German Professions, 1800-1950

German Professions, 1800–1950 Geoffrey Cocks Konrad H. Jarausch, Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS German Professions,...

Author: Geoffrey Cocks | Konrad H. Jarausch

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German Professions, 1800–1950

Geoffrey Cocks Konrad H. Jarausch, Editors

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

German Professions, 1800-1950

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German Professions, 1800-1950 EDITED BY

Geoffrey Cocks Konrad H. Jarausch

NEW YORK

OXFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1990

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan "Profession as Vocation: The German Civil Service" Copyright © 1990 by Jane Caplan All other material Copyright © 1990 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data German professions, 1800-1950 / edited by Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H. Jarausch. p. cm. Includes some papers delivered at the 1985 German Studies Association meeting in Arlington, Va. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-505596-9 1. Professions—Social aspects—Germany—History—19th century. 2. Professions—Social aspects—Germany—History—20th century. I. Cocks, Geoffrey, 1948. II. Jarausch, Konrad Hugo. HT690.G3G46 1990 305.5'53'0943—dc20 89-34784 CIP

246897531 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Preface

This collection originated at the 1985 German Studies Association meeting in Arlington, Virginia. Animated discussions between panelists and audience revealed that the history of the German professions was beginning to arouse considerable interest among scholars who had undertaken to study a wide variety of academic callings from 1800 to the present. Although the idea of compiling this work came independently to the editors, collaboration was an obvious and happy option. Starting with the Arlington papers, we added essays by other American scholars and some continental colleagues so as to produce a representative survey of current work on the German professions. A natural division of labor developed, with Konrad Jarausch providing a conceptual and historical overview, while assuming responsibility for part I, and Geoffrey Cocks contributing an essay to and overseeing part II. At the outset, we would also like to note our gratitude for Charles McClelland's counsel, Geoff Eley's encouragement, and Jay Baird's hospitality. Albion, Mich. Chapel Hill, N.C June 1989

G. C. K. H. J.


Contents

ix

Contributors

Introduction Konrad H. Jarausch and Geoffrey

3 Cocks

The German Professions in History and Theory

9

Konrad H. Jarausch I

The Nineteenth Century

Specialists Against Specialization: Hellenism as Professional Ideology in German Classical Studies

27

Anthony J. La Vopa

Public Office or Free Profession? German Attorneys in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

46

Hannes Siegrist

The Making of the Modern Medical Profession, 1800-1914: Prussian Doctors in the Nineteenth Century

66

Claudia Huerkamp

Volksschullehrerinnen: Bavarian Women Defining Themselves Through Their Profession

85

Joanne Schneider

Engineers in Wilhelmian Germany: Professionalization, Deprofessionalization, and the Development of Nonacademic Technical Education

104

Kees Gispen

Academic, Proletarian, . . . Professional? Shaping Professionalization for German Industrial Chemists, 1887-1920 Jeffrey A. Johnson

123

viii

Contents

A Struggle for Existence: The Professionalization of German Architects

143

Vincent Clark

II

The Twentieth Century

Profession as Vocation: The German Civil Service

163

Jane Caplan

The Past as Future: The German Officer Corps as Profession

183

Michael Geyer

The Professionalization of Applied Economics: German Counterparts to Business Administration

213

David F. Lindenfeld

Femininity as a Vocation: Gender and Class Conflict in the Professionalization of German Social Work

232

Young Sun Hong

Conflict Within the Legal Profession: Simultaneous Admission and the German Bar, 1903-1927

252

Kenneth F. Ledford

Women and the Professions in Germany, 1900-1945

270

Jill Stephenson

Psychology in Twentieth-Century Germany: Science and Profession

289

Mitchell G. Ash

The Professionalization of Psychotherapy in Germany, 1928-1949 Geoffrey

Index

308

Cocks

329

Contributors

Mitchell G. Ash is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. Jane Caplan is professor of history at Bryn Mawr College. Vincent Clark is instructor in history at Johnson County Community College in Kansas City. Geoffrey Cocks is professor of history at Albion College. Michael Geyer is professor of history at the University of Chicago. Kees Gispen is associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi. Young Sun Hong is assistant professor of history at California State University, Fullerton. Claudia Huerkamp is a research assistant in history at Bielefeld University. Konrad H. Jarausch is Lurcy Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Jeffrey A. Johnson is assistant professor of history at Villanova University. Anthony J. La Vopa is associate professor of history at North Carolina State University. Kenneth F. Ledford is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. David F. Lindenfeld is associate professor of history at Louisiana State University. Joanne Schneider is associate professor of history at Wheaton College, Massachusetts. Hannes Siegrist is associate professor of history at Bielefeld University. Jill Stephenson is senior lecturer in history at the University of Edinburgh.




Introduction KONRAD H. JARAUSCH AND GEOFFREY COCKS

Two images, combined in Bismarck's reference to "blood and iron," dominate modern German history: the spiked helmet of the Prussian officer and the steel ingot of the Ruhr tycoon. Ever since the foundation of the Second Empire in 1871, Western observers have been fascinated and disquieted by the peculiar blend of militarism and industrialism in Central Europe. Yet the Kaiser's power rested not only on weapons or on goods "made in Germany" but on a different kind of accomplishment: the prestige of humanistic cultivation and science. Thousands of American students flocked to a more gentle, scholarly Germany, embodied in the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. The chief product of the prestigious Central European research universities were clergymen, lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, and all manner of academic graduates pursuing their work dutifully and competently. Not as arrogant as soldiers, as boisterous as entrepreneurs, or as famous as professors, these educated men quietly staffed government offices, manned the free professions, and provided technical business leadership. Since these professionals made an essential contribution to the rise and fall of German might, their history needs to be reclaimed as part of a fuller understanding of the problematic Central European past. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the development of the German professions in the hope of opening this new field to further study. Following a historical and theoretical overview, the book is divided into two thematic sections on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. Focusing on the rise of the professions, the essays in part I carry their discussions up to or through the First World War. Concerned with the problems of mature professionalism, the chapters of part II, while reaching back to the turn of the century, deal with the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. In examining continuity, they transcend the conventional watershed of 1945 and stop around 1950, since they do not present a detailed analysis of the successor states. In order to explore the problems and limits of professionalization, this collection of essays goes beyond the classical professions and discusses struggling callings such as social work as well as vocations only touched by the 3

4


impulse toward professionalism, such as public office. However, selection was somewhat constrained by the availability of research, which, unfortunately, prevented the inclusion of an essay on the clergy. As part of a "third wave" of analysis, these essays represent a significant maturation of the historiography of the professions. The initial Whiggish approach was favored by the practitioners themselves and their uncritical admirers. For them the history of the professions was nothing less than a march of scientific and humanitarian progress, led by selfless, highly trained, and overwhelmingly male servants of humanity. This laudatory tone also informed much concurrent theorizing about modernization. Not surprisingly, subsequent studies sought to sweep away such self-serving accounts by exposing the baser motives of individual and collective professional behavior. Inspired by political economy and radical sociology, the focus of such critical work shifted from service ideals to material self-interest and occupational domination. Topics have ranged from analyses of market control and ethical transgressions to wholesale cultural jeremiads against bourgeois hegemony or expert "social control." While maintaining a sound skepticism, the most recent studies seek, above all, to provide carefully documented histories while avoiding gratuitous polemics. Current scholarship places the history of professions in specific political, cultural, and social contexts, thus laying the basis for comparative studies. The essays in this volume exemplify such balance, blending primary source material with secondary historical literature while relating their arguments to social theory. German professionalization began with the transformation of older academic occupations into modern professions during the initial two thirds of the nineteenth century. Konrad Jarausch's overview points out that the renewal of higher learning through neohumanism and the institution of rigorous state examinations professionalized traditional callings like the church, law, and medicine, the practitioners of which had been trained at the universities since the Middle Ages. As Anthony La Vopa's chapter demonstrates, the revival of classical studies both imparted a general cultivation (Bildung) to the educated middle class and instilled a novel research ethos (Wissenschqft), which endowed graduates with a new sense of self-respect. Devaluing practical training (Ausbildung), this generalized cultural mission served as a specific "professional ideology" for the emergent pursuit of classical philology, especially among teachers in the secondary schools. The rise of German professions was also stimulated by the enlightened absolutist state's desire to improve public administration by upgrading training, especially in the law. Hannes Siegrist analyzes the gradual liberation of attorneys from bureaucratic tutelage as spokesmen for the progressive, educated middle class (Bildungsburgertum) and the reformulation of their career as a free profession (freie Advokatur), which had been inspired by liberal professionalism during the founding of the Second Reich. Claudia Huerkamp shows that this extraordinary rejection of government security also informed the doctors' acceptance of a free market for academically trained physicians, which was based on their confidence in the superiority of scientifically grounded medicine. But the reformers' self-assurance waned with the

Introduction

5

overcrowding and sharper competition of the 1880s, leading to the emergence of powerful associations such as the medical Hartmannbund to defend collective interests externally. This neohumanist and liberal vision proved so attractive as to inspire other occupations to attempt professionalization during the last third of the nineteenth century. Caught between an exalted mission of public education and insufficient material rewards, school teachers at the primary level tried to emulate their colleagues at the secondary level. However, as Joanne Schneider shows, state parsimony and, in particular, the feminization of personnel precluded success. The emerging technical occupations fared somewhat better. The essay by Kees Gispen reveals that engineers achieved nominal equality with the Diplom title and the elevation of the technical colleges (Technische Hochschuleri), even if their attempts to fend off nonacademic technicians through closure failed and traditional academics continued to slight them. Jeffrey Johnson's essay discusses the chemists' response to the frustrations of overcrowding and industrial exploitation, pushing a sizable minority into union radicalism. Finally, Vincent Clark details the interminable difficulties of architects in separating themselves from artisan builders (Baumeister). While these technical callings succeeded in academizing their training, they failed, by and large, to establish a legally protected market monopoly as a result of the resistance of their employers in business and industry. This mixed result left them in a psychological and political state of suspension, unsure of their own identity and social role. In spite of increasing difficulties, the professionalization impetus continued to involve new occupations during the first third of the twentieth century. As Jane Caplan demonstrates, the prestigious bureaucracy developed a conception of Berufsbeamtentum, which rested on legal expertise, a sense of duty, a corporate consciousness, and collective organization, even if public officials retained a somewhat different ethos. According to Michael Geyer, the elite officer corps similarly attempted to use professionalism based on performance in order to gain autonomy from political control, although the consequences of this selfassertion were hardly benign. As a result of the entitlement system (Berechtigungswesen) of career access according to educational certificates, even many leaders of business, who had long been suspicious of formal education, succumbed to the allure of academic credentials. As David Lindenfeld shows, their desire for university standing led to the establishment of commercial colleges (Handelshochschuleri), the reorientation of a branch of economics to practical demands, and the emergence of a Diplom examination in business administration. Similarly, the transformation of charity from private and religious concern to public welfare involved the creation of a new social service profession, based on advanced schooling and association. Young Sun Hong's essay illustrates the limits of collective advancement due to welfare politics and the high proportion of women. Finally, even established professions such as law could be rent asunder by fundamental conflicts, as Kenneth Ledford shows in his investigation of the simultaneous admission struggle between lower and higher court attorneys.

6


Though the professionalization impulse made further headway during the Third Reich, many callings ultimately experienced the Second World War as a period of deprofessionalization. By giving free reign to misogynist impulses, Hitler's rule aggravated special problems of access and opportunity for female professionals. Even when labor force deficits made it necessary to reemploy women for the sake of the war effort, they could only return to their careers in separate and subordinate positions, as Jill Stephenson argues. In a culture that prized scholarship (Wissenschaft), new disciplines created by the dynamics of specialization continued their advance toward professional standing even during the National Socialist regime. However, as Mitchell Ash shows in discussing psychology, the price of academic institutionalization was the demonstration of practical utility in collaboration with inhuman Nazi goals. The spread and acceptance of psychotherapy similarly resulted from its military utility as well as its astute interest-group politics, which was protected by the notorious Goering name. Geoffrey Cocks's essay raises troubling questions about the meaning of professionalization by contrasting advances in academic recognition and organization with the immoral uses of expertise during Nazi rule. The thrust of deprofessionalization was even clearer in the instrumentalization of public officials, and even the generals lost autonomy before the experts regained a measure of respect after 1945. Whereas professional aspirations transcended all Central European regimes from the Second Empire to the Federal Republic, the structures and uses of professionalism changed profoundly from an initial elite reformism to later mass service during the last two centuries. The history of the German professions, therefore, adds anew perspective to the hoary discussion of the "German problem." The professionalization approach shifts the focus away from international debates revolving around Mitteleuropa, political analyses of Weimar's constitutional flaws, and intellectual examinations of the peculiarity of Central European culture. Instead of stressing the primacy of individual actors, researchers on the professions explore collective patterns of intermediary social groups located between the grand forces of Weberian social history and the everyday microhistory of Alltagsgeschichte. Though not quite as influential as the "mandarin" thesis would suggest, the graduates of institutions of higher learning occupied crucial positions of expertise just below the leadership of German society. As members of the Bildungsburgertum, Central European professionals actually exhibited a considerable degree of resemblance to the habits of mind and behavior of their West European colleagues, somewhat diminishing the impression of peculiarity (Sonderweg, separate path). Clearly, they did not act as a refeudalized Sancho Panza to the aristocratic Junker Quixote. Professionals pursued their own aspirations of competent service, autonomous practice, wealth, and status with remarkable tenacity despite all political changes, making only those concessions necessary to achieve their aims. The development of professions neither bears out H.-U. Wehler's thesis of German neofeudal or bureaucratic atavisms nor does it fully support Geoff Eley's contrary assertion of capitalist "bourgeois hegemony." By exploring a third alternative, historians of the rise of

Introduction

7

professionalism suggest a more contingent historical explanation for the collective experience of thousands of individual practitioners in facing the challenges from unification to partition. In contrast to abstract "isms," the emphasis on the profession offers a systematic approach to reconciling public recollection with personal memory by putting ordinary individuals back into their own history. The evolution of German professions also addresses, from a different vantage point, the inevitable question of the fateful origins, operations, and outcomes of the Third Reich. Tensions had already been building in the empire, but only the existential crisis of the Weimar Republic prodded the majority of practitioners to repudiate its liberal heritage in favor of illiberal solutions to their plight. Though similar problems were shared by other groups, conditions of overcrowding, unemployment, salary cuts, loss in status, disruption of practice, corruption of ethics, and organizational inertia particularly disappointed professional expectations. Authoritarian efforts to restore professionalism by abolishing "socialized medicine" and volklsch promises to purge Jews, leftists, and women fell on more receptive ears. The Nazis not only captured the professions from without but undermined them from within. For a time, rigorous measures to combat overcrowding, coupled with a returning prosperity and foreign political successes, bore out the hopes of practitioners. For some groups—notably physicians, engineers, or the military—the Nazi need for willing experts and organizational chaos ("polycracy") provided enormous opportunities, allowing psychologists and psychotherapists to claim a significant measure of professional capacity and status. Others all too soon experienced the return of earlier problems of achieving competence, meeting staffing needs, providing economic rewards, and the like. During the war, the creeping erosion of standards, the collapse of the labor market, a loss of buying power, a drop in social prestige, corruption of everyday practice, an ill-defined self-image, and the destruction of organizational autonomy became so pervasive as to produce an ever-accelerating deprofessionalization. Only Germany's shattering defeat eventually permitted the restoration of a somewhat chastened professionalism in the West, which was still marked by the successes and failures of the previous century and a half. On balance, the experience of the German professions during the past two centuries was hardly a success story. Rich in drama, the nineteenth-century development of German professionalization demonstrates the rise of a Central European version of professionalism, as was the case in neighboring countries to the west. Inspired by a liberal vision, these akademische Berufsstdnde succeeded in reforming law, health, education, and technology as impressively as any experts anywhere. When confronted with an unparalleled crisis in the twentieth century, the German professions, as a result of their greater dependence on the state and academic elitism, proved particularly vulnerable to rightwing extremism. In collaborating with Hitler's ruthless policies of conquest and extermination, Central European professionals not only lost many of their prerogatives but also betrayed their higher mission. Ultimately the drastic selfcorruption of expertise in the Third Reich suggests that moral ambiguity might

8


be inherent in modern professionalism in general. Even where they resist fascist appeals, practitioners are forever torn between their desire for material selfaggrandizement and an ethos of altruistic service. How experts resolve that fundamental dilemma between narrow selfishness and broader public interest will determine whether the professions are a scourge or a benefit to humanity.

The German Professions in History and Theory KONRAD H. JARAUSCH

During the last two centuries, paid work has become a central dimension of the human experience. While the hours of toil have decreased and leisure time has been more sharply differentiated, a person's occupation has turned from a series of intermittent jobs into a lifelong full-time pursuit. "Our work is always our mistress," a German high school teacher typically reflected in 1937. "In this regard every true man is a kind of bigamist who is not as faithful in marriage as his wife. . . . He has something that he loves beyond her and to which he dedicates more time, energy, and often more passion. . . ." Crucial for material well-being, the occupational role has come to exert a considerable formative influence upon its members. "A profession becomes a man's fate. In the course of time it shapes and penetrates his whole being." The educational philosopher Eduard Spranger mused on the German conception of a calling: "Not only do we have a profession, but a profession has us. That is why the profession determines a considerable part of our Weltanschauung; it is the perspective from which we view the world."1 Instead of identifying themselves through religion, political affiliation, or residence, an increasing number of people have begun to define themselves through their work. While manual laborers still talk about jobs, the academically trained have come to see themselves as following a "profession." Overly sanguine commentators have gone so far as to speak of "the rise of professional society."2 Called "professionalization" by social scientists, this transformation of the occupational system has all too long been ignored by historians. During the 1930s through the 1950s, functionalist sociologists endorsed the normative claims of professionals and established a powerful master code, linked to the Beyond the essays in this volume, these ruminations have been stimulated by the comparative discussions of the state and professions group organized by Arnold Heidenheimer, the Biirgertum project directed by Jurgen Kocka at the Zentrum fur interdisziplinare Forschung (ZiF), and the professionalization and conflict theories circle led by Rolf Torstendahl at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS).

