NAZISM AND THE WORKING CLASS - 1933-93

 

Nazism and the working class - Sergio Bologna

Italian autonomist Sergio Bologna discusses the rise of Nazism and its relationship to the German working class.

 

Submitted by libcom on July 23, 2005

NAZISM AND THE WORKING CLASS - 1933-93

by Sergio Bologna

translated by Ed Emery

[Paper presented at the Milan Camera del Lavoro, 3 June 1993]

https://libcom.org/article/nazism-and-working-class-sergio-bologna

 

A meeting like this doesn't just happen by chance. We have received assistance from a number of organisations. For example, the Micheletti Foundation (to be specific, Pier Paolo Poggio) has researched the available literature in English, American and French journals; the research institutes in Hamburg and Bremen have made available original research work and a selected bibliography; and Michael Wildt, editor of Werkstatt Geschichte undertook to study the journal published for history teachers in junior and secondary schools in Germany, Geschichte im Unterricht. We wanted to see whether the teachers' association has, in recent years, addressed itself to the relationship between Nazism and the working class, whether the subject has been discussed in their journal, and whether we might find useful bibliographical references. As it happens, in the past six years the topic has not even been broached.

 

Such a lack of interest strikes me as bizarre, given that recent events in Germany's political and social life have brought to the fore the problem of the influence of extreme Right-wing and neo-Nazi ideas and forms of behaviour within the working class, among skilled workers, apprentices and irregularly-employed youth.

 

On the other hand, in a disturbing development, over the past decade various historians have focused increasingly on what they say was the decisive contribution of sections of the working class to the Nazis' electoral victories, and they have also documented a massive presence of the working class within the social composition comprising the electoral base of the Nazi Party.

 

In this area we are witnessing a crescendo of contributions.

1. The workers who voted for Hitler: the new historical revisionism

Already by the early 1980s work was being done on analysing election results from the 1930s. This work has been continually updated and enriched, and has now arrived at the following conclusion: the percentage of votes for the Nazi party deriving from the working class showed a continual upswing in the period preceding the Nazis' seizure of power. Jurgen Falter is one of the historians who has researched the phenomenon in depth, and he presented his initial results in 1986 in the journal of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, an organisation close to the Social Democratic Party. In his most recent article, published at the start of this year (in the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft), Falter previews the results of his research project carried out on 42,000 Nazi party membership cards, from which it appears that the party's working-class membership stood at more than 40 per cent.

 

What we find developing here is an interpretation of Nazism as a phenomenon within which the working-class component is strongly present, if not decisive. This flies in the face of the traditional interpretation, which sees the Nazi party essentially as the party of the Mittelstand, in other words of the middle classes. This is one aspect of the problem.

 

In my opinion there is an even more important consideration. Namely: since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a number of articles and books have appeared in Germany, published with remarkable editorial efficiency, all tending to demonstrate not only that the working-class component was decisive within Nazism before Hitler's taking of power, but also that, after taking power, the policies pursued by the Nazi regime were actively favourable to the working class and tended to bring its social status closer in line with that of the middle classes, along tendentially egalitarian lines, thus making Hitler a true "social-revolutionary" of the twentieth century.

 

A key work in this revisionist strand is Rainer Zitelman's book Hitler, Selbstverstandnis eines Revolutionars (published in Italian translation by Laterza in 1990).

 

Before dealing with his theses, it is worth pointing out that about ninety per cent of the literature on the relationship between the working class and Nazism in Germany does not accept this interpretation. However our publishing industry chooses to ignore this fact, and is happy to promote books that are launched by the media, particularly if they present a challenge to accepted historical interpretations.

Given that the Italian Left also tends to follow cultural fashions, it has become a kind of echo chamber for this historiographical revisionism.

 

Zitelman's text is pretty insubstantial, given that it consists of a compilation of quotations from Hitler's speeches and writings, unaccompanied by any research into archive sources. The basic thesis is that Hitler was a true working-class leader who had a real interest in the betterment of the working class; he set in motion highly advanced social policies, and specifically a policy which used the instrument of the indirect wage to produce equalising tendencies within the structure of German society.

 

All this, as I say, is based not on a close examination of the facts, but on Hitler's offical statements, writings and speeches. I would say that here we are dealing with a kind of historiography which is tendentially new, compared with the historiography around which the issue of the so-called Historikerstreit developed. This latter involved a dispute around the nature of Nazism and the problem of the guilt of the German people, prompted by the publication of the work of Ernst Nolte. The controversy began in 1986, but by 1989 it had run its course, partly because the polemic had run out of steam, but also because in that year the fall of the Berlin Wall opened a whole new series of contradictions and cultural problematics which were inevitably also reflected within historiography.

 

The new polemic to which I am referring has not yet arrived in Italy, but I expect that it soon will. It would be sensible not to let ourselves be taken by surprise. In order to avoid being thrown onto the defensive by this new revisionism, we need to react in advance, in order to clarify publicly the terms of this new debate.

 

2. Historical research in Germany today

The fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as creating new contradictions, made available a large amount of new historical material - sources from the ex-German Democratic Republic, which were particularly rich in material covering industrial and economic issues in Germany during the Nazi period. This source material is invaluable for a reconstruction of the context of working-class life and work under Nazism. In addition, in West Germany, as from the early 1980s a number of major industrial companies opened their archives, not only to company historians, but to outsiders too. The Daimler Benz company provides a good example of this development. In 1987, two research projects were published virtually simultaneously. The first was put together by a group of researchers whose principal concern was to present a good image of the company; the second was able to highlight Daimler Benz's grave responsibilities in the preparation of the Nazi war machine, and in the use of forced labour. This second text, the Daimler Benz-Buch, prepared by our Foundation (principally by Karl-Heinz Roth) was widely read (a new and updated edition is about to be published by the 2001 publishing house). Its importance was that it opened a breach in the wall of silence on the subject of forced labour under Nazism, to which I shall return below. Among other things it forced Daimler Benz to admit publicly the silences and contradictory claims of its "official" historians, and, for reasons of image, to shell out the not inconsiderable sum of 20 million marks as financial compensation for surviving forced labourers and their families.

