Corporatist Discourse and HeavyIndustry in Wilhelmine Germany:Factory Culture and Employer Politics in the SaarDENNIS SWEENEY

University of Alberta

During the decade before 1914, the central coordinates of factory culture andemployer politics in the heavy industrial Saar entered into a process of transfor-mation. In a marked departure from the familial metaphors and representationslong associated with the paternalist factory regime in this region of coal miningand iron and steel production in southwest Germany, many Saar industrialistsbegan to reimagine work identities and the social relations of factory productionin distinctively corporatist terms. In their industry newspaper, journal publica-tions, and internal reports after the turn of the century, they increasingly referredto a new social aristocracy of labor in the productive economy and a har-monious community of work in the large-scale business enterprise. They alsobegan to link these definitions of work and occupational identity to a largersocial imaginary that articulated a corporatist vision of a world composed ofoccupational estates (Berufsstnde). In this new ideological idiom, Saar em-ployers began to call for the political organization of a wider Occupational Es-tate of Industry and Trade (Gewerbe- und Handelsstand) and the formation ofa corporative state (Stndestaat). Accordingly, the language of Saar employersduring the prewar years became corporatist in a dual sense: it articulated aworldview in a vocabulary that invoked forms of social address, natural hier-archy, and community that seem reminiscent of the old regime corporate order;and it formed the basis of programmatic political aims calling for the direct rep-resentation of economic interests in the realm of party politics and the state.

Until very recently, historians have interpreted the meaning of nineteenth-and twentieth-century corporatist terminology in the context of debates aboutGermanys lack of modernity and the long-term origins of Nazism. Postwar in-

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0010-4175/01/701735 $9.50 2001 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

I would like to thank several friends and colleagues who have helped me develop the arguments inthis essay: Kathleen Canning, Thomas Childers, David Crew, Geoff Eley, William H. Sewell, Jr.,Margaret Somers, Steve Soper, Ron Suny, Markus Reisenleitner, and the anonymous readers andthe editors of this journal.

tellectual historians Fritz Stern and George Mosse, for example, trace corpo-ratist definitions of work and social order to a specifically German tradition ofromantic anti-modernism, consisting of various strains of racial thought,Germanic Christianity, and Volkish nature mysticism: that is, to a much a larg-er cultural-political climate that repudiated the core values of the Enlighten-ment (i.e., reason, progress, freedom, and individualism), rejected modern lib-eral, secular, and industrial civilization, and ultimately helped pave the wayfor the archaic barbarism of National Socialism.1 Similarly, the historical social-science perspectives of the late 1960s and 1970s explain the resonance ofcorporatist ideology well into the twentieth century in terms of the so-calledGerman Sonderweg, or the divergence of German socio-political developmentfrom the normal trajectories of the Western capitalist democracies. In thisinterpretive framework, corporatist representations of social order and calls forthe creation of a Stndestaat are associated with pre-industrial, pre-capitalist,and pre-bourgeois social groups, including backward-looking elites (e.g. aris-tocratic landowners, civil servants, and army officers), artisans, and shopkeep-ers, who were out of step with, and largely hostile toward, the consequences ofrapid economic change.2 In other words, corporatism is identified with the ar-chaic ideological arsenal of the German right, which failed rationally to corre-spond with economic modernization and successfully blocked the advance ofmodern social and political relationships and the healthy arrival of a liberal-democratic, capitalist modernity in Wilhelmine Germany.3

Challenges to the Sonderweg thesis in the 1980s and the more recent histo-riographical focus on the rapid onset of German modernity, however, haveopened up new perspectives on the relationship between economic structuresand right-wing ideology in the early twentieth century. In their critique of theteleologies embedded in the Sonderweg narrative, David Blackbourn and GeoffEley argue that many of the late nineteenth-century authoritarian ideologies inGermany (e.g., radical nationalism, imperialism, or employer paternalism) werebourgeois phenomena, generated not in a bygone feudal era but in the Wil-helmine period itself in response to the very modern imperatives of popularlegitimation and capital accumulation in a rapidly changing industrial society.4More recently, Detlev Peukert has also challenged assumptions about the lackof fit between economic changes and right-wing ideology in Germany in his ef-forts to locate the origins of National Socialism not in archaic cultural-politicaltraditions but in the uncertainties and crisis-prone nature of the process ofmodernization itself. The ensemble of socio-cultural changes associated withthe arrival of modernity, Peukert argues, prompted contemporary observers tosystematize all that was new and to formulate plans for a rationally organizedsocial ordera response inscribed in ideological formations as divergent associalism and fascism.5 Thus, schemes for the rationalization of industrialproduction during the 1920s, according to Peukert, could be assimilated tosocial-democratic conceptions of economic democracy, communist varieties

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of Stakhanovism, or fascist designs for a corporatist works community.6Similarly, Mary Nolans recent study of industrial rationalization in Weimarheavy industry emphasizes not a singular but rather competing visions of moder-nity. In this context, Nolan argues, right-wing employers, engineers, and in-dustrial sociologists associated with the Ruhr-based Dinta (German Institute forTechnical Labor Training) articulated a vision of a rationalized economy in arhetoric that combined the economic and the spiritual, the modern and the ar-chaic and offered both an acceptance of economic modernity and an admi-ration for right-wing militarism and a conservative ideology of leadership.7

This focus on the compatibility of corporatist ideas with industrial moderni-ty constitutes a major historiographical achievement, not least for the way inwhich it challenges the previous emphasis on the backwardness of employerideology in Germany. Nevertheless, it shares with earlier history-of-ideas andsocial-scientific approaches an important analytical convention which mightlimit our understanding of corporatist discourse: the presupposition that lan-guages or ideologies are relatively fixed systems of meaning that (should) re-flect underlying or extra-linguistic economic conditions or social structures.8In the works of Peukert and Nolan, for example, the import of corporatist ide-ology in heavy industry is defined by the extent to which it corresponds withor facilitates the organizational, bureaucratic, and technical imperatives of ad-vanced industrialization. A residual teleology, therefore, remains at work inthese studies in so far as they assume a generalizable social-structural processtoward industrial modernity against which a variety of ideological trajectoriescan be measured.9 This kind of normative procedure tends to impute an intrin-sic logic to complex socio-cultural formations (in this case German moderni-ty), which then call forth cultural and ideological responses; according toMargaret Somers, it thereby measures the behaviors and expressions of histor-ical actors in specific social settings against an endogenous directionality ora priori definition of rational action.10 Implicitly, then, right-wing corporatismbecomes modern or less modern, rational or less rational, and capitalist or lesscapitalist to the extent that it reflects or responds to the universal material andsocial imperatives intrinsic to the process of capitalist modernization takingplace across western Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries.

While this essay embraces many of the challenges posed by this recent work,it takes a very different approach to the study of corporatist discourse. Draw-ing on the insights of recent work in cultural studies, it examines Saar corpo-ratism neither as a coherent system of ideas operating outside the realm of livedsocial relations nor as an ideological reflection, however mediated, of material-economic changes. Instead, corporatist terms and representations are under-stood here as part of an ideological discoursea historically secured and so-cially organized connotative field of reference which defined a particularindustrial-social order.11 This definition departs from the understandings men-

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tioned above in at least two ways. First, it rests on theories of articulation whichcall into question the assumed semantic fixities and logical coherences of ide-ological discourses over time. The dynamics of articulationunderstood herein the dual sense of expression in language and connection (or linkage) betweenlinguistic elementsinvolve an ongoing and contingent process of struggleand repositioning which takes place within and between discourses.12 Thismeans that ideological discourses cannot be read in terms of a priori assump-tions about their necessary logics of arrangement; rather they are best un-derstood as contingent formations whose connotative references and principlesof articulation are historically variable. In the words of Stuart Hall, therefore,the so-called unity of a discourse is really the articulation of different, dis-tinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they haveno necessary belongingness. From this perspective, rather than identifyingfixed discourses and their semantic unities over time, it makes more sense toexplore how different linguistic elements come, under certain conditions, tocohere together within a discourse and how they do or do not become artic-ulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects.13 Second, thisdefinition of corporatist discourse draws on the radical contextualism of cul-tural studies as a historical practice and thus presupposes that there are nonecessary correspondences or entailed relationships in history between dis-courses, practices, and social forces. Instead, it posits that history is always theproduction of such connections or correspondences.14 In this essay, therefore,the signifying power of corporatist discourse is understood in terms of both itsconnotative resonances and its contingent articulation in and with an evolvingconfiguration of social practices, institutions, and relations.15