9

10


advancement of modernization. In the 1960s and 1970s, this typological approach triggered much critical debunking of profession as a prescriptive notion that castigated practitioner self-interest.3 In the last decade, the social science debate has moved from attacks on professional monopoly to a more balanced structural and cultural understanding of the institutionalization of expertise.4 Historians generally failed to challenge sociological generalizations about professionalization, because, until recently, the rise of the professions was the province of nostalgic amateur recollections or laudatory chronicles of progress in individual disciplines. In part this neglect resulted from Marxist preoccupations with social class, which tended to ignore the role of auxiliary strata such as the "intelligentsia." Such disinterest also stemmed from the lack of analytical fit of the profession category into either the grand abstractions of a neo-Weberian focus on power, economy, and culture or the petites vignettes of everyday life favored by the newest of the new social histories.5 Only when historians started to probe the consequences of education and shifted their attention to the intermediary social groups, did a sustained and critical interest in the evolution of the professions begin to emerge.6 Within this general pattern, the German discussion displays some important peculiarities. While focusing on practitioner autonomy and ethics, the classical social science theorists on the professions largely ignored the implications of the Central European experience, because empirical evidence was rarely available in English.7 When comparativists tried to apply professionalization terminology, it soon became evident that categories derived from an AngloAmerican model hardly fit the bureaucratic German pattern.8 Only recently have some sociologists come to realize that there might be a continental variant of professionalization with different dynamics from the British original.9 Under the dual impulse of stringent theoretical questions and exemplary practitioner accounts, serious historical analysis of the professions gradually commenced in the last two decades.10 However, the political catastrophes of the twentieth century fixated investigations inordinately upon 1933, rendering the exploration of Nazi complicity predominantly political and moral.11 Moreover, the search for the elusive Central European Bildungsburgertum (educated middle class) often submerged the professions in the larger educated stratum without delineating their specific problems.12 Such deficits pose a double challenge: Still insufficiently developed, the history of German professions should provide more empirical evidence on the evolution of academic occupations so as to destroy premature stereotypes. At the same time, professionalization research would do well to examine the Central European development more closely in order to broaden its somewhat ethnocentric theories.13 The application of a professionalization perspective to Central Europe has been complicated by the absence of the very term in the German language. Since the eighteenth-century notion of Professionist eventually disappeared, the word Professionalisierung had to be reimported by Anglo-American social scientists after the Second World War. The governing German concept was Beruf, a Protestant sense of calling that during the nineteenth century merged with the


11

late feudal idea of Stand, denoting social estate, to form the hybrid Berufsstand. During the empire this hierarchical collective term narrowed to mean vocation and, when modified by the adjective akademisch, designated an academically trained profession.14 Permeating journals and speeches, the notion of Berufsstandespolitik evolved as an important derivative to indicate the organized pursuit of collective interest by an occupation. In its focus on upgrading training, increasing pay, raising social status, defending jurisdiction, improving ethics, and so on, this concept had similar connotations as the American usage of "professionalization."15 A seemingly closer equivalent is the cluster or freie Berufe, designating the classical "free professions." But since it is not limited to university graduates and fails to include state officials or industrial white-collar employees, this term is too narrow for a comprehensive analysis.16 Though reflecting a different horizon of consciousness, the notion of akademische Berufsstande indicates the existence of functionally equivalent academic occupations in Central Europe. Although they complicate comparison, these linguistic differences encourage a self-conscious exploration of the tension between professionalization theory and German evidence, independently of the commonsense meaning of the English word.17 The definition of a profession in the German context requires recasting Anglo-American theoretical criteria to conform to Central European empirical structures. Although minimalism avoids the taxonomic morass of quibbling about traits, akademische Berufsstande were something more than "socially idealized occupations organized as closed associational communities." Viewing professions as "somewhat exclusive groups of individuals applying somewhat abstract knowledge to particular cases" comes closer to academic self-understanding, but remains underspecified.18 More appropriate to a statecontrolled environment is Jurgen Kocka's suggestion that "profession means a largely non-manual, full-time occupation," requiring "specialized, systematic and scholarly training" and elaborate examinations, relying on "a monopoly of services as well as freedom from control by others," and providing economic rewards and higher social prestige based on "competence, professional ethics and the special importance of [its] work for society and common weal." Though covering much ground, this definition needs to be complemented by more stress on professional self-images and organizations so as to address the cultural and political dimensions.19 Reflecting the self-consciousness of German academic practitioners, this ideal type suggests important dimensions of inquiry that can transform the descriptive history of professions into a theoretical analysis of professionalization. While their importance varies according to the dynamics of a particular career, training, certifying, economic reward, social status, working practice, collective self-images, and group organization tend to recur as crucial areas of concern among Central European professionals.20 These analytical categories reveal a complex process of advancement and decline among German professions. Even less than in Britain, there is no single story of Central European professionalization, but rather a series of distinctive experiences, connected by the shared aspirations and mutual references of the university graduates involved. Although the prestige of the Prussian civil

12


service dominated all educated careers, the professions differed from the bureaucracy by insisting on academic training for admission, requiring subject specialization, competing with each other in a service market, striving for autonomy of practice and developing organizational independence, and so on. Structure and ideology varied dramatically among the traditional status professions such as law or medicine, the increasingly academic nineteenth-century occupations such as secondary school teaching or engineering, and the newly emerging twentieth-century pursuits such as business administration or psychology.21 Some occupations such as primary-school teaching or architecture had great difficulty in achieving recognition as full-fledged professions. Other pursuits such as public service or the military moved toward professionalism, without being ever fully subsumed under this ideal.22 Instead of being inevitable, in Central Europe the progress of professionalization was repeatedly imperiled by overcrowding (among chemists) or reversed entirely by adverse policies, initiating a deprofessionalization (among lawyers and secondaryschool teachers in the Third Reich).23 Transcending such distinctions, the evolution of the German professions differs from the Anglo-American model mainly in being state-sponsored, as "professionalization from above" in Hannes Siegrist's apt phrase. Although the bureaucratically created professions soon assumed a life of their own and began to resemble their western counterparts, their different genesis added a particular governmental flavor, which is found elsewhere on the continent as well.24 Within the professional arena, Central European actors developed a peculiar style and a particular set of relationships. In contrast to the claim that their academic callings were created from the outside, German practitioners did play an important role in the emergence of their own professions. The Berufskonstruktion thesis underestimates the experts' individual influence in and collective impact on ministries or industrial firms. It was not at all uncommon for former practitioners to become high-ranking bureaucrats or to mobilize the educated public on their behalf. In some particularly contested issues, such as the school quarrel between classicists and moderns, the government systematically consulted those concerned.25 As a result of the slower development of civil society, regional and national associations grew out of local sociability groups only in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, once founded, scholarly assemblies like Der Deutsche Juristentag became popular and were soon superseded by more practically minded interest groups such as Der Deutsche Anwaltverein in 1871. Gradually, the focus of activity and locus of power shifted from local chapters to statewide organizations, and eventually moved on to national bodies, depending on where the crucial legislative jurisdiction lay. As a result of the often-derided German propensity to join associations (Vereinsmeierei), membership figures continued to rise so that four fifths of lawyers or secondary school teachers were organized by the First World War.26 Although the state always loomed large in Central European society, professionals had an increasingly vital part to play in their own destiny. Clients featured less prominently in the emergence of the German professions, but they nevertheless remained indispensable. Obviously patronage was a


13

primary influence in the emergence of the early modern academic occupations, especially in law and medicine but also in teaching and to a lesser degree in the clergy. Unlike the princes, nobles, or patricians, university graduates were minor servitors; thus power rested with the patron and the success of a practitioner was measured by the wealth of the client.27 Professionalization was in part an attempt to escape this dependence by recourse to collegial standards and depersonalizing such relationships. Academization allowed a generalized notion of competence to replace the individualized effort to please a particular patron, and by the mid-nineteenth century practitioners began to gain dominance. As a result of veneration for cultivation and lingering tradition of obedience to authority, democratic attempts to return power to the lay public were less frequent and vocal in Central Europe than in the West. But left-wing political movements such as the Socialist party sponsored some efforts to break the legal monopoly in trade and business courts or to create parent associations in schools after the turn of the century. Generalized social attitudes toward issues such as health continued to affect professional practice not only in medicine. Another distinctive feature of the German pattern is the greater influence of organized mediators between practitioners and clients, such as public health insurance funds, government provision of educational or social services, or white-collar employment in large industrial firms. Beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Central European practitioners more frequently worked for large impersonal organizations than for individual clients.28 The state's central role in German professional development has become a truism. Through their concern for their own strength and the welfare of their subjects, cameralist eighteenth-century governments initiated the rise of the modern professions in Central Europe by upgrading their university training and instituting a series of elaborate examinations as precondition for licensing. While it weakened during the liberal mid-nineteenth century, bureaucratic control extended to setting fee schedules (Gebiihrenordming for lawyers) and influencing social prestige through the bestowal of professional or honorary titles (such as Justizmt, judicial councillor). Legislative decisions determined practice in settling disputes in jurisdiction and officials supervised professional ethics until practitioners achieved a measure of self-government. Association law constrained organizational possibilities while the emergence of an intervention state in the late nineteenth century created an arena of interest-group struggles over the apportionment of welfare measures. As the regulator of the market for services, the state became the central focus of much professional lobbying, directed toward producing a policy favorable to practitioner hopes. Eventually, not only did governments use experts to achieve specific aims, but professionals also appealed to the bureaucrats in order to realize their aspirations, establishing a mutually dependent relationship.29 Many public employees like secondary school teachers tried to emancipate themselves from bureaucratic tutelage, while the minority of doctors or engineers in government service sought to emulate the majority of their colleagues in free practice or industrial employment. Somewhat contradictorily, professionals wanted to be

14


free from state control while clamoring for government protection from their competitors. Not surprisingly, this extraordinary fixation on the state made professionals particularly vulnerable to the changing ideological priorities and policies of different regimes in the twentieth century.30 Equally important was higher education, since by definition the akademische Berufsstande were based on university training. Whereas nineteenthcentury medicine demonstrated the success of bureaucratic professionalization before the establishment of a firm scientific base, the twentieth-century decline of theology illustrated the limits of the self-creation of problems.31 In contrast to an apprenticeship in craft skills, formalized higher education imparted the general liberal education (Bildung) that is necessary for an elevated social position, a modicum of the abstract scholarly knowledge (Wissenschaft) that is essential for generalized problem solving, and some degree of trade training (Ausbildung) facilitating subsequent practical learning. The complex system of two tiers of state examinations, with the first testing scientific information and the second checking on its application to practice, elevated all German academic vocations above lesser pursuits. Repeatedly, professionalization struggles revolved around educational issues such as the equality of the Technische Hochschulen for engineers and architects or a separate examination for chemists or psychologists.32 Since the professorial and the bureaucracy dominated examination commissions, practitioners did not control the transmission of knowledge, creating continual tensions between the theoretical and practical direction of instruction. Recurrent overcrowding crises proved the examination system an imperfect regulator of labor supply, thereby fostering movements for additional admission controls (such as a numerus clausus).33 Exemplified by the superior status of learned specialists, the prestige of academic training was so great in Central Europe that even massive complaints were unable to break its linkage to the professions. But in spite of prevalent professorial rhetoric, the German professions developed beyond academe, with even scientific pursuits requiring successful application and more practical callings remaining firmly practitioner centered.34 As a result of its special context, the pattern of Central European professionalization was distinctive, even within the continental experience. While there were many free professionals and white-collar employees in business and industry, more graduates of higher education worked directly or indirectly for the state than elsewhere. But the conclusion that the German professions were essentially bureaucratic is misleading, since it suggests a mental dependency that did not always exist. Even within public service or the military, professionalization efforts were aimed precisely at liberating practitioners from control and gaining them an autonomous sphere of self-determination based on their expertise.35 Instead, the modern German pattern was a mixture of heavy profession, state, and education emphases and little client power. The institution that embodied this blend was the chamber (Kamiwr), a mandatory form of professional self-government with quasi-official authority. Prevalent in the classical free professions such as law, this Kammer had a compulsory member-


15

ship and levied dues in order to serve as corporate representation toward government and watch over practitioner ethics with special honor courts. Such chambers were a compromise between untrammeled competition and tight government regulation, differing from voluntary associations that coexisted with them.36 Since public officials such as high school teachers and white-collar employees such as engineers also strove for their own Kammern, those with academic credentials searched for freedom from state and market pressures in order to recapture corporate security within organized capitalism. Such expert aspirations could be deviously misused by the establishment of the Reichskulturkammer for the sake of Nazi party control. This widespread tendency suggests reading the German pattern as a special continental type of "neocorporate" professionalization.37 The professions in Central Europe evolved in phases, shaped by the disruptions of industrialization, the struggle over participatory politics, and the ambiguities of modern science. Instead of a rigid sequence, a loose succession of distinctive stages—characterized by different problems—influenced the pattern of professional pursuits. In traditional society, the corporate model of artisan self-control predominated until the modernizing absolutist governments reformed the academic occupations through examinations and bureaucratic controls, initiating a statist phase.38 During the revolutionary midnineteenth century, scientifically confident practitioners rejected state supervision, deestablished their vocations, and introduced free competition in a remarkable set of laws for medicine (1869) and law (1878), ushering in an era of liberal professionalism.39 However, overcrowding problems, accelerating specialization, and sharpening competition at the turn of the century unleashed pressures for protection of experts, leading to a neocorporate compromise that might be taken to characterize the German experience in general.40 During the twentieth century, professional life was caught up in successive socioeconomic, academic, and political crises, triggering even more rapid changes. In the strife-torn Weimar Republic, professions turned into interest groups so as to cope with hyperinflation, depression, governmental instability, and the loss of scientific certainty.41 Instead of rescuing professionalism, the Nazis ruthlessly instrumentalized expert occupations for their own racial genocide and foreign conquest, thereby ultimately deprofessionalizing practitioners in spite of some short-range gains.42 Only later in the Federal Republic did experts succeed in regaining a kind of neoprofessionalism that restored their socioeconomic health, democratized their politics, and recovered their prior competence.43 Far from a Whiggish story of inevitable progress, this experience presents a cautionary tale of proud achievement coupled with abject failure. This uneven development was produced not only by external pressures but also by actions from within the professional arena. As a result of the small number of academic graduates (2.6 percent of the work force in 1933), cooperation among practitioners was essential for the achievement of common goals. During the past century, vocational associations evolved from amateurish notable groups to professional functionary organizations with elaborate offices, publication organs, national congresses, and the like. While interests

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differed internally between specialists and generalists, urban and rural practitioners, established and entering experts, and the like, common external threats demanded repeated compromises. The leadership was forced to remain responsive to membership desires by the continual threat of schisms.44 Although it rarely took place in a completely "free field," competition was endemic even in Central Europe. Unable to eliminate economic rivalry among practitioners, associations sought to regulate market behavior by a special code of ethics, insisting on fairness (e.g., no attorney advertising) so as to keep professionals from ruining one another. With regard to the general society, organizations tried to establish legal monopolies over their field of practice in order to eliminate competitors altogether and increase the case load for themselves (e.g., allowing only lawyers as court room representatives).45 Therefore, conflict was as unavoidable as it was ubiquitous. When they involved basic life chances or fundamental beliefs, clashes between competing segments of a profession (such as established male and entering female practitioners during overcrowding) could not easily be reconciled. Often the success of one group required the suppression of another, such as the struggle between secondary and primary school teachers over academic training. At best, Ralf Dahrendorf's thesis of the "nostalgia for synthesis" illuminates only part of the mentality of the German professionals.46 In response to such challenges, professions in Central Europe adopted a series of special strategies. One favorite scheme was academization, first requiring high school graduation (Abitur) and eventually a complete higher education for entry into a career. In a bureaucratic society, advanced training— documented by a Diplom title—guaranteed higher rewards, superior prestige, and governmental acceptance for business economists or journalists. 47 Another tactic was legal closure to either nonqualified outsiders or unwelcome newcomers during periods of overcrowding. In an entitlement system, academic access restrictions worked reasonably well, but the restriction of entry to beginning professionals through a numerus clausm proved much more difficult, since credentialling was controlled by government and not by practitioners themselves.48 Yet another popular preoccupation was legislative and bureaucratic lobbying for fee increases, salary raises, and other measures stimulating demand for their services that might improve economic well-being. Associations frequently orchestrated press campaigns to polish their public image and raise the prestige of their calling.49 A further measure to safeguard the autonomy of practice against outside control was energetic self-discipline in cases of violations of honor codes. Much professional rhetoric also revolved around general social reform, suggesting the removal of abuses and improvement of health, law, education, welfare, and so forth, through their particular expertise.50 While some frustrated practitioners occasionally resorted to union tactics such as striking, most experts preferred "professional" association as a form of representation in order to achieve their ends.51 In contrast to the market monopolies of practitioners in the West, professionals in Central Europe favored bureaucratic and academic strategies to protect their interests. The interrelationships between professionalization and German society,