 

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the events that surrounded it produced a major upheaval in the structures of historical research in ex-East Germany, and set in motion a process of self-criticism among various leading East German historians, in particular over how they had handled the problem of relations between the working class and Nazism.

 

In short, with the fall of the Wall, a sound basis was laid for continuing detailed research work and examination of the documents and archives of the Nazi period. This has subsequently led to a vigorous publishing activity. The effect of two decades of this work has produced results which the machinery of revisionism will be incapable of eradicating.

 

My intention in drawing your attention to all this research is to enable you to judge for yourselves the baselessness and intellectual dishonesty of the new voices of historical revisionism, and the profound ignorance of those who choose to publish and promote their books.

 

3. Forced labour in the Nazi period: examples of research

An early example of this research is an article by Ulrich Herbert, director of the Centre for Studies of the Nazi Period, in Hamburg. This was published in the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft in 1979, under the title "Workers and National Socialism. A historical assessment. Some unresolved questions". Ulrich Herbert is a well-known historian, particularly known in Italy because of his work on an overlooked corner of historical research - the use of foreign labour-power within the German war economy from 1938 onwards.

 

As I said above, the question of forced labour was also one of the main points of the research carried out by Karl Heinz Roth on the history of the Daimler Benz company, and it has been the subject of work done recently by Italian historians.

 

Unfortunately not many Italians choose to research the social history of Nazism. For this reason it is worth mentioning two important recent works by Italians - the study by Gustavo Corni entitled "The agrarian policies of National Socialism, 1930-1939", and Brunello Mantelli's piece entitled "Camerati del Lavoro", on the use of Italian forced labour within the German war economy.

 

Mantelli's studies have been proceeding in parallel with a study by our own Foundation, on the transfer of Italian workers to Nazi Germany, an oral-history project which has been largely in the hands of Cesare Bermani. Bermani's work has opened new understandings of everyday life in Nazi Germany on the basis of a little-studied episode in relations between the Third Reich and the fascist government in Italy: the handing over of some half a million workers in return for supplies of fuel. This was an anomalous episode in the history of Italian emigration. Before the Second World War, emigration was spontaneous and uncontrolled, whereas in the case studied by Bermani and Mantelli the exchange of labour power was formally contracted between two nation states.

 

As I was saying, progressive German historiography has given us a useful view of the years of the war economy - namely that the composition of the workforce was multinational, the ethnic stratification was extremely rigid, and 80 per cent of this workforce was working under conditions of forced labour.

 

This element of forced labour has been one of the new areas of research which has been pursued during the past decade not only by our Foundation, but also by other researchers, and it provides a fundamental basis for understanding the relations between Nazism and the working class.

 

4. The work of Timothy Mason, and the debate among German social historians

A crucial work in the history of relations between Nazism and the working class is the book by Timothy W. Mason, Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft ("Working Class and the 'National Community'" [published in English as Social Policy in the Third Reich, Berg, Providence and Oxford, 1993]), which revolutionised our view of working-class behaviour under Nazism. Halfway through the 1970s, and in opposition to all previous positions, he used unpublished documentation to show that, in Nazi Germany, in the period from 1936-37 onwards, in particular among the working class, and not only in the factories, there was a passive resistance, which often became active, and that there were also strikes, to which the regime was forced to respond with repressive measures.

 

Mason thus completely overturned the dominant view which claims that there was no resistance to the Nazi regime from within the working class except during the first few months of its rise.

 

Mason's thesis is supported by a wealth of documentation. The book (1,300 pages long) was published in 1975. More than three quarters of it consists of documents. The only part to have been translated into Italian was the Introduction, which was published by De Donato in 1980, under the title La Politica Sociale del Terzo Reich, a book which unfortunately disappeared from circulation when its publisher went bankrupt.

 

As from that moment, all historical research had to take account of Mason's work. On the one hand it produced further studies along similar lines, and on the other it created fierce opposition.

The new wave of historical revisionism tends to dismiss Mason's work and documentation out of hand. Mason's great merit, leaving aside his observations on the subjective behaviour of German workers, was that of redefining the historiography of Nazism, which, in Germany in particular, at least until the mid-1970s, had only once shown signs of life, in the debate sparked by the great Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer.

 

For the rest, Western historiography continued churning out books on Nazism as a totalitarian model, following the canons of an institutional historiography which was completely blind to phenomena in the society at large.

 

Although Fischer also belonged to this school, his merit was to have posed the problem of the "continuity of elites" in German history, a continuity which carried on uninterrupted in the transition from the Wilhelmian period to Weimar, and from Weimar to the Nazi period: the continuity of the power groups, particularly in the field of economic power, had the effect of diminishing the effects of institutional changes. Broadly speaking, the transition from monarchy to republic, and then from republic to dictatorship, were changes of facade, while real power remained firmly in the hands of the same groups as previously.

 

Many historians polemicised against this interpretation.

 

One of the protagonists - and this brings us to our own area of interest - was a historian who is seen as one of the founders of social history in Germany, Jurgen Kocka.

 

The social historians counterposed to Fischer's line of argument a conception of social dynamics based on an analysis of class relations and on the emergence of forms such as the socialist mass parties. This conception was in opposition to what they saw as Fischer's "immobilist" vision, trapped within analysis of the power elites.

 

On the other hand, for Karl Heinz Roth and for the work of our Hamburg Foundation, Fischer's thesis has provided a fundamental interpretational tool.

