roughly corresponded to that of civil servants in the judiciary, i.e. judges and public prosecutors – after all, the administrative function

44 Cf. Siegrist, Professionen; Ritter, Rolle; Lundgreen, Techniker, pp. 178–189; König/ Weber, Netzwerke; König, Staatsdiener. 45 Cf. Bolenz, Baubeamten, pp. 121–128; the contributions in Müller-Benedict, Karrieren.

3.3 The Employment Profile: On the Way to the Late Industrial White-Collar. . .

45

group par excellence.46 The number of technical experts employed by the private sector was still growing rather modestly during this period. After all, the privatesector industrialization dynamic was carried primarily by owner-engineers on the one hand, and by freelance engineers in the semi-state-organized steam-boiler supervision on the other.47 This constellation then changed fundamentally with the transition to a highly industrial phase of development with its relative growth of medium-sized and large companies. By the end of the 1870s, there were already more employed engineers than civil servants and freelancers combined. From Self-Employment and Civil Servants to Salaried Employees At the turn of the century, white-collar workers already outnumbered the other two occupations by a factor of two and, according to the 1939 occupational census, by a factor of four. The remaining 20% were shared more or less equally by the selfemployed and civil servants (including public employees).48 Due to the relative stagnation of the construction industry – which was dominated by smaller firms and freelancers – the share of self-employed existence(s) in the engineering profession had shrunk particularly sharply over the previous five decades. In the wake of the nationalisation of the railways and the expansion of the provision of public goods since the 1880s – gas, water, electricity, postal and telecommunications services, and passenger transport – civil servants and state and local government employees had comparatively boomed.49 The opportunity for self-employment was thus dwindling rather more rapidly than the opportunity for access to civil service. Both forms of employment were regarded by contemporaries as similarly attractive – and rightly so, of course – as considerably more appealing than white-collar existence in large industrial enterprises. Since about the turn of the century, the industrial employee has thus formed the standard type of engineer. At the same time, the qualification profile had shifted in favour of middle school graduates. In addition, the boom of the industrial economy was also associated with occupationally and socially less explosive effects, i.e. effects on the specialisation. Mechanical engineering, electrical engineering

46

Cf. Sander, Jura, p. 129. Cf. Lundgreen, Bild; id., Techniker; Sander, Ingenieurwesen; id., Krise. 48 Cf. Table 2.1. 49 Cf. Lux, Stellung; Mertens, Privatbeamten; TuK 18 (1927), p. 234 f.; DTZ 6 (1924), p. 260; Bolenz, Baubeamten. 47

46

3 Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of. . .

and chemistry increasingly dominated the industry – both on the labour market and in training.

The Public Service: The Entitlement System in Retreat With the relative decline of senior building officials, engineers lost what had once been their most important professional point of reference. It is true that the state sector (public goods) expanded. But posts in the higher civil service remained at around 4000 between 1870 and 1930.50 Thus, although they still accounted for around a tenth of engineers in the civil service in the 1930s, they were of course a vanishingly small proportion of the total professional group – around 1%.51 This decline in the numerical importance of senior civil servants was significant for one reason in particular: outside the building administrations, there was de facto no senior civil service reserved for academics. The expansion of the public goods supply (energy, transport, information) was therefore of no use to diploma engineers. Thus, in the case of the goods utilities, academic engineers were in principle classified in the middle career. Although there was a higher service, the numbers were so small that there was little chance of advancing to this level of the hierarchy in the course of one’s career. The reasons for this have hardly been researched: for the Reichs-Post- und Telegraphenamt (Imperial Post and Telegraph Office), it can be stated that when the apparatus was set up in the early 1880s, the necessary examination board for higher civil servant candidates was simply not set up for reasons that can hardly be reconstructed.52

50

Cf. Deutscher Baukalender 38 (1905), o. p. (1.8.); StatDR, vol. 458, pp. 119, 205 and 407; Bolenz, Baubeamten, pp. 117–122; DTZ 6 (1924), p. 260. The district and municipal master builders included in some of these figures, although mostly academically trained, were mostly in the middle grade, and since 1912 in the newly created „upper middle grade“. 51 In addition, in the course of the comprehensive privatisation of the mining industry, the mining assessors/councillors had been transferred to private-sector employment since the 1880s. 52 Cf. Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung 2 (1882), p. 14; Sander, Ingenieurwesen. According to the Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung (1 (1881), p. 143), the railway administration of the Reich was planning “to abolish the posts of railway master builders [in the higher service] and to bring the (. . .) civil servants of the state railway administration as railway construction and operations inspectors [middle service] to the first budgetary employment.” Cf. UArch Chemnitz, 302/IV, 1557 (Carl von Bach to Prussian-Hessian State Railways v. 12.6.1898); Ulrich, Ausbildung (1893), p. 4 f.

3.3 The Employment Profile: On the Way to the Late Industrial White-Collar. . .

47

However, there is some evidence of strategic action here: On the one hand, the civil service was explicitly kept small compared to the white-collar sector in the public goods utilities. On the other hand, many companies had to make binding projections for their personnel expenditures for 10 years. It was thus hardly possible to adapt to the rapid expansion of these public enterprises. Accordingly, management tasks in the narrower sense were also performed by members of the intermediate civil service or similarly graded salaried employees. The Reichspost, for example, had only two positions in its Berlin headquarters in the early 1890s in the higher technical service – compared to several hundred posts in the middle career.53 Similar to the situation in industry, the diploma engineers in the service administrations thus competed directly with the graduates of the middle schools.54 Only the graduates of the lower branch of the middle schools remained excluded from these inspector posts in the intermediate civil service, as most of them did not have the intermediate school-leaving certificate. In times when the labour market was unfavourable for employees, many TH graduates probably entered such middle careers. The usual salary for inspectors was, after all, roughly on a par with that of industrial engineers. The subaltern option of the middle service was thus not even unattractive to university students in pecuniary terms.55 Nevertheless, the career structures of the goods suppliers motivated even the VDI, anything but a representative of the interests of academic engineers, to complain to the Prussian Minister of Public Works about the “use of the technical universities for the training of middle technical civil servants.”56

State Control and Its Paradoxes Even from today’s perspective, it seems paradoxical when, on the one hand, the educational administrations of the Länder strengthened the academic character of the technical universities with the right to award doctorates in 1899 and the recognition of the diploma examination as the First State Examination in 1903, 53

Cf. Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung 11 (1891), pp. 44 and 464 as well as ZVDI 63 (1919), p. 1018. 54 For the railway administrations and the municipal gas, water and electricity suppliers, see the job advertisements in the Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung, the official organ responsible, contrary to this title, for all areas of the state and municipal service. 55 Cf. Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung 1 (1881) – 34 (1914) and Table 2.3. 56 ZVDI 65 (1910), pp. 1339 and 1960; cf. also Peters, Geschichte, p. 132 f. On the further reasons for this initiative.

48

3 Broken Professionalization: Qualifications and Professional Positions of. . .

while, on the other hand, the ministries of trade and commerce, postal services and public tasks largely deconstructed meritocratic principles at the same time. However, this contradiction between educational hierarchization efforts and the leveling practices of public employers resolved itself to some extent in the interwar period. After the Reichsbahn had made headway in 1920, the other public administrations also set up trainee positions and associated examination boards in the years that followed. After the municipalities had finally followed suit since 1925, the Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI) was only able to establish the absence of such direct access to the higher civil service career for individual companies in the state of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.57 However, this was not associated with an expansion of the higher service; the majority of engineers continued to be in the middle career. Added to this was the “Personnel Reduction Ordinance” of October 23, 1923, with hiring freezes and job cuts that followed it. For the Reichspostverwaltung, for example, this meant that in the second half of the 1920s exactly 20 university graduates a year could be placed as trainees in the higher civil service at what was by then the largest public employer of engineers.58 If one adds up all the service administrations, the number of jobs was probably slightly higher than in the pre-war period. In 1931, the Reichsbahn and Reichspost alone had about 1500 technical employees and civil servants in higher career positions.59 Summa Summarum, including the building administration, one can finally assume for the early 1930s about 11,000 higher technical civil servants as well as similarly classified employees at the Reich, Länder and municipalities.60 At this time, about two thirds of the engineers in the service of public corporations were in intermediate careers (Table 2.1). It is true that the civil service shrank only slightly over the entire period under consideration. However, the marked decline in the importance of the higher civil service has had a significant downgrading

57

Cf. TuK 18 (1927), p. 80. Cf. DTZ 11 (1929), p. 128 f. 59 Cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, p. 35 f. The entire senior civil service of the Reichspost, of which general, non-technical functions accounted for about two-thirds, comprised about 2100 posts in the spring of 1931 (Reichsbahn: about 2000). In 1925, the Reichsbahn had still employed 3285 senior civil servants. Cf. Peters, Personalpolitik, p. 132. 60 According to the Jahrbuch der technischen Berufsverbände 1931, p. 22 f., the Reichsarbeitgemeinschaft technischer Beamtenverbände im Reichsbund der höheren Beamten (RhB) had 11,000 members. The corresponding branch associations also included employees of public corporations and traditionally achieved organization quotas in the range of 80–90%. 58

3.3 The Employment Profile: On the Way to the Late Industrial White-Collar. . .

49

effect on the engineering profession as a whole. In addition to the corresponding real career option, the model of the higher civil service may also have become more fragile. It is difficult to say what economic and political considerations had led to the late introduction of traditional career regulations in the public goods utilities, which was hardly expected by contemporaries.61 Regardless of the cost-induced, insofar modern employment control in the (semi-)public administrations, these had of course not lost their character as highly standardised, less flexible organisational structures. For example, a first state examination in mechanical engineering had always been required for recruitment to a trainee position at the goods supply companies. Although the universities had been offering courses in electrical engineering, metallurgy and marine engineering since the 1880s, it was not possible to take a state examination in these subjects. Throughout the entire period under consideration, the technical management level of the public service administrations was therefore staffed with experts, most of them from other disciplines.62

61 62

Cf. Peters, Personalpolitik, who does not mention this aspect. Cf. Sander, Ingenieurwesen.

4

The Working Life of German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: From Universal Experts to Managed Specialists

4.1

The Technical Experts as an Object of Industrial Dynamics: Bureaucratization and Aspirant System

The usual catalogue of professionalisation criterias also includes working conditions – and this as a partial aspect of the profession-sociological core question of the monopolisation of labour market segments.1 Due to the meanwhile extensive research on the history of enterprises, we know even more about the working conditions of white-collar workers, including their higher batches, than we do about the dependent members of the classical professions, i.e. salaried hospital doctors, judges and prosecutors and senior teachers.2 In the late industrial development phase relevant here, only the overarching trend towards company concentration and the numerical growth of engineering positions at the company level caused a change in working conditions. While the importance of small firms continued to decline after the turn of the century, the proportion of employees in medium-sized firms increased only slightly, while that in large firms with more than 1000 employees rose from 3.3% (1895) to 8.5 (1925).3 At the company level, the tendency to divide the workforce according to ever finer

1

Cf. Rüschemeyer, Professionalisierung; McClelland, Experience, pp. 11–14; Lundgreen, Berufskonstruktion; Heidenreich, Berufskonstruktion; Sander, Professionalisierung; Pfadenhauer/Sander, Professionssoziologie. 2 Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung;, Die Angestellten; ders, Angestellte; Speier, Die Angestellten; Spree, Angestellte; Pierenkemper, Arbeitsmarkt; Schulz, Die Angestellten; Janßen, Medizin; Sander, Jura; Enzelberger, Sozialgeschichte; Bölling, Sozialgeschichte. 3 Cf. Hoffmann, Wachstum, p. 212 (On the basis of technical units). Medium-sized enterprises are understood here as producing units with 11 to 1000 employees. # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_4

51

52 4

The Working Life of German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth. . .

hierarchical criteria, but also according to horizontal, work-content-related criteria, and even in the spectrum of the higher employee ranks, becomes particularly apparent for this period. Around 1900, the design office of the Charlottenburg plant of Siemens & Halske employed a supervisor, four deputies, eight group leaders and 91 subordinate engineers. These were joined by an indeterminable number of draughtsmen and typists.4 With the growth in the size of the company, the job description and everyday working life had moved far away from the idea of the inventor-engineer in the sense of a technical expert with sole responsibility. In the mid-1920s, for example, the Düsseldorf chemical company Henkel felt it had to emphasize, even for the engineers in its development department, that “everyone has a room 4 m wide at his disposal.”5 Contemporaries, however, were mainly chafing at the consequences in terms of work content and expertise: In such a system based on the division of labor, the individual engineer accordingly only overlooks “parts of the design drawings of a machine.”6 The processes of hierarchisation and standardisation of engineering work can thus be understood in part as a secular, inevitable consequence of increasing technical complexity and company sizes. As a result of this change, however, the guiding principles of management also changed. The measures taken against this background additionally drove the standardisation of work processes and the expansion of operating units.7 These were therefore reciprocal processes in which cause and consequence can hardly be distinguished. Thus it was a further consequence of the growing number of engineers per company that these highly qualified and -paid employees were also included in new methods of personnel management. For example, since the 1890s many engineers in medium-sized and large companies were subject to fixed working hours, the fulfilment of which was also monitored. Nor were senior commercial and technical employees spared the so-called reporting system, i.e. regular appraisals by superiors. The economist Carl Erich Raßbach even

4

Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 482; on the following, cf. ibid., pp. 182–194, 284–292, 482–504; Siegrist, Familienbetrieb; Schulz, Arbeiter. 5 Werden und Wirken (Henkel), p. 150; Wischermann, Unternehmenskommunikation. 6 NZI 2 (1907), p. 136. 7 Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensorganisation; Siegrist, Familienbetrieb; Franz, Markt, pp. 84–90. Above all, the rapidly growing range of commercial literature since the end of the nineteenth century is likely to have ensured that guiding principles were effective across companies.

4.1 The Technical Experts as an Object of Industrial Dynamics:. . .

53

thought he had to warn young engineers against the questionnaires of the personnel departments on confessional and political attitudes.8 The increasing degree of standardization of personnel organization instruments naturally collided with the professional self-image of engineers. Thus, in contrast to the masses of formally less educated commercial employees, the engineer saw himself not only as an autonomous, insofar professional expert, whose technical judgement could only be questioned to a limited extent by authority.9 As a result of the traditional bourgeois elites’ criticism of technology and the engineering profession, engineers had moreover developed a professional ethos that focused increasingly on the practical and the creative – and in this respect came into an initially latent, and in the 1920s more and more openly articulated, opposition to the utilization-oriented reality of employment.10 These tendencies were commented on pathetically in the otherwise decidedly entrepreneur-friendly Technische Monatshefte: But the technician is not only a technician, he is also a human being. And in the purely human, the huge world company becomes mortal. Among the army of employees, the individual disappears. It is a coincidence if his special abilities are recognized.11

The bureaucratisation push of the 1890s and 1900s, which was clearly recognizable in larger medium-sized and large companies, naturally only affected a proportion of engineers in real terms. Until the 1920s, just under half of the technical experts were still employed in medium-sized or small companies with fewer than 200 employees.12 Here there were usually at most a handful of engineers. This meant that the importance of the individual engineer for operational processes was inescapably visible, and his contact with the management was direct, so that disciplinary measures were only applied to a limited extent.13

8

Cf. Raßbach, Betrachtungen, p. 229. Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 172 f.; Johnson, Power, p. 156. 10 Cf. esp. Dienel, Optimismus; Lundgreen, Bild; Freytag, Laufbahn and Matschoß, Vom Ingenieur. 11 Ernst Bütikofer, Der Angestellte in der Großfirma, in: Technische Monatshefte 9 (1918/ 1919), p. 245 f., here 245. On the Zeitgeist behind this. 12 Cf. Zentralarchiv, Berufszählungen, Datensatz BZ.25.T02.DAT4. A different interpretation of the same occupational census contemporary in Speier, Die Angestellten (1932/1933), p. 31. Cf. also Potthoff, Privatbeamtenschaft, p. 133. 13 Cf. Freitag, Laufbahn, p. 33 f. (with further evidence). 9

54 4

The Working Life of German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth. . .

Working Conditions: Double Deprofessionalisation The professionalization of university engineers was thus not only challenged by the failed monopolization of a labor market segment. Compared to the classical academic professions, the specific work-organizational over-forming of the highly industrial salaried workforce also marks a clear dividing line. Thus, for the vast majority of industrial engineers, the scope for action in shaping their own work processes can be estimated to be significantly smaller than for established professionals in medical practices, courts and schools. In addition, since the 1890s, the practice of employing engineers entering the profession initially for 1 or 2 years as candidates, as so-called Diätare, had become increasingly common.14 From the point of view of the companies, the engineer acquired his core skills only on the job and not in the course of formal schooling. The proliferation of these trainees was also one of the central criticisms of the Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI) before the First World War. For once, the VDI, which had an affinity with industry, sided with the employees on this issue: among all white-collar professions, there were “no cheaper workers than academically educated engineers at the beginning of their careers.”15 In fact, the salaries of dieticians amounted to only about half of what would otherwise be paid to entry-level employees. At first glance, the introduction of the dietary model seems to have been a consequence of general, occupationally unspecific industrial cost-cutting strategies. However, the overcrowding of the engineering labour market, i.e. the ubiquity of labour and a correspondingly weak market position, must also be taken into account. The aspirant system became particularly popular whenever the engineering labour market showed stronger overcrowding tendencies – especially throughout the 1920s. Even the Norddeutsche Zeitung für die gesamte technische Industrie (NZI), an employers’ organ, had to note this.16 Above all, however, a comparable traineeship remained unknown among in the middle and upper commercial management.17 But what was the model for this aspirant system for highly educated technical experts? First of all, the traineeship and assessorship of lawyers, theologians and

14 Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, pp. 284–292; NZI 21 (1927), p. 72; the term Diätar refers to the comparatively short, usually weekly, remuneration intervals. 15 Thimm, Privatbeamte, p. 13. 16 Cf. NZI 21 (1927), p. 72. 17 Cf. DlA 1 (1919) ff. and Franz, Markt, pp. 181–207.

4.2 Non-competition Clause and Inventor Protection

55

higher teachers seems to suggest itself here. However, the comparatively low importance that industrial management attached to formal school qualifications argues against the role model function of meritocratic public career systems. Employment as an aspirant (Diätar), after all, affected middle and university graduates alike. Presumably – and this is what contemporaries also suggest – it was primarily the artisan apprenticeship that stood as a godfather.18 Finally, the relative dependence on the labour market situation makes it clear that the dietetic system was at least as much a cost-cutting instrument as a personnel development tool.

4.2

Non-competition Clause and Inventor Protection

During the period under consideration, there were only a few factors that counteracted the described integration of engineers into capitalist labour market dynamics, into the power of the managements. This concerned above all the further development of employment contract and inventor law. In 1869, the trade regulations of the North German Confederation, which were incorporated into imperial law in 1871/1878, had granted the so-called technicians a special role within the “private civil servants”, i.e. employees. Beyond this materially inconsequential differentiation, however, there was no protection of job titles (engineer, technician), nor were there any further special regulations that would have brought the technical experts close to the established academic professions. When, under the pressure of the impending class division in the early twentieth century, the forming welfare state began to increasingly address the social issues of white-collar workers, engineers were even to benefit from this somewhat more than other groups of employees. In the summer of 1914, a new legal regulation of the so-called Konkurrenzklausel (competition clause) was introduced. This supplementary agreement under private law was common in around 80% of employee’s contracts at the time. It made it considerably more difficult to change employer, which – in line with the basic idea of protecting trade secrets – applied to the direct competitors of the previous employer. In the event of termination by the employee, non-competition

18

Cf. Grüner, Entwicklung, pp. 96–102 and 189–258.

56 4

The Working Life of German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth. . .

clauses provided for a prohibition of employment for mostly 1–2 years as well as in some cases a pro rata continuation of salary payment.19 Now, in 1914, the waiting period was limited to a maximum of 2 years and at least 50% continuation of salary was made obligatory. The decisive factor for this reform had been pressure from employees’ associations.20 In the case of senior commercial employees, the construction was almost as common as in the case of engineering employment contracts. Against the background that the non-competition clause was in fact applied much more broadly than only to direct competitors, however, the question of direct competition was not clarified as a matter of principle.21 Engineers thus continued to face the risk of significant income losses as well as the interruption of their employment biography. This was all the more true when one takes into account the enormous importance for career opportunities of a technically specific professional practice, often based on concrete processes or types of construction. The new legal regulation of 1914 thus only compensated for part of the disadvantages that resulted from the key functional position of engineers in the industrial economy.

The Long Struggle for Inventor’s Rights During the first third of the twentieth century, the right of inventors was debated in technical and labour law journals with similar excitement as the competition clause. In terms of their employment opportunities, however, the inventor’s right was of less practical than symbolic significance for the vast majority of engineers. The ideal image of the “creative”22 engineer, who tried to distinguish himself from the more theoretical natural scientists, was condensed in the type of inventor. In view of the

19

In 1914, however, this only applied to around one sixth of all clause contracts. Alternatively, the employee could also pay a contractual penalty, which was roughly equivalent to one year’s salary. Cf. Günther, Techniker, pp. 185–195; Raßbach, Betrachtungen, pp. 90–109; Schulz, Arbeiter, pp. 279–286. 20 Cf. Law Amending the Commercial Code of 10 June 1914, in: Reichsgesetzblatt 1914, pp. 209–213, and on the version valid to date Reichsgesetzblatt 1896, pp. 145–149. 21 This question had also remained unexamined when the Mühlheim cable manufacturer Felten & Guillaume sued a total of six emigrated employees between 1908 and 1911 for compliance with the non-competition clause and the courts had already proposed a wage continuation of 50% as a settlement. Cf. Schulz, Arbeiter, pp. 279–286. On the 1920s, cf. DlA 7 (1925), p. 175; DlA 10 (1928), pp. 138–140. 22 NZI 21 (1927), p. 63.

4.2 Non-competition Clause and Inventor Protection

57

growth in the size of companies and the increase in the complexity of development and production, a technical invention promised additional income in the early twentieth century, but only in exceptional cases the step into entrepreneurial independence.23 The core of the debate on inventor’s rights was the question of the individualizability of inventions. It was not until 1877 that the German Reich, mainly under pressure from the USA, abandoned its long liberalist, anti-regulatory position in favour of comprehensive protection for inventors. From then on, however, the Reich Patent Office, which operated according to “enlightened-absolutist”24 standards, granted the legal titles, which thus became fully marketable goods, only very sparingly. In addition, the standard only knew the applicant of inventions, but not the inventor himself. As a result, companies secured ownership rights to their employees’ inventions on a large scale under employment contract law.25 If the invention originated from the so-called field of work of the employee, the judges granted the right of ownership to the company anyway. It did not matter whether an invention had come about in the course of the employee’s professional activity, i.e. in particular during working hours. In addition, the scope of work was defined very broadly in the employment contracts as well as in jurisdiction. As a rule, the entire business area of the company was cited.26 The employees’ associations as well as the technical professional associations, which had increasingly advocated a new regulation of the inventor’s right since the turn of the century, concentrated their demands on the definition of the field of work. Otherwise, the professional associations held back: if an invention fell within a narrowly defined field of work, the inventor should be able to be registered as such, but the economic right of use should remain with the company. Only the Association of Technical-Industrial Employees (Bund der technisch-industriellen Angestellten und Beamten, Butib), which was known for its willingness to engage in conflict, advocated a share in the economic gain of at least 30%.27

23 Cf. NZI 4 (1910), p. 112; NZI 14 (1920), p. 45; König, Künstler; ders, Technikwissenschaften as well as the acquisition biographies in Wessel, Know How. 24 König/Weber, Netzwerke, p. 125. 25 Around 1900, between 49 and 62% of the service contracts of technical employees had clauses to this effect. Cf. Raßbach, Betrachtungen, p. 124; Czwalina, Lage, p. 49; Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 483. 26 Cf. the examples of contracts in Raßbach, Betrachtungen, p. 123 f. 27 Cf. Flesch, Privatangestellte, p. 9 f.; Isay, Erfinderrecht; Potthoff, Angestelltenrecht.

58 4

The Working Life of German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth. . .

A new regulation of the inventor’s right finally came about only in the context of the 1927 cardinal reform of employment contract law. In the analogously reformed patent law, the older demand of the employees’ side was initially fulfilled and the applicant was replaced by the inventor. The degree of personalisation of inventions was henceforth divided into five levels – from job-based inventions, through so-called company inventions, to completely free inventions.28 This was associated with increasing rights of use for the employee, in this order. The most important innovation were the “company-related free inventions”. For the first time, the employee was granted the right to exploit inventions which were related to the respective work-based tasks, i.e. which benefited from them, but which did not come into being in connection with the work-related tasks in terms of time and content. From the employee’s point of view, the new regulation had thus gone beyond the demands of the pre-war period in a positive sense.

Interim Balance: Tendencies Towards Operational-Functional Downgrading The described tendencies of the company-organizational and formal-legal overforming of engineering work meant various social re-stratifications – both internal and external, concerning the comparison with other occupational groups. As a result of the tendencies towards standardization in the organization of work, even among higher ranks of employees, the engineering profession had lost a good deal of its former expert character, which was still visible during the period of high industrialization, both in functional terms and in (public) perception. Apart from the freelancer, only the engineer in small and medium-sized enterprises still stood out from the seriality of administration and production. In obvious ignorance of these realities, occupational sociological studies up to the 1920s still spoke primarily of the constructive, i.e. creative character of engineering work.29 This was a development that may ultimately also have had an impact on the internal assessment of engineers – especially in comparison with business people in upper and senior management. Within the occupational group, the situation of an

28

Cf. NZI 21 (1927), p. 63 f.; Allfeld, Urheber- und Erfinderrecht. In the case of job-based inventions, also known as establishment inventions, the complete right of use remained with the employer. 29 Cf. Freytrag, Laufbahn; Matschoß, Vom Ingenieur; Raßbach, Betrachtungen; Czwalina, Lage.

4.3 Standardization Tendencies of Engineering Work

59

engineering elite in particular had improved: i.e. senior engineers, workshop and office managers. These top positions were not affected to the same extent by the bureaucratisation of company organisation. And: the reforms of the competition clause and inventors’ rights benefited these higher batches more than average. Finally, with regard to the perception of their own working conditions, it can be assumed that for engineers the negative effects of shrinking autonomy at the workplace in the wake of growing engineering workforces as well as the increasingly authoritative penetration of everyday working life slightly outweighed the positive trends in employment contract and inventor law.30

4.3

Standardization Tendencies of Engineering Work

A complex occupational field such as engineering is also subject to differentiation processes that have only horizontal social effects. This refers to effects that do not entail any significant advantages or disadvantages in terms of living conditions. First of all, the dichotomous division of engineering work into the areas of development on the one hand and production supervision on the other, which is still valid today, should be mentioned here. In this context, the practice of having the production process supervised by the highest-ranking technical occupational group of (company) engineers had only become established since the 1880s.

Development Versus Production In industrial practice, the structural change in the organization of production initially seems to speak a very clear language: According to the tendency, the engineering task profiles shifted away from development towards production supervision. Thus, from the 1880s/1890s onwards, both the production and consumer goods sides were characterised by steadily growing unit numbers and increasingly complex production designs. With the rise in importance of mass production, the general technical, in a broader sense constructive, effort in the area of production expanded at the same time. The cost side of production became more conscious and

30

For corresponding contemporary observations from different perspectives and esp. Johnson, Macht und König, Künstler.

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The Working Life of German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth. . .

manufacturing processes were refined: a trend that gained further momentum in the course of the rationalization euphoria of the 1920s.31 Only little numerical information is available on these basic development trends of engineering functional areas. A mixed picture emerges that does not permit any conclusive findings. In 1875, for example, only one engineer was employed in the manufacturing department of the Charlottenburg Siemens und Halske-Werke, which had about 500 employees.32 In contrast, the development department had 11 technical experts. We do not know how many production engineers there were around 1900, when the design office comprised 104 engineers.33 At the Georg Fischer steelworks in Schaffhausen, the personnel costs for development had in any case increased considerably in the twentieth century; since the turn of the century, the ratio of development engineers to operating engineers had shifted from 16 to 21 to 41 to 25 in 1929.34 Admittedly, one must assume a considerable variance between industries and company sizes. The trend towards standardization of products and production processes had only a very weak impact on manufacturers of capital goods who were only able to produce in series to a limited extent or, like Georg Fischer Werke, used innovative processes.35 The concrete engineering work content is also difficult to reconstruct. It is true that the individual engineering functions were defined more and more precisely, and the tasks in the sense of job descriptions were thus more narrowly defined. Nevertheless, there were probably more and more functionally mixed job profiles: i.e. those jobs which, in the course of the growth in importance of production design, were equally related to processes of development and production.36 For the engineers themselves, however, this was of only limited concern: apart from the somewhat higher prestige of design engineers in the public eye, normal development and production engineers were similarly remunerated.37

31

Cf. in summary Abelshauser, Umbruch. Possibly, however, his (two) assistants were also referred to as engineers. This evidence alone should be sufficient to refute the diagnosis of König/Weber, Netzwerke, p. 436, who speak of an entry of engineers into manufacturing since 1900. 33 Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, pp. 118, 141 f., 280, 470 f., 563 and 574. 34 Cf. Siegrist, Familienbetrieb, p. 177. 35 Cf. the references in König/Weber, Netzwerke. 36 Cf. esp. König, Künstler; Czwalina, Lage, pp. 14–32. 37 Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung (for the period up to c. 1910); DTZ 9 (1927), p. 144 f.; NZI 21 (1927), p. 111. 32

4.3 Standardization Tendencies of Engineering Work

61

Technical Fields The technical disciplines form a further dimension of the horizontal division of the engineering profession. It is true that the conception of technical university education in the 1860s/1970s explicitly referred to the sectoral differentiation of industry at the time. From this, the four core disciplines of civil engineering/architecture, mechanical engineering, mining and metallurgy, and chemistry were derived, to which shipbuilding, electrical engineering, and vehicle construction were to be added over the next two to three decades.38 However, from the point of view of both university lecturers and industrial practitioners, only civil engineering and architecture and chemistry stood out from the basic engineering field of work and competence. Indeed, civil engineering/architecture and chemistry were also the only disciplines that were specifically demanded by the labour market. The graduates of all other directions were considered technical generalists – and especially among the management.39 The primacy of professional practice, which also determined the career opportunities of engineers, thus also shaped the technical and industry-specific requirements. It was professional experience in a particular industry that made the engineer an expert in mechanical, electrical or metallurgical engineering, not training.40 Already the high acceptance of middle school students on the labour market can be seen as a testimony to the low professional significance of the technical (study) fields.41 After all, the mechanical engineering schools had virtually no other more specialized study and graduation options.42 The education of technical generalists was to emerge more and more as the silver bullet. Thus, one of the few (self-)critical sentences in Conrad Matschoß’s hagiography of the engineering profession, published in 1930, read: “One can state today that the (. . .) too extensive specialization at the technical colleges has everywhere come into disrepute.”43

38

Cf. Lundgreen, Techniker; ders. Ausbildung; Albrecht, Bildung, pp. 61–198; Manegold, Universität; Burchardt, Wissenschaft; Sander, Ingenieurwesen. 39 The chemistry curricula also overlapped to a large extent with those of the mechanical engineering directions. Cf. TH-Berlin course catalogue, WS 1911/1912 and 1921/1922. 40 Cf. Schulz, Arbeiter (on the seamless Mannesmann tubes); Wessel, Know-How; König, Technikwissenschaften; Kocka; Unternehmensverwaltung, esp. pp. 274–277. Werner von Siemens, for example, did not attach importance to newly hired dieticians having graduated (diploma) in electrical engineering. 41 Cf. Table 3.1 and Sander, Ingenieurwesen. 42 Cf. Sander, Ingenieurwesen; Lundgreen, Ausbildung. 43 Matschoß, From the Engineer, p. 13.

62 4

The Working Life of German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth. . .

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

1940 WS

1938 WS

1936 WS

1934 WS

1932 WS

1928 WS

1926 WS

1924 WS

1921 WS

1918 WS

1914 WS

1912 WS

1910 WS

1908 WS

1906 WS

1904 WS

1900 WS

1897 WS

1892 WS

1890 WS

1888 WS

0%

From bottom to top: building/civil engineering, architecture, mechanical engineering, mining and metallurgy, shipbuilding, electrical engineering, chemistry.

Fig. 4.1 Students at technical universities in the German Reich by field of study, 1888–1940, percentages. (Source: Sander, Engineering, p. 247)

The public employment services were unaware of this low importance of technical subjects. They always recommended specific fields of study to prospective students.44 Nevertheless, the take-up of the individual technical fields of study roughly followed the general economic development of the industries (Fig. 4.1). Apparently unaware of the low importance that employers attached to fields of study, students thus attempted to gear their educational planning to a supposedly specific demand. Even more so, however, the assessments of first-year students followed short-term industry trends. Thus, it probably resulted from the great prominence of the Wilhelmine naval construction programs that the shipbuilding specialization showed particular growth rates between the turn of the century and the First World War; a career planning that would turn out to be a solidly misguided investment only a decade later. When, in the immediate post-war years, TH studies experienced an increased influx, the aspirants finally concentrated more on the late industrial core subjects of mechanical and electrical engineering. Overall, therefore, the transfer of

44

Cf. Reichsarbeitsverwaltung, Handbuch; Untersuchungen, Heft 10; Strater, Arbeitsämter (1928).

4.3 Standardization Tendencies of Engineering Work

63

information tended to follow rather short-term economic trends and/or their often insubstantial journalistic interpretation.

The Industrial Engineer as a Real Type In the occupational censuses of 1907 and 1939, professional specializations were also recorded. In each case, however, the values refer to all engineers in the industry concerned. A mechanical engineer working in metallurgy who had not only learned this subject but was also active as one was thus identified as a metallurgical engineer. Seen in this light, we are dealing here with information on the personnel development of engineers in individual branches, but not with the actual professional specialisation. The numerical development of the engineering workforces that can be read from these data therefore also corresponded – almost inevitably – to the cyclical development in the respective industry.45 The major trends of the industries become excellently visible here: the long-term decline in importance of the construction and metallurgical industries compared to the boom of the electrical industry in the early twentieth century.46

Changing Working Conditions and Cultures The occupational census data, meanwhile, depict a significant change in working conditions and cultures in the high and late industrial engineering profession. Roughly speaking: The industrial engineer as a basic type gained greater descriptive power for the profession as a whole in the first third of the twentieth century, and not only because of the decline of proprietors and civil servants. Moreover, with the shift from jobs in the construction industry, which in terms of division of labour and degree of mechanisation must be described as catching up with industrialisation, to the electrical and chemical industries, the professional activity of the engineer became increasingly characterised by genuinely industrial workplaces and corresponding work processes and cultures. Large design offices, serially organised

45

Cf. Hoffmann, Wachstum, pp. 390–393; on the development of return on equity, see Spoerer, Scheingewinn. 46 On longer-term trends, see Sander, Crisis, and Hohls/Kaelble, Erwerbsstruktur, pp. 72 f.; Chandler, Scale; Bolenz, Baubeamten, p. 398; Czada, Elektroindustrie.

64 4

The Working Life of German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth. . .

workshops and factory halls increasingly left their mark on the engineering profession. In the late industrial phase of development, the designers and production engineers of the large and medium-sized companies in the urban centers of the German Empire, which were organized on the basis of a high degree of division of labor, moved even further into the center of the engineering profession. The engineer in the large industrial enterprise, who in any case shaped public perception, can in this respect also be described from the perspective typical of the real world as the prototype engineer. The expanding social constitutional state was thus quite capable of cushioning the soft consequences of late industrial structural change for engineers to a certain extent. The bureaucratization and the loss of autonomy with regard to the content of work were countered by moments of labor market regulation in the form of the Competition Act of 1914, the Inventors’ Law reformed in 1927, and the general overhaul of dependent employment under social law. Of course, this does not say anything about the harsh consequences of economic-social structural change: what is at issue here is the overcrowding of the labour markets and the development of incomes that is largely determined by this.

5

The Labour Market of German Engineers: Between Economic and Social Dynamics (Nineteenth Century to 1933)

5.1

Allocation Patterns in Comparison

Before the First World War, it was only the technical professional associations that were interested in the development of the engineering labour market. As interest increased in the 1920s on the part of politics and administration, however, it was hardly possible to break away from older occupational-social patterns of interpretation. It had nothing to do with balanced labour market diagnoses when social scientists close to trade unions ignored the exposed social position of engineers within the white-collar workforce and included the technical experts in diagnoses of proletarianisation with regard to the new (lower) middle class.1 With the opposite finding, the same applied to public administrations: When they began to build up labour market statistics in the 1920s in the interest of long-term, predictive career guidance, they remained closely attached to a traditional notion of the employment conditions of academic professions that had been established in the Kaiserreich. The offices took it for granted that academics always monopolised individual segments of the labour market.2

1

Cf. Lederer, Privatbeamtenbewegung; ders, Privatangestellten; Croner, Angestelltenbewegung; Speier, Die Angestellten; Lux, Stellung. 2 Cf. Titze, Akademikerzyklus, pp. 282–290; Volkswirtschaftliche Zentralstelle, Jahresbericht 1932. Similarly, studies on the state of the academic professions from the early 1930s were devoted only to civil engineers, where civil service and freelancing dominated. As the only exception, cf. as mentioned Gablentz, Industrie. # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_5

65

66

5 The Labour Market of German Engineers: Between Economic and Social. . .

Three Crises: 1870s, 1900s and Early 1930s In 1904, the Association of Technical-Industrial Employees (Butib) wrote: “The overcrowding of the profession has become downright glaring (. . .); joblessness has become so great (. . .) that the labor value of technicians has already sunk low and is sinking still further.”3 Together with other engineering associations, they attributed this development to the recent slump in the economic cycle. In addition to the development of the economy as a whole, and here above all of course of industrial value added, social factors also played an important role in balancing supply and demand on the engineering labour market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Training Boom Even the labour market development of the years 1930–1932, when engineering unemployment rose to about 30% in the course of the Great Depression, can be attributed in part to the ungeber of such social factors significantly. Compared to the pre-war period, the participation of technical university students had increased by an average of almost 100% over several years. This expansion of the labor supply produced a surplus of at least 15 thousand engineers by the end of the 1920s. Thus, about one-third of the 30% unemployment rate in 1932 can be attributed to a structural base.4 Figure 5.1 gives an overview of the development of technical secondary and tertiary education in comparison with the unemployment rates of technicians of all kinds, which includes basically engineers and draughtsmen. Even before the First World War, contemporaries had always attributed labour market overcrowding to macroeconomic cycles: for example, in the crisis of the 1870s and in the minor economic crisis of 1902–1904. Accordingly, in both cases the relatively short economic slump, lasting only a few years, had had a direct negative impact on the employment prospects of technical experts. In both the 1870s and 1902–1904, the consequences of these economic frictions extended into the training system. In the years that followed, the number of students enrolled in the THs declined significantly. At the same time, new enrolments at the THs – unfortunately not handed down – had shrunk to such an extent that the less elastic

3

25 Jahre Technikergewerkschaft, p. 25. Cf. also Stiel, Warnung (vor dem technischen Studium, 1905); Lux, Stellung (1908). 4 For the calculation bases, see Sander, Ingenieurwesen.

5.1 Allocation Patterns in Comparison

67

Students technical universities Pupils in technical middle schools (extrapolation) Job seekers "technicians of all kinds"

Fig. 5.1 Students at technical high schools and technical colleges and technical employees seeking work, German Empire 1903–1937. (Own calculations according to: Müller-Benedict, Karrieren; Reichsarbeitsblatt, Part II (unofficial part), 7 (1909) – NF 15 (1935)). (All cases linearly interpolated. The last digit of the timeline label indexes the quarter. For further notes, cf. Sander, Ingenieurwesen)

total number of TH students not only grew at a slower rate for about 5 years in each case, but actually declined. With the time lag of about one study period, the number of graduates naturally declined as a result.5 In the years following these two crises, i.e. at the end of the 1880s and after 1905, the engineering labour market recovered significantly in each case. Of course, it cannot be decided whether supply and demand were brought into line by overcoming the economic slump or as a result of declining numbers of graduates. In the 1880s, the economic upswing, which had meanwhile resumed, and the number of graduates, which had not risen accordingly but had actually fallen, resulted in a veritable shortage of engineers. As an aside: in the debate at the time about the future of technical education, this provided the decisive argument for the founding of the technical middle schools and technical universities, i.e. for the

5

Cf. Sander, Ingenieurwesen, Table 5.1.1.2.

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5 The Labour Market of German Engineers: Between Economic and Social. . .

creation of a further, sub-academic form of education. After the official kick-off in 1890, there were already 14 such technical middle schools in Prussia alone around 1900, each with several hundred, in some cases even over a thousand students – as many as a medium-sized technical university.6

Engineering Labour Market: Externally Induced Waves or Systemic Cycles? Contemporaries had already pointed to the long waves of the engineering labour market; a diagnosis that was also followed by research into the history of education in the 1970s and 1980s. The same was true of the economic cycle as the primary cause of the ripples.7 By also taking the supply of labour into account, however, observers from the late nineteenth century had already developed the more complex interpretations: for example, contemporaries attributed the shortage of technical experts in the 1880s not only to the upward trend in the economy, but also to the drop in student and graduate numbers. It was thought that an imbalance in the entire system of supply and demand had been identified, which threatened to become autopoietic and develop into a cyclicality inherent in the system. This naturally gave rise to predictions about the future. In 1890, for example, the ranks of the VDI voiced the fear that the current increase in TH enrolments could lead to renewed overcrowding in the coming years. This would then in turn cause a decline in training participation.8 In order to find a way out of this systemic dilemma, an author of the Bauzeitung recommended the establishment of public labour market reporting: It would be a great help if the number of employed and unemployed could be determined statistically by official means, in order to be able to determine approximately the number of new employees that will be needed if the situation remains calm It is safe to say that overproduction is already taking place again at the moment.9

The municipalities did indeed set up job counselling services in the following period. However, these institutions were not able to provide such complex

6 Cf. ibid. and on contemporary perception Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 272 f. and Lundgreen, Ausbildung. 7 Cf. Pfetsch, Entwicklung, pp. 173–181; Laer, Arbeitsmarkt, pp. 158–161. 8 Cf. ZVDI 34 (1890), p. 991 f. 9 E. Dietrich, Überproduktion, quoted in ZVDI 34 (1890), p. 992.

5.1 Allocation Patterns in Comparison

69

information as those of prospective students about the cyclical nature of certain fields of employment. As a result, the participation of students in the TH declined again quite markedly in the course of the subsequent economic and labour market crisis that began in 1902. At the middle schools, which in terms of their quantitative importance were by now equally involved in engineering education, such a reaction was only limited: Here, only the rates of increase fell somewhat, without a contraction occurring (Fig. 5.1). It is quite paradoxical: this (still) limited labour market sensitivity of middle school students was obviously the reason why the feared shortage of engineers did not occur this time, between 1905 and the First World War.

Shifts in the Age Structure The ripple effects on academic labour markets were first examined more closely by historical educational research in the 1980s. However, structurally deep-rooted cycles were identified exclusively in the area of classical academic, i.e. university careers. With their intervals of 30–35 years, however, these cycles are strikingly similar to the fluctuations of the engineering labour market and TH students. Finally, the regular recurrence of overcrowding and shortages in the labour markets of lawyers, medical doctors, senior teachers and theologians could be explained by the category of replacement demand. According to this, in the second third of the nineteenth century a skewed age structure of the professional workforce had developed as a result of recruitment surges among the civil service professions and increased admissions among the academic freelancers. As a result, the age profile of professionals was initially quite young, but later, with an average working life of 30 years, it was comparatively old. This age profile caused recurring waves of retirements – with the same regularity of 30 years – and thus phases of higher and lower demand for new entrants to the profession.10 It is true that the engineering labour market shows similarly cycles: Apart from this, however, it differs from the classical academic professions in three respects: (1) First, the cyclical courses of both segments were chronologically inverted. The overcrowding of technical experts in the 1870s was contrasted by a phase of shortage in university careers, which then also flipped in the 1880s, i.e. turned into overcrowding here. (2) Moreover, in the case of such a rapidly growing

10 Cf. Titze, Akademikerzyklus. For an extended variant of the explanatory model presented here, see Müller-Benedict, Akademikermangel.

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5 The Labour Market of German Engineers: Between Economic and Social. . .

occupational group as engineers, the need to replace the entrants recruited 30 years earlier at the respective current point in time is likely to have played only a minor role. In the course of such a period, the engineering profession grew sixfold. Accordingly, the need for replacement due to retirement affected only one sixth of all first-time hires. The relationship between supply and demand was therefore hardly affected by this.

The Engineering Labour Market: Not a Closed System of Supply and Demand Another fundamental difference to university careers is the weak link between education and profession, which was shaped by autodidacticism in the nineteenth century. When the autodidacts were replaced by the technical middle school graduates from 1890 onwards, this special role continued: the middle school students were hardly guided by labour market forecasts. The form of education was apparently so popular that its boom could hardly be irritated. The reciprocal cyclicality of educational participation and the labour market situation was thus limited to university students, whose educational behaviour was consequently only able to shape the labour market to a certain extent. In contrast to university careers, the engineering profession did not form a hermetically sealed system of supply and demand. The similar expansion of the engineering and academic cycles, spanning some 30 years, may therefore be due to completely different causes: Economic cycles here, replacement demand there. Figure 5.2, where the student numbers of technical universities (TH) and classic universities are shown in the form of five-year, i.e. mathematically smoothed, growth rates, initially shows the mirror-image course of both education markets and – as we know from other sources – also of the labour markets.11 In the Weimar Republic, on the other hand, study participation apparently developed in parallel. Volker Müller-Benedict explains this by pointing out that the length of the two cycles can be estimated differently in real terms. Accordingly, in the mid-1920s the 30–35-year replacement demand cycles of the old professions synchronized with the 15–20-year Kuznets cycles of the economic cycle. The frequencies of technical universities and classic universities thus happened to rise at the same time in the early Weimar Republic!12

11 12

Cf. the contributions in: Müller-Benedict, Karrieren. Cf. Müller-Benedict, Wachstum as well as Metz/Spree, Kuznets-Zyklen; Metz, Trend.

5.1 Allocation Patterns in Comparison

71

150

100

50

0 1939 WS

1936 WS

1933 WS

1930 WS

1927 WS

1924 WS

1921 WS

1918 WS

1915 WS

1912 WS

1909 WS

1906 WS

1903 WS

1900 WS

1894 WS

1897 WS

1891 WS

1885 WS

1888 WS

1882 WS

1879 WS

1873 WS

1876 WS

-50

-100

Fig. 5.2 Five-year growth rates of technical university (TH) and (classic) university students, Prussia and Germany 1871–1941. (Sources: Sander, Ingenieurwesen; Titze, Hochschulstudium) (Five-year growth rates shown, for example, for 1900–1904 for the year 1902)

Apart from the question of whether the economic inflationary cycle of the early 1920s can be reconciled at all with long-term cycle theories such as Kuznets’s, this interpretation certainly has its appeal. However, the dependence of the TH student numbers on the economic cycle is contradicted by the fact that the economic frictions and the corresponding negative journalistic diagnoses in the 1870s and after 1900 always lasted only a few years, while the student numbers fell behind the long-term trend for about a decade in each case. The positive turns in public economic diagnoses in 1879/1880 and 1904 thus remarkably did not entail a change of heart on the part of the actors! There are to consider therefore other, socially more deeply rooted explanations for this educational behaviour.

The Influence of the Bourgeois Education Markets On the supply side, the two groups of actors, prospective university and middle school engineers, interpreted the market quite differently: while attendance at TH followed the aforementioned pronounced cycles, middle schools showed only a very weak cyclical pattern. Both forms of technical education differed above all in

72

5 The Labour Market of German Engineers: Between Economic and Social. . .

their social profile. In contrast to the middle schools and a striking analogy to the traditional universities the working class was virtually unrepresented at the technical universities (TH). In addition, a much larger proportion of students at the THs before 1914 (around 45%) and in the Weimar Republic (just under 32%) came from the genuinely bourgois, academic professions and the employers.13 Here, too, the TH were almost exactly like the supposedly more bourgeois universities. So it stands to reason that TH and university attendance were linked by such a social bracket. In other words, when classical careers were overcrowded, as was the case in the 1880s and 1890s, many first-year students switched to engineering education, which seemed promising in comparison – at least as long as a bad economic situation did not intervene at the time. Conversely, when the prospects for traditional academic careers were good, the appeal of technical universities declined. This explanatory approach, based on evasion effects within a relatively closed academic-educational milieu, had already been introduced into the debate by a young engineer shortly after the turn of the century.14 However, it failed to resonate with the public, with engineering representatives and especially with the associations of the classical academic professions, which always discussed their overcrowding crises in an agitated manner. The systemic momentum from which nineteenth-century engineers proceeded, then, is probably less to do with the engineering labour market, which was far too open to such autopoietic logics. Rather, we must speak of the dynamics of the academic education system and the relevant aspirant groups – of the dynamics of higher, bourgeois education markets.

5.2

The Permanent Overcrowding Since 1902

Despite the enormous expansion of engineering jobs, the labour market remained tight even after the crisis of 1902–1904 had been overcome. Figure 5.1 (see above) does not adequately reflect this development: The official documentation does not take into account all sources until 1922/1923, i.e. the job markets run by profes-

13 Cf. Jäckel, Statistik, p. 26 f.; Badische Hochschulstatistik, Karlsruhe 1912, pp. 74–77, pp. 168–171 and pp. 270–273; Deutsche Hochschulstatistik. Bd. 2, Berlin 1929, p. 28 f.; Titze, Hochschulstudium, pp. 238–281; on the other hand, the information in Schröder, Nationalismus, p. 107 f. is simply wrong. 14 Cf. Lux, Stellung (1908), p. 359; Klatt, Alters- und Sterblichkeitsverhältnisse.

5.2 The Permanent Overcrowding Since 1902

73

sional associations.15 Nevertheless, an unemployment rate of around 10% can be determined with a good conscience for the pre-war period on the basis of association statistics.16 The First World War subsequently brought a notable recovery in the engineering labour market – quite in contrast to commercial employees, where the situation tended to worsen. As the largest association of engineers in the meantime, the Association of Technical-Industrial Employees (Butib) reported 5% jobless members in the summer of 1916.17 Compared to these average conditions, the engineering labour market in the 1920s was characterised by significantly higher unemployment rates, consistently amounting to 10–15%. However, this phenomenon can only be described as structural to a limited extent. This level was (partly) caused by the enormous increase in the number of TH students. And the number of middle school students also exceeded the pre-war level to an almost similar extent (Fig. 5.1). At best, the labor market was able to saturate this educational boom during the brief inflationary boom of 1921/1922. Why higher technical education was so successful in the young republic – after all, the pre-war glut was still well remembered – remained a mystery to contemporaries.18 At the height of the world economic crisis in the summer/winter of 1932, one in three “technicians of all kinds”, i.e. engineers, master craftsmen or technical draughtsmen, was registered as seeking work.19 All in all, the crisis dragged on for almost 4 years – from the beginning of 1930 to the end of 1933. The end of the crisis, when unemployment among engineers had returned to around 10% by the end of 1933, cannot be attributed solely to the economic recovery. The decline in TH and middle school enrolment since the mid-1920s was also a major factor. In short: even before the National Socialist policy of deficit spending really took effect, the quasi-structural, ultimately supply-side (graduates) cause of engineering unemployment had, so to speak, taken care of itself.20

15 On the development of the labour register after the First World War, see Schmuhl, Arbeitsmarktpolitik, esp. p. 102 f. On the bases for registration, see Reichsarbeitsblatt, Part II (unofficial section), 7 (1909) to NF 3 (1923). 16 Cf. 25 Jahre Technikergewerkschaft, p. 73; ZVDDI 1 (1909), pp. 1–14; Berndt, Not, pp. 10–13. Unproductive in this respect: Laer, Arbeitsmarkt. 17 Cf. Sandrock, Kriegsmaßnahmen, pp. 4–6; Schmuhl, Arbeitsmarktpolitik, pp. 68–70. 18 Cf. Maschinenbau – Wirtschaft 5 (1926), p. 84; DTZ 9 (1927), p. 269 f.; NZI 21 (1927), p. 201. 19 See Fig. 2.1, where the share of the actually unemployed among jobseekers is likely to have been higher than in quieter times, i.e. close to 100%. 20 Cf. ibid. as well as Herbst, Deutschland, pp. 160–175.

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5 The Labour Market of German Engineers: Between Economic and Social. . .

Overcrowding Crisis and Social Situation of Engineers With all these profound changes, it remains to be said: Social differences within engineers remained largely unaffected by rampant unemployment. In view of the constant overcrowding in their segment of the labor market, which had not been substantially reduced almost since the turn of the century, technical experts were used to certain losses in salaries and company privileges. The labour market pressure, which increased many times over during the Great Depression, can only give an idea of how many high school and middle school engineers were pushed into master craftsman and draughtsman positions at this time – and: in the sense of a trickle-down effect of qualification levels, increased the competitive pressure there.21 Of course, such hierarchical evasion movements were not recorded by the labour market statistics. As a central finding, in this displacement phase – the employment prospects of diploma engineers did not improve in comparison to middle school graduates. Accordingly, the Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI) also refrained from publishing the number of its job seekers during the global economic crisis.22 If we look instead at the vacancies published by the VDDI in 1936 retrospectively for the period 1930–1932, we see a consistently stable relationship to technical employees in the official job market (Reichsarbeitsnachweis).23 On this basis, therefore, a quota of a good 30% of jobseekers during the peak of the Great Depression can also be reconstructed for technical academics.24 The VDDI was ruthless in whitewashing these conditions: in 1935, for example, it reported that 11% of its members were unemployed in 1932. In doing so, they obviously overlooked the fact that before the crisis (1927) they had already reported a higher rate of 15%!25 Thus, like a burning glass, the crisis shows that university and middle school students belonged to a common labour market segment and that companies gave little consideration to the formal level of education – ultimately not

21

Cf. DTZ 13 (1931), p. 44 f. List was also open to non-members. 23 See Fig. A.2 and the arithmetical neutralization of the different reporting modes of vacancies in Fig. A.3 (1921 = 100). 24 Especially since in the mid-1920s both records had been at the same level of around 15% job seekers. Cf. C. Este, Vom Arbeitsmarkt für Diplom-Ingenieure, in: TuK 18 (1927), p. 71 f. For January 1927, 670 unemployed persons are given here among some four thousand VDDI members. 25 Cf. ibid. and Steinmetz, Arbeitsraum. Cf. also DTZ 11 (1929), pp. 186–197. 22

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even under conditions of displacement, in which higher levels of education and function have to accept a loss of income but enjoyed greater job security. In contrast to these stable intra-professional differentiations, however, the external social position of engineers shifted in the course of the world economic crisis: their position in the overall social field of occupational and social stratification. In absolute terms, the rate of 37.6% unemployed engineers determined by the Butab in mid-1932 differed only slightly from unemployment among the working class and commercial employees.26 In addition to agricultural workers, it was primarily civil servants who did not feel the effects of the economic crisis to the same extent and who, after the previous job cuts in the mid-1920s, now had to accept only 10% job cuts. Finally, a comparison with commercial employees shows that technical employees, who are on average much more highly qualified and better paid, are among the main losers of the crisis: Since 1929, the number of unemployed engineers, master craftsmen and technical draughtsmen had risen more sharply than the number of unemployed commercial employees. Either the quasi-structural unemployment among merchants was even higher in the 1920s or, more likely, the secondary sector was at least somewhat more affected by the great economic crisis.27 At the same time, however, this also means that without the extraordinary influx of graduates in the 1920s, engineers would presumably have come through the crisis comparatively unscathed. The most severely affected were lower technical employee ranks, i.e. in particular master craftsmen, as well as commercial employees in industry.