This attempt to treat discourses as a socially articulated and contingent fieldsof reference and to question assumptions about entailed linkages between dis-courses and social forces permits a very different understanding of both themeanings and generative context of corporatism in the early twentieth-centurySaar. By contrast with previous historical social-science analyses, which em-phasize the non-correspondence and disjuncture between a pre-modern irra-tional vocabulary and modern capitalist factory relations, this essay stresses thevery fluid articulations between what were novel corporatist terms and repre-sentations, on the one hand, and modern industrial rationalities, institutions,and relations on the other. Indeed, it reveals the simultaneous emergence of, andconstitutive links between, corporatist vocabulary, schemes for workplace ra-tionalization, and new labor policies and occupational organizations in Ger-man heavy industry and politics during the decade before 1914. By contrastwith recent research which treats corporatist ideology as a response to the ma-terial changes associated with industrial modernity, moreover, this essay em-phasizes the productivity of ideological discourses: that is, the ways in whichthe latter helped to constitute the real relations and institutions of the factoryworkplace and became important sites of social struggle. Corporatist discourse

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reoriented factory labor and social policy and employer politics in the Saar pri-marily in response to the class-centered industrial actions and political com-mitments of the socialist and Christian labor movements, which challengedthe familial discourses and institutions of the paternalist factory regime dur-ing the prewar decade. In this sense, Saar corporatism was articulated in effortsto reestablish authoritative definitions of industrial work and social relationsand their associated institutions and practices in the evolving relations of classhegemony in early twentieth-century Germany.16

corporatist discourse in german heavy industry

Corporatist categories and assumptions shaped the theoretical reflection andsocial experience of a diverse range of philosophers, social theorists, state of-ficials, and politicians in central Europe and Germany in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries. They may be found, for example, in the political phi-losophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Adam Mller, and Hegel in the early nine-teenth century. In the period after 1830, Catholic social theoristsincludingFranz von Baader, Bishop Ketteler, and Franz Hitzeembraced corporatistideas about social and political organization as a response to the problems as-sociated with industrial growth. In addition, estatist representations of social or-der were integral to the mid-century social theory of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl,the traditionalist conservatism of Ernst von Gerlach in the 1860s and 1870s,the monarchical socialism of the prominent economist Adolph Wagner, theChristian Socialism of Adolph Stoecker, and the corporative experiments ofBismarck, who in 18801881 attempted to establish a National EconomicCouncil as a counterweight to the Reichstag.17 Indeed, by the eve of 1914, cor-poratist terms and premises shaped the ideological visions of a range of politi-cal and economic interest groups, including the Conservative Party, the Agrar-ian League, Mittelstand and peasant organizations, and, to a certain extent,Catholic social reform associations. Capable of accommodating a wide rangeof signifying practices and programmatic aims, the language of corporatismwas not the preserve of any single social group in Germany; nor did it functionas a single, immutable discursive system. It was a multiaccentual discoursewhich operated as a field of debate, marked by shifts in register, subject todifferent kinds of appropriation by a wide variety of historical actors.18

During the Wilhelmine period, perhaps the most important articulation ofcorporatist discourse came in response to intensifying labor conflict and the lan-guages of class in German politics. The half-decade after the turn of the centu-ry marked a pivotal moment in German labor and class relations, as it witnessedthe dramatic rise of trade unions and labor militancy, the formation of nation-wide employers anti-union organizations, and the growing systematization ofthe weapons of struggle at the workplace, in the form of coordinated measuressuch as region-wide strikes, lockouts, blacklists, and labor exchanges.19 Thesenew forms of labor conflictespecially the efforts of the unionswere artic-

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ulated in and with languages of class and were part of the wider struggle overthe organization of work and the distribution of wealth in Germany.20 Thiswas most obviously the case with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD),which emerged as the second largest party in the Reichstag after the electionsof 1903, and the socialist-affiliated trade unions. The latter effectively centeredtheir social and political identities around the subordinate status of (male) wageearners at the workplace and the inequalities and exploitation intrinsic to in-dustrial capitalism. It was also the case, however, with the conservative andheavily Catholic-influenced Christian labor movement, which, in competitionwith the socialists, forged a class identity within a religious-ecclesiasticalframework and pushed for more limited schemes of social reform.21 Indeed,employers themselves recognized the centrality of class identities and analysisto labor organization and militancy: thus, the chairman of the Central Associa-tion of German Industrialists (CVDI), Axel Bueck, routinely identified allworkers combinations and even social reform associations as class-politicalorganizations. In relation to the labor contract and genuine worker questions,he maintained, there were no differences between the liberal unions, the Chris-tians Trade Unions, and Social Democracy.22

It was in attempts to dissolve the unifying appeals of class and class lan-guages that industrialists and their allies began to elaborate a new social imag-inary that emphasized the central role of industrial-commercial occupations orestates (Berufsstnde) in the life of the German nation. Thus, as early as 1906,editors of various industry publications and important industry spokesmen be-gan calling for protection of the economic interests of the productive estatesas a response to the inroads made by the class-political trade unions and theSPD into what were deemed employer prerogatives at the workplace.23 And es-pecially after 1908, the growing popularity of corporatist vocabulary among in-dustry publicists was unmistakable: key figures such as the Hamburg factoryowner J. A. Menck, the Hamburg banker Max M. Warburg, Chairman of theKrefeld Chamber of Commerce Otto Pieper, Chairman of the DsseldorfChamber of Commerce Otto Brandt, and Saar industry spokesman AlexanderTille began publishing articles and pamphlets that explicitly referred to the im-perative of occupational unity among German employers and elaborated plansfor occupational-political (berufsstands-politische) organizations capable ofrepresenting employer interests. Indeed, such initiativesarticulated in corpo-ratist visions of a social order composed of occupational estatesincreas-ingly came to define the social policy orientation and political strategies of theCVDI from 1908 to 1914.

The most systematic and tireless exponent of corporatist social theory with-in the ranks of German heavy industry was Tille.24 A former university profes-sor of literature, Tille sat on the governing board of the nationalist Pan-GermanLeague, worked as Axel Buecks assistant and later served on the governingcouncil of the CVDI, and became director of the main industrial organizations

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of the Saar in 1903. In a series of essays and booksmost notably his four-volume study of German political economy entitled The Occupational Poli-tics of the Industrial and Commercial Estate (Die Berufsstandspolitik desGewerbe- und Handelsstandes)Tille argued that modern industrial societywas composed of three principle groupings or occupational estates (Berufs-stnde): the estate of agricultural producers, the estate of educated profession-als and officials (Beamtenstand), and the estate of industrial and commercialproducers (Gewerbe- und Handelsstand). These social groups, organized bystrict internal hierarchy, included everyone engaged in their respective areas ofeconomic activity (i.e., agriculture, intellectual labor, and industry and com-merce), from the wealthiest landowner, government official, and employerdown to the lowest paid farmhand, clerk, or wage laborer.25

This was not, however, an atavistic representation of the social world, con-tinuous with pre-industrial schemes of social classification. Most versions ofeighteenth- and early nineteenth-century corporatist vocabulary in the Germanstates articulated a vision of a legally and religiously sanctioned social order offour hereditary estates, comprised of the nobility, clergy, peasantry, and Brg-ertum. According to this scheme, an individuals place in society was deter-mined by birth, official sanction, or ecclesiastical ordination and was rela-tively fixed.26 By contrast, Tilles proposed estates were consequences of recenteconomic growth, ordered along the lines of industry and occupation, and con-stantly evolving or dynamic (dynameokratisch) social forms. In his words,The concept of estate had been transformed; the former hereditary estates hadbeen superseded by the current occupational estates, and the once horizon-tal arrangement of pre-industrial estates (into upper, middle, and lower sociallayers) had given way to vertically aligned Berufsstnde, each encompassingall levels of social status. Indeed, by the Wilhelmine period the feudal conno-tations of the word Stand had largely given way to an entirely different under-standing of Berufsstand as an occupation.27

The changed meanings of estate are particularly evident in the way Tille ac-commodated his corporatist sociology to certain principles of economic liber-alism. An ardent supporter of what he called the liberal societal order, inwhich the freedom of the individual was secured,28 Tille took pains to defendthe freedom of trade and the freedom of the wage contract, by which hemeant the right of employers to set the terms of employment in their business-es without the involvement of the state, social reformers, or independent tradeunions.29 Similarly, he staunchly defended the central features of the liberaleconomy, including private ownership of enterprise, private investment, andcapital accumulation. This general liberal economic framework, according toTille, created the conditions for a dynamic social meritocracy (dynameo-kratische Gesellschaft) because it released the creative capacities of the indi-vidual by offering free room for maneuver to all forces and granted each theright to display his abilities . . . on the field of play.30 Tille celebrated the role

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of competition between individuals and individual achievement or perfor-mance (Leistung) in the realm of productive labor as the principle motor of in-dustrial growth and progress. It was precisely this dynamic economic frame-work and the industrial growth it fostered, he argued, that had created thepresent social order of productive estates.31