 

The historical debates that followed on this were not particularly to do with Nazism, but they had important consequences in the historiography of the Nazi period, in particular the controversy among the social historians themselves. This divided the current headed by Jurgen Kocka from the "young" historians who, arising out of the movements of 1968, gave greater importance to a "history of the everyday" (Alltagsgeschichte), breaking down the divisions between the personal and the political. This tendency distanced itself from a social history which had tended to work within the classic schema of working class = trade union.

 

In the course of the debate, different conceptions of the "working class" were to emerge. For Kocka and his school, the working class means waged labour; for historians of the everyday, the monolithic concept of working class is sterile, because in their opinion the historian's job is to analyse all the divisions and differentiations within society, and in particular to analyse all aspects of everyday life, even where they are not principally defined by work or by work relations.

 

This debate has very important implications at the level of relations between the working class and Nazism.

 

Why? If we adopt a monolithic concept of the working class, inevitably our judgement on its behaviour in relation to the Nazi regime will end up being schematic - either for or against, either opposition or submission - whereas if we use the more highly differentiated concept of stratified class composition and analyse everyday behaviours as "political" behaviours, this gives us a more diversified space within which to judge the attitude of the German people as a whole, and of the proletariat in particular. It enables us to reach more articulated conclusions. Furthermore, Kocka's conception, which is similar to that of many Italian historians close to the ex-Italian Communist Party, assigns a central role to the organisations of the labour movement - the political party and the trade union - in the history of the working class and of working-class mentality. They tend to assume an identity between the class and the party, whereas the historians of the everyday tend to highlight the "autonomy" of the working class from the party and from party ideology, a possible "distance" that separates the culture (or rather cultures) of the various working-class and proletarian groups from the culture of the party and union.

Among the principal exponents of the "historians of the everyday" we might cite Alf Ludtke and Lutz Niethammer - the latter being the author of a recently published book Die volkseigene Erfahrung, which attempts to understand, via a series of interviews, the subjective view which the citizens of the ex-DDR had of the communist system of power.

 

5. The movement of grass roots historians

When historians of the Kocka tendency come to deal with Nazism, they generally view the behaviour of the working class negatively, and therefore consider Tim Mason's work as exaggerated in its claims.

The Alltagshistoriker, on the other hand, see Mason as an important reference point. Arising out of his treatment of the social history of everyday life, the end of the 1970s saw a new movement emerging in Germany - that of the Geschichtswerkstatten or "History Workshops". As elsewhere, this was a movement of non-professional "grass roots" historians, but more importantly it can also be seen as part of the movement of Burgerinitiativen, of the civil rights movement, insofar as it defended the right of local communities to know and understand their own pasts.

 

It played an important role in preventing the distancing and the demonisation of Germany's Nazi past, and thus also made possible a reconstruction of the history of the working class and proletariat, insofar as its concern was more with the "history of the forgotten ones" than with the history of Great Protagonists.

 

This was one of the aspects of the neue soziale Bewegungen (the "new social movements") in the 1980s.

 

This overall movement, which reached its height in the period 1983-4, today finds expression in two journals: Geschichtswerkstatt and Werkstatt Geschichte. One of the controversies between the social historians and the "historians of the everyday" hinges on the definition of "culture": the social historians accuse the historians of the everyday of replacing the idea of "class" - in other words of a social formation defined by a set of material conditions that are quantitatively verifiable - with an idea of "culture" as an ensemble of subjective and "non-material" elements which tend to dissolve any "class" identity. The historians of the everyday, on the other hand, accuse the social historians of wanting to limit the identificational criteria of a social class to quantifiable elements, and of advancing party and trade-union ideology as the only element of collective working-class culture.

 

Alongside this debate there also developed a debate on the use of oral sources.

 

While these methodological disputes were important in the sense that they helped lay the basis for a new phase of studies on the relationship between the working class and Nazism, what was more interesting was the results obtained at the concrete level of researching documents, connections and memories.

 

A couple of major oral history projects were carried out in individual regions, in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the behaviour of German people under Nazism; Lutz Niethammer's study on the Ruhr focused on relations between the working class and Nazism in an industrial region, while Martin Broszat's study on Bavaria dealt with a principally agricultural region where Nazism enjoyed its earliest successes. These two were followed by many other studies which focussed on a given region, a city, a village, a factory, a neighbourhood, or even a group of friends.

 

So, we have a project of diffuse local research which in part confirms Mason's theses and in part highlights the ambivalence of working-class attitudes and behaviour.

 

As I say, one of the controversies was over the problem of culture, and the contradiction between the culture of working-class communities and the culture of political parties and trade unions.

The historians of the "everyday" tendency maintain that working-class culture is a culture which is created in specific environments (neighbourhoods, factories, local communities), and is thus a gruppenspezifisch (group-specific) culture, of limited social nuclei which live in a community or milieu of their own; it is, if you like, a sub-culture, and thus the history of the working class is to be seen as a history of interconnecting sub-cultures.

 

Secondly, the history of the working class is to be analysed in all the various fragmentations and segmentations which the working class has experienced; one should not limit oneself, as so often happens in the work of social and labour-movement historians, to examining only the central portion of the factory working class that is tied culturally to the social democratic party and the social democratic trade union.

 

This historiographical innovation had the merit of mounting a radical criticism of the concept of culture, and of the way that it was used by social democracy.

 

Some of these researches have maintained that the culture of the party and its functionaries was seen as alien by the rank and file. Apparently they termed it Wissensozialismus, the socialism of abstract knowledge; these historians say that the history of culture has to be examined in the mental attitudes of the working class at this mass level too, because the fracture between high culture and low culture, between rank and file culture and the culture of party functionaries, becomes very strong in certain historical periods.