Causes of the Permanent Overcrowding of the Labour Market So what reasons can be identified for the overcrowding of technical colleges and the engineering labour market in the 1920s? In the Weimar Republic, not only attendance at the TH but also at the classic universities had increased dramatically: on a ten-year average, compared to the pre-war period, the growth of the TH amounted to about 100 and of the universities to about 70%. In both cases it is true that the intention to study, which had been postponed due to the war, is by far not sufficient

26

Cf. Prinz, Mittelstand, p. 52; Borchardt, Zwangslagen, esp. pp. 162–174. Cf. Sander, Krise, pp. 438 f. and 451. Butab also assumed that unemployment in the crisis grew more strongly among technical employees than among commercial employees. Cf. DTZ 13 (1931), p. 381. 27

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5 The Labour Market of German Engineers: Between Economic and Social. . .

to explain the growth.28 The boom in academic education finally took place against the backdrop of an education reform debate that was essentially shaped by the demand for social opening. But even this socio-politically highly explosive discussion was hardly the sole cause of the student boom.29 However, the tendencies towards social openness were considerable – and thus partly responsible for the Weimar boom in academic education. After the bourgeoisie had contributed around 45% to university and technical college students in the pre-war period, this ratio fell to around 32% in the 1920s.30 This was offset by the outright run on academic education by the lower middle classes. The offspring of the families of small self-employed persons and executive employees, thus for the first time formed the largest proportion of the – significantly increased – student population. Thus, around 1920, about twice as many children from the old and new lower middle classes, also called the petty bourgeoisie, were enrolled as around 1910. The relative social openness of academic education in the Weimar Republic can, however, only be exhaustively assessed if sub-academic courses of education are included in the analysis.31 There, the offspring of small self-employed and middle employees were also offered noteworthy opportunities for advancement. After the First World War, however, such medium-level courses, which were formally situated between craft and commercial apprenticeships on the one hand and academic studies on the other, fell well behind academic studies. This area of higher vocational education included in particular the technical middle schools and the seminars for elementary school teachers. While attendance at the teacher training colleges actually declined, the number of students at the technical middle schools grew by about 40% on a ten-year average compared to the pre-war period. However, the 100% growth of the TH was clearly missed.32 In other words, in contrast to

28 In the case of the TH, for example, a 70% increase for the duration of 3 years would have sufficed. Cf. Titze, Hochschulstudium, pp. 26–40. The ten-year average was determined on the basis of the winter semesters for the periods 1904–1913 and 1919–1928. 29 Cf. Wittwer, Schulpolitik; Titze, Akademikerzyklus, pp. 276–281; Nath/Dartenne/ Oehlerich, Pygmalioneffekt. 30 Cf. in summary Titze, Akademikerzyklus, pp. 113–158. 31 Cf. ibid. as well as McClelland, Experience; Jarausch, Professions; Lundgreen, Bildung as well as the contributions in Müller-Benedict, Karrieren. 32 In each case, the ten-year average. Own calculations according to Bölling, Sozialgeschichte, p. 10 and Table A.2. Altogether, middle schools and teacher training colleges together achieved about two-thirds of the educational achievements of the academic field, i.e. of universities and TH.

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the pre-war period, social advancement was now evidently associated for the most part with academic study. How such a nimbus of academic education could develop in the field of tension between millieu-specific everyday worlds and public information regimes remains a research desideratum.33 From an observer’s perspective, at any rate, clear information deficits stand out. After all, a technical middle school graduation enabled a veritable promotion to the upper white-collar status of an engineer.

Engineering: The Alternative Career of the Bourgeoisie However, only part of the increase in the attractiveness of the technical universities can be explained by social openness. Compared to the development of middle schools, the expansion of the TH makes it clear that this was not primarily a boom in the engineering profession, but a boom in academic education. On this basis, however, i.e. secondarily, the engineering profession also gained in attractiveness. After all, the TH expanded much more than the classic universities during the Weimar Republic. This is presumably due to the same effect that Heinrich Lux had already observed two decades earlier: both aspirants to social advancement and bourgeois circles concerned with maintaining status shifted important parts of their educational intentions from the universities to the TH. However, certain economic-social preconditions had to be fulfilled for this to happen: This is, firstly, the negative assessment of employment opportunities in the classical academic professions. At least in the post-war period, this was indeed the case: the reservoir of legal and pedagogical assessors, who still came from the pre-war period and were now seeking employment again, already exceeded in 1919 in terms of numbers the vacant positions that had remained unfilled during the war.34 Secondly, in the first years of the Weimar Republic there were comparatively good employment opportunities in the private sector – a consequence of the inflation boom. This was compounded by the fact that pay in the higher civil service had been noticeably cut after the war.35

33

Cf. the corresponding approaches in Nath/Dartenne/Oelerich, Pygmalioneffekt. On perception cf. Nath/Dartenne/Oelerich, Pygmalioneffekt, on the ‘situation’ Jarausch, Professions, p. 34 f. as well as the contributions in Müller-Benedict, Karrieren. 35 Cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, pp. 113–121. 34

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5 The Labour Market of German Engineers: Between Economic and Social. . .

Thirdly, after the turn of the century, the fundamental reservations of a traditional bourgeois milieu towards the engineering profession had receded somewhat. The bourgeois scepticism had been based on a diffuse unease about the – ostensibly technicistically organised – modern mass society. As a result, the engineering profession still did not quite rise to the status of a complementary career (of equal value) among the bourgeoisie. But it became more and more important as an alternative career. The traditionally mirror-image course of growth of technical universities and classic universities in the 1920s was thus not synchronized by chance – as, for example, by the temporal coincidence of an economic boom with the replacement demand cycles of the old academic professions.36 Rather, both forms of academic education were increasingly drawn into the pull of the fundamental dynamics of overcrowded classical academic labour markets and growing educational aspirations in general! In the 1920s, not only bourgeois but also petty-bourgeois educational goals were concentrated to an unprecedented degree in the academic field. The social climbers in particular would certainly have been better off directing their disproportionately greater material and social-emotional educational investments to the engineering schools and teacher training seminars. With the subsequent radical overcrowding of the academic and – in the case of engineers – semi-academic labour markets, the decades-old ambitions of politicians and administrations to steer university attendance in a forward-looking, anti-cyclical manner had finally come to an end.37 It was only when the situation became even more dramatic in the course of the global economic crisis that instruments such as admissions restrictions were discussed as an ad hoc solution, and in some cases implemented.38

36

Cf. Müller-Benedict, Wachstum. Cf. Klatt, Alters- und Sterblichkeitsverhältnisse. 38 Cf. Conrad Matschoß, Wirtschaftskrise, in: VDIN 11 (1931), o.P.; ZVDI 73 (1929), p. 479 f. On the attitude of the Association of German Universities, cf. TuK 21 (1930), p. 198; Viefhaus, Ingenieure, p. 318 f.; Jarausch, Professions; McClelland, Experience. 37

6

German Engineers in the Nineteenth Century to 1933: Salaries and Social Situation in Professional Comparison

6.1

Salaries in Professional Comparison

In terms of income and social standing, the Regierungsbaumeister (building officer) was still considered the ideal form of engineer’s existence at the end of the nineteenth century. After the turn of the century, however, contemporaries came to two certainities: first, that the expansion of the industrial sector would continue and that the higher civil service career would thus become more and more important for the engineering profession. The mathematical chance for university (TH) graduates to enter the highly respected and paid higher civil service of the construction and benefit administrations was one in seven at that time – with a clear downward trend.1 Secondly, it became clear that company managements would not grant engineers – after all, one of the most important productive forces in industry – either a symbolic or a material special position in the industrial structure, even in the medium term. This had been different in the early industrial 1850s and 1860s: Industrial engineers in this period had earned incomes similar to those of their colleagues in the higher civil service careers.2 Since the turn of the century, engineers have looked for professional models only in the higher civil service as a whole, i.e. the old official professions of judges, priests and senior teachers. In their own community, there was virtually no longer any professional orientation foil. Table 6.1 shows the incomes of engineers in private-sector employment, in the civil service, and of relevant reference groups that are also relevant to everyday culture. The synopsis illustrates the lack of valid

1 2

Cf. Vogelstein, Bemerkungen (1907) and Sander, Ingenieurwesen. Cf. Scholl, Ingenieure, pp. 39–220.

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_6

79

1900

1899

1890

1885

University graduates (n = 41) at Siemens & Halske (incl. Dieticians) Technical employees (n = 12) at Siemens & Halske with middle school education (incl. Dieticians) Employed architects according to job advertisements Employed building echnicians (middle school) by job advertisements Engineers and technicians (n = 62) at BASF; engineers (n =?) at MannesmannröhrenWerke 3422 5771

2051

2930

2591

4066

Senior building officials (diploma),Prussian state railways

Senior building officials (diploma), Prussian state railways

5550

5100

Civil servants and employees in the state and municipal service Building inspectors 3600 (intermediate grade) in the railway and building departments Building inspectors railway/ 4200 building administration

Master at Felten & Guillaume (n = 102)

Chemists (n = 150) with academic training at BASF

Public prosecutors of the 1st instance in Prussia

Comparison groups Master craftsmen (n = 24) at Felten & Guillaume

2032

3827

4230

1582

6

Employees in the industrial Economy Technical employees of MAN 4436 (n = 11)

Engineers and technicians

Table 6.1 Nominal income by occupation with comparison groups, German Empire 1885–1930, in Reichsmark/year

80 German Engineers in the Nineteenth Century to 1933: Salaries and Social. . .

1923

1912–14

1910

1907

1905

Company officials (i.e. engineers/technicians and foremen etc.) at Felten & Guillaume (n = 91) Survey in greater Berlin (n = 3265) With a university education Technical employees (n = 463) with higher education at Siemens & Halske Technical employees (n = 751) without higher education at Siemens & Halske Inspection engineers of the German boiler inspection associations (average starting salary) Engineers (n =?) at Mannesmannröhren-Werke; all technical employees (n =?) ibid. Class IV pay scale: Technical employees in industry since Nov. 1923; Gr. III (. . .who carry out difficult work partly independently) Senior building officials, Prussian State Railways

Employees of public authorities and public. Gr. IX (=Gr. IV Privatwirtsch.); Officials Gr. XI

6658 3457

2437 1818

2196

2795

2228 2630 2091 3770

3657

2412 3720

6300

Judges and public prosecutors of the 1st instance in Prussia

Foremen (n = 271) at Siemens and Halske

Lawyers in Saxony (1901)

(continued)

6065

3016

79% over 4800

6.1 Salaries in Professional Comparison 81

Tariff Gr. T V (= Gr. IV until 1926) in the industry of Anhalt

1929

4476

4517

3960 3000 8708

5640

“Engineers and master builders” at the Saxon. Electricity works

4592

Senior technical civil servants (n = 5)

Employees of public authorities and public enterprises, Gr. IX (=Gr. IV Privatwirtsch.)

Source: Sander, Ingenieure, p. 238 f. and Sander, Krise, p. 446 f

1930

1927

Tariff Gr. IV, Rhineland from 1.5.; Gr. III Living standard rich (n = 39)

1926

1924

Civil servants and employees in the state and municipal service

4724

non-higher civil servants; Lebensh. Reich 1927 (n = 297) University graduates in the chemical industry, tarif class V University graduates in the chemical industry, tarif class V

7020

5400–6720

7692

3924

Officials Gr. XI

Foremen in Bavaria (1925)

Comparison groups

6

Employees in the industrial Economy Engineer/technician with 3420 university education according to collective agreement in potash mining from 6th year of occupation. Tariff of Gr. IV: Technical 3168 employees Nov. 1924 in industry

Engineers and technicians

Table 6.1 (continued)

82 German Engineers in the Nineteenth Century to 1933: Salaries and Social. . .

6.1 Salaries in Professional Comparison

83

cross-company surveys of white-collar workers in the private sector – and thus the difficulties of consistent synchronous and diachronic comparisons of white-collar salaries. Income Differentiations Such a compilation of samples is not able to reflect the differences within the occupational group. The differences in income according to occupational position, from aspirants/trainees to technical manager, can of course be attributed primarily to the organisational principles of free labour markets. Nonetheless, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, few occupations and occupational groups with such a firmly defined definition of function as engineers, as well as relatively clearly defined access criteria, exhibited such a high degree of material inequality.3 This impression also emerges if one leaves out the salaries of the trainees and the top level (engineers as division managers and authorized signatories): For the remaining core segment, income ranges can finally be determined, which around 1900 ranged from about 1500 to 6000, and in the mid-1920s from 2500 to 10,000 marks gross per annum. Compared to this factor of about four, the differences in the higher civil service amounted to only a factor of two and a half – and here evoked by only two promotion levels, i.e. three pay groups, but a considerable professional experience factor, the automatism of seniority.4 In view of these significant differences within the profession, the incomes of employed engineers can best be compared with those of the liberal academic professions. In the case of lawyers, who were already regarded by contemporaries as the prototype of highly unequal employment opportunities, the gap widened similarly – albeit at a noticeably higher level.5 The differentiation of engineer incomes had little to do with formal qualifications. Job advertisements stating salaries and individual company studies show that the same positions were paid the same for university and middle school engineers.6 The Berlin Industry Survey of 1907, however, shows average salaries

3 See, for example, the conditions among book printers, bank clerks, and clerks in: Einkommenserhebung 1920, pp. 18–34. 4 Cf. Sander, Einkommen; ders., Jura; Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, pp. 101–133 as well as Table 6.1, which shows companies, who pay above average. 5 Cf. Siegrist, Advokat; Sander, Jura. 6 Cf. Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 284 f.; Schulz, Arbeiter, esp. p. 157; Siegrist, Familienbetrieb.

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German Engineers in the Nineteenth Century to 1933: Salaries and Social. . .

for TH graduates that are a good 20% higher than those of middle school graduates.7 This not inconsiderable difference can largely be explained by the greater likelihood that university students reached significantly more elevated engineering positions as heads of design departments and the like, where the diploma title was accorded symbolic relevance. These positions were overweighted in the survey (Table 6.1). Thus, university graduates had little advantages in terms of opportunities, especially with regard to top positions. This is also confirmed by the breakdown of salaries by age groups, where such – then mostly clear – income advantages of university graduates are demonstrable above all for the last 10 years of the professional career.8 For the majority of promotion positions, and this is especially the first and most important promotion level of the so-called senior engineers, the university degree hardly played a role. At the same time, the salary advantage of university graduates in the Berlin survey testifies to industry specifics. Thus, in addition to the chemical industry already mentioned, the electrical industry was a branch of industry where academic engineers enjoyed at least certain advantages over their colleagues from middle schools. In this relatively young, and therefore particularly research-intensive, branch of industry, formal school-based knowledge was of above-average importance.9 However, it was probably more decisive that a close cooperation – not common in other industries – had developed here between some large companies and the university chairs, which helped the graduates to gain advantages in terms of opportunities on the basis of personal networks.10 From such a sectoral perspective, it may be somewhat surprising that in the shrinking construction industry in the 1920s, the collectively agreed salaries of technical experts were always above the average for the industrial sector. This was a special case, probably due to the high level of professional organisation of the construction engineers and their corresponding collective bargaining power.11 In sum, the sources on engineer incomes confirm that in the majority of industrial sectors, and when it was not a matter of filling particularly exposed positions, formal education played almost no role.

7

See also the data for Siemens and Halske in Table 6.1. Cf. König/Siegrist/Vetterli, Warten, p. 618. In Switzerland, which is empirically relevant here, there was a similar competition between qualification levels as in Germany. 9 This concerned physical knowledge in particular, cf. König, Technikwissenschaften. 10 Cf. ibid. and Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung, p. 141; Czwalina, Lage, pp. 5–9 and 72 f. 11 Cf. StatDR, Vol. 293; Lohn- und Gehaltserhebung vom Februar 1920, Berlin 1921, p. 41*; DTZ 7 (1925), p. 67. On the civil engineers’ union, the DTV. 8

6.1 Salaries in Professional Comparison

85

Function Before Qualification Finally, with regard to income elasticity, it is not only company files and job advertisements that refer to the primacy of function over qualification. Even in the collective agreements of the 1920s, only the job profile, i.e. the operational function, was mentioned in principle when defining salary levels. Only in absolutely exceptional cases was reference also made to (formal) training.12 It should be noted, however, that the Butab, as the representative primarily of middle school engineers, had a collective bargaining monopoly in most sectors and thus naturally strictly avoided negotiating separate salary grades for academics. Finally, to a similar extent as according to operational function, engineering salaries varied according to professional experience. Even more so than for the middle ranks of employees, the anciennity applied to the remuneration of senior commercial and technical employee positions. By the 1920s, however, the progression by professional experience on salaries had declined somewhat for all whitecollar groups. While 30–50% before the First World War, the post-war pay scales provided for increases of only 15–20%.13 The company- and function-specific average incomes documented in Table 6.1 essentially describe the material situation of engineers in average positions/ functions and with average professional experience. Nevertheless, far-reaching differences in income are evident here, namely – as mentioned – according to branches, but even more so according to (individual) companies. Special processes that were not yet widespread and a correspondingly monopolistic market position meant that, for example, at the Mannesmannröhren-Werke in 1899 it was possible to earn around 70% more than the average for metalworking firms. Mannesmann’s engineers outperformed even their colleagues at BASF, which was also favourably positioned in the market.14 Engineering Salaries in an Employee Context In addition to the classic academic professions, the various industrial white-collar occupational and functional groups naturally also formed an important foil for 12

Among the 62 collective agreements printed in the Deutsche Techniker Zeitung between 1919 and 1933, there were two exceptions. Cf. DTZ 6 (1924), p. 98. 13 In each case on the basis of unchanged activity/function and related to the greatest possible professional experience. Cf. the numerous company studies listed in the references to Table 6.1. Cf. also Czwalina, Lage, p. 76 and Siegrist, Familienbetrieb, p. 103 f. The age progression mostly reversed (again) with the entry into the sixth decade of life. 14 Cf. Table 6.1 and individual job advertisements in ZVDI 44 (1900).

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German Engineers in the Nineteenth Century to 1933: Salaries and Social. . .

comparison. The average income of master craftsmen exceeded that of average engineers by only a relatively small margin, namely by 10–20% (Table 6.1). It should be borne in mind, however, that master craftsmen were generally promoted from the labour force and were therefore on average not insignificantly older. The age progression of salaries thus had a greater effect here. Even compared to the office workers who, in contemporary diction, were “executive”15 – the numerical core of the white-collar workforce – the salary advantage of the technical experts was only slightly more pronounced. This is in contrast to the fact that contemporary engineers, just as today, were placed on the same level as the middle management in large companies.16 Average engineering salaries were roughly equivalent to the exclusive 15% of commercial positions.17 According to this, middle management was also less clearly distinguished from general commercial staff than data for individual companies would appear to convey at first glance.18 The small income advantage of the formally highly educated engineers – both, middle school and university graduates – over the on average significantly less qualified merchants employed at sales counters, bank counters and in offices can also be seen from the only usable contemporary survey. In the 1927 income and consumption survey of private households by the Statistische Reichsamt (Reich’s statistical office), the 4517 marks/annum of the technical experts were finally contrasted with the 4106 marks of the average employee salary, which was largely dominated by merchants in executive functions.19 The engineers were even surpassed by the civil servants in the middle grade (4724 marks).20 It can be summarised that both an average engineer and a senior accountant representing

15

DlA 1 (1919), p. 14. Cf. DlA 2 (1920), pp. 101 and 144 f. 17 The 5% or so of (still) higher-paid employees, whom the Association of Senior Managers (Vela) counted among its potential clientele, earned around 30% higher salaries than the engineers. The – not only historically – vague concept of middle management is understood here for the 1920s to mean the level of department heads and office managers in mediumsized and large companies, insofar as they did not function as direct superiors of the middle employee level, the clerks. 18 Cf. Schulz, Arbeiter, pp. 172–183 and König/Siegrist/Vetterli, Warten. 19 Cf. Zentralarchiv, Haushaltsrechnungen (household accounts; earnings of heads of households). As expected, white-collar workers show a larger standard deviation (1448 Reichsmark) than engineers (1099). 20 See Table 6.1 (including officials in the upper middle grade). 16

6.1 Salaries in Professional Comparison

87

middle management earned around 20% more in the 1920s than a clerk with commercial training representing the vast majority of salaried employees. Donwgrading of Engineering Salaries 1900–1930 If anything, the income advantage of engineers over middle positions had been somewhat more pronounced in the pre-war period.21 The symbolic status of engineers as quasi-scientific experts, who even in the case of middle school graduates had been educated in a markedly research-oriented manner in the sense of industry-based science, was challenged by this material situation. This was even codified quasi-state in the Weimar Republic. Since 1924, the highest industrially negotiated pay scale group for engineers, group IV (from 1926 T V), functioned as the official equivalent of grade IX (from 1926 A IV /A III) of the newly created upper intermediate civil service. The upper intermediate service required the intermediate schoolcertificate, but not necessarily a further school education such as (professional) middle school graduation.22 In relation to the qualification requirements, work in the public sector was thus valued better. Moreover, the cyclical, short-term fluctuations of the labour market were less strongly reflected in the public sector. In the economy, temporary macroeconomic frictions were also passed on fairly directly to salaries at higher whitecollar ranks. For example, the nominal salary of technical employees at Felten & Guillaume had risen by 35% between 1895 and 1900; in the following 5 years, during the general economic crisis and the glut in the engineering labour market, the increase was only 6%.23 The stability of civil servants’ incomes that could be observed in contrast, however, was then cancelled out to some extent in the course of the Great Depression. In addition to long-term losses in real income, civil

21

According to the complete survey conducted by the Reichsversicherungsanstalt für Angestellte in 1913, 30% of employees subject to compulsory insurance, which mainly covered the lower and middle ranks, earned more than 2000 marks per year. This was a threshold that was usually exceeded by engineers at this time after a probationary period of 1 or 2 years. As the company-related data in Table 6.1 show, the 3000 Mark mark was then quickly reached in most cases, which meant that they were already among the 9.3% income elite of employees subject to compulsory insurance. Cf. Raßbach, Betrachtungen, pp. 30–33 and Table 6.1 (Kesselrevisionsvereine; Siemens and Halske). 22 Cf. for the pre-war period the regular listings of inspectors’ salaries in the Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung 1 (1881) – 34 (1914). 23 Cf. Schulz, Arbeiter, p. 294 f. and the references in the study by Pierenkemper, Arbeitsmarkt, p. 73 f., which is otherwise not very productive for technicians and engineers.

88

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German Engineers in the Nineteenth Century to 1933: Salaries and Social. . .

servants were also exposed to short-term cuts during this phase. The 6% cut in the 1930 financial year and the further 10–13% cut in 1931 essentially corresponded to the private-sector wage settlements of those years.24 Engineering Salaries: Bourgois or Middle Class Level? A central characteristic of engineers’ salaries in the first third of the twentieth century is their average level in every respect. This applies above all in comparison with the objectively, but also in everyday life relevant reference groups of higher civil servants on the one hand, and executive commercial employees on the other. The averagely positioned and experienced engineer achieved just under 70% of the remuneration of the so-called entry level of the higher civil service, to which thejudges, councillors and district doctors belonged.25 The social hierarchical basis of the engineers, namely the middle-ranking commercial employees, were more in sight, with incomes just about 20% lower. From the contemporary perspective of rigidstatus boundaries between middle-class and bourgeois social positions in German society, the engineers’ material and social-lifeworld investments in education thus paid off only to a very limited extent. The difference in income to higher civil servants remained largely stable over time. This must have been perceived as neuralgic above all by diploma engineers, who had been hoping for more than symbolic equality since the turn of the century, partly in the wake of the right to award doctorates since 1899.26 Given the glut in the engineering labour market in the 1920s, however, this relative stability is quite remarkable. Ultimately, therefore, both real engineering and higher civil servant incomes fell from pre-war levels to about three-quarters of this former level. Middle-level civil servants and middle-level commercial employees, on the other hand, suffered virtually no real income losses during this period.27 The relative decline in specialist incomes in the course of the first third of the twentieth century may ultimately have left particularly deep marks on the lives of engineers. In contrast to the higher civil servants, they came in touch to the middle ranks of employees. Moreover, in their everyday work, technical experts were in

24

Whereas the collective agreements in this period were also based on state regulations, on the now area-wide compulsory arbitration Cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, pp. 129–133; Prinz, Mittelstand, pp. 57 f.; DTZ 12 (1930), pp. 428 f.; DTZ 13 (1931), p. 247. 25 Cf. Table 6.1. 26 Cf. Sander, Defensive; Jarausch, Professions. 27 Cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, pp. 119–133. Kocka/Petzina/Faust, Arbeitsbuch, p. 110.

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much more direct contact with the subaltern hierarchical levels of foremen and workers than was the case with many classical professionals in medical practices, law firms and classrooms. This shrinking of social distances was in turn not conducive to the engineers’ general of professional reputation.

6.2

The Social Situation of German Engineers: Summary

The so-called power approach in the sociology of professionsalso commented on the history of the engineering profession. This field of research is primarily interested in the intersubjective negotiation of professional status and benefits. According to this, the academization of engineering education can be traced back primarily to the social exclusion efforts of the upper middle classes: The bourgeoisie was able to establish training courses and occupational profiles in which its own junior staff possessed advantages of opportunity.28 However, this analysis stopped at the intentional level – namely at academization as the first modulein the process of constructing “bourgeois professions”.29 Therefore, it was simply overlooked that such fundamentally conceivable efforts at graduation could also fail in result, as in the case of the diploma engineers – who were actually socialized in a decidedly bourgeois manner. For the diploma engineers, the extensive equality of occupational opportunities with middle school graduates largely called into question the gratificatory and social-status-related exploitation of their educational titles. Thus, despite the academization of large parts of engineering knowledge, there can not be determined a successful or complete professionalization of the diploma engineers. The competition with a non-academic educational group on the labour market as well as the overall sub-bourgeois income opportunities and working conditions contradict both, analytical criterias of professionalization as well as contemporary ideas of a bourgeois profession.30

28

Cf. Dreßen, Hierarchisierung. Nevertheless, the author of the present work clearly leans towards this approach. Since every social reality is based on processes of action, there can of course be no functional, i.e. socially secular necessities or realities in the sense of Parsons, against whose influence on classical occupational sociology the aforementioned current is directed. 29 Siegrist, Professionen, p. 14. 30 On the professional criteria approach, cf. Pfadenhauer, Professionalität, pp. 32–37 as well as in historical perspective Heidenreich, Berufskonstruktion; Lundgreen, Bildung; ders, Berufskonstruktion; Sander, Professionalisierung.

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The lack of corporate differentiation of university graduates with middle school graduates doesn’t allows us to speak of diploma engineers as an independent professional formation. If we look at technical experts as an occupational group, they appear as a merely quasi-professional occupational formation. At first glance, the scientification of their professional skills and abilities as well as the pronounced control of the engineering community over the corresponding knowledge reserve merely stood in the way of the fact that not all professionals possessed formally scientific knowledge acquired at universities.31 It is true that by 1900 the autodidacts had been largely ousted from the profession, i.e. from the level of technical experts – the graduates of universities and middle schools thus possessed a functional monopoly. However, the social situation of engineers, their material and social resources acquired through their profession, were not necessarily typical for a highly specialized and (on average) highly educated occupational group. Rather, the middle position between the large number of commercial employees at middle functional levels on the one hand and the established academic professions on the other turned out to be formative. Although the average educational level of engineers tended to correspond to the socially hierarchically higher comparison groups, the working conditions and incomes of engineers tended to be lower – although middle school and university graduates clearly surpassed the average formal educational level of commercial assistants.32 For diploma engineers, this means that their particularly high investment in education was not rewarded by the labour market. In comparison, senior commercial employees, such as office and branch managers in medium-sized companies, achieved incomes comparable to those of engineers. However, almost without exception they could only look back on a commercial apprenticeship as a formal qualification. Moreover, the engineers had a close personal and ideational link between the theoreticians at the universities and the practitioners in industry. In addition, they had a not insignificant influence on state education policy, which enabled them to control their professional knowledge to a large extent. The on-thejob qualified middle managers who had risen through the ranks in the course of their professional lives did not have such a specialist community at their disposal. Their professionalism in terms of work content remained unconcentrated and more externally determined.

31

Something similar can be said for France. For an international comparison, see Perkin, Rise; Malesta, Society; Gidney, Gentlemen; Haber, Quest; Halsey, Decline; Lundgreen, Bildung; Lundgreen, Education; Smith/Meiksins, Labour. 32 Cf. en detail Sander, Ingenieurwesen.

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The quite obviously weak market position of engineers can ultimately be attributed primarily to the overcrowding of their labour market segment. Especially since their functional position in the industrial economy – as could be seen – developed at least stably. It is true that in individual branches of industry, such as the iron and steel industry, former areas of responsibility of the foremen were transferred to personnel groups in the engineering rank, and thus the functional area of the technical experts was gradually devalued. However, this was countered by the veritable rationalisation euphoria of the 1920s, in the course of which management made specialists in cost accounting or personnel planning out of some of the engineers. Detailed studies could shed light on the extent to which this functional expansion of engineers into originally commercial areas can be traced back to their formal school core qualifications – i.e. the engineers were possibly simply better at calculating.33 In principle, of course, it must be taken into account that the engineering labour force could be cheaply employed on the overcrowded labour market – and the engineers possibly only lost no competencies because of a corresponding diffusion into all kinds of fields of activity on a large scale. The limits of functional-objectivist explanations become apparent at this point. In addition to the overcrowding of the labour market, more general, society-wide social attributions must also be taken into account. Part of the reason for this downgrading, which was initially symbolic and subsequently material, was certainly the virulent scepticism about technology among the general population, at least up to the First World War, and especially among the top managers of the industrial economy with their numerous economists and lawyers. It is possible that successes in professionalization could only be achieved if engineers were able to present themselves not only as a knowledgeable but also as an essential professional group.34 This was only to succeed in this form after the Second World War. Academisation Without Demand In the case of diploma engineers, the contours of a general pattern of academic employment in the free economy finally become visible. The academic engineers found themselves in a similar, i.e. double conflict situation as the somewhat later (since 1900) academized merchants: the public disdain for a new kind of profes-

33 On the mathematics and science curricular components of high schools vs. middle schools, see Sander, Ingenieurwesen; Grüner, Ausbildung. 34 Cf. Pfadenhauer/Sander, Professionssoziologie.

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sional culture was joined by an academization that largely bypassed the market.35 It should therefore be noted that a university education, for which there was obviously no specific need on the dominant industrial labour market, not only endured, but even expanded substantially. Engineering Labour Market: Informational Deficits Explanatory approaches in this regard, in turn, require a socially broader perspective. In the first third of the twentieth century, for example, the engineering profession became a catalyst for growing educational aspirations in two respects. Before the First World War, when middle schools had grown particularly strongly, the aspirations for advancement of a “petty bourgeoisie”36 of skilled workers and middle-ranking white-collar workers were still concentrated here. In the Weimar Republic, on the other hand, there was a general move towards academic education: Even more than before, the middle ranks of white-collar workers and civil servants were now striving towards this highest level of formal education and social status – and, an important result of the study here: they increasingly left out mediumthreshold channels of advancement such as the teachers’ seminars and the technical middle schools. Moreover, because classical university careers were crowded, many middle-class families also shifted the career planning of their offspring to TH studies – and this despite all reservations about technology and technical sciences. Apparently, in the face of the overcrowding of traditional academic professions, the engineering profession was considered to be – since academic – approximately adequate. Remarkably little was known in these circles about the reality of the engineering profession. The social situation of the technical academics was thus not only negatively influenced by the competition with the middle school students. In the form of the evasive movements of bourgeois youngsters towards technical university studies, the diploma engineers or their bourgeois milieu of origin played a part in the crisis of the engineering labour market. The “resource information”37 (Hartmut Titze) remained a rare and therefore valuable commodity in the media public of the 1920s.

35

Cf. Franz, Betriebswirte. Lepsius, Wandel, p. 451. 37 Titze, Academikerzyklus, p. 423. 36

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Critique of Technology and German Engineers in Modern Society (Nineteenth Century to 1933)

By the 3rd–4th generation at the latest, the large cities and industrial centers have destroyed the spiritual flowering of the people. (Wilhelm Büsselberg, 1926)1

7.1

Bourgeois Critique of Technology

Diploma engineers were certainly among the most significant groups of losers in the economic and social structural change of the early twentieth century – paradoxical as it may seem. The largely equal opportunities with middle school graduates, the generally poor employment conditions and the fragile social recognition ensured a petty-bourgeois rather than veritably bourgeois social situation. As will be seen in detail, the functionaries of the engineers’ associations certainly imagined their base as truly bourgeois. So where did the everyday cultural boundaries of the bourgeoisie lie? To what extent was the new professional group of engineers intertwined with the established elites, the educational and economic bourgeoisie? To what extent did they share basic patterns of everyday life, i.e. mentalities and lifestyles? And: To what extent did the engineers – and especially the diploma engineers – emulate the lifestyles of these ruling classes, even though their financial means did not permit this in its entirety? Did a possibly (educated) bourgeois habitus had to cope with a sub-bourgeois social situation? Mentalities and lifestyles are to be understood as the expression of a predominantly unconsciously mastered everyday life of the actors. Nevertheless, they are

1

In: DlA 8 (1926), p. 150.

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_7

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always also publicly negotiated. Thus, contemporaries also possessed a formulated idea of their own and others’ everyday cultures. In particular, the interest groups of middle and higher professional function levels often attempted to justify material demands with ostensible qualities from the lifestyle of their clientele. As an important representative of the academic technical experts, the Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI) also believed it could achieve a professional-social demarcation from the middle-school engineers by referring to the “professional and life view unique to academics.”2 However, this was not only about the socialisation instance of academic study, but often also about the milieu behind it in the sense of an exclusive everyday culture of the educated.3 From their own point of view, the technical academics had simply earned better conditions of employment through their bourgeois status. At least in the form of such political, tactically weighed arguments, the diploma engineers thus clearly related positively to a contemporary notion of bourgeoisie. Special Public Role of Engineers However, the engineers took on a peculiar special role in the Wilhelmine public sphere. Since the attainment of quasi-university status in the 1870s, the engineering associations and the full professors of the TH had striven to achieve the status of a fully-fledged academic technical and professional group, initially at the formal level of education. With the right to award diplomas and doctorates in 1899, the right to take examinations for the higher technical civil service (1903) and the integration of the TH into the training of higher teachers (1922), all differences to the universities were successively eliminated. Nowhere was it more true than in industrialized Germany: “Technical studies were developed for cultural and social reasons.”4 By contrast, the efforts of the engineering associations to achieve an abolition of the monopoly of lawyers in the higher state administration in favour of technical university graduates had failed.5 This initiative, which began shortly after the turn of the century and was supported by the entire closely networked engineering

2

Achner, Entlohnung, p. 360. Johannes Gottfried Hoffmann (1844) quoted in Kocka, Bildungsbürgertum, p. 12. On the (growing) importance of academic studies within the bourgeois self-image in the late Empire, see Schäfer, Bürgertum, esp. pp. 39–50 and 287–298. 4 Byrkjeflot, Models, p. 244. For international comparison, see Meiksins/Smith, Perspective; this, Engineers; and König, Staatsdiener. 5 Cf. König, Ingenieure; Viefhaus, Ingenieure. 3

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community, can be understood on the one hand as an attempt to intervene in the strained labor market for technical experts. On the symbolic level, however, such a rise of engineers to the top of the civil service hierarchy was also expected to correct the public image of engineers.6 This was not just about the recognition of a comparatively young academic discipline, the technical sciences at the universities, but about the body of knowledge and working techniques of an entire professional group. This explicitly included those engineers who had enjoyed their education at the “excellent”7 intermediate technical schools. Public Technology Scepticism The long-simmering journalistic debate about the social significance of technical progress – and, on a side track, also about the social value of technical expertise – took on concrete forms in the 1890s. The reasons for the established elites’ distance to technology as well as the engineers’ counter-strategies became fully visible for the first time. At the centre of this was the apostrophized opposition of idealism and materialism. It is true that engineers had always described the motives of their work and of engineering knowledge production itself in terms of application and practical relevance.8 However, the richly negative label of materialism, a “soul-empty and cold”9 view of the world, had only been attached to them by bourgeois journalism.10 The bourgeois elites, influenced by Neuhumanismus (new humanism), wanted education to be understood exclusively as a normative-ontological value in itself. If it was difficult to deny the formal abstraction of education and its material exploitation, for example in the form of professions, the economic bourgeois elites also carried such a rigorous concept of education. This was actually incompatible to 6

Cf. H. Horn, Die Techniker im Kommunaldienste, in: ZVDDI 2 (1910), pp. 83–88, 141–143; ZVDI 62 (1918), p. 106 (Technische Intelligenz in der Leitung von Gemeindeverwaltungen); Denkschrift. Erweiterung des Tätigkeitsfeldes des freien Ingenieurs, in: ibid., pp. 82–84; ZVDI 63 (1919), pp. 299, 322, 370, 394, 520, 469, 594, 642, and 1100 (Der Ingenieur in der Verwaltung). 7 This was a statement by the mighty VDI, Quoted from Matschoß, Vom Ingenieur, p. 4. In view of its focus on professional practice and the shaping of the association’s leadership by entrepreneurs, the VDI was generally positive towards middle school graduates. On Matschoß’s role in the VDI, see König, Ingenieure. 8 Cf. (Max Maria v.) Weber, Stellung (1877/78), p. 4 f. According to this, the engineers were considered “upstarts” from the point of view of the “Facultäts-Wissenschaften.” Further evidence in Manegold, Universität. 9 Oechelhäuser, Arbeit, p. 50. 10 Cf. especially the reactions to Sombart’s lecture in: Soziologentag 1910, pp. 63–84; Weber, Aufsätze, p. 204 (“Fachmensch ohne Geist”).

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the reality of the market economy. Here one can certainly speak of a paradox of modernity.11 Until the First World War, engineers reacted to the cardinal accusation of an allegedly purely utilitarian, materialistic view of technical work mainly with attempts at adaptation. Thus, publicly present engineers strove to simply apply an idealistic concept of education to their own professional group. Such an approach formed the core of the engineering recognition struggle – especially after the award of the right to confer doctorates to the technical universities (1899) had received little attention in the bourgeois media. Conrad Matschoß, the founder of the historiography of technology, for example, compared the engineering work culture, which he said dated back to the ancient master builders, with that of classical academic professions. By virtue of his “creative” activity, the engineer was on a par with “the artists” and even “great humanistic scholars.”12 Matschoß also demanded corresponding qualities from the next generation of engineers.13 According to him, the core of technical expert work was not the strict scientific calculation oriented towards efficiency, but the creative scope detached from it. By linking up with the tradition of the ancient and medieval builders and designers, the engineers finally hoped for a complete reconciliation of the public image of engineering with a (new) humanistic understanding of scholarship. Education and Spirit Versus Civilization and Technology Around 1900, the bourgeois criticism of technology and engineers even intensified somewhat. After technology and society had previously been more strongly related to each other in scientific and bourgeois feuilletonistic journalism, a veritable scepticism of technology had developed. Its guiding principle was the alleged

11

Cf. Ziegler, Großbürgertum; Hettling, Bürgerlichkeit; Tanner, Patrioten; Habermas, Frauen. On the quasi-religious function of Neuhumanism, see Mommsen, Kultur. 12 Matschoß, Der Ingenieur, p. 3. See also Paul Juliusburger, Der Bildungswert der Technik, in: Technische Monatshefte 7 (1916), pp. 65–67, here 66; Brinkmann, Ingenieur, p. 43 and Kammerer, Aufgaben, p. 4 f. At the 1904 general meeting of the VDI, the wellknown engineer Max von Eyth had even described engineering as “intellectual work of a magnitude and fineness that is not surpassed by any other form of intellectual creation”. ZVDI, 48 (1904), pp. 1129–1134, here 1132. 13 Cf. Matschoß, Vom Ingenieur (1930), p. 2 f. Cf. König/Weber, Netzwerke, p. 409 f.

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“impoverishment” of the individual through “technical-rational”14 thinking. The former uneasiness towards technology was now transformed into a veritable critique of modernization. From then on, technology was not only understood as a cultural disturbance, but in its industrial form of expression was also held responsible for manifest social tensions. Only now, after half a century of industrialization, did modernity become the threatening “machine age.”15 Industry epitomized several moments of “massification”16 (Simmel): In that the mass that appeared here threatened the loss of concrete bourgeois privileges as a result of the growing political pressure of the large formations of workers and employees produced by industrial society: industrial seriality was mirrored in the Social Question. Talk of the masses became the topos sine qua non of the political-social journalism of the early twentieth century. This radicalization of social images is inconceivable without the opening of the political opinion market – among other things as a result of the repeal of the Socialist Law (1890). The dawning “age of extremes”17 (Hobsbawm) was expressed in the expanding press as well as in the leisure culture of a social democraticunionist workers’ milieu with its conspicuous large-scale events with up to hundreds of thousands of participants.18 Equally formative for the bourgeois perception of the crisis, however, was the numerical expansion of the white-collar workers. The associated question of which side in the class struggle the new middle class would be heading towards in the future.19 Against this background, the mood in the feuilletons and salons at the turn of the century became a brittle alloy of sceptical forecasts of the future with a fin de siècle-typical optimism.20

14

The certainly most popular contribution was made by Eduard v. Mayer u.d.T. Technik und Kultur. Gedanken für die Verstaatlichung des Menschen (1906). Cf. also Nolte, Ordnung, p. 60. 15 Schmoller, Maschinenzeitalter (with a predominantly positive connotation, however). Cf. also Weipert, Mehrung; Hübinger, Kapitalismus. 16 Simmel, Geld, p. 17. 17 Hobsbawm, Age. 18 On other aspects of this fundamental politicization, see Ullmann, Kaiserreich, pp. 126–137. 19 Cf. Mangold, Angestelltengeschichte; Nolte, Ordnung, pp. 58–60. 20 Cf. the contributions in Frevert, Jahrhundert; Drehsen/Sparn, Weltbildwandel; Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1999/2; Salewski, Technik; Föllmer, Verteidigung, pp. 25–64; Mommsen, Auflösung; Hettling, Bürgerlichkeit, pp. 233–241. Utopian components can thus be found above all in the area of foreign policy and the understanding of the nation. Föllmer (ibid.), however, would like to put the diagnosis of a pronounced mood of crisis into

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This fundamental scepticism towards industrial social change changed practically nothing in the following three decades. In 1920, for example, the literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius turned down a professorship at the Technical University of Aachen because he did not want to be addressed as workmate by the chair of heating and ventilation. However, the equation of technology and industrial modernity with social distribution struggles also remained relevant to the broader bourgeois public. This was impressively reflected in the sales figures of Oswald Spengler’s two-volume “Decline of the West.” Here the unease in modernity, the alleged lack of spirit and inwardness was simply attributed to the category of “civilization”21 and thus at least indirectly to the work of engineers. In the engineering associations, it was still rightly stated at the end of the 1920s that “the cause of so many phenomena of our time is still seen in the machine devil.”22 However, public criticism of technology was by no means a universal social phenomenon. While a critical attitude remained dominant in the bourgeoisintellectual forums, an enthusiasm for technology even developed among the general population. However, this was not about technical-industrial change in its entirety. Rather, people enjoyed technical achievements such as the first cogwheel railways in the Alps (1870s), ocean liners, or the construction of skyscrapers on the other side of the Atlantic. Often, however, this euphoria for progress was also nationally coded – as with the naval arms race that began in 1900.23 This emphatic modernity was given additional impetus by the change in the media landscape, the circulation boom of popular magazines in the 1910s and 1920s. Here, as well as in parts of the fiction, engineers were at least occasionally regarded as the “conquerors of nature”24 they liked to style themselves as.

perspective. In doing so, however, he refers to civic identity as an overall complex. This was certainly not determined exclusively by the public crisis debate, but at least equally by various stable factors that were possibly more relevant to life, such as employment opportunities. 21 For a critique of the distinction between civilization and culture, see Ernst Horneffer, Der Ingenieur als Kulturträger, in: TuK 18 (1927), pp. 213–215. 22 K.F. Steinmetz, Über Berufsfragen der Diplom-Ingenieure, in: TuK 16 (1925), pp. 129–135, here 131. Cf. also DaA 10 (1928), p. 31; the contributions in Hardtwig, Kulturgeschichte; Peukert, Republik, pp. 185–190; and Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, pp. 483–486. 23 Cf. Ludwig, Technik, pp. 42–47; König/Weber, Netzwerke, pp. 536–552; Berghoff, Verheißungen. Every battleship laid on keel was celebrated as a “piece of our national identity”, wrote Eugen Diesel in the 1920s (ders., Der Weg, p. 180). On the perception of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, see Ash, Wissenschaftspopularisierung. 24 Dienel, Zweckoptimismus, p. 10. Cf. König/Weber, Netzwerke, p. 546 f. as well as vividly Theodor Fontane, Irrungen/Wirrungen, p. 117: “For industrialists I have had a passion from

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Counterstrategies of the Engineers Not only the criticism, but also the reactions of engineers radicalized in the twentieth century. Among prominent representatives of the field, a veritable “optimism of purpose”25 (Hans-Liudger Dienel) emerged even before the First World War. From then on, criticism was simply turned into positive: According to this, technical-scientific innovations were called upon to raise the prosperity of society as a whole and thus the material situation of all classes. Analogous to this ambitious publicistic promise of the engineers that the social question would be solved through progress that would benefit everyone, a new self-confidence had also developed at the technical universities.26 The “mathematisation”27 of the engineering sciences, which had helped them to academic consecration, was gradually reversed. Independent modelling in engineering science, which was primarily based on experiments simulating real conditions, once again came to the forefront of the scientific self-image. It was shortly after the turn of the century that this probalistic-empirical approach was elevated to a primary principle of knowledge gain.28 In distinction to the natural sciences, the concept of technical sciences (Technikwissenschaften) was now also launched for the first time. From the 1910s onwards, the engineering associations finally made less and less effort to embrace the – hitherto desperately claimed – new humanist concept of education and science. In turn, a veritable cult of utilitarianism began to take shape: “Today we know that knowledge, without the ability to translate it into practical skill, often becomes dead weight.”29 This process of demarcation was soon to reach formal educational content as well. The economics and law lectures at the TH were now no longer proof of one’s educational affinity, but were increasingly seen critical as “luxuries of high general education.”30

my youth (. . .). Either they invented new armor plates or laid undersea telegraphs or bored a tunnel or built a climbing railway.” 25 Dienel, Zweckoptimismus. 26 Cf. Oechelhäuser, Arbeit (“Heraufhebung der Massen,” p. 50); Ackermann, Entwicklung. 27 König/Weber, Netzwerke, p. 409. 28 Cf. ibid.; Sander, Ingenieurberuf; König, Künstler; Manegold, Universität, esp. pp. 48 f. 29 Thus Matschoß himself from the year 1930 looking back (ders., Vom Ingenieur, p. 14). 30 Koehne, Volkswirtschaftliche Seminare, in: ZVDDI 9 (1918), pp. 51–55, here 52.

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Partial Mass Cultural Acceptance The engineers, meanwhile, continued to try to win public opinion for their project. After all, with the aforementioned early Fordist ideologemes (prosperity for all) they had reacted very specifically to the bourgeois fears of a majorisation in the distribution struggles of the masses. However, this only met with a significant response in small sections of the social-democratic and left-liberal political camp.31 This approach did not penetrate into the depths of the feuilletons and thus into the everyday culture of the ruling middle classes.32 On the other hand, the importance of engineering work for the “industrial power of the German people”33 could be emphasized more successfully. A motif that only really came into its own when the debate included the military –the real arena of national upheaval in early twentieth century Germany. Already during the naval arms race in the pre-war years, it had been difficult to deny the national significance of technical development work. This initially tolerant acceptance of technical-industrial achievements finally changed in the last 2 years of the First World War. At least among parts of the political elite, the contemporary, originally negatively coloured dictum of the “war of the engineers” (Lloyd George) met with a positive response. From then on, engineering journals confidently called for greater penetration of the officer corps by technical experts; with the tenor, of course, that in this case the war would have been won!34 As the then VDI chairman and general director of MAN, Anton von Rieppel, made clear in a speech from

31

In the SPD, this approach was even at the centre of the ideological agenda for a time, which was mainly due to August Bebel’s bestseller “Die Frau und der Sozialismus” (Women and Socialism), first published in 1879. On the subsequent period, cf. Peukert, Weimar, p. 119 f. 32 Cf. Dienel, Zweckoptimismus; Dietz/Maier/Fessner, Kulturwert. 33 Conrad Matschoß, Festvortrag, in: ZVDI 51 (1907), pp. 1672–1676, here 1676. 34 Cf. Die deutsche Technik hält durch, in: NZI 13 (1918), Oct./Nov., p. 3; ZVDDI 9 (1918), p. 123 (report on “the builder of the 120 km gun, Krupp engineer and VDDI member Fritz Rausenberger”); ZVDDI 9 (1918), 81–83; ZVDI 62 (1918), p. 70 (US Army Corps of Engineers); ibid. p. 81 (engineers in the British Army administration); ZVDI 63 81.919), p. 712 (US Army); ibid., p. 1157 (naval engineers). Immediately after the end of the war, in December 1918, Friedrich Romberg, a technical university professor, was finally appointed head of the General Directorate of the Army Workshops in the Berlin War Office and thus, as was noted with satisfaction in technical circles, “for the first time an engineer was appointed to the head of a military-technical institution” (ZVDI 63 (1919), p. 88). For further evidence, see Walle, Technikrezeption; Dietz/Maier/Fessner, Kulturwert; Dienel, Zweckoptimismus; Berghoff, Ziele; and Radkau, Technik, pp. 239–253, who also speaks of the “quasi-dagger thrust legend” of the technicians.

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December 1917, this demand referred to the entire social organisation of the nation. Rieppel not only emphasized the importance of technology for the war machinery. He also wanted the intellectual status of the engineers to be understood as the central social support of the “Wehrstand”35 (military class). The engineers’ optimism about technology had acquired its first social technological coloration. Regardless of how one assesses the crisis experiences of the war and post-war years in principle – as a motor for reinforcing or challenging established patterns of interpretation: there was movement in the sideshow of the reception of technology.36 The thinking in rationally organized systems proclaimed by the engineers even entered the political agenda during the early Weimar years. This was particularly evident in the so-called Gemeinwirtschaft (social economy), which had become quite popular in the meantime and was prominently advocated by Walter Rathenau. In this economic-social model of organization, a quasi-governmental control of production in the sense of an increase in overall economic performance was envisaged – under a popularly conservative superstructure.37 From Social Technology to Technocracy Despite all the integration successes in the meantime, engineers had long since come to terms with their “Cinderella role.”38 With the technical sciences, they had developed a professional identity that no longer claimed to be compatible with established professional and social images. In the context of the social-technological ideas that were becoming increasingly popular – at least among exposed engineers – technology was increasingly treated less as a part of social development, as one “cultural factor” among others. Technology and technical thinking were no longer understood solely as a form, but as a social regulatory principle in itself, as the essence of society and the nation.

35

ZVDI 61 (1917), pp. 987–998, here 989. On the question of whether everyday cultural and political attitudes broke out after the First World War or whether older patterns persisted all the more clearly, see Föllmer, Verteidigung, p. 197 f. 37 Cf. Rohkrämer, Moderne, esp. p. 112 f.; Schulin, Erfassung. With Wichard von Moellendorf, the second prominent representative of the common economy besides Rathenau was also closely intertwined with the ‘engineering community’, so that one can certainly also speak of transfer effects here. 38 Paul Juliusburger, Der Bildungswert der Technik, in: Technische Monatshefte 7 (1916), pp. 65–67, here 65. On the following, cf. Dietz/Maier/Fessner, Kulturwert. 36

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“The days are not far off (. . .) when warfare will become a special branch of technology.”39 This is how an aesthetically radical, modernist group of young architects had already apostrophized in the pre-war period. In the 1920s, such ideas, which were no longer merely social-technological but explicitly technocratic, became common sense in the engineering milieu. Society as a “gigantic apparatus,”40 the neo-humanist vision of horror from the turn of the century, was now envisioned as a social ideal. In the sense of such a “planned technology”41 state and society were not only to be organized and controlled according to technicalscientific principles. The nation could also be evolve idealistic.42 In this context, the technology formed the sole ontological point of reference: only through the domination of technology in the form of technical experts over society both areas could relate to each other (again). His monopoly of knowledge about the principles of rational, efficient organization thus gave the engineer not only universal planning and steering competence. As its “master”43 he was called upon to shape culture in its entirety. For the technocratic masterminds among the engineers, technology remained an apolitical category despite – or rather because of – all the claims of social power that were traced back to it. If the ostensibly objective engineers were (finally) to move to the top of society, social “friction losses”44, i.e. social conflicts, would become superfluous. In the political conjuncture of the Weimar Republic, such nominally apolitical ideas were absorbed into a highly political alloy. Under this autocratic ideology, important engineering associations sought a more (VDDI) or less (VDI) close alliance with right-wing conservative and nationalist political currents. On the Broad Impact of Technocratic World Views The effect of such technocratic world views, which were only held by some of the exposed engineers, should not be underestimated. The technical sciences, which were separated from the rest of higher education in terms of scientific theory and 39

Brinkmann, Ingenieur, p. 83. Cf. also Riedler, Bedeutung, p. 11. Weber (Alfred), Beamte, p. 1322. 41 Weihe, Die Philosophie der Arbeit, in: TuK 24 (1933), pp. 36 f., here 36. 42 Cf. Carl Weihe, Zur Geschichte und Kultur des Bildungsproblems, in: TuK 13 (1922), p. 101 f. as well as Willeke, Technokratiebewegung; Herf, Modernism; Rohkrämer, Moderne. 43 Brinkmann, Ingenieur, p. 6. 44 Technik voran! 12 (1930), no. 3, p. 11. More common, however, was the talk of the “highest degree of efficiency of the state machinery” (Friedrich Heintzenberg, Deutsche Politik und Deutsche Diplom-Ingenieure, in ZVDDI 9 (1918), pp. 103–105 and 119–121, here 104). 40

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educational paradigm, conveyed such ideas to students in a decidedly direct manner. In view of the close links between science and industrial practice, this attitude was then also passed on directly to the working engineers.45 In this respect, the change in public self-image described above can be seen as a profound paradigm shift that presumably extends into the foundations of professional culture. The weakened variant of engineering social images, namely the optimism of progress limited to the technical in the narrower sense, did not disappear at all. Even in the 1920s, the engineering societies still tried to reconcile technical achievements with the prevailing neo-humanist concept of culture. During this period, it was above all the Frankfurt physicist, philosopher and publicist Friedrich Dessauer who tried to make it plausible that technology belonged to general culture.46 The engineering associations aimed to do something similar by endowing monuments to widely known professional colleagues such as Otto Lilienthal. The expansion of the Deutsches Museum von Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaft und Technik (German Museum of Masterpieces of Science and Technology) in Munich, which was initially founded as a provisional institution in 1905, is also part of this integration strategy. Here – not without success – the popular affinity for technology was to be cast in legitimate forms (museum).47 The lack of acceptance on the part of the established academic elites thus not only steered the engineers in a progress-affirming direction. At the same time, they came into opposition to existing scientific ideals and social images. The lack of public recognition could only be compensated for by a professional-social gesture of superiority. A senior civil servant in Berlin had already written during the First World War: “Hardly any kind of human intellectual activity is so idealistically directed in its essence as the technical one. The judge who dispenses justice, the

45

In quantitative terms, at least, this is suggested by the orientation of the non-specialist, feuilletonistic contributions in the journals of the technical associations (VDI, RDT, VDDI, Butab). Taken together, they reached more than half of the engineers directly, i.e. as subscribers. On the limited significance of the Reichsbund Deutscher Technik (RDT) and its journal Technik voran! see Willeke, Technokratiebewegung. 46 Cf. Dessauer, Philosophie. Since the mid-1920s, however, Dessauer also tried to philosophically counter the “bloodlessness of the mass age”. Cf. Dessauer, Streit (um die Technik), p. 230 f. Cf. also Tuchel, Philosophie. 47 On the foundation of monuments, cf. Monatsblatt des Berliner Bezirksvereins des Vereins Deutscher Ingenieure 8 (1914), p. 159 (Lilienthal); ZVDAI 2 (1913), 212; Stahl und Eisen 25 (1905), p. 1467; Ibid., p. 1382. On the Deutsches Museum, cf. Menzel, Musealisierung.