In addition, Tilles corporatist social analysis derived from biological theo-ries about human evolution and natural selection. Accordingly, his vision of adynamic society of occupational estates rested on a social Darwinian para-digm that conceived of human relations in terms of an ongoing struggle forexistence, governed by the law of natural selection. Social relations within theoccupational estates, he argued, were determined by the competition betweenbiologically privileged or capable individuals, on the one hand, and thoseless capable, on the other.32 Work was central to this design because it wason the terrain of productive labor that individuals could realize their differentinnate capacities and abilities. The hierarchy between employers and workersin the world of production, therefore, reflected the natural, biological in-equality among individuals. A factory owner, according to Tille, simply pos-sessed more evolved innate capacitiesespecially intellectual facultiesthana day laborer. Under these conditions, therefore, the leading elements in the so-cial order constituted a biologically determined (male) social aristocracy ofability and achievement in the realm of work.33

Tille also framed his understanding of the social aristocracy of work in theproductive economy of occupational estates with reference to contemporaryconcerns and fears about the sexual division of labor and social and biologicalreproduction of the body of the nation (Volkskrper). In his theory of a socialorder of productive estates, Tille counterposed the masculine realm of compe-tition in the productive economy with the male-headed (though largely female)household savings economy, in which the natural meritocracy of mental andphysical attributes arranges itself . . . in a way that subordinates the woman tothe will of the man and the children to the will of both parents. According tothis scheme, the appropriate interaction between the savings economy and theproductive economy would secure the biological reproduction of future labor-ers and promote austere household efficiencies that would produce biological-ly fit husband-fathers capable of competing in the realm of productive la-bor.34 It provided the framework for a meritocratic productive and biologicalorder that would secure favorable conditions for industrial growth and thehealth of the German Volkskrper. In this way, the maintenance of the healthand the cultivation of the innate capabilities of biologically superior male indi-viduals, who comprised the new social aristocracy of work in the social or-der of productive estates, would allegedly improve the economic and biologi-cal prospects of the German Volkskrper in the growing struggle for existencebetween nation-races.35

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industrial work and the social aristocracy in the modern factory

This particular vision of a social order comprised of vertical strata of occupa-tional groupings was closely linked to debates over the organization of work inthe large-scale factory (Grossbetrieb) after the 1890s. It was forged in a largerideological struggle between a wide range of political economists, social re-formers, academic practitioners of the new science of work (Arbeitswis-senschaft), politicians, government officials, industrialists, and trade unionleaders. In particular, Tille drew on the ideas of an emerging cohort of conser-vative economists and academically trained publicists for the capital goods andextractive industries most closely associated with the CVDI.36 Despite theirsometimes divergent methods and theoretical concerns, these right-wing intel-lectuals attempted to reorient the science of political economy (National-konomie) away from what they regarded as the politicized and moralisticclaims about work relations and Sozialpolitikranging from calls for arbitra-tion bodies to official recognition of trade unions to more fully developed so-cial insurance schemesput forward by academic social reformers (the so-called socialists of the chair), socialists, and Christian trade unionists. In theprocess, they turned not to nostalgic visions of a pre-industrial past but to thelatest objective methods and discoveries of the modern social and naturalsciences.37

In the Saar, this new scientific orientation was part of a novel set of responsesto the threat of labor organization and militancy. The longstanding paternalistorganization of work and public life in the region, dominated by the influentialsteel industrialist and Free Conservative politician Karl Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg, had successfully blocked reform efforts and the formation of tradeunions since the 1870s. But in 1903, socialist organizers renewed their attemptsto break into the Kingdom of Stumm: for the first time since 1877, theylaunched a recruitment drive, created a workers secretariat (1904), and beganpublishing their own newspaper, Saarwacht (after 1905). The Christian TradeUnions engineered an even more successful organizing campaign, winning re-cruits among steelworkers for a brief period from 1904 to 1906 and buildinglonger-lasting foundations among the Saar miners. By 1910, 14,007 out of50,802 Saar miners working in the Prussian state-owned coal fields were mem-bers of the Christian Miners Union.38 Private employers in the rest of localheavy industry responded with the formation of the Employers League ofSaar industry in 1904, an anti-strike organization that shared information aboutunion activities, created a spy system to infiltrate union meetings, and circulat-ed blacklists among its members. In addition to these coercive measures, theyresponded with a series of other ideological initiatives. After his arrival in 1903in the wake of Stumms death, Tille built up an impressive public relations ap-

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paratus, including a redesigned industry newspaper, a pamphlet series that pro-vided newspapers with information about Saar industry, two journal series, a li-brary, a newspaper archive, and a Southwest German Business Archive. Theaim of this activity was to represent the interests of Saar employers in the pub-lic sphere and, as part of the national debate, to elaborate a scientific and the-oretical response to the spread of socialism in all its forms.39

This public engagement of local employers and their scientific response tothe class-political claims of the Christian and socialist labor movements andsocial reformers resulted in a fundamental redefinition of work and the factoryworkplace. In an attempt to reject demands for workplace bargaining rights, ar-bitration bodies, and worker control over the conditions of employment, Saaremployers turned to scientific and bio-racial discourse in order to devalue thecontribution of manual laborers, to exalt the position of employer and entre-preneur, and to elaborate a vision of natural inequality in the factory. Depart-ing from previous paternalist claims about the ennobling and moralizing qual-ities of work, therefore, they embraced a new definition of labor after 1900 asthe product of the expenditure and deployment of energy, the physical force(Kraft) variously expressed in nature, machines, and the human body. Univer-salized as a product of energy and inscribed in a scientific discourse concernedwith the physical economy of labor power (Arbeitskraft), however, work wasnot to be confused with mute natural forces on their own: indeed it was deemedpresent only with the creative intervention of the employer or entrepreneur,who gave direction to such simple operations of manual energy, performedby machines, animals, and men.40 In this scheme, the employer was the trulycreative force in the workplace and in society, and the contribution of manu-al workers was becoming increasingly less significant.

This new interest in the physical economy of labor power and the scientificmanagement of bodies signaled the gradual dissolution of the paternalist fac-tory family as a framework for labor policy. The authority of the employer-father as master of the house (Herr im Hause), secured by means of an im-mediate and personal relationship between employer and employee and adisciplinary regime that penalized workers for inappropriate behavior on andoff the job, gave way to a new managerial rationality that defined the industri-al workplace and tasks of the employer in terms of an economic and biologicalcalculus of efficiency.41 The Saar factory after 1900 was increasingly viewedin functional-technocratic terms as the site at which machines and men cameunder direction of the employer. Accordingly, the employers principal task wasnow to assess the physical and mental capacities of workers (Handkrfte) froma productive-economic standpoint. In this way, Saar employers began to em-phasize the functional fit of workers with their assigned tasks in the productionprocess and the role of wages and benefits as incentives in generating produc-tive efficiencies at work. By contrast, therefore, with the work rules of the pa-ternalist model of Stummwhich penalized workers for civil infractions, il-

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licit (i.e., non-marital) cohabitation, and excessive drinking off the jobSaar employers increasingly embraced a logic of efficiency that emphasized thecontractual aspects of employer-employee relations, limited the direct contrac-tual authority of the employer to the workplace, and reconfigured the work re-lationship, wages, and benefits in accordance with the interaction betweeneconomic laws and the function, use and performance of labor power (Hand-kraft).42

This rationality also transformed the moralizing ambitions of paternalist so-cial policy in the leading Saar factories. Previous concerns about the moral andintellectual elevation of the workers estate that were central to the social pro-vision of the paternalist regime (ranging from housing loans to the use of recre-ational facilities), gave way to an abiding interest in the cultivation and preser-vation of the physical capacities of the worker and the physical health andbiological reproduction of the working-class family.43 In order to maintain ahealthy and work-capable (arbeitsfhig) core of employees, therefore, Saarfirms began to provide new health care programs and institutions for employ-ees in the factories, including a wide array of nutritional offerings (canteens,cafeterias, and special dispensaries for mineral water, coffee, tea, milk and di-luted beer), recreational outlets (especially swimming pools), and medical fa-cilities (e.g., medicinal baths, hospitals, and convalescent homes for workers ina condition of reduced labor power).44 Moreover, new programs for wivesand children of workers were createdand existing programs reconfiguredfor the purposes of social hygiene. After 1900, pre- and postnatal medical carefor mothers, household assistance and advice for the wives of workers, sepa-rate factory schools for boys and girls, and recreational programs for childrenall aimed to cultivate the strength of the future generation by attending to thephysical health of the working-class family and by rationalizing and normaliz-ing the gender roles of private life in ways that served the interests of social andbiological reproduction.45