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culture, and politics were complex and ambivalent. In late eighteenth-century Central Europe, shared cultivation blended bureaucrats, free professionals, and some businessmen into a unique social formation, called the Bildungsbiirgertum. By the mid-nineteenth century, these Gymnasium and university graduates were recognized as "cultivated middle classes," although the actual term Bildungsburgertum only emerged as a retrospective critical category in the 1920s.52 Since they hailed from diverse backgrounds, the members of this social formation derived their unity from formal neohumanist training and informal student subculture, which established a distinctive style (classical citations), form of communication (literary journals), and manner of sociability (student corporations). While leading the ideological transition from liberalism to nationalism and beyond, the educated middle class did not find a clear political voice of its own and failed to develop any capacity for common action. Since occupational advancement seemed more promising, aspiring professionals organized instead on the basis of their specialized vocation in order to strengthen the material foundations of their careers. The slow erosion of the Bildungsburgertum began during the empire, accelerated during the crisisridden Weimar Republic, and culminated in the anti-intellectual and illiberal Third Reich, whereas the first decades of the Federal Republic offered a kind of deceptive afterglow.53 The rising professions replaced the diffuse cultivated milieu with tighter special-interest organization at the price of fragmenting the cohesion of educated middle class. Building on older middle-class values, professionalization was therefore an attempt to create for academic occupations a viable modern realm that would be distinct from the industrial or bureaucratic spheres. FrustratedBildungsburger saw professionalism as an attractive alternative to fuzzy intellectual idealism, the tainted profit motive, or the anonymous government bureaucracy.54 Although educated women presided over enlightened salons as early as the late eighteenth century, the German professions emerged as self-evidently male domains. Even after decades of school agitation, the 1908 admission of girls to Prussian universities did not mean free access to academic occupations, since traditionalist men in the status professions vehemently resisted feminist demands.55 Pursuits in which private female roles of nurturing and caring could be made public, such as secondary school teaching or medicine, offered some opportunities as early as the empire period, whereas restrictions on careers in law had to be eliminated by Reichstag decree in 1922. In the newer quasi professions such as primary school teaching or social work, women made quicker progress—at the cost of inhibiting their full professionalization because of misogynist prejudice. The increase in female training aggravated the overcrowding crises of the 1920s and triggered a sexist backlash that prompted neoconservative and Nazi restrictions against female professionals, especially if they were married.56 The manpower shortage of the Third Reich reversed policies without changing ideology, forcing women to resort to separation and subordination in order to return to practice. In the postwar era, the decimation of male cohorts created fresh career opportunities without, however, eliminating the hold of a neotraditional family ideology.57 Its meritocratic spirit made

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professionalization theoretically compatible with claims for women's emancipation, since both processes were initiated by the liberal middle class. But in practice these reform movements often clashed, since male practitioners feared for the success of their aspirations and had to be compelled through political pressure to accept female colleagues. While misogynist prejudices were commonplace elsewhere, emancipation in Central Europe came comparatively late and the Third Reich reversal was particularly virulent. Too often ignored by social scientists, the cultural imprint of German professionalization was paradoxical as well. As a result of educational dominance of neohumanism after 1800, practitioners shared an ethos of classical cultivation and scholarship, embodied in the complementary ideals of Bildung and Wissenschaft. The emerging secondary school teaching career of philologues embraced the guardianship of this vision as its central mission.58 In subsequent decades, the dynamism of specialization ruptured the unity of liberal education and created a series of distinctive discourses, dominated by experts in a particular Fachwissen (specialty), which fragmented philosophical inquiry into separate disciplines and careers.59 The emergence of discrete subcultural clusters for jurists, doctors, scientists, humanists, and so forth, no doubt led to startling research discoveries and enhanced practitioner competence, since many experts pursued their field with other-worldly asceticism. But specialization also created a sense of cultural malaise, prompting a chorus of laments about the erosion of Bildung and the soullessness of technology, which fostered public alienation. In spite of considerable pride in their scientific achievements, many experts seem to have developed a curious penchant for irrational inwardness in their general attitudes.60 Though radical intellectuals tried to forge a social and democratic modernism after 1900, the existential sociopolitical threats of the Weimar Republic fostered a widespread feeling of cultural crisis among professionals. Prompted by experimentalist provocations and tasteless mass consumption, this Kulturkrise (crisis of culture) rhetoric projected the concrete difficulties of practitioners onto a larger idealized screen as criticism of culture per se.61 Ironically, the liberal optimism of early professional reformers turned into an illiberal pessimism among beleaguered experts of the twentieth century. The political involvement of the professions in Central Europe was deep but problematic. While claiming to be objective men of science, German experts were heavily embroiled in the political process, since the advancement of their cause required countless decisions about power, wealth, and prestige. Inside a profession various subgroups (e.g., hierarchical, geographic, ideological) fought for articulation of demands, control over spokesmen and determination of agenda (e.g., the conflict over simultaneous admission of lower court attorneys to higher courts). Outside of an occupation, different callings struggled over jurisdiction (among psychologists and psychotherapists), pay (secondary versus primary school teachers), and status (the engineer's campaign for full acceptance as Akademiker, a university-bred man). Since their number was relatively small compared to the large mass of other workers, professionals were forced to build coalitions with kindred interests, lobby through informal


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contacts, and use their superior rhetorical skills to sway the public.62 The outlook of the akademische Berufsstande generally evolved with the other middling strata in their region, but each calling had a particular flavor, determined by its occupational perspective (e.g., lawyers were more libertarian, teachers more statist, engineers more technocratic). Not surprisingly, the political orientation of professionals depended on the responsiveness of a particular party, government, or system to their specific desires. Hence during the empire even liberal practitioners were confirmed monarchists, during the Weimar Republic experts remained reluctant about democracy, whereas in the Third Reich many initially welcomed the Nazis until jolted from their illusions by the loss of the war.63 German professionals preferred an apolitical brand of politics that prized specialized expertise over public struggle. The contribution of professionalization to German history during the last two centuries has been profoundly contradictory. The rise of the modern professions enhanced the problem-solving capacity of society in many important areas. In combating epidemics, increasing literacy, renewing urban slums, or coping with mental disturbances, Central Europe was recognized as a world leader around the turn of the century. At the same time, the dominance of experts decreased lay influence and made client choices dependent on the judgment of authorities over whom they had little or no control.64 The professionalization of academic research similarly increased the power of intellectual discovery and made German learning synonymous with rigorous scholarship, leading to the adoption of its methods in other countries. But simultaneously a fundamental cultural malaise arose among the educated middle class, who complained about a loss of meaning in sciences, which could no longer furnish a coherent world view.65 Moreover, the emergence of cadres of well-trained experts removed whole areas such as social work from political contention by making them amenable to "professional" treatment. However, the price was all too often collective extortion such as the astounding advance of dentists from a quasi-academic craft to the highest-earning occupation in the Federal Republic.66 In the general transformation from notable to interest-group politics, the professions played only a subordinate role, due to their limited numbers. But their unrestrained pursuit of self-interest to the detriment of the common good proved nefarious, since it made professionals particularly vulnerable to antiSemitic resentment and Nazi occupational appeals. Instead of consolidating liberty through reform, the professions, when faced with a severe existential crisis, become accomplices of reactionary tyranny.67 The implications of this German experience suggest a rethinking of professionalization theory. So as to include the akademische Berufsstande, the very definition of "profession" should be broadened and the process ought to be understood as multifarious and reversible. Among actors, emphasis needs to shift from practitioners and clients to the state and higher education as sources of power and legitimacy. As a result of the importance of chambers on the continent, a distinctive neocorporate type of professionalization might be added to the conceptual inventory. Instead of imposing a general evolutionary

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model with obligatory stages, phases of professional development should be seen as historically contingent and limited to a given national context. Professional strategies as distinct from political efforts or union tactics ought to be delineated according to the structure of the surrounding system, which made them more bureaucratic and academic in Central Europe than elsewhere. At the same time, the professions' location within the middle class should be more clearly defined in relationship to the entrepreneurs, public officials, and other members of the Bildungsburgertum. The problematic nexus between the rise of the professions and the movement for women's emancipation is just beginning to be explored and ought to be analyzed further. The culture blindness of traditional social science theorizing risks overlooking the impact of professionalization on intellectual life in general. Finally, the political implications of the emergence of the professions demand more study, moving from the narrower definition of the experts' interest-group efforts to the wider role of professionals in the larger polity.68 Such a reconceptualization would make professionalization theory not only empirically richer but also analytically more powerful. In a comparative perspective, the puzzling peculiarity of German professionalization was but a regional variant of the wider continental pattern. The ritualized debate about the Sonderweg has spawned a veritable cottage industry of self-absorbed reflections, with the pendulum of interpretation swinging inconclusively from uniqueness to commonality and back.69 A closer look at the actual evidence on the professions indicates structural similarities of continental development, culminating in an identical overcrowding crisis during the 1920s and 1930s.70 The same linkage between academic unemployment and illiberal politics is startlingly evident during the formation of fascism in Italy, during the rise of the indigenous Nazis in Austria, and during the emergence of a variety of racist movements in Hungary.71 While the "trahison des clercs" was widespread in Central Europe, the purge of Jewish colleagues, the persecution of left-wing practitioners, and the discrimination against female competitors were more thorough in Germany than elsewhere.72 Even in the West, where more practitioners resisted the temptation of right-wing politics, the underlying problem was similar. Though altruistic rhetoric proclaimed high-sounding goals of social service, professional practice was all too often centered on the crass advancement of material self-interest. Because its corruption was so blatant, the German example points more clearly to the perils of an egotistical professionalism, oblivious to ethical concerns. Capable of making enormous contributions to human welfare, the professions only deserve their privileges when they use their powers with social responsibility and political liberality.73 Notes 1. Havenstein to Schumann, Feb. 3, 1937, in N. Hammerstein, ed., Deutsche Bildung? Briefwechsel zweier Schulmanner, 1930-1944 (Frankfurt, 1988), p. 108f.; and Spranger, quoted in K. H. Jarausch, Preface, The Unfree Professions, 1900-1950 (New York, 1990).


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2. H. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society in England Since 1880 (London, 1989), echoing D. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York, 1976), p. 374. SeeH.U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1700-1815 (Munich, 1987), 1: 133ff. 3. For instance, M. S. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley, Calif., 1977); and R. Dingwall and P. Lewis, eds., The Sociology of Professions (New York, 1983). 4. E. Freidson, Professional Powers (Chicago, 1986); and A. Abbott, The System of Professions (Chicago, 1988). 5. J. Kuczynski, DieIntelligenz (Cologne, 1987); and essays by H.-U. Wehler and N. Davis, forthcoming in Storia delta Storiographia. 6. K. H. Jarausch, ed., The Transformation of Higher Learning (Chicago, 1983); B. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (New York, 1976); and G. Geison, ed., Professions and Professional Ideologies in America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983). 7. H. Siegrist, "Biirgerliche Berufe: Die Professionen und das Biirgertum," in his Biirgerliche Berufe (Gottingen, 1988), p. llff., citing the pioneering texts by T. Parsons, H. Wilensky, and others. An exception was D. Rueschemeyer, Lawyers and Their Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1973). 8. H. Daheim, "Berufssoziologie," in R. Konig, ed., Handbuch der empirischen Sozialforschung (Stuttgart, 1967), 8: 1-100; H. A. Hesse, Berufe im Wandel (Stuttgart, 1968); and C. E. McClelland, "ZurProfessionalisierung der akademischen Berufe in Deutschland," in W. Conze and J. Kocka, eds., Bildungsbiirgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1985), p. 233ff. 9. G. Geison, ed., Professions and the French State, 1700-1900 (Philadelphia, 1984); and Abbott, System of Professions, p. 19f. 10. Such as A. Weissler, Geschichte der Rechtsanwaltschaft (Leipzig, 1905) and F. Ostler, Die deutschen Rechtsanwdlte, 1871-1971 (Essen, 1971) for lawyers. 11. U. Geuter, Die Professionalisierung der deutschen Psychologic im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1984); and R. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York, 1986). 12. W. Conze and J. Kocka, eds., Bildungsbiirgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 1: BildungssystemundProfessionalisierungininternationalenVergleichen(Stuttgarl, 1985);U. Engelhardt, "Bildungsbiirgertum": Begriffs- und Dogmengeschichte eines Etiketts (Stuttgart, 1986); and most recently J. Kocka, ed., Das Bildungsbiirgertum in Gesellschaft und Politik (Stuttgart, 1989). 13. For examples, see C. Huerkamp, Der Aufstieg der Arzte im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1985); and M. H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989). The subsequent discussion applies to the concepts of M. Burrage, K. H. Jarausch, and H. Siegrist, "An Actor-Oriented Framework for the History of the Professions: Prerequisites for a Theory," M. Burrage and B. Torstendahl, eds., Professions inTheory and History (London, 1990), to the German evidence. 14. W. Conze, "Beruf," in O. Brunner et al., eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart, 1972), 1: 490-506; A. J. Heidenheimer, "Professions, the State and the Police(y) Connection," (Ms., St. Louis, Mo., 1983); and E. Tatarin-Tarnheyden,Da'e Berufsstande, ihre Stellung im Staatsrecht und die deutsche Wirtschaftsverfassung (Berlin, 1922). 15. McClelland, "ZurProfessionalisierung," p. 233ff.; H.-E. Thenorth, "Professionen und Professionalisierung," in M. Heinemann, ed., Der Lehrer und seine Organisation (Stuttgart, 1977), p. 457ff. 16. S. Feuchtwanger, Die Freien Berufe—Staatsamt oder Sozialamt? (Konigsberg, 1929); V. Deneke, DiefreienBerufe (Stuttgart, 1956); and H. Kairat, "Professions" oder "freieBerufe"? (Berlin, 1969). 17. Jarausch, Unfree Professions, chap. 1, part 1.

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18. R. Collins, "Comments on 'A Framework for the History of the Professions'," (Ms. Riverside, Calif., 1987); and Abbott, System of Professions, p. 318. 19. Kocka in the introduction to Bildungsburgertum, p. 16ff.; and M. Burrage et al., "Framework for the History of the Professions." 20. H. Siegrist discusses in his contribution to this volume all seven categories while C. Huerkamp's essay addresses training, practice, licensing, and association. 21. In contrast to J. Caplan's contribution to this volume, see also the essays by H. Siegrist and C. Huerkamp, the chapters by A. La Vopaand K. Gispen as well as the pieces by D. Lindenfeld, Y. S. Hong, and M. Ash. 22. See the chapters by J. Schneider and V. Clark as well as the contributions by J. Caplan and M. Geyer in this volume. 23. See the essay by J. Johnson in this volume and K. Jarausch, "The Perils of Professionalism: German Lawyers, Teachers and Engineers in Nazi Germany," German Studies Review 9 (1986): 107ff. 24. Siegrist, "Burgerliche Berufe," and his essay in this book. 25. L. Burchardt, "Professionalisierung oder Berufskonstruktion?" Geschichte undGesellschaft6(\980): 326ff.; and J. Johnson's contribution in this volume. See also J. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1983). 26. See C. E. McClelland's forthcoming book on the rise of the German professions and Jarausch, Unfree Professions, chap. 1, part 2. 27. See the essays by La Vopa, Siegrist, and Huerkamp in this volume as well as C. Huerkamp, "Arzte und Professionalisierung in Deutschland," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 6 (1980): 349ff. 28. See the contributions by J. Schneider, J. Caplan, and Y. S. Hong to this collection; R. Spree, Soziale Ungleichheit vor Krankheit und Tod (Gottingen, 1982), p. 138ff., and D. Light et al., "Social Medicine versus Professional Dominance: The German Experience," American Journal of Public Health 76 (1986): 78ff. 29. A. J. Heidenheimer, "Comparing Status Professions: The Evolution of StateProfession Relationships of Lawyers and Physicians in Britain, Germany and the U.S." (Ms., St. Louis, Mo., 1987). 30. Essays by J. Caplan and M. Geyer in this collection; and M. Burrage, "Revolution as a Starting Point for the Comparative Analysis of the Legal Profession," in R. Abel and P. Lewis, eds., Lawyers in Society (Berkeley, 1989), vol. 3. 31. Compare the Huerkamp essay in this volume with O. Janz's chapter on pastors in Burgerliche Berufe. Part of the reason for the officers' loss of autonomy was the lack of rigor of "military science." 32. See the chapters by C. Gispen and V. Clark, J. Johnson, and M. Ash in this collection. 33. M. Beatus, "Academic Proletariat: The Problem of Overcrowding in the Learned Professions and Universities During the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933," (Diss., Madison, Wise., 1975); D. K. Miiller, Sozialstruktur und Schulsystem (Gottingen, 1977), p. 274ff.; and P. Lundgreen's essay in Burgerliche Berufe. 34. See the essay by M. Ash in this volume, in contrast to F. Ringer, Die Gelehrten: Der Niedergang der deutschen Mandarine, 1890-1933 (Stuttgart, 1983). 35. For an overemphasis on state see McClelland, "Zur Professionalisierung," Bildungsburgertum, p. 233ff., and Heidenheimer, "Comparing Status Professions." Contrary evidence comes from the essays of J. Caplan and M. Geyer in this volume. 36. H. Siegrist, "Gebremste Professionalisierung: Das Beispiel der Schweizer Rechtsanwaltschaft im Vergleich zu Frankreich und Deutschland," in Bildungsburgertum, p. 30Iff.