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doctor (. . .), even the merchant (. . .) have no, or at least only a very inadequate, sense of the connection of their activity with general culture.”48

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There can be no question of the low income being compensated for, for instance, by an elevated position or other social moments, inclusion in the hierarchy. (Karl Werner, 1930)49

The intellectual surface of the public discourse on the status of engineering revealed the lack of public recognition that had an undoubtedly notable impact on the professional self-image and thus the everyday world of engineers – among others in personal contact. The neo-humanist concept of education, which engineers temporarily tried to claim for themselves by their technical cultural offensive, was associated with the hope that technology would enter the formalized culture of museums and schools, “the foundations of general education”. When reference was made to “ubiquitous studies of the history of literature and art”, this was not only to a legitimate high culture, but at the same time to the everyday cultures of a bourgeois milieu – and with an increasingly critical-distancing intention. Around 1910, Conrad Matschoß had still hoped that the “world-historical significance” of technology would also become apparent to those who were “more distant from technology.”50 In contrast, a few years later the Berlin councillor Paul Juliusburger pointed out how large the gap was between engineers and an established bourgeois milieu: in the course of a conversation about Schiller and Richard Strauss, he had been asked the question “how does the locomotive driver steer his train through the many curves without the locomotive and the wagon leaving the tracks?”51

48

Paul Juliusburger, Der Bildungswert der Technik, in: Technische Monatshefte 7 (1916), pp. 65–67, here 66. 49 Der Berufs- und Lebensraum des Industrie-Akademikers, in: DtA 12 (1930), pp. 56–58, here 57. 50 Matschoß, Vorwort, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Technik und Industrie 1 (1909), p. IIIf. 51 Paul Juliusburger, Der Bildungswert der Technik, in: Technische Monatshefte 7 (1916), pp. 65–67, here 65. The Technische Monatshefte bore the subtitle „Technik für

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The feelings of strangeness and aversion, however, first came from the bourgeois side. According to this, it was the engineers who were incapable of adequate conversation and lacked the necessary “societal education.”52 In almost all protoscientific accounts of the engineering profession between 1900 and the end of the 1920s, the distinctive gesture of bourgeois circles towards the “plebeian threat”53 posed by engineers was cited. According to these discourse excerpts with a moreover (micro-)political character engineers, and explicitly also diploma engineers, were only very fragilely integrated into the ruling classes of the established academic professions and the larger employer, who formed the clearly delineated upper middle classes. In the end, these bourgeois efforts at demarcation were not only about the affective distance towards the unknown educational culture. The “evaluation of purely technical achievements in general, both in public and in private life”54 merged with another negative attribution. This was expressed particularly succinctly at a meeting of the VDI in 1899: “As a student still counted among the preferred social classes, with the average philistine, to which I count the educational philistine, the engineer after completing his studies is actually not much more than a better locksmith.”55 The bourgeois demarcation from the engineers was thus also based on the engineer’s job in the (supposedly) standardized-serial industrial enterprise. Furthermore the income conditionsquite clearly fell short of the bourgeois minimum standard of the higher civil service. Ultimately, the professional activity was located in a subaltern social sphere. Thus, taking up a higher technical profession merely testified to “valiant”56 (Thomas Mann) motives. Engineers increasingly reacted to this social disdain by isolating themselves. The debate about the role of technology in society, in which engineers increasingly drifted into a special role, was thus reflected in everyday life. The engineers now put

Alle“(Technology for All), which, in view of the form of presentation, referred primarily to a lower middle-class readership. 52 Dritter Stand, in: Deutsches Staatswörterbuch, vol. 3, 1858, pp. 176–182, here 179. 53 Ibid. p. 66. In the following it says: “The natural sciences, on the other hand, play a quite different role in the intellectual life of modernity.” Cf. also Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, p. 297. 54 Czwalina, Lage, p. 218. 55 A speaker at a meeting of the Lower Rhine District Association of German Engineers in February 1899, in: ZVDI 43 (1899), p. 930. 56 Mann, Zauberberg, p. 27.

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forward their allegedly more realistic, more pragmatic view of their profession and life: One often experiences that the lawyer or the scholar, who has cultivated Latin and Greek abundantly, gets on much worse in Italy and Greece than the former middle school pupil (. . .), because the former has less sense and understanding for the living language than the latter.57

Actually, such comparisons were not common within the status community of academics. They testify to deep-seated social frustrations in the sense of unfulfilled status expectations.58 This veritable arrogance towards the profession and education of the engineers must of course have been perceived as unjustified above all by the diploma engineers. After all, the basic framework of bourgeois existence, namely the economic “ideal of independence” and an ostensibly special “education”59 was thereby called into question. This is particularly true in so far as the diploma engineers – as will be seen – were a socially relatively exclusive grouping that was fed to a large extent by precisely this bourgeois milieu. It is therefore somewhat surprising that between the turn of the century and the early 1930s, TH students were recruited from the middle classes to a similar extent as university students. This acceptance of the engineering profession among the educated and business bourgeoisie could be explained primarily by the temporarily poor employment prospects in traditional academic careers. Accordingly, the engineering profession was often taken up out of pragmatic considerations. Certainly, at the (individual) level of action, there was also hope that employment conditions would improve in this seemingly emerging career. Social Background With one exception, concerning the TH-Karlsruhe (1900–1905), the social background of technical university students has only been included in official statistics since 1925 (Prussia) and 1927 (Reich).60 Compared to the universities, a somewhat

57

Freytag, Laufbahn, p. 31. Cf. the excerpts from the professional debates in Jarausch, Professions; McClelland, Experience; Caspar, Lehrerverein; Enzelberger, Sozialgeschichte; Hamburger, Lehrer; Hürkamp, Aufstieg; Janz, Bürger; the contributions in Müller-Benedict, Karrieren. 59 Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 767. 60 The comparison to the universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg in Baden shows similar patterns of inter-professional status inheritance as in the rest of the Reich, so that the 58

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larger proportion of students at the TH-Karlsruhe at the beginning of the twentieth century came from the higher middle-class parental homes of the larger employers and the academic professions – namely just under 50%.61 Thus, engineers quite clearly surpassed the social exclusivity of the higher teaching profession, the traditional academic career of social advancement. Ambitions for social advancement in technical subjects, on the other hand, were concentrated in the training courses of technical middle schools, which, after all, promised comparable income opportunities with significantly lower educational investments. This is confirmed by further surveys: According to the 1907 Berlin survey of 3265 engineers, between 28 and 55% of university engineers and only 12–24% of middle school engineers came from an upper middle-class parental home – depending on whether or not the self-employed merchants were classified as belonging to the category of the larger employers and thus to the (economic) upper middle classes. In contrast, 10.4% of the middle school engineers and only 1.3% of the university engineers came from the working class.62 This constellation changed in the 1920s in one important respect: from around 45% in the pre-war period, the self-recruitment rate of the upper middle classes at universities and technical universities (TH) fell to around 32%. The relative exclusivity of the TH remained intact. The boom in academic education, which was fed almost exclusively by the employed and civil servant middle classes, thus affected universities and THs in equal measure. With 55% of the students, the middle classes

Karlsruhe information can certainly be generalised. Cf. Badische Hochschulstatistik, pp. 270–273. For small-scale data for the nineteenth century, cf. Scholl, Ingenieure, pp. 219 and 333; Henning, Beamtenschaft, pp. 56 f. 61 At the universities in Baden, one can assume – based on the missing values – that at least 40% and at the Prussian universities for the year 1905, when a breakdown of the selfemployed according to the size of the enterprise becomes possible, at least 38% of the students came from the bourgeois parental homes defined in this way. In the present context, the larger self-employed, as entrepreneurs in the narrower sense, are understood to be the owners of enterprises with more than ten employees. Due to the apparently even more exclusive definition of “entrepreneurs” in the university statistics and the missing values, I estimate here a middle-class recruitment rate of 45%. Cf. Badische Hochschulstatistik; Titze, Hochschulstudium, pp. 238–241 and on the definition of the self-employed ibid. pp. 236 f., on the similar exclusivity of university chemistry studies cf. ibid. pp. 260 f. 62 Cf. Jäckel, Statistik, p. 26 f. The remaining shares are attributable to the middle-class occupational groups of middle and lower civil servants, salaried employees, farmers and small shopowners.

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in both places now represented the most extensive group of background.63 It is true that between 1900 and the 1920s, workers’ children recorded the highest rates of increase: their share grew from less than one to about two and a half percent.64 However, they were not yet significantly involved in higher education – let alone in relation to their share of the population. Traditional and Instrumental Educational Aspirations In addition to these social hierarchical classifications, the social background profiles of TH and universities also reflect horizontal dividing lines – namely between a traditional and a more practically oriented understanding of tertiary education. This dividing line, however, was primarily found within the large formations of the middle classes and the bourgeoisie. It did not have much to do with social exclusivity if at THs in comparison to the classic universities (1) the proportion of children from families of larger employers was larger than from the academic bourgoisie, and (2) the proportion of white-collar workers was larger than middle and lower civil servants.65 These differences were due to socially horizontal causes, i.e. family occupational traditions. The popularity of the TH in the predominantly commercial white-collar families is evidence of the fact that the differentiation did not take place between the technical sciences on the one hand and the classical sciences on the other. After all, the university canon of subjects also included the fields of Nationalökonomie (macroeconomics) and law, which were administrative in the broader sense, and thus came much closer to the qualification and activity profiles and work content of office workers than engineering. The occupational images and thus also the educational intentions broke down rather into a respective positive image of the free economy on the one hand, and of the civil service and the state-regulated freelance professions on the other. Thus, in addition to engineering, the sons of entrepreneurs favoured the study of law,which could also be used in the private sector, by a

63

Cf. Deutsche Hochschulstatistik. Bd. 2, Berlin 1929, p. 28 f. and the corresponding subsequent years. On the universities, cf. Titze, Hochschulstudium, pp. 238–281. 64 Cf. ibid. as well as Badische Hochschulstatistik, pp. 74–77, 168–171 and 270–273. However, the Baden higher education statistics do not show workers. Most likely, the 0.6% of unassigned paternal occupations were predominantly blue-collar occupations. 65 Cf. Badische Hochschulstatistik, pp. 74–77, 168–171 and 270–273; Deutsche Hochschulstatistik. Bd. 2, Berlin 1929, pp. 28 f.; Titze, Hochschulstudium, pp. 238–281.

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considerable margin over philology and medicine.66 Of course, succession in company management was an immediately obvious, pragmatic motive. Limited Social Opening in the 1920s We can therefore conclude: the social-hierarchical self-recruitment of the bourgeoisie at TH and universities overlapped the professional orientations of a hierarchically heterogeneous economic milieu of entrepreneurs and employees at TH. The professional-cultural differences described above, which ran equally through the middle classes and the bourgeoisie, thus pale in comparison to the social-hierarchical boundaries between the two major milieus: the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the middle classes on the other. With its 32% participation in academic education, the bourgeoisie was still overrepresented by almost 20 times its share of the population at the end of the 1920s. The old and new middle classes, on the other hand, which accounted for around 55% of students, were only overrepresented by two to three times.67 Lifestyles These findings on educational mobility can be linked to a central finding of research on the middle classes in the 1980s and 1990s. In the course of extending the subject matter to everyday thinking and action, i.e. to lifestyles and mentalities, it was possible for the first time to define the outer boundaries of the bourgeoisie more precisely. It became clear that the two cores of the bourgeoisie, larger entrepreneurs on the one hand and academic professionals on the other, were closely intertwined in terms of personnel. Not least in that they shared central orientations to everyday life. In its lifestyles, especially in its “educational ideas and work ethic,”68 this bourgeois milieu also markedly distinguished itself from other everyday cultural

66 Cf. Senta Humperdinck, Soziale Schichtungen und Veränderungen, in: DlA 12 (1930), pp. 103–105. 67 On the numerical size of the middle classes, cf. the estimate by Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, p. 308, which assumes a share of the economic and educated middle classes in the population of around 2% and is more precise than that in vol. 3, p. 763. In the same book, the „upper economic middle classes“ quite obviously also included small shopowners. Cf. the following and the detailed contemporary extrapolation by Sombart, Volkswirtschaft, pp. 440–475. I have estimated the size of the middle classes here at around 20% of the Reich’s population. Cf. Petzina/Abelshauser/Faust, Arbeitsbuch III, pp. 54–57 and Geiger, Schichtung, p. 72, who, including the higher civil servants(!), indicates 25.58% for the year 1925. 68 Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 767; see also Schäfer, Bürgertum, pp. 154–166.

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contexts – partly in an affective-routinized way, partly by intended distinction. The core elements of such a bourgeois everyday culture were predominantly shaped by the educated bourgeoisie. Thus, even the economic bourgeois distinguished himself from the masses not so much through possession as through education and general lifestyle.69 Research into the middle classes thus has the merit of having made clear the far-reaching cultural homogeneity of the educated and economic middle classes. At the same time, however, the detailed lifestyle studies also made it plausible why many successful small shopowners and well-earning white-collar workers, whose social situation was often more favourable than that of some educated middleclasses, were not counted as upper middle-classes by their contemporaries. Their everyday behaviour simply did not correspond to what was required in this bourgeois elite milieu.70 From a theoretical point of view, everyday cultural classifications are always about distinction and/or distance: Either the lifestyle of the white-collar elites did not qualify them for inclusion in the established ruling classes. Or among the whitecollar elites there was such a pronounced affective distance from bourgeois styles that there were very limited desires for inclusion. The Everyday Relevance of the Social Situation However, in the course of the strong focus on lifestyles and mentalities, the social situation (education, profession, income) had almost completely fallen out of the field of vision of the intensive German upper middle-class research. Of necessity, this then also affected the secondary meaning of social position – seemingly decoupled from everyday thought and action. The accumulated capital responsible for the respective esteem or exclusion by a certain milieu was not only composed of adequate manners, frequented evening events or the styles in clothing and home furnishings. The occupational-social situation also plays a central role at the level of everyday acting. If we look at the bourgeoisie in the early twentieth century, the dichotomous coding of occupational relations into status and non-status attributions should be emphasized. Here, it is essentially a matter of the prestige of individual professions in a particular milieu, in this case the bourgeoisie.

69 Cf. especially Augustine, Patrizier, as well as Ziegler, Großbürgertum; ders, Kontinuität; Kocka, Bildungsbürgertum; Siegrist, Professionen; Habermas, Frauen; Lundgreen, Bildung. 70 Cf. especially Ziegler, Großbürgertum and Hettling, Bürgerlichkeit.

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It would certainly not be possible to determine this deeply internalized professional prestige in everyday life by means of surveys. Since such an approach, which was popular in the sociology of the 1960s and 1970s, would hardly reveal more than the “official self-image of a society”71 (Peter A. Berger). What is meant here are attributions that are generated in media-organised public spheres. Public evaluation thus shapes the everyday interpretations of the actors to a particularly large extent. With regard to the perception or appreciation of professional conditions, the composition of the upper middle-class milieu itself also raises questions. Especially with regard to the enormous material inequality between the educated and the economic bourgeoisie. Manfred Hettling’s survey of the incomes of various clearly bourgeois groupings in Breslau, for example, shows a significantly higher mean income for entrepreneurs than for senior civil servants and academic freelancers (doctors, attorneys).72 Accordingly, only the already contemporarily so-called larger entrepreneurs can be understood as genuinely bourgeois self-employed.73 One could also say: the at least twelve thousand marks that were taxed annually in this catchment area were necessary to compensate symbolically, in everyday life, for the lower average level of education compared to the academic elites.74 In Bourdieu’s words, the chances of belonging to the upper middle classes depended on the volume of capital, which could be composed either more strongly from cultural or economic sources.75 Ultimately, however, it was not such resources for action that were decisive for success in the social arena, but the dispositions for action. The practically effective, habitually deeply inscribed preferences, mentalities and values, determined the extent to which and the manner in which people were able to belong to the bourgeoisie. They determine to what extent and how one can also symbolically-practically bring one’s own resources respective capital to bear. On the other hand, a professional position in the academic credential system, i.e. a position as a higher civil servant, freelance lawyer or doctor, was in any case regarded as a bourgeois form of existence and thus as a valid entry ticket into 71

Berger, Erwerbsklassenbildung, p. 669. Cf. Hettling, Bürgerlichkeit, p. 49 f. 73 In addition to the owner-entrepreneurs, in the case of employment in larger companies with several hundred employees, the “manager-entrepreneurs” (general directors) are also to be included in this social scope. Cf. Ziegler, Großbürgertum. 74 Cf. Sombart, Volkswirtschaft, pp. 465–475; this diagnosis is also found in Ziegler, Großbürgertum, esp. pp. 118 f. 75 Cf. Bourdieu, Unterschiede, pp. 143–159, 185–227 and 365–390, and on the following: Sander/Weckwerth, Personal. 72

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bourgeois elite contexts. Here the characteristics attributed to an occupation could be quite complex. As could be seen, the employed diploma engineers were negatively charged not only with their false education but also with the working conditions in the serially structured industrial enterprise, which did not appear to be bourgeois. In contrast to this low social standing of the industrial engineers, the higher technical civil servants, i.e. the comparatively scarce government architects, railway engineers, etc., were not subject to any corresponding reservations. This is shown by the membership lists of exclusive bourgeois associations. These testify of a fairly complete integration of the higher technical officials into the bourgeois milieu.76 Quite obviously, the technical councillors enjoyed the general high esteem of the higher civil service, which was rooted not only in their academic education but also in a positive image of state-supporting authority.77 Bourgeois TH Students: Middle-Class Engineers The contradiction that has now become apparent between the high social exclusivity of TH studies on the one hand and the less advantageous professional opportunities and the low prestige of the engineering profession in everyday life on the other can be clarified somewhat on the basis of the Prussian student surveys. Among other things, they asked about career goals: of the 2287 students enrolled at the Prussian Technical University in the winter semester of 1926/27, 9.4% aspired to selfemployment, 59.4% to employment in the private sector, and 31.2% to a civil servant position. Only the desire for self-employment corresponded to the real opportunities. Thus a good half of the 9.4% envisaged a professional future as a business owner, while in fact around eight per cent of the TH students were children of “owners or directors of factories.”78 On the other hand, the chance of entering the civil service in general was overestimated by a factor of about three and the chance of entering the higher civil service – which was most likely the target here – was even overestimated by a factor of about ten.79 Furthermore, almost all of those respondents who aspired to a salaried position in the production sector stated the

76

See Table A.2 and the following. Cf. Föllmer, Verteidigung; Vogel, Nationen; Ziegler, Großbürgertum. 78 Cf. Preußische Hochschulstatistik 1 (1927), p. 162 as well as the subsequent years of this survey in the Deutsche Hochschulstatistik, which does not show any significant deviations in these figures. 79 Cf. Table 2.1. 77

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exclusive position of plant manager as their career goal, which of course was only ever achieved by a marginal proportion of the employed engineers.80 These veritable misperceptions of the social reality of the engineering profession may come as a surprise given the relative closeness of entrepreneurial and whitecollar families to the industrial labour market. However, the labour market crisis of the classical academic professions also played a role. In such difficult times, people saw an alternative career opportunity above all in higher technical civil service. Presumably, the (supposed) future prospects of technical branches were combined here with the employment and status promises of the academic credential system. The bourgeoisie and the upwardly mobile milieus were affected to different degrees by the consequences of such misjudgements of the social usability of TH studies. For example, a missed opportunity to maintain status generally caused greater irritation in the lives of the upper middle-class offspring than the upward ambitions of the middle commercial employees, which could at least be partially fulfilled with a salaried position as an average engineer.81 In the course of their professional careers, however, the sons of upper-middle-class families certainly had greater chances of attaining exposed engineering positions, since they could fall back on corresponding personal networks and, of course, inevitably had the suitable, habitually internalised everyday practices at their disposal.82 No major surveys are available on the social backgrounds of exposed engineering positions – heads of department, directors, senior civil servants. According to the contemporaries, these career opportunities were nevertheless unable to resolve the “discrepancy between the demands one can make on life on the basis of education and training and what one achieves in economic activity under the conditions of production”83 . The

80

Those interviewees who stated that their career goal was to be an employee in industry were exhaustively distributed among the categories of development engineers (designers) and plant managers. Cf. Preußische Hochschulstatistik 1 (1927), p. 162. 81 For contemporary findings on the phenomenon of missed status retention, see Schmeiser, Söhne. 82 If one opts for one of Bourdieu’s somewhat contradictory definitions in this respect, I would thus like to understand symbolic capital not as a resource of action, but rather as action ‘in itself’. Cf. Bourdieu, Unterschiede, pp. 171–221 and 355–404; ders, Raum, p. 10 f.; Sander/ Weckwerth, Kompetenzen. 83 Thimm, Privatbeamte, p. 2 f. This diagnosis explicitly refers to academic employees. Cf. on the following, following Bourdieu, also Kocka, Bildungsbürgertum, p. 19. If one assumes, as Bourdieu does, that experiences of the family of origin have a high degree of persistence, which still has a significant influence on dispositions of action in adulthood, then the

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habitus of the bourgeois-socialized diploma engineers is thus likely to have come into noticeable conflict with social reality. Associations and Networks The study of personal contact circles can provide important information on the question of the everyday cultural bourgeois character of engineers. Historical studies of such face-to-face associations must, however, be limited to the area of associations. More detailed, e.g. biographical or regional sources are only available in isolated cases and mostly not for normal engineers. In addition, an investigation of the associations must concentrate on the typically upper middle-class associations. It is only for this social sub-section of the diverse association system in the first third of the twentieth century that lists of members are available which contain a significant amount of occupational information.84 The oldest variant of bourgeois associations were the so-called welfare and educational associations, which date back to the first half of the nineteenth century, i.e. to the beginnings of the “modern”85 bourgeoisie. In the second half of the century, they were joined by the Masonic lodges, which had a similarly milieuspecific character.86 The social composition of these two types of association lost none of their traditional exclusivity, at least until the mid-1930s. In concrete terms, this meant that beyond the bourgeois milieu in the narrower sense – i.e. entrepreneurs and academic professions – members of middle-class milieus were hardly represented there: Smaller shopowners, middle civil servants and white-collar workers made up on average only about one-tenth of the members.87 Even senior employees with a high level of professional exposure at the level of authorized signatories and salaried directors were clearly underrepresented in the welfare and educational associations and the lodges.

academic engineers are to be counted among the most bourgeois that can be found in the first third of the twentieth century. 84 Obviously, the extent to which the estates were stored in public archives and libraries is strongly related to the official purpose of the association. 85 This is the periodization concept of the Bielefeld Collaborative Research Center on the Social History of the Bourgeoisie, which ran from 1986 to 1997. 86 Eichberg, Lebenswelten, p. 43, has also pointed out the social function analogies between educational and charitable associations on the one hand and the lodges on the other. 87 Cf. Tenfelde, Entfaltung; Haupt/Crossick, Kleinbürger. On the persistence of social exclusivity, cf. the numerous scattered references in Schäfer, Bürgertum and, for the period up to 1914, Hoffmann, Politik, pp. 334–340. On the following, cf. Bourdieu, Unterschiede.

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Bourgeois Associations Between Leisure and Business If the occupational groups of white-collar workers and middle civil servants were able to join bourgeois associations, one can certainly speak of social, or more precisely, everyday cultural advancement. Access to the association’s internal networks promised manifest advantages – with effects on the individual social situation. After all, it was here that jobs, shares in companies, reduced-rate loans, etc. were arranged. As a local gathering place for the bourgeois elite, the lodges, welfare and educational associations were thus simultaneously involved in various social processes. Demonstrative charity and the promotion of high culture were constitutively accompanied by the cultivation of private business contacts and the associated gain in distinction of a strictly delimited bourgeois sphere.88 In the words of Michael Ruck, bourgeois associationism functioned as a site of “constant actualization of the cohesion of the ruling classes.”89 As with all personal networks, professional and private relationship elements entered into a fruitful symbiosis. A distinction must be made between these explicitly bourgeois contact circles and the self-help and savings associations of the middle classes, the master craftsmen and tradesmen’s assistants, which had also gained enormous importance since the 1860s. In the 1910s and 1920s, this concentration of middle-class associations on material, subsistence-oriented purposes broke down. The non-working time of the employed middle classes had increasingly turned into explicit leisure time as a result of increased material – pecuniary and temporal – scopes for action. The cultivation of hobbies as an element of self-realization was integrated into middle-class associations – this was the basis of the veritable boom of sports and amateur clubs (railway enthusiasts), of animal breeders’ and singing clubs in the early twentieth century.90 Bourgeois Associations and Engineers Unfortunately, we know nothing about the affinity of engineers to these new types of hobby associations. In contrast, the findings on bourgeois associations, however, are clear: In a sample of four associations in highly industrialized medium-sized and

88 Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann (ders., Politics, p. 115) succinctly refers to the lodges as “laboratories of bourgeoisie.” 89 Ruck, Korpsgeist, p. 54. On the importance of the association system in relation to business relations, cf. Ziegler, Großbürgertum. 90 Cf. Maase, Vergnügen, pp. 20–38 and 79–114; Paulmann, Freizeit; Langewiesche/Tenorth, Bildung, pp. 15–20; Eichberg, Lebenswelten, pp. 40–60.

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large cities from the 1880s to the 1910s, broken down regionally as well as by association purpose, engineers made up less than five percent of the members in each case. Thus, they were significantly underrepresented relative to their share of the population.91 The communalization processes practiced in these associations thus exerted either little attraction on the technical experts – or, what can hardly be decided on the present empirical basis: Qua successful closure strategies of the established circles, this sphere remained largely closed to them. The only exception was the Dortmund Gesellschaft Casino, in which 10.2% of the members were engineers. This can certainly be attributed in part to the fact that the Casino society presented itself less of neo-humanist-educational than than of commercial character. In relation to the (high) proportion of engineers in the population of this industrial region, however, this was still a clear under-representation.92 Finally, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann’s study of the professional profiles of the Masonic lodges in Breslau and Leipzig in 1896 yields a very similar finding.93 In addition, it is also apparent from the lodges that the majority of the engineers were either freelance architects or Bauräte (building officers, higher civil service). In contrast to the employed industrial engineers, those possessed the necessary cultural and social-hierarchical symbolic capital. This constellation did not change until the 1920s when industrial modernity finally seemed to promise engineers an increase in their professional prestige. This is conveyed by the membership lists of synoptically evaluated Masonic lodges. For this period the only source on the professional composition of the bourgeois associations, here again a regionally, in terms of urbanity and economically balanced sample of five lodges was compiled. Whereas in 1905/06 2.7% of the members were engineers, by 1928/29 rose to 7.9% (Table A.2).94 However, this

91

Cf. report on the business activities of the Verein gegen Verarmung und Bettelei; Stadtarchiv Göttingen, Pol Dir XIII Fach 68, No. 4; Mitglieder-Verzeichnis und Statuten des Heidelberger-Schloss-Vereins, pp. 4–12; Verzeichnis der Mitglieder des Vereins für Hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde, pp. 5–17. Heidelberg, 1886: 2 engineers and 1 civil servant architect among 324 native members; Göttingen, 1885: two engineers among 311 members, 1889: two engineers among 323 members; Kassel 1880: 11 engineers among 298 members (including 6 government building officers). 92 Cf. Janz, Bürger, p. 532. 93 Hoffmann, Politik, pp. 357–359. 94 A change in the social function of the lodges can be excluded as a possible explanation. In the 1920s, the lodges were rather perceived as representatives of a particularly elitist, even anachronistic bourgeoisie. Cf. Hoffmann, Politik, p. 337.

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did not mean a significant increase in the integration of engineers into the bourgeois milieu of the association, since almost the entire increase can be attributed to the simultaneous expansion of the the engineering profession in the basic population. The generally weak, at best minimally increasing integration of engineers into traditionally bourgeois networks after the First World War testifies to further, subordinate processes of closure. Thus, around half of the engineers represented in the Masonic lodges in 1905 and 1928 can clearly be attributed to an elite section of the engineering profession. And this did not apply to diploma engineers, who were in principle no more strongly represented in the bourgeois associations than their colleagues from the middle schools. Apart from engineers in the higher civil service as well as freelancers, this (bourgeois) engineering elite consisted mainly of owners or directors of companies. The very slight increase in the lodge membership of engineers therefore primarily reflects – as we know from other sources – the growing acceptance of economic leadership functions (higher management) in the bourgeois milieu.95 The weak integration of engineers into everyday bourgeois contexts also becomes apparent if one defines the middle classes as broadly as possible and includes all potentially included occupational groups. In concrete terms, this means, in addition to the engineers, the small shopowners as well as middle management merchants, who at least had chances of access, if the required lifestyles were available in the individual case. If we take Hans Ulrich Wehler’s estimate as a basis, we arrive at a proportion of engineers in these broader middle classes of a good 15% in the mid-1920s.96 By contrast, technical experts accounted for only about 7% of lodge members. Finally, a similarly pronounced distance from the bourgeois networks can be seen among the higher commercial employee ranks in the area of authorized signatories and the heads of entire business divisions (directors).97 In the field of associations, therefore, one can speak unabashedly of an everyday cultural division of the upper classes into a traditional educated and economic bourgeoisie on the one hand and the new commercial and technical elites on the other.

95

Cf. Ziegler, Großbürger; Köhler, Wirtschaftsbürger. Cf. Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, pp. 712 f. and 763. Calculated on the basis of 4.5-person families as well as about 150 thousand engineers and about 100 thousand middle and higher management employees. On the latter, cf. the plausible contemporary estimate in Vgl. DlA 10 (1928), p. 112. 97 These titles from the corporate sector were usually also used in (private) everyday life. It can therefore be assumed that they found their way into the occupational titles in the membership lists. 96

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Engineers in Late Industrial Society: Internal Differentiation: Special Social Role Access to the local circles of notables thus reflects the moment that has already been identified as typical for the professional-social situation of engineers. This refers to the great importance of status differentiation within the group, either according to professional or, in this case, social success. The latter was, of course, related to the former. Thus, the diploma title could at best be used to proliferate on the societal stage if this educational status had been converted into a veritable career as a higher civil servant or in a higher management position. The engineers’ complaints about their special role in everyday culture had already pointed out that the limited links of engineers as a whole, as well as of academic engineers, with the bourgeoisie can probably be traced back to a large extent to the efforts on the part of this established bourgeois milieu to close itself off. From the bourgeois point of view, there were manifest reservations about the technical culture of expertise and knowledge as well as the typical engineering situation – comparatively low income and an affiliation to the industrial mass business. It was difficult to reconcile the working conditions of most engineers with the bourgeois ideal of independence and a related idea of professional autonomy.98 Nevertheless, all we know about the attitudes of the engineers themselves on the basis of the previous research steps is that they were characterized by a strikingly close attachment to their own technical culture and to the profession in general: a characteristic that is quite obviously rooted in the bourgeois critique of technology and the failure of the engineers’ corresponding struggle for recognition. This could accordingly only have developed in the one or two decades after the turn of the century. In addition, however, the representatives of the engineers’ associations also assumed that the engineer had chosen his special role in society to a certain extent himself – i.e. that, due to his specialist cultural character, he displayed comparatively little interest in the less logical social and political processes.99 Of course, the low political interest of the engineers was not meant by their contemporaries as a political ideology in the narrower sense or even as a party-

98

On these value orientations, cf. the relevant bourgeois historical studies cited in this chapter. Cf. Riedler, Rede; TuK 13 (1922), p. 121; Carl Weihe, Die kulturellen Aufgaben des Ingenieurs, in: TuK 15 (1924), p. 48 f.; the latter, Technik und Politik, in: TuK 18 (1927), p. 14 f.; Siegfried Marold, Technik und Weltanschauung, in: TuK 18 (1927), p. 101 f.; TuK 20 (1929), pp. 209–11; DTZ 6 (1924), p. 427.

99

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political affinity, but rather as a proto-political, everyday cultural disposition. However, the functionaries of the technical professional associations again used bourgeois-academic standards as an unquestioned destination. It is precisely this, however, that makes such (self-)diagnoses from the ranks of the engineering associations to quite reliable findings concerning location of the technical experts in the milieu matrix of the early twentieth century. By simply seeing engineers disappear into the mass of white-collar workers, outside observers eventually came to a similar conclusion. According to the numerous contemporary treatises on the political participation of the middle and lower classes, most of which came from a left-liberal political camp, the social needs of white-collar workers were primarily directed towards private satisfactions in the area of family and consumption. Accordingly, this also affected the better-off and more highly educated whitecollar circles, such as academic engineers and middle- and upper-management merchants.100 By trying to explain the low level of integration into established social classifications, one usually spoke of the “specialist”101 – a self-diagnosis that was admittedly not free of moments of social staging: With the extended general education also goes hand in hand the settling down into the forms of good society, which, unappealing as they may often be to the engineer intent only on efficient performance, must not be neglected if one is to achieve success in life.102

The low level of social and political acceptance naturally offered the engineering associations options for political complaints. Thus, in the technical association journals, it was regularly pointed out that until 1918 there was not a single engineer among the members of the Reichstag. This was blamed on the one hand, of course, on society’s hostility to technology and, on the other, on the political disinterest of the technical experts themselves.103 If one combines the Reichstags of the Empire

100 Cf. for example Thimm, Privatbeamte (1908). Hortleder, Gesellschaftsbild, p. 94 adopts such contemporary interpretations one-to-one. 101 Kurt Schindler,Techniker und Politik, in: DTZ 11 (1929), p. 148 f. Cf. DTZ 12 (1930), p. 221 f. 102 Speaker at a meeting of the Lower Rhine District of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) in February 1899, in: ZVDI 43 (1899), p. 930. 103 Cf. Biedenkapp, Ingenieur, p. 25; ZVDI 61 (1917), p. 990; ZVDI 62 (1918), p. 885. A total of 14 engineers belonged to the Imperial Diet/Parliament(Reichstag). Cf. Jarausch, Professions, p. 70.

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and the Republic, there were a total of 40 engineers compared to 131 philologists and 404 lawyers – whereby the engineers outnumbered the philologists and lawyers many times in the basic population. Moreover, one third of these 40 engineers had only entered the Reichstag in the last years of the Republic – and they had done so for the NSDAP.104 The völkisch-conservative political radicalization of many academics that began at the end of the 1920s had thus evidently brought with it a considerable gain in the attractiveness of big politics among engineers.105 In view of such diagnoses of self and others, it is certainly not sufficient to cite the low prestige of the engineering profession among the old elites and the processes of demarcation based on this to explain the weak integration of engineers – and also of academic engineers – into bourgeois milieu contexts. The typical diploma engineer was also not interested in the formed public sphere of associations, local networks and even politics to the extent that his professional position and level of education would have led him to expect at the time.

104

Of the 26 engineers in the Weimar Reichstag, one belonged to the KPD, two to the SPD, three to the DVP, four to the Zentrum, three to the DNVP, and 13 to the NSDAP. 105 On the representation of engineers in local politics, see Matzerath, Oberbürgermeister.

8

Prevented Bourgeoisification: Lifestyles and Mentalities of German Engineers and Other Middle-Class Groups in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century 8.1

The Everyday Life: Family as a Planning Task

White-collar workers often displayed, depending on their material means, a spontaneous relationship to the acquisition of fashionable consumer goods and the use of leisure time. Their abandonment of the traditional value pattern of deferred satisfaction points to a behavior that was to dominate the consumer society of the later twentieth century.1

This diagnosis by Hans-Ulrich Wehler is fundamentally called into question by the significantly increasing participation of white-collar workers in academic education during the period under consideration. After all, making higher education possible for one’s own offspring required a limitation of the need for immediate enjoyment in favour of long-term orientations. However, the importance of such long-term planning was even more pronounced among middle-ranking civil servants. At the end of the 1920s, around 28% of students came from the families of this professional-social group – compared with around 12% among white-collar workers. The white-collar workers thus participated in academic studies pretty much in proportion to their share of the population, thus clearly outperforming the self-employed, who were similarly situated. Of course, this is even more true for the middle civil servants: Numerically, they were overrepresented at universities and colleges by at least 10 times.2

1

Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 762. Estimate based on the German Higher Education Statistics and the occupational censuses of 1925 and 1933. According to Lundgreen, Sozialgeschichte (Part II, p. 128, Table 40), children

2

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_8

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Without doubt, the development of educational participation in the early twentieth century forms a particularly striking example of the increasing role model function of bourgeois everyday orientations.3 But in other areas, too, patterns of interpretation and action that were originally exclusive to the upper middle classes increasingly prevailed. Routinized strategies for coping with life, i.e. mentalities and lifestyles, were thus decoupled to a certain extent from social situations.4 Family planning can also be counted among such tendencies of bourgeoisification of the lower middle classes. In the nineteenth century, it was initially only the bourgeois groups of higher civil servants and academic freelancers who systematically limited the number of their children. In the marriage period from 1875 to 1899, they had an average of 2.9 children per marriage according to a sample from Lower Saxony. Among whitecollar workers and middle and lower civil servants the figure was 3.4, among the self-employed 4.3, and among farmers 4.2.5 The wives of higher Bavarian civil servants who had married in the same period even produced only about 2.4 children.6 In the (collective) framework of a large social group, a “strategic variable”7 of life chances was thus attempted to be controlled for the first time. To put it bluntly, childbearing had developed from an affective matter of course into a regular choice of consumption, which came into competition with other areas of need. This is also illustrated by the further development of generative behaviour, which was specific to social classes and occupational groups. Thus, around 1900, middle-rank civil servants first followed with birth restriction, followed about a decade later by white-collar workers. A little later, in the 1920s, white-collar workers even undercut the average number of children of the white-collar milieu. The 1927 Reichsamtliche Verbrauchsstichprobe (official consumption survey) of 2000 blue-collar, white-collar and civil servant households shows an average of 1.59 children per marriage for (male) white-collar workers, 1.82 for middle civil servants and 2.0 for higher civil servants.8 of middle-ranking civil servants were even 25 times more likely to be represented at middle schools than children of salaried employees. Cf. also Kaelble, Mobilität, pp. 130–134 (with slightly different calculations of these relative mobility chances). 3 Cf. Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 766; Geiger, Schichtung, p. 137 f. 4 Cf. also Haupt/Crossick, Kleinbürger, pp. 120–151 and 254–284. 5 Spree, Angestellte, p. 295. 6 Cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, p. 80 (birth cohorts of men 1841–1855). 7 Spree, Angestellte, p. 293. 8 Cf. Zentralarchiv, Haushaltsrechnungen (household accounts). For the higher civil servants, cf. with similar results (2.04 children/marriage) Bohlen, Lebenshaltung. Cf. also Spree,

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This outright overtaking of the white-collar middle classes in the area of birth restriction shows that in the process one cannot speak of a seamless bourgeoisification of these lower middle-class milieus. This is also suggested by Sandra Coyner’s older study of the Angestellten-Verbrauchsstichprobe (workers’ consumption sample) of 1927. Here, the differences within the dependent middle classes, i.e. whitecollar workers and civil servants, are initially striking.9 In contrast to white-collar workers, middle-rank civil servants used the material leeway they had gained through birth restriction primarily to improve their children’s educational opportunities. In terms of the relative importance of individual spheres of life, they therefore showed considerable similarities with the higher civil servants and academic freelancers.10 Such a reduction in the number of children ultimately had a double effect: falling expenditure shares in the primary expenditure area of food, clothing and housing went hand in hand with the fact that fewer children had to be provided with the intended high quality of education. On the other hand, the newly acquired resources of employees flowed primarily into domestic (magazines, radio) and non-domestic leisure activities (restaurants, cinema). Material privilege thus had an effect primarily within large sociocultural formations. The basic, milieu-specific orientations differed markedly – as has been seen: social advancement (middle-rank civil servants) and status maintenance here (academic professions), leisure consumption there (white-collars). These lifestyle preferences ultimately explain the different absolute limits to which birth restriction came up in the 1920s. The scope for action in the everyday world that had been gained through such a controlled lifestyle flowed, in the case of civil servants, with education into a sphere of life that was in turn rationally regulated and oriented towards the long term. In contrast, the employees focused on the immediate, pleasure-oriented consumption of the resources gained through renunciation. In this respect, it was above all the middle-ranking civil servants who emulated a bourgeois model and moved closer to this leading social formation. Ultimately, socio-professional cultures, i.e. the differences between the middle-class employees and the (middle) civil servants, therefore social hierarchical positions, overlapped.

Angestellte, p. 298. In this evaluation of various birth cohorts of the 1939 occupational census, it should be noted that the age cohorts shown separately can only be applied in an estimated way to an actual situation such as that envisaged by Spree (1927). 9 Cf. Coyner, Patterns; this. Class Consciousness. 10 Cf. ibid. These findings by Coyner from the 1970s, whose heuristics appear rather simplistic overall, were confirmed by Triebel, Klassen and ders, Konsum.

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Family Planning in Engineering Households If we add engineers to this matrix of generative behaviour, which admittedly can only reflect a certain section of the entire mentalities, they initially present themselves as a homogeneous sub-fraction of white-collar workers. Thus, in the 39 families of employed engineers from the 1927 consumption sample, on average about as many children were raised as by employees on average – namely 1.62.11 In the broader context of such family-reproduction-related patterns of behaviour, however, the engineers also showed limited similarities with bourgeois patterns. The age difference between the spouses of the technical experts averaged four years, which was numerically almost exactly between the five and a half years of the higher civil servants and the approximately three years of the white-collar workers. The decisive factor for this middle position may have been the academically educated engineers, who had to take into account significantly longer periods of education than the salaried employees when planning their families. The rigid birth restriction of employed engineers in the first third of the twentieth century is therefore not yet able to provide any clear indications of everyday cultural analogies or distances from other social formations. It can only be stated that the engineers acted in a comparatively long-term planning, resource-saving manner. Thus, engineers do not yet appear to be typical employees, “harbingers of modern society”12 (Coyner), who controlled their generative behavior primarily in order to be able to participate in the consumer and leisure offerings of the emerging modernity. The quoted survey from 1927 differentiated the 39 households of technical experts into those of “engineers” and those of “technicians”. Quite obviously, this was based on the contemporary, but not always clear-cut, classification of the term “engineer” as referring to diploma graduates and the term “technician” as referring to middle school graduates. If one concentrates on the 25 “engineers” surveyed, the average number of children is reduced even further to 1.56. It is true that the academic engineers thus fall all the more outside the ideal-typical “academic pattern” of the higher civil servants, with whom they shared the bourgeois social background. It is possible, however, that the birth restriction fulfilled precisely this purpose, namely to be able to realise in nuce academic expectations in the pattern of life that were determined by their social background. After all, at around 5500 marks per annum, the household income of these 25 engineers in the sample was

11 12

Cf. also on the following Zentralarchiv, Haushaltsrechnungen. Thus the subtitle of Coyner, Patterns.

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only around 55% of the level of the higher civil servant households. It seems, then, that the diploma engineers, with their rigid family planning, reduced themselves to a certain extent in order to be able to bourgeoisify themselves!13

8.2

Household Expenditure: New Middle-Class Hedonism

Surveys of household expenditure of private households, so-called household accounts, allow a rather exhaustive insight into everyday life and its management. They are indispensable, above all, for macro-historical studies of lifestyles related to larger social groups. This is especially true for subject areas that predate the onset of modern survey research in the late 1950s. From these surveys of household accounts, which go back to the 1880s, the consumption sample of the Reich Statistical Office of 1927 stands out in several respects: on the one hand, because of its data base of 2000 households, and on the other hand, because of a survey interest which here for the first time aimed at the comparison of different, albeit exclusively dependent, socio-professional groups. By forming different income groups, the cases can first be differentiated sociohierarchically, i.e. according to social situation. Furthermore, the indicated occupational titles allow fine distinctions.

The 1927 Consumption Sample The basis of the present study is formed by the 25 employed (diploma) engineers of the 1927 consumption sample (Table 8.1).14 The education-based, quasi-formal denominations also reflect further occupational-social differences: namely in the form of the slight income advantage of the academics. While the average gross

13

Is equal to: Statistisches Reichsamt, Lebenshaltung 1927. Notes: All sp.: arithmetic mean. Excluding remaining expenditure. HV: head of household/identical with the earner of the highest regular income. Earned income other than HV salary: from paid employment and fee activities, excluding income from property of all kinds. Domestic services: wages for permanent service personnel. Education: school and all other education, including all learning materials and kindergarten fees, as well as books and periodicals. Amusements/admissions: theatre, concert, cinema, events of all kinds; including subscriptions to stage and concert societies and fares to events, and broadcasting fees. Holidays: Including excursions and sports activities at permanent residence. Travel expenses: Including purchase and repair of bicycles. 14 To the “technicians” see Table A.3.

Persons/household Number of children Age head/wife Age 1st child Working income head Acquisition income other than HV salary Income/expenditure Taxes/duties Insurance/provision Debt repayment Save Gifts Food and luxury foodstuffs Clothing Total housing Of it: Rent Household goods and repairs Heating and lighting Domestic services Services “yes” 596.40 293.04 183.72 117.56

10.8 5.3 3.3 2.1 16

% 3.64 1.56 39.4/34.8 8.8 4702.40 84.52 5534.04 285.56 5.2 382.04 6.9 80.68 1.5 75.36 1.4 184.32 3.3 1768.32 32 729.88 13.2 1073.16 19.4

1 Engineers n = 25

591.,39 290.06 178.72 46.71

11.4 5.6 3.4 0.9 6.7

2 Middle employees n = 300 % 3.71 1.67 39.0/35.9 7.8 4632.72 129.56 5199.15 266.45 5.1 418.67 8.1 61.94 1.2 96.00 1.8 139.51 2.7 1744.67 33.6 666.58 12.8 1060.54 20.4 636.80 360.95 200.31 63.51

11.9 6.8 3.7 1.2 9.8

3 Intermediate officials n = 297 % 3.87 1.82 40.3/36.4 8.6 4724.02 65.49 5343.50 276.96 5.2 170.56 3.2 91.50 1.7 90.79 1.7 171.13 3.2 1771.53 33.2 752.01 14.1 1202.42 22.5 1265.00 580.51 349.85 744.13

12.8 5.9 3.6 7,4 70.2

4 Higher officials n = 47 % 4.02 2.00 45.5/39.7 10.3 8809.53 25.49 10.037.72 650.55 6.5 320.43 3.2 100.51 1 127.19 1,3 667.36 6.7 2226.13 22.4 1170.72 11.8 2221.21 22.4

Table 8.1 Persons, income and expenditure of the households of engineers, employees and civil servants, German Empire 1927

126 8 Prevented Bourgeoisification: Lifestyles and Mentalities of German. . .

Source: Central Archives, household accounts

Personal and health care Education Pleasures/admissions Holiday Association fees Travel costs Remaining expenditure

128.04 171.96 80.92 119.52 67.40 137.76 84.92

2.3 3.1 1.5 2.2 1.2 2.5 1.5

102.77 151.82 70.77 123.23 66.19 80.10 86.88

2 2.9 1.4 2.4 1.3 1.5 1.7

143.69 202.98 63.32 130.29 47.88 60.38 93.20

2.7 3.8 1.2 2.4 0.9 1.1 1.7

371.81 393.21 133.23 427.94 110.60 91.85 185.19

3.8 4 1.3 4.3 1.1 0.9 1.8

8.2 Household Expenditure: New Middle-Class Hedonism 127

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annual earnings of the “engineers” amounted to 4702 marks, the “technicians” came to 4185 marks. In the following, these two groups of employed engineers can be compared with middle commercial employees (n = 300) as well as middle civil servants (“Subalternbeamten”, n = 297) as well as with higher civil servants (n = 47).15 In addition to a typical middle-class occupation, engineers are thus also placed in the context of materially similar groups.16

Contours of a Leisure Society Even against the background of the social transformation processes of high industrialization (urbanization, proletarianization), the first third of the twentieth century presents itself as a period of above-average rapid social change in terms of mentalities and lifestyles. As already indicated, in the course of rising real incomes and shortened working hours, organized and commercialized forms of leisure activities attained cross-class relevance for the first time. With the growing range of magazines and periodicals, excursion restaurants, inner-city variety shows and sporting events, and – since the 1920s – cinema and radio, the older political festive culture with its collective symbolism was accompanied by diverse forms that could be consumed individually. Already dismissed by contemporaries as half petty-bourgeois, half proletarian “mass leisure”17, the diagnosis of a far-reaching social levelling of leisure behaviour has been corrected by more recent research. In the process, the translation of milieu specifics into finer differences is also emphasized more strongly.18 According to this, the everyday culture of the workingclass remained characterized by the

15 To validate the comparative procedure, those 300 cases of (commercial) employee households were selected here whose income was within the absolute income range of the engineer households. 16 Due to the concentration of historical household surveys on dependent employees, households of larger self-employed persons can unfortunately not be taken into account here. Moreover, in view of the small number of cases for engineers and senior civil servants in earlier consumption surveys, the diachronic comparison originally intended could not be realised. Cf. Zentralarchiv, Haushaltsrechnungen as well as the contemporary evaluations by Albrecht, Struktur; Krziža, Haushaltungsbücher; Feig, Erhebung; Günther, Haushalt; Günther, Techniker. 17 Silbermann, Zwei Bücher, p. 301. 18 Cf. Maase, Vergnügen, pp. 11–112; Ruppert, Kulturgeschichte; ders. Arbeiter; Dussel/ Frese, Vereinskultur; Paulmann, Freizeit; Schütz/Wegmann, Medien; Obelkevich, History.

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overspending, which – especially with regard to alcohol – had already been commented on disparagingly in contemporary times. In contrast, the middle-rank civil servants and the materially highly heterogeneous white-collar workers adopted the controlled spending behaviour of the bourgeois milieu – albeit in different forms in each case.19 So far, however, the focus of research has remained on the working class and the petty bourgeois milieu. The consumerist lifestyles of the middle and executive ranks as well as the upper middle classes have not yet been systematically studied.20 With these first contours of a leisure society, at least important basic differences between middle-class and bourgeois milieus weakened. Out-of-home entertainment and socializing in clubs and dance halls were now also part of the integral lifestyle of the new middle class – admittedly with various subtle differences in the types of clubs, the alternatives between theater, vaudeville or cinema, and admittedly the genre of the play, performance and film, etc. Further tendencies towards convergence can be traced back to the development of income gaps between the major social milieus, dubbed classes by contemporaries. The decline in the real incomes of senior civil servants after the First World War contrasted with the relative income stability of middle civil servants and the majority of white-collar workers. In response to this contraction of the financial scope for action, charitable expenditure in particular was cut back on the bourgeois side; not least in order to be able to maintain other symbols of bourgeoisie in the area of housing or evening entertainment.21 The two most important socio-structural and socio-cultural neighbours of the engineers, i.e. the bourgeoisie and the salaried middle classes in the middle levels of the hierarchy, had thus moved a little closer together in their lifestyles in the two to three decades before the 1927 consumption survey. In a lifestyle study based on household accounts, it must of course be borne in mind that those preferences are reflected in pecuniary terms. Moreover, expenditure on a large number of consumer goods is grouped into categories, which obscure the

19

Cf. Triebel, Zwei Klassen, pp. 231–413; id., Konsum and contemporary Achner, Lebenshaltung. 20 As micro- and mesohistorical approaches, cf. Schäfer, Bürgertum; Hettling, Bürgerlichkeit; Wierling, Haushalt. Moreover, the productive macro-historical approach of Spree, Klassenund Schichtbildung (Class and Stratification) should not be overlooked, which, while considering lifestyles as a dependent variable in a cluster-analytical manner, cannot, for example, reconstruct the differences or similarities between white-collar workers and higher civil servants with the same income. 21 Cf. Schäfer, Bürgertum, esp. pp. 287–298.

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view of subtle and even quite basic differences. For example, in the present sample, expenditure on elementary schooling (school fees, teaching materials) has been lumped together with adult educational expenditure and, more importantly, with expenditure on books and press products of all kinds.22 But even irrespective of this, the financial expenditure simply says nothing about the concrete good, the relation of quantity and quality as well as about the chosen brand, the style of clothing or of home furnishing let alone about the handling of the acquired goods and services, the practice itself.

Bourgeois Comparative Foil: The Lifestyles of Senior Civil Servants When looking at the data on income and expenditure in Table 8.1, the first thing that strikes the eye is the far greater material scope of senior civil servants. They earned almost twice as much as the middle-class groups. But even in the relative expenditures, which in the form of percentages neutralize the differences in income, these ideal-typical educated citizens differed from the engineers, white-collar workers, and middle civil servants in several characteristic respects. Namely, in the items considered particularly demonstrative gifts and maids, personal care, and vacations, as well as, to a lesser extent, education and housing. With regard to the income levels of the social groups examined here, the significance of Engel’s so-called law is actually negligible. As head of the Prussian statistical office, Ernst Engel had already established in the 1880s that a certain minimum level could not be undercut for the immediate life-sustaining items of food, clothing and housing: The lower the income, the larger the share of this so-called rigid need. However, the demands of academic civil servants on the quality of their food were less clearly above those of the other three groups than their financial advantage would suggest: although they earned around 85% more, they spent only around 25% more on food – per capita even only around 15%. A similar situation applies to clothing. However, the average clothing expenditure of the higher civil servants did not yet reach the ideal bourgeois level. As the correlation measures (Pearson’s r) show, the higher civil servants spent more money on food and clothing in particular in the case of individually higher incomes (Table A.5). Compared to the items of food and clothing, higher civil

22

On this problem, see Pierenkemper, Informationsgewinne; Lüdtke, Kommentar.