This new scientific-technocratic turn in the discourse of Saar employers wasclosely associated with a particular theory about the nature of occupational for-mation (Stndebildung) and job performance in the modern factory. In an ar-ticle published in the local industry newspaper in 1901, Tille argued that rapidindustrial growth and the attendant use of expensive production methods andcomplicated machinery in German factories since the 1890s had dramaticallyincreased demand for (male) workers of high value (hochwertige Arbeits-krfte). As a result, the dregs of society (i.e., primarily unskilled women andchildren), who worked in factories during the early industrial period, had beenreplaced. Yet this marked only the first stage in a constantly evolving processof social change in the factory. Industrial growth continually fostered demandfor more valued workers and reduced the demand for workers of lesser value(Minderwertige); the attendant rise in wages for the more skilled workers in-creased their opportunities for greater job performance, while the reduction in

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wages for lesser skilled workers continually forced them below the wage ex-istence minimum. The resulting process of occupational evolution, therefore,had produced two distinct categories of manual labor: the skilled industrialworker and the Handlanger (or unskilled day laborer), each caught up in anongoing process of economic and biological competition for survival.46

Accordingly, the new scientific calculus of labor and social policy was de-signed to facilitate this process and to accommodate the needs of the superiorworkers or the social aristocracy among wage earners. It was meant to takeadvantage of the restless dynamic of economic and biological forces and com-petition between workers in order to produce the most efficient and productiveworkers. Thus, in a clear departure from the moralizing ambitions of previousforms of company social provision, Saar employers sought the reformulationof the function of factory welfare institutions as compensation in return forsuperior performance as early as 1908. Increasingly framed within a rhetoricof racial economy, company benefits and welfare programs were redescribedas special advantages offered to the select group of loyal, capable, and pro-ductive (leistungsfhig) workers in an effort to improve their job perfor-mance.47 In this new rationality, company benefits and workplace incentivesbecame the principal means of promoting the prospects of the social aristocra-cy of work in the factory: of cultivating select workers special physical capa-bilities and superior job performance (Leistung), their bodily strength(Krperkraft), stamina, conscientiousness, and their capacity and willingness. . . to subordinate themselves to the larger factory organization.48

In view of its importance to the factory regime, Saar employers set out ac-tively to define and represent the new social aristocracy of industrial labor bymeans of statistical surveys and quantitative measures. In July and November1903, the leading Saar employer organizationsthe League for the Protectionof the Common Economic Interests of the Saar Region, the Southwest GermanAssociation of German Iron and Steel Industrialists, and the Chamber of Com-mercebegan to formulate petitions to the state insurance agency and to cir-culate surveys among their members designed to create a statistical basis forevaluating the different social position of skilled industrial workers and un-skilled day laborers.49 In this way, they constructed a new scheme of classifi-cation which defined the social aristocracy of labor not in terms of a work-ers specific job skills or function in the factory, but rather on the basis of thenumber of years of training (usually one or more years), wage level (1,200 to1,600 marks per year), status in the institutions of company welfare, and a vagueset of physical and mental qualities, such as endurance, attentiveness, consci-entiousness, dexterity, deftness, presence of mind, and consideration.50

In addition, Saar employers began to publicize the new category of an ele-vated social aristocrat and to invent its symbolic forms. In their newspaperand in company brochures, they claimed that the superior skilled workers couldbe distinguished from less capable class of manual workers on the basis of

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their own occupational identity, an occupational consciousness (Standesbe-wusstsein) that was visible in their patterns of social interaction and in their ownself-image. According to local employers, skilled workers tended to socializewith each other in certain clubs, taverns, and community festivities, and theydistinguished themselves from unskilled workers in the choice of occupation-al title. In the steel industry, for example, skilled laborers allegedly preferredthe title foundry man (Httenmann) over worker (Arbeiter). Foundryman, according to the Saar industry newspaper, was a name of honor; it sig-nified pride in work, competence, and respectability and separated the skilledfrom the unskilled laborer, who usually works with a shovel and lacked themoral qualities ascribed to the social aristocrat.51 Moreover, the contrast be-tween the Httenmann and a simple worker was part of an attempt to de-fine a proud consciousness of occupational estate (Berufsstandsbewusstsein)among industrial workers, by invoking the terms and symbols associated withthe traditions of the local mining industry.52 These included newly designeduniforms for the upper stratum of skilled workersmodeled after the minersuniforms and consisting of the familiar black tunic, factory cap with plume, andleather apronwhich were introduced at the Burbach steelworks, the Rchlingsteelworks, and at the Fenner glassworks in 1905, and designed to signify thenewly emergent consciousness of the social aristocrat: When the laborer wearshis work smock with pride, he clings to his occupation and job with a differentkind of passion than he would were he only a member of an undifferentiatedmultitude.53 They also included the new factory festival in Malstatt-Burbach,which was introduced by the Burbach steelworks in 1905 and provided the firstoccasion for the public display of the steelworkers new uniforms.54

Finally, Saar employers centered the exalted identity of the social aristocrataround masculinist conceptions of industrial work and the factory worker. Inthe Saar, nearly all large industrial concerns excluded women from employ-mentexcept for certain glass and ceramics firmsand employers insistedfrom the start that the category of skilled industrial worker could only be ap-plied to adult male workers. Yet because skill in this context was not directlylinked to a particular set of tasks, they constructed this new work identity bylinking assumptions about masculinity with the physicality of industrial work,superior performance, discipline, and obedient behavior. Industrial laborplaced significant physical demands on workers, they maintained; conse-quently only physically strong people can be taken on. The result was that theoutward appearance of the foundry man is very impressive, and the mass ap-pearance of foundry men is considerably different from the starving battal-ions,with which Socialism parades.55 In this rendering, the skilled social aris-tocrat was consciously linked to a masculine image, revealed in the manlylips of disciplined, martial formations of uniformed foundry men. And im-plicitly his masculine qualitiesphysical strength, dexterity, discipline, andobedience to workplace superiorswere counterposed to the femininity of

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the trade unionist, who was physically weak, unskilled, obstreperous, and sus-ceptible to socialism.

company unions and the community of work in the saar factory

The most sustained attempts to cultivate new work identities came with theformation of yellow or company unions (Werkvereine) in the Saar beginningin 1906. Like employers in other German industrial regions after 1905, Saarfactory owners and loyal employees created company unions in order toorganize workers who would agree to reject strikes and membership in strikeorganizations (i.e. socialist, Christian, and liberal unions). The first such or-ganization, the Burbacher Httenverein, was created in late May 1906 at theBurbach steelworks in response to the organizational efforts of the ChristianMetalworkers Union at the plant.56 After the latter launched a strike involving3,000 to 4,000 workersnearly the entire labor force of the steelworksinJune and began to extend their recruitment efforts to other industrial towns, of-ficials at other large factories began to follow suit: company unions were sub-sequently created in 1907 at the Halberg steelworks in Brebach, the Rchlingsteelworks in Vlklingen, the Rchling coking plant in Altenwald, the Vopeliusglassworks in Sulzbach, and finally in 1912 at the Stumm steelworks in Neun-kirchen. By means of coercive measures and incentivesmost notably by link-ing all company benefits and social provision to membership in the unionSaar employers were very effective in organizing their workers in the new anti-strike unions. In 1912, for example, the Burbacher Httenverein numbered4,671 members or 86.5 percent of the total labor force of 5,400 workers. In ad-dition, they created an impressive region-wide movement by linking the unionstogether in the District League of Saar Company Unions in March 1912, whichimmediately became a corporate member of the national League of GermanCompany Unions (Bund deutscher Werkvereine).57

In German historiography, these unions, modeled after similar organizationsin the Ruhr and in Augsburg, are generally understood as paternalist strategiesfor controlling labor, but in the Saar this turn to company unions was part of thegrowing crisis of paternalist hegemony in the regionthe incipient dissolutionof the institutional and discursive coordinates of the Stumm model of work re-lations after 1900.58 This crisis was manifested in the formation of trade unionsand the Employers League of Saar Industry, and thus the centrality of whatcompany union organizer Dr. Karl Rchling called class cleavages at workall of which had rendered the paternalist vision of a familial and personal re-lationship between employer and employee no longer convincing to a major-ity of Saar industrial workers.59 Accordingly, Saar factory owners viewed theWerkvereine as a new organizational and ideological means by which to countersocialist images of the exploited wage earner and the factory as an arena of classstruggle. The principal aim of the company unions was not simply to coerce the

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loyalty and compliance of workers or to seduce them with material advan-tages but to win their active consent to relations of inequality by offering theman alternative conception of the nature of work relations in the modern factory.Referred to as the inner conquest of the labor force by officials of the Rch-ling Steelworks, this project was part of a newly emergent ideological forma-tion which began to displace the paternalist model of work relations.60