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37. Jarausch, UnfreeProfessions, chap. 1, part 2. See A. Steinweis' dissertation on the Reich Chamber of Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988). 38. See H.-U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1815-1848/49 (Munich, 1987), 2: 22Iff. 39. See especially the chapters of H. Siegrist andC. Huerkamp in this collection. 40. See the articles by C. Gispen, J. Johnson, and V. Clark in this book. 41. See the essays by D. Lindenfeld, Y. S. Hong, J. Caplan, andK. Ledford in this volume, and K. H. Jarausch, "The Crisis of the German Professions, 1918-1933," Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 379ff. 42. See the chapters by M. Ash and G. Cocks in this collection as well as Geuter, Die Professionalisierung der deutschen Psychologic, p. 448ff., versus Kater, Doctors Under Hitler, and Jarausch, "Perils of Professionalism," p. 107ff. 43. K. H. Jarausch, "Die unfreien Professionen: Uberlegungen zu den Wandlungsprozessen im deutschen Bildungbiirgertum, 1900-1950," in J. Kocka, ed., Burgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europdischen Vergleich (Munich, 1988), 2: 124ff. 44. See the essays of C. Gispen and J. Johnson in this volume. 45. M. Ramsey, "The Politics of Professional Monopoly in 19th Century Medicine, " in Professions and the French State, p. 225ff. See the chapters of H. Siegrist and K. Ledford in this collection. 46. Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1967), p. 129ff. See also the contributions of J. Schneider and J. Stephenson to this book. 47. R. Torstendahl, "Essentialist, Strategic and Temporal Analysis of Professionalism," (Ms., Uppsala, 1987); andR. vomBruch, "Die Professionalisierung der akademisch-gebildeten Volkswirte in Deutschland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts," in K.-E. Jeismann, ed., Bildung, Staat, Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1988), p. 36Iff. 48. H. Titze, "Die zyklische Uberproduktion von Akademikern im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 10 (1984): 92-121; and A. Nath, Die Studienratskarriere im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt, 1988). Restricting professionalization to closure alone ignores other professional strategies. See R. Murphey, Social Closure (New York, 1988). 49. Jarausch, Unfree Professions, chaps. 2-4. 50. See the contributions of C. Huerkamp, H. Siegrist, Y. S. Hong, andG. Cocks in this collection. 51. See especially the essay by J. Johnson in this book. 52. Engelhardt, Bildungsburgertum, and J. Kocka, "Vorwort" to Das Bildungsbilrgertum in Gesellschaft undPolitik (Stuttgart, 1989). 53. Jarausch, "Die Krise des Bildungsburgertums im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts," in Bildungsburgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1989), pp. 180ff. 54. Siegrist, "Biirgerliche Berufe," p. 42f. 55. See J. Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women (Princeton, N.J., 1988), and K. Jarausch, Students, Society and Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, N. J., 1982), p. 109ff. 56. See C. Huerkamp's essay on women students in Biirgerliche Berufe. See also the contributions by J. Schneider and Y. S. Hong to this volume. 57. See the essay by J. Stephenson in this book, and the UNC dissertations in progress by I. Richards on female professionals in the Third Reich and L. Heinemann on postwar German women. 58. See A. La Vopa's essay in this collection and his Grace, Talent, Merit: Poor

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Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Eng., 1988). 59. See the essays by P. Lundgreen and others in K. H. Jarausch, ed., The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860-1930 (Chicago, 1983). 60. F. K. Ringer, "Bildung and Its Implications in the German Tradition, 18901930," and K. Jarausch, "Bildungsideale, Society and Politics," NIAS Lustrum, June 1986. See also H. Schulte, ed., The Tragedy of Inwardness? (Hamilton, Ont., 1989). 61. K. H. Jarausch, "Die Not der geistigen Arbeiter: Akademiker in der Berufskrise, 1918—1933," in W. Abelshauser, ed., Die Weimarer Republik als Wohlfahrtsstaat (Stuttgart, 1987), p. 280ff. 62. See the chapters by K. Ledford, C. Gispen, and V. Clark in this volume. 63. Jarausch, UnfreeProfessions, chap. 8. See the essays by J. Caplan, M. Geyer, and G. Cocks in this volume. 64. Compare the contributions to J. R. Dukes and J. Remak, eds., Another Germany: Reconsideration of the Imperial Era (Boulder, Colo., 1988) versus Spree, Soziale Ungleichheit. 65. K. H. Jarausch, "The Universities: An American View," in Another Germany, p. 181ff., versus F. K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). 66. P. Huttenberger, "Interessenvertretung und Lobbyismus im Dritten Reich," in G. Hirschfeld, ed., The "Fuhrer State": Myth and Reality (Stuttgart, 1983), p. 429ff. See also the essay by Y. S. Hong in this volume. 67. T. Childers, "Social Language of Politics in Germany: The Sociology of Political Discourse in the Weimar Republic" (Ms., Philadelphia, 1989); Kater, Doctors Under Hitler; and K. H. Jarausch's essay on the professions' repudiation of liberalism in K. H. Jarausch and L. E. Jones, eds., In Search of a Liberal Germany (Leamington Spa, Eng., 1990). 68. D. Riischemeyer, "Professionalisierung: Theoretische Probleme fur die vergleichendeGeschichtsforschung," GeschichteundGesellschaft6(l980): 31 Iff., and Burrage, Jarausch, and Siegrist, "Framework for the History of the Professions." 69. G. G. Iggers, "Introduction" to his collection on The Social History of Politics (Leamington Spa, Eng., 1985); and for recent entries G. Eley, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston, 1986) and T. Nipperdey, Nachdenken iiber die deutsche Geschichte (Munich, 1986). 70. W. Kotschnig, Unemployment in the Learned Professions (London, 1937), p. 105ff. 71. M. Barbagli, Education for Unemployment: Politics, Labor Markets and the School System—Italy, 1859-1973 (New York, 1982); H. Engelbrecht, "Zur Organisierung der osterreichischen Lehrerschaft an hoheren Schulen," in M. Heinemann, ed., Der Lehrer und seine Organisation (Stuttgart, 1977), p. 201ff.; and M. M. Kovacs, "Luttes professionnelles et antisemitisme," Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 56(1986): 31ff., as well as "The Ideology of Illiberalism in the Professions: Leftist and Rightist Radicalism among Hungarian Doctors, Lawyers and Engineers, 1918-1945" (Ms., Washington, D.C., 1988). 72. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler, and Jarausch, Unfree Professions, chaps. 5-7. 73. Jarausch, Unfree Professions, chap. 8. See also the essays by J. Caplan, M. Ash, and G. Cocks in this volume.

I THE NINETEENTH CENTURY


Specialists Against Specialization: Hellenism as Professional Ideology in German Classical Studies ANTHONY J. LA VOPA

In the emergence of the academic professions that formed the core of the nineteenth-century GermanBildungsburgertum (educated middle class), the new discipline of classical studies (Altertumswissenschqft) had an obviously central significance. As the dominant group in the reformed Gymnasium, the practitioners of the discipline (the Philologenstand) commanded the narrow entry way to the university faculties. Their organization and production of scholarship offered the natural sciences as well as the humanities one of the earliest models for a research-based profession.1 The story of this ascendancy has several ironic twists, which are still in need of an integrated explanation. Inherent in the preference for classical studies was a repudiation of the discipline of pedagogy, although as late as the 1790s most reform-minded schoolmen had been committed to Padagogik as the disciplinary basis of their profession. The turn from pedagogy to history was also a selfconscious departure from the latinity of Protestant humanism. As this older classicism came to be dismissed for its narrow "pedantry" and empty formalism, and as the new dispensation sought to grasp the essential spirit of antiquity, the Greeks displaced the Romans at center stage. It was an emphatic Hellenism, not to say Graecomania, that initially inspired an intensely specialized research ethos and hence made the new discipline a precocious model for modern academic professionalism. Yet the same Hellenism was also the vehicle for a pronounced antimodernism, and at the heart of the antimodernism lay an indictment of specialization itself. From this distance there is a striking tension (if not a blatant contradiction) between the specialized nature of the research and the soaring vision it was supposed to sustain. 2 However, for the founders Hellenism functioned effectively as ideology—or, to put it another way, it generated a credible illusion— precisely because it seemed to transcend the tension. In its paradoxical logic, highly specialized research—the textual editions and philological monographs 27

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that embodied the new discipline's expertise and launched and sustained its practitioners' careers—would yield a holistic cure for the pathology that seemed to accompany modern specialization. The new discipline echoed the antipathy to Enlightenment pedagogy and its utilitarian reform agenda that Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schiller had begun to articulate in the 1790s.3 However, for our purposes it will be instructive to maintain a distinction between early neohumanism and its academic offshoot. Neohumanism was an eclectic and broad-reaching cultural reaction, drawing on Kantian and Idealist philosophy as well as on the revival of classical studies. The new conception of classical studies as a Wissenschqft (scholarly discipline) formed in such a manner as to diverge in some ways from the source and become shaped to the social and institutional locus of the profession it was designed to justify. The critical moment in that process was the first decade of the nineteenth century, and its principal agent was Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824).4 In 1787, when Wolf had set about founding the seminar in classical studies at Halle that would produce a new breed of schoolmen-scholars, he insisted on excluding pedagogy; indeed his lectures left students with no doubt about his contempt for that so-called discipline. In the early 1790s he became a friend and correspondent of Humboldt; each found inspiration in the other's formulations of a Hellenic ideal. Whereas the aristocrat regretted that he had discovered the classics too late in life to become "a professional philologist," his correspondent had become the prototypical modern professional.5 Wolf's Darstellung der Altertumswissenschqft, a lengthy essay first published in 1807, incorporated Humboldt's earlier meditations on classical antiquity into a professional ideology. Hellenism had become the crux of an effort to distill the essential ethos of a new discipline, to order it internally, and to provide it with defensible boundaries within an expanding, increasingly balkanized academic landscape.6 The emerging professional community for whom Wolf spoke was neither limited to his own students nor confined to north Germany. In 1808 Friedrich Ast, a young professor at the Bavarian university at Landshut, celebrated and mapped classical studies in much the same way in his GrundrissderPhilologie.7 In addition to contributing to the reorientation of the universities' philosophy faculties, the new Hellenism fueled a sense of mission among schoolmen. There is no more succinct statement of their militancy than the inaugural lecture that Friedrich Jacobs (1764-1847) delivered as a newly appointed professor at the Munich Lyceum in 1807.8 Wolf and his colleagues asserted a territorial imperative and a claim to public authority for a disciplinary community in the making. The substance—as transparently self-serving as it was—deserves to be taken seriously.9 The study of ideology at this level promises to enhance our contextual understanding of the emergence of modern German professionalism. Until recently, sociology offered models for professionalization that purported to be universally applicable but in fact were derived largely from the national experiences of England and the United States. Such models—particularly those linking the rise of the Anglo-American "free" professions with nineteenth-

Hellenism in German Classical Studies

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century industrialization—have proved ill-suited for continental Europe, where an overarching framework of public bureaucracy was obviously in place well before modern industrialization got under way. It was symptomatic of the German scene that classicists saw public employment as the only secure route to professional status, but at the same time had to come to terms with its threats to professional and personal integrity.10

I Like Anglo-Scottish nostalgia for ancient republican virtue, German neohumanism paired corruption with modern specialization. However, one need only peruse Humboldt's meditations on classical antiquity to realize that neohumanistic antimodernism initially had another set of social and institutional referents.11 Humboldt's ancient citizen (Burger) had used his or her freedom not to exercise the austere devotion to duty that ensured the survival of a republic, but to enjoy an "arbitrary choice of a self-contented life-style and activity."12 If civic activism was not the quintessentially human means to selffulfillment, then it was also not a bulwark against corruptive change. Only Imperial Rome—not the republics—had developed a "lasting political constitution," and that was precisely because it had enforced the constrictions of individuality that the Greeks had been "too noble, tender, free and human" to countenance. Nor had commercial specialization been at the root of corruption. It was the bureaucratic state of Imperial Rome that had anticipated modern pathology; its insistence on the one-sided functional competence of the dutiful Burger had been at the price of the spontaneous and multifaceted selfrealization of the human being (Mensch). In eighteenth-century Germany, educated observers were not faced with commercialization on the English scale or with any equivalent to English parliamentary corruption. In the absence of a national parliament and a metropolitan political and cultural arena like London, the territorial universities of the various German states played a central role in the creation of a public opinion and gave it a distinctly academic coloration. At the same time that university scholarship was self-consciously transcending the corporate boundaries of the old-regime Gekhrtenstand (learned profession) and addressing a larger educated public, it was beginning to pattern into a new, more intricate mosaic of Wissenschaften that had to validate new territorial claims, or reformulate old ones, by demonstrating internal coherence and fixing defensible boundaries. Hence, in the formation of a coherent public culture for a modern society and polity, university scholarship might be the constitutive element or a major obstacle. Inseparable from this academic specialization was the universities' historical assignment to train competent officials for the civil and judicial bureaucracies of the territorial states and the ecclesiastical hierarchies of the state churches. What confronted university graduates entering public employment— especially the sons of the Burger who constituted the great majority of them—

30


was the moral duality of Amt (office). In one sense office, like property in republican ideology, was a foundation for independence, in that its public status and security ensured a measure of invulnerability to market forces and social pressures. However, office also threatened to corrupt its occupants, to alienate them from their essential humanity by confining them to a more or less narrow functional role within a more or less bureaucratic structure.13 The first generation of neohumanists took an especially grim view of modernity in this guise, and that was in part because they were reacting against the sober orthodoxy that their elders had taken to preaching.14 By the 1780s, the rationalist conception of pedagogy as a discipline and the accompanying agenda for educational reform were hardening into a rigid schematism, almost caricaturing the mix of utilitarian enthusiasm and social caution that characterized the German Enlightenment as a whole. To the measure that "philanthropists" like Joachim Heinrich Campe and Ernst Christian Trapp acknowledged that all future Burger should be introduced to the same "general human education," they became all the more insistent that the usefulness of the Burger had priority over the perfectability of the Mensch. Their alternative to oldregime corporatism was a functional hierarchy of quasi-corporate occupational groups, each exhibiting the life-style and the ethos appropriate to its expertise. If the educated Burger was to be spared open-ended expectations of selffulfillment, then he or she had to internalize collective imperatives, to suppress or redirect instinctual drives and emotional urges that might cause alienation from an assigned role.15 Public employment, educated young men were warned, differed from "mechanical" manual labor only by degree; for the government official, for the clergyman, and even for the university scholar the rational exercise of duty required acceptance of a certain delimiting routinism. 16 It was above all the reduction of rational self-discipline and indeed "virtue" (Tugend) to self-constriction within specialized work roles that made rationalist orthodoxy so intolerable to the early neohumanists. The modern bureaucratic state and the new society in the making seemed to be forming into a single dehumanizing machine, which a utilitarian work ethic promised to supply with self-motivated cogs. This rationalist future would culminate a process of specialization that seemed to have advanced inexorably since the Greeks, with the development of the modern state and the expansion of knowledge as its mutually reinforcing agents. The modern individual, Schiller lamented in his Letters on Aesthetic Education, "becomes merely a stamp of his official duties, his branch of knowledge."17 The bitter irony was that the educated man, far from soaring above this fate, embodied its pathology; as he acquired "the official spirit, enclosed in a uniform circle and, within it, narrowed still more by formulas," he became alienated from both himself and his fellow men. The same image of a bureaucratic machine, dehumanizing its agents as well as its "subjects," informed the essay on "the limits of state action" that Humboldt wrote several months after abandoning a career in the Prussian judicial bureaucracy.18 When the neohumanists condemned rationalist pedagogy as "mechanical," they meant that it was designed to legitimate this dehumanization. Pedagogy


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approached the individual personality as a mere variation on a standard force field, and its strategy was to manipulate that field by ordering its forces and counterforces into an internal hierarchy, as the requirements of functional roles dictated. Drawing on Kantian and Idealist conceptions of the unconditional freedom of the self-realizing subject, the neohumanists celebrated the "particularity" (Eigentumlichkeit) of each "personality" as a unique embodiment of a quintessentially human moral force. In the organic and emphatically aesthetic process that was Bildung (cultivation), sensual and affective energies achieved nobility of form as they nourished reason with the full richness of their substance.19 For Humboldt, Greece offered the purest historical testimony that a truly human culture, like a truly human personality, gave form to an innate integrative energy. The result was a holistic antipode to modern fragmentation—a unique fusion of the sensual and the cerebral, of natural simplicity and sophistication—that was to be confused neither with the crudity of popular culture in contemporary civilization nor with the overrefinement of polite society. In contrast to the modern tension between private pursuits and public participation, Greek religion, art, and politics (the symbolism of the priest, the creative expression of the artist, the rhetoric of the statesman) had fused into a single public culture that both thrived on and nourished self-cultivation.20 At times Humboldt seemed to venerate this culture less as an actual historical achievement, to be recovered through Wissenschaft, than as the projection of a present longing for personal wholeness. However, there was always a "dialectic" between subject and object; even as the subjects projected their longing, they strove to grasp the object and in the process had to emulate it, to develop an analogously multifaceted but integrated "character." Hence it was not simply that the Hellenic ideal promised to "heal" by example; the study itself—the very effort to recover a remote past—might be "more therapeutic," in that it involved the "strain(ing) (of) all powers symmetrically."21 In the first decade of the nineteenth century, schoolmen made both the diagnosis and the therapy central to their professional ideology. That was in part because the ideal of self-cultivation crystallizing within the new Hellenism offered them a kind of neoaristocratic surrogate for old-style liberality.22 But schoolmen also had to reconcile the neohumanistic indictment of specialization with constraints that Humboldt (and Schiller) were in a position to avoid. For all his distaste for aristocratic dilettantism, Humboldt instinctively assumed the true liberality of the cultivated man to be incompatible with a professional identity, and an inherited title and independent wealth dispensed him from the need to assume one. Wolf was preoccupied with transforming classical studies into an independent university discipline: one that would no longer be open territory for scholarly amateurs, that would have an apprenticeship entirely separate from theological studies, and that would constitute its own career track. His Halle seminar recruited its regular members largely among the commoners in the theology faculty, and above all among the sons of obscure pastors, artisans, and shopkeepers who owed their studies to patrons. If the new discipline was to vindicate their abandonment of the conventional career, then it

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had to structure a new route into the academic elite. By the turn of the century, it was obvious that the path would lie through original research, and that originality, as their mentors defined it, resulted from an "anatomical" focus on particular historical artifacts.23 At the same time, professional recognition for this emerging disciplinary community promised to implicate it still further in bureaucratic structures. The neohumanistic Gymnasium, unlike the new secondary school that the philanthropists had planned, would ensure a "general human education" by keeping its pupils insulated from the demands of occupational life; however, it would do so as the entryway to an academic system that was geared to replenishing the increasingly variegated ranks of the state bureaucracies, the churches, and its own institutions. At the close of the eighteenth century, most teaching "offices" in the Latin schools and Gymnasien were still being supported with school fees and other more or less makeshift local arrangements, often more private than public, and sometimes merging with charity. Reacting against this dependence on uncomprehending parents and local dignitaries, schoolmen had adumbrated the equation of professional status with state office that would become central to German "middle-class" identity in the nineteenth century. Aside from allowing secession from the clergy, a state-centralized educational system would ensure professional autonomy by creating and securing a genuinely "public" teaching office, which would be perched above local society and invulnerable to its pressures. In the transition from a rationalist to a neohumanistic reform idiom at the turn of the century, this expectation remained axiomatic. Professional expertise was now a mode of aesthetic cultivation, not an instrument of "enlightened" utility; however, the need to institutionalize the teacher's distanced superiority seemed no less urgent. 24 The new concept of Wissenschaft accommodated its practitioners to academic and bureaucratic realities even as it promised to negate or transcend them, and that was its ideological significance. It did so in part by domesticating the vaulting optimism that had occasionally entered Humboldt's Hellenism. In his essay on "the limits of state action," Humboldt had imagined a time when even peasants and artisans might become "artists," with their manual labor springing from their free choice as harmoniously integrated personalities, and thus "humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it."25 This was to envision the regeneration of society by way of an inner transformation of its members, and not by way of fundamental changes in its structure. The assumption was that conventional work roles, as fragmenting and hence dehumanizing as they now were, could be revitalized by a new breed of human beings. The irony is that the ideal of moral freedom through aesthetic wholeness— as antipathetic as it was to the utilitarian prescription for duty—justified this impulse to accommodation. Far from licensing selfishness or self-indulgence, neohumanism claimed to reconcile the natural freedom of the Mensch with the social responsibility of the Burger in an ideal of self-discipline without selfdenial, duty without coercion. Aesthetic harmony guaranteed character and thus ensured that cultivated people would find an occupational outlet for their