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servants handled other lifestyle areas much less flexible. Such static areas of expenditure naturally indicate a particular importance in the respective milieu: these are obviously milieu-typical preferences. In the case of senior civil servants, these included above all the size, location and furnishing of the home, the maintenance of a maid, and club life. All of these areas were already regarded as monolithic guarantors of a bourgeois lifestyle in the Empire.23 With such a pronounced insistence on the traditional, the higher civil servants must have experienced the interim drop in real incomes by around 30% as a considerable irritation in their lives. Their pronounced political protest behaviour in the Weimar Republic can only be explained by this firm attachment to tradition and milieu and the resulting uncertainty – and not, as has so far mostly been the case, by the falling incomes per se.24

The Lifestyles of the Middle Classes: Engineers, White-Collar Workers, Middle Civil Servants The financially quite homogeneous middle classes in Table 8.1 also differed markedly in their lifestyles. First of all, however, there are fundamental similarities: Quite obviously, the new middle class tried to create material leeway for itself with its rigid birth restriction, within the framework of which the fundamental orientation of these occupational strata in the social hierarchy upwards could be practically implemented. This was also what some contemporaries thought they had observed: After all, even among the white-collar proletarians the residue of bourgeois, individualistic thought and feeling was not altogether inconsiderable. At least outwardly, a certain bourgeois cultural tradition was maintained, emphasizing in home and dress the distance from the proletarian habit of life.25

23

Cf. Bohlen, Lebenshaltung. Cf. Jarausch, Professions; Fattmann, Bildungsbürger. Fattmann does explicitly refer to Coyner’s findings (see above, Patterns) on lifestyles. However, these are not related to income, so that income trends must ultimately serve as the only explanation for the political development of the higher civil service. Nor does Fattmann mention the more recent study by Triebel, Zwei Klassen. 25 Erwin Steinitzer, Die Unterbezahlung der geistigen Arbeit, in: BBl 4 (1922), p. 169 f., here 169. Cf. also the very differentiated contemporary study by Achner, Lebenshaltung. 24

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However, the family economy in the new middle classes was not organized in a completely flexible way – and thus without tradition. In order to be able to imitate bourgeois standards in certain, symbolically particularly conspicuous points, such as clothing, investments in education, or entertainment outside the home, people by no means made every compromise. For example, gainful employment for the wife was almost as uncommon among engineers, white-collar workers, and middle-class civil servants as it was among the educated bourgeoisie. Of course, the renunciation of such an additional income must also be classified as a significant milieu symbol.26 As Armin Triebel’s pioneering study on lifestyles in the early twentieth century showed, the absolute savings as well as housing and education expenditures of ordinary white-collar workers and lower civil servants differed only minimally from those of the better-off middle-class occupations focused on here (Table 8.1). Instead, the lower-income white-collar workers and civil servants restricted their number of children even more and saved primarily in pleasure-oriented areas – such as food and leisure activities outside the home.27 The dependent middle classes were thus quite willing to postpone the immediate satisfaction of needs in favour of an adequate, sometimes downright restrictive lifestyle. In these lower income brackets, the proto-bourgeois self-image of the new middle class, oriented more towards the top than the bottom, is thus revealed in a particularly condensed form. The enormously divergent social positions within the white-collar workers and civil servants thus melted together to a remarkably high degree in terms of everyday culture!

The Middle Officials: ‘Half’ Educated Citizens On the other hand, the socio-professional differences at the middle and upper levels of living of the salaried middle classes were quite noticeable. Thus, at first glance, the lifestyle of the middle civil servants seems to belong to a bourgeois pattern – and this in contrast to the commercial employees as well as the engineers. In clothing, housing, and educational expenditures, and to some extent in personal care, the 26

In 1925, a total of 25% of married women were in full-time employment. Cf. Zentralarchiv, Berufszählungen, (Occupational Censuses), dataset BZ.25.T02. 27 Cf. Triebel, Zwei Klassen, esp. pp. 250–262, 335–340 and 374–380. Based on a total expenditure level of 3200 to 3600 marks, which was clearly below the average earnings of a skilled clerk in a clerical position. Cf. ibid., vol. 2 (set of tables), esp. pp. 340 f., 348 f., 352 f., 356 f., 366 f., 376 f.

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middle civil servants stood out clearly from these other two main groups of the salaried middle classes.28 Compared to the pleasure-oriented consumer behaviour of white-collar workers, especially with regard to entertainment outside the home, as already emphasised by Coyner, Spree and, most recently, Triebel, the middle civil servants were distinguished not only by their pronounced educational aspirations.29 The bourgeois ambitions of the middle civil servants’ families were expressed on the one hand in the social advancement aspirations for their offspring, and on the other hand also in the design of their homes and clothing. Without being able to penetrate into the concrete styles, tastes and the associated interpretations of similarity and difference, such a role model function cannot be conclusively proven.30 However, it were precisely these areas, housing and clothing, where also the senior civil servants differed from employees in higher management, who achieved a similar level of income. Housing and clothing thus seem to have been traditional bourgeois areas of identification and demarcation in which then also the middle officials expressed their status ambitions.31 Of course, the middle officials could only realize a slimmed-down version of the four-room belle étage apartment, the ideal center of an educated and upper-middleclass lifestyle: cutbacks had to be made either in terms of size or residential area,.32 This was also reported by contemporaries. For example, the functionary of a whitecollar workers’ association recognized an external, functional obligation in the lavish housing culture of the subaltern civil servants: For civil servants, in contrast to senior employees, only certain “better residential quarters” were eligible for “official reasons.”33 The expenditure on housing and clothing became feasible for the middle civil servants because, in addition to modern leisure activities outside the home and

28

Given the comparable total expenditure, this is of course as true in absolute as in relative terms. 29 Cf. Coyner, Patterns; this. Class Consciousness; Spree, Angestellte; Triebel, Zwei Klassen. 30 Cf. Nollmann, Kultur. 31 Cf. Zentralarchiv, Haushaltsrechnungen. 32 Cf. Tyszka, Hunger (1927), p. 337 f. as well as the building activities of the Berlin Civil Servants’ Housing Association in ders, o.T. In terms of their external ornamentation, the residential buildings, which were mostly intended for lower and subaltern civil servants, competed with the upper middle-class representative buildings in the respective districts. In contrast, the comfort of living, the use of the apartment as a place of private self-development, remained in the background of the planning goals. 33 Humperdinck, Lebenshaltung, p. 17.

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consumption in restaurants (which falls under food expenditure), they also restricted themselves in terms of club subscriptions. This is a typically middle-class area that was also strongly related to the public sphere. In this respect, the culture of imitation of the subaltern officials bears more inwardly directed features of self-assurance than demonstrative ones directed at the public sphere.34 In short, what was the use of the lavish apartment and ambitious clothing if one did not participate in the actual contact circles of the bourgeois associations. The under-representation of middleranking civil servants in the typical bourgeois associations is also confirmed by the membership lists (see above). In the context of the fundamental orientation of the salaried middle classes upwards, which Pierre Bourdieu was able to trace for French society of the 1960s, the middle civil servants ultimately took on a special role. They imitated the educated bourgeoisie, i.e. their colleagues in the higher service, but only for themselves. Ultimately, in the case of the middle-ranking civil servants, we are looking at a very specific socio-professional group culture that could not entirely shake off the moment of imitation and thus its origins in the middle classes.

The Model of the Modern Middle Classes In contrast to the middle civil servants, the (diploma) engineers fitted seamlessly into the middle class culture – i.e. into the mass of mostly commercial employees.35 On the basis of a certain degree of existential security, as expressed in educational expenditure as well as savings rates, the affective life plans of both commercial and technical employees (engineers) conspicuously followed needs for pleasure and entertainment. This is shown by the expenditure on food as well as on theatre, vaudeville and cinema (amusements/admissions). In terms of expenditure on food and drink and tobacco, however, the difference compared with middle civil servants only becomes apparent if the higher number of children among civil servants is taken into account.36 The engineers and commercial employees fed themselves

34 This publicity can certainly not be assumed to the same extent for the other items of leave and domestic service, which are kept small by the middle officials. 35 This was also noted by the Afa-Bund. Cf. DTZ 12 (1930), pp. 146–148. 36 If one considers children as full persons, which is of course only approximately valid and understates the differences mentioned, the middle civil servants spent 458, the engineers 485 and the middle employees 470 Marks per capita on food and beverages.

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somewhat more lavishly – and mainly in the form of eating out in restaurants.37 Self-fulfillment through consumption of pleasures thus had, among the new middle classes, above all an extra-domestic component that was oriented towards the offerings of a new kind of leisure society. This pattern of employee consumption differed from that of the middle civil servants primarily by one overarching characteristic: The obligatory expectations of a professional-social milieu quite obviously played a minor role among the new middle classes. Of course, white-collar workers also regarded themselves as bourgeois in the broader sense, as educated and cultivated, and, like the real bourgeoisie, set themselves apart from the allegedly unbridled hedonism of the working-class milieu by wearing a suit, going on a weekend trip to a coffee house, living in a wellkept apartment with functionally separate rooms, and reading books and magazines.38 Whether or not this was a vision of advancement, i.e. a rigid imitation of bourgeoisie: unlike the engineer, for the middle-ranking civil servant the quasibourgeois three-room apartment and well-groomed clotheswere part of the good flavour of one’s own class. Certainly existing further needs, to go to the vaudeville and cinema or to cultivate certain hobbies, were curtailed in return.39 In contrast, the leisure culture outside the home of engineers and commercial employees left more room for such individual activities, detached from the collective rythm. The three occupational groups examined in more detail here – engineers, senior commercial employees and middle-level civil servants – can all be attributed to a middle-class culture. In their basic self-image and thus in their mentalities and lifestyles, however, two poles became visible: on the one hand, a need-led, insofar gradually individualistic way of life of the white-collar workers, including the employed technical academics. On the other hand, there is the collective canon of the middle civil servant milieu. In the case of the middle civil servants, this was essentially a culture of imitation. In the case of their colleagues in the higher civil

37

Cf. Table A.4. The foodstuffs listed here must be deducted from the total expenditure on foodstuffs and luxury foodstuffs in order to obtain the remaining expenditure on bakery products, potatoes, vegetables, etc. 38 Cf. v. Saldern, Gesellschaft; Hartmann, Alltagskultur, esp. pp. 201 f. and 210–13. On middle-class residential styles, cf. Kanacher, Wohnstrukturen, pp. 89–113. 39 The breakdown of the item amusements/admissions, which can only be carried out for individual cases, shows that, overall, white-collar workers actually frequented the cinema somewhat more than middle-ranking civil servants, whereas the latter spent comparatively more money on going to the theatre. Cf. Spree, Angestellte, p. 289.

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service, however, one can speak of a self-evident elite culture that merged with the members of the economic bourgeois professional classes. Socialization was thus sought by commercial employees and engineers more in the area of the individually, often also ad hoc usable offers of modern mass culture than in the affiliation to a specific group context. But even on this basis, it would have been expected that especially the academic graduated engineers would have developed a professional self-image that was oriented towards the social distinction of the old educated bourgeoisie. A positive reference to ‘the’ educated bourgeoisie was – as could be seen – ultimately only established by the functionaries of the engineers’ associations, who were struggling for recognition by the old elites for a long time.

White-Collar or Bourgoisie? Engineers in the Higher Civil Service and Senior Merchants That traditional bourgeois codes of affiliation also applied somewhat among technical experts. is attested by the (only) five cases of engineers in the higher civil service (Table A.3). While they fell short of the usual bourgeois expenditure level in the areas of personal hygiene and education, the higher technical civil servants certainly shared classic bourgeois preferences with their high expenditure on rent and household goods as well as clothing and holidays.40 Above all, however, they did not use their financial leeway to the same extent as their salaried professional colleagues for entertainment outside the home. In contrast to the engineers in the higher civil service, above-average earning senior commercial employees were more in line with the lower middle class consumption pattern of their ordinary colleagues. The 25 households of senior clerks significantly exceeded the expenditure of the educated middle class (senior civil servants) on non-domestic entertainment.41 At the same time, these professionally and financially exposed white-collar workers also invested in education to a high, just bourgeois degree. However, this could also be due to the purchase of books and periodicals, which also fell under this heading. In the case of the senior commercial employees, one particularly misses information about finer lifestyle patterns: their professionally exposed position, but

In these five cases, one childless family with exceptionally low educational expenditure, i.e. exclusively on books and press products, is particularly noteworthy. 41 See Table A.3. 40

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above all the strongly performance-oriented work attitudes of this publicly very selfconfident middle and higher management, must also have been reflected in their (private) everyday life. To what extent, then, were these salaried economic elites united by the class unconsciousness of being the real experts of the modern world, the true producers of material and social progress? Did this comparatively traditionless, upper white-collar milieu possibly become visible to contemporaries as a group on the level of subtle differences, for example in the frequency of certain clubs and individual styles of leisure (e.g. vaudeville)? In contrast to the middle-ranking civil servants, the lifestyle of the educated Bourgoisie did not serve as a role model for the engineers and commercial employees. This can also be noted at the level of the basic differences discussed here, the aggregate consumer behaviour. Thus, the consumptive lifestyles of the upwardly mobile also differed markedly from those of the bourgoisie: only in the case of housing did the senior employees reach the expenditure level of the higher civil servants. Admittedly, this does not say anything about the relationship between the cost factors size and location of the dwelling and the furnishing styles. However, the expenditure on personal hygiene and servants suggests that even these high housing costs were not a matter of status: only just under half of these actually bourgeois employees afforded a caregiver – something that would simply have been unthinkable in the educated or economic bourgeoisie.

Rising Incomes: Unchanged Consumption Patterns The correlation measures (Pearson’s r) of the individual expenditure areas also underline the strikingly low significance of affective affiliations to a special milieu context for engineers and commercial employees (Table A.4). Thus, with individually increasing income, engineers – similar to average commercial employees – increased all expenditure areas almost to the same extent. By contrast, among senior civil servants, a level of entertainment expenditure (entrance fees) had become established that was just about normal and hardly dependent on the financial resources available at the time. This level offered virtually no scope for increase and was strictly adhered to, even by those higher civil servants with below-average incomes. The same is illustrated by the relationships between the individual expenditure items. These also show that among engineer families rising incomes were invested less in the education of children – and thus to a certain extent in their own future status – and more in areas of individualistic self-realisation, i.e. in food and entertainment.

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Finally, correlation coefficients between the individual expenditure items reflect the preference orders of all social strata or income levels represented in the sample. If, on the other hand, one isolates the 13 highest-income engineering households, an identical picture emerges: although the 6784 mark of average household income was below that of higher civil servants, this engineering elite reached the pleasure expenditure of higher civil servants in absolute terms and clearly surpassed the educated citizens in terms of food and luxury items per capita.42 Among engineers and salaried merchants, rising incomes were thus invested in family luxuries (food, housing) and only to a lesser extent in the sociability of likeminded people (associations, clubs). It is true that the new leisure activities typical of the time, primarily cinema and metropolitan vaudeville, may have functioned as a form of collective self-production for the well-off middle classes. However, such forms of practice certainly did not come close to the community character of bourgeois club life. In contemporary modern white-collar culture, the public sphere was thus interpreted in a more arbitrary, individualistic way. Possibly one is looking here at the lifeworldly substance of many contemporary journalistic diagnoses: Here, employees were not only accused of a lack of political, but also of “social interest.”43

The Engineers as Harbingers of Modern Society Contrary to the wishes of the exponents of the engineers’ associations, engineers have hardly handled the limited public recognition of their profession or their less typical academic earnings – in the sense of striving for a typical bourgeois lifestyle. This also applies to the diploma engineers, where the material-social demands qua background and corresponding educational investments were high. Instead, in the course of their professional lives, the engineers quite obviously came to terms with the social development opportunities offered to them by the new type of massculturally differentiated (leisure) society. In fact, the role model function of the traditional (educated) middle classes actually declined for the diploma engineers. This is shown by the findings on personal contact circles. The extent to which background-specific expectations, which may still have existed during studies, can erode later in life is demonstrated

42

Cf. Zentralarchiv, Haushaltsrechnungen. Admissions: 120.46 Marks; food and beverages: 2135.31 Marks (average household size: 3.77 persons). 43 Thimm, Privatbeamte, p. 11.

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not least by engineers in the higher civil service: Their close ties with the traditional middle classes and a corresponding everyday outline even distinguished them from employed engineers with above-average professional success. The latter tended to practice the white-collar lifestyle of their professionally less successful colleagues. In short, professional experience, i.e. the, ‘business world’ or higher administration, and of course the prestige attributed to it and the corresponding contacts, evidently exceeded the formative power of education and income. This independence of engineers from established status cultures probably already emerged in the early twentieth century. It is true that the bourgeois public had already assigned technical experts as outsiders due to their professional content. The downright stiffening of what the engineers themselves called a “Cinderella” -identity only became apparent later: namely, after the final failure of the engineers’ public struggle for recognition – from about the 1910s onwards.44 Detailed microhistorical studies could shed light on how far this independence of an engineering, strongly profession-related image of others and, above all, of oneself actually extended. Reinhard Spree has attempted to explain the individualistic identity formation of middle-ranking commercial employees with the dequalification of their work content since the late nineteenth century. According to this, the occupational-functional degradation evoked the search for alternative sources of social identity.45 Insofar as this finding hardly applies to engineers, who are rather characterised by a markedly high degree of occupational loyalty, the individualisation of engineering lifestyles that can be observed may require greater emphasis on the world of experience outside the workplace and the processes of distinction of the old elites that take place here. The supply side must also be taken into account: In the course of longterm increases in real incomes and diversified leisure offers, completely new opportunities for self-development arose in the early twentieth century, which now for the first time competed promisingly with the occupation as a source of identity. Ultimately, the everyday practice of diploma engineers in family and leisure time testifies to a largely tension-free integration into the social status matrix of the interwar period. In any case, they did not deny their economic-social situation – their class. This can be said more of the middle civil servants, who staged themselves in their entire life as an educated bourgeois group on a par with the higher civil servants. The diploma engineers were not committed to such an ideal

44 45

On the contrasting positive self-image in the nineteenth century, cf. Lundgreen, Bild. Cf. Spree, Angestellte.

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conception of social status. The bourgeois criticism of technology and the engineering profession, as well as the objective social degradation caused by the failure to achieve working conditions and incomes typical of academics, were compensated for in individual cases in the course of a generation, i.e. from about 1900 onwards, and thus collectively ground down. In terms of everyday life, the double defense of unfavourable employment opportunities and public criticism of technology has thus largely dissolved. The political references made by many engineers’ associations to the education-based employment conditions of the classic academic professions, i.e. the professions regulated by the state and thus protected from market influences, are therefore to be understood primarily as intended strategies for improving the employment situation rather than as politically translated collective frustrations.

9

Between Interest Policies and Right-Wing Utopia: German Engineers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

9.1

Professional Politics 1870–1918: From “Gemeinschaftsarbeit” to Interests

The professional organization of engineers underwent several processes of change in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The first far-reaching change in form consisted in the decline in importance of purely professional exchange in the 1890s and 1900s. Two newly founded associations in particular placed the improvement of the social situation of their members at the top of their agenda – and thus set themselves apart from the concentration of the association’s purpose on professional-scientific exchange: the Federation of Technical-Industrial Civil Employees (Butib, founded in 1904) was joined in 1909 by the Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI). Although the VDDI, in contrast to the Butib, was basically a peaceful organization, both associations concentrated on improving the material and social situation of their clientele. Until the end of the First World War, they thus stood alone in the technical professional association system; the field remained dominated by the so-called technical-scientific associations, which – like the prominent Association of German Engineers (VDI, founded in 1856) – were, however, mostly dominated by mediumsized and large entrepreneurs under the dictum of a technical collective work. Consequently, they were often perceived by their contemporaries as being less than neutral. In 1919/1920, other newly founded associations joined the Butib and VDDI model of interest politics. On the basis of the Collective Agreement Regulations (TVO) of November 1918, these associations were not only concerned

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_9

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about the social situation of their members, but also favoured collective bargaining policy and – on this strategic basis – often labour struggle.1 The Traditional Model: Technical-Scientific Engineering Associations The technical-scientific model, the cultivation of professional exchange in the service of the professional group, but also of industry and nation, remained attractive among engineers in the 1920s. Thus, the number of members of the VDI continued to rise even in these politicized times up to about 30 thousand in 1927. If the technical-scientific organizational model could already be traced back to the 1820s, other associations joined the ranks of the top dog VDI, especially during the period of high industrialization. The most important of these associations, which mostly represented individual technical disciplines and thus industrial diversification, were the Association of Metallurgy Engineers/Verein deutscher Eisenhüttenleute (VDEh) and the Association of Electrical Engineers/Verein Deutscher Elektrotechniker (VDE).2 Moreover, with the founding of the German Empire in 1871, the older, strongly regional associations of architects and civil engineers had united under the umbrella of the Association of German Architects and Engineers (VDAI). The entrepreneurs, scientists, freelancers, civil servants and employees gathered in these associations also saw themselves first and foremost as professional representatives of technology, of a technical expertise beyond professional-social facets. In addition, the technical-scientific associations also functioned on a higher level as links between industry, science, and state and society: in matters of commercial law, educational policy, operational safety, and industrial standardization, they were valued as advisory bodies, and in some cases were even given sovereign functions.3 The socially harmonious character of the technical-scientific associations corresponded not only to the political culture of the empire, but also to the existing

1 These include: the Association of German Technicians (VDT) in the Gedag, the Technicians in the GdA, both primarily representatives of middle school engineers, as well as the Association of Senior Employees (Vela) and the Association of Employed Chemists and Engineers (Budaci), which primarily organized academic technical experts and will be examined in more detail below. 2 Cf. the still valid contemporary overview by Raßbach, Betrachtungen, pp. 194–197. On the VDE and the Elektrotechnischer Verein (ETV), which was merged into the VDE in 1893, see Knost, Interessenpolitik. 3 Among others, the steam boiler monitoring associations. Cf. especially Lundgreen, Ingenieur-Vereine.

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professional models. The classical professions of theologians, lawyers, physicians, and teachers had already created a structuring pattern of professional selforganization in the catchment area of professionalism with their similarly integrative, mostly much older professional associations.4 In contrast, the cushioning of risk situations did not play a significant role in these academic professional associations – in contrast to the middle-class craftsmen’s associations.5 Since technical progress in the technical-scientific associations was equated above all with the economic development of industry: the employment conditions of employed engineers, but also those of self-employed engineers, played hardly any role here.6 It is true that entrepreneurs and technical (university) teachers were over-represented in the technical-scientific associations in comparison to their social significance. However, since the 1890s at the latest, the associations were numerically dominated by employed engineers.7 However, the structurally entrenched association cultures virtually demanded that only “outstanding men of technology”8 were elected to the executive boards. These were disproportionately university professors and entrepreneurs; even leading employed engineers who had become famous through their inventions were hardly ever elected. It was above all the educational policy as an essential element of the common struggle for the public emancipation of technology against the “educational conceit (. . .) and class arrogance”9 of the established elites that was still able to unite the camps within these associations in the nineteenth century.10 By means of this extensive and in part also influential association system, which also had an influence on the appointment of TH chairs, the engineers controlled a large part of the subject-specific knowledge stocks – a core criteria of the profes-

4

Cf. Lundgreen, Career Construction; McClelland, Experience; Müller-Benedict, Careers. Similar to the technical-scientific associations, the associations of skilled craftsmen also included the principals. On the craft association system, cf. Engelhardt, Handwerker; Tenfelde, Entfaltung; Trischler, Steiger; and on the commercial one: König, Die Angestellten. 6 Cf. Lundgreen, Ingenieur-Vereine; König, Verein as well as the contributions in Ludwig/ König, Technik. 7 According to Gispen, New Profession, p. 57, in the 1870s the VDI still counted slightly more entrepreneurs than employees among its members. 8 ZVDI 54 (1910), p. 453. For the following, cf. Ludwig/König, Technik, esp. p. 580 f. 9 Riedler (Rector of the TH-Berlin), speech, p. 4 (1900). 10 Cf. König, Verein, p. 309 f. Lundgreen, Techniker; ders, Ingenieur-Vereine; Manegold, Universität; Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung; Knost, Interessenpolitik; Scholl, Ingenieure. 5

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sionalism of emerging professions.11 The considerable political influence of the engineering associations mentioned above did not, however, have a positive effect on the social situation of engineers, especially those of salaried engineers. Division of the Association System Since 1900 Within the VDI, it was above all the lecturers at the polytechnics, as predecessor institutions of the technical universities (TH), who had driven academisation forward. In doing so, the technical teachers – partly academics educated in the natural sciences, partly pure practitioners – had naturally also sought their own social upgrading. After the ultimate success of this initiative, which in the 1870s had resulted in the renaming of the polytechnics in technical universities, the industrialists in the VDI questioned the performance level of the diploma engineers: among other things, they apparently feared a supply monopoly of the academics.12 In the mid-1880s, the balance of power within the VDI tipped. The entrepreneurs succeeded in getting the entire association behind them to such an extent that the creation of a sub-academic form of training was now being pursued. With the establishment of mechanical engineering schools, initially in Prussia, in 1890, this initiative was known to be successful. This initiative went back to the analogical “Karlsruhe Guidelines” of the VDI from 1889. In addition, the shortage of engineers in the 1880s had provided an intersubjective argument for the addition of the overcrowded TH that could be understood by all interest groups.13 On the basis of the VDI’s far-reaching influence on education policy, the balance of power within the association had thus ensured the “surplus of hierarchisation”14 (Wolfgang König) of engineering education that was to shape the social situation of engineers for decades to come. At the turn of the century, when education at mechanical engineering schools had massively developed, the competition between the two technical education groups became the focus of the professional policy discussions of the engineering

11

Cf. for the period until 1914 the correspondence of the state secretaries in the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Commerce in: GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 120, Abt. E IV as well as Heidenreich, Berufskonstruktion; Pfadenhauer, Professionalität. 12 Cf. ibid. and ZVDI 54 (1910), p. 453; Riedler, Rede. Cf. also Scholl, Ingenieure; Ludwig/ König, Technik; Lundgreen, Ausbildung; ders, Education; König, Verein. 13 Cf. ibid. and on the preceding debate within the industrial associations Manegold, Verein, p. 156. 14 König, Verein, p. 310. Cf. also Lundgreen, Education.

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associations.15 The VDI was unable to adequately represent either side, which was to lead to the founding of the middle school engineers’ association Butib (1904) and the diploma engineers’ association VDDI (1909).16 The founding of the Butib was not so much the result of intra-professional demarcation efforts – after all, middle school engineers ranked on a par with diploma holders – as of the economic crisis of the 1900s. While the founders of the Butib saw the overall employment opportunities of employed engineers declining during this period, a few years later the VDDI’s association leadership had to realize that middle school graduates had successfully placed themselves on the engineering job market even during the cut-throat competition that had taken place in the meantime.17 Engineers and Associations: Pioneers of Professional Change For the self-organization of engineers, the founding of Butib and VDDI finally meant the transition from a technical-scientific phase into a phase that was now predominantly shaped by professional or rather interest politics.18 If one leaves this macro-perspective, however, continuities also become visible. The conflicts that had arisen within the VDI at the end of the nineteenth century were outsourced to other institutional forms after the turn of the century, namely the VDDI and Butib. With the VDDI, which from the beginning sharply distinguished itself from the middle school graduates, not only the question of employees but also the question of education developed into an internal engineering political issue. Moreover, with the Butib and the VDDI, two contemporary poles of professional interest politics were to clash: the conflict orientation of the Butib, which went as far as industrial action, was contrasted with the strict labor peaceful consensus principle of the VDDI. What role did the general, overarching change in professional organizational culture in the late Empire play in this focus on interest politics, in the certain radicalization of engineering associationism? Despite the fairly extensive research on engineering professional politics, this aspect has remained almost completely unexamined so far. After all, it is not possible to speak of a decisive change in the culture of professional and interest politics between the 1870s and the First World War. The numerically most important associations of white-collar workers were socially harmonious in orientation, i.e. they concentrated on demarcating

15

Cf. Lux, Stellung; Peters, Geschichte; ZVDI 46 (1902), p. 186. Cf. esp. König, Verein, p. 307; Gispen, New Profession, pp. 302–310. 17 Cf. Deutsche Industriebeamtenzeitung 2 (1905), p. 52. 18 Similar is the finding of Gispen, Interessenkonflikte, p. 309. 16

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themselves from the working class, largely left income issues out of the equation and directed their quaisist claims at the state and its social legislation.19 Although there was no talk of a “revolution of consciousness”20 (Fritz Croner) in the New Middle Class until 1918: Small associations, such as the Zentralverband der Handlungsgehilfen (ZdH, Association of Commercial Clerks), at least discussed industrial action in the pre-war years. Against this background, the engineers’ union Butib, which also fought industrial disputes in single cases, can certainly be understood as an important driving force behind the increasing tendency to conflict among employee representations. After gaining 10,000 members after only a few years (1908), the Butib attained over 20,000 members in 1913 and represented almost a quarter of all organised engineers. The remaining three quarters were distributed almost exclusivelyamong the individual technical-scientific associations. With its 1500 (1910) and finally 4000 members (1913), the VDDI was of considerably less importance.21 On the other hand, the Deutscher Techniker Verband (DTV, German Technician’s Association), founded in 1884, had grown to become a power: the association, which almost without exception organised employed construction engineers from the building trade schools, had around 30 thousand members in 1913. In contrast to the Butib and analogous to the large associations of craftsmen, the DTV represented a socially harmonious middle-class ideology. In contrast to most of the associations of commercial clerks, however, employers were excluded from membership. This already laid the foundation for the later merger with the Butib, which was finally realised in 1919.22 In the first years of its existence, the Butib had still concentrated on professional self-help – certainly also a reaction to the overcrowding of the engineering labour market at the same time. In addition, the technical-scientific associations did not maintain such unemployment, death and accident funds. Against this background, the Butib was able to grow to around 10,000 members within a few years (1908) and thus achieved half the organizational strength of the VDI.

19

With the Insurance Act for Salaried Employees (VGfA) of 1911, this approach was known to have met with some success. 20 Croner, Angestelltenbewegung (1928), p. 105. Cf. on the following Lederer, Privatbeamtenbewegung; Sohlich, Privatbeamten, pp. 2–4 and Protokolle, pp. 34–60. 21 Cf. Table A.6. Of course, it is not possible to quantify the presumably frequent dual memberships in VDDI/Butib and a technical-scientific association. 22 Cf. Lederer, Privatbeamtenbewegung; Raßbach, Betrachtungen, pp. 169–171; 25 Jahre Technikergewerkschaft; and Gispen, New Profession, pp. 261–264.

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Strategically, the Butib kept the peace with the employers’ side in the first years of its existence. It largely confined itself to socio-political demands in the area of protection against dismissal and the competition clause. In 1907, however, by advocating the eight-hour working day, the Butib had already clearly distanced itself from the large trade union associations and had moved into the ideological vicinity of the free trade union, social democratic camp.23 More offensive strategies were not considered until the labour market had stabilised to some extent around 1910. In any case, Emil Lederer was wrong in his contemporary observation that the Butib had already “founded itself with purely trade-union tendencies.”24 This raising of the Butib’s profile cannot be imagined to the same extent without its counterpart, the companies and employers’ associations. According to this, the Confederation “alienates factory workers from businessmen and employers” because it “does not distinguish between intellectual and manual workers.”25 This referred solely to the fact that in 1908 the Butib for the first time discussed “direct action”26 – read: industrial action. Against this background, large companies in southern Germany in particular went into direct opposition, apparently locking out Butib members purely as a precaution. Radical Comrades? The Butib and the Employer Side It can thus be said that it was the Butib as an engineering association which led the employers’ side to concretise the new middle class. Previously, in the case of the likewise mental working commercial clerks this had not been necessary. Those claimed a quasi-entrepreneurial function for themselves and rejected industrial action. The fact thatan association was rejecting industrial harmony, whicheven represented employees (engineers) earning better on average than the clerks, weighed all the more heavily in this respect. From the point of view of the employers, it was ultimately a matter of preventing the feared slide to the left of the white-collar workers in the organised class struggle. The lower and middle employees, on the other hand, who were massively threatened by the standardisation of job profiles, continued to cling to the distinction 23

Cf. 25 Jahre Technikergewerkschaft, p. 28; DIBZ 2 (1907), p. 366. Lederer, Privatbeamtenbewegung, p. 243. 25 Schuster, Chronologie (o.p.). Cf. DIBZ 4 (1908), p. 281 f. On initial reactions to the founding of the Butib, cf. Vogelstein, Bemerkungen; Mertens, Bewegung. 26 Cf. Karl Sohlich, Zum Jahreswechsel, in: DIBZ 4 (1908), p. 1 f., here 1. Sohlich, a member of the Verein für Socialpolitik, also acted as editor of the Deutsche Industriebeamten-Zeitung, the journal of the Butib. Along with the chairman Wilhelm Stiel and the managing director Hermann Lüdemann, he is to be counted among the executive leadership of the association. 24

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mental vs. manual, to the demarcation from the manual workers.27 When the big machinery factory MAN began to dismiss individual Butib members in 1908, the bourgeois press also condemned this as an unacceptable restriction on freedom of association. But the industrialists had fundamentally misjudged the Butib’s social self-image. The association had not (yet), as one MAN executive board member put it, “completely aligned itself with the social democratic trade unions.”28 The Butib had no ideological sense of mission in the direction of other employee unions, nor did it have any idea of a formed class struggle among dependent employees. By advocating an extension of the existing workers’ insurance to salaried employees during the preliminary negotiations on a salaried employees’ insurance scheme, the Butib had merely demarcated itself from a socially harmonious white-collar ideology – and thus from the other larger salaried employees’ associations.29 The Butib: Pragmatism as Core Ideology The Butib’s position on professional policy remained moderate. The federation’s leadership was well aware that it was organising a white-collar elite that expected pragmatic strategies to improve the situation. Both the political language and the lack of a solidarity principle quite clearly separated the Butib from a free trade union position before the First World War. A strategic closing of ranks with the working class remained undisguised and accordingly absent.30 The relationship between the Butib and the VDDI was similarly pragmatic. It was only in the course of a strike in the Berlin metal industry from the autumn of 1911 that the Butib began to take notice of the VDDI and developed a deeper understanding of the heterogeneous qualification profile of engineers. The VDDI had finally reacted to this industrial action, which was substantially supported by the Butib, by calling on its members to work overtime and so ensure that production continued. The VDDI thus attempted to reinterpret this conflict, in which the

27 In the academic ‘field’, this view was certainly most prominently represented by Gustav Schmoller (ders., Mittelstand). For the following, see also Mangold, Angestelltengeschichte and Gispen, New Profession, pp. 288–298. 28 Quoted from Rupieper, Arbeiter, p. 58. 29 Cf. Gispen, New Profession, pp. 255–287. 30 Cf. the numerous references in Gispen, New Profession, p. 291 f. as well as Lederer, Privatbeamtenbewegung, p. 237 f.; Raßbach, Betrachtungen, p. 168 f.

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employee and employer sides were actually opposed, as a question of education and professionalism within the engineers.31 From the VDDI’s point of view, responsibility for industrial production and social progress was an academic characteristic.32 In return, the Butib for the first time took a closer look at its membership base. Among its own strike participants it counted 19% diploma engineers as well as numerous engineers in leading positions. By no means all technical academics saw themselves as an unreservedly businessloyal elite. Extrapolated to the approximately 20,000 Butib members, the social profile of the strike participants ultimately results in a value of approximately 4000 diploma engineers in the Butib. This meant that in 1911 the engineering union counted around twice as many academic engineers among its members as the VDDI.33 Obviously, this organizational power among the diploma engineers confirmed the Butib leadership in the view that the distinction between capital and labour represented the primary structuring principle of the industrial economy – and that this insight had also arrived in the political consciousness of the technical white-collar workers.34 For the VDDI’s strikebreaking action, then, the Butib found rather sober, almost laconic words: “The private economy does not permit a class structure based on educational differences.”35 From the point of view of the Butib, this did certainly mean that diploma engineers could earn more due to their longer periods of training. It was just that the (everyday) cultural exaggeration of meritocratic hierarchies was strictly rejected – for example, when the VDDI spoke of the special loyalty of academics. Ultimately, the VDDI also did not want to see an irreconcilable antagonism between middle school and university graduates. Nor did it requested a closing of ranks with other groups of employees or even with the working class. The Confederation was concerned with the interests of the above-average educated and well-off technical employees in the sense of “practical interest.”36 31

On the VDDI, cf. Lang, Ein Jahr and the numerous references in ZVDDI 1 (1910). For a detailed chronology of events, see Gispen, New Profession, pp. 305–312; 25 Jahre Technikergewerkschaft, p. 44 and DIBZ 6 (1911), p. 594. 32 Cf. Lang, Diplom-Ingenieur, pp. 4–7 and 11 f. 33 See Table A.6. 34 Cf. Der Diplom-Ingenieur als Arbeitnehmer, p. 7 f. 35 DIBZ 7 (1912), p. 10. Cf. minimum salaries, p. 35. With its journal Der Ekkehard, which was launched in 1910, the Butib addressed all young engineers, i.e. middle and university students alike. On the apparently considerable appeal of the Butib among technical academics in the chemical industry, see Johnson, Macht, p. 156. 36 Bolte, Schichtung, p. 334.

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Strategically, the strike did not seem to play any particular role for the Butib. Nothing is known about actual industrial action before 1914. And in the association’s budget, too, the self-help facilities exceeded the strike fund, which accounted for 8.7% of the total budget, many times over.37 It is possible that the industrial action had a primarily symbolic function. In retrospect, it is difficult to judge whether and to what extent the federation’s leadership relied on the threatening potential offered by the strength of its membership. After all, before the First World War, nearly one in three employed engineers belonged to the federation.38 Clash of Ideologies In contrast to the Butib, the VDDI had already established clear ideological coordinates at the beginning of its association history. According to this, the differences between diploma and middle school engineers were not limited to the different formal level of education. Rather, it was more important that, due to their ostensibly “altruistic” view of work, diploma engineers acted automatically as mediators between employees, including non-academic engineers, and company managements or the capital. Compared to the “obligations towards science and society,” “earning money”39 is secondary for technical academics. With its strike-breaking action in the course of the Berlin industrial dispute of 1911, the VDDI had given practical expression to this socially harmonious ideology. At the same time, the association made it clear which side – capital or labour – could be the crucial mediator: according to this view, technical academics were the ideal “confidants”40 of any management. The category of responsibility used here was a long-established argument borrowed from the old academic professions to legitimise professional-social privileges. The VDDI was well aware of this line of

37

Own calculation according to Raßbach, Betrachtungen, p. 172, who here provides a more accurate assessment of Butib than other contemporaries or even modern research. Cf. Lederer, Angestelltenbewegung; Vogelstein, Bemerkungen; Mertens, Bewegung as well as Gispen, Profession. 38 See Table 2.1 and A.4 (excluding civil engineers). 39 Lang, Diplom-Ingenieur, p. 11 f. Cf. also Lang, One Year, p. 354, where he speaks of the “higher moral values” of academics. On this line of argument, cf. Jarausch, Professions; McClelland, Experience; Huerkamp, Ascent; Sander, Professionalization; Hodson/Sullivan, Organization; Abbott, System. 40 Lang, One Year, p. 345.

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tradition. Thus, with the founding of the VDDI, the “academic-technical intelligentsia” had “taken up the organizational idea of the old academic ranks.”41 By taking the old academic professions as a model, the VDDI leadership set the bar quite high. One thus claimed completely academic-exclusive job markets, similar to lawyers, doctors and higher teachers. After all, diploma engineers would have “numerous points of contact in professional and life attitude” with these occupational groups.42 In the preceding it could be seen that this everyday cultural fusion of engineers with the old elites was more wishful thinking than reality. The same misjudgement was made by the Berlin economist Theodor Vogelstein: the “views of life [of the diploma engineer] are those of the bourgeoisie and the higher civil service; (. . .) his traffic the noblest in the city.” By concluding that therefore the income level “cannot be lower in the long run than that of similarly educated categories of civil servants,”43 Vogelstein summed up the VDDI’s strategic goals. However, no company was prepared to grant the diploma engineers exclusive employment contracts. The leadership of the VDDI, above all its chairman Alexander Lang, soon came to this conclusion. The claimed functional advantage, the special loyalty of technical academics to company managements, also met with no response. However, these findings were not made explicit. Only in the form of an anonymous publication the VDDI did complain about the lack of solidarity among business leaders.44 From 1911 onwards, the VDDI practised dissonance avoidance and almost silenced it’s talk of “competition with the non-academically educated element.”45 Rather, from then on, the association leadership tried to represent the diploma engineer as a model of success. Thus the pursuit of the goal of material improvements was simply transferred to the diploma engineers themselves. A “union” attitude presupposed the “consciousness” of “never getting into a

41

Ibid. p. 333. Ibid. p. 334. Cf. Die gesellschaftliche Stellung des Ingenieurs, in: ZVDDI 1 (1910), p. 372 f. 43 Vogelstein, Remarks, p. 491. However, Vogelstein also conceded to the “petty bourgeois son,” the graduate of a “Technikum” (middle technical school), that his education was sufficient to “manage [a] company.” Nothing could be determined about possible connections of the later industrialist Vogelstein to the VDDI. 44 Cf. Surgite,Worte. Gispen, New Profession, p. 315 incorrectly attributes this contribution to Alexander Lang. Cf. Lang, Dem Ziele entgegen, p. 49. 45 Lang, One Year, p. 341. 42

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managerial position in life.”46 Quite obviously as a result of the failure of the industrial consensus course, a political representation of interests was largely abandoned. However, the VDDI was not only focused on employed engineers in industry: its clientele milieus were diverse. Before the First World War, just under half of the members were employed. With university teachers, civil servants and freelancers otherwise represented, the association was co-determined by groups who enjoyed, at least in part, the benefits of the academic entitlement system.47 In the words of the VDDI, here “academic credentialing did indeed come to full fruition.”48 The talk of a success model was, however, primarily motivated by strategic reasons: After all, up to that point the association always talked of diploma engineers being disadvantaged – and in this respect including some they had responsibility for the industrial labour market. With the quite considerable growth to about 4000 members in 1913, the VDDI had already reached saturation point. Even in the post-war period, when a significantly larger number of diploma engineers were in working life, this number was not to be surpassed. In 1913, the VDDI thus organised a good 8% of the employed TH graduates.49 Ultimately, it can be assumed that the diploma engineers’ association in the pre-war period was able to attract either civil servants and successful freelancers or just about frustrated white-collar workers. The latter obviously wanted to be helped over their professional situation by the association’s elitist indulgences. In the pre-war period, it was above all the chairman Alexander Lang who had a comparatively realistic view of the conditions. When he wrote that the “doctrinaires of Adam Smith” had “developed the liberalist principle to the point of exaggeration,”50 he at least took note of the capitalist employment conditions. At the same time, he conjured up a socio-political predicament: the solution of one’s own social

46

Ibid. and p. 335. The existing associations, meaning the Butib and the DTV, were thus tailored to „middle and lower technicians.“ 47 Cf. Gispen, New Profession, p. 320, who identifies 33–48% private sector employees and 29% employees of public corporations (civil servants and employees). 48 Lang, One Year, p. 341. 49 Own calculation; cf. Table A.6. On the method of calculation, Sander, Ingenieurwesen. For the (slightly) different results of Gispen, cf. his New Profession, p. 317. 50 Lang, Ein Jahr, p. 333 f., where he ibid. p. 345 also speaks of the “great struggle of principles between ideal and material worldview”. Cf. also Lang, Diplom-Ingenieure, pp. 4–7.

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problems was handed over to politics and (the whole of) society, and companies were largely taken out of obligation. The VDDI’s only option in terms of interest policy was thus to demand protection of the designation “engineer” for academic graduates. Apart from the freelancers, who were numerically of little importance, this objective, which was quite promising both symbolically and materially, could only have been aimed at salaried employees. When, shortly before the First World War, protection of the title seemed less and less promising, the demand for the establishment of “chambers”51 for diploma engineers was made. With this the example of the old academic professions was followed. In view of the fundamentally sceptical attitude of the administrative-political elites towards the comparatively new profession, this was an almost utopian request. No political camp, neither the labour movement nor liberal-conservative bourgeois circles, expected any additional support from a strengthening of formal status differentiations within the white-collar workforce. To the political camps the new white-collar workers were only attractive in their (ostensibly) homogeneous totality. Kees Gispen has attributed the general strategic failure of the VDDI to the lack of correspondence between the class situation and the level of education.52 After all, the VDDI’s ranks included not only white-collar workers and civil servants, but also some, mostly small to medium-sized, entrepreneurs. Gispens’ comparative foil, however, was the successful interest policy of many white-collar workers’ associations in the 1920s, which largely excluded entrepreneurs. The industrialists in the VDDI were probably advocates of an academic entitlement principle who were prepared to set an example in their own companies. It seems to be much more decisive in this context that the association did not have any large industrialists in its ranks who could have at least gradually redefined the principles of status allocation through appropriate employment and remuneration practices. Even in the following period, the VDDI remained without influence on the business associations.53 Such socio-economic diagnoses also neglect the historical and political context of ideas. It is true that Gispen also emphasizes the socially harmonious expectations in the VDDI.In this way he underscores the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, that was so typical of the late Empire: the simultaneity of liberal-capitalist reality

51

Cf. ZVDDI 3 (1912), p. 94; Lang, Diplom-Ingenieur, p. 3. Cf. Gispen, Interessenkonflikte. Similar already the interpretation of Raßbach, Betrachtungen, p. 148 from the year 1916. 53 Cf. the polemics against big industry in F. Junge, Großkapital und Technik, in: ZVDDI 4 (1913), p. 386 f.; Die Berechtigung der Standesorganisation, in: ZVDDI 2 (1910) p. 68 f. 52

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and quasi-static images of society. What remains unmentioned is that the demand for rigid, meritocratically generated and symbolically overformed professional hierarchies was anything but an extreme position at this time. Such demands were, after all, represented not only in the academic milieu but also, within the framework of their middle-class ideology, by the majority of the clerk’s associations.54 If one takes into account the expectations of the industrial camp, which, in view of the increasing willingness of the blue-collar workforce to strike in the pre-war period, were aimed particularly at the loyalty of white-collar workers, it was not impossible that the VDDI would not have achieved at least minor successes by informal influence.55 The Change of Course of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) Around the First World War, however, the strategic situation of the VDDI deteriorated even further. Above all, because the VDI was less and less willing to support the VDDI in its initiatives for direct access of diploma engineers to the higher technical service. In 1910, the VDI had contacted the Prussian Minister of Public Works in order to protest “against the use of the technical universities for the training of middle technical railway officials.”56 When the designation engineer was legally restricted to academics in Austria in 1917, the VDI finally spoke out unequivocally against exclusive access for diploma engineers to the higher technical service: “Today, when all citizens should strive more than ever to level out class differences, to pave the way for the capable, privileges should not be created without necessity, new barriers should not be erected.”57 The reasons for this anti-academic course by the VDI are difficult to find out. In addition to a further gain in influence by the entrepreneurs over the naturally academic-friendly university lecturers in the association, the socially integrative political conjuncture of the war society is also to be taken into account. After most public bodies had created a higher technical civil service in the first place between 1920 and 1925, the VDI even devoted itself to a real fight against such an

54

Cf. Kocka, Die Angestellten; Priamus, Angestellte as well as Breuer, Ordnungen. For example, Ernst Borsig and the director of MAN, Anton von Rieppel, were fundamentally open to the gratificatory demands of the diploma engineers. Cf. UArch Chemnitz, 302/IV/1577 (estate of Carl von Bach), sheet 122. 56 Peters, Geschichte, p. 133, cf. also ZVDI (1910) pp. 1339 and 1960, and König, Verein, p. 310. 57 ZVDI 61 (1917), p. 503. For the following Peukert, Republik, pp. 111–115. 55

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“entitlement system”, which was qualified as disfunctional.58 Ideologically, however, the positions of the VDI and VDDI continued to overlap. Technical and material progress and the expected upswing in national self-confidence were considered possible on both sides only through an intensification of the “collective work” of labour and capital, of technical practitioners and industry. While the VDDI was obviously afraid to stand up to the big VDI, the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects (Österreichischer Ingenieur- und Architekten-Verein, ÖIAV), which also exclusively organised academics, unabashedly called the VDI“the largest German association for the promotion of industry.”59

9.2

The Reorganization of the Technical Associations in Germany 1918/19

The general political conjuncture, marked by socially deeply rooted interest movements, and the political-institutional reforms it evoked in the founding phase of the Weimar Republic also had an impact on the professional organization of engineers. On the one hand, the level of education became an increasingly important factor in the organizational behavior. On the other hand, other associations of technical experts emerged; these associations were all based on the collective bargaining autonomy that had been normatively anchored in November 1918. Although most of these associations did not explicitly refer to an educational differentiation of engineers, they were frequented either primarily by middle school or university graduates. The Association of Senior Employees in Trade and Industry (Vereinigung der leitenden Angestellten in Handel und Industrie, Vela) and the Federation of Employed Chemists and Engineers (Bund der angestellten Chemiker und Ingenieure, Budaci) offered diploma engineers two alternatives to the consensus course of the VDDI during the Weimar Republic. By statute, only the Budaci was limited to academics. However, the Vela cultivated such an elitist gesture that technical academics were actually overrepresented here. However, the reason for these new associations was certainly not only the extension of the formal scope of action of workers’ representatives as a result of the change of political system. At least in equal measure, the motivation of these higher categories of employees to

58 NZI 21 (1927), p. 23 (reaction to the vote of the German Association of Cities for a higher technical career). 59 Journal of the Austrian Society of Architects and Engineers 69 (1917), p. 378.

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organise themselves professionally can be attributed to the fact that they wanted to follow the example of the successful wage struggles of many lower and middle, above all commercial, employee groups in the spring/summer of 1919.60 Although Budaci and Vela did not have a predominantly engineering character, i.e. they were dominated by commercial managers (Vela) and chemists (Budaci) respectively, they soon acquired a significant importance for the professional organization of diploma engineers. In the 1920s, Vela and Budaci together covered about 4000 academic engineers. In total, they thus achieved approximately the organizational importance of the VDDI. On the other hand, the rival organizations to the Butib had only limited appeal to the middle school engineers: the Technicians in the Trade Union Federation of Employees (Techniker im Gewerkschaftsbund der Angestellten, GdA) and the Association of German Technicians (Verband Deutscher Techniker, VDT) also attracted these, ‘normal’ engineers. The Engine of Differentiation: The Ideological Profiling of the Butib In addition to the general political development, the Butib also had a significant influence on the differentiation of the engineering professional organization system during this hot phase from 1918 to 1920. After the association had become increasingly involved in polemics against the “title-addicted”61 academics, almost all diploma engineers had left the association by the end of 1920.62 This ideological profile-raising had developed in the comparatively short time of 1–2 years: The conviction was that “instead of the principle of formal education, the principle of achievement”63 had to take precedence. This had a major influence on the direction of the Federation of Technical Employees and Civil Servants (Bund der technischen Angestellten und Beamten, Butab), as the Butib had called itself since its unification with the German Technicians’ Association (DTV) in the summer of 1919.64 This

60

Cf. Croner, Angestelltenbewegung; Kocka, Angestellte; Hamel, Verband. Die Stellung des Bundes zum technischen Bildungswesen, in: DTZ 2 (1920), p. 423. 62 The wave of resignations was (of course) kept quiet by the Butab. Cf. Curt Goldschmidt, Zur Entwicklung der Berufsorganisationen im neuen Deutschland; in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), p. 29 f. 63 Techniker und Besoldungsreform, in: DTZ 3 (1921), p. 180. 64 Similar to the pre-war period, the DTV can be regarded as the „comparatively economically peaceful“(Raßbach, Betrachtungen (1916), p. 152) association. These strategic differences naturally made the merger more difficult for the Butib board. Cf. 25 Jahre Technikergewerkschaft, p. 77. It can hardly be claimed that the two associations had already converged programmatically to the point of “confusion”, as Hortleder, Gesellschaftsbild, p. 70 takes from a commemorative publication from the 1960s. 61

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diagnosis must have referred to the simultaneous introduction of a selective access of diploma engineers to the higher civil service.In the industrial economy, after all, such meritocratic staggered career systems were far away. The latter was also seen as such in the Butab – not without satisfaction: “The overestimation of the so-called higher education (. . .) has long since been refuted by the achievements of technicians”65 – what meant middle school engineers. This relativisation of educational titles with reference to the market-economy valuation of human labour was somewhat hypocritical: after all, the Butab also based its own collective bargaining policy guidelines for engineers/technicians on a minimum qualification, namely that of a middle school graduation. Moreover, the Butab leadership did not shy away from simultaneously calling for easier transitions from middle schools to technical universities.66 The outright exclusion of diploma engineers from the association, which would have been unthinkable before the First World War, was also due to major political trends. Thus, by joining the Consortium of free White-collar Unions (Arbeitsgemeinschaft freier Angestelltenverbände, AfA) in the penultimate year of the war, the Butib/Butab had clearly positioned itself to the left of the associations of salaried employees. The other white-collar associations emphasized the middle-class status of salaried employees in distinction to the working class.67 However, this placement in the free trade union political orientation was not associated with any major ideological convictions. The educational policy programmes of the free trade union organization federations were conspicuous at best by a “programme deficit.”68 Moreover, the Butab’s strictly client-centred selfimage and it’s liberal-capitalist idea of performance was not fully compatible to the crisis ideology dominating the free trade union camp. This was based on the assumption of a creeping proletarianisation of white-collar workers – at all levels of the hierarchy. Against this still Marxist background, the Butab’s aim in excluding diploma engineers was probably less to sharpen its ideological profile than to forge an organizational base that was as homogeneous as possible and thus capable of action.

65

Die Stellung des Bundes zum technischen Bildungswesen, in: DTZ 2 (1920), p. 423. On the overall development cf. A. Lenz, Vorbereitung zum höheren Verwaltungsdienst, in: DTZ 1 (1919), p. 124 f.; DTZ 2 (1920), p. 25 f. 66 Cf. ibid. 67 Cf. Kocka, Klassengesellschaft, pp. 77–80. 68 Wittwer, Schulpolitik, p. 45.

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By restricting its claim to representation to the middle school engineers and uniting with the middle school construction engineers from the DTV, the Butab had thus above all more clearly contoured its social profile. Social homogenisation was also important for the Butab insofar as potential competitors had appeared on the scene in the form of the GdA and the VDT. Their ultimately limited development potential could not yet be foreseen at this time of professional political awakening.69 In the year 1919 – when the newly founded Vela and Budaci associations began to attract diploma engineers and Butab, VDT and GdA concentrated on middle school students – technical experts finally entered another, third professionalpolitical phase. After the technical-scientific era (ca. 1850–1900) and initial approaches to interest politics by Butib and VDDI (1900–1918), the interestpolitical addressing of education-defined clientele groups had now become the dominant principle.