Under the leadership of Hermann Rchling, son of the founding director ofthe Rchling steelworks in Vlklingen, Saar company unions set out to forge anew solidaristic unity of entrepreneurship, capital, and labor: that is, a com-munity of work (Arbeitsgemeinschaft or Werksgemeinschaft) in the factory.61The notion of a community of work in the factory was most commonly identi-fied with the research and theoretical writings of Rostock economist RichardEhrenberg, who, along with his student Erich Sperler, helped to create the pro-totypical company unions at the Siemens electro-technical firm in Berlin andthe Krupp steelworks in Essen and to train leaders of the Werkverein movement.The idea of a community of work was based not on the paternalist vision of afactory family, nor on preindustrial understandings of Gemeinschaft, but ratheron scientific and empirical observations of the nature of work and indus-trial organization in the age of machine technology and the large-scale factory.Thus, according to Ehrenberg, the increasingly complex division of labor andthe vast differences in skill, income, and status in the modern industrial enter-prise had given rise to a community of work in which employers and work-ers shared the same interestthe business interest (Geschftsinteresse) ofthe firmrather than to an arena of conflicting or competing interests. Yet, themodern factory, unlike previous forms of craft production, had evolved to meeta vast array of local, regional, and global needs, and therefore demanded farmore complex organization (e.g., in terms of the division of labor and use ofmachine technology) and direction. Consequently, the managerial skills or theintellectual labor of the employer became the decisive motor of factory pro-duction, and strict labor hierarchy became an existential imperative in thecommunity of work of the modern factory.62

By contrast with the paternalist emphasis on the familial relations of the fac-tory family and the employer as provider, therefore, the rhetoric of Saar yel-low union leaders emphasized both the associational and the hierarchical as-pects of a community of work in the factory. Local employers increasinglybegan to address their workers, through the yellow unions, as comrades withshared interests, and the company union movement as a whole embraced quasi-egalitarian self-definitions and forms of address.63 In his speech before a meet-ing of the Rchling yellow unions in August 1908, for example, the foremanLober stressed both the equality and hierarchy among employer and workers:No matter what conditions we are born into, whether of high or modest rank, we are allmen and we are all workers. The worker who gives us employment, however, especial-ly deserves our highest respect, owing to his education and knowledge. To him often fall

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the difficult tasks that command very intense efforts and a great deal of knowledge. Forthis he earns our complete trust. We want to work with himwork with him to try toimprove the situation of each individual.64

Company union leaders and functionaries, therefore, defined the legitimacy oftheir activities in distinctly populist terms, claiming that the new unions derivedtheir authority from the support and desires of their wage-earning membersrather than the paternalist benevolence of the employer or the state. In the wordsof Rchling machinist Latz, We need no government saviors, like state secre-taries or Obergenossen, to bring us good fortune. Indeed, company welfareschemes were vigorously redescribed: no longer deemed the product of em-ployer charity (i.e., alms or beggars money), they were regarded by the in-dividual Werkvereinler as the legitimate fruits of his labor, the just rewardsfor superior job performance. In this self-image, company union members weredeemed independently minded architects of their own fate, who had con-sciously decided to subordinate themselves to their employers.65

Saar Werkvereine also developed organizational structures and activities thatwere designed to accommodate the everyday living conditions (Lebensver-hltnisse) of their members and to cultivate the masculine and nationalist ethosof the factory community. Most created administrative bodies and representa-tive procedures characteristic of the voluntary association, including a govern-ing council, a directorate comprising representatives from different factory sec-tions, a general assembly of all members, and courts for settling disputes.66Beyond the formal meetings and administrative tasks, moreover, lay a muchwider field of sociability that served to cultivate a good comradery and thespirit of unity among all employees and employers of a firm. The yellowunions sponsored a broad range of educational and athletic activitiesinclud-ing libraries, lectures, musical and theatrical groups, sports clubs, and youthsectionsas well as numerous social events (e.g., festivities and family out-ings), which were designed to provide for the leisure-time needs of workers andtheir families.67 In addition, the Saar company unions attempted to nourish thefeeling of brotherly community among their members and to forge com-radely bonds with other male industrial workers within the dense local net-work of nationalist associations. These ranged from choral societies and gym-nastics clubs to the organizations more directly committed to propagandizingon behalf of German nationalism, Weltpolitik, and anti-socialism.68 Their directlinks with the local National Liberal party, the only viable nationally-mindedparty in the region after 1900, and their membership in the League of GermanCompany Unions and the Council of National Workers and OccupationalLeagues of Germany (Hauptauschuss nationaler Arbeiter- und BerufsverbndeDeutschlands) placed the Saar organizations squarely within the milieu of na-tionalist pressure groups on the German right during the prewar decade.69

Finally, Saar employers, under Tilles direction, linked the community ofwork in the factory with efforts to build a larger occupational-estate con-

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sciousness: accordingly, the company union was deemed the best means ofcultivating among workers the attitudes and values that would foster a feelingof occupational community within the entire estate of industry and trade.70They viewed the yellow union as the ideal form of occupational association(Berufsverein), since it schooled its members in the laws of (corporatist) polit-ical economy and economic peace. In the course of its meetings, education-al lectures, and classes the company union provided the necessary technicaltraining for specific occupations in the factory, a certain technical under-standing for the enterprise and its operations, and a more general and scien-tific economic knowledge of the natural functioning and requirements of theindustrial economy. Indeed, Tille himself was actively involved in organizingand delivering lectures on economic and social questions to the companyunions.71 In view of the strike threat and class conflict posed by socialist andChristian unions, these activities were deemed crucial to the ideological laborof imprinting in the mind of every reasonably talented company union mem-ber a mental picture of the world of the economy as it really is today, easilygrasped in a conceptual system and slogans (Stichworte) which would ef-fectively counter the dangerous economic theory and thieves argot of so-cialism.72 Much more modern than the class-political trade unions, thecompany unions were designed to convince each individual member of the needto master the masculine skills necessary for superior job performance and forovercoming the risks of liferisks which were conditioned by his health,his labor power, and his capabilities and the workings of an industrial econo-my driven by large-scale factory production, productive occupations (Berufs-stnde), and the laws of racial-biological competition.73

saar employers, BERUFSSTANDSPOLITIK, and the corporative state

The corporatist social theory of Tille, the scientific and bio-racial reconstruc-tion of work and factory organization, and attempts to define skilled male work-ers as part of a collective occupational estate of industry in the company unionswere related to the changing relations between state and society in Germanysince the 1890sa set of more general structural realignments in European po-litical economy which a number of historians and political scientists have la-beled corporatist.74 In this interpretive framework, the term corporatism refersto the formation of a new system of interest representation in the advancedindustrial countries during the twentieth century, involving state-sanctionedand regulated bargaining between non-competitive and hierarchically consti-tuted economic and social interest groups. In opposition to theories of plural-ism, this definition of corporatism points both to the ways in which states havegranted to various organized interest groups a representational monopolyover their specific fields of economic-social activity and to the displacement ofdecision-making power away from the parliamentary arena and toward the bu-

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reaucratized bargaining between state officials and non-elected leaders of large-scale interest organizations.75 Yet this social-scientific approach to corporatismgenerally seeks to describe a universal or transhistorical axis of develop-ment in modern industrial societies rather than a historically secured set ofpolitical-ideological relationships; it therefore downplays the variety of corpo-ratist tendencies and the very dynamics of ideological struggle that producedcorporatist projects in Germany and Europe in the early twentieth century.76Only more recent attempts to explain the political-economic transition fromFordism to post-Fordism from the perspective of regulation theory have moreself-consciously begun to treat twentieth-century economies as historicallycontingent formations. This important new approach, with its interest in chang-ing regimes of accumulation, modalities of governance, and their associateddiscourses, pays much more attention to the role of social struggle and repre-sentational practices in the elaboration of capitalist political economies.77

It is precisely this emphasis on language that points to a more fruitful frame-work for reading the complex historical productivity of corporatist discoursesin this case, the specific and varied ways in which their meanings were con-densed and reverberated off other discourses and found institutional expressionin the changing economic and political context of Wilhelmine Germany.78 Thus,by the 1890s, a broad array of overlapping and often divergent reform and in-terventionist projectsincluding liberal social reform, state-directed and in-dustrial paternalism, social Catholicism, social and racial hygiene, and SocialDemocratic reformismgave impetus to increasing state regulation of theworkplace and the creation of welfare schemes in the interests of social stabil-ity. Until the 1890s, leading sectors of German heavy industry supported muchof this intervention, since it was largely framed within the Bismarckian modelof state-mandated social insurance coupled with repressive labor and anti-socialist laws. After 1900, however, heavy industrialists began to criticizethe increasing volume of state welfare commitments, attempts at regulation ofworkplace safety and work time, and the growing presence of trade unionistsand Social Democrats in the governing bodies of the social-insurance schemes,introduced by Bismarck in the 1880s. They also disparaged the labor concilia-tion bodies, especially the sickness insurance boards and industrial courts, re-configured in the New Course legislation of Chancellor Caprivi from 1890to 1894. They located the cause of these developments variously in the imperialgovernments reluctance to crack down on Social Democracy and the unions,the failure of the existing parties to defend employer prerogatives, and the uni-versal male suffrage of the Reichstag. In short, employers began to criticize theentire party-political and constitutional system of imperial Germany, whichthey believed had subverted the vital interests of heavy industry.

