Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  One attraction of the titles was that they gave members of the Wirtschaftsbürgertum a sense of equal status with Bildungsbürger, whose claims to serve some general social interest that transcended mere self-seeking derived in part from their close relationship to the state that had long fostered their existence. Relations between the two groups were changing in a number of ways in the second half of the century. Jürgen Kocka points to the years between 1840 and 1870 as the period when Wirtschaftsbürger overcame the old sense of inferiority to official and professional groups, a change in part tied up with the former’s increasing wealth and the more rapid growth in their income levels. Although the prestige of businessmen was sometimes tarnished by economic crisis and scandal, as at the moment when large numbers of new firms set up on shaky foundations in the euphoric atmosphere generated by the unification failed after 1873 (the so-called Gründerkrise), in the longer term it was heightened by the boost that Germany’s rapid economic growth gave to the country’s position in world affairs. The slogan of “industry for the fatherland” sometimes put forward in this period may have served as a justification as much as a motive, but at least some historians find evidence that pride in the transformation that made an economic powerhouse out of a country until then regarded as a sleepy backwater may have played a role in encouraging entrepreneurship. Clive Trebilcock thinks such feelings may have been particularly at work in those businessmen who formed the boards of the many cartels that ran important segments of German industry before 1914, a good number of them connected to banks.12 Neither England, the country of early and spontaneous industrial progress, nor France, long accustomed to being the major political power on the continent, seems to have benefitted from a similar sense of new national purpose in their entrepreneurs (although competing with the Germans did become a motive for promoting industrial and scientific advance in France after the defeat of 1870).

  One dimension of state intervention in bourgeois life that played a significant role in Germany’s industrial growth was the encouragement governments gave to both education and to the advancement of science. Although there is disagreement about just how much economic importance should be attributed to this orientation, it surely grew in significance as enterprises requiring increased scientific and technical competence – steel-making, industrial chemistry, electricity, optics, and precision instruments – assumed greater prominence from around 1880, especially in contrast with the more casual and informal approach to such things that prevailed in England. The interest governing authorities took in education and science had roots in the same competition between territorial states that encouraged the development of the class of officials who comprised the original core of the Bildungsbürgertum. In line with the notion that these Beamte were exemplars of the personal development that made individuals responsible and mature members of bürgerliche Gesellschaft, the universities provided them with an education based on the humanist classicism of Humboldt and Wolff. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, this orientation was becoming a focus of inter-state rivalry, exemplified by the program of the Prussian minister of education Karl von Altenstein, who sought to make the University of Berlin a showplace for state support of intellect and culture by giving faculty positions to scholars with international reputations. He thus encouraged hiring people whose published work made them known outside Prussia and even Germany, in preference to candidates recommended by prominent local people, and he was instrumental in broadening this association between the state and Wissenschaft (the German term has a wider sense than its English counterpart science, referring to any organized body of knowledge) so that it spread from classical philology to the natural sciences.

  Other states followed his lead. German science had by no means been backward during the eighteenth century, and a sense that scientists throughout the German lands formed a community was nurtured by publications devoted to chemistry and mathematics, which created widespread linkages not unlike those of the reading and patriotic societies considered in Chapter 4. These contacts expanded after 1815, and by the 1830s an association of scientists and physicians was holding meetings in various German cities, at first chiefly involving people who worked in practical fields such as medicine, but soon in areas of basic research and theory as well. A study of German physicists shows that none of those born around 1770 received specialized training in the subject, but that all of those born around 1800 did. These developments were given additional impetus by the spread of university research laboratories, of which the first was established by the chemist Justus Liebig at Giessen (in the state of Hesse) in 1825; it was based on the then novel idea that advanced students should conduct research under the direction of a professor. Liebig’s innovation may have been facilitated by small size and relative flexibility of the University of Giessen, but his example was quickly taken up by people at larger and more famous places. By the time of the unification, the new state could boast a “costly and highly influential series of laboratories, seminars, and institutes.”13