 

One may or may not agree with these theses, but from a heuristic point of view they were strongly innovative and set in motion a series of fruitful research projects aimed at establishing a relationship between historical memory and the new generations of Germany's citizens, without the filtering mediation of ivory-tower academics or party apparatchiks. This gave us a historiography which identifies the localities where things took place, uncovers the historical remains, and restores to specific locations - to cities that were devastated by war, razed to the ground, and then rebuilt - the memory of their past, particularly the memory of their past under Nazism.

 

Here, for example, we had many initiatives in the area of Gedenkstatte - of places where one could meditate on the recent past (for example, uncovering the traces of concentration camps or some of the smaller forced-labour camps) - and also many initiatives aimed at gathering the memories of communities that had subsequently been dispersed, be they neighbourhoods, factories, or villages.

After the devastation of World War II, which resulted in internal migrations and emigrations, other migratory movements were then sparked by the division of Germany into two separate states, and the return of territory of the ex-Third Reich to neighbouring countries such as Poland, Russia and Czechoslovakia, which caused further movements of populations; then there were the great waves of immigrant workers coming from southern Europe, the Balkans and Turkey, resulting in a continuous redesign of localities.

 

The fact of preserving traces of the past and constructing around them an initiative based on historical memory - not simply the setting up of a memorial stone - ranks high in the scale of civil activity and meaning.

 

What does it mean? It means that, whether we like it or not, history has a political function. And, as it says in the title of a recently published collection of historical essays, Geschichte als demokratische Auftrag ("History as a democratic undertaking"), the preservation and elaboration of memory should be one of the commitments of democracy. From a cultural point of view, this way of doing history is the absolute antithesis of an academic culture, counterposed to it in mentality, intentionality, tone and language. In many cases local trade-union and municipal organisations have encouraged and supported these rank and file initiatives, which have been simultaneously a challenge, a warning, and a stimulus to the university-based historical establishments.

 

We have seen various professional academic historians abandoning their isolation and getting involved with this kind of initiative; a number of factory councils have organised the gathering and recording of people's memories, and have encouraged companies to open their archives; we have also seen priests and pastors collaborating, in making available documents from Church archives.

 

Many of these grass roots historians are teachers and social workers.

 

Anyway, the point that I am making is this: in Germany there was the growth of a rank and file movement which, through to the mid-1980s, was able both to monitor and stimulate the research of professional university historians. This movement was able to add many pieces to the historical jigsaw of working-class life in the Weimar Republic and under Nazism.

 

6. The debate on "modernisation"

One of the problems which has animated historians in the past ten years has been the so-called "modernisation" debate. In other words, is it the case that, far from being a step back in history (as earlier interpretations have seen it) National Socialism was in fact a period of powerful innovation at all levels, not only in economic and technological terms, but also in social and industrial policy, in management of the media, etc. Needless to say, a question like this puts the cat among the pigeons, because if one sees the regime as having been innovative and modernising, one may end by having a more favourable view of it.

 

The problem here is in the ambiguity of the terms "modern" and "modernity", and in the values which they are accorded among different historians, depending on their vision of the world and their idea of progress.

 

This discussion concerns us here, because in the recent period it has focussed on the problem of social policy, in other words on the regime's intitiatives aimed at "integrating" the working class.

 

Karl Heinz Roth's latest work to be published by our foundation completes the edited collection of documents of the Institute of the Science of Labour of the DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the Nazi trade union). In this work Roth gives a clear exposition of the various phases and positions represented in this debate, and he takes a position which is categorically opposed to the modernisation thesis.

 

In Roth's opinion, the Nazis' measures and policies of control, repression and destruction of the working class are far more in evidence than measures and policies aimed at consensual integration.

 

Naturally, this debate has not been limited to the history of the Nazi period; it has also extended back to the history of the Weimar period. One of the most original contributions has been that of a young historian who died recently - Detlev Peukert. He coined the phrase "the pathology of the Modern" to characterise the regressive aspects of Weimar and the Hitlerite regime. Peukert dealt with, among other things, the anti-Nazi resistance of German youth and of German militant workers. (His book The Social History of the Third Reich was published in Italian by Sansoni in 1989.) A number of his colleagues have since written articles in a volume in his memory, dealing with the problems arising from the concept of the "modern" and its use by historians: Zivilisation und Barbarei. Die widerspruchlichen Potentiale der Moderne. Detlev Peukert zum Gedenken, ed. F. Bajohr, W. Johe and U. Lohalm (1991).

 

All these controversies, and the various levels of research that feed them, make it possible for us to set about finding an answer to the fundamental question that Mason's book had posed: why was it that the passive resistance to Nazism did not then translate into active resistance, into an open demonstration of antagonism, and why was there not a "sacrifice" of struggle against Nazism by the working class and the German proletariat, such as could be presented to the judgement of history as an element of its memory? Why was it that those sectors that did put up resistance were so thoroughly defeated? And how is it possible for historians from the "Left" area close to the Social Democratic party to write - as Gunter Mai did in an article published in the late 1980s - "The bourgeoisie brought Hitler to power; the working class kept him there"?

 

Is it historical revisionism? Is it a polemical exaggeration? Is it a product of the tendency to devalue the role of the working class today? Is it an ideological stance? Or is it a logical consequence to be drawn from a reading of the documents? Is Mason now a thing of the past? Did he misread the documents? Is his distinction between "opposition" and "resistance" artificial? Or is it the case that, as the majority thesis would have it, the resistance was of such tiny, insignificant minorities as to reduce it to a peripheral and passing episode?

 

I would like to attempt to answer these questions, on the basis of work that has been done by historians from Germany and other countries. I shall limit myself to two basic elements in the period covering the transition from the Weimar Republic to Nazism: the regime's administration of unemployment, and the physical confrontation with the Nazi gangs.