In the Saar, these changes were decried as threats to the existential inter-ests of the industrial and commercial estate. The accumulation of financialand regulatory burdens and the failure to curb the extortion of the trade

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unions, local employers maintained, had reduced productive employers (gewerbliche Unternehmer) to citizens with lesser rights. According to thiscritique, German employers had increasingly become victims of trade unionand social-moralist excess, ideologically construed claims for rights whichfailed to comprehend the actual forces that sustained economic and sociallife in Germany. The social-moralists (i.e., social reformers, union leaders,and Social Democrats) ignored the central position of the employer as the su-perior social aristocrat, the bearer of the productive economy, who provid-ed work, promoted technological innovation, and mastered the challenges ofcompetition in the expanding industrial order, namely, harnessing the availableeconomic forces, productive forces, intellectual power, and labor power. Theunbounded claims of social moralists, therefore, allegedly threatened themost important branch of German economic lifethe productive work-shops, factories, and businesses of the industrial and commercial estateandthe competitive prospects of German manufacturing in the international econ-omy.79

Moreover, these attacks on state Sozialpolitik and attempts to regulate thefactory workplace were framed within a discourse of racial economy. Tille crit-icized reform measures ranging from state-sponsored workers insurance, pen-sions, and unemployment insurance to workplace advisory bodies, collectivewage agreements, and legalized trade unions as forms of economic moral-ismthat is, as dangerous attempts to apply ethical and egalitarian ideals toan industrial workplace structured by natural hierarchy and governed by thelaws of race and biology. In addition to increasing financial burdens and threatsto German manufacturing, they allegedly subverted the mechanisms of wagecompetition in the productive economy and the law of natural selection in thebio-racial economy. According to Tille, they served artificially to sustain theunfit (i.e., improvident and lazy workers) at the expense of the fit produc-ers (i.e., entrepreneurs and skilled wage earners) of society. In this scheme, con-tinued state Sozialpolitik and attacks on employer prerogative threatened thedynamic meritocracy of the liberal social order and the very health of thenational body, since the latter depended on the law of natural selection inthe competition over the means of existence.80

These concerns fueled criticism not just of the dominance of the parties ofreform (the SPD, the Center, and the left liberals) in the Reichstag, but also ofthe National Liberal Party, long an important bastion of industrial interests. Inthe years after 1900, the left wing of the National Liberals and, to a lesser ex-tent, its party chairman Ernst Bassermann began to show sympathy for a pop-ulist program of social reform and progressive taxation.81 Consequently, as ear-ly as December 1907, Axel Bueck, general secretary of the CVDI, had advisedmembers of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists (VDESI )to reexamine heavy industrys relationship to the National Liberal party. Twomonths later he warned of the leftward drift noticeable in the social policy of

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the National Liberal Reichstag fraction which in many ways contradicted theinterests of industry and employers.82 At the same time, leading industry pe-riodicals such as the Deutsche Arbeitgeber-Zeitung were increasingly com-plaining about insufficient representation of industrial interests and aboutparty delegates elected to the Reichstag whose understanding of politicaleconomy amounted to nothing.83 From the Saar, Tille accused the liberal par-ties of being so strongly infused with egalitarian ideas, indeed even commu-nistic tendencies, that they have left the former ideals of political freedom inthe background. The National Liberal Partys descent into the arena of socialreform, he claimed, was simply part of a strategy to curry favor with the mass-es: Out of National Liberalism has grown a National Equalism, a NationalSocialism which will obviously transform one day into a National Commu-nism.84

These concerns, coupled with the declining numbers of employers servingas delegates in the Reichstag, prompted a series of discussions about the polit-ical organization of German employers in the years after 1908. In the spring ofthat year, the Hamburg manufacturer J. A. Menck offered the first widely dis-cussed plan for a more effective employers organization in the pages of theDeutsche Arbeitgeber-Zeitung, a proposed League of Productive Employ-erscomprised of all industrialists, artisans, and small shopkeepersthatcould provide the lobbying strength employers needed to curb the social legis-lation of the Reichstag. Subsequent proposals for an employers party, electoralorganizations, and direct financing of campaigns were aired by numerous oth-er representatives of heavy industry.85 In addition, Tille called for the forma-tion of a League of Employers that would include producers in all branchesof heavy and light industry, as well as large- and small-scale commercial, re-tail, and artisanal trades. Such an organization was needed, he maintained, inorder to overcome the divisive sectarian dispositions among German pro-ducersthat is, to create the conditions in which no one any longer thinks ofhimself as a member of a particular branch [of industry] but rather . . . as a com-rade within an occupational estate. Rather than focus only on Sozialpolitik andlimit itself to influencing the existing parties like most of the other proposals,Tilles league was conceived most explicitly as a corporatist (berufsstands-politische) organization that would replace the obsolete parties and representemployer interests directly in the organs of the state.86

Plans for a political organization of employers were finally realized with thecreation of the Hansabund (Hansa League) in the summer of 1909. Accordingto many German historians, the Hansabund marked the first comprehensiveanti-agrarian coalition of German capital before 1914, and thus embodied lib-eral aspirations for a politically active bourgeoisie ready to protect commerce,trade and industry against attacks from a one-sided agrarian demagogueryand to challenge the feudal power holders of the German state.87 Yet manyindustrialists associated with the CVDI were interested in the Hansabund as a

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corporatist form of representation. They conceived of it as the commercial-industrial version of the Agrarian League: that is, as an association that wouldrepresent the concerns of German industry during elections, in the parties, andat all levels of parliamentary government.88 In the Saar, this corporatist ambi-tion was central to the self-understanding of the Hansabunds local branch. Fororganizers such as Burbach steelworks director Edmund Weisdorff and theSaarbrcken builder Arthur Olle, the Hansabund represented the estate ofproductive industry and the common occupational estate of producers whowere united by a solidarity of interests.89 As the managing director of the Saarbranch, which by November 1909 could claim 1,100 members from light andheavy industry, retailing, and the artisanal trades throughout the region, Tilledeveloped these ideas even further. He insisted that the Hansabund was not apolitical party but an occupational association, similar to those uniting agri-cultural producers, white collar professionals, civil servants, and wage earners.It reflected the growing recognition of a shared ethos and community of inter-esta consciousness of estateamong producers in the construction andartisanal trades, the commercial and transportation industries, and mining andmanufacturing.90 And he pursued these corporatist themes during regular meet-ings of the local Hansabund organization and during a series of evening courses,for which his four-volume work Die Berufsstandspolitik des Gewerbe- undHandelstandes served as the textbook.91

Indeed, it was the failure of the Hansabund to conform to this corporatist vi-sion that generated local opposition to its national directorate. Saar employersaccused the national organization of failing to represent the occupational inter-ests of the industrial and commercial estate. This was evident in its neglectof the latters economic concerns, particularly strategies to reduce the amountof social legislation and to enact legal measures to curb trade union activity, andalso in its pandering to political parties of the left.92 Moreover, the Hansabundwas conceived in the Saar as a political-occupational organization of the es-tate of industry and commerce rather than a political party or an economic as-sociation with political aims. As such, it was supposed to represent the eco-nomic interests of the entire estate of industry and trade in the parliamentaryrealm. According to Tille, the Hansabund failed to do this in two ways: it ne-glected the economic interests of the productive Brgertum, and it failed to em-brace all members of the occupational estate, namely the white collar and in-dustrial workers who rejected the class-political aims of the labor movementand the native (bodenstndig) and patriotic workers of the yellow unions.93For these reasons, Saar employers, along with other representatives of heavyindustry, withdrew their support for the Hansabund in the summer of 1911.