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creativity without having to internalize collective imperatives.26 If in this sense voluntary commitment to duty was a natural product of Bildung, then the inculcation of self-discipline was inherent to its pursuit. Here again the young Humboldt had articulated the paradoxical needs that Hellenism fulfilled. While he turned to classical scholarship as an alternative to narrow specialization (as a route to the universal through the particular), he was also fascinated by its demand for the kind of self-disciplined, sustained hard work that the aristocratic dilettante avoided—hence the dual appeal of the Greek achievement. At the same time that the pure humanity expressed in its myriad cultural forms made it of universal value, its self-containment, and indeed its very historical remoteness made it resistant to penetration. In the kind of therapeutic dialectic Humboldt envisioned, it was in the struggle to overcome this objective resistance that the subjects realized their potential. The Hellenism of schoolmen gave all this a new specificity. Like the leisured self-cultivation of the old-style aristocrat, the classicist's scholarship was practiced for its own sake, as something intrinsically noble, rather than extrinsically utilitarian. Yet this liberal pursuit could and indeed must be driven by a relentless work discipline, eminently suitable to the bureaucratic environment that schoolmen occupied and most of their pupils would enter. The professional ethic had been anticipated, in fact, in Wolf's creation of a coterie of seminar students at Halle, and in the criteria he brought to their evaluation. If his apprentices were assured that pursuit of scholarship for its own sake raised them to a higher order, of purity, they also were rewarded for "iron and impassioned industry." His own life had become "monotonous" and "workfilled," Wolf once confided to his mentor Christian Gottlob Heyne, because he had to compensate for the "disorderly and wild study" of his youth; his progeny were more disciplined versions of his earlier self.27 In Friedrich Jacobs' inaugural address of 1807, the same ethic is central to the modus operandi of the reformed Gymnasium and is well on the way to becoming the official rhetoric of bureaucratic regimentation. Jacobs extolled the quest for "the spirit of antiquity" as an ennobling alternative to utilitarian dictates, and insisted on its repudiation of the formalism and rote memorization of the old dispensation. However, for the fledgling Hellenist, expertise in philology and textual editing was as essential as an aesthetic awareness of form. "The lofty goal is not reached by the rose-strewn path of convenience," Jacobs warned his audience; "the more active the material, the more difficult and persevering the struggle demanded by the work of art of free human cultivation." Such "discipline," he would remind his fellow classicists several decades later, made the Gymnasium "a heaven of order, of legality, of industry and discipline" as well as a "school" of "truth" and "justice."28 II

In the hands of Wolf and a younger generation of schoolmen, the ideal of personal wholeness through self-disciplined scholarship offered aesthetic and

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ultimately moral insulation from bureaucratic routinism, even as it reconsecrated the kind of work discipline that bureaucratic employment demanded. This was to reconcile—in the realm of ideology—an aspiration to personal integrity with the conditions of accommodation. The need for such a reconciliation was not limited to schoolmen; it helps explain why the ideal of liberal education inspired by the new Hellenism became central to a "halfbureaucratic, half-professional" identity in broad circles of the nineteenthcentury Bildungsbiirgertum. However, the point is not to make German-style professionalism one more variant on an unpolitical German Biirgertum, at least not if "unpolitical" evokes the aesthete's "retreat to inwardness" or the stereotypical German official's automatic obedience. As a specific antidote to specialization, the new Hellenism was also the vehicle for another duality, which in one form or another, may have been inherent in the formulation of modern professional ideologies everywhere. Professional groups have sought to establish public credibility as "communities of the competent," generating the authoritative public vision that the culture and the polity would otherwise lack. This is to assert the privileged authority of expertise in a highly specialized division of labor, but at the same time to claim to transcend the limitations of specialization. Professional expertise is in a class by itself (so the standard logic goes), because it yields a broad, disinterested public vision, in contrast to the self-limiting outlooks that other kinds of specialization necessarily entail.29 In Germany this logic had already surfaced in the 1770s and 1780s, as Enlightenment rationalism had begun to pattern into the reform agendas of schoolmen and other occupational groups. The patterning was part of a larger, eminently political process in which the educated Biirgertum attempted to constitute itself as an "enlightened" public, and thereby to win recognition from both the larger society and the bureaucratic state as a kind of moral arbiter of public issues.30 The schoolmen's shift from pedagogy to Hellenism marks the new directions the process entered at the turn of the century, as the overarching presence of bureaucratic states became more problematic. In the 1780s, Amt exercised an irresistible appeal in the reform thought of schoolmen, and not simply because official security and prestige promised disentanglement from local dependencies. If the fledgling profession was to establish an authoritative public voice, despite its dubious social credentials, then its representatives had to contribute to the broader formation of an "enlightened" public opinion, and office offered the platform from which to do so. An external source of credibility was urgently needed, and in late eighteenthcentury Prussia it seemed a reasonable expectation that the bureaucratic state would provide it. The state would play the role of enlightened mentor, granting schoolmen a large measure of autonomy within its ranks at the same time that it protected them from outside threats. The jolt came in the late 1780s, when Johann Christoph Wollner, the new Prussian minister of ecclesiastical affairs, confronted schoolmen as well as pastors with the choice of bending the knee publicly to a state-enforced Lutheran orthodoxy or risking removal from office. Wollner's crackdown did


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not induce most reform-minded schoolmen to question their equation of professional independence with official status.31 Rather, its impact lay in advancing a growing awareness that, if the new profession was to achieve a measure of autonomy in relation to the state as well as society, it would have to generate within itself the unimpeachable moral norms that would make its public voice authoritative. It was this need for an internal source of credibility that made pedagogy seem increasingly inadequate as a disciplinary base, and that made classical studies a particularly appealing alternative. In 1780 Ernst Christian Trapp, Wolf's predecessor at Halle, had articulated the claims for pedagogy as a disciplinary basis in his Versuch einer Padagogik. Pedagogy was both an inductive science that continually refines its grasp of the universal "principles" governing human growth, and the "art" (Kunst) of applying those principles in matching the particular "vocation" of each pupil to the appropriate occupational outlet.32 In the 1780s Friedrich Gedike and several other young schoolmen gave this conception of Wissenschaft a thrust that was, in context, radical. Now the essence of the expertise lay in penetrating beneath the social surface, in commanding privileged insight into a natural economy of human resources and an innate entelechy. The vision it yielded was above all "public" in the sense that it hovered above narrow, selfish interests as a reproach to obsolete familial traditions and forms of privilege, and justified a meritocratic order in closer alignment with nature. This was to claim for Wissenschaft, by virtue of its distinct marriage of scientific detachment and artistic intuition, an unimpeachable normative authority in defining the appropriate priorities for a more rational order.33 In the 1790s, neohumanism contributed to and gained strength from a crisis of confidence in the cognitive assumptions behind this pedagogical mission. What made pedagogy such an easy target for the neohumanists was its reliance on the crude tenets of utilitarian rationalism and materialist psychology.34 Inseparable from the derivative status of the "discipline," that is, from its inability to generate a credible body of theory within itself, was its vulnerability to ideological appropriation from outside. To the neohumanists, in fact, the statist utilitarianism of rationalist pedagogy and the orthodox reaction of the Wollner era were two sides of one coin, that is, ideological variations on the same threat of political manipulation from above. It was in this context that Wolf's militant preference for classical studies came to reflect and heighten a larger awareness of the need for an alternative grounding for disciplinary credibility. Aside from being too dependent on other disciplines for its theory, Wolf warned in his lectures at Halle, pedagogy was too implicated in "political questions" that made life "sour" for the practitioner.35 In iheDarstellung, Wolf offered the hope that the empirical precision and the systematic coherence of the new discipline would to a degree meet the standards of the "exact sciences."36 However, what gave the discipline normative authority as a "moral" science, and indeed what made it unique in that regard, was the empathic, emulative interaction with an historical object that Humboldt had found so "therapeutic." In insisting that Greece was the only suitable historical object, Wolf—echoing Humboldt—had to reconcile a radical claim to unique-

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ness with an equally radical claim to universality. The "form" of a culture expressed a pure humanity and hence had universal value to the extent that it fashioned a rich variety of elements into an absolutely unique configuration. One implication, already obvious intii&Darstellung,was that Greek wholeness had to accommodate a seemingly limitless variety of elements, many pointing to its debt to other cultures, but nonetheless had to retain an unconditional autonomy, and hence an absolute purity, as it took shape and matured. 37 The purity of Greek culture also lay in the unique translucence of its forms, which were the artifacts and symbols that gave access to a quintessentially human spirit. It was precisely this quality, of course, that made possible the historical hermeneutic (the densely contextualized grasp of meaning) that had been lacking in the traditional latinity. However, for a self-consciously new discipline that prided itself on having repudiated the rote, narrow-minded pedantry of old style classical scholarship, translucence had ironic implications. At the same time that the traditional preoccupation with imitative mastery of classical eloquence and stylistic elegance was repudiated, the meticulous attention to grammatical constructions and to the internal properties of texts received a new lease on life. It was in the most technical activities (the ones most likely to produce small but solid contributions to original scholarship) that the Hellenist was most human. The unique translucence of classical Greek lay in fusing concrete sensuality with logical abstraction, and hence in embodying the integral unity that made the culture incomparable. Grammatik (the analysis of the technicalities of grammatical construction) became an integral part of the process through which the scholar, in his effort to make the Greek Geist accessible, cultivated himself. At the same timeKritik, or textual criticism, acquired a virtually sacred dignity. It was textual criticism that made the historical artifact as translucent as possible, by scraping off later accretions and reconstructing the original text. Since this effort required a detailed, multifaceted understanding of the text's linguistic and literary properties as well as the historical context in which it had materialized, it became the supremely concentrated instance of the process in which the scholar, in straining all his powers to grasp the culture, emulated its integral harmony.38 Hence the profile of the educated professional as a broad-minded, or "liberal," personality was intimately linked with an ideal of Wissenschaft that defined itself in and through its Hellenism. There was another, closely related sense in which the exclusiveness of Wolf's Hellenism—his insistence that Rome receive attention only insofar as it preserved the Greek legacy, and that the rest of the ancient world be excluded altogether—was dictated by the need for an internal source of professional credibility. If the discipline was to censure modernity without being vulnerable to "political" manipulation, then it needed a new kind of disciplinary self-containment. It would achieve that selfcontainment not by appropriating a particular method, but by defining itself— empirically and ultimately morally—in terms of its historical object. As an inventory of research methods, in fact, Wolf's Darstellung was remarkably


37

interdisciplinary. The very need to grasp Greek culture as a multifaceted whole, he insisted, required that classical studies draw on the varied fund of scholarly expertise and techniques that it shared with other disciplines. However, the new discipline could be so eclectic in this sense precisely because its historical object—its Hellenism—provided it with fixed and defensible boundaries. If this use of Hellenism marked Wolf's effort to fashion an uncompromising alternative to pedagogy, then it was also a measure of his divergence from Humboldt. When Humboldt imagined a unitary antidote to modern academic specialization, it was on the assumption that Kantian philosophy and classical studies would combine to unify all branches of knowledge under a new anthropology. By 1807, his apotheosis of Greece had become metahistorical; the Greeks' inner Sehnsucht (longing) now seemed to be a "mystery" and explained ultimately as in some sense a spark of the divine.39 In Wolf's historicism, Humboldt's earlier phrasings entered the service of a territorial imperative. Of all the ancient peoples, Wolf observed, only the Greeks and Romans had bequeathed enough artifacts to allow thorough exploration of a national "character"; yet in their case, unlike that of modern peoples, the sum of artifacts was small enough to form a manageable research territory. Wolf moved quite naturally, and perhaps without quite realizing the leap, from this pragmatic argument to a normative Hellenism in which the Greeks, more than any other ancient people, were credited with achieving that "higher genuine intellectual culture" that stood in contrast to the merely "civil polish" of modern civilization.40 Although the discipline recovered what was of universal human value in a particular historical object, the object provided the fixed, defensible boundaries that made the discipline the preserve of specialists. The practice of textual criticism not only constituted a multifaceted entry into an integral culture, but in recovering the genuine artifacts of the culture, despite later accretions, it also determined what lay within the disciplinary borders and what lay outside them. Only the specialist in language (the scholar who had mastered the intricacies of Grammatik) could hope to penetrate those borders. At the same time that it gave specialists a map from the external forms to the inner substance of the Greek spirit, Grammatik confronted outsiders with an impenetrable barrier.41 The turn to history was pivotal in the displacement of pedagogy by Hellenism, but it was nor a turn away from "nature." Wolf and his disciples were drawing on a genetic and vitalistic tradition in natural science that had been shaping a new historical orientation in German thought since the mideighteenth century. From that angle, in fact, the new Hellenism marks one of the lines of continuity between the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century historicism.42 Its enthusiasts were convinced that their historical image of Greece exhibited the human dimensions of nature in purest form, and in a sense they were simply transferring to a particular culture the fascination with natural entelechy that pedagogy had brought to childhood. If the pedagogue penetrated beneath the social surface to an inner reality, the classicist claimed an analogous form of privileged insight; the new surfaces, made translucent by histori-

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cal expertise, were the language, its texts, and the other surviving artifacts. Just as the development of language skills in childhood had been the pedagogue's model for natural maturation, so now the historical evolution of a language marked the natural "biography" of a "nation," the entelechy in which an essential spirit initially manifested itself and gradually matured. Wolf's Darstellung also left no doubt that, in the translation of normative standards into a public voice, classical studies would not assume the role to which the enthusiasts of pedagogy had aspired. The new Wissenschaft would not enter a partnership with the state in defining the priorities for a progressive society; it would stand at a distance, using invidious comparisons with the Greek achievement to censure a modernity of which the bureaucratic state, for all its welcomed protection, was an integral part. As the angle onto nature shifted, so did the use of nature as a reproach to the existing society, culture, and polity. In projecting a more rational future, one might argue, pedagogy underestimated the degree to which society, by virtue of its entrenched inequalities and the values that legitimated them, was and would remain a product of its history. In Wolf's alternative vision, for all the concern with organic evolution, the image of Greece was hardening into a sacred icon and corruption seemed inherent in the very process of historical change since antiquity. In the Darstellung, Wolf limited the discipline's therapeutic mission to providing unimpeachable standards in the face of the rage for novelty in contemporary art and the obsession with "popularity" in an increasingly commercialized literary culture.43 The "political" desiderata that had corrupted pedagogy were now beyond the pale, although their very extrusion from the discipline's public mission rested on an eminently political (and ideological) distinction. Ill

The Verein deutscher Philologen und Schulmanner, one of the earliest professional associations for academic scholars and teachers, was launched in 1838.44 The association was the creation of classicists, many of them Wolf's students; however, by then the discipline that Wolf had mapped (for all its success in establishing itself in the universities' revitalized philosophy faculties, and in entrenching itself at the strategic center of the new Gymnasium) was entering the state of crisis that would eventually dislodge it. As a way of escaping the corporate ghetto of traditional learning, Wolf's Hellenism was no less modern than utilitarian rationalism. However, it promised to exempt scholarship from political appropriation by a reform-minded but overbearing state apparatus, and therein lay its unique appeal to a new generation of schoolmen. The paradoxes of the new Hellenism were arguably a creative ideological response—the kind of illusion that welds a nascent group into a dynamic solidarity and promises to ground its claim to an independent and credible public voice. However, under the changing circumstances of the 1830s and 1840s, the layers of paradox threatened to become a rhetorical smokescreen for


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the contradictions between self-image and reality. The assertion of paradox was becoming an anxious-—not to say panicky—incantation, mixing defensiveness with smug superiority in the face of the oncoming "barbarism." The crisis was in part self-generated and, in fact, was to some degree a byproduct of success. Inevitably the marriage of historical and philological research that had revitalized classical studies spread to the study of other historical cultures, both ancient and more recent. In 1841 Professor Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, speaking as president of the philological Verein, acknowledged these new fields as "colonies" that "wisely maintain communication with the mother country";45 however, the colonials were already beginning to tire of such patronizing gestures. Ironically Wolf himself had ended his Darstellung in 1807 with a warning against "the endless striving to accumulate detail as detail in the entire historical material of antiquity, and especially in the languages . . . without having an inkling of the spirit that molds all detail into a harmonious whole."46 His alarm proved well founded; increasingly the discipline's very precocity as a modern research community (its massive production of highly specialized monographs) seemed to belie its holistic vision. In 1850 August Boeckh, the preeminent classicist at Berlin, observed that "the celebrated principle of the division of labor" had become as essential to scholarly progress in philology as it was in natural science. However, he also acknowledged a conflict between the resulting Mikrologie, which was exhibited in a veritable "flood" of specialized monographs, and the humanist's aspiration to illuminate detail with "an idea of the whole within himself."47 The irony is that Boeckh's own career was symptomatic of the problem. As Wolf's most eminent student, Boeckh presided over the philological seminar and a seminar for aspiring schoolmen at Berlin. Under his guidance, Prussia's new university became one of the great production centers for textual editions and philological monographs. The grand synthesis (the work on the many-sided unity of the Hellenic world that had been on Boeckh's agenda since his youth) never materialized. In addition to inviting skepticism about its scholarly mission, the discipline also raised doubts about its privileged place in the new educational system. The professional philologists who staffed the Gymnasien were acting on their commitment to Bildung by drilling their pupils in vocabulary and the technicalities of grammar; indeed, despite their preference for Greece over Rome, Latin proved as suitable a medium as Greek. The drilling may have been effective in inculcating bureaucratic discipline; however, disgruntled educators and parents nonetheless wondered why boys destined for careers in the modern world of business, government, and the professions had to endure a lengthy rite of passage in rote antiquarianism, which was reminiscent of the pedantry of the old dispensation.48 Mounting skepticism on the part of the lay public did not provoke an internal confrontation with the realities of professional research, or with the discipline's function within a larger bureaucratic structure. Instead, creative illusion hardened into stubborn orthodoxy; whether the objection was to the extreme specialization that typified the discipline's published research, or to the new

