The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization
By Alfred Kelly, translator, editor & introduction byUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1987 Alfred Kelly, translator, editor & introduction by
All right reserved.ISBN: 0520061241 Introduction In the two generations before World War I, Germany emerged as Europe's foremost industrial power. The basic facts of increasing industrial output, lengthening railroad lines, urbanization, and rising exports are well known. Behind those facts, in the historical shadows, stand millions of anonymous men and women: the workers who actually put down the railroad ties, hacked out the coal, sewed the shirt collars, printed the books, or carried the bricks that made Germany a great nation. This book contains translated selections from the autobiographies of nineteen of those now-forgotten millions. The thirteen men and six women who speak from these pages afford an intimate firsthand look at how massive social and economic changes are reflected on a personal level in the everyday lives of workers. Although some of these autobiographies are familiar to specialists in German labor history, they are virtually unknown and inaccessible to the broader audience they deserve. My hope is that these translations will prove at once useful, interesting, and entertain-
ing to a wide range of historians, students, and general readers. The purpose of this introduction, which is aimed primarily at those nonspecialists, is to enrich the reading of these autobiographies by placing them in their historical context and by sketching some of the major themes in the secondary literature.
The first question usually asked of workers' autobiographies is: Are they representative of the lives of the working class as a whole?1 In the narrowest sense the answer to this question must
On working-class autobiographies, see Georg Bollenbeck, Zur Theorie und Geschichte der frühen Arbeiterlebenserinnerungen (Kronberg, 1976); Ursula Münchow, Frühe deutsche Arbeiterbiographie (Berlin, 1973); and "Das Bild des Arbeiters in der proletarischen Selbstdarstellung. Zur Bedeutung der frühen Arbeiterbiographie," Weimarer Beiträge 19 (1973): 110–35; Adelbert Koch, "Arbeitermemoiren als sozialwissenschaftliche Erkennmisquelle," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 61 (1929): 128–67; Cecilia A. Trunz, Die Autobiographien von deutschen lndustriearbeitern (diss., Freiburg, 1934); Bernd Witte, "Arbeiterautobiographien. Dokumente sozialen Kampfes oder Abenteuer der Seele," in Arbeiterdichtung. Analysen-Bekenntnisse-Dokumentationen, ed. Österreichische Gesellschaft für Kulturpolitik (Wuppertal, 1973), 37–46; Leo Uhen, Gruppenbewusstsein und informelle Gruppenbildungen bei deutschen Arbeitern im Jahrhundert der lndustrialisierung (Berlin, 1964); Wolfram Fischer, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung. Aufsätze-Studien-Vorträge (Göttingen, 1972), esp. 214–23; Frank Trommler, Sozialistische Literatur in Deutschland. Ein historischer Überblick (Stuttgart, 1976), esp. 339–55; Mary Jo Maynes, "Gender and Class in Working-Class Women's Autobiographies," in German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary History, ed. Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 230–46; Juliane Jacobi-Dittrich, "The Struggle for an Identity: Working-Class Autobiographies by Women in Nineteenth Century Germany," in German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Joeres and Maynes, 321–45; Hermann Bertlein, Jugendleben und soziales Bildungsschicksal (Hannover, 1966) presents sixty autobiographical selections on youthful experiences and education; Wolfgang Emmerich provides a full bibliography of working-class autobiographies, useful biographical sketches of their authors, as well as short selections from the works themselves, in his Anfänge bis 1914, vol. 1 of Proletarische Lebensläufe. Autobiographische Dokumente zur Entstehung der Zweiten Kultur in Deutschland (Hamburg, 1974); Richard Klucsarits and Friedrich G. Kürbisch have collected short excerpts of working women's autobiographies in their Arbeiterinnen kämpfen um ihr Recht. Autobiographische Texte zum Kampf rechtloser und entrechteter "Frauenspersonen" in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Wuppertal, 1975). By way of comparison, see John Burnett, ed., Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working Class People 1820–1920 (Bloomington, Ind. and London, 1974); Margaret Llewelyn Davies, ed., Life As We Have Known It (New York and London, 1975); David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working Class Autobiography (London and New York, 1981); on Russian workers, see Victoria E. Bonnell, ed., The Russian Worker: Life and Labor under the Tsarist Regime (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983). On the genre of autobiography, see Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
be no. Anyone of any class—but particularly the working class—with the time, talent, and ambition to complete an autobiography is almost by definition exceptional. Out of millions of working-class lives we have only about a hundred autobiographies for this period, all but a handful of them by men. (Given the difficulties of defining who is, or still is, a worker, no precise count is possible.) Moreover, at the time that they wrote, some of these men and women had left behind the world of work—if not the working class—and become writers, trade union or party functionaries, or even state officials. There is, then, a gray area where the working-class autobiography meets the proud story of the self-made bourgeois. Only one of the authors (Otto Krille) in this book falls into the latter category. Four others (Franz Osterroth, Franz Rehbein, Ottilie Baader, and Adelheid Popp) had moved into the world of working-class politics and journalism when they wrote—though they still considered themselves part of the working class. As for the other fourteen, they were either still working, retired, or ill when they wrote.
But representativeness is not a single category of analysis. The appropriate questions are: Representative of what? Of a range of industries? Of working conditions? Of wages? Of living conditions? Of family situations? Of regions? To these more precise questions, we may fairly answer: yes, taken as a group, the selections in this book are representative of the wide range of experiences of the working class. We encounter traditional industries and modern industries; wretched working conditions and toler-
able ones; and wages up and down the scale. There are people from all different parts of Germany (and Austria), living in all kinds of housing—both rural and urban—in a variety of family situations. All the "typical" working-class experiences are present in these selections: unemployment, high job turnover, long hours, low wages, grinding drudgery, child labor, crowded housing, alcoholism, sexual abuse, illegitimacy, home work for women, and so on. And in every case the autobiographies put a dramatic personal edge on the statistical reality.
Representative experiences are fairly easy to establish empirically. Determining representative attitudes is another matter. Our authors are acutely conscious of how typical their work and living conditions are, but they usually set themselves apart intellectually. Moritz Bromme, for example, talks about "we enlightened"—in contrast to the inert masses. There is an element of snobbery here, to be sure. Yet there can be no doubt that those who wrote autobiographies were more educated and informed than the vast majority of their fellow workers. The very fact that all but one of the men (Karl Fischer, the oldest) and three of six of the women were class-conscious Social Democrats suggests an unusual degree of awareness, as well as the ability to see beyond their immediate personal situations. Nonetheless, is there any reason to assume that those who are better able to articulate will therefore articulate idiosyncratic attitudes and emotions? Surely, the coal hewers next to Max Lotz, the women sewing collars next to Ottilie Baader, or the threshers choking in dust alongside Franz Rehbein would recognize their own distress in the descriptions of their more articulate neighbors. As individuals, those millions who had similar experiences to our authors are forever mute. If they are to be anything more than anonymous statistical objects, we must allow these few authors to speak for them. In short, there is no more reason to dismiss these autobiographies than there is to dismiss those of the upper classes. All autobiographies are the products of unusual individuals. Lower-class people certainly write less, but the greater uniformity of life imposed by poverty warrants wider generalization from each single work.
Although the genre of workers' autobiographies is rather small, the reader deserves a word of explanation about why these particular selections were chosen. Above all, I have been guided by the desire to provide the greatest possible diversity. Further, I have sought autobiographies that lend themselves to excerption—that is, books with chapters or long passages that can stand on their own. Some authors, who might otherwise merit inclusion, simply eliminate themselves because of the structure of their narratives: these may be either disorganized chronologically or topically, or else too heavily dependent on references to other parts of the text. Interest and liveliness have also been major considerations; given a choice, there is no point in including a dull selection when an exciting one on the same topic is available. When feasible, I have given preference to the more personal narratives and have avoided works whose real center is the party or union. These latter works are significant in their own right, but with their submergence of the individual into the workers' movement, they are only marginally autobiographical. The reasons why someone became politically involved are obviously of great interest; but I prefer to document the development of political consciousness in the more subjective context of individual experience and emotion. In such a context political consciousness reveals its problematic side and appears less an abstract given. Finally, in the case of works by women, there is simply less from which to choose. Were women represented in this book according to their numerical contribution to the genre, there would be only one or two women's selections. I have raised that number to six so that it is more in accord with the proportion of women to men in the work force at any given time. Personal preferences have certainly played their part in the final selections. Nonetheless, I believe that this book provides the reader a good feel for the whole genre of German workers' autobiographies.
I have arranged the translations in chronological order, based roughly on the dates of the central experiences each author is describing. This arrangement (like any other) is somewhat arbitrary, but it does have the advantage of giving the reader a sense of historical development, without obscuring the unevenness
with which historical change is experienced by different individuals.
The Origins of the Autobiographies Given the obstacles they faced, what prompted these workers to write autobiographies? It is not possible to say in every case, but where we do know something of the origin of these works, we usually detect the influence of either Social Democratic or bourgeois-reformist editors. At least initially, progressive members of the middle class were most instrumental in the development and popularization of the whole genre. Pastor Paul Göhre is the key figure here. As a young theological student in 1890, he had worked "under cover" as a common laborer in a Chemnitz machine factory. His widely acclaimed Three Months in a Workshop is one of the finest early descriptions of both factory work procedures and worker attitudes. In a country with little tradition of popular social novels, the book did much to alert the middle class to the psychological, as well as economic, dimensions of the "labor question." As one conservative reviewer remarked, "we were better acquainted with the condition of life of the half savage African tribes than with those of our own people."2 (Only men worked in Göhre's factory; but his book stimulated Minna Wettstein-Adelt, a middle-class Berlin feminist, to describe her experiences among women workers in several Chemnitz factories.)3 In 1891, Göhre was elected secretary of Friedrich Naumann's Evangelical-Social Congress (Evangelisch-Sozialer Kongress ).4 The congress counted among its members prominent cler-
Anthony Oberschall, Empirical Social Research in Germany 1848–1914 (New York, 1965), 81; see Paul Göhre, Three Months in a Workshop: A Practical Study, trans. A. B. Carr (London and New York, 1895).
See Minna Wettstein-Adelt, 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin. Eine practische Studie (Berlin, 1893).