In the final years before 1914, these frustrated ambitionscompounded bythe results of the Reichstag elections of 1912 from which the SPD emerged asthe largest party in Germanyprompted German industrialists to pursue theircorporatist commitments in other ways. Within the occupational estate of in-

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dustrial producers itself, the leaders of German heavy industry began to helpforge nationwide organizational links between the CVDI and the yellow unionmovement. In 1910, the latter created the aforementioned League of GermanCompany Unions, and shortly thereafter joined with the League of PatrioticWorkers Associationsa national confederation of non-industry and non-company-specific workers organizationsin the Council of National Work-ers and Occupational Associations. The Council eventually organized laborersfrom a variety of trades and industries, including factory workers, artisans, re-tail workers, and sailors, in an anti-socialist alliance.94 In order to strengthenthis bulwark against the red danger, the CVDI established official ties to theCouncil in December 1912, lending considerable publicistic and financial sup-port to the company and patriotic unions in the final prewar years. In the Saar,similar ties were established between the Employers League of Saar Industryand the regional company union federation. These were aimed at forging acloser union among all employers, managers and clerical workers, and wage la-borers of the productive economy which would help foster the feeling of oc-cupational consciousness within the entire industrial and commercial estate.95

At the same time, the CVDI began reinvigorating its efforts to win the sup-port of the Mittelstand of small producers. In the summer of 1911, CVDI lead-ers joined with representatives from the Agrarian League to assist in the cre-ation of the nationalist Imperial-German Mittelstand League. Promoting thealliance of Handwerk and industry, according to CVDI chairman Max Roet-ger, was necessary to halt the steady advance of Social Democracy and sociallegislation that subverted employer interests. Tille, the leading advocate of Mit-telstandspolitik within heavy industry, cast this initiative in distinctly corpo-ratist terms. In his programmatic article entitled The Industrial League andin his speeches before the Mittelstand League in 1912, he stressed the impor-tance of small business to the unity of the industrial estate. Small workshopsand commercial businesses, he argued, were equally burdened by the social leg-islation that privileged wage earners. Much more serious, however, was thegrowing power of Marxist prejudices widespread within the small businesscommunity itself. These included moralistic criticisms of entrepreneurs asrobber barons and hostility toward capitalist forms of investment, profit-making, and managerial-entrepreneurial (or non-physical) labor. A broad-ranging coalition or Industrial League involving producers from the mining,manufacturing, commercial, transportation, housing, retailing, and artisanal sec-tors, therefore, would help root out socialist ideas in the Mittelstand, consoli-date the occupational unity of the entire estate of industry and trade, and defendthe capitalist industrial order.96

These corporatist initiatives were central to the wider process of ideologicalrealignment taking place on the German right. During the final prewar years,representatives from German heavy industry and agriculture for the first timeattempted to forge a genuinely populist coalition, by actively appealing to the

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interests of small-scale producers of the Mittelstand and the peasant classes onthe basis of a radical-nationalist appeal.97 By the spring of 1913, a wide rangeof groups were actively pursuing organizational contacts, including the CVDI,the Agrarian League, the Christian Union of PeasantsAssociations, the Imperial-German Mittelstand League, and several nationalist pressure groups. Their goalwas to forge a common political alliance organized around commitments toanti-union legislation (especially laws against picketing), a cessation of stateSozialpolitik, anti-socialism, and German imperialism. Finally, representativesof these interest groups, along with leaders of the Pan-German League and theImperial League against Social Democracy, met in Leipzig to announce the for-mation of the Cartel of Productive Estates in August 1913. As its programsuggested, the Cartel was conceived as an alliance of the main productive es-tates or occupations whose principle task was to unify industrialists, agrarians,and Mittelstndler in defense of their economic interests, to maintain author-ity in all economic enterprises, to secure price guarantees and the protectionof those willing to work (strike-breakers), and to defend against Social Democ-racy and socialist heresy.98

In addition, the Cartels call for the formation of an economic parliamentwith decision-making powers in the areas of economic and social policy re-vealed the growing interest of key sectors of heavy industry in new strategiesfor bypassing the existing parliamentary and constitutional order altogether.The strongest public signal for this commitment within heavy industry camefrom Max Schlenker, who replaced Tille as head of the Saar Chamber of Com-merce after the latters sudden death in 1912. In his essay entitled Revision ofthe Reichstag Suffrage or the Creation of an Imperial Upper House? of June1913, Schlenker criticized recent debates in the Reichstag over the Army bill,which proposed direct taxation in the form of business and property taxes. Hewarned that the Reichstag had embarked on a path that must fill the [produc-tive] estates with the utmost concern about the future. In response to this mostrecent invasion of the Reichstag into the realm of private property and the deep-er problem of the dearth of businessmen-delegates in the Reichstag, Schlenkerproposed two possible constitutional solutions: (1) changes in the electoral lawsthat would guarantee the number of businessmen delegates in the Reichstag(e.g., property qualifications and residency requirements); and (2) the creationof an imperial upper house composed of representatives of the occupational es-tates (Berufsstnde). According to Schlenker, only constitutional change couldprevent legislation from restricting further the discretionary power of the em-ployer in his factory and shield this aristocracy of labor from the tyranny ofthe unpropertied majority.99

Schlenkers call for an imperial upper house and electoral reforms foundgrowing support among German industrialists. Indeed, growing hostility towardmass politics spawned a number of possible schemes for constitutional revisionin 1913, emanating from the Ruhr and Saar in particular and published in the

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leading press organs of heavy industry.100 Yet demands for property qualifica-tions to existing imperial and Prussian suffrage laws and designs for the creationof an upper chamber that would act as a countervailing force to the Reichstagfound a growing audience among even wider sectors of German heavy industry.They were raised in the context of discussions within the CVDI, in the DeutscheHandelstag (the collective forum of the chambers of commerce), and, in morelimited forms, were winning adherents from the ranks of the export-oriented andliberal free-trading firms of the Hansabund, the Association of Saxon Industri-alists (Verband sschischer Industrieller), and the League of German Industri-alists (Bund der Industriellen) by 1913.101

* * *

This reading of Saar factory culture suggests neither that the turn to corporatistdiscourse was common to all industrial regions across Germany nor that cor-poratist terms and imperatives entirely displaced paternalist understandings ofwork organization in the Saar. Nevertheless, it does point to a much broaderideological transformation which took place in German heavy industry duringthe pre- and postwar decades. It identifies the ways in which notions of bio-logical aptitude and race became increasingly common motifs in the languageof employers throughout Germany in the final prewar years; references to thecommunity of work in the large-scale factory became a staple of the grow-ing yellow union movement; and constitutional change that would protect theinterests of the productive occupational estates became a persistent aim ofGerman industrialists associated with the CVDI. Finally, despite (or becauseof) the challenges and disruptions of the war years, the postwar revolution, andthe institutional gains of the trade unions during the early Weimar years, thiscorporatist orientation of right-wing employers was revived and rearticulatedin the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this form, it provided the ideological foun-dation for newly created schools of industrial sociology and labor policy (espe-cially the Ruhr-based Dinta), shaped the anti-parliamentary and anti-democraticaims of employers during the crisis of the early 1930s, and established commonideological ground between key fractions of German heavy industry and Na-tional Socialism by 1933.102

Yet this corporatist discourse had little to do with the persistence of pre-industrial, anti-modernist, irrational, and anti-capitalist traditions and values.As this essay argues, Saar corporatism condensed within its connotative frame-work references to the social aristocracy of labor, the community of workin the factory, and the social estate of industry and trade; a schema of ratio-nal workplace management, which embraced a bio-medical calculus of theeconomy of labor power, a scientific-technocratic redefinition of factory orga-nization, and a productivist vision of the industrial capitalist economy; theeconomically liberal values of individual competition, job performance, theprofit motive, and capital accumulation; the modernist celebration of large-scale industry, technology, and progress; and newly emergent authoritarian am-

724 dennis sweeney

bitions grounded in racial and gender hierarchies. This corporatist discourse,therefore, framed an entirely new modernist project which aimed to redesignthe early twentieth-century industrial-social order.

In addition, rather than being a subjective response to the autonomouseconomic or social logic of modernization, Saar corporatism emerged as theproduct of the ideological struggle to shape the industrial, social, and politicalrelations of the late-Wilhelmine period. Indeed, corporatist discourse emergedduring a specific historical moment in the Saar: in the midst of an incipientcrisis of paternalist hegemony throughout the region. In this context, it repre-sented a complex discursive formation composed of elements derived fromdiverse sources which were actively combined, dismantled, bricolaged inefforts to produce a new politically effective coalition among Saar employ-ers.103 This coalition was actively constructed in opposition to the egalitarianand class-collectivist orientation of socialism and trade unionism and to thegrowing intervention of the state, political parties, and social reformers into theprivate concerns of employers.