  Both the development of industry and the general tone of bourgeois life in Germany were colored by these developments. The Bavarian entrepreneur Wilhelm Sattler, one of the central figures in Franz Bauer’s highly informative study of “Bürger paths and Bürger worlds,” was inspired to set up his first successful business, a plant to manufacture chemical dyes opened in 1814, by reading an article about how to make a bright green pigment that retained its quality in artificial light in a publication started by a professor at the University of Braunschweig. Bauer describes the journal, Chemische Annalen, as important both in furthering professional chemical research and in giving form to a “chemically interested public.” Sattler did well with his dyes, using them for both paint and textiles, but he eventually gave up making them (turning to wallpaper, beet sugar, and pottery instead), perhaps because, as a person with no formal scientific education working at a time when businesses were still largely conducted within families (his wife, an artist, had an important role in his), he did not have enough technical knowledge to deal with the new processes of making dyes from coal tar that developed toward the middle of the century. But one of his correspondents, younger than he, was a chemist who had studied with Liebig and who turned precisely to these later ways of producing dyestuffs. Although he had no university education himself, Sattler had a number of friends and correspondents who were Bildungsbürger, among them lawyers and public officials, and the letters they exchanged give evidence both that he and they understood the different kinds of resources each group commanded, and that they were able to be of help to each other on this basis. Indeed, despite his lack of formal study Sattler was something of an intellectual himself. After serving in the Bavarian parliament during 1848, where he supported liberal reforms, unification, railroad-building and Jewish emancipation, he retired to devote himself to reading and writing, filling notebooks with discussions of science, literature, and philosophy (where he took a materialist and anti-religious stance close to that of contemporaries such as Ludwig Feuerbach).14

  Later Sattler’s descendants would intermarry with children of some of the people he knew through his political activities and his intellectual interests, forming a configuration of interlinked families whose members were involved at once in practical life and in science, art, and culture. Bauer traces these connections and their lineage into the early twentieth century, showing that the continuing connections both businessmen and scientists maintained with the humanistic Bildung originally associated with educating officials often remained an active element of their self-consciousness, providing an orientation that some of their children would more wholeheartedly take up by rejecting practical careers in favor of “higher” activities and values. To be sure, connections between business families and people who made careers in state administration or culture can be found in every country, but only in Germany did universities and the Wissenschaftsideologie they fostered infuse their values into such ties, giving to relationships like those betwee
n Sattler and his friends a quality distinct from the personal ties between sociologically similar people in other countries. One testimony to the special character these kinds of relations gave to German bourgeois life is suggested by what made the famous friendship between Engels and Marx typically, even uniquely, German: it was a bond between the Wirtschaftsbürger Engels, a person with no university degree whose highly developed interest in intellectual life shared much with the cases of Sattler and Mevissen, and a Bildungsbürger whose sense for the negative impact of contemporary economic advance went along with a belief in the universal historical and human significance of bürgerliche Gesellschaft.

  A noteworthy figure who moved in some of the same circles as Sattler’s descendants later in the century was Werner Siemens, the founder of the famous electrical company that still bears his name. Like Sattler, Siemens was a businessman who saw scientific advance as opening new paths for commercial activity; in his case, however, he sought the knowledge and training he needed not only in reports on university research, as Sattler did, but in another locus of the state’s encouragement of science, namely the training in engineering provided by the Prussian army, and which led him to enlist in it in 1835. His later career drew at once on the technical skills he developed there (in 1846 he invented a telegraph whose receiving device could point to letters instead of just making clicks, saving operators the need to learn Morse code, and later he would patent an improvement to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone) and on government connections that stemmed from his military service. The company he founded with a partner in 1847 took off when it was hired to build the first telegraph line in Germany, connecting Berlin to Frankfurt to keep the Prussian government in touch with doings at the elected national assembly; official ties were of help too in the steps that rendered the business international, establishing it in Russia after building a line from Berlin to St. Petersburg, and then in London when the British hired it to establish a still longer connection between London and Calcutta.

  Siemens’s profile as a businessman was shaped by his combination of two seemingly contrasting features, one a traditional sense that business should remain a family affair, the other a penchant for bureaucratic organization. His desire to keep control in his family was responsible for a threat to the firm’s future during the 1880s, when he rejected an overture from Emil Rathenau, the more venturesome founder of the German General Electric Company (AEG), to cooperate in manufacturing material to install electric lighting in Berlin; because the project would have required heavy borrowing from banks, Siemens feared it would give outsiders too much power over the enterprise. Fortunately for the firm his son Wilhelm did not share these scruples; taking over after Werner’s retirement in 1890 he greatly expanded the company by moving into mass electric lighting and generating, and raised capital by selling shares. This expansion required a much larger organization (by 1912 the company would have some 12,000 office workers), but in this regard Werner Siemens had already laid the foundation by introducing a bureaucratized administrative structure whose form, as Jürgen Kocka points out, was modeled on that of the Prussian civil service. Although Werner still relied on family members and associates for the top positions in the company (his brothers headed the London and St. Petersburg offices), some of his middle managers were former government officials, and Kocka finds something of the spirit of discipline and pride typical of these Beamte operative in the firm even before Wilhelm gave it its new direction. One reason why further expansion does not seem to have sapped this spirit (despite the fact that, unlike government bureaucrats, the company’s employees had no guarantee of permanent tenure and were subject to lay offs in bad times) is that the “first-class experts and administrators” it determinedly recruited from outside would only accept positions “if they were offered a high degree of autonomy.” The result was an organizational structure marked by what Kocka calls “planned decentralization,” giving the firm an efficient mix of flexibility and focused management that developed in other German electrical firms as well (and would later come to some American ones). The relative failure of contemporary British companies to evolve such an operating style has been cited by some historians as a contributing factor to the greater success of Germany in this field before 1914. Thus the history of Siemens points to some of the ways in which the preeminent position won by German industry at the end of the nineteenth century owed a debt to the special connection between Bürger of all kinds and the state.15