40


regimen for Gymnasium pupils, it was answered with assertions of faith in the efficacy of the individual personality's empathic encounter with a language and its texts. The acknowledged danger lay not in internal decay or ossification, but in the direction of change in the surrounding society and polity. This was to sound the antimodernism inherent in the new Hellenism, but with a shift in focus that marked the discipline's progress from the outer edge to the strategic center of an academic and official elite.49 In its original formulation, Hellenism articulated schoolmen's deep-seated ambivalence toward the bureaucracy. The state offered a barrier against an ignorant, tradition-bound laity and a secure platform from which to censure modern corruption; however, as a specialized apparatus of power, always threatening to truncate the personality and to turn Wissenschaft into an ideological instrument, it was deeply implicated in the corruptive process. As the profession was integrated into the bureaucratic establishment, there was a marked tendency to celebrate theKulturstaat as fait accompli. It became another article of faith that the state, precisely because it was now suffused with humanistic Kultur, accepted the exemption of pure Wissenschaft from state tutelage as axiomatic. Usually left unsaid, of course, was that Wissenschaft could be exempted because, for all its principled opposition to utilitarian priorities, it was deeply engaged in the grooming of state personnel, and because it defined itself increasingly as an antidote to the kinds of change that threatened to produce social instability and political radicalism.50 This is not to locate the typical classicist at the reactionary end of an emerging spectrum of political ideologies. What is striking about the discipline's spokesmen in the decades surrounding the Revolution of 1848, in fact, is their commitment to a moderate liberal nationalism and their agility in harnessing Hellenism to its needs. Scholars and schoolmen who apotheosized a pagan culture (albeit one, they insisted, with deep affinities with the essence of Christianity), and whose discipline had only recently been emancipated from theology, had special reason to see a revival of repressive obscurantism in the new alliance of throne and altar that conservative Protestantism sought, and to make the strict separation of church and state a hallmark of the Kulturstaat. In response to critics calling for a thorough germanization of academic culture, they claimed a vital role for Hellenism in the development of a national selfconsciousness by appealing to a unique affinity between ancient Greeks and modern Germans. Similarly, the classical polis testified to the wisdom of middle-class constitutionalism, whether as the progenitor of its ideal of civic and intellectual freedom or as a warning of the inevitable dialectic between mobocracy and despotism. The state may have been in need of constitutional reform, but it was no longer the main target of Hellenists' attacks on the fragmenting impact of modern specialization. Similarly, the threat from the uninitiated was no longer embodied in tradition-bound local communities. As Germany entered the industrial age, corruption took the form of rampant commercialization and an accompanying preoccupation with the technological applications of natural science. It was utilitarianism and materialism in this guise that the seventy-five-


41

year-old Friedrich Jacobs condemned in 1840, in his keynote address before the third annual convocation of the philological association. The same rationalist pedagogy that he had earlier paired with the despotism of the state "machine" was now charged with opening the door to industrial materialism and an accompanying Neomanie, parading as "enlightenment." It was these "demonic creatures," "bastards of the Zeitgeist," that threatened to engulf pure Wissenschaft.51 In the Bildungslibemlismus (educational liberalism) that Jacobs and other classicists articulated in the 1840s, a vision of liberal and national progress stood in tension with a profound cultural alienation. The ideal of Bildung entailed rejection not only of the ascendancy of wealth as a new basis for status and power, but also of the very cultural ethos of a market society. To celebrate the pursuit of scholarship for its own sake was to deny legitimacy, more or less explicitly, to the kind of competitive achievement that such a society recognized. This censure of "the world" went in close association with classicists' self-image as a kind of ascetic priesthood, and the very paltriness of their incomes bore witness to their purity of motive in the face of the reigning corruption. At the same time, the commitment to liberal progress coexisted uncomfortably with disdain for an emerging political arena of interests and opinions. To the extent that academic freedom was equated with a "pure" Wissenschaft—hovering above mere "political" opinion or, more accurately, ideology—it seemed incompatible with the active exercise of civic freedom. In theory, the normative tradition embodied in Hellenism would resolve the tension between liberal optimism and cultural pessimism, by insulating true progress from corruptive change; however, in fact, it threatened to make the discipline solipsistic, to turn the aspiration to provide authoritative guidance into self-congratulatory hauteur. The liberal proclivities of Wolf's successors underscored the irony of the territorial imperative that had shaped his Hellenism. One of the first highly specialized modern professions was assuming the posture of a modern clerisy—a high priesthood of Kultur guarding a pure realm of spiritual values against myriad forms of modern corruption.52 In its insistence on purity and superior detachment, it ran the risk of becoming so contemptuous of, and so irrelevant to, a changing society, culture, and polity as to deprive itself of the credible public voice with which Hellenism had promised to endow it.

Notes 1. Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Das preussische Gymnasium in Stoat und Gesellschaft: Die Entstehung des Gymnasiums als Schule des Staates und der Gebildeten, 1787-1817 (Stuttgart, 1974). R. Steven Turner, "The Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia, 1818-1848—Causes and Context," in Russell McCormmach, ed., Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 137-82, is particularly enlightening on the importance of classical studies as a model for the internal structure of a "discipline-community"

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and its relationship to the state. See also Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700-1914 (Cambridge, Eng., 1980), pp. 122-32, 151-89. 2. Anthony Graf ton, "Polyhistor into Philolog: Notes on the Transformation of German Classical Scholarship, 1780-1850," History of Universities 3 (1983): 159-92. 3. This lineage is particularly evident in Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer: Philanthropinismus-Humanismus, ed. Werner Hillebrecht (Weinheim, 1968). 4. Wilhem Korte, Leben und Studien Friedrich August Wolfs, des Philologen, 2 vols. (Essen, 1833), and J. F. J. Arnoldt,Fr. Aug. WolfinseinemVerhaltnissezumSchulwesenund zur Pddagogik (Brunswick, 1861-62). See also Manfred Fuhrmann, "Friedrich August Wolf," Deutsche VierteljahrsschriftfurLiteraturwissenschaftundGeistesgeschichte 33, no. 2 (1959): 187-236; A. Horstmann, "Die 'Klassische Philologie' zwischen Humanismus und Historismus: Friedrich August Wolf und die Begrundung der modernen Altertumswissenschaft,"Benditez«r Wissenschaftsgeschichte 1 (1978): 5170. For a judicious reassessment of Wolf's originality, see Anthony Grafton, "Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 109-29; see also the Introduction to F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer (1795), trans, and ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton, N.J., 1985). 5. Humboldt to Wolf, in Wilhelm von Humboldt, Briefe, ed. Wilhelm Rossler (Munich, 1952), pp. 74-75, 83-85; Wolf's "Entwurf einer Selbstbiographie," in Friedrich August Wolf: Bin Leben in Briefen, ed. Siegfried Reiter, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1935), 2: 337-40. On the founding of the seminar, see in the same work, 1: 52-57, 61-63. 6. Friedrich August Wolf, Darstellung der Alterthumswissenchaft, ed. S. F. W. Hoffmann (Leipzig, 1839); and idem, Encyclopddie der Philologie: Nach dessen Vorlesungen im Winterhalbjahre von 1798-99 (Leipzig, 1831). See also Lenore O'Boyle, "Klassische Bildung und soziale Struktur in Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1848," HistorischeZeitschrift 27 (1968): 584-608. 7. Friedrich Ast, Grundriss der Philologie (Landshut, 1808). 8. Friedrich Jacobs, "Zweck einer gelehrten Schule," in Dokumente des Neuhumanismus I, 2nd ed., ed. R. Joerden (Weinheim, 1962), pp. 32-45, originally in Friedrich Jacobs, Vermischte Schriften, 9 vols. (Gotha, 1823-62), 1: 108ff. For biographical detail see "Nachrichten aus meinem Leben," in Jacobs, Schriften, 1 (1840): 1-298. 9. Too often professional ideology is explained tout court as a rationale for group self-interest, without attention to the intellectual substance that gives the rationale its cultural and its historical significance. See, for example, the analysis of Standesideologie in Detlef K. Miiller, Sozialstruktur und Schulsystem: Aspekte zum Strukturwandel des Schulwesens im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1977). 10. Lenore O'Boyle, "The Middle Class in Western Europe, 1815-1848," American Historical Review 71 (1966): 826-45, and R. Steven Turner, "The 'Bildungsbiirgertum' and the Learned Professions in Prussia, 1770-1830: The Origins of a Class," Histoiresociale—Social History 13, no. 25 (1980): 105-35. See also Dietrich Riischemeyer, "Professionalisierung: Theoretische Probleme fiir die vergleichende Geschichtsforschung," GeschichteundGesellschaft6, no. 3 (1980): 311-25; Charles E. McClelland, "Zur Professionalisierung der akademischen Berufe in Deutschland," in Bildungsburgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Werner Conze and Jiirgen Kocka (Stuttgart, 1985), 1: 233-47. 11. See especially, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, Eng., 1983).


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12. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Geschichte des Verfalls und Unterganges der Griechischen Freistaaten," in W. von Humboldt, Werke, 2 vols., ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (Stuttgart, 1960-61), 2: 73-91. See also Humboldt, "Uber das Studium des Altertums, und des Griechischen insbesondere," in Humboldt, Werke, pp: 1-24; idem, "Latium und Hellas, oder Betrachtungen iiber das classische Altertum," in Humboldt, Werke, 2: 25-64; idem, "Uber den Charakter der Griechen, die idealische und historische Ansicht desselben," in Humboldt, Werke, 2: 65-72. 13. Hans Gerth, Biirgerliche Intelligenz um 1800: Zur Soziologie des deutschen Friihliberalismus, ed. Ulrich Herrmann (Gottingen, 1976); Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). 14. Roy Pascal contrasted this antimodernism with the thought of the Scottish Enlightenment in his " 'Bildung' and the Division of Labor," in German Studies Presented to Walter Horace Bruford (London, 1962), pp. 14-28. 15. Herwig Blankertz, ed., Bildung und Brauchbarkeit: Texte von Joachim Heinrich Campe und Peter Villaume zur Theorie utilitdrer Erziehung (Brunswick, 1965). The "philanthropists" were continuing the educational reform movement that Johann Bernhard Basedow had launched with his famous experimental school, the Philanthropinum, in Dessau in 1774. 16. See, for example, Blankertz, Bildung und Brauchbarkeit, pp. 45-47, 53-57, 85106. 17. Friedrich Schiller, Uber die dsthetische Erziehung des Menschen, ed. Wolfhart Henckmann (Munich, 1967), pp. 89-96. 18. Ibid.,p. 93; Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, ed. J. W. Burrow (Cambridge, Eng., 1969), pp. 34-35. 19. Walter H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: "Bildung" from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (New York, 1975), pp. 1-18; Clemens Menze, Die Bildungsreform Wilhelm vonHumboldts (Hanover, 1975), pp. 18-58. 20. It was this image of integral wholeness that made Humboldt's conception of classical studies different from that of his mentor Christian Gottlob Heyne; see Clemens Menze, Wilhelm von Humboldt und Christian Gottlob Heyne (Ratingen, 1966). 21. Humboldt, "Uber das Studium des Altertums," especially pp. 7-8; idem, "Theorie der Bildung des Menschen"; both in Humboldt, Werke. 22. Wilhelm Rossler, Die Entstehung des modernen Erziehungswesens in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1961); Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), especially pp. 86-127; Ralph Fiedler, Die klassische deutsche Bildungsidee: Ihre soziologischen Wurzeln und pddagogischen Folgen (Weinheim, ca. 1972); Charles E. McClelland, "The Aristocracy and University Reform in Eighteenth-Century Germany," in Schooling and Society-.Studies in the History of Education, ed. Lawrence Stone (Baltimore, Md., 1976), pp. 146-73. 23. See especially, Wolf's complaints about amateurishness in a letter to Heyne, June 12, 1784, in Reiter, Wolf: Bin Leben in Briefen, 1: 27-28, and Wolf's reports on seminar members in the same work, pp. 70-73, 75-76. 24. See, for example, Friedrich Gedike, Gesammlete Schulschriften, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1789-95); Phillip Julius Lieberkuhn, KleineSchriften (Zullichau, 1791). The continuity in schoolmen's expectations about state-centralized reform is emphasized in Jeismann, Das preussische Gymnasium. 25. Humboldt, Limits, p. 27.

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26. See especially Humboldt, "Theorie der Bildung des Menschen"; idem, Limits, pp. 16-21. 27. Arnoldt, Wolf, pp. 88-89 and 265ff. (Suppl. 14); Reiter, Wolf: Bin Leben in Briefen, 1:9,57, 70-76. 28. Jacobs, "Zweck einer gelehrten Schule," pp. 35, 40-45; Jacobs' address before the Verein deutscher Philologen und Schulmanner (1840), in Jacobs, Schriften, 8: 8-34, and especially 30-33. 29. On "communities of the competent" and their claim to cultural authority, see especially Thomas L. Haskell, "Professionalism versus Capitalism: R. H. Tawney, Emile Durkheim, and C. S. Pierce on the Disinterestedness of Professional Communities" in The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory ed. T. L. Haskell (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), pp. 180-225. 30. Friedrich Gedike's Berlin "letters," published anonymously in theBerlinische Monatsschrift, 2 (1783): 542-48; ibid., 3 (1784): 463-69. See also Hans Erich Bodeker, "Prozesse und Strukturen politischer Bewusstseinsbildung der deutschen Aufklarung," in Aufkldrung alsPolitisierung—Politisierungals Aufkldrung ed. Hans Erich Bodeker and Ulrich Herrmann (Hamburg, 1987), pp. 10-31. 31. See especially Jeismann, Das preussische Gymnasium, pp. 132-48. On the Wollner era see Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, N.J., 1966), pp. 142-53. 32. Ernst Christian Trapp, Versuch einer Pddagogik, ed. Ulrich Herrmann (1780: Paderborn, 1977). 33. See, for example, Gedike, Schulschriften; Lieberkuhn, Schriften. See also Miiller, Sozialstruktur und Schulsystem, p. 98ff.; Hans Georg Herrlitz, Studium als Standesprivileg: Die Entstehung des Maturitatsproblems im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1973), pp. 98-108. 34. See, for example, Trapp, Versuch, especially pp. 34-43. 35. Wilhelm Korte, ed., Friedrich August Wolf tiber Erziehung, Schule, Universitdt ("Consilia Scholastica") (Quedlinburg, 1835), pp. 6-7, 18. See also Fuhrmann, "Wolf," pp. 202-4. 36. Wolf, Darstellung, pp. 24-25; idem, Encyclopddie, p. 13. 37. See, in addition to the Darstellung, Ast, Grundriss, pp. 6-13. 38. Wolf, Darstellung, pp. 57-58. See also Jacobs, "Zweck einer gelehrten Schule," pp. 41-42. 39. Humboldt, "Geschichte des Verfalls," especially pp. 119-22. 40. Wolf, Darstellung, especially pp. 12-16. See also Wolf, Encyclopddie, pp. 8—9, 24-31; Ast, Grundriss, pp. 23-24. 41. Wolf, Darstellung, pp. 22-25, 50-75. 42. Hans Erich Bodeker, George G. Iggers, Jonathan B. Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill, eds., Aufkldrung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1986). 43. Wolf, Darstellung, pp. 18-19, 58-62, 72-73. 44. R. Hinton Thomas, Liberalism, Nationalism and the German Intellectuals, (18221847): An Analysis of the Academic and Scientific Conferences of the Period (Cambridge, Eng., 1951), pp. 69-80; and Verein deutscher Philologen und Schulmanner, Verhandlungen des Vereins deutscher Philologen und Schulmanner: Erster Lustrum (1838-1842). (Nuremberg, n.d.). 45. See the Protokoll of the fourth Versammlung, p. 42, in Verhandlungen. 46. Wolf, Darstellung, pp. 74-75. 47. August Boeckh, "Rede zur Eroffnung der eilften Versammlung Deutscher


45

Philologen, Schulmanner und Orientalisten, gehalten zu Berlin am 30. September 1850," in Roeckh,Gesammeltekleine Schriften, 1 vols. (Leipzig, 1858-74), 2: 190-91. Boeckh departed from Wolf in refusing to define Philologie exclusively in terms of classical antiquity, and in emphasizing the underlying unity of all Wissenschaften. See hisEncyklopddie undMethodologiederphilologischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig, 1877), especially pp. 4-34. 48. The new routinism is well described in Menze, Bildungsreform, pp. 384-404. 49. See especially Welcker's address, Protokoll of the fourth Versammlung (1841), pp. 42-52; Rector Moser's address, Protofa?//of the fifth Versammlung (1842), pp. 8-14; the addresses in Boeckh, Schriften, vol. 2. 50. Ulrich K. Preuss, "Bildung und Burokratie: Sozialhistorische Bedingungen in der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts," Der Staat 14 (1975): 371-96. 51. Jacobs, Schriften, 8: 8—11. For an example of Jacobs's liberalism, see his "Republicanismus der Zeit," in Jacobs, Schriften, 1: 405-24. 52. On the concept of a modern "clerisy," see especially Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1978), especially pp. 178-213. See also the analysis of "mandarin" ideology in Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins.