On Göhre, see Oberschall, Empirical Social Research in Germany 1848–1914, 28–30, 80–82; and Horst Kern, Empirische Sozialforschung. Ursprünge, Ansätze, Entwicklungslinien (Munich, 1982), 102–4.
gymen and academics (including Max Weber) who were seeking an alternative to Social Democracy. These men believed that the working classes could be integrated into the modern industrial state by means of enlightened social legislation. One of their main concerns, therefore, was to arm themselves with empirical data about the status of the working class. (Naumann himself would later edit a worker's autobiography.) The congress's aims—and to some degree its membership—overlapped with those of the older Social Policy Association (Verein für Sozialpolitik ), which sponsored pioneering sociological studies. Weber himself, in his massive study of the status of agricultural laborers in eastern Germany, relied heavily on the testimony of country pastors.5 For a man like Göhre, who was sympathetic to Social Democracy and stood on the congress's left wing, interest in the lives of workers was a product of the interaction of Christian activism, progressive liberalism, and the newly emerging discipline of sociology.
The boundary between Social Democracy and the cluster of attitudes just described was fluid, and in 1900 Göhre joined the Social Democratic party (SPD). Three years later he was elected to the Reichstag, where his background aroused the suspicion and contempt of the Social Democratic leader, August Bebel. Intellectuals, Bebel warned, were "marauders who attack the party in the rear."6 Surely Göhre did not mean to be a traitor to Social Democracy when, in 1903, he edited a sizable autobiography by Karl Fischer, a sixty-two-year-old unskilled laborer. Fischer had been moved by Göhre's book to record his own experiences in a variety of industries, including steel and railroads.7 But Göhre's choice of publisher, the new Eugen Diederichs Verlag, was revealing. Diederichs was making a name for himself
Weber's Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland (Leipzig, 1892) appeared as vol. 55 of the Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik; see also Oberschall, Empirical Social Research in Germany 1848–1914, 31.
Bollenbeck, Zur Theorie und Geschichte der frühen Arbeiterlebenserinnerungen, 245.
Ibid., 108.
publishing conservative völkisch material, and in contracting with Göhre he was certainly not intending to advance the cause of Social Democracy. In fact, Diederichs instructed Göhre to de-emphasize Social Democracy in the introduction, and to stress instead "the need to fulfill our social duties."8 The main purpose of the book, in Diederichs's view, was to promote a true folk community (Volksgemeinschaft ) by introducing bourgeois readers to an "unknown folk comrade."9
Diederichs need not have worried. Fischer was a man of patriarchal, preindustrial outlook. When he learned—to his dismay—that Göhre was a member of the SPD, he feared that his book would be turned into a piece of Social Democratic propaganda.10 Actually, the whole book was primitively written ("First I did this, then I did that"), and gave the impression that Fischer was simply a passive victim of his milieu. The reviewers liked the book, seeing in it the genuine voice of a little man struggling against adversity.11 Göhre had clearly succeeded in his aim of informing the bourgeoisie without alarming them with calls for social revolution. He rummaged through Fischer's voluminous manuscript and issued a sequel.12
Emboldened by the success of Fischer's book, Göhre was now on the lookout for more manuscripts. In 1905 he edited the life story of Moritz Bromme, a tubercular woodworker whose articles for Social Democratic newspapers had caught the pastor's eye. Bromme was an avid Social Democrat, but Göhre called the book simply The Autobiography of a Modern Factory Worker . As he admitted frankly in the introduction, the words Social Democrat in
Diederichs is quoted in Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 1890–1933 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 100.
Bollenbeck, Zur Theorie und Geschichte der frühen Arbeiterlebenserinnerungen, 112, 242–43.
Ibid., 110; see also Trommler, Sozialistische Literatur in Deutschland, 342.
Trommler, Sozialistische Literatur in Deutschland, 343–44.
The sequel caused less of a stir. Many probably sympathized with Marie Soslich, who reviewed Fischer's original volume for the Preussische Jahrbücher; Fischer is interesting, she said, but enough is enough! See the review in the Preussische Jahrbücher 114 (1903): 336–38.
the title might scare off bourgeois buyers! Similar concerns were on his (and probably Diederichs's) mind when he followed with two more autobiographies in 1909. Both authors—Franz Rehbein, a north German farm laborer, and Wenzel Holek, a Bohemian brickyard worker—were Social Democrats. But once again Göhre presented their stories as factual reports rather than propaganda. This pretense of objectivity, as well as the high price tags, angered Franz Mehring, the SPD's chief cultural critic. "A book for the bourgeoisie" was his contemptuous label for Holek's autobiography.13 Mehring's judgment reflected a deep-rooted suspicion in Marxist circles that "bourgeois" publishers distorted the true voice of the proletariat by depicting workers as victims of their milieu. Victims of a bad environment (like the characters in naturalist literature, also a target of Mehring's wrath) could only wait passively for the liberating reforms of well-meaning liberals.14 Whatever the merits of this argument, Mehring was at least right about the readership of the autobiographies edited by Göhre: it consisted largely of politicians, professors, students, and pastors.15
In the same spirit, Die Neue Zeit, the SPD's official theoretical organ, also attacked Adolf Levenstein, a factory foreman turned amateur sociologist. From 1907 to 1911, Levenstein conducted a huge opinion survey of workers in the textile, metal, and mining industries. In the eyes of the party, he was an outside meddler, exploiting his connections in the working class. Die Neue Zeit urged workers not to return Levenstein's extensive questionnaire.16 Despite the opposition, Levenstein published the tabulated results of some 5,000 questionnaires, as well as some lengthy selections gleaned from his correspondence with the more articulate workers. Max Weber, who was perhaps slightly jealous, dismissed the ex-foreman as a rank amateur sociologist;
Trommler, Sozialistische Literatur in Deutschland, 346.
Bollenbeck, Zur Theorie und Geschichte der frühen Arbeiterlebenserinnerungen, 11.
Ibid., 248.
Kern, Empirische Sozialforschung, 107.
nonetheless, Levenstein's The Labor Question (1912) is a gold mine of information and is justly considered one of the pioneering works of modern sociological research.17 It was, incidentally, Levenstein who discovered Max Lotz, the extraordinarily gifted coal miner whose story appears in this volume. The Eberhard Frowein Verlag, the publisher of Levenstein's correspondence with workers, saw as its task not the spread of Social Democracy but rather the discovery of hidden talent among the lower classes. By "finding the path into the human soul" on a "psychological basis," the press hoped to "contribute to the understanding of our social conditions."18 Similar sentiments informed the work of other middle-class editors and publishers. In their eyes the autobiographies were "tales of woe" about "victims of the environment."19
As might be expected given their complaints about Göhre and Levenstein, Social Democrats viewed workers' autobiographies as part of the literature of agitation. It was not enough to use them as documentary evidence for socially committed scholarship, as did Göhre, Levenstein, and later Eugen Rosenstock, who published the autobiography of Eugen May, an itinerant turner. Rather, Social Democratic editors were frankly seeking educational and inspirational works by dedicated party people whose conversion to Social Democracy had been the central experience in their lives. Never were these workers presented to the reader as mere victims of the environment. One might call this the "If
See Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der sozialpsychologischen Seite des modernen Grossbetriebes und der psychophysischen Einwirkungen auf die Arbeiter (Munich, 1912); and his Aus der Tiefe. Arbeiterbriefe. Beiträge zur Seelen-Analyse moderner Arbeiter (Berlin, 1909). On Levenstein, see Kern, Empirische Sozialforschung, 106–11; and Oberschall, Empirical Social Research in Germany 1848–1914, 100–106, 131–32. On Weber's critique, see Max Weber, "Zur Methodik sozialpsychologischer Enqueten und ihrer Bearbeitung," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 29 (1909): 949–58.
Trommler, Sozialistische Literatur in Deutschland, 348.
Franz Bergg, Ein Proletarierleben, ed. Nikolaus Welter (Frankfurt, 1913), 9. G. Braun, ed., Im Kampf ums Dasein! Wahrheitsgetreue Lebenserinnerungen eines Mädchens aus dem Volke als Fabrikarbeiterin, Dienstmädchen und Kellnerin (Stuttgart, 1908), 8.
only everyone were as aware as Comrade X!" literature. These works were published by either Dietz or Vorwärts (the two major Social Democratic publishing houses) and were aimed largely at proletarian, rather than bourgeois, readers. Short excerpts often appeared in Social Democratic newspapers. As books, however, they rarely reached their intended working-class audience, attracting at most a few middle-class readers. Among the works in this book, those by Ottilie Baader, Aurelia Roth, and Franz Osterroth are the most notable examples of such Social Democratic agitation. Overall it would be fair to say that the autobiographies had a modest influence on the progressive bourgeoisie but virtually no influence on the working class.
The World of Work For the men and women who speak in these pages, work was the great, overwhelming reality of life. When we say that these people lived during the Industrial Revolution, we may be prone to conjure up images of homogeneous urban masses mindlessly tending machines in huge factories. While there is a tiny kernel of truth to these images, they are for the most part misleading. These autobiographies serve as a useful reminder of how complex and variegated the Industrial Revolution really was. In the lives of actual workers we repeatedly run across the older realities of work—the rural and small-town flavor, the small scale, the personal relations, and the mix of muscle power and craftsmanship. Even a self-styled "modern factory worker," like Moritz Bromme, had deep roots in the past, and the pattern of his life confounds any simple model of radical change during the Industrial Revolution.20
Occupational statistics confirm that the autobiographies do
There is a huge literature on German industrialization. For a general overview, see W. O. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power, 1834–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975); Knut Borchardt, "The Industrial Revolution in Germany, 1700–1914," in The Emergence of Industrial Societies, pt. 1, ed. Carlo M. Cipolla, vol. 4 of The Fontana Economic History of Europe (London and Glasgow, 1973), 76–160; Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning, Die Industrialisierung in Deutschland 1800 bis 1914 (Paderborn, 1973). Of course, German workers were not the only workers in the Reich; see Richard Charles Murphy, Guest Workers in the German Reich: A Polish Community in Wilhelmian Germany (New York, 1984).
give an accurate picture of the world of work. According to the census of 1907, some 72.5 percent (17,836,000) of all those employed in agriculture, industry, and commerce and transportation were classifed as workers (Arbeiter ).21 (The figure does not include the 1,736,000 servants.) Now this seems like a lot of workers in a total population of about 62 million in the Second Reich. But what is really being counted here are wage earners, over 40 percent of whom (7,283,000) were in agriculture. These Landarbeiter made up nearly three-quarters of those employed in the agricultural sector.22 Given the immense regional diversity, generalizations about them are dangerous, but our two agricultural autobiographies (those by Franz Rehbein and Otto, the contract laborer) suggest two salient points. First, especially in the lands east of the Elbe River, landless workers lived in a distinctly premodern relationship with the landowners. Though nominally free, such workers were still subject to the old Servants Code (Gesindeordnung ), which contained numerous feudal vestiges: payments in kind, service obligations, restrictions on mobility, informal employer police powers, and the like. Second, the impact of farm machinery was only just beginning to be felt at the turn of the century. The steam thresher had come to the countryside, but most farm labor was still the human (and animal) muscle work that was little different from previous centuries. Thus, in the daily life of the millions still working on the farm, the Industrial Revolution marked no radical departure from the past.23
Of the remaining 10,553,000 workers counted in the 1907
Gerd Hohorst, Jürgen Kocka, and Gerhard A. Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch. Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs 1870–1914 (Munich, 1975), 67, 69.