Between Interests and Ideologies: The Middle School Engineers and the Butib/Butab The Butib/Butab was initially able to continue its pre-war success story in the Weimar Republic. This applied to the quantitative organizational development as well as to its political balance sheet. The Butab benefited not only from the freedom of collective bargaining in itself, but also from its concrete form. On the one hand, the Collective Agreement Ordinance (Tarifvertragsordnung, TVO) from 1918 was based on the occupational group definitions of the 1869 Trade Regulation Act.70 Within the occupational group of “technicians”71 defined there, the Butab usually had the largest number of members at company level, so that it was awarded sole leadership in collective bargaining. The same applied to the increasingly common, regionally structured sectoral collective agreements. In addition, the inter-company agreements reached in this way were more and more frequently declared generally

Cf. various references in DTZ 1 (1919) – 2 (1920). Cf. Reichsgesetzblatt 1918, pp. 1456–1467 (§133a of the Gewerbeordnungs-Novelle of 1891). No mention of this regulation in Bähr, Staat. 71 Schicker, Gewerbeordnung, p. 760. The Reich Ministry of Labour now apparently distinguished the foremen from the “technicians”. In the Trade Regulation Act, however, both groups were combined. 69 70

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binding by the Ministry of Labour – thus further extending the Butab’s quasimonopoly of representation for technical employees.72 In the Weimar Republic, therefore, almost all legally binding collective agreements for technical employees above master craftsman level went back to the Butab as the employee representative. On the one hand, this meant that separate salary groups for academics were of course not negotiated. For another, the VDT and the Technicians in the GdA as representatives of the middle school engineers, as well as the Budaci and the Vela as meanwhile important bodies of the diploma engineers, were practically largely ousted from formalised interest politics.73 Having numbered some 24,000 members in 1914, the Butab saw a veritable explosion to 106,000 in the fall of 1918. This meant that the engineering union represented about three-quarters of the middle school graduates. However, just under a quarter of the above increase was due to the affiliation of the DTV. With this organizational level, the Butab not only far outstripped its technical competitors, but also – somewhat less clearly – the clerk’s associations, which were able to organize on average around 50% of their potential base.74 Despite its record-breaking organizational power, the membership growth of the Butab was not a special case within the general white-collar movement of 1918/ 1919. In terms of membership growth between 1913 and December 1919, the commercial associations were at least on a par.75 Finally, the Butab’s degree of organization now also reached a saturation zone. Butab was thus able to keep the ideological competitioners at a distance: the christian-conservative Association of German Technicians (VDT) and the Technicians in the Trade Union Federation of

72 The ZAG agreement of 15.11.1918 already provided for the possibility of a declaration of general applicability. For a summary of the reconstructible practice of a declaration of general applicability, see Lesch, Mindeststandards, pp. 1–18; Ullmann, Tarifverträge, p. 227; Bähr, Staat. 73 There was, of course, the possibility that employers’ (associations’) organisations might voluntarily agree to negotiate with individual associations. 74 Cf. Table A.6; DTZ 2 (1920), p. 215. Around 10,000 of the 30,000 DTV members had apparently not supported this step for ideological reasons and had left. Cf. 25 Jahre Technikergewerkschaft, p. 76 f. On the reference figure of employed engineers and their breakdown according to schooling. On a position of the Essen Steigerverband, which had joined the Butib in July 1918 but later switched to the Vela, originally comparable to that of the DTV, cf. Trischler, Steiger, pp. 163–168. 75 Own calculation according to Priamus, Angestellte, p. 103.

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Employees (GdA) – These two liberal conservative alternatives each achieved only a few thousand members among engineers in the early 1920s.76 It was only in the last years of the Republic, when the organizational preferences of white-collar workers as a whole shifted a little further to the centre-right, that the VDT and Technicians in the GdA became dangerous to the Butab. In general, the long-standing dominance of the Butab can certainly be attributed to the pragmatic strategic orientation of the federation, which focused on pay struggles. In 1918/ 1919, when the salaried employees were, awakened, the Butab also benefited from the fact that, unlike many of its competitors, it already had a functioning associational infrastructure. For interest-political and organizational reasons alone, there was no getting around the Butab. Middle School Engineers: Favourable Social Situation and Organising Behaviour Clarifying the causes of this special position of the Butab and of the middle school engineers with their overall extraordinarily high organizational degree in general, two aspects come to mind: (1) Contemporary observers had already pointed to the transfer effects that resulted from the inevitably close contact between engineers on the one hand and foremen and workers on the other. According to this, the successes of the free workers’ unions in terms of collective bargaining gave the engineers a positive example of the possibilities of an offensive representation of interests.77 The engineer’s occupational-functional position, their fairly close contact to the

76

The VDT had 4500 members at the end of 1921. Cf. Reichsarbeitsblatt NF 5 (1924), p. 23*. On the GdA cf. Priamus, Angestellte, pp. 109–116; Speier, Die Angestellten (1933), p. 149 and Leo Müffelmann, Entwicklungstendenzen in der modernen Angestelltenbewegung, in: DlA 3 (1921), pp. 9–12. On the immediate reaction of the Butab to the founding of the GdA cf. DTZ 2 (1920), pp. 215 f. and ibid. p. 422. From February 1921 onwards, the GdA published a two-page leaflet Der Techniker as a supplement to its federal journal, in a sense the association journal of the Technicians in the GdA. Until the summer of 1921, the VDT initially operated under the name Deutscher Techniker Verband (DTV). After a court decision, the name had to be changed to “Neuer DTV” (New DTV), until it was changed again a few months later, now to VDT. In the course of 1921, the Bund nationaler technischer Angestellter (BntA), which had been founded shortly before in Berlin, joined the DTV/VDT. According to its statutes, the BntA saw itself as a “völkisch” association. Cf. DTZ 3 (1921), p. 54; DTZ 2 (1920), pp. 20, 391, 401 and 422. 77 Cf. Lederer, Movement; Croner, Employee Movement.

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workers, possibly had a direct influence on “micro-politics,”78 the norms of behaviour and communication alliances in the industrial enterprise. In contrast to the diploma engineers, a large proportion of the secondary school students came from the working class or the craft, and thus had mastered the codes of the blue collars. (2) The good social situation of middle school engineers points in the same direction. Thus, even among the materially enormously heterogeneous commercial employees, higher income brackets tended more strongly in the free trade union direction.79 Among these white-collar elites, the much-cited fears of levelling out vis-à-vis the working classes were evidently less pronounced. Therefore the political promise of a middle-class position in the overall social structure was ultimately less attractive.80 In general, interest politics could develop more pragmatically. Theodor Geiger stated: “The class element (. . .) often breaks through as resentment all the more violently, the more painfully it is belied and repressed by dependent position.”81 Such relative privilege may have played a special role among middle school engineers. After all, their academic colleagues hardly earned more on average. Coming for the most part from petit bourgeois backgrounds and from the working-class, the middle school students could thus feel like true upwardly mobile people. With their professional position, they had made it into the higher echelons of the new middle class at least and even acted on a par with academics. The occupational sociology of the 1920s, however, had its difficulties with technical employees. The significant differences between the various functional areas and hierarchical levels of technical employees were ignored, as was the fact that technical employees as a whole were a relative white-collar elite. Fritz Croner, a student of the famous Emil Lederer, noted that among technical employees “there is

78

Cf. the contributions in Welskopp/Lauschke, Mikropolitik; esp. diess. Introduction and Welskopp, Klassenkonzept. 79 The average income of AfA-Bund members exceeded that of GdA members. Cf. PalbergLandwehr, Angestelltengewerkschaften, pp. 32–45. However, it should be borne in mind that the AfA-Bund included an above-average proportion of technical, and thus higher-earning, employees due to the Butab. 80 Cf. especially Kocka, Die Angestellten; ders, Angestellte; Schulz, Die Angestellten. 81 Geiger, Schichtung, p. 104. On the category of the “intellectual worker,” see especially Geiger, Panik, p. 647: “The [colocated] external image of the occupation (office and penholder) clearly points to the former ‘status of the educated.’”

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a degree of formal education that cannot be rationalized away.”82 On the part of the dominant, late Marxist school, engineers and foremen, who on average also earned more than merchants, were nevertheless included in the general prognosis of the proletarianisation of white-collar workers. If this could not be proven in the present state of affairs, reference was made to the inevitable class division according to productive forces.83 Loss of Power Through Politicization? The Butab Since 1925 In the mid-1920s the Butab’s success story slowly began to peter out. After the number of members had already dropped to around 86 thousand by 1924, it fell again to 55 thousand (spring 1929) by the time of the Great Depression, a good half of the 1920 figure. In view of the rapidly expanding number of employed middle school engineers, these losses are of course much higher in relative terms. It is true that the AfA, the umbrella organization of the Butab, also had to cede ever larger sections of its organised employees to the Christian or conservative Gedag and GDA associations in the course of the 1920s. However, the bloodletting of the AfA in total was weaker.84 This is surprising because the Butab actually celebrated its greatest successes in collective bargaining between 1925 and 1930. The cause of these disproportionately strong membership losses is therefore more likely to be found in the ideological dynamics.85 It was organization the AfA-Bund which since the mid-1920s had been working towards a stronger ideological sharpening of the Butab’s profile. Apparently, the aim was to harness the above-average, highly educated technical employees with their corresponding “level of consciousness”86 to the cart of the free trade union movement. After all, the later AfA chairman Siegfried Aufhäuser, an exponent of the left wing union movement, had been managing director of the Butab in the early

82

Croner, Employee Movement. p. 111. Cf. ibid.; Lederer, Bewegung. In contrast, Speier, Die Angestellten (The Employees) and Geiger, Panik (Panic) make a much greater effort to differentiate between social structures and the corresponding everyday culture and politics. Cf. also Geiger’s differentiation from Lederer ibid. p. 645. 84 Cf. Kocka, Die Angestellten, p. 156. 85 The increasing use of compulsory arbitration by the state does not seem to have had a particularly negative impact on the Butab agreements. 86 Ewald Bote, Gerechte Bewertung technischer Arbeit, in: DTZ 5 (1923), p. 49 f. Cf. also DTZ 8 (1926), p. 77 f. 83

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1920s.87 The original character of the Butab as a “bargaining machine” – in its own words – limited to “trade union materialism”88 was visibly lost from the middle of the decade onwards in favour of an ideological strategic element. Many members obviously did not agree with this sharpening of the left-wing political profile. This was all the more evident in the moderate political mood of the stabilisation phase between 1924 and 1928.89 The VDT and the Technicians in the GdA were the main beneficiaries of the Butab’s membership losses. The VDT grew to just over 12,000 members by 1930, and the Technicians in the GdA, which had only been founded in 1922, even reached over 15 thousand adherents.90 These gains by the competition cannot, however, explain the entire losses of the Butab. After all, the organizational potential, the number of employed middle school engineers, had approximately doubled between 1920 and 1930. The clear majority of employed middle school engineers thus now decided against any professional organization. A paradoxical effect may also have been significant: Since the collective agreements negotiated under the auspices of the Butab were declared generally binding almost without exception from the mid-1920s onwards. Thus, occupational organization in individual cases became less and less urgent. It is therefore possible that the Butab also became a victim of its own political successes. In the 1920s, the situation was very similar for foremen. Here the free trade union German Foremen Association (Deutscher Werkmeisterverband) held a similar monopoly position to that of the Butab.91 The comparatively favourable situation of the foremen in terms of their function in the company and thus also in terms of income policy, with salaries only just below the average earnings of engineers, also 87

From 1913 to 1919 Aufhäuser had been a member of the executive committee of the Butib/ Butab, at times also holding the post of salaried secretary. His function as managing director extended from January 1919 until the founding of the AfA-Bund and the assumption of the chairmanship on October 3, 1921. 88 The position of the Federation on technical education, in: DTZ 2 (1920), p. 423. DTZ 1 (1919), p. 20 f. 89 In Palberg-Landwehr’s study of the AfA-Bund, the Butab is completely ignored. Cf. also Speier, Die Angestellten (1932/1933), esp. p. 150 f. 90 Cf. Table A.6 and Speier, Die Angestellten, p. 149. 91 The only serious competitor was the Deutscher Werkmeisterbund (Essen), which, as a Gedag branch, was only able to attract around 15,000 members between 1921 and 1930. See Leo Müffelmann, Entwicklungstendenzen in der modernen Angestelltenbewegung, in: DlA 3 (1921), pp. 9–12; the sources for Table A.6; Deutscher Werkmeisterverband, Festschrift; Lederer, Privatbeamtenbewegung; Raßbach, Betrachtungen; and Croner, Angestelltenbewegung.

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points to a connection between relative privilege and ‘left-wing’ professional policy preferences.

Grassroots and Associations: The Organizational Behavior of Technical Academics in the Weimar Republic If one compares the organizational behavior of university and middle school engineers, despite all the differences described so far there are also commonalities to be considered,. In both groups, membership in technical-scientific associations was still a vital part of the professional self-image in the twentieth century. Despite the enormous boom in professional interest politics, the membership figures of the VDI and the numerous smaller scientific associations continued to rise – more slowly than the number of professional engineers, but nevertheless steadily. This high significance of the technical in the social self-image of engineers can certainly be explained less functionally, for example with the expansion of technical knowledge stocks. It rather resulted in the social outsider role of the technical disciplines and their representatives. The sense of community founded here, which welded entrepreneurs, freelancers, civil servants and employees together into a veritable engineering community, was shared to a similar extent by high school and middle school students. Thus the proportion of 24% academics among the members of the VDI in 1917 roughly corresponded to the conditions on the labour market.92 The extent to which the ratio of high school and middle school students might have changed in the Weimar Republic, when the technical-scientific associations lost some of their organizational power, is not documented. Regardless of formal education, at the end of the Empire around one in three engineers was organised in the VDI, VDEh and VDE, and in the mid-1920s this figure was still one in five.93 Diplom-Engineers: Dwindling Importance of Professional Interest Politics The trend in professional politics typical of the time, namely the shifting of important parts of self-organization to trade-union-oriented associations, was

92

In fact, the proportion of academics in the labour market was somewhat higher. However, there were also numerous entrepreneurs among the VDDI members, who – if they had a commercial education – naturally did not belong to the engineering profession. Cf. Table A.6 and the contemporary interpretation by Neufeld, Akademiker. 93 See Table A.6.

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completely absent among the diploma engineers after 1918. Whereas before the First World War the Butib/Butab had counted some 4000 diploma engineers among its free trade union ranks, after the wave of academic leavings in 1920 the managers’ association Vela and the chemists’ union Budaci also brought together some 4000 technical academics.94 The union camp, which stood in opposition to the socially harmonious VDDI, had simply not grown. The same applied to the professional-political camp in the broader sense, i.e. including the socially harmonious VDDI. Between 1913 and 1925 this camp comprised a constant eight thousand diploma engineers. This meant that the proportion of academic engineers in professional organizations had fallen from around 20% in 1913 (VDDI, Butib) to just over 10% in 1927 (VDDI, Budaci, Vela).95 The representation of the interests of diploma engineers thus suffered a greater weakening during this period than the technical-scientific direction embodied by the VDI. The veritable boom of professional self-organization in general and of the trade union principle of conflict in particular had thus passed the diploma engineers by completely without a trace. . On the other hand, in the mid-1920s, more than 50% of middle school engineers were represented in associations that were at least principally conflict-oriented. Of these, in turn, around three quarters preferred the leftwing Butab. The monopoly position of the employee representation with the largest membership per company and occupational group (technicians), the equality of opportunity on the labour market of diploma and middle school graduates was permanently established. The Budaci’s ambitions to gain a foothold in collective bargaining outside the chemical industry were ultimately thwarted by this constellation. Overarching Patterns of Professional Organizational Behavior These findings on the organizational behavior of technical academics lead to two further insights. First, it was the diploma engineers who broke away from the typical organizational pattern of white-collar workers. This refers to the tendency of better-off groups of white-collar workers to prefer conflict-oriented associations that hardly harboured any ambitions for symbolic social upgrading. As will be seen,

94

Of course, a high degree of overlapping of personnel is to be assumed. In each case based on the extrapolation of student numbers in the technical sciences (excluding pharmacy and chemistry) to diploma numbers. Assuming a duration of study of eight semesters and a working life of 32 years, this results in around 48,000 employed TH graduats in 1913 and 76,000 in 1927. Cf. Table A.6.

95

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the Vela and the Budaci also represented elitist ideas that partly referred to the protected labor markets of the classical academic professions, and in this respect negated the social reality of white-collar status to a certain extent. In the 1920s, therefore, what the economist Wilhelm Mertens had already noted in 1907 was at least approximately true: “The class consciousness of technicians is (. . .) poorly developed. It is overgrown by the differentiated status consciousness.”96 Moreover, secondly, the low propensity for professional political organization fits into the apparently positive integration of diploma engineers into the social status matrix. Within two or three decades, most of them had come to terms with their lower middle-class situation. This does not mean that the conspicuously low willingness of academics to organise themselves in terms of interest politics is not also due to a distance to the ‘materialistic’ field of professional interest politics that is anchored in everyday culture. Analogous to their individualistic everyday orientations, however, they apparently preferred individual strategies for improving their income and social status. In the special occupational field of civil service, on the other hand, the interest policy of academic engineers certainly experienced a notable boost after the First World War. After around 4000 senior technical civil servants had been organised in the Reichsbund der höheren Beamten (RhB) in the pre-war period, the technical branch associations of the RhB totalled just under 10,000 members at the end of the 1920s.97 The, as could be seen, weak growth of the higher technical service was thus quite clearly surpassed. At the same time, the RhB always emphasized a material-professional difference between its clientele and their salaried colleagues – which, in the case of the engineers, corresponded to the real social conditions. The boom of the technical associations in the RhB must therefore be considered separately from the organizational behavior of the technical academics as a whole.98

96

Mertens, Movement, p. 653. Cf. Jahrbuch der technischen Berufsverbände 1931, pp. 22–24; the estimate by Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, p. 37, note 22, which arrives at somewhat higher figures, and for the pre-war period Kulemann, Berufsverbände, vol. 1, pp. 99–103 and vol. 2, pp. 221 f. and 273–275. 98 Moreover, professional associations of civil servants can in any case only be regarded to a limited extent as professional-political associations with any appreciable scope for action in terms of interest policy. See, for example, Staat und Technik 1 (1926), pp. 11 f., and generally on the RhB Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, pp. 134–159. 97

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Reichsbund Deutscher Technik (Reich Federation of German Technology) Despite the considerable professional-political differences in organizational behavior between middle school and university engineers, the formation of a technical umbrella organization had succeeded during the First World War. Thus, the close professional-cultural cohesion of engineers was expressed above all in the Reichsbund Deutscher Technik (RDT), which brought together over 100 members from more than 76 clubs and associations.99 Despite the technical-scientific orientation of the RDT, which was only marginally concerned with professional issues, its ability to act was certainly affected by the professional conflicts between high school and middle school students.100 As a result of internal disputes, the VDDI had even temporarily withdrawn from the RDT.101 Meanwhile, in the further course of the 1920s, the RDT concentrated on public relations work on behalf of industry and engineers, on the journalistic promotion of the still fragile public acceptance of technology. In contrast to the journal of the VDDI, which pursued similar goals under the title Technik und Kultur (Technology and Culture), Technik voran (Technology ahead), the periodical of the RDT, aimed at a relatively broad audience: an approach that was, however, hardly crowned with success. Nevertheless, the RDT succeeded in exerting a certain influence on political circles. Members of the Reichstag were regularly welcomed at events in exclusive Berlin restaurants.102 In the 1920s, the Schutzkartell deutscher Geistesarbeiter (Protective Cartel of German Intellectuals) achieved a greater public resonance than the RDT. Under the leadership of the conservative MP Otto Everling, the Schutzkartell, which was resolutely oriented toward educational status, brought together academic associations of all disciplines. By the mid-1920s, almost all the relevant associations had joined the Schutzkartell, including the VDDI.103 Thus the umbrella

99 As a forerunner of the RDT, the Federation of Technical Professions had already been founded in the spring of 1918, which, like the RDT later, included the industrialists’ associations. 100 Cf. Mitteilungen des Bundes technischer Berufsstände 1 (1919), No. 12, p. 4; NZI 21 (1927), p. 55; and generally Ludwig, Technik, p. 37. 101 Cf. Technische Monatshefte 10 (1920), p. 88 f.; Jahrbuch der technischen Berufsverbände, p. 113. 102 Cf. Technik voran, section “From the RDT.” In 1928, the association counted three MP among its ranks. Cf. Jahrbuch der technischen Berufsverbände 1931, p. 111. 103 See Jarausch, Professions, p. 94. The protective cartel is hardly mentioned in the relevant studies on the history of professions, and its importance is therefore possibly underestimated. Cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger; McClelland, Experience. The institutional origins of the

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organization for academics was able to develop into a veritable service provider whose announcements were regularly printed in the organs of the member associations. Apart from a few of Everling’s radio speeches, however, the Schutzkartell was unable to open up any new public spheres.104 The social question here was also limited to the loss of real income after the currency stabilisation from 1923. The problem of demarcation from ‘subaltern’ educational groups was hardly addressed.105 Gaining Importance of Educational Differences in the Weimar Republic Concerning the technical academics, neither the RDT nor the Schutzkartell are therefore able to correct the picture of far-reaching professional political restraint. The Schutzkartell does, however, give a foretaste of the importance that the educational principle and the status-based social images derived from it (still) had in the Weimar Republic. Meanwhile, large sections of the engineering community attempted to continue the idea of technical collective work in close collaboration with the industrialists’ and their associations. Around 1930, the five larger technical-scientific associations alone counted almost 60 thousand members.106 Those diploma engineers who hoped that a confrontational professional course would provide them with a way out of their employment and income misery finally came together without exception in associations outside their discipline: in the chemists’ association Budaci and the commercial managers’ association Vela. Given the VDDI’s limited strategic resources, these two associations must be seen as the only academic counterpart to the Butab. In contrast to the VDDI’s maximum demand for an entitlement system for employed academics, Vela and Budaci initially concentrated on gradually increasing salaries by means of a cautious conflict strategy.

Schutzkartell lay in the Reich Committee of Academic Professions, founded on 22 November 1918. It was renamed in the course of 1925, first to the Schutzkartell der notleidenden Kulturschicht Deutschlands, and a few months later to the Schutzkartell der Deutschen Geistesarbeiter. By the end of the 1920s, the association included 21 associations with some 130 thousand members. According to Pinkerneil, Die Zukunftsaufgaben der akademischen Berufsverbände, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), p. 8187, the Reichsausschuss still had 200 thousand members in 1919. 104 Cf. Vossische Zeitung v. 18.11.1926; ibid. v. 12.3.1927. 105 Cf. Everling, Schutzkartell, esp. p. 8 f. 106 See Table A.6.

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To what extent did the self-image of embodying an industrial elite, which dominated in all three associations, VDDI, Budaci and Vela, entered not only into the economic and socio-political agenda (co-determination, distribution policy) but also into fundamental attitudes towards the social and political system? And: Can the different political radicalisation of the three associations be explained primarily by their respective interest-political balances and the everyday cultural imprints of their members? Or is it rather necessary to attribute a decisive significance to overarching political conjunctures and elite discourses?

Variants of Academic Organization: Professional Core Strategies of German Engineers (1918–1930)

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The Bargaining Machine: The Association of Employed Chemists and Engineers (Budaci)

In May 1919, 28 spokesmen of already existing shop committees met in Halle, Saxony, for the founding meeting of the Bund der angestellten Chemiker und Ingenieure – Budaci for short (Federation of Employed Chemists and Engineers). Although the preparations had only taken a few weeks, the course was already set here for the development of the federation in the coming decade and a half.1 In principle, the 1552 chemists represented by mandate, engineers were still hardly represented, wanted to position the Budaci as a trade union alternative to the technical-scientific organization of the Association of German Chemists (Verein Deutscher Chemiker, VDCh). The Budaci’s main aim was to improve incomes by means of collective bargaining including industrial action. With 216 chemists from Höchst, 170 from Bayer in Leverkusen and 270 from BASF, almost all chemists from these major companies were members of the Budaci shortly after it was founded. The Budaci thus came from the heart of the German chemical industry, so to speak.2 The subsequent rapid expansion of the academics-exclusive association then also concentrated to a large extent on

1 Cf. BBl 1 (1919), pp. 1–4. The Budaci had its origins in two smaller predecessor organizations: the Akademikerverbund der Deutschen chemischen Industrie and the Verein angestellter Chemiker, which had merged to form the Bund angestellter Chemiker in Dessau on April 13, 1919. Cf. ZaCh 32 (1919), p. 215 (economic section) and BBl 1 (1919), p. 1 f. 2 Cf. Johnson, Macht, pp. 148, 192 f. and 205. At the end of 1911, BASF employed about 250 chemists in all operations and fields of activity (including field service).

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_10

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medium-sized and small companies.3 Thus, with the 8000 members that the association comprised at the end of 1920, a certain saturation had already been reached. By representing about 90% of the employed chemists, the Budaci reached a record level for trade union associations of salaried employees. At the beginning of the 1920s, only about 6000 employed chemists were distributed among the various branches of industry. Thus at least 2000 academic engineers had joined the association, most of whom were employed in the chemical industry.4 On the other hand, the VDCh, as the ‘mother association’ of the Budaci, also counted “almost 6000”5 salaried employees among its members. Among salaried chemists, dual membership in both associations had thus become established within a short period of time. The new trade union option in the form of Budaci did little to diminish the technicalscientific cooperation within VDCh.6 In accordance with its self-image as an association of employed technical academics, Budaci had thus succeeded in appealing not only to the academically educated chemists, but also to diploma engineers. Insofar as the 2000 diploma engineers mentioned came predominantly from Budaci’s domestic sector. It was and remained an association of academic employees in the chemical industry. Only a few hundred technical academics came from other industries.7 However, this was an involuntary limitation of the association’s activities. With its organizational strength of around 8000 members, the Budaci was able to break the representation monopoly of the middle school engineers’ association Butab, which was many times larger, at least in the chemical industry. There, the Budacimanaged to negotiate collective agreements in which the highest salary level was reserved for

3 The members of May 1919, on the other hand, still came from the comparatively small number of 39 establishments or 35 companies. Cf. BBl 1 (1919), p. 1. Cf. also Table A.6. 4 In 1921, for example, a regularly conducted VDCh survey of some 500 larger companies in the chemical industry revealed 2828 employed chemists. Cf. ZaCh 35 (1922), p. 281. An estimate that includes all branches of industry puts the number of employed chemists at around 5500. Cf. ZaCh 49 (1936), p. 522. 5 Cf. ZaCh 32 (1919), pp. 321–326, here 322 (report on the 32nd general meeting of the VDCh). 6 Cf. ZaCh 40 (1927), p. 704 and Table A.6. 7 At the founding meeting, one of seven “spokespersons” represented the operating group of a non-chemical company. Cf. BBl 1 (1919), p. 1. According to the 1925 occupational census, 2875 engineers were employed in the chemical industry, who, working primarily in production supervision, were probably divided equally between diploma and middle school engineers. Cf. Committee, Industry, p. 49.

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academics. An arrangement from which, of course, the diploma engineers in the chemical industry also benefited. Cautious Demarcation from the VDCh When VDCh noticed the first tendencies to found a chemists union, it initially reacted with self-criticism. Probably the VDCh feared a complete bloodletting and could not yet foresee that most of the employed chemists in Budaci would by no means resign their VDCh membership. At a meeting of the district association of the VDCh in March 1919 this was still expressed rather vaguely as a “lack of understanding of economic issues.”8 What was meant, of course, was the social situation of employed academics. At the same meeting, however, the well-known supremacy of the industrialists in the association was openly addressed and VDCh was positioned “as a fighting association against the trade union efforts.”9 At other extraordinary district assemblies of the time, attempts were made to save what could be saved: on the one hand, the “common tasks (. . .) of academic employees and entrepreneurs were emphasised, especially in relation to the demands of the current ruling class”.10 On the other hand, plans were made to expand the VDCh’s self-help services (unemployment fund, job exchange) and to allocate the board of directors according to professional status. Combined eight civil servants, university professors and industrialists were to be placed at the side of also eight employees. This “parity composition”11 still did not reflect the real conditions in the association – 90% of the members were salaried employees. This did, however, significantly correct the usual distribution of power in technical-scientific associations like the VDI, where industrialists and university lecturers usually dominated the board. The Budaci, however, was not willing to respond to these attempts by VDCh: “The Budaci fundamentally rejects an affiliation with VDCh (. . .). Even with the

8

ZaCh 32 (1919), p. 215 f. Ibid. (Lecture by “Director Dr. Ihlder”). Cf. Burchardt, Zusammenarbeit; ders., Professionalisierung as well as presumably from the environment of the Budaci: Wiederhold, Lage. 10 ZaCh 32 (1919), p. 256. Lecture by “Dr. Meves, Radebeul”, who was subsequently elected chairman of the Dresden local group. These were the district associations of SaxonyThuringia, Berlin and Rhineland-Westphalia. 11 ZaCh 32 (1919), p. 395 f. Meeting of the Rhineland District Association of 12.4.1919. 9

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most far-reaching concessions.”12 By holding out the prospect of cooperation within the framework of a future “gemeinwirtschaftlich”13 social order, however, the Budaci avoided a radical cut. The concept of the collective economy, popular for a short time in the early 1920s, thus corresponded not only to the VDCh’s socially harmonious self-image, but partly also to that of the Budaci, which did not want to be seen here as a unpatriotic journeyman. After all, it was not only the “white-collar workers” who were advocated, but also “an intimate joining of all forces for the reconstruction of our economic life.”14 In the following years Budaci and VDCh always evoked their mutual acceptance. They even maintained a joint job register.15 The Budaci’s conflict course in collective bargaining policy existed unconnected to the VDCh’s cooperation of capital and labour ideology. Finally, the Budaci was not in a fundamental crisis of professionalisation: chemists, unlike diploma engineers, enjoyed purely academic salaries clearly set apart from other qualification levels. This was true at least in the chemical industry, where 80–90% of salaried chemists were employed. The Budaci was thus hardly based on a structural conflict with non-academics. The reason for founding a union of chemists was rather the loss of real income during the previous war years.16 The Budaci: A Pure Community of Interests If one follows the themes of the association’s journal, the expectations of Budaci members were indeed limited to the question of salaries as well as to regulation areas specific to employees, such as the law on inventions. Budaci thus also fell outside the usual profile of academic professional associations: status differences

12

BBl 1 (1919), p. 1. On the Federal Assembly of the VDCh, cf. ZaCh 32 (1919), pp. 321–326. 13 BBl 1 (1919), pp. 9–11, here 9. Cf. also ZaCh 32 (1919), p. 380. 14 ZaCh 32 (1919), p. 380. Berlin District Association, extraordinary meeting of 24.4.1919. Speech by the Schering chemist and Budaci plant group spokesman Mittelstenscheid. At the meeting of the Märkischer Bezirksverein 2 weeks earlier, Mittelstenscheid had been critical of the salaried chemists in the VDCh. Cf. ZaCh 32 (1919), p. 215. 15 Under the name Karl-Goldschmidt-Stelle. The Verband der chemischen Industrie (VCI) was also involved in this institution. Cf. DaA 9 (1927), p. 1; DtA 14 (1932), p. 29. However, the Budaci job index had already taken VDCh job offers into account since 1919. Cf. BBl 1 (1919), p. 57 f.; BBl 2 (1920), p. 87 f.; Ausschuss, Industrie, p. 6. 16 Cf. quite generally Johnson, Macht, pp. 187–191 and Plumpe, Mitbestimmung, pp. 107–130.

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vis-à-vis non-academics hardly played a role. The Budaci leadership concentrated entirely on a pragmatic policy of interests. The Budaci therefore had to achieve the necessary ideological binding force through its collective bargaining policy. In the middle of the 1920s, this inevitably led to a lack of legitimacy when the results of collective bargaining policy were temporarily unusually unfavourable. But even in this phase, the federation’s leadership was able to communicate the weaker results to the rank and file.17 The Reich Collective Agreement of 1920: The Basis for a Decade The Budaci had already demonstrated its fundamental willingness to engage in industrial conflict when it was founded. Especially in its founding phase, the association had profited from this attitude. In the summer of 1919, for example, the employers’ association, the Chemie-Verein, had offered the Budaci collective bargaining on its own initiative, mainly out of fear of industrial action.18 The sevenmonth marathon negotiations that followed culminated in the “Reichstarif-Vertrag für die akademisch gebildeten Angestellten der chemischen Industrie” (Reich Collective Agreement for Academically Educated Employees in the Chemical Industry) of January 17, 1920. It included framework agreements on working hours and protection of inventors, as well as a five-level pay scale for technical employees and remained in force until 1933. By reserving the highest classification, level 5, for academic employees, this collective agreement formed a clear antithesis to the four-stage collective agreements in other industries. There, after all, it was the middle school engineers’ association Butab that determined the employees’ demands: Accordingly, only one pay scale level was established above the foremen level, so that it included all engineers regardless of their formal previous education.19 However, the Butab was also represented in the chemical industry. By the beginning of 1920, however, the Budaci had already displaced the Butab in this industry. With its 6000 chemists and diploma engineers, it clearly outnumbered the approximately 1500 middle school engineers and another 1500 factory-trained

17

Cf. DaA 7 (1925), p. 48; DaA 8 (1926), 1.8. Chemie-Verein: Association for the protection of the interests of the chemical industry (founded in 1877). 19 Cf. Commentary on the Reich Tariff Agreement; BBl 2 (1920), p. 58 f. Cf. DaA 11 (1929), p. 55 f. 18

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chemical employees.20 In view of this numerical dominance of academics, the Budaci was also empowered to negotiate the lower four salary levels, where its clientele was not represented at all. In the chemical industry, therefore, the Budaci occupied a monopoly position similar to that of the Butab in the other industrial sectors. It is true that the Budaci collective bargaining agreements created a clear demarcation from all non-academics and from the engineering tariff in other sectors. However, the Budaci tariffs fell short of the level of the higher civil service, the reference par excellence for academics, by around 10%.21 Takeover Attempts by the Vela Against this background, it was easy for the Budaci to fend off the takeover attempts of the Association of Senior Employees (Vela). A cross-industry and crossprofessional association of technical academics and commercial elites did not materialize.22 In attempting to take over Budaci, Vela had sought the status of a white-collar umbrella organization. Budaci had rejected a compromise proposal that would have left the chemical industry exclusively to Budaci and given all other industries to Vela. After all, at that time Budaci was still working on the assumption that it would be able to organize the technical academics of all branches in the near future. The Budaci had not been bothered by the fact that the Vela did not exclusively represented academics, but defined its clientele according to function and salary. Rather, the elite question had been reversed: In the Vela’s view, in such a union of white-collar elites, academic degrees should not entitle to admission offhand23 . In this way, the Vela did not want to exclude chemists and diploma engineers in average positions, but only those in comparatively precarious jobs. After all, some

Own calculation based on a VDCh survey among “larger” companies in 1920. Cf. ZaCh 34 (1921), p. 195 f. 21 Cf. the collective bargaining agreements in Bavaria, Berlin and the Central German district in BBl 1 (1919), p. 51 f. and BBl 2 (1920), p. 77, and also for the following Table 6.1. 22 Apparently, Vela was able to win over parts of the academic chemists and engineers at the Elberfeld Bayer Works in 1919/1920. Cf. DlA 2 (1920), o.p. [No. 1]; DlA 11 (1929), p. 4; Dangschat, Keine Verschmelzung mit der Vereinigung, in: BBl 2 (1920), pp. 80 f.; Carl Höfchen, Die Vela, in: ibid., pp. 83–85; BBl 3 (1921), pp. 134 and 202. In the Budaci’s view, the Vela was a “yellow“association, since it also organized “authorized signatories, general agents, directors” (DlA 1 (1919), p. 13). 23 Dangschat, Keine Verschmelzung mit der Vereinigung, in: BBl 2 (1920), p. 80. 20

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technical academics worked in foreman positions and earned significantly less there than the commercial management.24 In the Budaci’s understanding, however, every academic was automatically to be counted among the industrial economic elite. This meritocratic conviction of the Budaci thus prevented the forging of a presumably powerful elite union. Expansion Efforts at a Dead End The Budaci leadership always tried to conceal the fact that it would hardly be possible to break the Butab’s power of representation outside the chemical industry. The commercial associations, however, sometimes voluntarily called on the Budaci to participate in collective bargaining. In 1919, such a constellation resulted in the prominent Zweibrück metalworkers’ collective agreement and an agreement in the Berlin brewing industry, where 10% flat-rate surcharges for academics were negotiated.25 In order to improve its chances outside the chemical industry, the Budaci leadership had already launched the affiliation to the Christian umbrella association Gedag since January 1920. Finally completed in March 1920, concerns were soon raised within the association. With rare ideological unambiguity, the “strongly antiSemitic (. . .) and völkisch-national note” was objected to.26 Moreover, this compromise soon proved to be a bad investment: the definition of the occupational group of “technicians”27 also applied in the case of membership of one of the large umbrella organizations. The association with the largest number of members among the technicians in a company or industry, i.e., as a rule, the Butab, was granted negotiating power. Despite this hopeless situation, the Budaci continued to court technical academics outside the chemical industry for some years. It was not until the turn of the year 1922/1923 that the leadership of the association admitted that “collective

Pay scale level V included “technical experts on an equal footing [with academics] on account of their performance, experience and knowledge”. Cf. BBl 2 (1920), p. 77; ibid., p. 27 f.: BBl 3 (1921), p. 134; ibid., p. 202, DaA 10 (1928), o.p. [n. 8]. 25 Cf. BBl 1 (1919), p. 57 f. and 62. 26 This referred primarily to the Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband (DHV), Gedag’s largest member association. Cf. BBL 1 (1919), p. 39 f. On the employee umbrella organizations, see Speier, Angestellte, pp. 124–133; Priamus, Angestellte; Prinz, Ende, pp. 331–335. 27 Cf. the corresponding suggestion in BBl 2 (1920), p. 104. 24

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salary arrangements for academics”28 outside the chemical industry would remain an illusion. From then on, the association transfigured collective agreements in the chemical industry to be it’s only goal. In the process, the meritocratic conviction was joined by classist voices: only the academic was “educated to pursue the objectives of his company.”29 In terms of interest politics, however, the Budaci remained successful.30 The renaming of the Budaci in 1925 to the Bund angestellter Akademiker technischnaturwissenschaftlicher Berufe (BaAtnB) referred to salaried academics in the public sector – an alternative strategy to the failed expansion in industry, which even led to its joining the Reichsbund der höheren Beamten (RhB) in 1928. With this step, the chemists’ union at least advanced to become one of the few whitecollar unions that had found admission to this elitist and politically conservative association of academic civil servants.31

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Between Conflict and Loyalty: The Association of Executive Employees (Vela)

In December 1918, a few dozen commercial employees from middle and higher management as well as a handful of so-called senior engineers from Borsig and Siemens-Schuckert came together in Berlin to form the Association of Senior Employees in Trade and Industry (Vela).32 The new professional association was thus at odds with the usual contemporary interpretation of occupational and social differentiation in two respects. Firstly, the Vela saw the new middle class as an inherently hierarchical structure – an “idea” that had “not yet fully established itself”33 outside the association. In fact, the far-reaching internal differences of employees in terms of function, income, educational level and everyday cultural

28

BBl 4 (1922), p. 172; cf. BBl 3 (1921), pp. 99 f. and 135; 5 (1923), pp. 41–43; cf. also Hromadka, Recht, pp. 167–169, and Engelberger, Tarifautonomie, pp. 141–143, on the principle of the openness of the Collective Agreement Ordinance (Tarifvertragsordnung/ TVO) and the ZAG Agreement to variable occupational group constructions. 29 BBl 4 (1922), p. 172. 30 Meanwhile VDCh had grown to 9000 members by the end of the 1920s. 31 Cf. ZRhB 10 (1928), supplement “der RhB.” 32 Cf. the hagiographic account by Kleine, Angestellten, p. 18. 33 Müffelmann, Entwicklungstendenzen, p. 12.

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affiliations played virtually no role in the prevailing view of social inequality and occupational interest movements in Weimar society.34 Secondly, the self-definition of the Vela did not fall back on education-related boundary lines, but rather on the “high capitalist development (. . .); the division of labour among the individual members of the production process.”35 Therefore the Vela represented the market – the modern age. This explicitly opposed the status arrogance36 of the craftsmen’s associations on the one hand and the academic professions on the other, who divided the society in manual workers, (all) whitecollars and academics. However, the Vela also had few alternatives: In middle and higher management, the diploma economists, lawyers, academic engineers and scientists were opposed by the vast majority of on-the-job qualified clerks. As its name suggests, the Vela was based on a purely functional definition of professional elites. From today’s perspective, the term “senior employees” seems much less precise than contemporaries understood it. Those saw at least managing directors in small and medium-sized enterprises and heads of departments in major companies in this category. Therefore the Vela referred to current status in the company hierarchy and thus exclusively to the results of individual training and career paths: The often neuralgic gap between educational attainment and later professional position could thus not arise in the first place. This distinguished the Vela from many academic associations, such as the VDDI and Budaci, which struggled for the professional-practical recognition of their educational qualifications. This concentration on operational function and the simultaneous fading out of formal education was not strategic, but simply unavoidable: in the catchment area of middle and higher management, which was after all characterised by on-the-job careers, the association had no choice but to break with the traditional factors of social validity. The Vela had to contrast the educational elitism with the performance, the rigid status hierarchies of the civil service with the, at least ostensibly, exclusively functionally generated hierarchies in the free economy.37

34

The socio-legal underpinning of the white vs. blue collar distinction, and thus also a homogeneous concept of the salaried employee, had been further expanded with the Works Council Act of 26 November 1919. Here, blue-collar and white-collar workers were assigned to different sub-corporations of co-determination. 35 Müffelmann (Vela managing director), Gewerkschaftsbewegung, p. 8. Cf. DlA 3 (1921), p. 1 f. 36 Ibid. p. 9. 37 Cf. Müffelmann, Gewerkschaftsbewegung. Cf. also Thimm, Privatbeamte.

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Senior Executives: Challenges of Welfare State Regulation With this functional definition of “senior employees”, however, the Vela had imposed a considerable pressure on itself to act. First, concrete demarcation criterias had to be anchored in the socio-political debate, not to mention Weimar social law. If the Vela wanted to become collectively bargainable as an employee representation, it was dependent on the Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft38 and the Reich Ministry of Labour accepting its definition. At first, however, the other employee associations questioned the character of the Vela as a representation of dependent employees. With reference to the great numerical importance of the highest management level in the Vela, the procurators and the ‘directors’ in large companies.39 After some hesitation, the Reich Ministry of Labour agreed with this objection, and initially denied the Vela the status of employee representation. Nevertheless, in mid-1920 the Vela succeeded in being authorized by the courts as an employee representative body. Procurators (authorized signatories) and directors, who “only use the title director in business life in accordance with their elevated position,”40 were allowed to remain in Vela according to the decision by the Reich Ministry of Labor on December 13, 1920. However, authorization as an employee representative body did not yet give Vela any scope for action under collective bargaining law. Stricter criteria applied for the recognition of collective bargaining capacity by the corporative Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft (ZAG) which Vela (of course) also sought. It had to be possible to prove that the members belonged to one (special) profession. Presumably ZAG argued with the valid trade regulations of 1869: according to these, Vela was an association of “assistants” and “technicians”41 – i.e. of two professional groups. After much toing and froing, the ZAG finally suggested that the Vela join one of the three large umbrella organizations for salaried employees, in order to gain quasi-automatic collective bargaining rights. By joining one of the large umbrella organizations, however, Vela would have given up its central aim of making clear the special role of managerial staff. The rejection of the ZAG proposal was not long in coming. Moreover, between the spring and winter of 1920 everything was still up in the air anyway: Vela had

38

The ZAG was the founding institutional framing of welfare state capitalism in Weimar (1918–1924). 39 Cf. BBl 2 (1920), p. 83. 40 Arbeitsrecht VIII (1921), p. 29 (quoted in Hromadka, Recht, p. 125). 41 Cf. DlA 2 (1920), pp. 38–40; DlA 2 (1920), p. 106. Cf. also DlA 6 (1924), pp. 44 f.

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needed admission as an employee representative body in order to be able to stand for work council elections. It had not yet been decided internally whether the association should really strive for collective bargaining status. Did some members of senior management really dare to disobey top management? The Vela in the Decision Year 1920: Employee Self-Image The Vela’s commitment to a collective bargaining, trade union self-image had been preceded by significant internal disputes. After all, in the founding phase of the association, it had still clearly seen itself as a “counter-movement to the trade union movement”42 and had even occasionally acted as a strike-breaker. At that time, the Vela had exhaustively described its objectives: “public influence (. . .), regulation of working conditions and mediation in disputes.”43 There was no mention of income issues let alone participation in collective bargaining in 1919. Instead, the socially harmonious view of a “real working community” of capital and labour was high on the agenda. At the same time, the managing director of the Vela, Leo Müffelmann, already spoke of a “trade union movement of executive employees.” In his understanding, this was merely an emergency community of “intellectual workers” against the “exaggerated demands of manual and executive workers.” Implicitly, however, Müffelmann made it clear that the executive employees would have to come to a similar organizational and strategic determination as the authorized white-collar unions, namely to “the same form of organization with the same benefits,” if they did not want to leave the fruits of the pro-worker political conjuncture to the “mass organizations.”44 In the end, a compromise was reached in the Vela. Similar to what Müffelmann had already apostrophised, collective bargaining ability should not automatically mean collective bargaining practice. The negative complaint of not being included in the “mass tariffs”45 of employees at middle functional levels was henceforth at the centre of the Vela strategy. In order to prevent the umbrella organizations AfA, GdA and Gedag from including the higher batches in the negotiated pay scales due

42

Annual Report of Vela, p. 1. Cf. also DlA 3 (1921), p. 77 (rejection of industrial action). Bernhard, Mitbestimmungsrecht, p. 22 f. 44 Müffelmann, Trade Unionism, pp. 8–10. 45 Cf. ibid., p. 13: “And the collective agreement (. . .) is also for the executives the way to form their own group right (. . .). That is why (. . .) collective agreements (. . .) are significant, not because of the income regulation they make.” Cf. also DlA 10 (1928), p. 211 f. 43

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to their oligopoly of representation for the entirety of employees, Vela sought informal participation in collective bargaining.46 When the Verein oberer Bergbeamter joined the Vela in March 1920, the association of mining foremen was far from underlining its, as Helmut Trischler puts it, “anti-union character.”47 After all, at this time the Vela not only belonged to the trade union spectrum, but even to the “free trade union” spectrum.48 It is true that the Vela did not resort to industrial action, and thus only to a limited extent subscribed to the principle of free trade unionism. However, by implicitly threatening a work stoppage, the Vela relied heavily on informal pressure.49 Despite the failure to achieve collective bargaining accreditation, the managers’ association was brought to the negotiating table by the employers in many cases. This had the positive effect for the Vela that managerial employees actually remained largely exempt from the dreaded “mass tariffs”. The highest pay scale performance groups, which came about under the direction of the AfA, Gedag and GdA, referred to “chief accountants, correspondents, chief cashiers, department heads and 1st expeditors.” These were functions which the Vela regarded as managerial only in the field of large companies.50 So, at least in the medium term, the Vela could afford to forego bargaining power, since its members were largely ranked as non-tariff employees.51 Who Is a ‘Senior’ Employee? For Vela, the downward demarcation of its membership base was much smoother than recognition as an employee representative body.52 This was irrelevant in terms of collective bargaining law. It was, however, a matter of addressing a reasonably concrete membership base in a way that attracted public attention. In 1919 and 1920, the definition of semiformal criteria had remained remarkably unclear, as

46

On the four-tier contracts of the GdA, the highest salary level of which was clearly below the Vela definition of managerial activity, cf. Priamus, Angestellte, pp. 37–41. Cf. Direct dazu DlA 1 (1919), pp. 10 f.; DlA 2 (1920), pp. 9 and 57. 47 Trischler, Steiger, p. 178. With the form of the corporative affiliation, the Vela evidently attempted to assume to some extent the character of an umbrella association in the sense of the large employee umbrella associations AfA, Gedag and GdA. 48 Cf. DlA 3 (1921), pp. 9–12, here 9. 49 Cf. Gehaltsfrage; Bernhard, Mitbestimmungsrecht; Soziale Bewegung, p. 5. 50 Cf. DlA 1 (1919), pp. 22 f.; 7 (1925), pp. 1–3; 9 (1927), pp. 218 f.; 12 (1930), pp. 13 f. 51 Cf. Prinz, Ende. 52 Meanwhile, the Reich Ministry of Labour also noted that the “downward delimitation of the group of senior employees is still undetermined.” DlA 6 (1924), p. 45.

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compensation for the lack of uniform educational titles. Thus the Essener Steigerverband, the Verein der Oberbeamten im Bankgewerbe and the Verband der Versicherungsangestellten had been accepted into the Vela without complaint, although their members did not fully correspond to the self-image and also did not completely fulfil the later defined admission criterias.53 It was not until 1920/1921 that Vela decided internally that commercial employees had to have at least the corporate title of director, head of department or prosecutor, and technical employees had to have the title of senior engineer, head of laboratory or similar.54 In the case of employees of small companies, where these denominations were of little significance, salary was used as a criterion.55 In this context, the Vela was slightly above the level of the so-called entry level of the higher civil service, which roughly corresponded to gross annual earnings of 7000 marks/year in the mid-1920s. As a rule, average salaried diploma engineers fell well short of this margin. Educational Attainment Versus Achievement The quite ambitious material criteria for admission to the Vela were even higher than those few positions in the private sector that were offered exclusively to academics. Thus, even chemists or engineers in the field service of large companies reached the aforementioned 7000 Marks per year only in exceptional cases. Thus the Vela had departed from its original approach of admitting “any academic.”56 In this context, the senior executives were admittedly regarded as a (educated) middleclass grouping with reference to their lifestyles.57 At the same time, however, these exclusive company-functional criteria were intended to distinguish them from the title addiction of academics. Nevertheless, both groups, functional business elites and academic professions, merged again in the area of work attitudes. When their

53

For criticism of the elitist character of the Vela, see especially Trischler, Steiger, pp. 177–180. 54 Cf. Social Movement; Annual Report of the Vela, p. 8. 55 Accordingly, managerial employees in the sense of the Vela had only come into being with the “development of large companies” (Müffelmann, Gewerkschaftsbewegung, p. 14) of the preceding two or three decades. Cf. DlA 1 (1919), pp. 49 and 59; Hermann Schäfer, Zur Begriffsbestimmung des leitenden Angestellten, in: Arbeitsrecht VII (1920), pp. 188–194; DlA 3 (1921), pp. 71–73, 108 and 113–115 and DlA 4 (1922), pp. 17–19; DlA 2 (1920), p. 9. 56 DlA 1 (1919), p. 14, cf. also DlA 2 (1920), pp. 3 f. and 12–14, as well as the failed ambitions to take over parts of the Budaci. 57 Cf. Humperdinck, Lebenshaltung.

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own clientele were assumed to have a special kind of mental attitude, the Vela claimed the same everyday-cultural-professional characteristics for themselves as the academic professions. Both groups, therefore, ranked “on the same level in the Vela’s view.”58 On the one hand, then, the Vela broke established, meritocratic images of elites in order to be able to further emphasize its exclusivity in sub-areas: “The selection of business leaders can be done nowhere better than in work.”59 On the other hand, the static status criterion of education was instrumentalized. From the mid-1920s onwards, the demarcation from the old elites, the academics, receded and there was now an unapologetic attempt to place the “senior executives in the front line of intellectual workers.”60 This ambiguity between (modern) achievement and (traditional) status is also reflected in the Vela board. Not necessarily more elite than the association as a whole, the Vela board in the mid-1920s included at least ten academics among its 23 members: two diploma engineers, four PhDs in university disciplines, and another four members who held the title of professor.61 Three of these doctoral graduates supplemented their professional-social self-description with the company title “Director.” Quite obviously, this was intended to express the possible coincidence of academic training and professional competences as “business leaders.”62 In a certain way, of course, this downright prestige boasting contradicted the publicly displayed idea of achievement. Moreover, it is striking that even at the meetings of the districts, virtually no academic business graduates (DiplomKaufleute) were represented. The Vela thus reflected not only the diverse skills profile of senior management, but also the difficult state of business diplomas in the labour market. Despite the meanwhile considerable reservoir of Diplom-Kaufleute, middle and higher management was thus still recruited largely from trained business people at the end of the 1920s.63

58

Müffelmann, Gewerkschaftsbewegung, p. 8. cf. also ders, in: DlA 2 (1920), p. 21 f.; DlA 4 (1922), p. 61 f.; DlA 6 (1924), p. 45. cf. also Sander, Professionalisierung. 59 Leo Müffelmann, Neue Aufgaben, in: DlA 6 (1924), p. 6. 60 DlA 6 (1924), p. 45. 61 Cf. DlA 6 (1924), p. 16 f.; DlA 11 (1929), pp. 4–7 and 12 f. In this context, all engineers held the company title of “senior engineer.” 62 Seitz, Führerprobleme, p. 15. 63 Cf. Franz, Markt, pp. 181–216.

10.2

Between Conflict and Loyalty: The Association of Executive. . .

185

With its exclusive admission criteria, the Vela leadership considerably limited the association’s organizational potential among technical employees: as mentioned, an average engineer’s salary was not enough for admission. After Vela had represented about as many engineers and chemists as merchants in the first year of its association history, this originally high proportion of technical experts, which had been a consequence of the association’s foundation in the environment of Berlin’s large-scale industry, rapidly declined in the following years. Despite the slight lowering of the admission criteria, the number of engineers and chemists in the Vela remained at around 4000, around half of them academics. The expansion of the Vela from 13,000 (1920) to around 26,000 members in the second half of the decade had taken place mainly in the tertiary sector, especially in the banking and insurance sector.64 However, the technical professions continued to be overrepresented in the leadership of the association for some time. With Georg Arnold, they not only provided the founding chairman, but also two of the three subsequent chairmen until 1933.65 Analogous to the declining importance of the technical professions in the Vela, the initially customary differentiation of its own clientele into an “economic and technical intelligentsia” also disappeared by the mid-1920s.66 In the course of this, the contributions in the Leitender Angestellter, the journal of the Vela, also concentrated more and more on the concerns of commercial-administrative “leaders.”67 This dominance of the merchants was also expressed in the journal’s advertising section, which was extraordinarily extensive for professional journals and was populated entirely by office machine manufacturers.