 

Or rather, instead of providing answers, I shall attempt to provide a better framework for the questions, formulating them in different terms, and highlighting aspects of the history of the German proletariat which may be unfamiliar to the wider public.

 

7. The structure of the workforce at the end of the Weimar Republic

After that lengthy prologue, I now come to the main body of my contribution.

I have divided it into three parts: 1) class composition and the structure of the workforce in the period of the Great Depression, before Hitler took power; 2) the organisation of self-defence and armed clashes between Nazi gangs and the German communist proletariat, taking the situation in Berlin as my example; 3) employment policies, the industrial lift-off, and the political behaviour of the working class in the early years of the Nazi regime.

 

So, let us begin with the technical composition of the class.

 

What was the working class at the end of the Weimar Republic? If we examine the statistics gathered by Heinrich A. Winkler in the third volume of his monumental work on the working class and labour movement in Weimar (Der Weg in die Katastrophe, Dietz Verlag 1990, 2nd edition) a few figures will suffice to define the situation: by the end of the Weimar Republic, the number of workers employed in factories with fewer than 10 employees stood at something like 7 million out of a total of 14.5 million - thus around 50 per cent of the workforce; in 1925 this had been 6,800,000 out of a total of 18.5 million, and thus a bare 34%.

 

Thus when we speak of the working class of the final period of Weimar, we are talking of a working class that was already extremely atomised, which inhabited a factory environment that was fragmented and pulverised - as if they had been subjected to a decentralisation of production ante litteram.

If the Weimar Republic was an extraordinary laboratory of modernity, it was partly on account of this form of production: instead of following the tendency of the times towards concentration and the big Fordist factory, it took an opposite path, in order to permit a better political and trade-union control of the workforce.

 

In addition, we should remember the massive presence of self-employed workers, which rose from 15.9% of the workforce in 1925 to 16.4 in 1933, while the overall percentage of workers remained stable at 46%.

 

According to Hachtmann, the author of a book on the industrial working class of the Third Reich (1989), self-employed workers represented 17.1% of workers employed in artisanal industry, and 25.1% of those employed in the transport-trade sector.

 

Thus we are in the presence of a working class which was extremely fragmented and which was characterised by relatively unstable patterns of employment.

 

The statistics on unemployment, classified by sector, feature at the head of the list, above engineering workers and workers in the metal trades, a strange figure of a worker, described as Lohnarbeiter wechselnder Art - in other words, a mobile waged worker, a worker who moved from one sector to another, from textiles to building, from engineering to transport, from agriculture to the service sector, without fixed employment in any particular sector.

 

Historians have given scant attention to this, but the statisticians of the period were sophisticated researchers, with a deep understanding of the world of work, and aware of the marked segmentation of the labour market; they were struck by the appearance of this particular figure of manual worker (they were not necessarily unskilled workers; they could as well be skilled workers selling their labour here and there, at higher rates than they could have obtained by remaining in one particular workplace).

The statisticians thus coined this term Lohnarbeiter wechselnder Art to describe this unstable, wandering mass. 900,000 of these mobile workers were unemployed in 1931; by 1933 the figure was 1,296,000. In Berlin, at the height of the Depression, they represented 45% of the unemployed, and in districts such as Kreuzberg, 48%.

 

8. The puzzle of the micro-enterprise

The problem posed by the statistics is the following: what grip was it possible for the political organisations of the labour movement, and in particular the Social Democrats, and the Catholic and Socialist trade unions, to have over a workforce that was so fragmented, dispersed and mobile?

The main thrust of the Social Democratic union had concentrated on the component of the working class employed in the big factories, or in municipal workplaces, where trade union agreements were more or less respected. But this vast territory of the micro-factory, of micro-work, was a territory governed by unwritten rules and family-type relations of control.

 

This level was characterised either by isolation, or by moments of cohesion that were at best informal.

Historians have studied this field very little; what has stood in the way of historical research has been the old prejudice that the micro-enterprise consisted essentially of pre-capitalist artisanal undertakings, and that the artisans, the micro-entrepreneurs, belonged to the Mittelstand, to the middle classes, and were thus all reactionaries.

 

The problem is that historiography is still carrying with it the prejudices of the historians of the Social Democratic labour movement, who considered as working class only the workers who worked in the big factories, and who have dedicated their research activities almost entirely to them. The result of this is that the province of artisanal undertakings was seen as the territory of the small-to-middle bourgeoisie, and therefore entirely reactionary and corporatist.

 

This prejudice, based on an implicit concept of progress whereby only the big factory was capable of introducing processes of modernisation - by creating on the one hand a productive bourgeoisie and on the other trade-unionised workers, has literally blinded historians to the real nature of the processes of decentralisation of production, through which, very early on, capitalism - and the Weimar Republic is a real laboratory in this respect - moved to weaken the social cohesion and trade-union unity of the working class.

 

The result of this prejudice is that historians have taken account only of the "little bosses" and not of their employees; thus historians have continued to see the artisanal concern as a pre-capitalist left-over, and not as the result of a decentralisation of the production of the big factory and a deliberate atomisation of the working class.

 

If we want proof that here we are dealing with a "modern" phenomenon (or with a "pathology of the modern", as Peukert would have it), and not with some pre-capitalist remnant, we have it in the fact that after 1925, in the period of so-called "rationalisation", when Taylorist methods were being introduced massively into Germany, and when there was thus a process of modernisation of capital, the number of workers employed in micro-enterprises employing less than ten workers remained constant.

 

9. The Communist Party and unemployed workers

I now turn to the question of the social base of the Communist Party, and I would begin with the phase of rationalisation, which began in 1924, when the worst of the inflation had been overcome by means of monetary reform, and particularly with help from the Americans.