  The Siemens story was not wholly a German one, however, and we need to take note of some of the ways it exemplifies the growing importance of distant and mediated connections in many spheres of late nineteenth-century life. The electric telegraph in whose early history the firm played so large a role was a crucial element in providing extended and thickened networks of communication, providing new opportunities and imposing new demands on businesses, banks, stock markets, political parties, diplomatic officials, police forces, spies, and of course newspapers. Telegraphy was closely linked to railroad transport, since telegraphic lines often followed the track routes, and one of their functions was to keep people along the grid informed about the movements of trains and their cargoes. The importance of this connection has been concisely summed up by a historian of telegraphy in America whose formula fits Europe too: the rapid transmission of data made it possible for railroads “to control efficiently and manage vast, complex flows of freight and passengers” and thus to integrate other large industries and markets; at the same time the experience of regular contact and interaction with distant places and conditions introduced people to “the new world of gigantic, impersonal, non-local institutions to which they had to accommodate as the century progressed.”16

  This description of the overall expansion of coordinated distant relations applies not only to industries and markets but also to activities in which information itself was the major object of exchange, and notably in learned, scientific, and technical professions among whose members were some of the “first-class experts and administrators” Siemens hired. It was in the period after 1850 that professions grew up in such new areas as chemistry, engineering and architecture; in the same decades the position of professionals in more traditional fields such as medicine and university teaching shifted from a longstanding dependence on connections to local structures of status and notability toward one in which personal standing derived from membership in national and even international bodies, devoted to developing and diffusing knowledge in some field and enhancing the lives and positions of those who made their careers within it. The activities of these organizations included setting standards for membership, sponsoring periodicals, encouraging correspondence between members, and holding regular meetings, as well as furthering the profession’s reputation with the wider public, and lobbying governments in pursuit of its interests. German professional organizations differed somewhat from those in other countries, however, in that they seldom developed the independent capacity for self-regulation that characterized their counterparts elsewhere, since the state kept much of the power to decide about who could engage in particular activities in its own hands.17

  What made these new grounds of professionalization so important for late nineteenth-century industry was not just that firms employed increasing numbers of engineers and scientists, but that the same structures and media of communication that supported and facilitated ongoing professional interchange also nurtured the expanding body of technical and scientific knowledge that fostered invention and innovation. The period before World War I was a great age of scientific and technological progress in part because researchers in widely scattered locations had more immediate and widespread access to each other’s work. Joel Mokyr argues that the expansion of communication and interchange reduced the “access cost” of knowledge, enlarging the base on which new discoveries could be made at the same time that it gave people more regular and rapid entry to it:

  An example is the simultaneity of many major inventions. T
he more a new technique depends on an epistemic base that is in the common domain and accessible to many inventors at low cost, the more likely it is that more than one inventor will hit upon it at about the same time … it is hardly surprising that many of the inventions of the period were made independently by multiple inventors who beat one another to the patent office door sometimes by a matter of days.

  Mokyr adds that the more complex organizations characteristic of such enterprises as Siemens derived not only from their sheer size, but also from the need to assemble and coordinate specialized information in quantities beyond what single individuals have the capacity to manage. “Given the limitations on how much each worker can know … the total competence that the firm has to possess is chopped up into manageable bites and divided among the workers, and their actions are then coordinated by management.”18 These features of late nineteenth-century industrial culture were visible in many places, but the special relations between the state and bürgerliche Gesellschaft meant that Germans were particularly able to draw benefits from them. As we shall now see, however, these same relations carried a different set of implications for politics, both for the country in general, and for bourgeois in particular.