64

See Table A.6. Cf. DlA 6 (1924), p. 16 f. Due to the aforementioned ‘overhang’ of technicians in the founding phase of the association, the two diploma engineers on the 1924 board presumably represented somewhat fewer status colleagues than the purely arithmetical 2700. The founding chairman of the Vela was the chief engineer of the Borsig works Georg Arnold. He was succeeded in 1921 by Alexander Kühns, a merchant, who was succeeded in 1923 by Franz Poehlmann, a Siemens engineer. Between 1927 and April 1933, the chemist Eberhard Meyer-Busche headed the association. Alfred Schmidt, a professor of mechanical engineering from Danzig, was the only full-time university lecturer and the only non-employee on the Vela board. The managing directors, however, were more in the focus of the association’s activities. Hermann Schäfer, who had a doctorate in economics, was succeeded in 1925 by Leo Müffelmann, a philosopher and factory director who had already served as editor of the journal DerLeitende Angestellten since 1919. In addition, the Vela had maintained a full-time “economic consultant” in Richard Zellien since 1921. 66 DlA 3 (1921), p. 14. 67 Seitz, Führerprobleme. Cf. exemplary DlA 7 (1925), pp. 4–6. 65

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Boom in Membership Without Major Successes in Interest Politics During the second half of the 1920s, the Vela did not suffer to the usual extent from the loss of membership of white-collar associations. At the same time, the Vela’s organizational success story, so its membership roughly doubled, can only be attributed to a limited extent to its strategic record. For example, the federation was denied collective bargaining competence as well as the establishment of its own batches for higher ranks of employees in the work councils or the labour courts. Only by exerting informal pressure was it possible to achieve a certain degree of success, which was difficult to verify empirically. For example, it was possible to prevent the integration of senior employees into the “mass tariffs”. However, this defensive strategy did nothing to counteract the falling real incomes of the higher echelons of the workforce since currency stabilisation in 1923.68 With its average membership of 25,000 in the 1920s, the Vela achieved an organising rate of at least 25%, a respectable figure for white-collar relations. Indeed, when contemporaries spoke of a potential organizational base of 100,000 executives, they were using somewhat less exclusive criteria than the Vela.69 In the final analysis, the integrative power of the Vela can probably be attributed more to symbolic than to interest-political moments. The preoccupation with general questions of economic development and corporate organization, the responsibility for the social and national whole, made the association a highly charged place for the self-dramatisation of a modern elite. Here, the employed managers tried to prove their everyday cultural as well as their political-public equality with the established elites, the old academic professions.70

10.3

The Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI): Professional Status Instead of Collective Agreements

In the 5 years between the founding of the association and the outbreak of the First World War, the strictly social-harmonic orientation of the VDDI had developed into a binding basic consensus of the association’s activities. This ideological conviction was firmly anchored not only in the formal statutes, but also in the informal

68

From 1930 onwards, as a result of the economic crisis, there were renewed attempts to achieve recognition as a collective bargaining party. Cf. DlA 12 (1930 to 14 (1932). 69 Cf. DlA 10 (1928), p. 112. 70 Cf. DlA 6 (1924), pp. 44–47, here 45.

10.3

The Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI): Professional. . .

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association cultures. Nevertheless, the political upheaval of the years 1918/1919 did not leave the VDDI unscathed. In the meantime, the Association of Diploma Engineers also succumbed to the temptation to make use of the expanded scope for action that resulted from the sanctioning of the industrial conflict. At the turn of the year 1934/1935, Carl Weihe, who had been a member of the VDDI executive board in both 1919 and 1935, looked back on the internal debate within the association in 1919 as follows: “The old fighters would rather see the association go under than join the Marxist class front.”71 In retrospect, Weihe thus stylised the strategic course set in 1919 as an ideological commitment against the free trade union movement. This was judgement that was essentially shaped by the political realities of 1935. In December 1918, the VDDI leadership had still stated that “trade unions are not automatically socialist.”72 This meant, after all, that collective bargaining and possibly even industrial conflict were within the realm of possibility. Fundamental Discussions in 1919 Under the impact of the labour struggles of spring 1919, the VDDI as a whole came to two realisations. Firstly, the socially harmonious basic attitude was called into question. During this period, the VDDI board accused the VDI of being under the “influence of industrialists” who “want cheap labour.”73 This was probably due more to the disappointment that the industrial leaders did not voluntarily pay the allegedly loyal diploma engineers more than to the fact that the association had switched over to industrial conflict. By denouncing salary dumping and thus publicly stating the income situation for the first time, the VDDI said goodbye to the hitherto constantly propagated success model of the diploma engineer. Secondly, for the first time the association’s leadership took a closer look at its own social basis. In view of the fact that about 80% of the members were salaried employees, the unfavourable situation of the salaried employees could no longer be concealed.74 However, the VDDI board once 71

TuK 26 (1935), p. 3. H. E. Krüger, Die Organisationsform der wissenschaftlich qualifizierten Kopfarbeiter, in: ZVDDI 9 (1918), pp. 130–133, here 130. 73 [Rudolf] Skutsch, Braconiden, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), p. 1 f. Karl Friedrich Steinmetz, Gewerkschaft der Diplom-Ingenieure, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 25–27. 74 Cf. Steinmetz, Gewerkschaft der Diplom-Ingenieure, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 25–27, here 25. Steinmetz reproduces here the apparently first correspondingly detailed membership survey from the Essen district association, which had produced a composition of 82.7% 72

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again resorted to a strategy of dissonance avoidance: they vehemently urged young diploma engineers to seek employment in the public sector – a supposed meritocratic oasis. Not a word was said about the fact that many diplomas held only middle positions in civil service.75 With regard to the still unresolved question of whether collective bargaining policy should be pursued, it was Rudolf Skutsch, a well-known university lecturer, who dealt extensively with collective bargaining law. Thus Skutsch pointed out the difficulties which the grouping of all technical experts in the group of “technicians” meant for a successful representation of the academic engineers. Accordingly, the diploma engineers would have to ally themselves with the “also engineers,”76 the middle schoolgraduates in order to gain the ability to act in terms of collective bargaining – which Skutsch assessed quite positively. As a result of this debate, the association again swore itself in to the views of the majority of the board members on socially harmonious interest-politics.77 If one follows the subtext of the contributions to the debate in the VDDI journal, it was above all the pressure from the membership base that had made a strategy debate necessary. These “serious disputes” had, as was said in retrospect (1922), “gone to the lifeblood” of the association.78 There is some evidence to suggest that this meant, among other things, a considerable number of resignations from associations. While the VDDI was getting its act together again under the old sign

salaried employees, 3% self-employed, 6.1% civil servants and 8.2% freelancers and unemployed. 75 Cf. Müller-Franken, Das Angestelltenproblem, in ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 49–51, who states that “[diploma engineers] are found in all classes of civil servants.” 76 Cf. Skutsch, Braconides, p. 2. 77 Skutsch, Braconiden, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), p. 1 f., here 1. On the leadership of the association: The chairman Kurt Friedrich was a government building officer in Berlin. Carl Weihe, also editor of the association’s journal, belonged to the group of patent attorneys comprising a few hundred persons who had obtained their admission on the basis of a Dipl.Ing. instead of a law degree. Cf. Sander, Jura. In the years 1922–1924, the VDDI did not have an official chairman. The “honorary managing director” Karl-Friedrich Steinmetz held this position on a temporary basis. In 1926 at the latest (the association archive no longer exists), Friedrich Romberg (born in 1871), who had held a chair in marine engineering in Berlin since 1902, finally took over the chairmanship. In December 1918, Romberg had been appointed head of the General Directorate for Army Workshops in the Berlin War Office and can therefore be described as one of the most politically influential technical scientists. Cf. ZVDI 63 (1919), p. 88. 78 E.H. Schulz, Die Stellung des Verbandes im heutigen Staate, in: TuK 13 (1922), pp. 3–6, here 3.

10.3

The Association of German Diploma Engineers (VDDI): Professional. . .

189

of a consensus course, technical academics were now also offered the Vela and the Budaci as alternatives. Back to the Old Course The return to the consensus course also meant that the VDDI revised its interim realistic picture of the job market for diploma engineers. Influential members of the association, such as the Karlsruhe geodesist Curt Goldschmidt, admitted that there was a “confusion of qualifications.”79 But when Goldschmidt at the same time diagnosed that 61% of employed diploma engineers were in “leading positions”, this can certainly be described as wishful thinking. The construction of the diploma engineer as a success model, which therefore was already dominant before the war, was thus simply reactivated in this course. According to the VDDI, better-placed diploma engineers would turn away from the association if it were to become involved in collective bargaining. Particularly since also the Vela rejected “collective agreements for higher intellectual workers.”80 At the same time, it was deliberately concealed from its own members that Vela was at that time explicitly fighting for recognition as an employee representative body.81 The VDDI’s return to a socially harmonious interest-based political orientation was duplicated at the general political level. The transformation of the political system and the change in the balance of power in the party spectrum were initially observed from a thoroughly sober perspective. As a matter of course, the VDDI leadership assumed that even the “democratic state with a strong socialistic touch” could only be built on “occupational statuses.”82 As in the pre-war period, the fact that diploma engineers in the private-sector would also soon enjoy social guarantees was ostensibly derived from the typical academic work ethic. The VDDI’s own

79

Curt Goldschmidt, Zur Entwicklung der Berufsorganisationen im neuen Deutschland, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), p. 29 f. Cf. also Karl Müller-Franken, Das Angestelltenproblem, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 49–51, who, in contrast, states that a noticeable proportion “hold technician positions.” On the entire debate, see also ZVDDI 9 (1918), pp. 65 and 68; Carl Nipkow, Der Verband Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure und die im Privatdienstverhältnis stehenden Diplom-Ingenieure, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 2–4; ZVDDI 11 (1920), pp. 17–20; ZVDDI 11 (1920), p. 56. 80 ZVDDI 11 (1920), p. 56. 81 Cf. Table 8.1, Priamus, Angestellte, pp. 37–41; DlA 1 (1919), pp. 10 f.; DlA 2 (1920), pp. 9 and 57. 82 Steinmetz, Gewerkschaft der Diplom-Ingenieure, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 25–27, here 25.

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labour market expert, Karl Friedrich Steinmetz, asked the rhetorical question: “Aren’t we also working for the sake of the work itself?”83 When the public goods services finally introduced direct access for diploma engineers to the higher service since 1920, the VDDI naturally welcomed this. A revision of the association’s strategy now seemed all the more superfluous. Especially since the VDDI leadership did not register, at least not publicly, that the higher civil service career there was so small in scope that the vast majority of diploma engineers continued to enter the middle service. With its strategy of informal influence, the VDDI was able to achieve only one small success in the industrial sector until 1933. In 1921, the Northwest Group of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists (VDESI) had agreed to consult a VDDI shop steward in matters of labour contract law from then on.84 This, however, was primarily a matter of inventor’s rights and competition clauses. The income situation of the diploma engineers and the collective bargaining power of the middle school engineers’ association Butab were still ignored obviously intentionally. The same applies to the overcrowding of technical universities and the engineering labour market. The VDDI’s strategic impasse was also reflected in the development of its membership. After the aforementioned losses in the meantime, the membership level of the pre-war period was reached again by 1927. In view of the new competition in the form of Vela and Budaci, not even this could have been expected. Nevertheless, the VDDI’s level of organization fell from just under 10% in 1913 to a good 5% towards the end of the 1920s.85 It borders on self-righteousness when the VDDI board tried to reinterpret the direction of impact: It is not the “form of organization [that is] the cause of [the VDDI’s] allegedly inadequate performance, but the insufficient scope of organization.”86

83

Ibid. Cf. H. E. Krueger, Die Organisationsform der wissenschaftlich qualifizierten Kopfarbeiter, in ZVDDI 9 (1918), pp. 130–133: “To be German is to do a thing for its own sake. As long as this sentence is true, union organization is unable to bring any advantage to the scientifically qualified headworker.” 84 Cf. ZVDDI 12 (1921), p. 44; cf. TuK 15 (1924), p. 12. 85 Unfortunately, Schröder, Nationalismus does not contain any noteworthy references to the perception of the VDDI by TH students. 86 Karl Friedrich Steinmetz, Die Ausschusssitzung 1919, in ZVDDI 11 (1920), pp. 17–20, here 18.

10.4

10.4

Comparison of Association Strategies: Social Foundations and. . .

191

Comparison of Association Strategies: Social Foundations and Ideological Traditions

To what extent were the different association strategies of Budaci, Vela and VDDI related to their respective social foundations, i.e. to the labour market situation of their members? The Budaci: More than three quarters of the base of the chemists union’ consisted of employed technical academics in the chemical industry. Here the chemists, as a consequence of a supply monopoly of academics in the nineteenth century, achieved far above-average salaries, which clearly distinguished them from all non-academically technical employees. In the chemical industry the Budaci’s wage policy extended this meritocratic valuation of labor to diploma engineers. On the other hand the formal regulation of the capital-labour relationship in the Weimar Republic prevented the association’s ambitions to gain a foothold in collective bargaining in other industries as well. Comparatively small trade unions had little chance of participating in collective bargaining. The Vela: It is true that the senior employees did not have a labour market monopoly, which was due to the close link between educational titles and professional position like in the case of the chemists. However, by making the current professional position the sole criterion, and thus completely excluding the formal status criteria of education, the association consisted automatically of a white-collar elite. Only those who were actually successful were counted among the potential organizational base. Structurally induced frustrations, which could result from the mismatch of educational or social background related expectations on the one hand and the occupational situation on the other, were thus excluded from the outset. This purely functional self-definition of the Vela is not due to strategic considerations, but to the career paths in middle and higher management. In-company training as a commercial apprentice, codified since 1897, together with a subsequent career of probation, usually lasting decades, formed the normal case.87 The VDDI: Compared to the chemists in the chemical industry and the commercial functional elites in Budaci and Vela, the professionalismof the diploma engineers in the sense of the monopolisation of labour market segmentsfell significantly. Only the higher technical civil servants and a few self-employed persons moved into fields of activity that assured them what was understood as a adequate academic income in contemporary terms. As we have seen, only senior engineers in large companies reached this level. Of course, the VDDI also counted such

87

Cf. Commercial Code (HGB), v. 10 May 1897, §§ 76–82.

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Variants of Academic Organization: Professional Core Strategies of. . . high Budaci

Conflict Orientation

Vela

VDDI low

,Professionalism ' (professional-social situation)

high

Fig. 10.1 Occupational situation in relation to interest-political conflict orientation: VDDI, Budaci and Vela in comparison, 1918–1933. (Own illustration)

engineers among its ranks. However, there is nothing to suggest that the association organised mainly such top engineers – rather the opposite.88 Was the professional-social situation in any way related to the strategic approaches and concepts of the associations in the area of conflict and consensus? Here we are initially concerned only with the objective social basis of the associations, not with how the members assessed their own professional situation (Fig. 10.1). In terms of willingness to engage in industrial conflict, the Budaci ranked ahead of the Vela which in turn ranked well ahead of the VDDI. The propensity for conflict was thus not linearly related to either a favourable or an unfavourable sociooccupational situation, according to contemporary standards. By this small number of cases, however, there is an approximate affinity between a comparatively low level of occupational-social frustration (Vela, Budaci) and a conflict-oriented approach. Different Strategies: Multiple Causes The differences between the core political strategies of the three associations can ultimately be traced back less to occupational conditions than to the legal occupational-political framework conditions on the one hand and the respective specific ideological ties and traditions of the occupational milieus on the other. Thus there was an open discussion in the Vela in 1919/1920 that lasted over a year, in the course of which many things were possible, in particular a free trade unionist

88

Cf. the isolated references to the (regional) membership composition in ZVDDI, e.g. Steinmetz, Gewerkschaft der Diplom-Ingenieure, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 25–27.

10.4

Comparison of Association Strategies: Social Foundations and. . .

193

course. Although the sovereign refused to grant it collective bargaining rights, this hardly hindered the federation strategically. By exerting informal pressure, it managed to reach a compromise between conflict and consensus. In contrast to the Vela, the VDDI’s core strategy remained largely unaffected by changing external conditions. It was rather the ideologically downright cemented socially harmonious image of society that prevented the adaptation of the interest policy strategy to the realities of the engineering labour market. This ideology extended so far that the opportunities and limits of employee representation (works councils) and collective bargaining policy were not even discussed in the association’s internal debate of 1919/1920. Beyond its maximum demand, which amounted to meritocratic career systems in the private sector as well, the VDDI did not develop any substantive ideas, let alone strategies. It hoped for the solidarity of the established bourgeois elites in the administrations and at the top of companies – without, however, developing a more precise impression of the prevailing interests and ideological imprints there. Thus it was possible to criticize the mass dictate of the large employee associations. However, the special regulations they longed for could not be implemented to a limited extent in an expanding social constitutional state that was based on regulatory models for large-scale professional formations.89 The limitedideological adaptability of an association leadership shaped by the civil service, mainly university lecturers or senior civil servants, certainly played a role in this. These actors were apparently simply unaware of the fact that the particular rights of academic employment formations and a market-economy valuation of human labour tended to be disparate phenomena, and that alternative models of action had to be developed in order to synchronise them.

89

Cf. Hentschel, Geschichte; Sander, Professionalisierung.

Ideology of Intellectual Work and Völkisch-Conservative Radicalization of German Engineers 1927–1933

11.1

11

Corporative Elites as a Compensation Strategy: The Three Associations in Comparison

As far as the achievement of their professional policy goals was concerned, the VDDI, Vela and Budaci each had a very different record throughout the 1920s. The Budaci was certainly the least in need of complementary concepts to its successful collective bargaining policy. This applies both to the analytical external perspective and to the internal perspective, the self-image of the federation. The VDDI, on the other hand, cut its teeth on the equal treatment of technical academics and middle school graduates. In the end, the Vela’s pressure to act was middle-of-the-road. After the association had succeeded in informally ensuring that its clientele remained exempt from the usual pay scales, it was primarily concerned with the symbolic recognition of the salaried economic elites. At the same time, the Vela hoped that the recognition of managerial employees in the social framework would improve their operational position. It is true for all three associations that such second-order strategies essentially concentrated on three fields: the socio-legal regulation of the respective occupational group, the redistribution by the welfare state in favour of the higher professions, and the training and recruitment of their own junior staff. Collective Bargaining as Sole Purpose: The Budaci Quite obviously because of its successes in collective bargaining, the Budaci did not even need to establish that the technical academics were in some way a distinguished social group. Corresponding claims had only been formulated at the beginning of the association’s history, when it was still trying to compete outside the chemical industry with the Butab. In this context, the main argument was the # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_11

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higher “performance”1 of academically educated employees due to their qualifications. Even socially harmonious convictions such as “the works councils must have conscience”2 that had sporadically emerged disappeared shortly afterwards, and for a long time. The Budaci can certainly not be reduced to an “outdated idea of harmony,”3 as George Roche writes in the only academic publication on the association to date. It is true that in 1927 the Budaci renewed its demand for a special role for academics in “employee contract law.”4 However, this only referred toprivate employment contract law and not topublic labour and social law. In contrast to such special questions of employment contract law, VDDI and Vela sought a comprehensive and permanent codification of the elite character of their clientele in the Weimar social order. The Vela: Declining Incomes: Declining Room for Manoeuvre It is true that since the mid-1920s the Vela no longer harboured any hope that senior executives would ever form their own contingent in the public works and economic councils.5 Noting a “levelling of the salaries of senior executives”6 since currency stabilisation (1923), the Vela nevertheless shifted its attention to the directly material aspects of Weimar social policy, the distributional effects of old-age and survivors’ insurance. Thus, between 1923 and 1928, the salaries of the “executive staff” had been raised by “8, 10 and another 5%.”7 For their own clientele, on the other hand, they claimed losses of 30–40% – and this after they themselves had reported almost stable real incomes in 1924/1925!8

1

BBl 1 (1919), p. 62. Cf. BBl 1 (1919), p. 5, which previously stated: “As a result of the (. . .) workers’ and employees’ committees, a significant shift has occurred in the relationship between employer and employee in favor of the latter.” 3 Roche, Engineers, p. 162. 4 Cf. DaA 9 (1927), p. 44 and the older formulation in BBl 2 (1920), p. 202. 5 Cf. Heinz Potthoff, Konstitutionelle Betriebsverfassung, in: DlA 7 (1925), p. 3 f. 6 DlA 6 (1924), p. 45. 7 DlA 10 (1928), p. 101. 8 Cf. Hermann Schäfer, Besoldungsfragen der Oberbeamten, in: DlA 9 (1927), p. 238 f., here 238. Cf. DlA 6 (1924), p. 45. 2

11.1

Corporative Elites as a Compensation Strategy: The Three Associations. . .

197

These losses, quite accurately reflected from today’s perspective, motivated the Vela board to seek solidarity with the classical academic professions. After all, those were affected by similar losses in real income.9 The Vela had always seen itself as part of a “united front of intellectual workers” that had often been circulated in Weimar. In the current real income crisis, the “intellectual workers, who are the bearers of intellectual culture, were materially pushed to the wall.”10 Above all, solidarity was felt with freelancers, and was jealous of the 10% income increase of the higher civil servants from November 1924.11 The clearly increased pressure to act on the income issue did not lead to any revision of the collective bargaining policy course. The Vela continued to concentrate on the informal means of threatening conflict and, until the end of the 1920s, made no further attempts to obtain recognition as a collective bargaining party from the Reich Ministry of Labour. At least the existing instruments were sufficient to ward off the recurring ambitions of the Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband (DHV), which wanted to include the highest salary levels in the pay scales.12 With the approach of addressing the distributional effects of social security systems, the Vela now turned its attention primarily to its older members. The non-tariff employees had apparently taken hardly any private pension plans.13 Although the Vela was critical of the expansion of the welfare state because of its redistributive effects per se, it now argued for a significant increase in the compulsory limit of pension insurance: “If necessary, mandatory insurance.”14 In 1924, compulsory insurance ranged up to gross annual earnings of four, since 1926 five, and since 1928 6000 marks; the vast majority of Vela members thus had to make full private provision.15 However, the demand for “compulsory insurance” was not only aimed at the older colleagues who were soon to be affected, but above

9

Cf. DlA 10 (1928), p. 101. DlA 8 (1926), p. 114. 11 Cf. Leo Müffelmann, Beamtenbesoldung und Angestelltengehälter, in: DlA 7 (1925), p. 2 f.; DlA 8 (1926), p. 117 f.; DlA 9 (1927), pp. 74–76; DlA 10 (1928), p. 166. 12 Cf. Leo Müffelmann, Neue Aufgaben, in: DlA 10 (1928), p. 211 f. 13 Cf. DlA 7 (1925), p. 24. 14 Cf. Hermann Schäfer, Besoldungsfragen der Oberbeamten, in: DlA 9 (1927), p. 238 f., here 238. The Vela fundamentally criticized the discrepancy between contributions and benefits of the social insurance systems in the area of higher income groups. cf. DlA 6 (1924), pp. 24 and 35. 15 Cf. Hentschel, Social Policy; Winkler, Schein. 10

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all at the 50% employer’s contribution to the state pension insurance scheme.16 Senior employees, who were well above this compulsory insurance margin, should also be able to benefit from this. The Vela thus shunted its income policy strategy onto the sideline of social policy. This was undoubtedly an ambitious stance vis-à-vis the employers’ associations and politics: on the one hand, the members were to remain non-tariff, on the other hand, they were to benefit from the welfare state. The Budaci: Commitments to the Welfare State In contrast to the Vela, the Budaci, with its collective bargaining capacity in the chemical industry, was in control of income policy. The chemical workers’ union also suffered real income losses. However, thanks to the Budaci’s quite decisive approach to collective bargaining the losses were kept within limits. Thus, the salaries of chemists remained on a par with the higher incomes of civil servants, which shrank less than in the free economy.17 After the Budaci had spoken of the “proletarianisation of employees”18 during the inflation years, it remained conspicuously silent in this regard in the second half of the 1920s. Beyond its collective bargaining options, Budaci had no recipes for improving the situation of its members. At best, inventor and labour contract law (competition clause) formed an additional field of action. With Heinz Potthoff, MP and government councillor in the Ministry of Labour, one of the most influential labour lawyers of the Weimar Republic stood at the side of the Budaci.19 Moreover, the Budaci leadership had welcomed from the outset the fact that its younger, still relatively low-earning members would profit from the benefits of the planned unemployment

16

See DlA 6 (1924), pp. 44 f.; DlA 7 (1925), pp. 66 f.; Rose, Zur Frage der Pensionsversicherung, in: DlA 7 (1925), pp. 14–16; Otto Everling, Not der Geistesarbeiter, in: DlA 7 (1925), p. 57 f.; Hermann Schäfer, Besoldungsfragen der Oberbeamten, in: DlA 9 (1927), p. 238 f. Cf. also the (high) expenditure of higher-earning employees on ‘insurance/provision’ in Table 8.1 and A.3.2. 17 Cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, pp. 120–133. 18 BBl 3 (1921), p. 225. Cf. also Offener Brief an die Berliner Metallindustriellen, in: BBl 4 (1922), pp. 160–162. 19 Heinz Potthoff, a member of the Butib board until 1914, was a member of the “Parliamentary Commission for the Creation of a Uniform Labour Law” and acted as editor of the journal Arbeitsrecht, the leading socio-political medium in the Weimar Republic.

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insurance scheme.20 On the whole, then, Budaci operated with considerable selfconfidence. The successful collective bargaining policy as well as the secure backing of a loyal base, which was moreover prepared to engage in conflict, presumably explain why the association dared to make quite far-reaching demands with regard to competition and inventors’ rights.21 Among the three associations, the Budaci was finally the only one which did not only question “social policy” in terms of group-specific material advantages, but regarded it as a matter of principle. The association resolutely supported welfarestate redistribution as a necessary superstructure of the “individualistic (. . .) capitalist system,” at least until the end of the 1920s. Finally, the “contrast between the self-employed and the dependent” had also become “ever greater”.22 in recent years. The VDDI Unlike Vela and Budaci, the VDDI found itself in a double defensive position. First of all, the Association of Diploma Engineers wanted to overcome the equality of academics with middle school graduates in industry and the low income level. The real incomes of diploma engineers, which had also fallen and were nominally about a third lower than those of the Budaci and Vela members, were a secondary issue.23 The ostensible success model of the diploma engineer continued to dominate and the salaried status was called a transitional phenomenon on the way to a selfemployed or civil servant existence. It was Kurt Geisler, member of the board and later chair at the TH-Berlin, who tried to move away from this strategy of avoiding dissonance: “What is the use (. . .) of title protection if [the diploma engineer] in

20

For unemployment insurance, the income limits of the Salaried Employees Insurance Act (AVG) applied. Cf. also DaA 9 (1927) p. 1 f. and ibid. the June issue (o.p.). In the Reich collective agreement for salaried employees in the chemical industry, the Budaci had already negotiated more favorable regulations for the case of a change of company (competition clause) than those provided for in the HGB amendment of 1914. Cf. commentary, pp. 44–48. 21 On the Budaci demand for full salary continuation during the waiting period, cf. Federal Programme, in: BBl 5 (1923), pp. 41–44; BBl 4 (1922), p. 34; BBl 3 (1921), pp. 87 and 135 f.; BBl 7 (1925), p. 22; DaA 8 (1926), pp. 5 and 22 as well as DtA 12 (1930), pp. 38–41. On inventor’s law, which in the mid-1920s found that case law practice had come closer to its own older requirements, cf. BBl 1 (1919), p. 52 f.; BBl 3 (1921), pp. 208–210; DaA 7 (1925), p. 22; DaA 9 (1927), o.p. (1.3. and 1.6.); DaA 11 (1929), pp. 17–19; DtA 12 (1930), p. 85 f. 22 Rechtfertigung der Sozialpolitik, in: DaA 9 (1927), pp. 53 f., here 53. Cf. DaA 10 (1928), p. 1 f. 23 For information on the development of salaried engineers’ incomes in the 1920s.

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praxi, according to his remuneration, represents nothing more than any graduateof a middle school.”24 The chairman of the association, Kurt Friedrich, at least, linked up with such a realistic insight by proposing the establishment of the association’s own job registers and more intensive research into the labour market. Both were subsequently implemented, at least to some extent.25 However, these measures can only be understood as an attempt at a minimal correction. Substantial strategies to bring diploma engineers a little closer to “typical academic”26 employment relationships were not developed – indeed, they were not even discussed. Bankruptcy in Terms of Interest Policy: The VDDI After 1922 Nevertheless, Geisler’s comment of 1922 marks the most important strategic turning point in the entire history of the VDDI. On the one hand, the insight that industry was “neglecting the academic class”27 now met with some internal resonance for the first time. Otherwise, the association’s leadership finally shifted the responsibility for the employment situation to the diploma engineers themselves. There was also apparently little hope in the association’s own job placement service. Expectations of the diplomas to be able to get into higher (. . .) scientific positions “on the basis of their diploma certificate from the outset” were even succinctly dismissed as “absurd”28 in this course. Geisler himself wrote: “If the diploma engineers are forced (. . .) to do work that does not correspond at all to their previous education, that is only their fault.”29 Thus, the VDDI’s basic goal of achieving meritocratic career regulations for all diploma engineers was de facto, but by no means explicitly, shelved. In the years 1922–1927, the VDDI’s core strategy in professional policy, ignoring the recognized circumstances, concentrated primarily on denouncing 24

Geisler, Entlohnung und Standesbewusstsein, in: TuK 13 (1922), p. 8. On the internal history of effects, cf. especially K. Friedrich, Der Verband und seine Arbeit, in: TuK 15 (1925), pp. 99–101. 25 Cf. Kurt Friedrich, Der Verband und seine Arbeit, in: TuK 15 (1924), pp. 4–7 and 99–101, as well as the section “Vom Arbeitsmarkt für Diplom-Ingenieure.” The VDDI had already maintained its own job index since 1920, cf. Fig. A.2. 26 ZVDDI 12 (1921), p. 6. 27 TuK 15 (1924), p. 9. 28 Kaefes, Auf dem Weg zu den leitenden Stellen, in: TuK 15 (1924), pp. 23 f., here 23. 29 Geisler, Entlohnung und Standesbewusstsein, in: TuK 13 (1922), p. 8.

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misleading uses of the term engineer in publicity, for example with regard to the Prussian-Hessian state railways, which at times used to refer to their master craftsmen as “works engineers”. The VDDI even took the cost-intensive route of legal proceedings when draughtsmen, graphic artists or beer brewers were found to be trying to enhance their professional title by adding a “Dipl.”30 The VDDI’s virtual inertia was only broken by a brief flare-up of debate on education policy. In 1925, this involved renewed criticism by companies of the practicality of university studies. In the course of the Prussian university reform of 1922, the scientific character of the TH had finally been strengthened (once again).31 The Berlin TH professor Wilhelm Franz now drew an unsparing balance in the VDDI journal. In contrast to the formal scientification, according to him, the curricular importance of the practical laboratory courses should have been significantly increased. At the same time, however, the VDDI feared that in this case the TH would have been “regressed to purely technical schools.”32 After some back and forth, however, the criticism of academisation ultimately prevailed. In addition to the industrial engineering course, the voluntary non-technical courses in TH studies were also called into question. According to this, “economic disciplines, philosophy, sociology, law” would downright “burden the curricula at the expense of the core qualification.”33 In the course of this debate on education policy, labour market issues were also raised again. However, the VDDI confined itself to demanding that “technical issues be dealt with by technicians”34 for the general public administration. Last but not

However, the VDDI had to note that “as court practice has shown in many cases, it is by no means easy to bring about a conviction.” TuK 15 (1924), p. 100. On the campaign against the “works engineer”, cf. TuK 18 (1927), p. 189, on further accusations against the “academization” of professions that “have nothing to do with science”, cf. Karl-Friedrich Steinmetz, Bemerkungen zur Hochschulreform, in: TuK 23 (1932), p. 23 f. 31 To the VDI Viefhaus, cf. Ingenieure, pp. 301–305. On the previous history cf. König, Ingenieure, pp. 267–269. 32 Colleone, Volkswirtschaftlich oder verwaltungstechnisch gebildete Ingenieure? In: TuK 16 (1925), pp. 164–166, here 165. Cf. Franz, Unstimmigkeiten im Zielgedanken der Hochschulreform, in: TuK 16 (1925), pp. 1–3; Von der Diplom-Ingenieur-Tagung 1927, in: TuK 18 (1927), pp. 197–208, esp. p. 201 (contribution by Oberregierungsrat Schenk); TuK 19 (1928), p. 50; TuK 22 (1931), pp. 118–122. This is possibly the first use of the term Fachhochschule. 33 Zur Frage der Ingenieurausbildung, in: TuK 16 (1925), pp. 202–204, here 202. 34 TuK 18 (1927), p. 179. In 1927, the VDDI still supported a petition by the DVP against the lawyers’ monopoly. Cf. also DtA 9 (1927), p. 79; Von der Diplom-Ingenieur-Tagung 1927, in: TuK 18 (1927), pp. 197–208, here 203 (Romberg’s contribution). 30

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least, the technocratically inspired demand that (diploma) engineers, with their planning skills, should have direct access to the general higher administration on an equal footing with fully qualified lawyers had thus also come to an end.35 In view of such hardly promising strategies of evasion, the call for new approaches to solving the social question of technical academics became louder and louder. The Vela: Escape into the Concept of Status Groups (Stände) With the decline in real incomes since the mid-1920s, the pressure to act had also increased for the Vela: The hitherto successful approach of exerting informal influence on the top echelons of the companies was of little avail in this respect. The culprits of the development, however, were quickly found. Now the Vela began to declare war on the “mass trade union dictate” on a massive scale. Although, just a few years earlier the Vela had spoken emphatically of an “economic democracy”36 and had even sympathised with the free trade union AfA-Bund. Increasingly helpless, the Vela found itself at the mercy of the “masses with mass effect.”37 In fact, the slight real increases in lower and middle incomes can be traced back to the collective bargaining power of these categories of employees organised in AfA, Gedag and GdA. The signs of dissolution of the (corporative) Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft in 1924 were then also called as a “crisis of the trade unions” with as much relish as inaccuracy.”38 Apart from that, the Vela leadership was only able to counter the loss of income with an attempt to sharpen the profile of managerial staff as a social category. Having good contacts to big politics unlike the VDDI and Budaci, thus the managers’ association, began to campaign increasingly for separate seats reserved for executives in the labour courts in 1925 (finally set up in 1927).39

35

Cf. ZVDDI 9 (1918), pp. 75–81 and 96–100; TuK 13 (1922), pp. 6 f., 25 f.,133 f. and 189–191. 36 DlA 4 (1922), p. 14. 37 Otto Everling (Chairman of the Protective Cartel of German Intellectual Workers), Program of the Reich Chancellor Luther and the Intellectual Workers, in: DlA 7 (1925), p. 25 f., here 25. 38 DlA 6 (1924), p. 36. 39 The continuation of the existing, provisional Reich Economic Council was discussed at this time as a possible successor to the ZAG, which had been dissolved in the meantime. Cf. esp. DlA 8 (1926), p. 1. Here the fear was also in the background that the “new ZAG” would also “undermine the company agreements by declarations of general applicability” (ibid.). Cf. also Müffelmann, Zum Kampf um den Reichswirtschaftsrat, in: DlA 11 (1928), pp. 55–58. In

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Before the ultimate failure of such idealistic political approaches became foreseeable, however, a new ideological basis had been agreed upon in the Vela. Since the mid-1920s, the Vela leadership had consistently spoken of the “rank and file”40 – a hitherto merely eclectic form of expression. In demarcation from the “equality ideals of blurred natural law conceptions,” the Vela leadership justified this new claim primarily with the category of “personality.”41 In doing so, they particularly liked to fall back on the programmatic publications of the Schutzkartell der deutschen Geistesarbeiter (Protective Cartel of German Intellectual Workers), which brought together almost all classical-academic professional associations. As a result of this inclusion in the ‘social movement’ of the academic professions, the argumentation figure of the social responsibility of the ‘intellectual’ professions moved more and more into the centre of the association’s ideology. In this respect, the “fetters of the Dawes Plan”42 were also denounced, as was a Germany that had become “infinitely poor”43 as a result of territorial losses. However, the self-presentation of the executives as the central functional group in society as a whole, whose universal, social sense of responsibility was to be honoured accordingly, was given a special colouring in the Vela that deviated from the usual professional customs.44 It is true that, analogous to the academic professional associations, an idealized notion of a past, strictly hierarchical, status groups (Stände)-based social order was cherished. This was expressed in anti-capitalist tendencies, in the talk of the “agglomerations of capital and labour,” as well as in the ontologically unique position of the “Volksgemeinschaft”, which was diametrically opposed to the “class struggle.” 45

1928, only a single representative of the vela or senior employees was claimed to be able to contribute to the total of 48 employee representatives. Cf. also DlA 8 (1926), p. 173 and DlA 9 (1927), p. 182, and Sander, Jura. 40 DlA 10 (1928), p. 121 f. 41 Hermann Schäfer, Von der Wirtschaftsgesinnung der Vela, in: DlA 7 (1925), p. 12 f., here 12. Ibid.: “The tendency towards the masses, whether it appears as an organized mass of workers or as a concentrated capital power, is more and more like a paralyzing force on personal activity.” 42 Poehlmann, Sechs Jahre Vela, in: DlA 6 (1924), p. 1. 43 Müffelmann, Neue Aufgaben, in: DlA 7 (1925), p. 6 f., here 6. 44 Cf. Stern, Consequences; Sander, Professionalisierung. 45 Müffelmann, Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft, in: DlA 6 (1924), p. 21 f., here 21; similarly: Schäfer, Sozialpolitik, p. 7. and id. Von der Wirtschaftsgesinnung der Vela, in: DlA 7 (1925), pp. 12 f., here 12.

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At the same time, however, the “intellectually creative economic classes” in the Vela were understood in a somewhat more ahistorical, modern way. As already explained, a fundamentally positive attitude towards the free market and the capitalist economic order prevailed in the managers’ association for obvious reasons. Consequently, a individualistic, economic liberal note was added to the harmonious social statics of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’: the “independently leading personality in the service of the whole” needed above all “freedom.” This, of course, meant first of all the material freedom of income in line with one’s status, as well as freedom from the ‘mass pressure’ of the trade unions and employers’ associations. The Vela was also concerned with the economic ‘freedom’ of individuals and economic units in a socially cushioned market economy. The subtext was something like: Through participation in quasi-stable self-governing bodies such as the Reichswirtschaftsrat (Reich economic council), the social constitutional state was at least supposed to provide senior employees with a competitive starting position in the organised class struggle. Thus, the Vela was not yet really concerned with a permanent, corporately guaranteed supremacy of ‘intellectual leaders’.46 More than the Vela, the VDDI saw itself as a victim of organised interests with capital on one side, the big white-collar unions on the other: “Mass valorisation leads to levelling.”47 Unlike the Vela, which at this point had made practical proposals for the founding of a new ‘community of labour’, the VDDI could do nothing with organised capitalism because of its “inner untruth”. A (national) “Gemeinschaftsarbeit”48 was still only conceivable on the basis of socially secured professions. Professional Associations as a Social Organization Principle: The VDDI From the mid-1920s onwards, the VDDI also associated the concept of class with a concept of society that was now becoming more concrete. Thus, collective work, which was also publicly discussed, was only considered possible in an economic and social order which, “in contrast to Marxist doctrine,” did not “value professional work as a commodity.”49 By portraying Marx as the intellectual creator of

46

Cf. Stern, Consequences; McClelland, Experience; Jarausch, Professions; Sander, Professionalization. 47 TuK 15 (1924), p. 132. 48 TuK 15 (1924), p. 8; Gemeinschaftsarbeit (collective work) 49 TuK 15 (1924), p. 9. Cf. also Kaefes, Von dem Weg zu den leitenden Stellen, in: TuK (1924), pp. 23 f.

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capitalism, the economic system and the free trade union movement thus merged into a homogeneous image of the enemy. Whereas the Vela designed the corporative protection of the higher professions merely as a gradual regulative, the VDDI questioned the capitalist economic order per se. Like so many academic professional associations in the 1920s, the VDDI placed the social and political spheres at one and stylised the acquisition system of the Kaiserreich, the “old Germany,”50 as the supposed ideal type of a professional order. As a result of such a socially harmonious view, which was developed to some extent consistently, the VDDI also defended ‘the’ economy against the organised interests of workers and employees. In 1924/1925, for example, it vehemently opposed the public tenor of a “too strong material direction”51 of German industry. The VDDI conceded that companies could behave in a market-logical way, e.g. in collective bargaining, but at the same time expected a status-based valuation of human labour that overrode market logic! Compared to such rather crude general political understandings, it almost seemed like Realpolitik when the VDDI pursued its older approach of a chamber of engineers. With such a chamber, following the example of physicians and lawyers, the “state of diploma engineers” would symbolically “step next to the other academics.”52 Of course, it was primarily the employees who would benefit from the combination of self-employed, civil servant and employed diploma engineers in such a body of professional self-administration, as they would then no longer be “pushed down to employees.”53 Tendencies of the Discourse of Status Groups (Stände) By dismissing the “social situation” as an “artificially constructed”54 concept, the VDDI declared everyday cultures and world views to be the only relevant

50

Fr.[iedrich] A.[ugust] Pinkereneil, Die Zukunftsaufgaben der akademischen Berufsverbände, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 81–87, here 81. 51 TuK 15 (1924), p. 68 f. Cf. ibid., pp. 99–101. The Reich Confederation of German Industry (RDI) and the Federation of German Employers’ Associations had met together for the first time in Berlin at the end of March 1924. 52 Steinmetz, Über Berufsfragen der Diplom-Ingenieure, in: TuK 16 (1925), pp. 131–135, here 132. Cf. ders, Ingenieurkammer, in: TuK 18 (1927), pp. 215 f. as well as the numerous replications in the Zeitspiegel section. 53 Steinmetz, Der Verband Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure, in: TuK 15 (1924), pp. 10–12, here 10. 54 Carl Este, Der Reichswirtschaftsrat, in: TuK 18 (1927), pp. 33–36, here 33.

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organising principles of professionalism. By negating income relations and working conditions, the association admittedly also attempted to conceal its strategic lack of success. In contrast, the contemporary concept of class emphasized the everyday cultural homogeneity of social formations that had commonalities in the “way of life,”55 as Max Weber defined it in demarcation from the concept of class some years before. On the one hand, the VDDI used the typical contemporary argumentation figure, namely the allegedly altruistic work ethic of the higher professions and its significance for the society as a whole. Thus, “the academic spirit puts the concerns of the whole above its own.”56 On the other hand, the VDDI ignored the fact that professional self-administration in the established academic professions was also based on the employment situation: a certain autonomy in the form of chambers was reserved for the self-employed, i.e. it did not apply to civil servants such as judges, hospital doctors or senior teachers.57 Notably, the VDDI thus imagined organizational framework for diploma engineers that went beyond the model of the classical professions. In the face of job cuts (higher civil servants) and the oversupply of professional services (doctors, lawyers) as well as the loss in real incomes the associations of judges, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers and priests also increasingly reintroduced their allegedly altruistic service to society from the mid-1920s onwards.58 The motive, however, was expanded: By seeing themselves helplessly at the mercy of the formed interests of the ‘masses’, the professional view oriented towards the common good would now bring material disadvantages. An employee of the Bavarian State Statistical Office summarized this self-image of the ‘academic movement’ of the 1920s as aptly as affirmatively:

55

Cf. Weber, Wirtschaft, p. 538. cf. ibid. pp. 177–179 and 531–539. Steinmetz, Über Berufsfragen der Diplom-Ingenieure, in: TuK 16 (1925), pp. 131–135, here 132. Cf. also TuK 15 (1924), p. 9: “Academic professional organizations must be guided first and foremost by the idea of a cultural promotion of the entirety, that only in the commitment to the Volksgemeinschaft, not in the class division, the division according to purely economic points of view, is the future founded.” 57 Cf. on the medical and bar associations Huerkamp, Aufstieg and Siegrist, Advokat as well as on the in contrast limited self-governing possibilities of the civil servant lawyers Sander, Jura. 58 Cf. Jarausch, Professions; McClelland, Experience; Mommsen, Resolution; Siegrist, Advokat, pp. 680–688; Huerkamp, Aufstieg, p. 244 f.; Sander, Recht. 56

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The intellectual worker, I am thinking here especially of the academic, in accordance with his whole social and societal integration, in accordance with his higher sense of responsibility and his more ideal professional conception, cannot and will not resort to the same economic means of struggle as the working class.59

As can be seen, the merchant elites in the Vela, only a small proportion of whom were academically educated, had also come closer to such a view of the status groups (Stände). Here, however, the notion of privileges of the status groups went less far, concentrating rather on adequate participation in the settlement of conflicts in the form of professional committees. This was certainly only partly related to the lack of a specific elite cultural tradition in the catchment area of the employed economic elites. Rather, the only partial adoption of professional ideas was based on a fundamentally more pronounced, affectively internalized acceptance of the capitalist social and economic order. In short, the market was not completely alien to the market-formed elites. This greater acceptance of market-based regulation of ‘higher professions’ on the part of the Vela was, of course, in turn linked to the lower social age of middle and higher management. On the other hand, the classical academic professions in the nineteenth century, the century of professionalization, not only developed high expectations of material privileges and social prestige, but also the self-image of being “leaders and teachers”60 of the people. This socially widely accepted prominent position of the academic and other higher professions was also expressed in the expectation of a pronounced social endogamy. This was also increasingly articulated again in the crisis at the end of the 1920s. The chances of being able to pass on one’s own social position to one’s offspring had not declined objectively (relative intergenerational social mobility). However, the income and employment crisis and the supposed mass influx into higher education led to a different perception of life.61 The claim to social status inheritance was in any case at odds with the meritocratic principles that the academic professions otherwise liked to uphold. Social status was perceived less as a meritocratically generated situation than as an inviolable, supra-temporal position. This attitude now came into conflict with the

59

Achner, Entlohnung (der qualifizierten Arbeit vor und nach dem Kriege), p. 360. Fr. A. Pinkerneil, Die Zukunftsaufgaben der akademischen Berufsverbände, in ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 81–87, here 82. Cf. Siegrist, Professions; McClelland, Experience; Ruck, Korpsgeist, pp. 49–54; Jansen, Antiliberalismus. 61 Cf. especially Kaelble, Mobilität; Titze, Akademikerzyklus; on the following: Stern, Consequences. 60

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market economy. The cuts in civil servants’ incomes were also a consequence of the macroeconomic crisis and correspondingly falling tax revenues, as well as with the Weimar worldview struggles, which were perceived primarily as a capital-labour dichotomy. Three Professional Associations: Three Ideological Paths The core problem of the VDDI was that technical development and the work of engineers were not publicly regarded as an “interest of the general public.”62 There was no social need for a “idealistic view of technology”63 and thus for a special social appreciation of diploma engineers. As shown, the opposite was rather the case: by the established bourgeois elites, even in the 1920s, technology and engineers were still associated with an apparently unbridled capitalism and massification and thus held responsible for the social conflicts of the present. Whereas the Vela merely aspired to occupational group-specific rights in the Weimar social order, the VDDI longed for a pre-market, and to that extent also pre-modern, society. The Budaci stood in marked contrast to these two cases: an ideology of “intellectual work”64 was not even rudimentarily developed in the chemists’ union towards the middle of the 1920s. Like a burning glass, this was shown in the case of the labour courts set up in 1927. Here, all salaried employees filled a common contingent; thus, occupations and functional positions were not taken into account. The higher ranks of white-collar workers were thus clearly outnumbered by the majority of so-called executive workers. Also in contrast to the comparatively moderate Vela, the Budaci called it “progress” to get such an “organic structure of jurisdiction [that] had not existed before.”65 Ultimately, the social situation of the members of the VDDI, Vela and Budaci was only one important factor influencing the strategic positioning of the associations in the spectrum of conflict and consensus. The previous interestpolitical balances were reflected at least as much in the further development of the respective association: the lower the interest-political success, the more important symbolic strategies concerning ‘higher professions’ became.

62

Anonymus, Berufsschutz, in: TuK 15 (1924), pp. 101 f., here 101. Steinmetz, Über Berufsfragen der Diplom-Ingenieure, in: TuK 16 (1925), pp. 131–135, here 131. 64 Otto Everling, Not der Geistesarbeiter, in: DlA 7 (1925), p. 57 f. 65 DaA 9 (1927), p. 45. 63

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At the same time, historical path dependencies also played a role: the prepolitical, everyday cultural traditions of the member base, but above all of the respective association’s leadership. I.e., the evolved internal political culture of the association fundamentally stood in the way of revising the established interest policy approach – despite limited (Vela) or even complete lack of political success (VDDI).

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The VDDI: At the Head of the “Volksgemeinschaft”

In the course of the 1920s, the VDDI thus became increasingly committed to the demand for a publicly protected status for technical academics within the framework of an economic and social order that was to be comprehensively reformed. For a long time, however, the VDDI was only marginally involved in major politics. This only changed towards the end of the decade. Now there was an increasing demand, and in line with the technocratic vision of a future social leadership role for diploma engineers, for technical academics to become more involved with ‘politics’ as a field with which the ‘specialist expert’66 was little familiar. The association’s leadership also began to deal with the general political debates. According to the editors, the VDDI’s journal Technik und Kultur was now increasingly devoted to a “critique of the Zeitgeist.”67 This was not so much a concretisation of the ideology of the status groups (Stände), which had hitherto only been developed roughly, but rather a classic right-wing conservative critique of current politics. In the news section of the journal, for example, the November Revolution was now succinctly described as an “overthrow” – and the current political order was dismissed as “democratic turmoil.” Or the “bloodsucking pump of the Dawes Plan” was blamed for the “irresponsible emphasis on class antagonisms.”68 In sum, such a conservative critique of political order and political process was only seemingly eclectic or arbitrary. Rather, it was based on a broadly autocratic, or at any rate anti-pluralist, conception of political decision-making. In the interwar period, this did not remain limited to conservative parties and groupings, but was

66

Weihe, Kultur-Umschau, in: TuK 19 (1928), p. 209. Towards the Goal, p. 108. 68 TuK 18 (1927), p. 1, p. 41 and p. 84. 67

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also constitutively anchored in bourgeois liberalism.69 Within the VDDI leadership, such political convictions were shared not only in principle. Rather, they had explicitly committed themselves to the social vision of a comprehensive status groups based protection of technical academics in a corresponding new social order. Motivating members to participate politically therefore meant “strictly avoiding politics as a party-political dispute.”70 One longed for an engineer who “also looks into the world somewhat with the philosopher’s eyes.”71 From Protest Conservatism to Völkisch Right-Wing Conservatism In the VDDI, however, such a traditionally conservative view of the Weimar Republic and society was short-lived. Soon after the onset of general political commentary, the völkisch sounds increased. The focus thus shifted from (state) politics in the classical, narrower sense to society as a comprehensive object of regulation that included politics. Thus, a festive event of the German Technical University in Prague in 1928 was not expected to be a public presentation of German technical sciences, but rather a “jubilee celebration of Germanness.”72 Hardly anywhere else can a process of ideological profiling be traced in such detail as in the example of the VDDI in the years 1927–1929: from alignment with an initially still external discourse and its subsequent affirmation to individual, group-specific further development. Accordingly, the boundaries between classical conservatism and the radicalized right-wing, so-called neo-conservative or völkisch ideological components (“Conservative Revolution”73) initially remained quite blurred. After all, the popularity of social-hygienic worldviews exended: even in the VDDI, the “less capable and energetic classes [were] considered more fertile

69

Cf. especially Jansen, Antiliberalismus as well as Schumann, Einheitssehnsucht and Weichlein, Sozialmilieus, pp. 169–215. Cf. also the evidence of the pronounced affinity of liberal circles close to the DDP to the NSDAP in Rohe, Wahlen, pp. 143–162. 70 R. Fischer: Bodenreform, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), p. 66 f., here 66. 71 Geisler, Der Wert der Technik für den Menschen. Anmerkungen zur Philosophie der Technik, in: TuK 13 (1922), pp. 91 f., here 91. 72 TuK 19 (1928), p. 158. 73 The term ‘Konservative Revolution’ was first used by the self-confessed right-wing conservative Armin Mohler in his 1950 dissertation thesis with the same title – certainly with an affirmative gesture. For a critique of the term, see Breuer, ‘Konservative Revolution’ and Walkenhaus, Staatsdenken.

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than the valuable.”74 This exceeded the right-wing resp. neo-conservative spectrum, i.e. far into a traditionally conservative camp and into parts of the liberal-bourgeois camp.75 The review of Hans Grimm’s 1926 book Volk ohne Raum (People without Space) by Otto Everling, the chairman of the Schutzkartell deutscher Geistesarbeiter (Protective Cartel of German Intellectual Workers), printed in the VDDI journal, was still halfway in the mainstream of conservative bourgeois journalism.76 Although subsequently dressed up by the NSDAP in the same slogan, this “poetic and patriotic feat” against “the intolerable treatment by foreign countries” (Everling) represented little more than a plea for a classical colonial policy, as also advocated by the traditional conservative parties DVP and DNVP.77 With the conceptual change from “the empire” and “the state”, which incidentally also stood for society, to the Volksgemeinschaft, as well as with the qualification of capitalism as the “scourge of humanity,”78 the VDDI subsequently began to set clear symbols. Those gave a foretaste of the basic motives of the further politicalsocial discussion. The VDDI had already discovered the essential element of right-wing conservative concepts, namely a specific critique of capitalism, which opposed an economic and social order based on competition between interests, the democratic “party state”, with a “people’s body” inspired by “spirit.” From 1929 onwards, the other two cornerstones of right-wing conservative ideology also came to the fore. With Fritz Reuter, an influential member of the board of directors, the corporate image of society and the criticism of the “yoke of created mechanical organization” were

74 Friedrich, Grundsätzliches zum Besoldungsgesetz, in: TuK 18 (1927), p. 190; cf. also Siegfried Marold, Technik und Weltanschauung, in: TuK 18 (1927), p. 101 f. “Technology is most advanced in the white race and not in the Mongolian.” 75 Although not always in this elite-political variant. Cf. Weipert, ‘Mehrung der Volkskraft’; Schwartz, Eugenik. 76 Cf. Otto Everling, o.T., in: TuK 18 (1927), p. 99. There one could also see “our German fate, as schools and parties admittedly do not teach it”. 77 Publicly, Hitler first replaced the previously authoritative “ground” with “space” in a speech at a Heidelberg NSDAP meeting on August 6, 1927, a little over a year after Grimm’s book appeared. Cf. Hitler, Vol. II/2, p. 439. 78 Cf. Carl Weihe, Mensch und Maschine, in: TuK 19 (1928), pp. 3 f. (“Capitalism”) and ibid. p. 23 (“Volksgemeinschaft”).

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accompanied by the “hunger for more,”79 the expectation of a radical change, which drew on mythological end-time motifs. Reuter merely hinted at the connection with the third basic völkisch motif: the ethnic exaltation of the self and exclusion of the other. Meanwhile, in a telling allusion to Hans Grimm’s bestseller, the editors of the VDDI journal headlined a report on the shortage of classrooms at the Berlin TH in big bold letters with “Students without space.”80 Weimar-Style Völkisch-Right-Wing Conservatism In the case of the dictum “conservative revolution,” it is important to take into account the affirmative connotation of the term “revolution”. On the other hand, it is also evident here that the various approaches of the protagonists of völkisch rightwing conservatism, from Ernst Jünger to Edgar Jung to Hans Freyer, were as a rule universally received and evolved. At least a collective term that includes the receiving public in the sense of a social history of the political therefore seems adequate.81 In the reception and appropriation of this right-wing conservative paradigm, rarely were all three basic motifs taken up at the same time. So was the VDDI#s case: namely, firstly, the Volksgemeinschaft, secondly, its ethnic foundation, and thirdly, the change in current conditions that was to be brought about in a revolutionary manner. Depending on whether the gaze was directed inwards or outwards: either the corporate or the ethnic-racial motif was linked to the expectation of a radical change in state and society.82 As in other strands of the neo-conservative discourse, the VDDI added further motifs to this tripartite basic pattern. The journal Technik und Kultur was also devoted to the experience of war and “public health,” which entered into a specific connection under the motif of “purification” and thus concretized both the corporative and the ideas of a comprehensive turnaround in state and society: “But then the

79

Fritz Reuter, Wandlungen in den deutschen Kulturzentren?, in: TuK 20 (1929), pp. 222–225, here 222 f. See here also the criticism of “so-called objective science” and the “ossified concept of the state with its banal utilitarian demands without an inner idea.” 80 TuK 20 (1929), p. 38. Cf. also A. Thiele, Zur Berufswahl des akademischen Technikers, in: ibid. pp. 41–43. “We [have] become the typical people without space since 1918.” 81 Cf. as pleas against a collective term esp. von dem Bussche, Konservatismus and Breuer, Ordnungen. 82 Cf. in contrast Breuer, Anatomie and his detailed ideology matrix. Cf. also Fattmann, Bildungsbürger; pp. 214–217 as well as Föllmer, Verteidigung, pp. 253–276, who also analytically distinguishes the view outside and inside.

