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The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization

University of California Press

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...