Ibid., 67, 70.
On agriculture, see Frieda Wunderlich, Farm Labor in Germany 1810–1945: Its Historical Development within the Framework of Agricultural and Social Policy (Princeton, 1961), 8–27; Borchardt, "The Industrial Revolution in Germany, 1700–1914," 128–29; Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee, eds., The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (London and Sydney, 1986), esp. chaps. 4–6; Robert G. Moeller, ed., Peasants and Lords in Modern Germany: Recent Studies in Agricultural History (Boston, 1986).
census, 1,960,000 were in commerce and transportation and the other 8,593,000 in the industrial sector proper (.which also included mining, construction, and handicrafts).24 Although the number of industrial workers had more than doubled since the 1882 census (population had increased in the period by about one third), the impact of modern industry was uneven geographically. For the Reich as a whole in 1907, 42.8 percent of the population was supported by the industrial sector (up from 32.8 percent in 1882). In Saxony, the old industrial heartland, 59.3 percent depended on the industrial sector; whereas in rural East Prussia the figure was only 20.4 percent.25 Moreover, industry should not automatically be equated with either large firms or large cities. Giant firms predominated only in the mining try, where by 1907 the majority of miners worked for companies employing more than one thousand people. (It's no accident that the miner Max Lotz is one of the few workers to complain about being "just a number.") Elsewhere, the small and medium-sized firms held their own. In the 1907 census, firms with five or fewer employees still accounted for 31.2 percent of the industrial work force. A majority (57.6 percent) worked for firms with fewer than fifty employees, and a mere 4.9 percent for firms with more than one thousand employees.26 City growth was far more spectacular than firm growth, but even as late as 1905 only 19 percent of all Germans (and even of those in the industrial sector, only about one-quarter) lived in cities of over 100,000 in population.27 Industry remained predominantly a rural and small-city
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 67.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 75.
Ibid., 52; Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y., 1978), 180.
phenomenon. And, as the autobiographies reveal, many of those who worked in cities lived on, or maintained contact with, the surrounding countryside, sometimes working part of the year in agriculture.28 To be sure, one was never far from a railroad line, but well into the twentieth century much of Germany looked, sounded, and smelled as it always had.
Nor should increasing mechanization obscure the continuing importance of brute strength. A great deal of traditional heavy labor was scarcely affected by the Industrial Revolution. As one historian has aptly remarked, "A vast amount of wheeling, dragging, hoisting, carrying, lifting, digging, tunneling, draining, trenching, hedging, embarking, blasting, breaking, scouring, sawing, felling, reaping, mowing, picking, sifting, and threshing was done by sheer muscular effort, day in, day out."29 The truth of this observation is brought home to the reader repeatedly in this book. Think only of the rail lines, the symbol of the new age. They were laid out by labor gangs using picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. And, as Max Lotz so poignantly depicts, coal, the fuel of the industrial age, was mined not by power machinery but by sweating hewers and haulers. To the unskilled in particular, work still meant what it always had—exhausting drudgery.
For skilled workers, the impact of industrialization was more complex and differentiated. Some crafts, like the making of wallpaper, hats, buttons, umbrellas, canes, soap, and light fixtures, were displaced by the new technologies and largely disappeared. Others, like the construction trades, were little affected by new machinery; while still others, like shoe making, shifted from production to repair.30 Moreover, new, specialized skills, especially in the metal industry, emerged in response to the need to
Peter N. Stearns, "Adaptation to Industrialization: German Workers as a Test Case," Central European History 3, no. 4 (December 1970): 303–31, esp. 306.
Cited by Burnett, Annals of Labour, 25.
Henning, Die Industrialisierung in Deutschland 1800 bis 1914, 126–32; Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866. Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich, 1983), 214.
produce, maintain, and repair the vast array of industrial machines. Overall, the number of artisans (Handwerker ) actually rose (both absolutely and relative to population) during the Industrial Revolution.31 Of the 8,593,000 industrial workers in 1907, about 4,900,000 were classified as skilled.32 Most of these workers had artisanal skills that had survived the Industrial Revolution either intact or as ancillary processes to machine work.
The survival of some artisanal skills, however, is not the same as the survival of artisanal status. By the end of the nineteenth century, the word Arbeiter was often applied casually to a Handwerker .33 It had not always been so. Traditionally, the artisan was a proudly independent member of the petty bourgeoisie.34 As a young apprentice he could look forward to becoming a journeyman at about age twenty. After two years of traveling around and seeing the world (Wanderjahre ), he could settle down with a real chance of eventually becoming a master with his own shop. Snug within the legally protected monopoly of the guild, the artisan did more than work and run a business—he defended a way of life with all its cliquish traditions and provincial rectitude. The modern world, with its stress on innovation, acquisitiveness, and individuality, was a foreign intrusion. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the craft guilds entered a long period of crisis and decline as they were sucked inexorably into the modern market economy. As fewer and fewer journeymen could realistically aspire to becoming independent masters, large segments of the artisan class slipped into wage dependency. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the craft guilds fought a rearguard action against their perceived enemies—new machinery and industrial freedom (Gewerbefreiheit ). But by about 1860, Gewer -
Henning, Die Industrialisierung in Deutschland 1800 bis 1914, 131–32; Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866, 210–19.
Lutz Niethammer, "Wie wohnten die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?" Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976): 61–134, esp. 112; Moore, Injustice, 180–81.
Bollenbeck, Zur Theorie und Geschichte der friihen Arbeiterlebenserinnerungen, 31.
Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866, 210–19.
befreiheit had triumphed in all the German states. Some informal vestiges of the old guild influence (the pride, the cliquishness, the Wanderjahre ) persisted into the twentieth century.35 Nonetheless, most artisans who came through the Industrial Revolution unscathed had been reduced to skilled workers competing in the free market.
Whatever the industry or skill level, hours were typically long, wages meager, and working conditions unpleasant or unhealthful. None of this was new, of course. In fact, all the evidence suggests that workers' lives were gradually improving during the Second Reich. Moritz Bromme is probably right that few workers of his generation (he was born in 1873) would have put up with the endless drudgery that had been routine for the older generation. In the 1870s, the typical workday outside of agriculture was about twelve hours. Although regulation of hours for adult men was excluded from the social legislation of the 1880s, the length of the workday drifted downward—to about 10 1/2 hours in 1900 and to about 9 1/2 hours in 1913. With a six-day workweek, this trend meant a reduction from a 72-hour week to a 57-hour week over a period of forty years.36 Of course these are averages. Hours for those who worked irregularly or in particular industries (like coal mining) might be shorter; while hours for many workers (especially women—see below) could be much longer.
As the workweek shortened, average wages rose, going from roughly 500 marks yearly in 1871 to roughly 1,100 marks yearly in 1913.37 What this meant in terms of real wages is a matter of dispute. The best recent estimate is that real wages rose by 79 percent in this period, although older studies peg the increase as
Sixteen of the thirty male autobiographers examined in one study had gone on Wanderungen; see Jochen Loreck, Wie man früber Sozialdemokrat wurde. Das Kommunikationsverhalten in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung und die Konzeption der sozialistischen Parteipublizistik durch August Bebel (Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 1977), 133.
Gerhard Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton, 1960), 45.
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 107.
low as 35 percent. There is general agreement that most of the improvement occurred before 1900.38 None of these statistics should be taken too seriously, but the general impression they give is confirmed by the anecdotal evidence of the autobiographies. A safe generalization would be that in the early part of this century a male worker making 12–15 marks per week was at the low end of the scale, one making 20 marks in the middle, and one making 25–35 marks at the high end. (See "A Note about Currencies" in the front of this book.) Skilled workers' wages averaged about one-third higher than those of the unskilled.39 By way of comparison, a breadwinner's income of about 2,000 marks would mark the threshold of the middle class. But, as late as 1912 in Prussia, nearly 40 percent of the population earned (or was dependent on someone earning) fewer than 900 marks yearly, down from 67 percent in 1896.40
Of course, periods of unemployment might drastically reduce yearly wages. While official statistics show relatively low unemployment levels (averaging 2–3 percent) for the Reich, the impressionistic evidence of the autobiographies suggests that these average figures are deceptively low.41 One historian quite sensibly recommends doubling the official rates to get a more reliable picture.42 But the burden was not felt as an average. Some, especially the unskilled and those in construction, were disproportionately affected. Even in a good year, a third of the work force might face significant periods of unemployment.43 With no state unemployment compensation available, it is no surprise that the
Ibid., 107–8; see also the summaries in Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus. Die Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt, 1973), esp. 40, 85.
Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945, 363.
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 106.
Jürgen Kuczynski, Germany, 1800 to the Present Day, vol. 3, pt. 1 of A Short History of Labour Conditions under Industrial Capitalism (London, 1945), 162–64.
Peter N. Stearns, Lives of Labor: Work in a Maturing Industrial Society (New York, 1975), 111, n. 27.
Ibid., 85–117 passim.
fear of losing a job and the depression of looking for work loom so large in many of these autobiographies. Judged by today's standards, the German working class was badly off indeed. But raw wage and unemployment data disguise a complex reality. Families of unskilled workingmen depended on the main breadwinner for only about 75 percent of their total income.44 The rest of the money came in from the earnings of wives and children, the renting of beds to lodgers, and other miscellaneous sources—from the pilfering of coal piles to the sale of surplus garden vegetables. To all of this we must add the intricate informal exchange of goods and services that had always been an integral part of the culture of the poor.