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victory of our enemies was a Pyrrhic victory over the willpower of our people, which will emerge purified and inwardly strengthened from this turning point in time!”83 Thus, Technik und Kultur had already been “indoctrinated” by “right-wing conservative” authors since the 1929 vintage and not, as Burkhard Dietz diagnoses in his general characterization of the VDDI journal, only since 1932.”84 Moreover, such a passive formulation does not seem appropriate. The spokesmen of this development turn belonged to the VDDI’s inner circle of leaders and had, almost without exception, published regularly in Technik und Kultur before. Even in this radicalised phase from 1928/1929 onwards, the VDDI’s journalism remained to a certain extent diverse and connectable. Because of its key role in the joint engineering project to turn the public concept of technology into a positive one, the journal continued to be received beyond the association – for example, in the VDI and in the relevant industrial associations.85 Comparatively neutral political and social contributions, especially on the history of technology, remained an integral part of the periodical until 1933. The project of a right-wing conservative restructuring of society nevertheless formed the core and consensus of the political-social discussion: in 1929 and 1930, four, and in 1931 and 1932, seven of around 20 main articles per issue, each of several pages long and with footnotes, were devoted to this project. It is inconceivable for Technik und Kultur that, similar to Amt und Volk, the journal of the Saxon regional association of the Reichsbund der höheren Beamten (RhB), which had already been founded in 1927 out of a right-wing conservative sense of mission, also featured a Social Democrat.86 Thus the repeatedly renewed appeal to members to become more politically involved became an unambiguous call to express

83

Heinrich Blüher, Kulturwende und Ingenieur, in: TuK 21 (1930), pp. 169–173. On the aforementioned motifs, cf. Reuter, Wandlungen, in: TuK 20 (1929), pp. 222–225, here 222: “After years of twilight in the directionless fantasy novel or in the hankering after daily successes of erotic discussions, the experience of the generation now acting rises up again with elemental force, the war.” Cf. also TuK 20 (1928), pp. 209–11, here 210 (Carl Weihe): “The food exhibition in Berlin, called the Fressa by the Berliner in his drastic expression, demonstrated the tremendous importance of technology in the production and preservation of food for public health and the training of man.” Weihe’s resignation as editor of TuK at the end of 1928, which he announced here, had nothing to do with ideological differences. He was eventually replaced in this position by the labour market expert Karl-Friedrich Steinmetz. 84 Cf. Dietz, Technik und Kultur, p. 122. 85 Cf. the references to TuK articles in ZVDI and NZI, for example. 86 Cf. Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, p. 216.

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reservations about the social order in the workplace, in leisure time and, if necessary, at the ballot box. The Balancing Act: Technological Euphoria and Right-Wing Conservative Criticism of Modernization Organizationally, the political profiling had no significant impact on the VDDI. Between 1918 and 1933, the number of members constantly hovered around 4000.87 For the association’s leadership, however, it was a matter of balancing the engineering-specific and the völkisch right wing conservative parts of its own world view. On the one hand, technology had always been propagated as part of culture in the common sense. On the other hand, the association saw itself as an elementary current of a right-wing conservative critique of modernization, which still attributed responsibility for the “soulless materialism” of the present first and foremost to technology. On the occasion of a new edition of “The Decline of the West,” the VDDI had simply rejected Oswald Spengler’s sweeping criticism of the rationalist and technophile worldview of the present time in 1927.88 By emphasizing the man-made, “creative” character of technology even more strongly than it was usual in the engineering community, the VDDI leadership subsequently attempted to resolve the increasingly obvious contradiction between technology affirmation and the völkisch “discourse of inwardness.” Accordingly, there could be no question of a “contradiction (. . .) between civilization and culture.”89 The ideological masterminds of the VDDI usually referred to Friedrich Dessauer’s “Philosophy of Technology” published in 1927. Here, materially shaping, technical creation was declared to be the basic motives of human action and thus, to a certain extent, embedded in an ontology claiming universality.90

87

See Table A.6. Cf. Carl Weihe, review of Spengler, in: TuK 18 (1927), p. 37 f. Cf. also Spengler’s pamphlet “Der Mensch und die Technik” (Man and Technology), published in 1931, which reached a circulation of 50,000 within 2 years and where Spengler formulated his technologycritical approaches more concretely: “Civilization itself has become a machine that does or wants to do everything machine-like” (p. 79). Cf. TuK 23 (1931), pp. 127–139 and 157 f.; TuK 24 (1932), p. 17 f. 89 Ernst Horneffer, Vortrag auf der Diplom-Ingenieur-Tagung 1926, in: TuK 18 (1927), pp. 213–215, here 214, at which the Giessen philosopher, according to ibid. 90 Cf. TuK 18 (1927), p. 56. Cf. also ibid. pp. 97–99. 88

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However, the VDDI’s technocratic worldview was to enter into an even more far-reaching fusion with the völkisch concept of culture.91 After all, technology in the VDDI was understood as the scientific-rational mastery of all challenges to existence, i.e. not merely as part of a general culture, but as the core of human existence. Initially, it was the engineers’ claim to social dominance derived from this that could be combined somewhat flush with the autocratic, status-based concept of dominance of the new right. The editor-in-chief of Technik und Kultur, Carl Weihe, imagined an ideal political power structure in which the engineer, as the “factual decision-maker (. . .) stands above the other party-politically minded politicians.”92 However, the actual opposition between a society built up “by planning”93 and the organic world view of right-wing conservatism had not yet been eliminated. In this respect, the VDDI ideologues had to make plausible not only an emotional understanding of technology per se – as with the talk of the “poetry of the railway”94 – but the “inner experience” of a future society organised in technicist terms as a whole. After all, technology lifted the Volksgemeinschaft not only to a new material level, but also to a hitherto undreamed-of ideal level.95 In contrast to the communis opinio of the technocracy movement, which was fairly popular at the time, the VDDI considered the rise of technology inconceivable without a restructuring of the people’s community. The technicist social world of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” was criticized for its lack of community ethos: “Anyone who knows the German worker knows very well that he will not enter the factory in the way he is portrayed in the film. Today the worker (. . .) is already informed that he represents a link in our great economic life.”96

91

In the 1928 volume of Technik und Kultur, Geisler, in complete contrast to his own later anti-capitalist self-image, had still countered Heinrich Hardensett, later the ‘chief theoretician’ of the Deutsche Technokratische Gesellschaft (DTG), that in technical work an economic drive had to be taken into account as well as a creative one. Cf. TuK 20 (1928), pp. 23 and 209–11. On the DTG, see Willeke, Technokratiebewegung. 92 TuK 18 (1927), p. 14; cf. also TuK 19 (1928), p. 210 and Heinrich Hardensett, Die Techniktheorie des technischen Menschen, in: TuK 24 (1933), pp. 3–7. 93 Romberg, Die Technik im neuen Staat, in: TuK 24 (1933), pp. 54–57, here 57. 94 TuK 15 (1924), p. 45. 95 Cf. especially Weihe, Die Philosophie der Arbeit, in: TuK 24 (1933), p. 36 f. as well as the amounts noted below. 96 Film review: Metropolis, in: TuK 18 (1927), p. 208 f. Cf. also Tuk 19 (1928), p. 210. On the technocracy movement, cf. Willeke, Technokratiebewegung; Herf, Modernism; Ludwig, Technik.

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Through the reciprocal construction of Volksgemeinschaft and technical social construction, it was also no contradiction when the VDDI itself spoke of the “yoke of created mechanical organization.”97 The critique of the mechanical referred solely tosocial mechanics, i.e. to the clashes of interests of the large social formations in “capitalism”, where the “engineer is appropriated for a private side enterprise.”98 This anti-capitalist stylistic flourish, of course, did not so much question capital accumulation as target the individual’s opportunities for selfrealization in gainful employment. In the 1920s, however, such eclectic anti-capitalism, quite typical of völkisch right-wing conservatism, had various hues. This concerned first and foremost the distributional aspect: similar to the older debate on the Gemeinwirtschaft (collective economy) from the early 1920s, the VDDI now once again sensed the danger that a forthcoming Volksgemeinschaft might be associated with an overly far-reaching social redistribution.99 According to the spokesmen of the association, a “transformation” of the corporative society could lead to a “classless society.”100 Even more than in the right-wing conservative mainstream, the VDDI strove for an “order of inequality.”101 In addition to the technical academics and the academic professions in general, the envisaged corporative order was also intended to benefit the entrepreneurs, who continued to be courted and were scrupulously left out of the

97

Reuter, Wandlungen in den deutschen Kulturzentren?, in: TuK 20 (1929), pp. 222–225, here 222. 98 Pasinski, Ingenik, in: TuK 23 (1932), pp. 53–57, here 56. Cf. also Albert Obergefell, Wandlungen in den deutschen Kulturzentren? In: TuK 22 (1931), pp. 2 f., here 2: In contrast to creative technology, capitalism brings with it an “emptiness” that deprives every “expression of life of meaning.” Cf. also Weihe, Technik und Politik, in: TuK 18 (1927), p. 14 f.: “Technology conceived in the right way, not as a money-making machine for the individual, but as a culture-founding and culture-promoting human activity.” In addition: K. Seyderhelm, Technik, ein Grundpfeiler der Kultur, in: ibid. pp. 41–47, here 43. “technology is something truly moral and not to be held responsible for damages that lie in the economic field.” Cf. also Romberg, Jahreswende – Schicksalswende, in: TuK 23 (1932), pp. 1 f. Finally, in TuK 22 (1931), pp. 5–7, Carl Weihe attempted to refute Georg Bernhard’s accusation (ibid. Excesses of Technology) that the “record addiction” of the technicians neglected questions of economic efficiency. 99 Cf. Heiss, Gemeinwirtschaft, in: ZVDDI 10 (1919), pp. 73–77; Staats- oder Privatwirtschaft, Vortrag auf der Diplom-Ingenieur-Tagung 1926, in: TuK 18 (1927), pp. 21–26, here 23. 100 TuK 23 (1932), p. 120. 101 Breuer, Ordnungen.

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in-house critique of capitalism.102 Consequently, the VDDI did not take part in the right-wing conservative criticism of economically harmful profits and tendencies towards market concentration by large corporations and cartels. The term Ingenik, introduced by the VDDI from 1929 onwards, finally formed a more moderate variant of the VDDI’s own technocracy. Ingenik, which went back to the VDDI board member Wilhelm von Pasinski, technology was still part of the general culture. The word “Ingenik” was intended to cover up the negative connotation of the term “technology” and, analogous to “jurisprudence and pedagogy,”103 to emphasize the creative and scientific character of engineering work. Ethnic Technocracy According to the core ideology propagated by the VDDI, the diploma engineers embodied an elite above all classes and interests of the fragmented society. This was called upon to guide a revolutionary, völkisch-corporatively structured community of destiny with a creative as well as (technically) rational spirit. This synthesis was advocated above all by the Berlin TH professor Georg Garbotz and the VDDI chairman Friedrich Romberg. In doing so, they took up the older motif of the engineer as “leader” in company and society.104 After Romberg had railed against the “centrifugal forces of popular life, infinitely fissured by party strife and ideological antagonisms” in his opening article for the 1932 edition of Technik und Kultur entitled “Jahreswende – Schicksalswende?” (Turn of the Year – Turn of Fate?), he prophesied of technology: “As divine creative power made man, it will then unfold its true nature: Liberation [. . .] from earthly burdens for the ascent to a higher humanity.”105

102

On partisanship for the employers’ side, cf. especially TuK 20 (1929), p. 149, and Kurt Haller, An der Wegscheide, in: TuK 23 (1932), p. 60 f., who, ibid. p. 60, seeks to distance himself from the “socialist” tendencies of many (New) Conservatives: “The problem of capitalism is not the cause of Marxism, but only its consequence!” 103 E.W. Köster, Ingenik, in: TuK 22 (1931), pp. 20–22, here 22. Cf. Pasinski, Von der Technik zur Kultur, in: TuK 20 (1929), pp. 99–102; thes, Die philosophischen Grundlagen eines bibliographischen Systems der Technik, in: TuK 22 (1931), pp. 152 f.; ders, Ingenik, in: TuK (1932), pp. 53–57. Cf. also Pasinski/Steinmetz, Ingenik (im Dritten Reich, 1934). 104 In 1927, Garbotz was appointed to the newly created chair of mechanical engineering in construction operations at the TH-Berlin, which he held until 1946. On 9 May 1933, Garbotz, although not yet a member of the NSDAP, was also ‘elected’ to the board of the VDI and a little later acted as its managing director. Cf. Ludwig, Technik, p. 116 f. 105 Romberg, Jahreswende. On the earlier Führer motif, which was primarily related to the engineer in the company, cf. Thiele, Berufswahl and TuK 20 (1928), pp. 209–11. In his speech “Deutschlands Jugend und der Reichsgedanke am Tage der 60. Wiederkehr des Festaktes zu Versailles (in: Tuk 22 (1931), pp. 39–42) before the students of the Berlin TH

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Technocratic visions of the rule of technology thus fell seamlessly into line with the social vision of the rule of engineers. This closed a circle: the technocratic world views, originally a hybrid outlet for the professional and social frustrations of the engineers, functioned beyond the typical academic class claims for security, an additional argument for a total restructuring of class society. According to this, the diploma engineer was not only entitled to an exposed social position because of his academic education. In the context of the redemptive ideology of the right-wing conservative “revolutionaries,” the VDDI also attributed to the academic engineers the role of saviors who, with the technicist restructuring, were able to pave the way to the long-longed-for völkisch inwardness. Main and Limbs’: the Concept of Status Groups Beyond such technocratic indulgences, which were not particularly popular outside the engineering community, the social utopia of the VDDI ideologues also referred to traditional instances of legitimacy. The meritocratic professional aspiration of diploma engineers had, after all, been clothed in the concept of status even before the conservative radicalization of the late 1920s, early 1930s; but the corporate image of society that this required had always remained very sketchy. This was now to change: Particularly in demarcation from the inflationarily used and elitepolitically poorly selective Volksgemeinschaft, the VDDI discovered the body metaphor of “head and limbs”106 for itself in the early 1930s. Outside the VDDI, not only the “dream of a hierarchical social order” was associated with the Volksgemeinschaft, but especially in the political superstructure of middle social classes also the idea of “equality and participation.”107 In the VDDI, the socialhierarchical, deliberately woolly talk of “the professions” in general discourse was thus replaced by a more self-confident variant. The rank of technical academics now explicitly took the place of the head of the Volksgemeinschaft – in a sense of “top of the pile.”108

the „never-ending, ever-rejuvenating strength“of the German people as well as the “shining example of patriotic sentiment” of the university students, who were “not bound by party dogmas, by interest politics and consideration for the masses”. “He shall be Duke who is a man, and who knows how to impose his Führer’s will on the masses, who knows no retreat from hazy cosmopolitan ideas.” 106 Numerous references in TuK. On similar echoes in the VDI, cf. A. Nägel, Technik und Wirtschaftskrise, in: ZVDI 76 (1932), pp. 320–322. 107 Föllmer, Defense, p. 255. 108 Bragg, Ideology.

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Since the mid-1920s, almost all academic professional associations and, as could be seen, in the form of the Vela also the salaried economic elites, increasingly invoked class-societal ideas of order again. In essence, this professional-political community of interests was concerned with the restoration of the income gap as well as a stronger formal-legal and symbolic demarcation from the lower middle classes. In doing so, they attempted to legitimize the correspondingly advantageous employment conditions of the academic functional groups with the already repeatedly mentioned, precisely classically professional argument: According to this, only the “intellectual workers” exhibited a professional view oriented towards the “whole of the people (Volksganze),” i.e. ostensibly not only oriented towards the cause, but also selfless. Above all, the ideologem of the academic as the “teacher of the people” could now be seamlessly integrated into the critique of the maneuvering problems of the pluralistic political system. An expertocratically directed Volksgemeinschaft was presented by many rightof-centre political representatives as an opportunity to eliminate the opposing interests that were supposedly leading to stagnation. The news section of Technik und Kultur said that the “party-political bonding” that took place in high school contradicted “the essence of academic study” because it made one unfree in the face of “the problems.”109 Georg Garbotz, one of the VDDI’s chief ideologues, summed up this line of tradition: “Help deepen the conception of the duties of an academic. Let intellectual ideals again triumph over material interests.”110 Orders of Inequality Such elitist and simultaneously static images of society had considerable appeal in the late Weimar years. After all, the middle and upper milieus felt threatened not only by a political but also – in the face of a confusing ‘mass’ or ‘leisure’ society – by a fragmentation of the everyday world.111 It is true that in the judges’, teachers’,

109

TuK 21 (1930), p. 126. Garbotz, Deutschlands Jugend und der Reichsgedanke, in: Tuk 22 (1931), pp. 39–42, here 40. In contrast to the formulations of the early/mid 1920s, however, reference was now made not only to the empire, but also to an older, genuine corporative order: “After the collapse of the old corporative state, the academic groups had not only saved themselves, but they found an unexpected support in the new civil service state.” Pasinski, Technology, Economy, State, in TuK 23 (1932), pp. 152–155, here 153. 111 On the fragmentation of the everyday world, which has not yet been examined in sufficient detail, i.e. on the – from the perspective of the bourgeoisie – outright occupation of public space by the middle and lower classes, cf. the references in Schäfer, Bürgertum; Mommsen, 110

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doctors’ and priests’ associations, too, corporative social designs were reactivated at the same time out of a professional-political defensive. Here, however, this comprehensive linkage with the other constitutive right-wing conservative ideological components did not take place. This does not mean, of course, that this classically educated middle-class milieu with these fragmentary ideological themes did not contribute significantly to the ‘triumphal march’ of right-wing conservatism in the political public sphere of the late 1920s and early 1930s. What explains this differently pronounced radicalisation of the academic engineers on the one hand, and the classical academic professional milieus on the other? Of course, the VDDI represented only a small part of the diplomas and fell quite short of the organization quotas of the associations of the older academic professions. However, a moderate right-wing conservatism, roughly on a par with that of the other academic associations, also characterized the membership-strong VDI during this period.112 With the VDDI, the diploma engineers, or parts of them, still stood out from the general political movement to the right. While the ‘old’ academics merely had to lament a relative social decline, the VDDI finally fought against a ‘structural phenomenon’ – against the failure of academic engineers to monopolise a segment of the labour market. In the ideological exuberance of the early 1930s, the VDDI also succeeded for the first time in fully admitting that the ‘income statistics of diploma engineers show a “staggering misery.”113 For the associations of the classical academic professions, and even more so for the VDDI, right-wing conservatism, the status groups based “order of inequality” (Stefan Breuer), thus indeed took on the function of an interest-based ideology. This right-wing conservatism is thereby to be distinguished from the free-floating intellectuals from the environment of the journal Die Tat. The so-called Tat circle, the intellectual core of the ‘Conservative Revolution’, was not, after all, primarily concerned with acquisition opportunities and stratification orders.114 In general, when attempting to classify the VDDI in terms of the history of ideas, the idiosyncratic combination of tradition and modernity, often attributed to National Socialism, must be taken into account. This simultaneity of strictly conservative worldview elements and an affirmative, mostly technocratically inspired attitude Auflösung and Triebel, Zwei Klassen. Cf. also Sontheimer, Denken, pp. 61–78 and Habermas, Strukturwandel, pp. 238–274. 112 Cf. Ludwig, Technik, esp. pp. 85–96. 113 TuK 24 (1933), p. 24. 114 Breuer, Ordnungen, pp. 137 and 370, who for this very reason speaks of a new nationalism.

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towards ‘modernity’, which is typical of the engineers as an overall formation, has been described by researchers since the 1980s – albeit on a hitherto rather limited source base.115 Pluralism Within the Association and Further Radicalisation Notwithstanding the further radicalisation of the VDDI’s political convictions, a certain pluralism of opinion remained within the association. Even later ideological leaders such as Carl Weihe and Wilhelm von Pasinski had to get used to individual thrusts of right-wing conservatism. Von Pasinski, for example, did not want to let the First World War count unreservedly as a ‘cleansing’ experience.116 The linking of the geopolitical dogma of expansion with the idea of race also caused temporary irritation in the leadership of the association. In 1930, for example, Heinrich Bluher’s contribution was preceded by the editorial restriction that the eulogies on the ‘strongest-willed people’, who had been ‘encircled’ in 1914 and were now rediscovering the ‘great moral idea of community’ as a result of the war experience, were merely being put up for discussion. The editorial note, however, referred only to Blüher’s remarks on the consequences of “miscegenation,” which he culminated in the demand for the “sterilization of the degenerate.”117 In subsequent years, however, both elements, geopolitical expansion and “racial thought,” were fully integrated into the VDDI’s core ideology.118

115

Cf. Herf, Modernism as well as Rohkrämer, Moderne, pp. 272–275; Bavaj, Ambivalenz; Könke, Modernisierungsschub; Frei, Nationalsozialismus; Rohkrämer, Moderne, pp. 277–340 as well as von dem Bussche, Konservatismus. 116 Cf. W. v. Pasinski, Wandlungen in den deutschen Kulturzentren? Die Tragik des Abendlandes, in: TuK 21 (1930), pp. 46–48 and ders, Auf dem Wege zu einer Philosophie der Nation, in: TuK 21 (1930), pp. 113–117. 117 Blüher, Kulturwende und Ingenieur, in: TuK 21 (1930), pp. 169–173. Cf. also Garbotz’s objection in TuK 22 (1931), p. 41. Heinrich Blüher was not related to the well-known Wandervoge activist Hans Blüher. On the popularity of ethnic ‘hygiene’ discourses, see Weipert, ‘Mehrung der Volkskraft’. 118 On the “race idea” cf. v. Pasinski, Der Mensch und die Technik, in TuK 22 (1931), p. 157 f. “What Spengler calls betrayal of the technology of the white race is likely to meet with undivided approval.” Cf. moreover the announcement of the Wartburgfest of the Wingolfbund in TuK 21 (1930), p. 126 as a “good, general political training.” The Wingolfbund had distinguished itself in the radical-conservative camp above all by its concept of race (“Aryan”). On the expansionist drive, cf. TuK 23 (1932), p. 26. “Is it not untrue that we have been at peace for 14 years?”; Kurt F. Haller, An der Wegscheide, in TuK 23 (1932), pp. 60 f.; TuK 22 (1931), pp. 42 f.

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VDDI and National Socialism With regard to the VDDI’s völkisch-rechtskonservative radicalization from 1929/ 1930 onwards, the open culture of debate as well as its own theoretical achievements, which were particularly evident in the intellectual management of the neo-conservative critique of civilization, indicate a high level of political penetration and conviction. It is true that von Pasinski, who had increasingly assumed the role of chief ideologist, openly professed his support for National Socialism on a few occasions since January 1932.119 But a substantial proximity of the VDDI to the NSDAP going beyond this cannot be proven, at least not on a personal level. A cooperation on the ‘professional’ level would have been quite obvious. Not only because the “party comrades” celebrated a public cult of technology. Since the summer of 1931, the NSDAP had also maintained a so-called Ingenieurtechnische Abteilung (ITA) in its “Reichsorganisationsleitung” (Reich organization management), whose technical and scientific activities in the form of lecture series and conferences testify to a linkage, very similar to the VDDI line, between the völkisch core ideology and a technocratically formulated anticapitalism.120 The VDDI was an association of intellectuals. In addition to frustrated employed diploma engineers, its members were mainly professors, senior civil servants and the self-employed. What might have been assumed against this background, namely that individual VDDI members made a career in the NSDAP, was not the case. After all, there is no evidence of personal overlaps between the approximately 4300 VDDI members whose names have been preserved and the extended party leadership of the NSDAP. Accordingly, no member of the VDDI belonged to the 13 engineers who were elected to the Reichstag for the NSDAP during the Weimar Republic.121 Despite the programmatic rejection of party politics, right-wing conservative currents naturally overlapped ideologically and in terms of personnel with

119

Cf. Pasinski, Ingenik, in: TuK 23 (1932), pp. 53–57 (the reference was to Fried, Gestaltung); ders, Technik, Wirtschaft, Staat, in: TuK 23 (1932), pp. 152–155, here 155; TuK 22 (1931), p. 43. 120 Cf. the more than incomplete records on the ITA in: BAB R 187/280, BAB NS 22, nos. 447 and 1214, and BAB NS 26, no. 1188 (Todt estate). Cf. also the founding appeal of the ITA in: VB v. 26.8.31 where, among other things, reference was made to the “tremendous possibilities of creative technology” which was currently being “misused for the creation of interest and dividends”. 121 Cf. Yearbook of the Association of German Diploma Engineers (as of 1928); Schwarz, Handbuch.

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parts of the bourgeois parties. VDDI members did not attain influential functions in politics in the narrower sense; this would have been reported in Technology and Culture. To what extent were the technocratic National Socialists competition for the VDDI? Beyond the ITA, the NSDAP also maintained its own technical professional organization since December 1931. The Kampfbund Deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure (KDAI), however, was hardly an obstacle to the VDDI’s ambitions to develop the association as a völkisch rallying movement of academic engineers; especially because the KDAI, which reached a strength of 2000 members within half a year, strictly avoided a differentiation of engineers into academics and non-academics. Otherwise, the NSDAP did pay attention to the integration of academic professions; in the case of the KDAI, however, the social reality of the engineering profession was deliberately followed.122 In the absence of a significant archival record, however, nothing can ultimately be said about possible attempts by the VDDI to influence the NSDAP or its branches in matters of professional policy, as the Reichsbund der höheren Beamten (Reich’s Association of Senior Civil Servants) strove to do from a position that was admittedly much more influential.123 The dislike of the “proles”124 in the NSDAP, which was often virulent in the bourgeois-conservative camp as well as in rightwing conservative circles, was in any case not shared in the VDDI. More important were programmatic differences. These concerned the extent of social stratification that was desirable within the framework of a corporative social order.125 With its blatant ideas of hierarchy, the Association of Diploma Engineers had come into at least gradual opposition to the collective concept of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’. The constitutive strategic gap of the Volksgemeinschaft-concept, which amounted to a 122

On the KDAI, see esp. Ludwig, Technik, pp. 90–96. On the National Socialist Association of German Lawyers (NSBDJ) and the National Socialist Teachers’ Association (NSLB), which also combined elementary school teachers and senior teachers, see Siegrist, Advokat; Jarausch, Professions; Laubach, Politik. 123 Cf. BAB R 187/280, BAB NS 22, nos. 447 and 1214 as well as BAB NS 26, no. 1188 and Fattmann, Bildungsbürger, pp. 218–225. 124 Bösch, Milieu, p. 115, who observes a decline in the aversions of established right-wing conservatives to the proletarian gesture of the NSDAP. Cf. Schildt, Konservatismus, p. 164 f. 125 Cf. Pasinski, Ingenik, in: TuK 23 (1932), pp. 53–57; Kurt F. Haller, An der Wegscheide, in: TuK 23 (1932), p. 60 f.; Romberg, Die Technik im neuen Staat, in: TuK 24 (1933), pp. 54–57 (April 1933; reprint of a speech in Kassel on 11.3.1933); Pasinski, Der Diplom-Ingenieur im Dritten Reich, in: ibid. On the predominantly supranational anticapitalism of the technocracy movement, see Willeke, Technokratiebewegung; Ludwig, Technik, pp. 90–141.

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concealment of social inequalities, fundamentally disturbed the VDDI. Accordingly, it consistently distanced itself from the Strasser wing, which was still influential in the NSDAP until the beginning of 1933.126 Such programmatic differences may have stood in the way of further cooperation between the VDDI and the NSDAP. However, this did not stand in the way of an emphatic welcome of the National Socialist successes and the first political measures in the spring/summer of 1933. In June 1933, the VDDI also willingly joined the Reichsgemeinschaft der technisch-wissenschaftlichen Arbeit (RTA).127 In contrast to the VDI, where at least certain reservations existed towards the new rulers, the composition of the VDDI’s management team remained largely unchallenged by the National Socialists. In April 1933, only two of the seven board members were replaced.128 In the end, the VDDI was of some interest to the National Socialists at best because of the numerous university teachers organized here. After 1933, the political-ideological differences finally became more and more apparent. Due to the lack of will to shape the corporative state, let alone the coporative society, the VDDI increasingly distanced itself from the political rulers and dissolved itself without a sound in July 1939.129 On the practical level, too, the National Socialist regime had not brought any concrete, socio-political improvements to the diploma engineers. Rather the opposite was the case: because of the enormous demand for engineers in the course of macroeconomic and military planning since the mid-1930s, the supposed ‘technical idealists’ in the NSDAP had

126 Cf. Blüher, Kulturwende und Ingenieur, in: TuK 21 (1930), pp. 169–173. In the fall of 1930, Blüher was apparently referring to the controversial reissue within the NSDAP of Gottfried Feder’s “gemeinwirtschaftliches” NSDAP program, the content of which was strongly influenced by the Strasser wing. There can therefore be no question of the VDDI being in favour of the “Federsche Richtung” in the spring of 1933, as Karl-Heinz Ludwig (ders., Technik, p. 138) states. 127 Cf. Kurt F. Haller, An der Wegscheide, in: TuK 23 (1932), p. 60 f.; Friedrich Romberg, Die Technik im neuen Staat, in: TuK 24 (1933), pp. 54–57 (April 1933; reprint of a speech in Kassel on 11(!).3.1933); W. v. Pasinski, Der Diplom-Ingenieur im Dritten Reich, in: ibid. pp. 101–103; ibid. Die Schwierigkeiten der ständischen Eingliederung der Industriewirtschaft, in: ibid. pp. 126–128. On the above-average positive reactions of university lecturers in the technical sciences, cf. Heiber, Universität, vol. 1, p. 39 f. 128 Cf. TuK 24 (1933), p. 53 f. 129 Cf. Pasinski, Die Schwierigkeiten der ständischen Eingliederung der Industriewirtschaft, in: TuK 24 (1933), pp. 126–128. In particular, the demarcation from the former workers’ and employees’ unions in the German Labour Front (DAF) was considered insufficient. Cf. Ludwig, Technik, pp. 138–140.

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Crisis of the Elites and Right-Wing Conservative Conjuncture: Vela. . .

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focused primarily on middle school education because of the shorter training periods and had massively promoted this direction.

11.3

Crisis of the Elites and Right-Wing Conservative Conjuncture: Vela and Budaci

Similar to the VDDI, Vela and Budaci also shifted their association activities increasingly to ideological political approaches in the late 1920s. This happened in both associations from a rather different starting position. While the Vela had always taken a stand on the current issues of imperial politics, the Budaci had hardly said a word about big politics. Only on the directly relevant issues of collective bargaining and social insurance had the Budaci leadership commented at all. Unlike the VDDI and to some extent also the Vela, the Budaci was the only federation that regarded collective bargaining partnership and social insurance without reservations as essential achievements of the Weimar social order. With Karl Martin Bolte, this pragmatic-self-referential understanding of politics of the Budaci can also be described as affected person policy (“BetroffenheitsPolitik”).130 The only exception in the years 1919–1921 was the debate on the collective economy (Gemeinwirtschaft). This socio-technological model of order, which was based on the assumption that the flow of capital and goods would be regulated by the state in accordance with efficiency criteria for society as a whole, met with almost unreserved approval in the chemists’ union.131 At the same time, however, no one in the Budaci leadership noticed that this model was at best only compatible to a limited extent with the distribution modes of a liberal market economy, which were consistently viewed positively in the association. This excessive demand in turn shows the general distance between technology and politics, which is also sedimented in everyday culture. Educational Citizen of a New School: The Vela In marked contrast to the Budaci, the Vela operated to a certain extent at the centre of bourgeois politics. Its full-time directors sat on the Reich board of the DDP (Hermann Schäfer) or, in the case of Leo Müffelmann, headed the anti-nationalist

130

Bolte, Schichtung, p. 334. Cf. Federal Programme, in: BBl 5 (1923), pp. 41–44, here 43. Cf. also: Die künftige Organisation der Wirtschaft, in: BBl 1 (1919), pp. 9–11. 131

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wing of Freemasonry in Germany.132 Nevertheless, the Vela struggled with the lack of acceptance that the political leadership groups, the majority of whom came from the traditional bourgeoisie, had for the executives. After all, the commercial executives would “know the economic interrelationships more precisely than perhaps others who are members of parliament.”133 Middle- and upper-management employees thus imagined themselves in a similar outsider role in political contexts as the engineers. To be sure, the Vela and their clientele were closely intertwined with traditional elite circles. But they did not yet move in politics as naturally as the traditional bourgeoisie. In the party-political spectrum, the Vela sympathized with all bourgeois parties – with the exception of the Catholic Center.134 Representatives of the DDP, DVP and DNVP could regularly be welcomed at larger gatherings. Given the material situation of the Vela clientele, it is hardly surprising that they were drawn first and foremost to the DDP and DVP, which were most likely to represent modern bourgeois, liberal policies concerning taxation and social distribution.135 Thus the gradual preference of these two parties had nothing to do with ideological issues, but exclusively with the fact that the DNVP was not clearly an upper class party. For that, the German Nationalists were too rooted in the countryside and carried too much of a petty-bourgeois self-image in front of them.136 However, the political convictions of the Vela by no means ended with the economic-individualistic idea of achievement. This had already become apparent in the early years of the republic. When they spoke out against “party bickering” and “tribal strife” and dreamed of a revival of the “sense of community,” the managers’ association shared nationalist reservations about pluralistic decision-making. Affirmatively, they referred to the “whole of the people”137 as the ostensible primacy of bourgeois politics.

132

On Müffelmann, see Melzer, In the Eye of a Hurricane; Neuberger, Winkelmaß. Zur Reichstagswahl, in: DlA 6 (1924), pp. 29 f., here 30. 134 When a list of demands was drawn up for the Reichstag elections of 1928, however, the Zentrum-party was also addressed. Cf. DlA 10 (1928), p. 78 f. 135 Cf. Schildt, Konservatismus, pp. 137–147; Bösch, Milieu, esp. pp. 37 and 44; Weber, Bürgerpartei; Mergel, Scheitern; Kittel, Fundamentalismus. The economic party, accordingly disregarded by the Vela, was strongly oriented towards the interests of the propertied, pettybourgeois middle class. 136 Cf. DlA 6 (1924), p. 29 f.; DlA 10 (1928), p. 70 f. and 78 f. 137 Müffelmann, ‘1923’, in: DlA 5 (1923), pp. 1–3, here 1. 133

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The first-time (Budaci) or increasing (Vela) preoccupation with general political issues that could be observed since 1927 was ultimately linked to the same political conjuncture as the simultaneous political profiling of the VDDI. In these years of supposed economic and social stabilisation (1927–1929),the discourse on economic and foreign policy and thecapacity of politics per se had taken on a new quality. The scarcity of capital, the Ruhreisenstreit, the reparations question, and the struggles over the level of socio-political regulation and redistribution had led to a radicalization of political content across camps. The conflict over the level of the employer’s contribution to unemployment insurance was famously to break up the Müller II cabinet in March 1930. Without these short-term political tendencies, which were also reflected in the political culture in the medium and long term, the new extraparliamentary movement of the völkisch, revolutionary and at the sime time intellectual “Conservative Revolution” can certainly not be fully understood. The Moderate Variant: Völkisch Conservatism of Vela and Budaci Looking first at the period up to 1930, Vela and Budaci followed different political paths than the VDDI. At this time, far-reaching corporative restructuring of society, ethnic feelings of superiority and the revolutionary-metaphysical idea had no firm place in these two associations. In the run-up to the Reichstag elections of September 1930, the Vela even explicitly opposed the end-time phraseology of the new right: It was not “the Reich” that had to be “saved”138 in their view, but only politics. However, as right-wing conservative ideological modulesfound their way into the linguistic and substantive repertoire, both associations nevertheless moved visibly to the right during this period. This shift by Vela and Budaci related primarily to the relevant interest-political issues. According to the Vela, senior executives now no longer claimed merely class special treatment as compensation for their ostensibly altruistic work ethos, as in previous years. Rather, it was a matter of defending personality – the key concept of the Vela at this time – against the “onslaught of collectivism (. . .), the mechanisation and levelling efforts.”139 The categories thus became more subtle: The achievements of the executives had taken a back seat to their “essence.” The apostrophized corporative order promised not only material benefits for a social elite, but also a new sense of community, which in turn was to benefit the executives materially: The “nation as a whole suffers,” if the senior executive does not “act as a

138 139

DlA 12 (1930), p. 173. Meyer-Bussche, Zum neuen Jahr, in: DlA 11 (1929), pp. 1 f., here 1.

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mediator (. . .) linking the two impersonalized worlds of capital and labour.” In the résumé of the same contribution, the Vela members were finally offered blunt rightwing conservative ideology: “Today we overestimate the mechanical, the organized, the external (...) and underestimate spirit and soul.”140 The Vela 1929–1932: Gradual Departure from Right-Wing Conservatism It is true that even in the following period the Vela railed against the “proletarianisation of the intelligentsia.”141 But a corresponding concept of the elite, shaped by status groups, remarkably lost its significance from 1929 onwards! Despite the positive reception of the radical community ethos of the new right, the concept of status groups was thus not usedfor a comprehensive questioning of the present social order – in contrast to the VDDI. At the same time, the appeal of rightwing conservative ideological fragments as a whole dwindled in the managers’ association. Thus, on the occasion of a visit by senior managers from Italy, there were indeed words of praise for the fascist society. However, they remained silent about the overall concept of the fascist social plan. This was in contrast to the bourgeois press, which generally looked quite favourably on the Appenine state.142 The Vela almost only gave space to nationalist content in form of some book reviews.143 This at least gradual turning away from right-wing conservatism and, what is even more surprising, from the concept of the status groups probably had nothing to do with internal differences within the association. After having initially welcomed the interpretative offers of the right-wing conservatives in the years 1927/ 1928 as a downright redemption from a socio-political torpor, one now apparently recoiled from the dynamics of this discourse. By refraining from staging the senior employees as an ostensibly neutral and thus professional authority above the circumstances, the Vela formed a clear

140

Rudolf Kötter, Mittler zwischen zwei Welten, in: DlA 11 (1929), pp. 82–84, here 82 and 83. Cf. Sontheimer’s (Denken, p. 461) differing location of the term Geist: “Seele was more important to them [the radical conservatives] than Geist and Intellekt.” In DlA 10 (1928), p. 136, the Vela also reprinted Otto Verlings’s “Volk ohne Raum”. 141 DlA 13 (1931), p. 87. 142 DlA 12 (1920), p. 166 f.; DlA 13 (1931), pp. 6–8. Cf. Weisbrod, Deutschland. 143 Thus, in DlA 13 (1931), p. 69, an obvious advertising text of the religious-völkisch journal Der Hochwart was printed, which spoke of the “renewal and liberation of the German people from its enslavement”. Similarly, the contribution by Ritter von der Osten in: ibid. p. 73–75. Cf. also the book reviews in: ibid. p. 124 and 183 (“bleeding Germany”).

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antithesis to most academic professional associations.144 It was true that the level of socio-political regulation was still considered too high and that it explicitly opposed the SPD on this core issue of the government.145 Also in contrast to its own positions a few years earlier, however, the Vela leadership now defended the Weimar welfare state per se. This was particularly true of attacks from the right, such as those put forward by the Christian conservative philosopher Ernst Horneffer.146 The comparatively pronounced confidence of the Vela leadership in the remaining political options of the crisis-ridden republic was also evident in the Brüning period of government since March 1930. They resolutely welcomed the austerity and tax-cutting course – with the exception, of course, of the special taxes for higher income groups.147 Otherwise, the Vela leadership during this period mainly discussed the budgetary feasibility of a Keynesian “deficit spending”148 program to “stimulate the economy.”149 Through its comparatively pragmatic policy proposals, the federation could well have taken credit for finally providing a selfless service to the community that higher professions claimed as the special characteristic of intellectual workers. The Budaci: ‘Natural Selection of the Academic Parts of the People’ Unlike the VDDI and Vela, which had increasingly complained about the undervaluation of their clientele’s work since the mid-1920s, a professional mood of crisis only became widespread in the Budaci from 1928 onwards. The achievement of collective bargaining goals had ensured a far-reaching immunity from the overarching debates about the crisis of elites. Now, however, it was apparently the overcrowding tendencies of the chemists’ labour market that gave rise to a change of heart.150 By referring to a status group of (technical) academics, the Budaci also joined the phalanx of representatives of a socially shaped concept of academics.

144

Cf. Jarausch, Professions, McClelland, Experience; Hamburger, Lehrer; Caspar, Lehrerverein; Krause-Vilmar, Lehrerschaft; Siegrist, Advokat; Sander, Jura. 145 Cf. DlA 12 (1930), p. 26 f.; p. 52 (against the expansion of employee insurance). 146 Cf. Müffelmann, Frevel am Volk. Gedanken zur deutschen Gelehrten-Politik, in: DlA 11 (1929), pp. 185–187. Cf. DlA 12 (1930), pp. 35–37. 147 DlA 12 (1930), p. 26 f.; Cf. ibid. p. 52. 148 Erich Welter, Diagnose und Therapie der Krise, in: DlA 13 (1931), pp. 4–6. 149 DlA 12 (1930), p. 102. 150 Cf. Janßen, Chemie. On the following, cf. in summary Sander, Professionalisierung.

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Nevertheless, the Budaci was not to achieve the ideological density of the VDDI and its almost innovative linking of a corporative class order with the promises of technical-industrial modernity. In 1928/1929, the Budaci initially focused on a highly constitutive element of class elite concepts that had hardly been addressed by the VDDI and Vela: the intergenerational transmission of occupational-social status. Accordingly, rising unemployment calls into question whether the chemist “will be able to bequeath to his descendants the tools he inherited from his ancestors, just as every fruit is held to provide the seed for the next harvest.”151 In contrast to the VDDI, the Budaci did not fundamentally question the modes of occupational-social status allocation: Since competition with non-academics played virtually no role among chemists, there was no need to prove a functional superiority of academic work. In times of overproduction of university graduates, however, the Budaci saw the social (market) value of technical academics dwindle, and the corresponding consequences for the company valuation of work. In the Budaci’s reading, extrinsic professional motivations were increasingly to blame for the overcrowding of universities and labour markets. Many students lacked an “inner consciousness”; rather, they took up their studies only “out of an external addiction to be more than their parents and to earn money more easily than them.”152 The lack of educated bourgeois exclusivity was to be restored under the heading of “natural selection” with a revaluation of “general education” and a revision of the allegedly prevailing principle of “mechanical learning.”153 Social advancement was thus simply to be restricted in favour of “our bourgeois families”154 by giving (even) greater weight to socially exclusive learning and everyday cultures in the school and university system. Family-socialized, everyday-cultural education was thus intended to improve the inheritance chances of profession and status of the educated middle classes. In contrast to the VDDI, the Chemists’ Association was thus concerned with safeguarding or restoring quasi-established privileges rather than introducing

151

DtA 13 (1931), p. 1. Fritz Schlamp, Akademisches Proletariat, in: DaA 10 (1928), p. 27 f., here 28. Cf. also DtA 12 (1930), p. 96 (beginn. i. Org.). Cf. Who may study technical natural sciences? In: DtA 12 (1930), p. 21 f. Cf. also ibid. p. 3 as well as DtA 13 (1931), p. 93 f., where a restriction of scholarships is demanded. 153 DtA 12 (1930), p. 3. Cf. also Quincke, Über allgemeines Studium und Ausbildung der Chemiker, in: DtA 12 (1930), pp. 80 and 87 f.; Probst, Ein Schritt zur Reform der TH, in: ibid. pp. 72–80. 154 Fritz Schlamp, Akademisches Proletariat, in: DaA 10 (1928), pp. 27 f., here 28 (reprinted from No. 4/1928 of the Monatsschrift für akademisches Leben). Cf. also DtA 12 (1920), p. 3. 152

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them. The specific social situations of the two professional groups, chemists and engineers, therefore had a significant influence on the content of professional policy. The Technical Academics in the People’s Community With these far-reaching claims to the inheritance of an exclusive bourgeois social status, the Budaci – like the majority of the academic professional associations at the end of the 1920s – questioned the meritocratic system, the principled universitas of academic education. At its core, academic training now became a bureaucratic ‘entitlement system”.155, After all, the smooth passing on of status forms a clear antithesis to a formation of status that comes about again and again through performance. Before the overcrowding crisis in the chemical labour market, it was precisely the Budaci that had still particularly emphasised the idea of performance. By now, the Budaci criticised the social opening of studies. However, the elitist ideas of educational policy that were now emerging only became a (consistent) ideology through reference to the big picture. Accordingly, the Budaci did not only pursue the interests of their own, the academic status group.156 Rather, in the face of “groups of employers and employees forcibly united in a community of production,” it yearned for those “leaders (. . .)whom we now lack to an alarming degree.”157 In keeping with the classic professional staging of social altruism, the employed technical academics earned a permanent, status group based safeguarding of their social position through their service to the community. They “worked (. . .) for the good of the whole.”158 Doubts About the Capitalist Order: Budaci and Vela However, the emergence of class ideas in the Budaci cannot only be traced back to their own professional crisis, but also to the overarching political-social debate. It is true that the Budaci’s talk of “leadership” represented a virtually common semantic figure of professional ideas of hierarchy. In the accumulation of this term, however, a critique of the “bloodlessness”159 of the present and a turn to the “soul” of an

155

DtA 13 (1931), p. 81. Cf. ibid. p. 93 f. Um die Zukunft, in: DtA 13 (1931), p. 1. 157 Karl Werner, Die Stellung des akademischen Technikers im Kampf um die Führung im Volke, in: DaA 10 (1928), pp. 29 f., here 30; DtA 12 (1930), p. 3. 158 DaA 11 (1929), p. 17. 159 A. Stock (Karlsruhe professor), Die technische Hochschule am Scheideweg, in: DtA 12 (1930), pp. 19 f., and pp. 27 f., here 28. 156

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ideally “organic”160society were to be expressed. Similarly to what the Vela also hinted at at this time, the Budaci saw the root of all evil in the late industrial change in economic structure. It criticized the “depersonalization, schematization, mechanization(!)” in the “Moloch money, stock corporation.”161 In contrast, the VDDI’s anti-capitalism had remained fragile. In order to maintain its traditional pro-employer position, the VDDI in the late 1920s had criticized only the effects on diploma engineers, not the organization of the economy per se. Bucaci: Politicization of the Apolitical The Budaci, which also developed an understanding of a “German technique”, penetrated even more deeply than the Vela into the popular and inward-looking discourse of right-wing conservatism in the late 1920s. Almost in keeping with the radicalism of the VDDI they longed for a “turn of the times.”162 Even more than in the case of the VDDI, Vela and other right-wing conservative supporting groups, the development of the Budaci can ultimately be described as a “politicisation of the non-political.”163 Unlike the Vela, the chemists’ union did not have its own political language or any significant political contacts. Looking at the mass of Budaci members, this low level of politicisation is certainly not surprising. For the board and the most important spokespersons, however, this is quite remarkable. Especially, since it was primarily universityprofessors who were at work here. The technical scholars can thus be seen as a fairly homogeneous component of a technical milieu: In essence, the professors also shared the characteristically high level of professional commitment as well as the reciprocally related shyness towards public life.164 Similar to the Vela, the radicalization of the Budaci was not a one-way street: instead of further developing its just-preformed professional-social elite concept in the context of the debate about the fragile Volksgemeinschaft, the Budaci rowed

160

DaA 10 (1928), p. 30. Hans Mülbach, Ceterum Censeo. . ., in: DaA 11 (1929), pp. 27–29, here 28. Cf. also Stark, Grenzen der Konzentration, in: DtA 14 (1932), pp. 58–60. The question of cartel formation, the highest expression of an “inhuman, mechanical” economy, was admittedly particularly topical in the chemical industry. 162 Kretschmar, Technisches Führertum am Scheideweg, in: DtA 12 (1930), pp. 58–61, here 61. 163 Von dem Bussche, Conservatism. 164 Cf. Jansen, Antiliberalismus; Ruck, Korpsgeist, esp. pp. 49–54; Föllmer, Verteidigung, pp. 129–150 and 254–276; Bösch, Milieu; Jarausch, Professions. 161

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back again a short time later. At a time when actually only the SPD and the KPD stood behind the Weimar welfare state, the Budaci argued for its preservation. Strictly speaking, they were defending the “soulless materialism” of ‘mass society’, which had been sharply criticised half a year before.165 The Budaci leadership also took a stand in the budgetary debate. Similar to the Vela, they voted for a policy of state demand management and against the rigid restructuring course of theold conservative political forces.166 In contrast to the VDDI, Vela and Budaci had only limited expectations of the right-wing conservative promises of a corporative order between 1927 and 1932. Although the associations saw far-reaching congruities with their own concept of the elite in the Volksgemeinschaft ideology, they did not want to follow unreservedly the concepts of ethnic superiority and purity such as those offered monthly in 30,000 copies by the right-wing circle Tat-Kreis to its multiplier audience.167 Vela: Radicalization in1932 From the summer of 1932 onwards, the Vela began to show renewed tendencies towards radicalisation. In the executive circle, one could observe a “striving for the organic state underpinned by the status groups.”168 At the same time, fears were voiced that “the ruling classes would succumb to the masses” if the “organizations, economy, parties [did not] subordinate themselves to the natural organizations, people, state and clans.169 However, in the end, a völkisch restructuring of society and politics was quite far from the minds of the economic elite: From their point of view, the patient “body of the people”170 was primarily suffering from its economic organ.

165

DaA 11 (1929), pp. 11 and 49; DtA 12 (1930), supplement to 1.10 (o.p.). Philoktet, Konjunktur und Krise, in: DaA 11 (1929), pp. 1–3. Cf. also DtA 13 (1931), p. 40, and on foreign policy and the reparations question ibid. pp. 48–51. On fiscal policy, cf. in contrast Jahn,Notverordnung, in: DtA 13 (1931), p. 49 f. 167 On the Tat circle, cf. especially Hübinger, ‘Tat’-Kreis, on other popular conservative journals and their authorial and recipient milieus the contributions in Grunewald/Puschner, Intellektuellenmilieu. 168 Schäfer, Ständevertretung des Wirtschaftsvolkes, in: DlA 14 (1932), pp. 168–171, here 169. 169 Mäusebach, Geistige und materielle Krise. A Sign of Cultural Decay? In: DlA 14 (1932), pp. 64–66 and 73–75, here 65 and 73. 170 Mäusebach, Nationalunternehmung, in: DlA 14 (1932), pp. 144–146, here 144. 166

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As a result, the Vela confined itself to calling for regulatory interventions on a limited scale, for example in the area of corporate taxation and antitrust law. It is true that the association’s leadership was concerned with völkisch-inspired, but ultimately limited interventions in the economic order of large-scale industry and finance capitalism. First and foremost, the Association’s renewed shift is to be understood as a direct reaction to the world economic crisis that culminated in 1932.171 Return to Classic Professional Social Images Thus, in 1932/1933, the Vela’s leadership envisioned a merely gradual, status groups-based overhaul of the current order. This concerned not so much the principle of capital accumulation and the principle of entrepreneurial competition as the modes of distribution of economic profits. However, such a reorganized distribution of resources was by no means to be based on rigid status group principles. The Vela merely called for a greater representation of the “intellectually creative classes” within a social order to be organized on a generally “economicclass”172 basis. Instead of the hitherto customary professional order, the professional associations were first to be reorganized according to hierarchical principles.173 In sum, the second wave of radicalization of the Vela since1932 concentrated on the revival of a moderate, classically professional concept of the status groups. In doing so, they predominantly used völkisch right-wing images of society. However, the corresponding ideological interpretations were not adopted in essence. Although, those were not explicitly rejected. The pronounced feeling for the political balance of power and the confidence in the parliamentary system of the managers’ association is illustrated by the fact that the widespread bourgeois fear of a victory for the left in the “class struggle” did not even arise.174

Cf. also Eduard Wächter, Planung – Führung – Ordnung, in: DlA 14 (1932), p. 122 f. Hermann Schäfer, Ständevertretung des Wirtschaftsvolkes, in: DlA 14 (1932), pp. 168–171, here 170. critically: Rudolf Streller, Beruf, Stand, Klasse, in: ibid. pp. 201–205. 173 Ibid. (“not like the merchants, from apprentice to merchant lord”). Cf. also DlA 15 (1933), p. 3. 174 Cf. Blasius, Weimars Ende; various contributions in Winkler, Staatskrise as well as Bracher, Auflösung. 171 172

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New Radicalization of the Budaci In the middle of 1932, the Budaci finally reactivated its search for socio-political alternatives. Similar to the Vela, the movement to the political right concentrated on concepts of elite status, on occupational-social hierarchies that were to be restored and firmly established. The chemists’ union, however, was overwhelmed by the rampant inflation of interpretations. Thus, in an unreflective adoption of individual comments in the daily press, “Bolshevik thoughts”175 were attributed to Schumpeter. In contrast to the Vela, the Budaci was not only concerned with interventions in the existing economic and social order in the sense of a professional principle. It is true that the stability and distributive justice of “financial capitalism,” the “Marxistliberalist (. . .) world economic ideology”176 was massively questioned. In the end, however, the corporative reorganization was conceived in a more völkisch way. Thus, in a “Volksgemeinschaft [...] the maintenance of all Comrades (Volksgenossen)” was to be guaranteed: semi-egalitarian demands that were typical of the Volksgemeinschaft discourse. Admittedly, the corporative society in the reading of the Budaci ultimately remained an order of inequality. First and foremost, such social-harmonious indulgences were about “alleviating the occupational hardship of German academics.”177 In the course of the fear of an “extinction of the culturally capable part of the people,”178 however, one’s own professional-political interests were translated more strongly than in the Vela into genuinely right-wing conservative ideologems. In the entire process of right-wing conservative political profiling, which first began in 1927/1928, Vela and Budaci thus remained largely focused on the corporative idea. With few exceptions, both associations avoided other implications of this Zeitgeist, especially ethnic and foreign policy implications. In this respect, both associations– can be characterised primarily as fellow travellers of the völkisch political conjuncture – in contrast to the VDDI. On the other hand, however, the partial political commitment of Vela and Budaci was sufficient for them to submit unconditionally to the new National Socialist 175

DtA 14 (1932), p. 42. Cf. Joseph Schumpeter, Dauerkrise, in: ibid. pp. 9–11. The technical academic had reprinted here a contribution by Schumpeter from Deutsches Volkswirt (6 (1931/1932), pp. 418–421) of 25.12.31. The article was not yet a pathological development of the economic order. Here Schumpeter did not yet speak of a pathological development of the economic order. Cf. also Schumpeter, Theorie (1931). 176 Edgar Fuchs, Dauerkrise?! In: DtA 14 (1932), pp. 66–69, here 66. 177 DtA 14 (1932), p. 101. 178 Felix Wilborn, Bildungswahn, Volkstod, in: DtA 14 (1932), pp. 88 f., here 88.