 

Productivity in the capital goods industry rose by 30% in the period 1925-29, and by 25% in the consumer goods sector.

 

These were characterised as Weimar's "golden years": 1924-28. For some sections of the "new bourgeoisie" this was the case, but for the mass of workers it certainly was not. The average level of wages remained below that of 1913, and was only exceeded in a few categories. There was a strong degree of hierarchisation.

 

In this period, not only did the condition of the working class fail to improve, but there also began a systematic and selective expulsion from the factories of the militant trade-union cadres of the Communist Party, and of the more combative among the Social-Democratic worker militants.

The base of the Communist Party in the following period of the Great Depression, was characterised by considerable fluctuations in its membership, and by a large membership of young people; these two aspects were in part linked.

 

In 1931, two years into the Depression, the German Communist Party was a party with a membership made up of 80% unemployed workers.

 

At the party's organising conference in Berlin-Brandenburg, one of the Communist Party's strongholds, 878 of the 940 delegates present were unemployed.

 

But the years of the Great Depression were also the years of an impressive electoral advance by the Communist Party. Electoral successes (or failures) are always to be measured against the "social power" of the party. We need to examine what strength the party might have had, given the social collocation of its members and supporters, in terms of influence over the mechanisms of power within civil society.

 

Since it was made up principally of the unemployed, and thus mainly of ex-workers and young people in search of a first job, the Communist Party was not in a position to exercise any kind of trade-union power. It had to limit itself to trade-union propaganda, and to the hope that one or two of its militants still surviving in the workplaces might be able to act as the driving motors of particular conflicts.

 

For a party that was still rooted in a "workerist" perspective, according to which the struggle against capital was to be won in the workplace, within the relations of production, this situation was profoundly disturbing. The Communist Party was obliged to shift onto "general" terrains, into mass campaigns that were as noisy as they were abstract, and the result of this was to over-emphasise the "propagandist", "cultural", "ideological" and basically electoralist side of its activity.

 

This paradoxical situation, of a workers' party which had absolutely no trade-union power, was one of the reasons for the party's growing "ideologisation" at a time when the collectivity, as a result of the Great Depression, was having to push for things that were very material and concrete - the satisfaction of its most basic needs.

 

But at the same time the condition of unemployment was a collective condition. The unemployed were not a marginal corner of society - they represented 30% of the population. The KPD was thus the strongest organisation of a new social stratum, that of the "long-term unemployed", which was a potentially explosive mix. This meant that the party had a social power and possibilities for mobilisation which were even greater when one remembers its popularity among the youth of the big cities.

 

10. Divisions among the unemployed, and fractures within the labour movement

A few statistics will suffice to give an idea of the extent of the unemployment, and the dramatic nature of the situation in the years of the Great Depression, when both the Communist Party and the Nazi party were winning their biggest electoral successes.

 

In the fourth quarter of 1930, the unemployed stood at 3,699,000; in the same period of 1931, the figure was 5,060,000; by one year later it stood at 5,353,000. The peak was reached when Hitler was already in power, in the first quarter of 1933, with 6,100,000 unemployed.

 

But these are only the "official" unemployed, registered as such at government employment offices. Historians had been working on these figures up to about ten years ago. Then, thanks to work done by a woman researcher, Heidrun Homburg, attention was focused on statistics of the period which suggested the existence of a "hidden" stratum of unemployment. Homburg's work provided the basis for Winkler's reconstruction (for the post-1933 period, Rudiger Hachtman embarked on original research which, however, takes as its starting point the same contemporary works that Homburg had examined). The atomised structure of the workforce in the micro-enterprises, and the presence of a wandering mass of precarious workers, meant that there were very large numbers of people who had not worked sufficiently to get the right to unemployment benefit. In addition, as we shall see shortly, there were reasons that served to keep the unemployed away from Employment Offices.

 

Thus if we also take into account the hidden unemployment, we arrive at the following figures: 4,115,000 unemployed in the fourth quarter of 1930, of which 32.5% were without unemployment benefit; 5,943,000 in 1931 (33.5% without benefit); 6,704,000 in the third quarter of 1932 (37.6% without benefit); and 7,781,000 in the first quarter of 1933 (31.6% without benefit). In short, if we add the "hidden" unemployment to the official statistics, we have to add between a million and a million and a half people to the figures. Unemployment on this scale produced such a strong fracture within technical class composition that it inevitably had consequences at the level of people's ideas, and thus of their political behaviours.

 

The first fracture, obviously, was that between the employed and the unemployed, and therefore between a significant part of the base of the Social Democratic parties and the Communist rank and file; the second split occurred between unemployed people on benefit, unemployed people with forms of personal support, and unemployed people with no support whatever.

 

The unemployment weakened the institution of the trade union in its functions of social control, whereby it creates a connective social fabric, a mediation between society's relatively guaranteed strata and its marginal strata.

 

Both the parties within the labour movement, the SPD and the KPD, were deeply affected by the unemployment, which undermined their ability to exercise real power in society. The Communist Party tended increasingly to turn to propaganda activities, whereas the Social Democrats increasingly focussed their energies on local municipal administration, and on the administration of health and social security - in other words on that small amount of real power which enabled it to defend its members employed within public administration - and the management of public resources, given that trade-union activity in industrial workplaces had been effectively paralysed by the Depression. There was thus an enormous distance between the mentality of an average SPD cadre, who identified (and not just ideologically) with the bureaucracy of the Weimar Republic - and the mentality of the average KPD cadre. What the Communist Party had to offer its militants (the young, the unemployed, the rootless, the impoverished, the declassed) was the Utopia of the conquest of power - in other words the destruction of the Weimar state and the setting up of a Soviet-style republic. When people talk about "the two parties of the labour movement, the SPD and the KPD", they are perpetuating a mystification, a historical falsehood. But it is one into which it is easy to fall.