This essay, therefore, breaks with the dominant theoretical frameworks andanalytical conventions of German historiography on the relationship betweeneconomic practices, work relations, and right-wing ideology. Most German his-torians interpret right-wing ideological discourses (e.g., paternalism, radicalnationalism, corporatism, and fascism) about economic and social relationswith reference to a rather fixed epistemological-ontological relationship in thepast between a normative, objective rationality of workplace organization andeconomic interest, on the one hand, and an irrational and/or subjective politi-cal ideology, on the other. For the most part, they treat discourses as semanticstructures whose meanings are defined extrinsicallythat is, by the degree towhich they reflect or respond to the real relations and institutions of economyand society. Moreover, they interpret the meaning of past ideological discoursesin terms of a priori assumptions about semantic coherence and rationality, es-pecially categorical distinctions between the rational and irrational, capitalistand anti-capitalist, liberal and illiberal, and modern and anti-modern. By con-trast, this essay has focused on the politics of significationthe struggle thattook place between workers and employers within discourse over definitions ofwork and social relations. It has presupposed that the meaning of corporatistdiscourse in the Saar did not depend on how things were but on how thingswere signified in a dynamic and institutionally embedded process of meaningconstruction.104 In this way, this essay has identified important and often over-looked aspects of corporatist discourse: its capacity to assemble a disparate ar-ray of linguistic resources into a new ideological configuration, to effect (atleast partial) changes to the social relations of the industrial workplace, andto articulate a set of forward-looking political demands for the creation of anauthoritarian-capitalist order of productive estates. Arguably, it is to these ca-pacities that we must turn if we are fully to appreciate the ideological appeal

corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 725

and the subsequent revival and rearticulation of corporatist discourse withinGerman heavy industry during the late 1920s and under National Socialism dur-ing the 1930s.

notes

1. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961),pp. xvixvii, 58, 23031, and 258; George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (NewYork, 1964), pp. 13ff., 28291, and 31216; and Kurt Sontheimer, AntidemokratischesDenken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1962), pp. 24952, passim.

2. See, for example, Jrgen Kocka, Vorindustrielle Faktoren in der deutschen In-dustrialisierung. Industriebrokratie und neuer Mittelstand, in Michael Strmer (ed.),Das kaiserliche Deutschland. Politik und Gesellschaft 18701918 (Dsseldorf, 1970),pp. 27879; and Heinrich August Winkler, Mittelstand, Demokratie und Nationalismus(Cologne, 1972), p. 114.

3. Hans Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 18711918 (Leamington Spa, 1985),p. 245; Winkler, Unternehmerverbnde zwischen Stndeideologie und Nationalsozial-ismus, Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte 17 (1969):369; and Ralph Dahrendorf, So-ciety and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1965).

4. See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History:Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984); and,more recently, G. Eley, German History and the Contradictions of Modernity: TheBourgeoisie, the State, and the Mastery of Reform, in G. Eley (ed.), Society, Culture,and State in Germany 18701930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 67103. The quote is from G.Eley, Capitalism and the Wilhelmine State, in G. Eley, From Unification to Nazism:Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston, 1986), p. 50.

5. Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (NewYork, 1989), pp. 82, 245; and D. Peukert, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne (Gttin-gen, 1989), pp. 6163, 66.

6. D. Peukert, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne, p. 75.7. Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of

Germany (New York, 1994), pp. 190, 192.8. This point is made also in Thomas Childers, The Social Language of Politics in

Germany: The Sociology of Political Discourse in the Weimar Republic, American His-torical Review 95 (1990):33158.

9. Thus, despite the extraordinary richness of Peukerts work, his approach is markedby a tendency to analyze modernity in terms of large-scale structures, tendencies, andlogics. See his The Weimar Republic, p. 281.

10. Margaret Somers, Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: RethinkingEnglish Working-Class Formation, Social Science History 16 (1992):60911. See alsoGeorge Steinmetz, German Exceptionalism and the Origins of Nazism: The Career ofa Concept, in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds.), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictator-ships in Comparison (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 26869.

11. Stuart Hall, The Rediscovery of Ideology: Return of the Repressed in Me-dia Studies, in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and Janet Woollacott(eds.), Culture, Society and the Media (London and New York, 1982), p. 79. See thediscussions of culture, ideology, and language in Raymond Williams, Marxism andLiterature (Oxford, 1977), pp. 21 44; S. Hall, The Problem of Ideology: Marxismwithout Guarantees, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Crit-ical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London and New York, 1996), pp. 25 46; andDick Hebdige, Staking Out the Posts, in Hiding in the Light (London, 1988),pp. 101207.

726 dennis sweeney

12. On articulation, see Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory(London, 1977); Stuart Hall, On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview withStuart Hall, in Morley and Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall, pp. 13150; S. Hall, The Redis-covery of Ideology; and Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Pop-ular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York and London, 1992), pp. 5256.

13. S. Hall, On Postmodernism and Articulation, pp. 14142; and S. Hall, TheProblem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees, p. 40.

14. See L. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place, pp. 5253; and L. Grossberg,Cultural Studies: Whats in a Name? in Bringing it All Back Home: Essays on Cul-tural Studies (Durham and London, 1997), pp. 24571.

15. Thus, this essay presupposes that corporatist terms became effective to the extentthat they were articulated to the field of political and social forces in late-WilhemineGermany. See S. Hall, The Problem of Ideology, pp. 4243; S. Hall, Culture, the Me-dia, and the Ideological Effect, p. 327; and L. Grossberg, We Gotta Get out of thisPlace, pp. 52ff.

16. On the Gramscian notion of hegemony, see especially Antonio Gramsci, Selec-tions from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (NewYork, 1971), pp. 1213, 161ff., 18082, and 210; and Raymond Williams, Marxism andLiterature, pp. 10814.

17. Ralph H. Bowen, German Theories of the Corporative State (New York, 1947).18. See Stuart Halls discussion of language via the work of Russian theorist

Volosinov/Bakhtin in The Problem of Ideology, pp. 4041; and Robert Gray, TheDeconstructing of the English Working Class, Social History 11 (October 1986):370.

19. For data on the rise of industrial organization and militancy during this period,see G. Hohorst, J. Kocka, G. A. Ritter (eds.), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch. Mate-rialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs 18701914 ( Munich 1975), pp. 13235.

20. Klaus Saul, Staat, Industrie, Arbeiterbewegung im Kaiserreich. Zur Innen- undAussenpolitik des Wilhelminischen Deutschland 19031914 (Dsseldorf, 1974), esp.pp. 98115; and Hans-Peter Ullmann, Unternehmerschaft, Arbeitgeberverbnde undStreikbewegung 18901914, in Streik. Zur Geschichte des Arbeitskampfes in Deutsch-land whrend der Industrialisierung, eds. Klaus Tenfelde and Heinrich Volkmann (Mu-nich, 1981), pp. 194208.

21. Willfried Spohn, Religion and Working-Class Formation in Imperial Germany,Politics and Society 119 (1991):10932.

22. Alex Bueck, Protokoll, Verein Deutscher Eisen- und Stahlindustrieller, Gener-alversammlung, 27 Oct. 1904, Bundesarchiv, R. 131, Nr. 163. For the Saar, see Alexan-der Tille, Die Berufsstandspolitik des Handel- und Gewerbestandes, Vol. IV (Berlin,1910), p. 101; and Alexander Tille, Der Soziale Ultramontanismus und seine katho-lische Arbeitervereine (Berlin, 1905).

23. See, for example, the demands put forward by the Deutsche Arbeitgeber-zeitungin 1906 and the pamphlet, entitled zur Reform des preussischen Wahlrechts, written in1907 by the Hamburg machine-factory owner and National Liberal delegate J. A.Menck. Both are in Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben, pp. 124ff.

24. Dieter Lindenlaub, Firmengeschichte und Sozialpolitik, p. 279, agrees withthis assessment. See also D. Stegmann, Die Erben, pp. 125, 335.

25. Tilles estate of industry and trade was comprised of producers from sometwenty-one different branches of manufacturing and service industries, including all fac-tory owners, managers, white collar clerks, and manual laborers, along with all bankers,traders, export manufacturers, retailers, artisans, etc., and their employees. See Alexan-der Tille, Die Berufsstandspolitik des Gewerbe- und Handelsstandes. Die politischeNotwehr des Gewerbe- und Handelsstandes, Vol. IV (Berlin, 1910), pp. 131.

26. Quoted from the Brockhaus Lexikon published in 1817 and cited in Rudolf

corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 727

Walther, Stand, Klasse, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zurpolitisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland Vol. VI (Stuttgart, 1990), p. 277.

27. Quotes are from Alexander Tille, Die Berufsstandspolitik, Vol. IV, pp. 9, 8. Onthe changing meanings of the term Berufsstand, see Rudolf Walther, Stand, Klasse,Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Vol. 6, pp. 27779.

28. Alexander Tille, Die Berufsstandspolitik, Vol. II, pp. 2829; Alexander Tille,Die Arbeitgeberpartei und die politische Vertretung der deutschen Industrie, Sd-westdeutsche Flugschriften, 5 (1908):1112.

29. See his lecture entitled Menschenrechte, delivered in Saarbrcken on 18 Apr.1907, and reprinted in Sdwestdeutsche Wirtschaftszeitung (hereafter SWDWZ), 26 Apr.1907, No. 17, pp. 11115; and SWDWZ, 3 May 1907, No. 18, pp. 12425. Indeed, thepages of the employersweekly, SWDWZ, began carrying a regular column entitled TheLiberal Social Order (Liberale Gesellschaftsordnung) during this period, designed todefend employer liberties and to catalogue the various threats to employers rights.

30. Alexander Tille, Die Berufsstandspolitik, Vol. IV, p. 7.31. See the explicit call for the reformulatio