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rulers. Thus, at the end of 1932, the Vela had already elected the National Socialist Alois Helzel as its chairman in the Berlin district (Gau), which was still dominated by Leo Müffelmann and other liberal thinkers. A few days after the Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) of 23 March 1933, Helzel was even to be elected Federal Chairman.179 Insofar as the commercial elites cannot be accused of any pronounced political naivety, it must be concluded that the völkisch empathy of a considerable proportion of the members went beyond that of the masterminds in the association, at least from the end of 1932. Finally, until mid-March 1933, the pressure on smaller professional associations to conform can still be regarded as quite manageable.180 This shows the extent to which National Socialism as an overall political concept was seen. Nevertheless, this was not the ideal solution, but at least as the only realistic option for realizing the political objective of a corporative protection of higher professions. In the case of Budaci, on the other hand, there are hardly any indications of the relationship between the leadership and the membership base. The new federal chairman elected in the second half of March, the otherwise unknown “Dr. Urban,”181 is also likely to have been an avowed National Socialist. The fact that this decision was made primarily on his own initiative is also underscored by the fact that the Budaci immediately afterwards restricted the services of the association’s own legal aid to so-called ethnic Germans. Such measures were finally ordered from above a good month later, when a comprehensive “Arierparagraph” (aryan paragraph) was also introduced. A comment by the Budaci board in mid-April 1933 may indicate how decisive was the integration into the National Socialist ideology and rule: For a long time now the trend has been pointing to a greater emphasis on the professional in state life. Certainly, this development is considerably accelerated by the events of recent times. (. . .) It is high time (. . .) for the academic professional

179

This was only announced on 1.4.1933, i.e. after the fact in the Leading Employee. In particular, the later FDP Federal Minister Hermann Schäfer and the economist Richard Zellien are still to be counted among the Berlin leadership. Leo Müffelmann was arrested by the Gestapo in September 1933 and, after a three-month arrest, went into exile in Jerusalem, where he continued his Masonic work in the “Symbolic Grand Lodge of Germany in Exile.” In August 1934 he died as a result of his imprisonment. Cf. Melzer, In the Eye of a Hurricane. 180 Cf. Ruck, Bollwerk; Erb, Gleichgeschaltet; Weber/Schönhoven/Tenfelde, Quellen, vol. 4. On the slogan in the NSDAP from early April 1933 regarding a cautious approach to smaller professional associations, cf. Ludwig, Technik, pp. 111–140. 181 DtA 15 (1933), p. 2 v. 1.4. (pagination no longer consecutive).

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associations, which, because of their independence from any former power groups, seemed eminently suited to take over state functions, to make themselves ready for use in the state’s rebuilding and new construction by an appropriate ideological refounding.182

Despite its early and emphatically demonstrated loyalty to the new rulers, the Budaci was dissolved along with it’s umbrella association Gedag on 4 May 1933.183 The VDT and the Technicians in the GdA met the same fate as branches of the major trade associations. While the Vela continued to exist in fragments until the summer of 1934 under the direction of the Reichsverband der Wirtschaftsleiter (Reich Association of Economic Directors), the VDI and VDAI also continued to exist for years as branches of the Reichsgemeinschaft der technischwissenschaftlichen Arbeit (RTA, Reich Association of Technical-Scientific Work) – in the case of the VDI, even until the end of the “Third Reich.” The fact that the aforementioned technical associations not only survived the summer of 1933 in formal institutional terms, but for the most part also continued their active association life, can be traced back to the explicit political will of the NSDAP. Technical expertise was considered valuable. Technical professional associations were treated with corresponding caution.184 Three Associations, Two Models of Radicalisation Vela and Budaci also adopted essential elements of the new right-wing völkisch ideology, but they did not reach the level of conviction of the VDDI by far. In the managers’ association and in the chemists’ union, the corresponding political positioning remained broken in several respects – at least for a long time. Until the end of 1932 both associations were still highly concerned with realpolitik solutions to the external economic and social crisis and the internal occupational crisis, relying on existing instruments. Moreover, neither the Vela nor the Budaci developed independent right-wing conservative ideological variants tailored to the respective professional crisis perceptions. The VDDI was the only organization to

182

Manfred Wend, Die Stellung der jungen Akademiker-Generation zu den akademischen Berufsproblemen, in: DtA 15 (1933), pp. 25–29, here 26 (15.4.33). In general, the author was concerned with the “reclamation of academic living space” (ibid. p. 27). 183 Cf. DtA 15 (1933), p. 44 (15.5.). 184 Cf. generally Hachtmann, Wissenschaftsmanagement and on the likewise at least compliant attitude of the technical university teachers in the spring of 1933 Heiber, Universität, vol. 1, p. 39.

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achieve this in the form of an intellectually sophisticated fusion of völkisch inwardness with the outsider position of technocratic progress optimism. While the Association of Diploma Engineers belongs to the core of right-wing conservatism, Vela and Budaci, like so many other academic professional associations, navigated in its wake. In all three associations, however, the (re-)establishment and safeguarding of their own professional elite status was expected from a Volksgemeinschaft structured along class lines respectively status groups. The differences between the VDDI on the one hand and Vela and Budaci on the other can certainly be traced back to specific professional-social conflict situations. The VDDI was fighting against the social levelling of technical academics and middle school graduates that had been established in the workplace for over 30 years. Due to the lack of political successes, this fundamental professional defense became more and more deeply inscribed in the association’s cultures. This certainlyproduced part of the pressure to act that ideologically quite clearly broke through since the end of the 1920s. On the other hand, Vela and Budaci were looking for solutions to professional political conjunctures, not structures. The real income losses of the higher ranks of employees since the mid-1920s and the overcrowding of the chemists’ labour market since the end of the decade formed the starting point of their professional and general political uncertainty. Nevertheless, in the case of all three associations one can speak of an attempt at utopian compensation for occupational-social conflict situations, or rather conflict perceptions. In all cases, not only the significance of overarching political discourses is evident, but also substantial economic-social developments. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, income losses and unemployment, as well as the collapse of large corporations and banks and the inability to act in budgetary policy, gave rise to a longing for traditional working conditions and a specific anticapitalism. This was not directed against private capital accumulation, but advocated state interventionism. For a long time, however, the higher professions still considered the restoration of their social leadership role, on the one hand, and their material privileges on the other. This was aimed by a traditionalist educational reform (Budaci) or a symbolic recognition of the executives as a state-bearing elite (Vela). Finally, the political events since the autumn of 1932 and the seemingly perpetuated economic crisis gave rise to an intensification of right-wing conservative protest. The cause of the almost unreserved support for National Socialism, however, was that people associated right-wing conservatism and the NSDAP with the political program of

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a new corporative order. It is true that groups such as Vela, Budaci and the various associations of the classical academic professions contributed little of their own to the right-wing conservative discourse. Through their positive reception and their multiplier function, however, they helped this ideology and policy to become (even) more widely accepted.

Social Situation, Mentalities and Politics of German Engineers 1890–1933: Summary

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Since the 1880s at the latest, the engineer employed in industry has been the core professional figure in the modern society of Imperial Germany. In the course of the highly industrial economic boom, the technical supervisors (Bauräte) as well as the owner-engineers were from then on clearly outnumbered by the employeeengineers. However, the new basic engineering type of the employed industrial engineer did not only ‘rule’ over the knowledge stocks of the manufacturing industry and thus over the material foundations of German high and late industrialization. Rather, he also shaped the ‘modernization path’ of imperial German society as a whole. Thus, even in an already late industrial phase of development, the expansion of technical knowledge stocks evidently clearly outstripped the administrative tendencies of legalization and bureaucratization. This was shown by a comparison of the numerical development of highly qualified expert personnel in different functions as well as sectors and industries. At the turn of the century, engineering work took on even sharper professional contours: secondary and technical school education was finally established as the minimum requirement for the upper-level salaried job of an engineer. It is true that in the course of this, the autodidactic (further) educated engineers were almost completely pushed out of the profession. However, the purely academic professional image that the founding of the technical colleges in the 1870s had hinted at did not emerge. After all, it was the business community that had been instrumental in establishing an ‘intermediate’ technical education (secondary and technical schools). According to industrial-private evaluation standards, these new mechanical engineering and building trade schools were on the same level as technical higher education.

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0_12

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With the establishment of minimum standards in the field of school-formal (training) education around 1900, engineers gained much sharper contours as a professional group. The same tendency can be observed at the operationalfunctional level: Not only did the expert status of engineers remain unchallenged. On the contrary, as a result of typical late-industrial trends in company organisation, they penetrated into originally commercial functional areas (rationalisation, cost accounting). Market Dynamics However, this very favourable professional situation was not reflected in the economic valuation of engineering work: between 1900 and the mid-1920s, engineers’ incomes actually fell – in relative terms – and approached the absolute level of average salaried jobs. In the face of capitalist labour market dynamics, the functionally central position of engineers in the industrial economy had thus not led to a social correspondence, reflected for instance in salaries. In view of the functional gain in importance and the corresponding high demand for engineering activities, which was expressed in the enormous expansion of the occupational group, it seemed conceivable to contemporaries that engineers’ incomes would tend more in the direction of higher civil servants and academic freelancers – the contemporary ideal type of professional employment. This was not the case until after the Second World War: the salaries of technical academics in the Federal Republic settled slightly above the entry level of the higher civil service career. Almost the same applies to the still highly regarded secondary school engineers, and from 1969 onwards to the Fachhochschule graduates or Dipl.-Ing. (FH): in the second half of the twentieth century, the discount compared with university engineers circulated around the 10% mark.1 Civic Profession Against Own Will The comparatively unfavourable market situation for engineers in the late Kaiserreich and Weimar Republic was based on the permanent overcrowding of the engineering labour market between 1900 and 1935, despite the steady expansion of engineering jobs. This oversupply of labour ultimately resulted from the rapid modernisation of educational aspirations. Thus, technical colleges had become both a catalyst for growing middle-class educational aspirations and an alternative in bourgeois career planning. In the traditional (educational) bourgeoisie, the equally poor prospects in classical academic careers overhauled the reservations that

1

Cf. HIS, Salaries; Burkhardt/Schomburg/Teichler, University Studies.

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actually existed in this milieu towards – thus utilitarian – technology as well as industrial economic modernity. The sometimes hopeless overcrowding of the ‘old’ careers of law, medicine and teaching since the early 1920s thus made these evasive movements possible. In addition, first-year students were far too positive in their assessment of the employment opportunities typical of engineering. As was typical of the time, academic training was equated with privileged employment opportunities, including by the public career counselling service. In terms of social recruitment, the academic engineering career in the first third of the twentieth century thus developed into a bourgeois profession against its will, so to speak. Everyday Cultural Special Role Since the turn of the nineteenth century, engineers formed a comparatively selfreferential identity, strongly related to the technical and to engineering work. One (co-)cause of this retreat was the aforementioned bad reputation of industrialization, mechanization and the engineering profession among the traditional middle classes. This ‘Cinderella role’ included not only a pronounced technical and occupational orientation, but also the development of a certain immunity to public life, to the status attributions and milieu symbols negotiated there. Since the turn of the twentieth century at the latest, these two characteristics, professionalism and the lack of a sense of belonging to everyday culture, can be described as the foundation of a typical engineering mentality.2 Integration into a bourgeois elite milieu of the ‘old’ academics and larger entrepreneurs was not among the typical life goals of a large part of the technical elite. Even the academically educated graduate engineers, who were socialized to a comparatively high degree in the bourgeoisie, were no exception. Such everyday cultural boundaries between the established ruling classes and the aspiring middle strata of technical professionalism were evident both in the personal circles of contact in clubs and societies and in overarching patterns of everyday life (consumer behavior, leisure activities, family planning). In contrast to these findings on the ‘average engineer’, a small group of professionally above-average engineers integrated themselves quite smoothly into a middle-class milieu of classical character. These were the higher technical civil servants, individual freelancers as well as engineers in higher management. In the field of tension between distinction and aspiration, it can thus be said: Only top

2

Cf. in detail Sander, Engineering.

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engineers both corresponded to the established bourgeois status criteria and also oriented themselves – by themselves, qua their habitus – to these ruling classes. Bourgeoisie and Traditional Bourgeoisie Without Role Model Function According to contemporary observers, the weakly developed traditional bourgeoisie of the (graduate) engineers was also primarily due to the distinctive attitude of the classically bourgeois elites. In the course of examining the consumer behaviour of different types of engineer, white-collar and civil servant households, however, it also became apparent that the engineers had hardly any corresponding aspirations. Thus, the core symbols of a bourgeois lifestyle, the prestigious belle étage apartment in urban centers and a distinctive consumption of high culture, exerted a significantly greater attraction even on the middle civil servants. In contrast, engineers pursued comparatively private, individualistic lifestyles, which were characterized by a pronounced orientation toward pleasure. A rich and high-quality diet as well as the leisure social options of weekend excursions and evening entertainment events formed the center of everyday pursuits in engineer households. Pleasure-Oriented Middle Classes: Engineers and Upper Commercial Employees The engineers, together with other groups of higher employees, thus formed a milieu of the better-off middle classes – in a sense, the consumerist upper class within the ‘new middle class’. The traditional everyday codes of the old elites, the high culture of concerts and theatre, the ‘befitting’ apartment with maids, the ‘better societies’ of the bourgeois clubs, were only of limited value here. The typical lifeworld orientations of these white-collar elites resembled the middle and lower spheres of the ‘new middle class’ much more closely than the – in terms of education, income and working conditions – actually more closely related educated citizens in the higher administrative service, in classrooms, surgeries and law firms. At the same time, the inner cohesion of this upscale white-collar milieu is presumably low. To the almost ascetic educated bourgeois, who economized on eating out and going out in favor of the obligatory collective symbols of his milieu, these better-off white-collar workers must have seemed like individualized ‘nouveau riche’ – and this despite their generally lower material resources. In the vaudeville or in the relevant excursion locales on the outskirts of urban centers, the engineers and other well-off employees possibly also stylized themselves to some extent as the new, (traditionally) unattached elite of the ‘leisure society’ – thus staging themselves as a group. Such outlines of a symbolic stratification in the area

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of the middle and upper classes could be made much more precise through appropriately focused micro-studies.3 These findings from the history of mentalities are now helpful for assessing the politics of the professional associations studied and the political behaviour of engineers. Thus, the professional interest policy of academic engineers, which in the Weimar Republic was increasingly shaped by the vision of an exposed ‘status’ of technical academics, can only be understood to a limited extent as an expression of collective social frustrations. The objective discrepancy between origin and educational investment on the one hand, and the conditions of employment on the other, was evidently dealt with subjectively by the graduate engineers. Unlike the middle-ranking civil servants, they did not emulate or even orient themselves to the lifestyle of the educated middle classes. In the 1920s, the status of the classical educated middle classes in the world of life, i.e. the macro-, but above all also the micro-public status, hardly played a role for the graduate engineers. Until the turn of the century, on the other hand, the classical bourgeoisie had still acted more strongly as a social role model for graduate engineers. At this time, the professional levelling of academics and non-academics was just beginning to crystallise as a permanent status. Until then, graduate engineers had still hoped that a labour market segment of ‘real’ (diploma) engineers would emerge and that they would, in a sense, automatically move alongside the established academic professions. Finally, in the interwar period, social levelling was a reality, and the everyday-culture-effective self-image as upscale white-collar workers, as ‘harbingers of modern society,’4 had been normality for a generation. Accordingly, the bourgeois professions and the idea of a class-based professional order derived from them formed less of an everyday cultural and more of an instrumental professional-political foil for the academic engineers. In explaining the political radicalization of technical academics in the late 1920s and early 1930s, political developments in the narrower sense must therefore be given special consideration. Nevertheless, the everyday cultural basis of this change in political attitudes should not be disregarded: Neither the classical academic professions nor the white-collar elites were immune to the melting of income differentials and the softening of the everyday cultural demarcation to the ‘mass’ of white-collar workers.

3

In particular, the advertising in public, professional association and hobby-specific magazines would be informative here, but also the specific leisure tips that were given in the editorial sections to a specific audience in each case. 4 Coyner, Patterns.

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In reaction to falling real incomes as well as to the overcrowding of labour markets and universities, almost all associations of the higher and academic professions at this time called for a permanent and clear, precisely ‘ständische’ demarcation from the middle classes. Although the arguments put forward, which were primarily aimed at the functional (added) value of „intellectual labor“for the state and society, met with little response on the whole, such images of society based on the estates nevertheless enjoyed fundamental acceptance among the contemporary interpretive elites. The three-class schema, which provided for a clear everyday cultural and, derived from this, socio-economic demarcation between a bourgeoisie of the classical type and the white-collar middle classes, was – still – a way of making politics in the Weimar Republic.5 State and Professions: Market Freedom Instead of Regulation In the end, however, it was only in the field of education policy that politics showed itself willing and able to symbolically strengthen the academic working groups: for example, in the case of the formal equality of technical colleges with universities (1921/1922) and the introduction of admission restrictions for university courses in the early 1930s. The political socialisation of the political elites, which was influenced by the market economy, stood in the way of any further regulation of the professions under social law. Title protection for graduate engineers or the recognition of “leitende Angestellte” as a professional group would have meant an excessive encroachment on market freedom, even for socially conservative circles. It was precisely this market freedom that, from the point of view of the centre-right in the Weimar Republic, had to be vehemently defended against the welfare-state, social-democratic political model.6 Traditional Occupational Constructions and Economic-Social Realities Certainly, the simultaneity of static notions of inequality and free-market modes of resource distribution, which are variable as a result, must be regarded as one of the essential ‘legacies’ of the Weimar Republic. The desire for material and symbolic status improvement, or at least status stability, and the ideologems of status society that developed from it could be identified here as a decisive motive for the general, 5

On contemporary images of inequality, especially scientific ones, cf. Ritter/Tenfelde, Arbeiter, pp. 111–154. 6 In this context, the ex-post concept of the welfare state should at least adequately describe the political content of Weimar social democracy. On the empirical basis or the state of research as well as on the following, cf. (still) Winkler, Revolution; Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Vol. 3); Föllmer, Verteidigung.

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völkisch right-wing conservative political development of the three professional associations studied in detail. All three associations represented dependent higher professions and thus the neuralgic clash of static elite images and market processes, admittedly framed (conditionally) by the welfare state. The Association of Senior Employees (Vela) and the Association of Employed Chemists and Engineers (Budaci) vividly demonstrated that within the spectrum of the radical-conservative ideological triad – national superiority, ethnic ‘purity’ and corporative social order – the idea of the Estates had by far the greatest appeal. This, as it were, partial political conviction led, however, to nothing less than “loyal cooperation” with the National Socialists among the professional associations mentioned. With Michael Ruck, one can even speak of “active collaboration”7 for the period from January to mid-April 1933, which at this time cannot yet be attributed primarily to political pressure from the new rulers. For the “intellectual workers” in the Weimar Republic, then, völkisch conservatism was primarily an ideology tied to interests – albeit with further-reaching consequences. Social Protest and Acceleration of the Political Cycle At the same time, despite all reciprocity, the political swing to the right of the professional associations studied – and thus of numerous other associations, not only but predominantly of ‘higher’ professions – can also be traced back to developments that were only indirectly related to occupational group-specific interests and life-world insecurities. In short, social frictions explain only part of Weimar’s (general) political conjuncture. Originally rooted in a youthful intellectual milieu, the völkisch-radikalkonservativen currents can only be understood to a limited extent as a social movement in the classical sense, as a product of distributional struggles. War experience, national ‘defeat’, a perceived loss of state authority, and the upsurge of social democratic and liberal political content in a rapidly modernizing, ostensibly anonymized professional and (other) lifeworld of advanced industrial society formed a complex bundle of motives for the radical intensification of a traditionally conservative ideological household.8

7

Ruck, Korpsgeist, p. 18. Cf. Hübinger, ‘Tat’-Kreis; Schildt, Konservatismus; Föllmer, Verteidigung; Weisbrod, Deutschland; Breuer, Ordnungen. On the ideological analogies between Reichsdeutsch liberalism and classical conservatism, cf. Jansen, Antiliberalismus; Stern, Consequences. 8

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The enormous appeal of these radical-conservative ideological offerings can be seen in the three professional associations in focus here. The striking simultaneity with which the form and content of the activities of the VDDI, Vela and Budaci came to a head within a few months at the end of 1927 points to the embedding of the political swing to the right in overarching discourses – which at the same time naturally profited from this influx. The transformation of parts of an older rightwing conservatism into a völkisch radical conservatism can thus be located quite precisely in terms of reception and discursive ‘power’.9 In this way, the findings of numerous studies can be substantiated, which assume either a steady increase or a sudden rise in the attractiveness of völkisch conservatism in bourgeois milieus as a result of the world economic crisis.10 Radicalization of the Graduate Engineers With their initially quite passive adherence to the völkisch discourse and their ultimate decision in favour of the radical solution of National Socialism, the Vela and the Budaci did not differ appreciably from the Philologenverband, the lawyers’ and judges’ associations or the Reichsbund der höheren Beamten.11 This ‘academic’ pattern of radicalization was surpassed quite clearly by the VDDI. In purely arithmetical terms, the 10% of graduate engineers in Vela, Budaci and VDDI who were organised along political lines drifted to the right to an above-average extent. The special role of the VDDI was expressed above all in the level of ideological penetration and conviction: In an almost innovative manner, the VDDI’s masterminds fused völkisch ideological building blocks with typical engineering, technicist images of society. Moreover, the VDDI had developed substantial ideas of national supremacy and ethnic exclusion that went beyond the obvious professional-political, interest-based idea of a society of estates. These elements of the völkisch ‘movement’ were shared by Vela and Budaci, as well as by the majority of the academic professional associations, for the most part only in rudimentary form. This changed from the end of 1932, when the increasingly strong

9 Cf. Mommsen, Auflösung. In contrast, Breuer, Ordnung, and Föllmer, Verteidigung, note a change in form, the emergence of a new, independent völkisch conservatism. 10 On the former approaches, see Breuer, Ordnung; Föllmer, Verteidigung; Weisbrod, Das ‘Geheime Deutschland’; Jansen, Antiliberalismus; on the emphasis on the economic and political crisis since 1930, see Jarausch, Professions; Fattmann, Bildungsbürger. 11 Cf. Jarausch, Professions; McClelland, Experience; Fattmann, Bildungsbürger; Caspar, Lehrerverein; Krause-Vilmar, Lehrerschaft; Hamburger, Lehrer; Siegrist, Advokat; Sander, Jura.

12

Social Situation, Mentalities and Politics of German Engineers 1890. . .

249

‘longing for unity’12, the desire for the estates and völkisch-national (re)order of relations, took away the last deterrent effect from the ethnic ideological elements. Just like many other academic associations, the VDDI, Vela and Budaci also inserted so-called Jewish paragraphs into their statutes at an early stage, without any significant political pressure.13 Social Order and Academic Employees Who, however, did the VDDI represent, if the present finding of a relatively tensionfree integration of graduate engineers into the everyday cultural boundaries of modern Weimar society is correct? With its focus on traditional academic employment, the VDDI ultimately represented a frustrated segment of employed university graduates. After all, the VDDI’s leadership was largely recruited from university professors and other senior civil servants who wanted their employed colleagues to benefit from such an entitlement system. Above all, however, they themselves were still so closely attached to the coupling of education and profession in the 1920s that the fight for the employed graduates also shows traits of self-assurance. Just like other political groupings, professional associations not only exhibit a characteristic content-related strategic gap between association leadership and membership base. At the same time, they usually represent a larger part of the population than the number of their members is able to reflect. This representative surplus was comparatively small in the case of the VDDI. Vela and Budaci were also only attractive to graduate engineers to a limited extent. The Budaci did achieve collective bargaining successes, but only in the chemical industry. In the Weimar social system, large professional formations ‘ruled’ – that is, the employees in their now extremely heterogeneous totality. Outside the chemical industry, only the Butab, the association of middle school engineers, succeeded in taking over collective bargaining leadership as the largest association of salaried employees in terms of membership. The regulation of the social partnership thus corresponded to a certain extent to the realities of the labour market for higher white-collar positions, where technical academics and also business graduates competed with non-academics. The low degree of organization among engineers with diplomas cannot be attributed solely to their engineering social identity as ‘specialists’ with little affinity

12

Schumann, Unity Longing. Cf. On the associations of lawyers and senior teachers Jarausch, Professions; Königseder, Recht; Hamburger, Lehrer. 13

250

12

Social Situation, Mentalities and Politics of German Engineers 1890. . .

for the public. This is shown by the example of secondary school engineers: in the Weimar Republic, every second technical secondary school graduate belonged to the free trade union Butab and the other smaller secondary school engineers’ associations, which can admittedly also be attributed to the aforementioned influence of collective bargaining policy.14 This simply cemented the principle of equal opportunities for middle and university engineers on the labour market. Despite the organisational affinity of secondary school graduates, engineers as a whole were thus less organised than commercial employees. Individual strategies for improving their (own) social situation – certainly an expression of the high degree of attachment to professionalism and privacy – played a greater role among engineers. Crisis and Political Radicalization While the equal status with secondary school graduates, i.e. the structural conditions of the engineering profession had receded into the background for the graduate engineers in the 1920s, the economic crisis hit them just as it did the old academic and other higher (white-collar) professions – i.e. falling real incomes in connection with the overcrowding of universities and labour markets. This cyclical strain on the professional self-image, which became virulent within a few years, could not be immediately integrated into the social self-image. This was vividly illustrated by the examples of salaried chemists (Budaci) and managerial employees (Vela), who, in contrast to graduate engineers, did not experience any structural downgrading: when managerial employees registered a significant drop in their real incomes in the mid-1920s and chemists registered the overcrowding of universities and the labour market from 1928/1929 onwards, this caused considerable insecurities in both association milieus, similar to those in the old academic professions, which were immediately translated into calls for social stability. The same was true of the renewed shift to the right by Vela and Budaci in the summer of 1931 – at the height of the economic and political crisis. Processing Opportunities of Social Crises With regard to the overall complex of the ‘higher’ professions, the importance of social demarcation and security must be emphasized from the perspective of the history of mentality. These groups were anything but immune to sudden crises that endangered certain (material) privileges. On the other hand, it can be seen as a generalizable result of this work that long-term, i.e. structurally consolidated

14

Or rather, it was this degree of organisation that made practical collective bargaining capability possible in the first place.

12

Social Situation, Mentalities and Politics of German Engineers 1890. . .

251

material and ideal losses – as in the case of graduate engineers – can certainly lead to a stable social identity within a few decades or a good generation. Having started out as (apparently) genuine educated citizens, graduate engineers eventually integrated themselves quite smoothly into an upper (white-collar) middle-class milieu. Such successful everyday cultural finding processes can also be observed in the recent past. Since the early 1980s, for example, humanities graduates have regularly shown lower expectations of income and professional-social status than graduates of other disciplines. In such cases, professional expectations shift to more intrinsic professional values.15 A strongly job-related, technology-centred world view remained a stable component of the engineering identity during the period under consideration. This was not only characterized by a comparatively low interest in the ‘big’ political events. Nor did everyday proto-political life have the significance here that it did in other milieus. The leaders of the engineering associations regularly complained about the weak connection of the rank and file to explicitly political as well as micro-political and everyday cultural processes and allocations.16 On the one hand, this low level of ‘social interest’ possibly made possible the smooth integration into the contemporary social status matrix in the first place. On the other hand, a building block of the völkisch-conservative radicalization is also to be sought here – in the sense of a “politicization of the apolitical.”17 Finally, these occupational and everyday cultural specifics are still evident, at least in gradual form, among engineers in the early twenty-first century.18 Leisure Society Identity Offers On the basis of the present findings, the extensively studied and frequently emphasized social role model function of the bourgeoisie can also be made somewhat more precise.19 There is no doubt that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, frugal, long-term household management and an expanded educational 15

Cf. Teichler, Hochschule, pp. 125–162; on the European framework Schomburg/Teichler, Education, pp. 96–104. On the change in work attitudes since the 1960s, cf. Sander, Wertewandel. 16 Cf. also Jarausch, Professions. 17 Von dem Bussche, Conservatism (subtitled: The Politicization of the Unpolitical). 18 Cf. in principle Sander, Ingenieurwesen as well as Schölling, Herkunft; Heine, Bestimmungsgründe on the motives for the choice of subject/occupation. 19 Cf. Kocka, Muster; ders, Einleitung; Sperber, Bürger; Schulz, Lebenswelt; Mergel, Bürgertumsforschung.

252

12

Social Situation, Mentalities and Politics of German Engineers 1890. . .

aspiration oriented towards the top of the occupational status pyramid diffused from formerly typical bourgeois behavioural patterns into the middle classes. These lifestyle elements thus lost their once exclusive character, strikingly delimiting the middle classes from ‘subaltern’ milieus. After the Second World War, a sense of domestic sufficiency and a certain degree of aspiration to social advancement finally became almost universal everyday cultural patterns that could also be found in large sections of the working-class milieu – and thus became the hallmarks of late industrial welfare-state societies as a whole.20 With the increasing separation of work and leisure in the everyday world, the diverse use of new, ‘organized’ leisure activities (clubs, cinema, vaudeville, sports, etc.), and the mass-media bridging of milieu-specific information and expectations, the 1920s were already so differentiated in terms of everyday culture that social options beyond traditional bourgeoisie became available, first in the upper social classes. The use of this scope for action, the development of new, independent milieu-like forms of practice, can be observed not only in social groups that were originally strongly oriented towards the bourgeoisie – such as graduate engineers in particular.21 Even occupationally and socially less afflicted formations, such as commercial employees in higher management, developed rather individualistic life plans and everyday patterns that unconsciously deviated from the bourgeois community ethos and its symbols. Here one can quite obviously observe the beginnings of a horizontal – and even cross-social – differentiation of everyday cultures. Simple commercial employees and graduate engineers had more in common than technical academics with other academics. They met in the same vaudevilles and outings. This developmental tendency of modern societies only came to full fruition in the post-World War II period. First, as is well known, Pierre Bourdieu empirically surveyed and theoretically framed this for the French case of the 1960s.22

20

Cf. Wehler, Bürgertum; Schulz, Lebenswelt, pp. 76–104; Siegrist, Ende; Beck, Risikogesellschaft; Mooser, Arbeiterleben; Kaelble, Sozialgeschichte; Sander, Wertewandel. 21 Which, among other things, far outnumbered the Diplom-Kaufleute – the first graduates entered the job market here in 1900. 22 Cf. Bourdieu, Unterschiede. On the sociology of lifestyles and milieus that followed in the 1980s, see Vester, Grundmuster. On the European comparison after 1945, see Kaelble, Sozialgeschichte. On the individualisation thesis based on this, according to which milieulike affiliations have generally lost importance, see first Beck, Risikogesellschaft.

Appendix

See Fig. A.1, Table A.1 See Figs. A.2 and A.3, Tables A.2, A.3, A.4 and A.5. See Table A.6.

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0

253

254

Appendix

1) Social situation

(level of education, working conditions, income)

2) Mentalities/ lifestyles

3) Political behaviour

(intentional collective action)

other influences except 2) other influences except 1)

socialized mentality components (especially in the family of origin)

present everyday life

political culture and political process in (organised) party and association democracy

.everyday publicity' of neighbouring milieus as well as political-social elites

Genesis of values/mentalities and (explicit-formal) political contents which influence the social situation of individual professional formations (corporate cultures, welfare state regulation etc.)

= Imprint Fig. A.1 Social situations, mentalities and politics – structuration in social environment

WS 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902

10,705

7458 7762 8443

Lecture at a high school 1 2364 2636 3020 3361 3918 4655 5065

7703 8924 12,923 14,439 15,484

Secondary and technical schools 2 WS 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1661 8661

Lecture at a high school 1 12,005 11,460 11,088 11,003 10,409 10,199 10,464 10,002 10,414 11,065 2741

Secondary and technical schools 2 16,552 17,160 17,432 18,595 21,714 22,372 22,969 23,792 24,337 24,566 7931 5586 7016 WS 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 19,606 15,563 14,484 10,238 9450 8369

24,655 22,516 21,529 21,446 21,150 20,401

Lecture at a high school 1 24,484

(continued)

24,846

33,192

30,891

Secondary and technical schools 2

Table A.1 Students of technical universities and middle (secondary/technical) schools, German Empire 1887–1937 (extrapolation)

Appendix 255

Secondary and technical schools 2 16,468 WS 1920

Lecture at a high school 1 22,062

Secondary and technical schools 2 WS 1937

Lecture at a high school 1 7430

Secondary and technical schools 2

Sources: Technical universities: ZVDI 31 (1887) – 76 (1932); Ten-Year Statistics, p. 288. Technical Secondary Schools (Prussia): Statistisches Jahrbuch für den preußischen Staat 1 (1904) – 16 (1920); Preußische Statistik vol. 272 (1924), p. 352; Preußische Statistik vol. 295 (1931), p. 754 Technische Mittelschulen (Deutsches Reich): Die Lage der technischen Berufe, in DTZ 8 (1926), pp. 269 f.; GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 120 (Ministry of Trade and Commerce), Dept. E IV, I, No. 2, vol. 5 (Die Statistik der Maschinenbauschulen und der Maschinenbau- und Hüttenschulen): Bl. 191–194, 215–218; Prussian Statistics vol. 272 (1924), p. 352; Prussian Statistics vol. 295 (1931), p. 754 Explanation: Extrapolation of the student numbers of all technical secondary schools and technical colleges from Prussia to the German Reich for the reference years 1898–1911 and 1913–1916 on the basis of the Reich-Prussia ratio of 1912 (factor 2.10.323.484). Analogous extrapolation of the other secondary and technical schools (mining schools, textile engineering schools, etc.) and the high-frequency evening and weekend courses in the German Empire for the reference years 1912, 1922, 1925 and 1931. Here, only the frequencies of the higher and lower mechanical engineering schools and the building trade schools are available. The extrapolation was based on the average factor of these schools compared to the Höhere und Niedere Maschinenbauschulen in Prussia for the years 1901–1913 (1.07.358.842)

WS 1903

Lecture at a high school 1 12,083

Table A.1 (continued)

256 Appendix

Appendix

257

Vacancies for graduate engineers, VDDI job index Vacancies for "technicians of all kinds" reported to the Reich Labour Register

Fig. A.2 Vacancies for graduate engineers and ‘technicians of all kinds’, German Reich 1920–1935. (Sources: Steinmetz, Arbeitsraum; Reichsarbeitsblatt, Part 2 (unofficial part) 18 (1920) to NF 15 (1935). Graph A.2.2: 1921 = 100)

258

Appendix

Vacancies for "technicians of all kinds" reported to the Reich Labour Register Vacancies for graduate engineers , VDDI job index

Fig. A.3 Vacancies for graduate engineers and ‘technicians of all kinds’, German Empire 1920–1935 (standardized). Sources: Steinmetz, Arbeitsraum; Reichsarbeitsblatt, Part 2 (unofficial part) 18 (1920) to NF 15 (1935)

Appendix

259

Table A.2 Engineers as members of Masonic lodges, 1905–1930

Berlin

240

8

5

Engineers in the management of the association 4) 1905/1906 0

Berlin

91

3

2

0

Bremen

202

2

1

1

Kassel Trier

204 81

1 8

0 2

0 1

Total In percent of 1)

1109

27 2.7

15 1.2

2

Berlin

274

20

9

Full members 1)

From 1): Engineers 2)

of 2): Engineering elite 3)

1928/1930 1

of 2) Additional designations 5) Civil engineers, technical director (construction), senior telegraph secretary, “Baumeister” Engineer and factory owner, civil engineer Engineer and director, architect Graduate engineer, senior engineer, building councillor, telegraph director

Government building officer, government master builder, senior telegraph secretary, senior telegraph inspector, technical advisor, senior engineer, Dr. Ing., engineer and co-owner company

(continued)

260

Appendix

Table A.2 (continued)

From 1): Engineers 2)

of 2): Engineering elite 3)

339

25

10

Engineers in the management of the association 4) 1905/1906 3

Bremen

87

7

3

1

Kassel

114

12

5

1

Goslar

146

12

6

1

Full members 1) Berlin

of 2) Additional designations 5) Chief engineer (n = 6), diploma engineer (n = 6), government councillor, railway chief engineer, diploma engineer and building councillor Architect, telegraph director, chief postal employee Dr. Ing. Architect and study councilor, chief engineer (n = 3), architect (n = 2), chief building inspector, study councilor building trade school Architect (n = 2), mining superintendent, engineer and factory manager, engineer and factory owner, diploma engineer (n = 2), Dr. phil. civil engineer

(continued)

Appendix

261

Table A.2 (continued)

Full members 1) Total In percent of 1)

960

From 1): Engineers 2)

of 2): Engineering elite 3)

76 7.9

33 3.4

Engineers in the management of the association 4) 1905/1906 7

of 2) Additional designations 5)

Sources: Membership directories of the St. John’s Lodges belonging to the Association of the Great National Mother Lodge of the Three Globes (see location in the table), o.O., o. Y Notes: Sp. 1: Includes so-called lodge officers. Sp. 3: Engineer elite means: Senior civil servants, directors/factory owners and architects/civil engineers (freelancers), but not senior engineers in private industry. Sp. 4: so-called lodge officials

262

Appendix

Table A.3 Personal profile, income and expenditure of the households of civil servant engineers, technicians and senior employees, German Reich 1927

Persons per household Number of children Age HV/wife Age 1st child Working income HV Acquisition income other than HV salary Income/expenditure Taxes/duties Insurance/provision Debt repayment Save Gifts Food and luxury foodstuffs Clothing Total housing Of it: Rent Household goods and repairs Heating and lighting Domestic services Services “yes” in percent Personal and health care Education Transfers/admissions Holiday Association fees Travel costs Remaining expenditures

1 Engineers & technicians: Civil servants 1927 n=5 % 3.80 1.80 42.0/36.4 8.2 8707.80 0

3.79 1.71 37.4/34.7 7.4 4184.71 72.14

9250.00 637.80 282.60 27.00 104.60 334.40 2305.60 1153.60 2152,80

4686.36 230.64 349.29 12.14 39.64 90.93 1681.50 579.50 1012.36

1073.00 591.20 355.60 907.00 256.20 250.00 107.80 501,80 99.80 70.60 191.40

Sources and notes: as Table 3.1 (in text)

6.9 3.1 0.3 1.1 3.6 24.9 12.5 23.3 11.6 6.4 3.8 9.8 80 2.8 2.7 1.2 5.4 1.1 0.8 2.1

2

3

Technician 1927 n = 14

Senior employees 1927 n = 25 %

513.21 322.64 176.50 0 100.00 196.29 57.07 92.50 62.71 91.29 90.50

4.9 7.5 0.3 0.9 1.9 35.9 12.4 21.6 11.0 6.9 3.8 0 0 2.1 4.2 1.2 2 1.3 1.9 1.9

% 4.4 2.28 38.6/36.3 9.1 8555.60 64.56 9519.28 543.88 509.88 213.88 245.16 354.72 2390.80 1180.12 2085.92 1049.84 750.88 285.20 484.12 220.12 354.28 170.60 342.64 76.32 153.52 193.32

5.7 5.4 2.2 2.6 3.7 25.1 12.4 21.9 11 7.9 3.0 5.1 44 2.3 3.7 1.8 3.6 0.8 1.6 2.0

Appendix

263

Table A.4 Expenditure on selected foodstuffs and luxury foods in the households of engineers, salaried employees and civil servants, German Reich 1927 1

Engineers 1927 n = 25 1768.32

Food and luxury foodstuffs As a percentage of 32.0 total expenditure Persons/household 3.64 Number of children 1.56 As a percentage of total expenditure: Meat and sausages 387.24 7.0 Fish 25.68 0.5 Fat 67.12 1.2 Butter 135.68 2.5 Drinks 242.96 4.4 Luxury food 231.76 4,2 Of it: Restaurant 68.68 1.2 Alcoholic 86.28 1.6 beverages Of which: Beer 49.68 0.9

2 Middle and upper salaried employees 1927 n = 300 1744.67

3

4

Subaltern officials 1927 n = 297 1771.53

Higher officials 1927 n = 47 2226.13

33.6

33.2

22.4

3.71 1.67

3.87 1.82

4.02 2.00

382.24 26.04 68.26 148.96 337.70 240.64

7.4 0.5 1.3 2.9 6.5 4.6

384.89 27.19 69.43 157.85 244.27 232.78

7.2 0.5 1.3 3.0 4.6 4.4

441.64 44.38 68.28 207.28 295.66 310.55

4.5 0.5 0.7 2.1 3.0 3.1

66.74 93.91

1.3 1.8

57.55 92.87

1.1 1.7

97.62 136.96

1.0 1.4

61.05

1.2

57.65

1.1

67.43

0.7

Sources: Zentralarchiv, household accounts Notes: Sp. 2, 4, 6 and 8: As a percentage of total expenditure. Fats: All types of fats excluding butter. Luxury foods: Tobacco products; Sweets excluding sugar; Alcoholic beverages; Coffee and tea; Cakes; Meals away from home or in restaurants. Catering: meals and beverages in public houses/restaurants

0.71

0.72

0.51

0.68

0.25

0.62

0.20

0.05

0.81

Total expenditure

1

Clothing

Living

Domestic services

Body/ge

School

Amusements

Holiday

Association

NuG

2) senior officials

Total expenditure

0.70 0.44

0.28 0.03

0.01 0.02

0.33

Gifts 0.67

0.05

0.58

0.28 Clothing

0.02

0.33

0.19

Save

0.14

0.11

0.01

0.61

0.20

0.01

0.19

-0.14

0.43

1

0.31 0.07

-0.31

1

0.05

0.71

0.14 0.11

Clothing

Save

0.03

0.02

0.14

0.05

1 0.11

0.20

-0.14

0.20

Gifts

1

Total expenditure

Gifts

Save

Total expenditure

1) Engineers.

0.63

Living

0.48

0.11

0.15

0.43

0.20

0.61

0.18

1

0.43

0.03

0.14

0.72

Living

0.68

Domestic services

0.28

-0.43

-0.11

0.40

-0.06

0.22

1

0.18

0.70

-0.07

0.02

0.51

Domestic services

0.49

Body/ health

0.71

0.45

0.08

0.37

0.43

1

0.22

0.61

0.44

-0.28

0.01

0.68

Body/ Health

0.19

0.54

School

0.42

0.26

-0.20

0.01

1

0.43

-0.06

0.20

-0.14

0.12

Amusements

0.53

0.09

0.17

1

0.01

0.37

0.40

0.43

0.61

0.20

-0.02 0.03

0.62

Amusements

0.25

School

0.40

Holiday

0.12

0.14

1

0.17

-0.20

0.08

-0.11

0.15

0.14

-0.11

0.01

0.20

Holiday

0.03

Association

0.24

1

0.14

0.09

0.26

0.45

-0.43

0.11

0.02

-0.33

-0.19

0.05

Association

0.74

NuG

1

0.24

0.12

0.53

0.42

0.71

0.28

0.48

0.58

0.28

0.01

0.81

NuG

Table A.5 Correlation r of selected expenditure items: Engineers, senior civil servants, middle and senior emloyeea, DtGerman Reich 1927

264 Appendix

Total expenditure

1

0.26

3) middle and upper level employees

Total expenditure

Gifts

1

0.26

Gifts

0.06

0.04

0,59 0,04

0.01

Clothing

0,24

0.26

Save

0,65

0.17

0.74

NuG

-0,12

0.17

0.03

Association

0,34

0.08

0.22

0.40

Holiday

0,23

0.16

0.04

0.12

Amusements

0.02

0.07

0.54

School

0,28

0.06

0,12

0.49

Body/Ge

0,45

0.11

0.03

0.68

Domestic services

0,31

0,11

0.14

0,63

Living

1

0.16

0.08

0.67

Clothing

0.08 -0.16

0.09 1

1 0.09

0.33

-0.05

Gifts

Save

-0.14

0.13

0.56

Living

0.40

-0.15

0.01

-0.02

0.28

0.39

0.40

1

0.31

-0.11

0.03

0.16

0.23

Domestic services

0.39

-0.12

0.40

0.01

0.36

0.29

1

0.40

0.45

-0.11

-0.12

0.11

0.42

Body/ health

0.37

-0.01

0.00

-0.09

0.50

1

0.29

0.39

0.28

-0.06

-0.07

-0.03

0.28

School

0.41

0.29

0.30

-0.04

1

0.50

0.36

0.28

0.24

0.02

-0.04

0.13

0.37

Amusements

0.09

0.18

0.30

1

-0.04

-0.09

0.01

-0.02

0.23

-0.16

0.08

0.06

0.29

Holiday

0.23

0.10

1

0.30

0.30

0.00

0.40

0.01

0.34

-0.22

0.04

-0.01

0.22

0.06

0.16

0.49

NuG

1

0.01

0.23

0.09

0.41

0.37

0.39

0.40

0.65

0.17

(continued)

Association

-0.01

1

0.10

0.18

0.29

-0.01

-0.12

-0.15

-0,12

-0.17

Appendix 265

0.49

NuG

0.07 0.08

0.01 0.16 0,50

0,19

0,18 0,13

0.08

0,18

0,15

0.02

0.13

0.06

0.06

0.11

0,01

0.03

0.03

0,01

1

0,02

0.13

0.02

1

0.11

0.16

0.13

0.04

0.01

-0.01

0.00

0.05

0.18

0.07

0.25

0.08

1

0.01

0.13

-0.11

-0.01

0.05

0.07

-0.04

0.20

1

0.08

0.01

-0.03

0.09

0.17

0.18

0.23

0.13

1

0.20

0.25

0.15

0.11

0.19

0.09

0.03

0.05

1

0.13

-0.04

0.07

0.18

-0.06

0.06

0.13

0.28

1

0.05

0.23

0.07

0.18

0.18

0.08

0.06

0.04

1

0.28

0.03

0.18

0.05

0.05

0.13

-0.02

0.12

1

0.04

0.13

0.09

0.17

-0.01

0.00

0.19

0.07

1

0.12

0.06

0.06

0.19

0.09

0.11

0.01

0.50

0.08

Sources: Zentralarchiv, household accounts Notes: Statistical significance, which is highly dependent on sample size, is not presented. It is true that all items are significantly (2-sided) related to the level 0.1, and mostly also to the level 0.05 with the sum of expenditure/revenue. However, this is only true for some of the relationships among the individual items. In particular, items such as domestic services, for which the case size is reduced again because not all cases in the sample demanded this service, show significant correlations with other items only in individual cases. NuG: Food, beverages and tobacco

0.22

0.28

School

Association

0.42

Body/Ge

0.37

0.23

Domestic services

0.29

0.56

Living

Holiday

0.59

Clothing

Amusements

0.26

Save

Table A.5 (continued)

266 Appendix

1860 1871 1879/1980 1890 1900 1905 1906–1908 1910 1913 1917 Share of academics in 1917 (percent) 1918 1921 1924 1927 1930 1931 1933 10,092 3599 (79%)

7500 7600 8000

24,561 6012 (24%)

25,207

30,220

28,140

4025 4450

8628 9799

23,952

6400

6266 1212 (19%)

300 900 2350

3534 5850 6640 7647

Association of German Ironworkers (VDEh) (1880) 3)

Association of German Engineers (VDI) (1856) 1) 367 1939 3802 6925 15,245

Association of German Architects and Engineers (VDAI) (1871) 2)

10,850

6087 1116 (18%)

3500 4715

3000

Association of German Electrical Engineers (VDE) (1893) 4)

2700

2769 (1925)

400 560

Association of German Architects (BDA) (1906) 5)

6000

4354 (1928)

1500 4000

Association of German Graduate Engineers (VDDI) (1909) 6)

(continued)

53,450 20,200 (37%)

German Federation of Technical Scientific Associations 7)

Table A.6 Membership development and training profile of clubs and associations of technical experts, German Reich 1860–1943

Appendix 267

Association of German Architects and Engineers (VDAI) (1871) Association of German Ironworkers (VDEh) (1880)

Association of German Electrical Engineers (VDE) (1893) Association of German Architects (BDA) (1906)

Association of German Graduate Engineers (VDDI) (1909) German Federation of Technical Scientific Associations

Sources: 1) Literature: Bolenz, Baubeamte, p. 132; Heuser/König, Zusammenstellungen, pp. 559–561; Petzina/Abelshauser/Faust, Arbeitsbuch, p. 112; Knost, Interessenpolitik, p. 448; Lundgreen, Ingenieur-Vereine, p. 295. 2) Contemporary sources, some with secondary references: ZVDDI 1 (1910), pp. 420 f.; Sandrock, Kriegsmaßnahmen, p. 5; Neufeld, Akademiker; 25 Jahre Technikergewerkschaft, pp. 49 f.; Kulemann, Berufsvereine, pp. 100 and 179–197; Croner, Angestelltenbewegung, pp. 115 f.; Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reiches 30 (1909), pp. 372 f.; Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reiches 35 (1914), p. 430; Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reiches 44 (1924/25), p. 402; Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reiches 51 (1932), p. 559; Reichsarbeitsblatt 10 (1913), pp. 758 f.; Reichsarbeitsblatt 16 (1918), p. 42; Reichsarbeitsblatt 18 (1920), pp. 514; Reichsarbeitsblatt NF 5 (1924), p. 23*; DTZ 11 (1929), p. 37; DTZ 12 (1930), pp. 43, 177; DTZ 15 (1933), p. 25; DlA 9 (1927), p. 174; ZaCh 40 (1927), p. 704; Jahrbuch des Verbandes Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure, pp. 321–377; Jahrbuch der technischen Berufsverbände 1931, pp. 22, 28 and 35f Notes: All sp.: founding years of the associations are indicated in brackets in each case Sp. 6, 1931: Apparently corrected upwards. Cf. Technik Voran. Jahrbuch 1930, p. 78 f. Sp. 7: Including multiple memberships. The associations listed in the preceding columns were members of the German Federation of Scientific and Technical Associations in 1914. Sp 12: The Budaci was renamed Bund angestellter Akademiker technisch-naturwissenschaftlicher Berufe (BaAtnB) in 1927. Cf. also the slightly different membership figure for 1930/31 in the Jahrbuch der technischen Berufsverbände 1931, p. 9. Sp 13, 1927: According to the Vela 23,344 members. This information comes from the 1930 Yearbook of Professional Associations, reproduced in Petzina/Abelshauser/ Faust, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, p. 112. According to a source not precisely cited here, the number of members rose to just over 30,000 in 1930 and 1931. Sp. 14: This information from the Reich authorities does not represent an addition of the information in the previous columns Supplements: Sp. 9, 1906–1908: of which about 12,000 were salaried civil engineers Other associations of technical experts: Reichsbund der höheren technischen Beamten (RhtB, founded 1919) 11,000 members 1931 Verein deutscher Chemiker (VDCh, founded 1887): 2096, 1900; 4131, 1910; 6001, 1919; 5568, 1920; 6444, 1921; 7916, 1926; 9000, 1931 Association of German Marine Engineers (founded 1893, Mtgl. of AfA-Bund): 4838, 1924; 5700, 1931 Association of Technical Mine Officials (founded 1885): 850, 1908; 7775, 1931 Association of Technical Municipal Officials (founded 1905): 950, 1908

1937 1943

Association of German Engineers (VDI) (1856) 38,755 57,757

Table A.6 (continued) 268 Appendix

List of Sources and Literature1

Archives BAB NS 22 (Reichsorganisationsleiter NSDAP). BAB NS 26 (Hauptarchiv NSDAP). BAB R 187/280 (Sammlung Schumacher). GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 120, Abt. E IV (Ministerium für Handel und Gewerbe, Technisches Schulwesen). Stadtarchiv Göttingen Pol Dir XIII (Polizeidirektion: Vereinswesen). UArch Chemnitz 302/IV (Nachlass Carl von Bach). Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung (Köln): BerufsBetriebsstättenzählungen des Statistischen Reichsamts (1882–1950). Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung (Köln): Haushaltsrechnungen. Elektronisch archivierter, in Teilen recodierter Datensatz, welcher auf den folgenden Erhebungen beruht: Statistisches Reichsamt, Die Lebenshaltung von 2000 Arbeiter-, Angestellten-, und Beamtenhaushaltungen (1927); dass., Erhebung von Wirtschaftsrechnungen (1906–13), Krziža, Haushaltungsbücher (1911–1913), Haushalt Postassistenten (1903).

1

Abbreviations of periodicals and series can be seen from the titles in the list of sources and references. Otherwise, only common abbreviations have been used. # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Sander, Engineers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41797-0

269

270

List of Sources and Literature

Periodicals and Series BBl – Bundesblätter. Mitteilungen des Bundes angestellter Chemiker und Ingenieure (Budaci). Fortgesetzt als DaA. Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung. Nachrichten der Reichs- und Staatsbehörden. DaA – Der angestellte Akademiker technisch-naturwissenschaftlicher Berufe. Mitteilungen des Bundes angestellter Chemiker und Ingenieure/angestellter Akademiker technischnaturwissenschaftlicher Berufe. Fortgesetzt als DtA. Deutsche Hochschulstatistik. Deutsche Richterzeitung. Organ des deutschen Richterbundes. Deutscher Baukalender. Jahrbuch des gesamten Bauwesens. DIBZ – Deutsche Industrie-Beamten Zeitung. Organ des Bundes technischindustrieller Beamter. DlA – Der leitende Angestellte. Halbmonatliche Zeitschrift der Vereinigung der leitenden Angestellten in Handel und Industrie (Vela). DtA – Der technische Akademiker. Mitteilungen des Bundes angestellter Akademiker technischnaturwissenschaftlicher Berufe. DTZ – Deutsche Techniker Zeitung. Zeitschrift für die sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Interessen der technischen Angestellten und Beamten. Etat der [preußischen] Eisenbahnverwaltung für das Etats-Jahr, Berlin. Maschinenbau – der Betrieb/Maschinenbau – Wirtschaft. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung, Betrieb und Wirtschaft. Organ der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Betriebsingenieure. Mitteilungen des Verbandes Deutscher Hochschulen. NZI – Norddeutsche Zeitschrift für die gesamte technische Industrie. Preußische Hochschulstatistik. Fortgesetzt als Deutsche Hochschulstatistik. Reichsarbeitsblatt. Amtsblatt des Reichsarbeitsministeriums, des Reichsversicherungsamtes und der Reichsversicherungsanstalt für Angestellte. Reichsgesetzblatt. Schriften des Bundes der technisch-industriellen Beamten (Butib). Staat und Technik. Zeitschrift des Reichsbundes der höheren technischen Beamten und der angeschlossenen Verbände. StatDR – Statistik des Deutschen Reiches. Statistisches Handbuch für den preußischen Staat. Fortgesetzt als Statistisches Jahrbuch für den preußischen Staat. Fortgesetzt als Statistisches Jahrbuch für den Freistaat Preußen. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsch Reich.

List of Sources and Literature

271

TuK – Technik und Kultur. Zeitschrift des Verbandes Deutscher DiplomIngenieure. VDIN – VDI-Nachrichten. VB – Völkischer Beobachter. Volkswirtschaftliche Zentralstelle für Hochschulstudium und akademisches Berufswesen. Jahresberichte, Berlin. ZaCh – Zeitschrift für angewandte Chemie. ZRhB – Zeitschrift des Reichsbundes der höheren Beamten. ZVDDI – Zeitschrift des Verbandes Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure. Fortgesetzt als TuK. ZVDI – Zeitschrift des Vereins Deutscher Ingenieure.

References2

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2

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