Low wages and unemployment were not the only threats. Poor health often precluded the long, uninterrupted work life that was so essential to any measure of security. Two of our authors (Moritz Bromme and Franz Rehbein) were permanently disabled by their work; while one other (Fritz Pauk) was forced to take up a sedentary trade. Among the others, illness, injury, and fatigue appear as almost constant, unwelcome companions. These laments probably mirror the generally depressed state of health among the working class. Precise interclass comparisons are not easy to make, but the high infant mortality rates among the poorest families are surely indicative of overall health conditions. Of the 2,201 children born into the 268 Munich families studied by Rosa Kempf in 1911, 910 had died—a mortality rate of 41.4 percent. Working mothers had lost more of their children than their hausfrau counterparts (46.4 percent and 38.9 percent, respectively). These figures are probably fairly typical for the period.45 By way of contrast, the mortality rate by age fifteen for
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 112. This figure is probably too high; see the discussion of women workers that follows.
Rosa Kempf, Das Leben der jungen Fabrikmädchen in München (Leipzig, 1911), 218–20; Kempf's book was vol. 135, pt. 2 of the Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik . See the discussions in Sabine Richebächer, Uns fehlt nur eine Kleinigkeit. Deutsche proletarische Frauenbewegung 1890–1914 (Frankfurt, 1982), 72; and Ute Frevert, "The Civilizing Tendency of Hygiene: Working-Class Women under Medical Control in Imperial Germany," in German Women in the Nineteenth Century: A Social History, ed. John C. Fout (New York and London, 1984), 332; see also Hartmut Kaelble, Industrialisation and Social Inequality in 19th-Century Europe, trans. Bruce Little (New York, 1986), 142–44.
the population as a whole during the first decade of the century was about 26.5 percent.46
Poor housing, inadequate diet, and inferior medical care no doubt played their parts here. Yet workers believed that their working conditions were responsible for many of their health problems. Despite the introduction of factory inspection in all of the Reich in 1878, a good deal of work was simply dangerous. Machine accidents in factories and mines, or on farms, could maim or kill; while dust and toxic fumes led to general listlessness, prolonged disability, or early death. At the very least, the endless exhaustion of most work contributed to premature aging. Earning power for a man usually peaked in his thirties. From age forty on—just when a middle-class man would be entering his peak earning years—a workingman was struggling to keep pace, especially if he did piecework. A study of the metal industry, for example, found that in the early years of the century only 5–10 percent of the workers were over fifty.47 Those forced out of work found themselves dependent on the Reich's health, accident, or old-age and disability insurance (enacted 1883, 1884, and 1889, respectively). To be sure, these laws were watersheds of social legislation and protected the individual against destitution in the short run. But long-term disability was another matter; one had to make do with a pension of perhaps one-sixth of average wages: "Too little to live on, too much to die on"—as the saying had it.48 It is a telling fact that almost all workers went on disability
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 33.
Marie Bernays, "Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal des modernen Industriearbeiters," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 35 (1912): 123–76, and 36 (1913): 884–915, esp. 35, 127–33.
Ibid., 36, 914; see also Gerhard A. Ritter, Staat, Arbeiterschaft und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland. Vom Vormärz bis zum Ende der Weimaren Republik (Berlin and Bonn, 1980), 52; and Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 156.
pension, rather than old-age pension, for which one was not eligible until age seventy.49
It is no wonder that working-class families got their children into the work force as soon as possible. Child labor had been an integral part of agricultural society and was also one of the most publicized evils of the early industrial period. The law of 1878 did away with some of the worst abuses: those under twelve (under thirteen after 1891) were banned from mines and factories; juveniles could enter the work force only upon completing their schooling; and their hours were limited. Further restrictions followed in the next generation.50 As the autobiographies clearly reveal, much of this legislation meant little in practice. Parents were desperate for the extra money that children would bring into the household; and children could always earn a few paltry pfennigs in unregulated home-industry jobs or in factories that hid children when the inspectors came. As late as 1903 there were still about 2 million school-age children working.51 By the time they got regular, legal jobs, adolescents were already used to hard work and harbored no illusions about continuing their education. While the children still lived at home, the family assumed that they (especially the daughters) would turn over much of their earnings to the household. 52 In the families studied by Rosa Kempf, daughters brought in 30 percent and sons 13 percent of the total household wages.53 Although the figure for
Henning, Die Industrialisierung in Deutschland 1800 bis 1914, 270; Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power, 233. Workers in the Austrian Empire had no state old-age pensions.a
Kuczynski, A Short History of Labour Conditions under Industrial Capitalism, vol. 3, pt. 1, 170.
Richebächer, Uns fehlt nur eine Kleinigkeit, 49.
Robyn Dasey, "Women's Work and the Family: Women Garment Workers in Berlin and Hamburg before the First World War," in The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee (London, 1981), 228.
Kempf, Das Leben der jungen Fabrikmädchen in München, 124.
daughters is inflated by the nature of the study (Kempf was studying only families with daughters working in factories), the figures do indicate the economic importance of getting adolescents into the work force.
Like child labor, women's labor tends to slip between the neat statistical categories designed for an adult male work world. Despite middle-class (and often working-class) beliefs that women belonged in the home, millions of women were in the labor force. Of the 17,836,000 people classified as "workers" in the 1907 census, 6,422,000 (36.0 percent) were female. The majority (4,254,000) of these were in agriculture. Of the remainder, 605,000 were in commerce and transportation and 1,563,000 in industry. Women represented 18.2 percent of all industrial workers, up from 13.3 percent in 1882. (The change probably reflects an increase in domestic industry, not a massive movement of women into factories.)54 To these numbers we must add 1,265,000 domestic servants and an unknown number of prostitutes (perhaps more than 300,000).55 Still, the picture is incomplete. The census routinely missed countless women who were occupied full-time or part-time at home doing piecework, some of which might have been taken home from a factory (a practice prohibited in 1908). This world of home work is a statistical quagmire. Not only was it seasonal and irregular, but also, both employer and employee had an interest in concealment—the former to save on insurance contributions, the latter to save on taxes.56 And then, there were any number of miscellaneous odd jobs for women: taking beer to a factory at lunch hour, washing dishes, cleaning apartment house corridors, tak-
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 67. On this issue, see Barbara Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent: Women and German Industrialization, 1871–1914 (Westport, Conn. and London, 1985), 17–39.
In 1907, 98.78 percent of domestic servants were females; see Rolf Engelsing, Zur Sozialgeschichte deutscher Mittel- und Unterschichten (Göttingen, 1973), 232, 235–36. On the number of prostitutes, see Richard J. Evans, "Prostitution, State and Society in Imperial Germany," Past and Present, no. 70 (February 1976): 106–29, esp. 108.
Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent, 124–42, esp. 127.
ing care of boarders, or tending a neighbor's children. Moreover, some 70 percent of working women also did all of their own housework—no small task in the absence of modern conveniences!57 Unlike men, women had virtually no free time.
Sex segregation of work tasks—so much a part of agricultural society—carried over in new forms into industrial society. The majority of women worked, as they always had, with cloth, food and drink, and dirt. They made, cleaned, repaired, and ironed clothes; they cooked and served meals; and they cleaned up the messes other people made. In the other great branches of the economy—construction, metals, wood and paper, and mining—males predominated. When women did work alongside men, it was usually as unskilled helpers—packing boxes, stirring vats, filling bottles, fetching and sorting materials, folding papers, and the like.58 Very few women had learned a skilled trade. What little money a family might have saved for an apprenticeship almost always went to the sons. In Rosa Kempf's study, 97 percent of working mothers were unskilled, and only 13 of the 125 children in skilled trades were girls.59 Clearly, these parents did not want to "waste" money and time training a daughter who
Jean H. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton, 1979), 39; Richebächer, Uns fehlt nur eine Kleinigkeit, 297, n. 4.
Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917, 27–45; Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent, esp. 17–39; Rosemary Orthmann, "Labor Force Participation, Life Cycle, and Expenditure Patterns: The Case of Unmarried Female Factory Workers in Berlin (1902)," in German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, eds. Joeres and Maynes, esp. 26–29; John C. Fout, "The Viennese Enquête of 1896 on Working Women," in German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, eds. Joeres and Maynes, 42–60; on the impact of the sewing machine on women's work, see Karin Hausen, "Technical Progress and Women's Labour in the Nineteenth Century: The Social History of the Sewing Machine," in The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing Since 1945, ed. Georg Iggers (New York, 1985), 259–81.
Kempf, Das Leben der jungen Fabrikmädchen in München, 13, 221. Even this small proportion is probably too high—inflated by the selectivity of the survey.
they hoped would make a good marriage and soon be out of the work force.
Many families considered domestic service the best preparation for marriage.60 A good housekeeper might well make the difference between modest dignity and impoverished squalor in the working-class household. However, domestic service was shunned by experienced city women who preferred the higher pay and greater freedom of the factory.61 Well-to-do households usually relied on unmarried girls from the provinces, who quit after a few years to get married. In the meantime these girls were at the complete mercy of their employers. Driven by the whims of an all-too-often tyrannical hausfrau, servants were on the jump fifteen, even eighteen, hours a day for wages that amounted to no more than three to four pfennigs per hour.62 If, in addition, they were fending off unwanted sexual advances from the men of the house, their lives could become a nightmare. There was no easy escape, since servants were not even free laborers in the modern sense. The old Servants Code put almost total power in the hands of the employer. As Doris Viersbeck's autobiography shows, a girl who fell out with her mistress could forfeit wages and be ruined by a bad reference in her workbook. Desperate servant girls were the most likely group to fall into prostitution.63 Yet despite its drawbacks, more women were employed in domestic service than in any other job outside of agriculture;
On domestic service, see Oscar Stillich, Die Frage der weiblichen Dienstboten in Berlin (Berlin and Bern, 1902); Regina Schulte, "Dienstmädchen in herrschaftlichen Haushalt. Zur Genese ihrer Sozialpsychologie," Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte 41 (1978): 879–920; Engelsing, Zur Sozialgeschichte deutscher Mittel- und Untershichten, 225–61.
Wettstein-Adelt describes women who would rather starve than submit to the tyranny of domestic service; see Wettstein-Adelt, 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik- Arbeiterin, 95.