Public Office or Free Profession? German Attorneys in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries HANNES SIEGRIST

The Lawyer Code of 1878 marks a caesura in the history of German attorneys between a period of a "professionalization from above" by the state and the modern era of the so-called open bar. Before the Rechtsanwedtsordnung (Lawyer Code, RAO), individual German states treated those who represented clients in court and provided legal assistance and advice as a kind of public office. After 1878, the bar exhibited more clearly the characteristics of an autonomous profession. The Lawyer Code of 1878, which was enacted as part of an overall process of legal unification several years after the founding of the German Reich, maintained essential criteria of former definitions of the profession such as university training and state examinations. However, it abolished limits on the numbers of members, introduced greater freedom of practice, diminished control by the state, and strengthened self-government and autonomous selfdiscipline, which the lawyer chambers or bar associations (Anwaltskammern) were shortly to obtain. The code was a compromise among professionalizing tendencies, liberal concepts of deregulation, and traditional notions maintained by the adherents of a strong state.' The central issue in this essay is the history of professionalization of the bar. The degree of control exercised by attorneys in areas that were especially important to their occupational and social status is the key criterion for assessing the extent to which they achieved professionalization in fact. Particularly important areas include the following: 1. Expert knowledge and the organization of its production and reproduction. 2. The socialization and institutional channels of admission to the profession. Translated from the German by James Polk and edited by Konrad H. Jarausch. 46

Public Office or Free Profession?

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3. The relationship between attorney and client. 4. Market regulation, the division of labor, and the question of economic opportunity. 5. The status and position of attorneys in a system of power and prestige. 6. The role of lawyers as mediators between the state and society.2 Whereas most of the Anglo-Saxon theories of professions tend to ignore the role of the state, it is impossible to understand the history of the German legal profession without taking into account the influence of a strong state on the bar. Although this impact was weakening in the late nineteenth century, more conventional mentalities and structural traditions survived so that government served as a positive or negative point of reference. Why did the German bar gain more control over the crucial dimension of its work in the long run? This essay proposes the thesis that on the one hand the "state" somewhat changed its attitude toward society and professional functions, while on the other hand, the Lawyer Code of 1878 accepted retrospectively common practices and informal actions that had spontaneously developed in the profession, in markets, and society. The complex history of the German legal occupation cannot be regarded as a unilinear process toward professionalization. There are good reasons to apply the Anglo-Saxon model of the professions. However, the German process of developing a professional bar has peculiarities that do not easily fit the prevalent model of professionalization. The differences are mainly caused by political structures and institutional traditions. Hence this analysis cannot treat the profession, its institutions, norms, and organizations narrowly as classic bar histories do, but it has to merge them into the general development of state and society.3 I

The consolidation of the centralized bureaucratic state in the late eighteenth century completely changed the form of the legal profession. The bar was decisively shaped by policies advocating the systematization of administration, law, judicial organization, and educational affairs. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, bureaucratization encountered a historically younger, quickly expanding challenge that advocated a self-regulating society based on the principle of free enterprise, the social contract, and citizen participation within a constitutional and parliamentary order.4 These conflicting processes created entirely new roles, groups, and classes within the power structure, the system of social and cultural inequality, and the division of labor. Forms of relations and communication were also subjected to change, and new patterns of conflict, cooperation, and conduct appeared. Attorneys became involved in disputes over power and influence. They found themselves immersed in negotiations over the control of scarce resources, and fundamental social values such as safeguarding civil rights and protecting the property, honor, and integrity of the individual.

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These contentious social changes posed the problem of the exact definition of the attorney's profession and function. In the early 1780s, the Prussian state declared that attorneys with the title of "assistant counsel" were employed as civil servants. The revised bar regulation of 1793 repealed the extreme experiments of 1781, which had been unique among modern states.5 In keeping with the general court regulations, the Prussian attorney was defined as "commissar of justice" and remained the model of a tightly state-controlled bar. Lawyers were state officials inasmuch as the educational prerequisites and admission requirements of attorneys were as regimented as the requirements of higher civil servants. Attorneys were regarded as "real servants of the state" and by virtue of their status as "official subordinates of the courts." Nevertheless, they received no salary and were not entitled to any kind of pension, but rather were required to support themselves independently by virtue of an office that was exalted as a privilege. This regulation was a distinctively continental variant of the bar within a bureaucratic authoritarian state, with similar forms to be found in the Habsburg Empire or in Bavaria. Smaller German states were slow to adapt to this pattern.6 The chief interest of the state in controlling the bar concerned the role of attorneys in legal proceedings before the courts. Many states found it difficult to reconcile the conception of attorneys as "assistants to the courts" with their functions as representatives of private parties. Lawyers were repeatedly urged to consider themselves primarily as servants of justice and to decline the representation of clients with "improper" interests. Since the late eighteenth century, German states had attempted to curtail the participation of attorneys in inquiry and trial proceedings by extending the functions and the discretion of judges. The bureaucracy did not attempt, however, to eliminate attorneys altogether but rather insisted that they should not interfere too much with the administration of justice. While officials complained of the excessive power of lawyers in legal proceedings, attorneys deplored their vulnerability before an omnipotent judge. In 1827, a Bavarian reform commission consisting of some attorneys appointed by the government, criticized the lack of independence of attorneys, whose legal expertise was necessary for ensuring the "free and honest appreciation of the law." If unfettered defense, in text and utterance, was in fact the "first and most hallowed guarantee of civil freedom," then it should be left "exclusively to the insight and conscience of the attorney . . . to decide upon the type of defense ensured by law, if he is to preserve his client's trust." Every curtailment of legal procedure would subject defendants to the arbitrary decree of officials and consequently place might above right. 7 By 1830, some German attorneys demanded a supervisory role in questions of legal knowledge and jurisprudence, claiming that they would employ it toward clients according to altruistic principles. In voicing their demands for an oral and public process of litigation, German attorneys were essentially striving for three things: the recognition of their academic learning and greater social prestige, a better position in relation to their professional rivals such as judges and government lawyers, and greater


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public appreciation of their selfless dedication to the service of justice. The last aspect was particularly important since state officials had publicly denounced attorneys as self-seeking meddlers who were responsible for the bad condition of the judicial system. In their struggle for higher professional status, attorneys were in need of the support of the general public. Their strategy of demanding public (oral) instead of secret (written) legal proceedings was partly professional, since legal knowledge selflessly employed was allegedly exempt from arbitrariness of state decree. At the same time, it was part of a general strategy of the bourgeois middle class that was struggling for emancipation from the guardianship of the state. When litigation actually became public and transparent through the introduction of oral proceedings, government bureaucrats believed even more that the attorneys played a cardinal role for the general welfare. "Attorneys appear everywhere," in 1853 the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior stated to the Ministry of Justice, "as experts in legal matters who, by virtue of their knowledge of laws and regulations, serve particular defendants in word and deed under the authority of the state." Therefore, attorneys could propagate "correct, but also false opinions and notions." Lawyers were capable of motivating "respect for the law and the institutions of the state," but "also of inciting mistrust and dissatisfaction." It was in their power to "strengthen or undermine the foundations of civil order."8 This polemic overstatement reflects the fear of losing control over the attorneys and the application of legal knowledge. The state reluctantly granted the attorneys a limited margin for the free interpretation of legal terms, but remained nevertheless ready to intervene in cases of "wrong views." Lawyers were not masters of legal knowledge and jurisprudence. Through its policy of increasingly engaging attorneys in intermediate and higher courts, the state managed at least to keep laymen at a safe distance. Laymen fit ever less into the framework of dogmatic, systematized jurisprudence and jurisdiction. Thus attorneys owed their patron relation to clients to this tendency of the enlightened bureaucratic state. This very point illustrates how ambivalent the relation between the bar and bureaucracy actually was. Some German states had already begun to require the engagement of attorneys during the ancien regime, and wherever this was not the case the state eventually institutionalized compulsory representation by an attorney (in Prussia comparatively late in 1846). In formal legal terms, lawyers thereby became the patrons of their clients. Though attorneys profited from the rationalization of law and gained formal supremacy over a client, they still suffered from the demands of legal bureaucrats, judges, and law professors for a dominant role in defining and interpreting jurisprudence. This fact has been decisive in the professionalization of German lawyers, more so than in England, France, or the United States. German attorneys were rarely employed as university professors; in many areas, holding a chair in law was incompatible with bar membership. In the first half of the century, only some attorneys residing in liberal states such as Baden or Wurttemberg gained recognition as legal journalists or commentators. The

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active participation of attorneys in the process of forming civil law was looked upon by representatives of state authority as unlawful: In 1844, Prince Metternich polemicized in a letter that attorneys were much too dominated by concrete legal cases and by the interests of their clients. In contrast, judges and scholars versed in jurisprudence were committed to the general principles of law and understood the common good of society.9 Extending down to the level of district judges, doubts emerged as to whether the motives of attorneys really were altruistic, calling their very professional status into question, in spite of their scholarly background, examination record, and superiority over clients. A certain ambiguity seems therefore to be inherent in the concept of professionalization. The state-initiated professionalization toward the professional group as an object endowed an occupation with the outward trappings of a profession. However, lawyers only marginally fulfilled the requirement of having control of and access to legal knowledge. By systematizing the study of law, the state succeeded in eliminating the attorneys' earlier influence on the socialization of the subsequent generation of lawyers. In eighteenth-century Prussia and later in the Rhineland, young lawyers received their practical training in part under the auspices of practicing attorneys. Thereafter, the state continually expanded its new model ofReferendariat while the older form of law apprenticeship vanished altogether and attorneys were eliminated from the legal examinations. The bureaucracy finally extended its supervision over the entire curriculum by repressing even the strong influence exerted by university professors and turning testing into civil service examinations. It is typical for German professionalization that attorneys were banished from a position of scholarly supervision and that the entire process of acquiring legal knowledge fell entirely under bureaucratic control.10 Rudolf Gneist argued that integrated legal education meant "something more than mere training," because it "ennobled the mind and character through the rich means of humanistic scholarship." The ethical self-discipline instilled by such "liberal education" was vastly superior to the "jungle relations" of open competition in the United States.11 It was the prerogative of the state, the minister of justice, the prince, or the king to appoint attorneys. For that reason, members of the Bavarian bar were entitled "royal attorneys." Upon admission, candidates were tested not only in erudition and prior examinations, but also in ethical integrity and political reliability. Such preventive measures were complemented by an oath of office and the subsequent supervision of attorneys by the courts. God, the king, duty, wisdom, and conscience—in that order—were the authorities to which the attorney swore to adhere. By conferring titles and offices, the state was the source of social and economic capital, governing an attorney's access to property and income. Occasionally lawyers pressed for more control over their livelihood and social prestige because they knew that their prosperity and success were, in spite of all state guarantees, actually dependent on their social position in the local community. They sometimes complained that through the appointment system the state hindered attorneys in using personal, familial, or local prestige simply


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because an attorney was often put into a position in an area where he was unknown or where he was not respected as a member of the middle classes by reasons of background. The state governed the economic return by officially limiting the number of attorneys and by subsequently controlling their income. Setting fees was designed to thwart any attempts to engage in questionable transactions for selfish financial interests. Indemnity due to court costs was a fixed tariff. In disputes about the costs of an attorney's work, the judges decided the level of the fee. Hence attorneys sometimes lamented that they were handicapped in comparison with other occupations, but in fact lawyer income varied according to locality, experience, and prestige. Rural attorneys frequently earned less than their urban counterparts and the income of younger attorneys was less than that of established colleagues. Compared to judicial salaries, which were often substantially lower, attorneys' earnings seemed adequate. Thus it was not, as a rule, economic distress that prompted their discontent. A more important reason for the latent frustration among attorneys was the judicial control of disciplinary proceedings. Since judges were superior in the official hierarchy, these two groups of lawyers were often caught in a strained rivalry. As a result of the institutionalized nature of the careers of civil servants, there was virtually no exchange between the two sectors of the legal labor market, which might have created solidarity between the two legal professions in the larger German states. The broadly based system of legal education was followed up by narrowly defined offices and careers. Only in smaller states did some of the older patterns persist: In the principalities of Lippe-Detmold and Waldeck, part of the civil service had been previously composed of attorneys, which was also the case in the Hanseatic cities where attorneys enjoyed high social esteem. In this instance, bar membership was also considered a prerequisite for obtaining an office as a civil servant or judge.12 Ultimately, political constraints hindered attorneys' attempts to increase their social prestige. As early as 1808, the Prussian reformer Baron vom Stein demanded that political representation should be granted solely on the basis of property. Each social rank was instructed to represent itself in order to keep "assemblies free of attorneys, pamphleteers and criers" who were supposedly not only ignorant of real concerns but also willing to sacrifice them for reasons of "conceit and addiction to novelty."13 Through a property census or other suffrage restrictions, the larger German states hindered political participation in semiparliamentary organs and in boards of local self-administration. Prussian attorneys were exempt from certain taxes, but consequently also excluded from some political rights.14 The situation was again different in the Hanseatic towns, where erudite attorneys, traditionally members of the most prominent families, wielded considerable political influence. In the corporate states of Saxony, Wurttemberg, the Electorate of Hesse, and in Baden, a small group of attorneys began as early as 1830 to attract public attention, and in small principalities they even participated in the estate assemblies as city representatives or property owners. Until about 1870, the history of the German bar was marked in every respect

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by rigorous state control. Though attorneys functioned as patrons to clients, the bureaucracy embodied a type of superpatron controlling not only lawyers and their clients, but also supervising the reproduction, distribution, and use of legal expertise. In addition, the state forced attorneys into subordinate positions outside the sphere of their professional life. For this reason, liberal concepts and antiestablishment ideologies received more support from attorneys than from any other academic profession. Particularly in South Germany, lawyers became the political allies of democrats, national movements, and entrepreneurs advocating a liberalized society. II

Ever since the introduction of the numerus clausus, which limited the number of privileged attorneys, demands had been raised for its abolition, though seldom publicly. Such requests appeared regularly in the applications of younger lawyers seeking an appointment. Individual citizens and communities that felt underprivileged appealed to the courts and the judicial administration to provide for additional attorneys. These demands were strongly supported by free trade currents in the second half of the nineteenth century. The enforced restrictions limiting the number of attorneys appeared to be incompatible with the principle of liberty in commerce, already adopted in many other areas. Guild protection of attorneys seemed unjustified when simultaneously industrialists and merchants were making history in vigorous pursuit of prosperity.1S Liberal principles called the entire structure of the bar into question. Initially attorneys were hesitant to adopt new national policies. Dominated by nonattorneys, the Conference of German Lawyers first demanded an "open bar" in 1863. At the beginning, attorneys delayed their response, but in 1876 the Conference of German Attorneys explicitly demanded a corporate constitution, the complete homogenization of the bar, and a free and open national market for legally trained persons with the necessary credentials. The controversy culminated during negotiations on the new Lawyer Code (RAO), especially in the organizations, journals, and assemblies of attorneys. For several years, the regulation of the bar occupied the Federal Judiciary Commission and the government until the Reichstag passed the RAO in 1878.16 The RAO established a uniform lawyer code for all of Germany, thereby pacifying widespread nationalist sentiments. It also united all the legal functions such as representation in court, legal assistance, and counsel into the single profession of the attorney. The most important topic of debate concerned the opening of the bar, and all other questions seemed trivial in comparison. The regional and socially heterogeneous bar had fluctuated between freeing access and fixing limits on the number of its members. A free-market policy was finally adopted because it was considered preferable to state control. The Lawyer Code, which became law in 1879, liberalized the market for those with equal qualifications and ended the limits of the number of attorneys, which had


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been often criticized by younger attorneys. As a result of their exclusion from admission, fully trained lawyers in Prussia and Bavaria had often been forced to wait as long as seven years before obtaining an official appointment. Government efforts to restrict free-market principles by favoring areas lacking a sufficient number of attorneys actually failed. Even the Prussian minister of justice no longer considered the question of whether or not to relinquish control of the market an issue. An exact limit on the number of attorneys was extremely difficult to establish because of fluctuating needs, and lawyers themselves frequently performed widely varied tasks other than those immediately related to court procedures.17 While traditionalists insisted that the professional dignity was best upheld by the state and by limits on the number of practitioners, their opponents argued that an open bar limited the arbitrariness of the administration of justice. However, the law accomplished less than liberal politicians and attorneys had hoped, because the policy of "localization" remained intact. Without special permission, legal practice was allowed only within the jurisdiction of one specific court. Localization was upheld by the states in the interest of guaranteeing the functioning of the judicial system. In view of existing compulsory representation by attorneys, their continued presence at court was believed to be essential for a quick and efficient litigation. For attorneys the question of localization was a problem of internal stratification, because new status divisions based on level of jurisdiction emerged between the majority of superior-court (Landgericht) and a growing minority of inferior-court (Amtsgericht) practitioners.18 The result was a chronic struggle for "simultaneous admission" (Simultanzulassung) according to court type. Bar associations were allowed only to express their expert opinion, since the Prussian minister of justice successfully rejected the demand for attorney self-control over admission. However, the regularized procedure established by this debate finally excluded excessive arbitrariness on the part of individual judicial administrations. Discussions over the RAO were less concerned with expert knowledge and education. Essentially the bar was in full agreement with the views of Gneist, who belonged to the professorial vanguard of the open bar. Though many attorneys regarded the question of control over the system of education as a potential problem, they had little success with their demands for increased participation in practical legal training. The Attorneys' Conference of 1876 had suggested a two-year period of practical instruction for candidates under the supervision of a host attorney after the end of law school. Of the three and later four years of practical training finally adopted, only six months were actually spent with an attorney, with the rest devoted to various services at court. The institutional position of attorneys in relation to legal training and knowledge remained somewhat precarious. The journal of the Society of German Attorneys (Deutscher Anwaltverein, DAV), the Juristische Wochenschrift (published since 1872), pursued the professionalizing strategy of assigning a priority to legal knowledge by publishing legal decisions and commentaries on