 

The SPD and the KPD occupied such different positions, and the mentalities of their militants were so different, that it is hard to see them as members of one single "labour movement". These two political forces had been locked in bitter battle since the revolution of November 1918 and the events which followed it: the split between the workers led by the Social Democrats and those led by the Spartacists; the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; the split between the Social Democratic union and the KPD factory cells during the period of "rationalisation" (in this period the trade unions had attempted to set up structures for co-management, whereas the communist cells had declared outright war on the rationalisation and had been systematically rooted out of the factories, with their militants being sacked in a joint union-employer campaign).

 

These were deep wounds, which, far from healing, became increasingly open. They were wounds within the body of the working class, and they aggravated the divisions already produced by the differences of social status (employed, unemployed, etc).

 

It was not simply a question of two separate political lines, of different strategies of leaderships that were at loggerheads with each other; it was a question of two cultures, two different and hostile mentalities, so that "unity at the grassroots level", in other words the kind of unity that can be born out of everyday relations, on concrete issues, was just as difficult, if not more difficult, to create, as unity at the top.

 

Erich Fromm, who was working at the celebrated Frankfurt Institute for Social Research run by Max Horkheimer, had the idea, in 1929, of organising a Workers' Inquiry, with the intention of examining the mentality and everyday opinions of ordinary working-class people, so as to identify possible inclinations towards authoritarianism; he applied a psycho-analytic methodology derived from family analysis. However his methods were not acceptable to the sociologists at the Institute. As a result of disagreements, the results of the Inquiry (which was terminated in 1931, on a very limited sample of around 700 questionnaires completed) were not published.

 

Fromm and his collaborator, Hilde Weiss, the woman who actually did most of the work and must therefore be considered the true author of the Inquiry, were only finally able to publish their results in 1939, in exile in America. At the time it appeared that they had been reluctant to publish in 1931, because they were alarmed by the authoritarian streak which was revealed in the answers from their respondents, who were mostly militants of or sympathisers of the SPD. A reading of the replies to the questionnaires, which were republished in 1983, confirms this impression.

 

Although the research sample was small, one can see a clear difference of mentality between the average SPD cadre and the KPD militant. One section of questions concerned issues of women's liberation, of women's dress and sexual behaviour, and another concerned questions of bringing up children.

It is striking that the answers to these questions were more open and more detailed than those about rationalisation and conditions of work in the factories, on which there were about 50% "don't knows".

 

11. The welfare system as a system of control

Now, to return to the Communist Party, and to probe the source of its difficulties even at the moment of its greater electoral successes. The Party's potential power in society derived from the fact of its being the largest political organisation present within the mass of the unemployed. This meant that the institutional negotiating partner with which Communist Party members had to deal was the administration apparatus of the Ministry of Labour involved in the organisation of unemployment benefit - in other words, a complex and capillary apparatus which was one of the pillars of the Weimar state. The Communist Party had to prove itself in the organisation and leading of social conflicts not in the workplace, but in the arena of social welfare.

 

If we wish to understand the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the transition to Nazism, it is clearly crucial that we understand the mechanisms of control, selection and disciplining which the welfare apparatus had at its disposal.

 

The spiralling rise of unemployment gave this apparatus huge powers during the final phase of the Republic. We could go so far as to say that, in the eyes of the ordinary citizen, the only identifiable face of the state was that of the welfare apparatus. The discretional powers of this apparatus steadily increased, and at the same time its function as a "benefit agency" was gradually replaced by a function of "gathering information about people".

 

The final Weimar governments, the two Bruning cabinets, the Von Papen cabinet and the Von Schleicher cabinet, were well aware of the controlling potential of the welfare apparatus. They used the lever of the system of Arbeitslosenversicherung - compulsory unemployment insurance - with great cynicism and to calculated effect in order to create a maximum of segmentation and atomisation within the mass of the unemployed.

 

This policy was put into effect by means of a series of decrees - and thus via a procedure which sidestepped parliament - in which the conditions of access to unemployment benefit were progressively altered. As the conditions of eligibility were changed, some social groups were excluded, while others found their money being drastically cut. In many instances these decrees (which among other things created enormous bureaucratic confusion, and an endless sense of insecurity) confined themselves simply to identifying social groups which were to be excluded from unemployment benefit or social security, for periods which might be temporary... or forever... or until the next decree...

 

For example, young women without children lost the right to benefit, as did young people below the age of 21, and particular categories of workers (usually the weakest, and the most rebellious). The arguments used to justify the cuts and exclusions - which were always accompanied by some little "present" for other social groups, in order to accentuate the divisions - were always the same: the necessity of reducing the public spending deficit.

 

Thus millions of the unemployed felt themselves constantly under threat even in an area of social right which they had acquired by means of contributions. Ordinary people, who were already desperate as a result of prolonged periods of unemployment, had the impression that the government was playing roulette with their poverty.

 

Insecurity and exasperation grew, and there was a strong desire to get rid of the regime. But the atomisation of the unemployed prevented a social reconfiguration to the Left.

 

The political Left did not exist; the SPD defended the Weimar regime as a democratic regime, as having been won by workers' victories; and the KPD wanted it to be abolished and replaced.

The fact of these constant changes in the rules of social welfare contributed importantly to increasing the level of "hidden" unemployment; increasing numbers of people found themselves denied any form of social security, while others chose not to put themselves in a position of having to apply for moneys over which they would always have to argue.

 

The system was organised around three forms of intervention. The first was the Arbeitslosenunterstutzung (ALU), the unemployment benefit made available under the 1927 law on compulsory unemployment insurance. This could be enjoyed only by those who had contributed for a certain period, in other words those who had been continuously employed over a period of years.