See the tables in Stillich, Die Frage der weiblichen Dienstboten in Berlin, esp. 423–33; servants consistently reported that they worked more hours than their employers said they did.
Richard J. Evans, "Prostitution, State and Society in Imperial Germany," 107–8; former barmaids were also numerous among the ranks of prostitutes.
and domestic service remained the typical transition from rural to urban life for women. In Hamburg, for example, about one-third of all employed women were live-in domestics in the generation before World War I.64 Perhaps as many as one-half of all urban working-class men married women who had at one time been in domestic service.65
Women's wages reflected their subordinate position in the labor market. On average, they earned one-third to one-half less than men. In some trades, like printing, the difference was even greater.66 Skill differentials are only a part of the explanation, for women typically received less even when they did basically the same work as men. The prevailing assumption was that women did not "need" as high a wage: their work was supposed to be supplementary or temporary—to help their family or to tide them over until marriage; and they had fewer expenses, being able to cook, sew, and clean on their own. Since these arguments expressed not only deeply held traditional beliefs, but also the employers' self-interest, they were impervious to empirical evidence. The millions of women supporting themselves or their families could consider themselves lucky if they made ten or twelve marks a week in the early part of this century.67 Those swarms of prostitutes were a grim confirmation of the widespread belief that "a woman can always get by."
Sex distinctions were sharpened by regulation. Middle-class
Dasey, "Women's Work and the Family," 229. In 1900, 12.4 percent of Hamburg households had servants, down from 17.3 percent in 1871; see Engelsing, Zur Sozialgeschichte deutscher Mittel- und Unterschichten, 240.
Peter Stearns estimates (probably conservatively) that at least one-third of urban working-class females had been domestic servants at one time or another; see Stearns, "The Unskilled and Industrialization: A Transformation of Consciousness," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976): 248–82, esp. 260–61.
Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945, 368–69; see also Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent, esp. 41–49.
More than half of working women may actually have been making less than a subsistence wage of nine to ten marks per week; see Richebächer, Uns fehlt nur eine Kleinigkeit, 28.
factory inspectors, striving to protect women and "save" the working-class family, fought to keep unrelated men and women apart on the job. (However, no one said anything about the wide-spread sexual harassment of women by male superiors at work.) Beginning in 1891, the Industrial Code limited women's workdays to eleven hours in industry, assured their lunch breaks (so that they could run home to tend the family), and compelled a four-week leave after births. And the years before World War I witnessed an expansion of restrictions—keeping women out of certain jobs (like underground mining), prohibiting night work, and cutting the workday to ten hours. Care must be taken not to exaggerate the effects of this legislation. As stressed earlier, most women workers were employed in agriculture, home industry, or domestic service—all beyond the reach of factory regulation. Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of industrial legislation (as well as the attitudes that informed it) was probably to reinforce traditional sex roles. To reformers, successful regulation got women out of "men's jobs" and returned them to the home.68
Such attitudes toward women in the work force should not be dismissed as simply reactionary. For the working class, work was rarely the path to the independence and personal fulfillment characteristic of the middle-class professions. On the contrary, work usually equalled body- and soul-destroying drudgery; it was something to be avoided. Most working-class men (and probably women too) felt that it was the height of good sense and decency to subject as few family members as possible to the hardships of work. Accordingly, most women withdrew from full-time work when they married, staying in or returning to the labor force only if absolutely necessary. The better-paid skilled workers were generally able to keep their wives at home and
On protective legislation, see Jean H. Quataert, "A Source Analysis in German Women's History: Factory Inspectors' Reports and the Shaping of Working-Class Lives, 1878–1914," Central European History 16, no. 2 (June 1984): 99–121; also Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917, 39–45; and Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent, 60–81.
preferred to do so as a matter of pride. As Göhre observed, "If a man earns enough, he doesn't let his wife and children go into the works of his own accord."69
However, full-time homemaking was not a realistic choice for many married working-class women. Given the nature of women's work, precise statistics are impossible to come by, but clearly, a majority of wives were in the work force at least some of the time. Rosa Kempf found in Munich that in households where both husband and wife were present, 42.4 percent of the wives were exclusively hausfraus, 16.5 percent worked part-time, and 41.1 percent worked full-time.70 (Of course, some of this work would have been domestic work.) Those who worked part-time contributed 10.3 percent to the total family wages; those who worked full-time, 28.3 percent.71 Families with many children were in a special bind: they needed more money, but it was all the harder for the mother to find extra time. Of course, married women whose husbands were "work-shy," incapacitated, or dead (over one-quarter of the women in Kempf's study) were driven, along with their children, into the work force.72 To judge by the autobiographies, the ideal of working people was a small family with the husband in a steady, skilled job and the wife a homemaker. Any deviation from this ideal (and how few families could measure up!) spelled hardship. But hardship was the reality.73
Göhre, Three Months in a Workshop, 116. A survey of married women in the textile industry revealed that only 10 percent of the women worked because they didn't like housework (which is not to say that they liked the textile work!); see Stearns, "The Unskilled and Industrialization," 254.
Kempf, Das Leben der jungen Fabrikmädchen in München, 13.
Ibid., 124. In contrast, a 1909 survey by the Imperial Statistical Office reported the wife's contribution as 7.7 percent if the husband was unskilled, 3.5 percent if he was skilled; see Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 112; Kempf's figures are probably more realistic.
In Kempf's study, wives who worked full-time had an average of 3.9 children, those who worked part-time 5.0, and those who were exclusively hausfraus 6.l; Kempf, Das Leben der jungen Fabrikmädchen in München, 218–20.
On working wives, see Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917, 37–39; Stearns, "Adaptation to Industrialization," 326–27; Dasey, "Women's Work and the Family," 223–24, 243–44; Frevert, "The Civilizing Tendency of Hygiene," 326–27; Bernays, "Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal des modernen Industriearbeiters," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 36 (1913): 906–9; Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent, 103–23.
Life Outside of Work Any discussion of life outside of work must begin with one overriding reality: after a worker had housed and fed his or her family, there was little money left for anything else. Food alone, at the turn of the century, represented at least one-half of the typical household budget.74 By today's standards, that money did not buy a very interesting diet. If, in Ludwig Feuerbach's famous equation, "You are what you eat," then German workers had traditionally been composed largely of potatoes, dark bread, and beer. Scholars generally agree that diet improved dramatically—in both quantity and variety—during the course of the nineteenth century. Workers were eating increasing amounts of meat (especially pork), white bread, sugar, fruit, fresh vegetables, and milk.75 But even as late as 1910, a male worker might consume several pounds of potatoes and bread daily, washed down by prodigious quantities of beer. Although beer is not the most efficient source of body energy, it does provide a significant number of calories, and it makes a plain, dry diet more palatable. (To subsume beer drinking under the rubric "The Alcohol Problem" would, then, be misleading. It was no accident that working-class drinking, of both beer and spirits, declined as diet improved.)76 On the whole, workers were getting as much nourish-
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 113, 118.
Ibid., 120–21; see also Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg, "Wie ernährten sich die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?" in Arbeiterexistenz im 19. Jahrhundert. Lebensstandard und Lebensgestaltung deutscher Arbeiter und Handwerker, ed. Werner Conze and Ulrich Engelhardt (Stuttgart, 1981), 57–73.
On beer as a food, see James S. Roberts, "Drink and Working-Class Living Standards in Late 19th Century Germany," in Arbeiterexistenz im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Conze and Engelhardt, 74–91, esp. 83–89; and Hans J. Teuteberg and Günter Wiegelmann, Der Wandel der Nahrungsgewohnheiten unter dem Einfluss der Industrialisierung (Göttingen, 1972), 143.
ment for their money as was reasonably possible. Actual famine was a thing of the past, though undernourishment—especially for those doing heavy labor—was still a fact of working-class life.77
The period from 1850 to 1900 may have been an "epoch of nourishment revolution,"78 but there was no equivalent revolution in housing conditions. Housing for the rural poor had always been wretched. Urbanization usually got the animals out of the house, but in other respects marked little improvement. Urban dwellings were both crowded and expensive. Between a fifth and a third of the wages of big-city workers might go for rent. (Only a tiny minority of workers were home owners.)79 For their money, workers were forced to squeeze their families into tiny, usually dismal, apartments. In 1910, 70.5 percent of all apartments in towns of more than 5,000 population had three rooms or fewer.80 With the middle class taking the "big" apartments, most working-class families were getting by with one or two rooms. Crowding was at its worst in Berlin, where in 1905, 74.7 percent of the population lived in one- or two-room apartments. In 1912, 600,000 people (about 30 percent of the population) in the capital city were living five or more to a room.81 This was
Teuteberg and Wiegelmann, Der Wandel der Nahrungsgewohnheiten unter dem Einfluss der Industrialisierung, 141–47. Wettstein-Adelt claimed that the factory women she observed could have eaten much better had they not spent so much money on personal adornment; see Wettstein-Adelt, 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin, 15.
Teuteberg, "Wie ernährten sich die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?" 60.
Niethammer, "Wie wohnten die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?" 80. Lower figures, reflecting the percentage of rent in the total household budget, are found in Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 112. In the industrial city of Bochum, for example, only 5.2 percent of the skilled metalworkers were home owners in 1880; see David F. Crew, Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860–1914 (New York, 1979), 173. On housing in the Ruhr, see S. H. F. Hickey, Workers in Imperial Germany: The Miners of the Ruhr (Oxford, 1985), 36–69; for a European-wide perspective, see Kaelble, Industrialisation and Social Inequality in 19th-Century Europe, 105–27.
Niethammer, "Wie wohnten die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?" 96.
Ibid., 87, 90.
cramped enough under the best of circumstances. When "home" doubled as a workplace—as it often did for women—beds, chairs, and stoves competed for space with worktables and sewing machines. Dora Landé, who investigated the living conditions of Berlin machine workers for the Social Policy Association, described the proletarian apartment at its worst:
A living room and tiny kitchen: with two adults and three children, that means that everyone sleeps in the same room, all three children in one bed. This is very much the norm in proletarian circles, for the single room of such an apartment has space for, at most, three beds, one sofa, one table, and one wardrobe.82
Nor did such apartments have the amenities that were increasingly common for the middle class. Even as late as 1910, flush toilets were a luxury, the shared outhouse being the rule.83 Electricity too was a rarity; and only about 15 percent of workers had gas for cooking, lighting, or heating.84 Most got by with petroleum and wood. Even the better apartments were likely to be dark, damp, smoky, and either too hot or too cold. As Wettstein-Adelt remarked, if one accepts the premise, "Tell me where you live and I'll tell you who you are," then most of the workers could not even be called human.85 It is no wonder that workers wanted to escape—to the tavern, to a suburban garden plot, or for a walk in the country. One of Levenstein's most consistent findings was that workers dreamed of owning a little house in the country.86 In small industrial towns some workers were in fact able to live in outlying villages, where they could maintain settled, semi-rural habits.87 But, especially in big cities, the usual pattern was
Bernays, "Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal des modernen Industriearbeiters," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 36 (1913): 901.
Kuczynski, A Short History of Labour Conditions under Industrial Capitalism, vol. 3, pt. 1, 169.
Ashok V. Desai, Real Wages in Germany, 1871–1913 (Oxford, 1968), 27. Heating and lighting accounted for 4–5 percent of the total household budget; see Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 113.
Wettstein-Adelt, 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin, 56.
Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage, esp. 115, 123, 130, 187, 198, 212–13.
Bernays, "Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal des modernen Industriearbeiters," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 36 (1913): 900–901.
a restless, almost frenetic, housing turnover, as workers moved into, out of, and around town—responding to job changes, family additions, or some deep inner need for variety. In some German cities the majority of apartments turned over every year.88
Middle-class social reformers, like Paul Göhre, were alarmed by proletarian housing conditions. They feared that crowding, excessive mobility, and particularly, the frequent presence of lodgers would lead to the breakdown of the family.89 At any given time, 10–20 percent of all households in the Reich had lodgers. The proportion was higher in the working class, particularly among hard-pressed families with children. In these families, lodgers were a significant source of extra income.90 Most lodgers were single men, who rented just a bed, sometimes sharing it with a family member.91 Under the best of circumstances they were taken into the bosom of the family and developed an avuncular relationship with the children. More often, they were a disruptive element, impinging on privacy and even molesting female family members. However undesirable such a family situation might have been, the fears of reformers were probably misdirected. There never was a golden age of the family, such as they envisioned. And even well-intentioned outside observers
Niethammer estimates that some families spent 10–15 percent of their rent budget on moving expenses alone; see his "Wie wohnten die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?" 114, and, for a table of apartment turnover in selected cities, 83.
Göhre, Three Months in a Workshop, 37–38; Hickey, Workers in Imperial Germany, 48–51.
Niethammer, "Wie wohnten die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?", esp. 116, 118; see also Franz J. Brüggemeier and Lutz Niethammer, "Schlafgänger, Schnapskasinos und schwerindustrielle Kolonie. Aspekte der Arbeiterwohnungsfrage im Ruhrgebiet vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg," in Fabrik. Familie. Feierabend. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte des Alltags im Industriezeitalter, ed. Jürgen Reulecke and Wolfhard Weber (Wuppertal, 1978), 152–53; on income from lodgers, see Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 112.
Female lodgers were not unheard-of. Wettstein-Adelt describes the wretched accommodations offered to her in response to a newspaper ad seeking a place to sleep in Chemnitz; see her 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin, 61–65.
were prone to misinterpret proletarian habits by applying idealized middle-class values.92
Viewed in historical context, the proletarian family was remarkably resilient. In fact, what the middle class viewed as family breakdown and rampant immorality are probably better understood as signs of continuity. Göhre complained that no worker over seventeen in Chemnitz was chaste. He pointed a finger at the dance halls.93 What he may not have known was that chastity in the countryside had been just as rare. Ländlich, Schändlich (rural and shameful) was the old saying in the country, where sexual relations among the young had always been casual, especially at festival times. Peasant couples frequently did not marry until the young woman was pregnant or had already given birth. As the autobiographies suggest, the same pattern carried over into the industrial age. Almost every physically presentable girl had her Schatz (sweetheart), who gave her presents, accompanied her on walks and to dance halls, and not infrequently got her pregnant. Marriage usually followed, but not always quickly or even to the baby's father. Among factory workers there was no stigma attached to illegitimacy, but there is no clear evidence that illegitimacy was on the increase. For most workers, marriage and children remained the norm.94
The quality of those marriages is, of course, hard to judge. By
Niethammer, "Wie wohnten die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?", esp. 122–28; see also James H. Jackson, "Overcrowding and Family Life: Working-Class Families and the Housing Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century Duisburg," in The German Family, ed. Evans and Lee, 194–200.
Göhre, Three Months in a Workshop, 202–3.
See the fundamental article by R. P. Neuman, "Industrialization and Sexual Behavior: Some Aspects of Working-Class Life in Imperial Germany," in Modern European Social History, ed. Robert J. Bezucha (Lexington, Mass., Toronto, London, 1972), 270–98, esp. 281–85; also Bernays, "Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal des modernen Industriearbeiters," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 36 (1913): 902–6. The illegitimacy rate (for live births) in the Reich was 8.5 percent in 1901, 8.4 percent in 1906, and 9.1 percent in 1912; see Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 36; for an early discussion of working-class illegitimacy, see Othmar Spann, "Die geschlechtlich-sittlichen Verhältnisse im Dienstboten- und Arbeiterinnen-stande, gemessen an der Erscheinung der unehelichen Geburten," Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft 7 (1904): 287–303.
middle-class standards, the expectations were minimal. From the matter-of-fact descriptions in the autobiographies, one gets little sense that workers married in quest of romantic love or personal fulfillment.95 Given the pressures of poverty, those goals would have been virtually unrealizable. Wettstein-Adelt was probably right when she observed: "In families that are either childless or blessed with one or two children, conditions are usually simple, but orderly, and marital harmony prevails. Where there are a lot of children, there is usually strife, distress, filth, and misery; and unfaithfulness on the husband's part is much more common."96 A large family, Wettstein-Adelt lamented, forced the wife to neglect the family and enter the work force full-time.97 The autobiographies provide a wealth of testimony about childhood hardship. But as they look back, most authors pay tribute to the struggling proletarian mother, who held the family together on a few marks a week and by sheer force of will.98
How successful a wife was at keeping the family together often depended on how much time and money her husband spent at the tavern. There appear to be no drunkards among our authors (writing an autobiography almost assumes sobriety), but stories of the horrors of alcohol fill these pages. Leaving aside barmaids (who were "professional drinkers"), alcohol abuse seems to have been largely a male problem. Like Frau Hoffmann, many a wife met her husband at work on payday in order to get her hands on the week's wages before he squandered them in the tavern. Just how many men drank up their wages is hard to say. Certainly, the potential for alcohol abuse was interwoven with the whole
Koch, "Arbeitermemoiren als sozialwissenschaftliches Erkenntnisquelle," 151.
Wettstein-Adelt, 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin, 42.
Ibid., 43–44.
Münchow, Frühe deutsche Arbeiterbiographie, 117.
fabric of working-class leisure. Taverns were refuges from home and work, social centers for card playing and gossip, resting places on Sunday walks, as well as the sites of club meetings and political rallies. Studies of workers' budgets at the turn of the century suggest that, on average, at least 5 percent of expenditures went for alcohol.99 Göhre, who was something of a moralist, observed that being drunk now and then was not held against a man.100 Yet Levenstein found only a small minority of workers who admitted that alcohol use was "indispensable" to them (5.6 percent of metalworkers, 5.9 percent of textile workers, but 19.7 percent of miners). Most workers claimed to prefer the pleasures of the family to those of the tavern.101 A good deal of drinking is probably being covered up in these answers, but it is important to keep the whole alcohol problem in perspective. Beer and schnapps were a part of the diet, and they were often consumed out of desperation as stimulants (or rather, covers for exhaustion) on the job. With the improvements in diet in mature industrial society, alcohol consumption (especially of schnapps) was actually falling.102
Clearly, the overwhelming majority of workers looked forward to Sunday, not as a day of drunken excess, but as a relief from the tyranny of work. For someone deprived of open spaces, sunlight, and good air, a country Spaziergang (walk) was the most tempting Sunday recreation. A Berlin mechanic spoke for many when he said, "I'd like to go walking all day the way the rich people do."103 Fortunately, woods and fields were only a streetcar's ride away for most city workers. A garden plot on the edge of town
James S. Roberts, "Drink and Working-Class Living Standards in Late 19th Century Germany," 77; Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 118; on drinking in general, see James S. Roberts, Drink, Temperance, and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Boston, 1984).
Göhre, Three Months in a Workshop, 199.
Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage, 257, 269, 281, and 247–82 passim.
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 121.
Bernays, "Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal des modernen Industriearbeiters," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 36 (1913): 911; see also Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage, 354–81.
might also provide a little contact with nature, as well as a few welcome fresh vegetables. Young single workers were more likely to seek simple merrymaking, frequenting dance joints or cheap concert halls (Tingeltangel in the inimitable original) with their sweethearts.104 Of course, at its worst, Sunday entertainment could degenerate into a tour of all the local taverns. But the German penchant for organizing clubs and associations ensured an abundance of wholesome entertainments—at least for men; women had little time to join in the fun. For the athletic, every town had its soccer, bowling, gymnastics, and (from the 1890s) bicycling clubs. There were choirs and bands for every taste and talent. And the intellectually inclined could choose (at least in the big cities) from an array of lecture series, extension courses, theater societies, and libraries.
Most of the autobiographers put particular stress on the pleasures of reading. To be sure, we are dealing with the more intellectual strata here (only 5.9 percent of the total males in Levenstein's overly precise but suggestive calculation). This elite was overwhelmingly skilled, urban, and male.105 Still, there is good evidence that reading was an important element of many workers' lives. By the late nineteenth century, illiteracy had virtually disappeared in Germany;106 and relatively cheap books and newspapers were plentiful. As the autobiographies suggest, there were still many poor readers, but even they might plow through trashy novels, popular calendars, or Sunday supplements. All the workers in the Chemnitz factory where Göhre worked read the
For a description of a variety of such places, see Wettstein-Adelt, 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin, 80–87.
Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage, 113. On working-class reading, see Dieter Langewiesche and Klaus Schönhoven, "Arbeiterbibliotheken und Arbeiterlektüre im Wilhelminischen Deutschland," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976): 134–204; see also Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 127–30.