 

The Krisenunterstutzung (KRU) was a benefit available for exceptional crisis situations in individual industrial districts or factories (along the lines of a special redundancy provision). This was available principally to those who had not accumulated sufficient contributions in order to obtain the ALU - in other words precarious workers, those who were unable to find a steady job, and who alternated periods of employment with periods of unemployment; this form of benefit was also introduced by the 1927 law.

 

The third form of benefit was laid down in a law of 1924, and could be defined as a poor law; whereas the two previous benefits were administered and paid by the employment offices, and thus were part of a state insurance system, this third benefit was paid by individual municipal councils. The difference lay in the fact that those who did not have a sufficient period of steady employment to enjoy the rights laid down in the law of 1927 fell into this form of assistance. However, it was not a right acquired through an insurance system, but rather a gesture of solidarity of the municipal council and was based on discretional criteria. It was paid according to the individual circumstances of the person concerned, and the claimant was eventually expected to repay it. This was called the Wohlfartsunterstutzung (WU).

 

The important point is the following: during the Depression, unemployment became a mass phenomenon and the periods involved grew longer and longer. Given that the system was conceived as operating at three levels, an increasing number of people who had the right to unemployment benefit ended up either losing their right, after prolonged periods of unemployment, or running out of time under the operating system laid down by the law.

 

The result was that during the Depression an increasing number of people fell out of the first two levels and ended up in the third, with the result that local councils found themselves having to cope with a demand for funds which hadn't previously existed. Thus unemployed people were receiving less and less money.

 

To phrase it differently, the unemployed were being turned into the assisted poor, and the judgement as to whether, and to what extent, they had the right to assistance was decided no longer by a ministerial bureaucracy but by a municipal bureaucracy which was in part unprepared, but which was also overwhelmed by the huge demands being made upon it.

 

For the latter Weimar governments this situation was something of an advantage, given that it shifted the problem of social security assistance from state finances to local municipal finances.

What did this mean for the unemployed, and particularly for the central core of the working class, which found itself driven into an assistential system which put them on the same level as the poorest and most marginal members of society? It meant that the workers became "the poor" not only in material terms but also in terms of the law.

 

The relationship with a "social state" had been very important to social democracy and to the trade unions, in giving a sense of citizenship to the working class of the Weimar Republic and in this way inculcating a loyalty to the Republic's institutions. This bond was now being shattered, and the result was a further sense of alienation among the unemployed working class, in relation to the state and its institutions. Thus, when the working class is accused of not sufficiently defending the democratic Republic, one has to bear in mind that this democracy by now represented very little in the eyes of the central nucleus of the workforce. The result of driving the unemployed onto the system of municipal welfare was to create an army of people obliged to go asking for charity from a bureaucrat, who very often judged their needs solely on the basis of subjective impressions. The unemployed could receive social security only if they succeeded in convincing the benefits officer in a face-to-face interview. This led to the creation of a mass of millions of people who were open to blackmail. Furthermore - a fact which was important for the subsequent Nazi regime - the details of all these people were thoroughly documented.

 

But this was not all. As I said above, social security benefits paid by the municipal councils were expected to be repaid. Thus large numbers of people found themselves saddled with lifelong debts to their respective municipal authorities. (In a shrewd move, in 1935 Hitler issued a decree which cancelled all debts of welfare recipients to their respective councils.)

 

These circumstances perhaps explain why it was that, as the crisis progressed, increasingly large numbers of people chose not to take up any form of benefit, and thus added further to the numbers of those who were no longer registered as unemployed.

 

This is the origin of the political, economic, social and statistical problem of the so-called "hidden unemployment" during the Great Depression. At the start of the crisis, the vast majority of the unemployed had the right to an unemployment benefit, the ALU referred to above. By March 1933, when Hitler was already in power and unemployment was reaching a peak, ALU recipients had become a minority. The vast majority ended up in the third pool: in other words, a situation was created in which millions of people were completely at the mercy of the municipal system of poverty assistance.

 

To these we should add those who objected to the fact of being subjected to a highly discretional system, and of being monitored, and in addition of having to pay back their meagre benefits, and who ended up increasingly in the ranks of the "hidden unemployed". These represented, as I say, 32.5% of the total numbers on benefit in 1930, 37% in 1932, and 36.6% at the end of 1933 (we should bear in mind that this slight fall during 1933 was due to a reduction in unemployment thanks to the forced-employment systems introduced by Nazism, to which I shall return shortly).

 

The result of all this was that during the years of the Depression, the weaker parts of the proletariat were either subjected to a system of monitoring and blackmail by the public social security authorities, or simply decided not to take up benefit, and thus found themselves deprived of any social or institutional reference point except that represented (for a minority) by the political organisations. Among these organisations, the two which exerted the greatest attraction for the mass of unemployed and rootless people were the National Socialist Party and the Communist Party, which, during that period, won the major electoral successes in both political and local elections.

 

To repeat, in order to be absolutely clear: the determining factor was not simply the problem of unemployment; it was the way in which unemployment - and unemployment benefits - were managed for the unemployed and the poor. This system seems to have been created deliberately in order to bring about further atomisation within the proletariat (this is clearly suggested by recent research on the crisis years).

 

12. The "anti-social" strata: from the welfare office to the "Lager"

Recent research projects have shown how the social security system and the bureaucracy which administered it were consistently seen by the German proletariat as an adversary against which it had to stand its ground.

 

The latest issue of the magazine Werkstattgeschichte carries a series of accounts by people telling the stories of their own personal tribulations as unemployed and poor people obliged to queue at social security offices in the 1920s. The accounts cover three successive periods: the Great Inflation (1923), the period following the great rationalisation (1924-28) and the period of the Great Depression (1929-33). In the memories of people who lived through those years, the relation with the welfare office is always