Of Prussian newlyweds in 1897, only 0.75 percent of the men and 1.25 percent of the women were classified as illiterates; see Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 166.
newspaper, even though only 3–4 percent of them were, in Gohre'Göhre's judgment, intellectually aware.107 The great majority of Levenstein's respondents claimed to be book readers. Their reading lists (even allowing for some bragging) are impressive tributes to self-education. Authors like Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Maupassant, Zola, Bellamy, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Hauptmann turn up repeatedly on the fiction side.108 August Bebel's Woman and Socialism (1879) was by far the most popular nonfiction book. There was also considerable interest in science (especially evolutionary theory), popular history, and anticlerical works. But party and union librarians routinely complained that workers showed little interest in serious political and economic works. Lassalle's speeches and Engels's Origin of the Family (1884) were reasonably popular, but even serious readers shied away from Marx. Clearly, the majority of reading was light reading of a kind hardly distinguishable from middle-class light reading. Most workers used their precious spare time to relax; a minority to better themselves; and only a tiny elite to increase their political awareness.109
Class Consciousness The majority of authors in this book were class-conscious Social Democrats. For some of them the very writing of an autobiography was a political act, and their conversion to Social Democracy forms the intellectual and spiritual center of their story. Like the authors of religious autobiographies, they see their life teleologically, and they judge their preconversion years solely in relation to their present consciousness.110 Of course, these men and
Göhre, Three Months in a Workshop, 113.
Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage, 382–403.
See Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, 127–30.
Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, 95–98.
women were far more politically aware than their fellow workers. But to judge by election returns, there were millions who shared their convictions. From a tiny base of 3.2 percent of the electorate (males over 25) in the first Reichstag election of 1871, the Social Democratic party proved itself an increasingly successful vote-getter. In 1890, the SPD emerged from the twilight of illegality as the largest single party in the Reich. And in the election of 1912, the last before World War I, the party garnered some 4,250,000 votes, 34.5 percent of the total (more than double that of its nearest competitor, the Catholic Center party).111 Some of these votes surely came from middle-class sympathizers, but there can be no doubt that the vast majority of male industrial workers considered themselves Social Democrats—at least on election day. For most workers, the development of political consciousness was tantamount to a conversion to Social Democracy.
Impressive as these election statistics are, they should not be taken as signs of a widespread, deep, or sophisticated commitment to Social Democracy. Actual party membership (a rough indicator of strength of commitment)—though growing—was only a fraction of vote totals, and overwhelmingly male.112 Even among those 970,112 party members (in 1912), the rough-and-ready intellectual awareness characteristic of the autobiographers was confined to a minority. (Recall Göhre's and Levenstein's sobering assessments of intellectual awareness.) Those frequent complaints in the autobiographies about the ignorance and lethargy of the masses are probably well-founded.
None of this should be surprising. As is abundantly clear in the autobiographies, the obstacles on the road to class consciousness were formidable, even for the intelligent and ambitious. Those in power in Imperial Germany tried every means at their disposal—from outright suppression to the subtle lure of social
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 173–75, 179.
Werner Thönnessen, The Emancipation of Women: The Rise and Decline of theWomen's Movement in German Social Democracy 1863–1933, trans. Joris de Bres (Glasgow, 1973), 116.
welfare—to contain the growth of Social Democracy. From an early age, children learned in school that Social Democrats sought to deprive honest people of the fruits of their labor, while rewarding the lazy and shiftless. Like school, the military (to which all young men were subject) also provided the state an opportunity to inoculate its citizens against the "inner enemy." Kaiser Wilhelm told a group of recruits in 1891 that they might have to "shoot down {their} own relatives, brothers, even parents," should Social Democracy threaten public order. No Social Democratic literature was permitted in the barracks; soldiers were barred from taverns frequented by Social Democrats; and vocal Social Democrats were isolated from their peers and tormented into submission.113 (With pardonable exaggeration, one might characterize the workhouse described by Ernst Schuchardt as the ideal of upper-class domination. There the worker is ruled by military discipline suffused with religious piety.) Despite its rigors, army service was for many men a welcome interruption in a dull life. Their selectively retained fond memories were psychological anchors in the existing order. But even when "free" and in the world of work, Social Democrats were still subject to harassment by employers, who were likely to regard Social Democracy as an economic pipe dream, contrary to human nature. Zealous agitators at the workplace could easily find themselves demoted, fired, and even blacklisted.
Hatred of Social Democracy ran deepest in rural areas, where millions still worked, lived, or at least had family connections or childhood memories. Peasants were generally suspicious of outsiders—especially, well-read and critically minded ones. As Fritz Pauk recalls of his rural childhood, the call "The Social Democrats are coming, was enough to send him scurrying under the bed to hide. Moreover, the enduring powers of traditional institutions greatly inhibited Social Democratic organizational efforts in rural areas.114 Few urban workers attended church, but in the
Ritter, Staat, Arbeiterschaft und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland, 30, 31–33.
On this issue, see Jens Flemming, "Landarbeiter zwischen Gewerkschaften und 'Werksgemeinschaft.' Zum Verhältnis von Agrarunternehmern und Landarbeiterbewegung im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 14 (1974): 351–418, esp. 351–56.
country, where the clergy was still influential, village pastors and priests condemn, ed Social Democrats as godless outside agitators. In town the worker was at least unconstrained at the ballot box; whereas those in the semibondage of estate labor voted under the overseer's watchful eyes (as Otto, the contract laborer, describes). Many workers with rural backgrounds internalized these negative images and were often astonished by their first contact with committed Social Democrats. Instead of the raving lunatics of their childhood fantasies, they encountered reasonable and decorous people who actually embodied many of the best "bourgeois" virtues.
Institutions were not the only forces constraining Social Democracy. Politically inclined men often faced vehement opposition from the women in their lives. A study of thirty-three Social Democratic autobiographers has revealed that not a single author was supported by his (or in three cases, her) mother in the decision to join the party. Wives usually reacted just as negatively.115 There were, of course, Social Democratic women, and their numbers were increasing in the last years before World War I. (Until 1908 women were legally barred from full membership in any party, and even the most progressive men were still ambivalent about yielding any real power to women.) By 1914 there were almost 175,000 female party members, about 16 percent of the total.116 But, as the party leadership realized, most of these women were the nonworking wives of highly committed male comrades. An independent decision by a woman to join the party was rare.117 Indeed, as Wettstein-Adelt pointed out, it was even
Loreck, Wie man früher Sozialdemokrat wurde, 238–39.
Thönnessen, Emancipation of Women, 116.
See Richard J. Evans, "Politics and the Family: Social Democracy and the Working-Class Family in Theory and Practice Before 1914," in The German Family, ed. Evans and Lee, 258–88.
rare for a woman to call herself a Social Democrat out of real personal conviction.118 Social Democratic women like Ottilie Baader and Adelheid Popp, both of whom achieved modest distinction, were unusual exceptions.
There were some immediate and practical reasons for women's greater conservatism and caution. Women were responsible for the tight family budget, and in a larger sense saw themselves as protectors of the family. They viewed party activity as a costly and risky threat. Why spend money on books, newspapers, or membership dues when the children need new shoes? And why risk being fired and impoverishing the family for a distant and perhaps unattainable goal? These are certainly fair questions, but the attitudes revealed in them run deeper than everyday pragmatism. The very structure of women's work tended to ingrain political passivity by narrowing and personalizing their views of economic relationships. If they did piecework at home, as was so often the case, they were isolated within a system that engendered self-competition and self-reproach: the harder I work, the more I make—it's all up to me! Unlike men, women had few opportunities at work or off work to exchange critical views, meet well-traveled outsiders, organize to define and defend their interests, or envision long-range alternatives to the present. Even in factories, where solidarity was physically easier, their greater vulnerability to sexual exploitation and personal favoritism bred docility. And after work, when the men might go to the tavern to talk politics, or just to grumble, women had to rush home.119
Women in domestic service were not only isolated, they were also likely to absorb a heavy dose of bourgeois values. Far from home and torn from their own families, servants sought acceptance into the bosom of their employer's household. Though usually rebuffed, they could at least pride themselves on their in-
Wettstein-Adelt, 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin, 71.
Christian labor organizations, with their more traditional appeals, had more success organizing women; see Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent, 161–77.
timate knowledge of, and ability to imitate, the habits and prejudices of their social betters. By all accounts, there was widespread misery and dissatisfaction among servant girls. However, the patriarchal system in which they lived and worked deflected their criticism onto the personal shortcomings of the individual employer, while obscuring the systemic causes of their plight. Rich and poor appeared to them as fixed categories; one could only hope to work for a decent rich person. Servants defused their anger in lonely crying fits, gossip, and frequent job changes. Their only alternative reality was an escape into the fantasy world of dime novels. In a typical such novel—aimed expressly at servant girls—the master of the house would expel his evil wife and throw himself into the arms of the pure-hearted servant girl.120 Equality (Die Gleichheit ), the Social Democratic women's magazine, routinely condemned these enormously popular books as reactionary fairy tales.121 But it was a losing battle. Servants were hard to reach and virtually impossible to organize politically. When they left service to marry, as most of them did, these young women carried their primitive political understanding into millions of working-class households. There can be little doubt that they acted as a brake on the development of Social Democracy.
Limited political awareness or even passivity (of either sex) should not be equated with contentment or total identification with the upper classes. Official statistics indicate that labor unrest was growing after 1900. By 1913, the major trade unions counted about 3 million members, 85 percent of them in the Social Democratically oriented Free Trade Unions.122 Work stoppage peaked in 1905 with the involvement of over half a million workers and the loss of over 7 million man-days of work. Thereafter, union leaders were more cautious with their treasuries in the face of well-organized employers; but the rising number of
Schulte, "Dienstmädchen im herrschaftlichen Haushalt," 908–9.
Richebächer, Uns fehlt nur eine Kleinigkeit, 115–18.
Hohorst, Kocka, and Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 136.
peaceful actions (short of work stoppages) continued to reflect discontent.123
And these statistics are far from the whole story. Discontent and protest are more likely to show up in disguised form. They may be expressed pathologically in, say, drunkenness, depression, wife beating, or crime.124 Or, more commonly, they may appear as attempts to control one's fate at the workplace. The majority of workers, quite understandably, disliked their work.125 It was tiring, often monotonous, and in larger firms workers were subjected to degrading control numbers and fines, and encumbered by a host of petty regulations. High absenteeism (especially "blue Mondays"), a typically slower work pace at the beginning and end of the week, and the casual waste of company materials may reasonably be interpreted as expressions of protest.126
More dramatic was the high job-turnover rate—a fact of working-class life that leaps from the pages of virtually all the autobiographies. There is more here than just the vestigial wanderlust of the skilled artisan. The unskilled moved too, not just from shop to shop (like the skilled), but from one industry to another. Some workers moved around in search of better pay and conditions or a more congenial foreman; some were responding
Ibid., 132–33; see also Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 29–32.
On the question of disguised militancy, see Dick Geary, "Identifying Militancy: The Assessment of Working-Class Attitudes Towards State and Society," in The German Working Class 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life, ed. Richard J. Evans (London, 1982), 220–46; also Klaus Tenfelde, "The Herne Riots of 1899," in The Social History of Politics, ed. Iggers, 282–312.
Levenstein found that only 15.2 percent of miners, 7.1 percent of textile workers, and 17 percent of metalworkers liked their work; see his Die Arbeiterfrage, 61, 68, 75.
Bernays, "Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal des modernen Industriearbeiters," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 35 (1912): 172–76; Wettstein-Adelt, 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin, 22–23; Hickey, Workers in Imperial Germany, 137–38.
to boredom or changing family needs. But reading between the lines of the autobiographies, one senses that these were often superficial reasons. Job switches often go unexplained, as though mobility is just taken for granted. Workers, even the more ignorant ones, seemed to sense that the only real freedom they could exercise in the free market system was the freedom to move around. Overall, the extreme mobility probably slowed the growth of Social Democracy by defusing individual anger and hampering organizational efforts.127
On the other hand, there were obviously powerful economic and social forces promoting the development of class consciousness. One of the great advantages of the autobiographies is that they provide a useful corrective to the widespread tendency to slide into abstractions in discussing the origins of class consciousness. When we listen to real workers—as distinct from middleclass theoreticians—talk about the origins of their class consciousness, what strikes us is the role they assign to the power of the spoken and written word. Revelations about the roots of exploitation and the liberating possibilities of Social Democracy are usually the immediate results of personal contact and pamphlet reading. To be sure, structural determinants are what make an individual receptive; no amount of persuasion could have converted a sixteenth-century peasant to Social Democracy. But the autobiographies do expose the problematic nature of structural determinants. Important concepts like mechanization and the division of labor—both central to the discussion of class consciousness since Marx—just don't come to life in the autobiographies.128 As stressed earlier, only a minority of workers actually did stereotypical factory work; and by no means all of them found it alienating. Some people preferred the anonymity of large
Stearns, "Adaptation to Industrialization," 327–29; Bernays, "Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal des modernen Industriearbeiters," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 36 (1913): 884–900. It is possible that the autobiographies give a somewhat exaggerated impression of mobility; people who have done and seen more are probably more likely to write an autobiography.
Uhen, Gruppenbewusstsein, 52–53.
firms and liked the hum of machinery.129 As Göhre showed, there were dozens of informal ways of preserving individuality, teamwork, and personal relationships within the modern plant. Printers and cigar makers, probably the most class-conscious of all workers, were by no means the most modern of workers. What they had in common was a subculture centered on the word. Printers spent their day making and reading words. Cigar makers, whose work could be done quietly, entertained themselves by talking or having someone read aloud to them as they worked. General correlations (e.g., that the strength of Social Democracy varied with the size of the industrial sector) obscure the meaning of Social Democracy to the individual worker. In his (or more rarely, her) eyes, he was responding to persuasion, not reacting mechanically to his place in the economy. And in his eyes, Social Democracy was not just another party, not just a program appropriate to his class position; it was an emotional revelation.
Several of the workers in this book (notably Max Lotz, Wenzel Holek, Franz Osterroth, and Otto Krille) write at length on the context and personal meaning of that revelation. There is no point in repeating their views here, but a few critical generalizations may illuminate the context. The reader will be struck by the obvious religious undercurrents running through discussions of Social Democracy. For many workers, the conversion to Social Democracy had been preceded by the destruction of their traditional religious beliefs. As one worker told Göhre, "Religion—there is no more of that among working men."130 Levenstein did find a minority who believed in God, although it was usually not the Christian God, but rather a God identified with the natural order of the universe.131 The rejection of Christianity usually marked the final emotional break with the dominant values of
Bernays, "Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal des modernen Industriearbeiters," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 35 (1912): 159–71.
Göhre, Three Months in a Workshop, 166. The statement is surely an exaggeration; on the continuing importance of religion in the lives of some workers, see Hickey, Workers in Imperial Germany, 70–108.
Levenstein, Die A rbeiterfrage, 336–53 passim.
society. Social Democracy (the "new gospel," as Krille calls it) rushed into the emotional void left by the rejection of Christianity. In Göhre's apt words, Social Democracy was "a new conception of the world and of life; . . . the logical outcome of materialism and the practical application of the doctrine of a natural order of the universe substituted for that of a moral and divine order."132 To the committed Social Democrat, the party was more than a political organization; it was a spiritual home, promising an entirely new world. A man like Moritz Bromme could live his whole life within the "alternative culture" of Social Democratic organizations.133
The reader may also be struck by the moderation of these men and women. Writing in 1899, Eduard Bernstein, the leader of the revisionist wing of the SPD, remarked that, "the desire of the industrial working classes for socialistic production is for the most part more a matter of assumption than of certainty."134 Likewise, Max Weber saw in the workers' resentments and hopes little to distinguish them from those of the petty bourgeoisie. A peculiarly proletarian consciousness, he argued, was largely the imposition of middle-class theoreticians.135 The autobiographies do offer some support for these views. Like parvenus, the workers parade their knowledge of the best of bourgeois culture from Schiller, to Darwin, to Tolstoy. None seems really familiar with Marx. Their socialism is a grab bag of half-understood propositions from Lassalle's speeches, Engels's Origin of the Family, Bebel's Woman and Socialism, newspaper articles, and popular books
Göhre, Three Months in a Workshop, 108–9.
The phrase "alternative culture" comes from Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (Oxford and New York, 1985). For a survey of the literature on workers' culture, see Gerhard A. Ritter, "Workers' Culture in Imperial Germany: Problems and Points of Departure for Research," Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978): 165–89.
Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, trans. Edith C. Harvey (New York, 1961), 107.
Weber, "Zur Methodik sozialpsychologischer Enqueten und ihrer Bearbeitung," esp. 956–57.
on evolution. There is no coherent economic analysis, little talk of revolution, and only the faintest hint of international solidarity. Most often their main interests are short-term gains and personal improvement; while their calls for future justice and equality seem little more than echoes of radical democracy.136
But it would be a mistake to end on that note. These men and women did have a keen sense that they were being exploited, and they regarded the upper classes with a cold, objective contempt. For reasons good or bad, their rejection of capitalism and the prevailing class system was sincere. The dignity they sought for their children transcended a mere amelioration of present conditions. However vaguely, they envisioned a future where exploitation, selfishness, and cruelty had disappeared. If, in the meantime, they took advantage of the best of the present—whether its literature or its nobler political sentiments—if they fought for a higher wage and a secure old age, then they simply revealed their humanity.
A Word About the Translations Translation is always a problematic craft, but the documents in this book confront the translator with unusual challenges. Few of these men and women are good writers by the standards of the educated classes. Lacking formal education, even the autodidacts among them write a prose that bears some of the marks of the halbgebildeter Mensch (half-cultured person). Their organization is often puzzling, their choice of words odd, their sentences and paragraphs either confusingly long or abruptly short. Most confounding to the translator is an intangible quality of awkward-
On these issues, see also Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, N.J., 1963), esp. 193–211; Moore, Injustice, esp. 208–26; Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, esp. 137–41.
ness, which seems to derive from an unevenness of style and tone. Within a few lines there are disorienting shifts from the colloquial to the overly formal and from High German into regional dialect. Yet there are a fair number of movingly eloquent passages scattered throughout these texts. It is an eloquence that does not just survive awkwardness; it seems, paradoxically, to thrive on awkwardness. In the most arresting passages of these autobiographies there is a directness and richness, born of passion and years of drudgery. Polished prose, written in a mood of reflective detachment, would eviscerate those memorable scenes that so command our attention: Karl Fischer's excavation site, Moritz Bromme's courtroom, and Max Lotz's pit baths, to name but three.
Lamentably, the translation is likely to be least successful where the original is most successful. What is uniquely valuable in these pages is rooted deeply, not only in language, but also in the intangibles of nationality (indeed regionality), historical era, and social class. Of course, awkwardness and eloquence (or even the marriage of the two) may be found in contemporary American English, as well as in the German of eighty years ago. But these qualities occur in different dimensions in the two languages. The search for a truly parallel awkward eloquence is fruitless and quickly degenerates into a parody of the original. Instead I have tried to translate as "innocently" as possible, trusting my first impression—pretending, as it were, that I was listening to the individual speak and had not yet heard everything. The accumulated effect, I would hope, is that the entire selection breathes the spirit of the original, keeping pace with the original, stumbling where it stumbles. To be sure, there is a tendency (I fear inevitably) to flatten the original. For the sake of clarity, I have broken up some overly long paragraphs; and thousands of tiny decisions about wording have, overall, scarred the eloquence and smoothed over the awkwardness. But, with any luck, most of those matchless passages have survived to haunt the reader in English.
I'm afraid that passages of regional dialect (that mine field for the translator) have simply disappeared into the colloquial. To seek equivalents in English dialects would be sheer affectation. What could they possibly be? Cockney for the Berliner? Appalachian for the Swabian? Down East for the Mecklenburger? The translator might flag the dialect with an asterisk, but with no enlargement of meaning to justify defacing the text. Then, too, obscure parts of obsolete tools and machines have a way of metamorphosing into generic blades, levers, or pedals. And regional soups, no doubt as foul-tasting as they are colorfully named, always seem to masquerade in English as "gruel." My hope is that these men and women have not come to sound suspiciously like a contemporary American academic. If nineteen individuals have found distinct voices in these pages, then despite the defects, I may claim some small measure of success.
Continues...Excerpted from The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrializationby Alfred Kelly, translator, editor & introduction by Copyright © 1987 by Alfred Kelly, translator, editor & introduction by. Excerpted by permission.
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