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court proceedings. By the beginning of the First World War, individual attorneys had succeeded in becoming highly esteemed specialists in certain spheres such as commercial law. But the actual control over legal knowledge remained in the hands of professors and judges, as judicial servants of the state. The results of the long and intense debate that crystallized in the RAO remained somewhat ambiguous from the perspective of a theory of professionalization. The Lawyer Code preserved the established service monopoly of attorneys at intermediate and higher courts and subjected them to disciplinary controls by the bar association (Anwaltskammer). However, lawyers lost their state privileges, since the majority of established attorneys chose a free market, implying the withdrawal of the state from its role as supervisor. Now the attorney was no longer a holder of public office and the bar was less an appointed position than a free profession. A combination of state, market, and corporate control succeeded the older established system. With few reservations, attorneys took a generally positive view of the RAO until the 1890s, when skeptical views began to gain strength. It appears doubtful whether this combination of state intervention and free market was a strategy for financial gain, as some professionalization theories would expect. Whereas income questions played a secondary role in professional politics in the 1870s, they grew more significant in the 1890s when many younger attorneys joined the bar, thereby increasing the total number of lowerincome members. The free market magnified the existing social and economic heterogeneity of a professional group, which was equal only with respect to education, title, and (in principle, but not in reality) functional roles in court. Especially younger attorneys demanded before and after the First World War the reinstatement of limits on the number of practitioners; this was prevented by the older generation of liberals who still dominated the professional organizations. The question of status superiority of experts over clients played only a marginal role in RAO negotiations, since neither the state nor the attorneys questioned the legal dominance. Debates concerning the patronage relationship between attorney and client heated up during discussions about the admission of attorneys to commercial courts and industrial councils introduced in 1890 and 1904, respectively. Lawyers strongly objected to their exclusion from practicing in these new forums and to the policy of allowing laymen to represent themselves. This exclusion from specific areas of jurisdiction caused both attorneys and judges to lose some influence and service markets.19 Ill

The transition to relatively open competition for legal services in 1878 partly resulted from the ascendancy of liberalism in the early Kaiserreich, but it also stemmed from the changes in the service market and in the needs of people. The traditional scope of attorneys' activities had began to grow when deregulation


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followed, making the state less able to pay for the control by granting certain advantages. An increasing portion of legal work took place outside the courts and therefore beyond state supervision. Which were the most important changes in the service market? The emergence of a modern civil society created new spheres of activity and an enlarged market for legal services. Therefore, during the nineteenth century, the law profession became an attractive occupation. First, the demand for attorneys was guaranteed by the requirement of court representation by an attorney. In Prussia (excluding the Rhineland), Hanover, and Saxony, lawyers had preserved the right to function as notaries and attorneys at the same time, thereby being subject to greater state control. The increase in the demand for legal services was partly due to the efforts of attorneys to convince a growing number of solvent middle-class clients that expert legal advice was indispensable in dealing with complicated laws and ordinances. New needs also brought qualitative and quantitative changes in the demand for attorneys. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the process subsumed under the concept of "defeudalization" was responsible for the surge in demand for attorneys to draw up inventories and contracts and help settle civil suits in court. Many possibilities for earning a good income opened in this enormous field. Losses through simplification of legal procedures at court were compensated by the increases in out-of-court advisory tasks as a result of expanding trade and commerce. Finally attorneys more frequently accepted mandates as legal assistants or counsel in administrative affairs due to the expansion of public administrative bodies on the community and district levels. During the later part of the nineteenth century, industrial progress prompted another surge in the demand for attorneys. A minority of advocates entered new, economically oriented areas of profession. They became free business lawyers or members of boards of directors of railway and steamboat lines, savings institutions, banks, and insurance companies. At the close of the century, attorneys also became involved in medium-sized and large joint-stock companies, in the regulation of mergers, and in the liquidation of bankruptcies. Attorneys constituted a group ready to assume economic leadership when there was a shortage of well-trained managerial and entrepreneurial personnel. The changes in the service market of attorneys were not free of risks and insecurities. In a bureaucratizing society, some of the activities that had earlier been performed by attorneys were now integrated into the jobs of civil servants. For instance, attorneys in smaller states lost virtually all opportunity of holding subsidiary offices as patrimonial or substitute judges because positions in the legal administration were occupied by full-time officials. Sometimes attorneys suffered from a decline in the demand for legal services that was aggravated by general economic crisis. On balance, the new tasks inside and roles outside the courts strengthened the self-confidence of the legal practitioners, making them less dependent on the state. In Germany, the expansion of the commercial market and general freedom of contract were chiefly responsible for the development of private

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legal experts.20 This was one more reason why attorneys favored an open market. Bureaucratization, which initially provided an incentive for the development of the legal profession, later lost some of its weight. Despite state emphasis on the legal generalist for all court matters, German lawyers also experienced a certain trend toward specialization. In some compulsory markets, such as for alms attorneys, virtually nothing could be earned. But there were also conditional markets in the sense that sometimes Catholics preferred to have a counsel of their own faith, entrepreneurs often liked to deal with someone who belonged to their own circles, and so on. Moreover, areas of practice were somewhat delineated according to age: In cities with numerous attorneys, younger lawyers were more frequently occupied in criminal court proceedings and as poor-law defenders—positions avoided by their older colleagues because they did not offer a sufficient income. More experienced attorneys concentrated on civil court proceedings and were eager to obtain positions as business lawyers, administrators, or trustees. Even though the trend toward specialization was inhibited by the government, it was noticeable in large urban areas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, a considerable number of attorneys remained generalists. Until the end of the nineteenth century, even the development of partnerships, which was potentially conducive to specialization, was continuously thwarted by the state and by adherents of an individualistic professional ethic. By the turn of the century, firms with three to four members plus some secretaries existed only in a few urban areas. IV

By officially limiting the numbers of attorneys, German states had pursued political, moral, social, and economic goals. These curbs were intended to dampen the litigiousness of citizens. They were also designed to guarantee attorneys some kind of financial security and to keep them from venturing onto illegal paths of material gain. States with official limits reduced the number of practitioners during the first decades of the nineteenth century; the ratio of attorneys to inhabitants stagnated or even actually decreased. Bavaria reduced the number of 401 licensed attorneys in 1820 to 359 in 1840, although the general population increased, dropping the per capita ratio to about 1:12,000. In Prussia (excluding the Rhineland), the proportion was similar.21 Until the 1870s, the ratio deteriorated, raising doubts whether citizens enjoyed adequate access to legal counsel and representation. The ratio of "inhabitants to licensed attorneys" can sometimes be misleading . If one considers that a considerable minority of licensed attorneys were, for reasons of sickness, old age, or because of other activities not even practicing, then the proportion appears too great. This group of inactive attorneys accounted on occasion for as much as one third of the total number. 22 However, the ratio appears in an overly negative light if two groups of actual legal representatives are excluded. The so-called shady lawyers or consultants (e.g., court


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clerks, clergymen, former civil servants, innkeepers, and restaurant proprietors with some legal knowledge) provided legal advice in many lower court cases. Moreover, a number of young lawyers who were waiting to be admitted to the bar served in the offices of licensed attorneys as law clerks (Referendare). If one were to add one or two of these clerks to every licensed attorney, then the ratio improves considerably. The proportion of one actual legal counsel for every 6,000 inhabitants seems a valid guess for a large part of the nineteenth century. The government always claimed that an appropriate number of attorneys was adequately distributed. In fact, the rural population was considerably neglected with little access to legal counsel, because attorneys tended to concentrate in urban areas. Courts were situated in cities where commerce, trade, and industry were concentrated. Lawyers were therefore a thoroughly urban group whose proportion in towns often reached a ratio of one to every 1,000 to 2,000 inhabitants. Citizens were quick to complain when the state failed to adjust to the legal needs of rapidly growing urban centers by providing for an adequate number of licensed attorneys. Prussia and Bavaria reflect the general trend. Where there were no official limits on the numbers of attorneys, the supply of legal services was considerably better and their geographic distribution was more equitable. While in the Kingdom of Hanover the ratio was 1:2,000 in 1840, the Hamburg figure was 1:1,500.23 The introduction of the open bar in 1878 dramatically reduced the ratio of licensed attorneys to potential clients throughout the entire German Reich. The proportion was cut in half from 1:11,000 in 1880 to 1:5,600 in 19II. 24 Attorneys used these figures to prove that their situation had worsened and to gather support for their professional demands. Based on the just-mentioned "real" estimate, one must conclude that the actual development was not so unfavorable. It is true that trade unions and associations provided their members with legal advice in simple cases. Furthermore, there really was a massive influx of applicants from the universities into the bar, which led to a rapid increase in the number of licensed attorneys.25 But the wider and diversified market for legal services neutralized its effects. The real problem was that the number of young attorneys, who had not yet built up their individual practice, was growing. Moreover, these beginners were hindered by the concentration of lucrative transactions in the hands of the more experienced, older attorneys. According to a widely accepted thesis, the majority of German lawyers is generally considered staatslastig (dependent on the state).26 This thesis refers to the state control over legal studies and institutions, and occasionally also to the authoritarian conduct of many lawyers. But it also implies that compared with other countries, a considerable number of German lawyers were employed by the state. Even if one considers only the figures of judges (excluding public prosecutors and those in practical training), the ratio of judges to attorneys was 3:1 in mid-nineteenth-century Prussia. As late as 1895, 8,500 judges were more numerous than 7,500 attorneys in the entire German Reich. However, fifteen years later, the proportion was reversed with 10,000 judges to 10,500 attorneys. By the year 1921, there were 12,000 attorneys compared to 10,000

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judges.27 When the majority of law school graduates began to enter the bar as attorneys, the bar was incapable (often not really willing) of regulating this influx. The increase in the number of attorneys meant, on the one hand, that the influence of attorneys in the legal community increased, thereby strengthening their collective self-consciousness. On the other hand, it became increasingly important for the state to control the structure and contents of legal study in order to assure the uniformity of the legal standards. V

Part of traditional state supervision was also the prescription of moral and behavioral guidelines for attorneys. These directives dictated that attorneys engage in lawful and altruistic legal services to clients in the name of justice and the common good. Since many aspects of this ethical code had been part of a long tradition, attorneys were actually continuing standards already established by the state. However, during the nineteenth century lawyers increasingly emphasized the notion of independence not only from the client but also from the state. This concept was derived from the highly refined deontology (science of duties) originally propounded by French attorneys.28 Liberalism brought to the fore the question of who was to control the enforcement of the ethical rules. Until the last third of the nineteenth century, the courts supervised correct attorney behavior during and outside of professional activities. Such judicial control became increasingly onerous to attorneys who began to demand more disciplinary self-government or professional jurisdiction. This goal was finally achieved with the creation of a bar association (Anwaltskammer) within the RAO. The concept of the "lawyer chamber" was copied from the French avocats, but it had three German origins as well. First, bar associations and disciplinary councils were introduced during the Napoleonic empire in the Rhineland. Though weakened after 1815, they had the right to impose at least moral sanctions (reprimands) on members of the profession. They functioned as a model for the Prussian Honor Courts of 1847, in which selected attorneys served together with state representatives as disciplinary sentinels. Second, individual regional bar associations with voluntary membership safeguarded the interests of professional fellowship and maintained an informal, voluntary form of control over honor and dignity of their members since the 1830s. For a long time, attorneys were nevertheless hesitant to promote compulsory associations out of fear that the state might monopolize them for its own interests.29 The real prototype of the bar associations in all of Germany were, thirdly, the bar associations founded around 1860 in Hanover and Baden, which enjoyed more autonomy. Attorneys at the provincial courts were forced to join the bar associations introduced in 1879. Chamber members elected a board of directors, which managed various transactions and mediated in instances of conflict. It also functioned as a court protecting the "honor and dignity of the profession" and


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enforcing penalties ranging from a simple reprimand to complete disqualification. A judicial official presided during investigations, and all appeals went to an honor court (Ehrengerichtshof, EGH) consisting of four judges and three attorneys from the Reichsgericht. In subsequent decades, lawyers sought more autonomy, but demands for a complete state withdrawal were unsuccessful. Attorneys did not pursue this goal more vigorously, because EGH representatives were frequently leading members of the DAV who enjoyed the trust and confidence of fellow members until after 1900. A large number of bar members also did not desire a pure system of professional self-discipline. Finally, the state also did not allow its influence to be eliminated completely. On the contrary, it tried to obtain the loyalty of the association's board of directors by bestowing upon its president medals and titles such as "privy councillor of justice." The composition of the bar association reinforced the independence of attorneys. However, judgments handed down by the Honor Court of Appeal revealed a conservative trend and new habits in practice were accepted with great reluctance. The EGH even tried to standardize notions about behavior by establishing its own concepts of a worthy and respectable professional lifestyle.30 It is doubtful whether attorneys actually followed these conservative middle-class precepts. The judgments of regional chapters show that chambers consisting only of attorneys were quite reserved in imposing disciplinary measures on behavior outside of immediate professional concerns. They gradually came to accept that a heterogeneous professional group of different economic, social, religious, and cultural background could not be expected to comply with a rigid uniformity. Nevertheless, some states such as Prussia at least offered a reward with which they hoped to entice attorneys into practicing good behavior. Lawyers were awarded the title ofJustizrat (judicial councillor) if they had displayed impeccable professional ethics over a considerable length of time. The few older attorneys who did not receive this honor because of deviant political or social behavior complained that their credibility had been diminished and their business practice suffered. German attorneys developed a professional ideology that was not easily reconciled with new trends inside and outside of their professional practice. The ambivalent attitude toward economic gain is an example of such conflicting value orientations. Publicly proclaimed ethics regarded attorneys as selfless high priests of law, justice, and the common good; furthermore, the same code encouraged them to ignore and despise the potential of profit-oriented entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, many economically successful attorneys were highly esteemed members of the profession. In the decades preceding the First World War, the EGH was forced to devise a compromise solution. Business activity did not endanger the "dignity and honor" (Wiirde undEhre) of the legal profession as long as it did not lead to personal dependence, or in other words, as long as the activity in question was morally sound. This principle applied to positions ranging from the board of directors to managers, but not to employees. Such criteria generally reflected the social distinctions of the middle class to which

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attorneys belonged by virtue of occupation, education, and status. Hence many lawyer values were not just typical of a profession but of the Biirgertum (bourgeoisie) as a whole. VI

During the decades preceding the First World War, attorneys also gained greater social esteem outside of their immediate occupational sphere. This improvement of status partly resulted from the legal and institutional upgrading of the profession and partly stemmed from political and social changes. Around the turn of the century, limits on holding office were dropped. German attorneys now participated more often in local self-government. Particularly on a local level, lawyers had the time to be elected to various bodies when the established elite lost its dominant position and before a new type of social democratic functionary and politician emerged. Attorneys were most often members of liberal bourgeois parties. The added prestige that was acquired by political office, and membership in parties, societies, and associations helped in gaining new clients, which was particularly important since other forms of advertising or soliciting were strictly prohibited. In regional parliaments, and especially in the Reichstag, lawyers were not well represented in comparison with their professional colleagues in other European countries.31 They rarely became ministers until after the First World War, because that office required a previous career in public administration. Nevertheless, the major German parties repeatedly had prominent leaders who came from the ranks of the bar. But these lawyers were less representative of attorneys. They were, instead, "lawyerpoliticians" who represented political parties, regions, or social groups. Nineteenth-century social changes seem to have supported a more liberal attitude toward the service market. They help to explain why attorneys practiced with conscious aloofness from the state. This hypothesis is substantiated by data relating to the social background and marital relations of attorneys. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, fewer attorneys came from civil servant families. Their social backgrounds broadened and the percentage of sons of merchants or industrialists increased significantly. The change in the social background of the bar was in part due to the emancipation that had given Jews equal civil rights without guaranteeing them equal social opportunity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Jews had been allowed to study law, but their chances of ever obtaining a civil service post remained poor. The deflection of Jews into the bar transformed its social composition by substantially increasing the number of merchants' sons among attorneys. This trend toward an increased integration of members of the middle class from nonbureaucratic backgrounds can also be observed in marriage patterns. The number of attorneys who married into families of landowners, merchants, and industrialists seems to be greater than the number of attorneys originating from such backgrounds. This marital strategy implied an increase in both economic as well as social capital and, in some ways, was more successful for


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individual social success than the collective efforts of professional associations that have been so heavily researched. The overall effect of these changes confirmed the general trust in a market economy or at least reinforced a professionalism that stressed a certain independence from the state. Nevertheless mounting pressure on the markets led in fact to renewed calls for restrictions and closure policies. But such efforts did not come to dominate the professional associations until the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, calls for closing the markets were also quite common in the German manufacturing and industrial sectors. Gains in functional, social, and political importance legitimated the position and status of the attorneys. Nevertheless their prestige remained vulnerable and attorneys often enjoyed less esteem in the bureaucratic, liberal society than did legally trained state officials and judges. The state somewhat reduced its hold on the attorneys. Even though lawyers were generally admired, bureaucrats and journalists repeatedly reproached them for being selfish. Attorneys sought to counter this image by emphasizing their ideology of professionalism. VII

Before they gained the right to organize for common purposes, attorneys were socially fragmented or belonged to nonprofessional associations. The first bar societies were founded in the 1830s and 1840s on a local and regional level. Beginning in the year 1844, an elite group of liberal attorneys repeatedly sought to unify the class (Stand) of advocates and to develop a nationwide law. The national Deutsche Anwalt-Zeitung, which appeared from 1844 to 1848, fully supported these efforts; but individual states remained vigorously opposed. In 1848 a German Bar Society was established, but it disappeared again as the Revolution of 1848 failed. During the 1860s, members of the revolutionary generation renewed attempts to establish professional attorneys' organizations. The largest of the associations, namely, the Bavarian and Prussian bar societies founded in 1861, merged ten years later to become the Society of German Attorneys (Deutscher Anwaltverein). Its statutes encouraged genuine professional cooperation among attorneys in order to represent the professional interests of the members. The DAV was highly organized and by 1900 had branches in more than forty German cities and towns. The board of directors was dominated by affluent attorneys who supported liberal ideas as well as moderate professionalism. In their "liberal professionalism," they combined ideas of professional autonomy and of relatively free competition with the meritocratic notion that certain services should be reserved to experts.32 In some areas, the voluntary DAV gained considerable influence over elections to the boards and disciplinary councils of the compulsory chambers. The attorney society captured the official representation of the profession and was to a certain extent able to instrumentalize it for its own needs.33 During the first few years, DAV conferences were primarily concerned with legal develop-

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ment, but after 1890 social and economic issues gained increasing attention. In 1907, they even threatened to split the association because less affluent attorneys expected the DAV to show more concern for their economic needs. But the association was in a weak bargaining position vis-a-vis the state, because the latter formally determined the fees. Hence the bar society reacted to the attorneys' demands by organizing improved methods of self-help. It installed new services including a unified liability insurance, a social aid fund, a literature agency, and public legal counseling offices, and provided for further education. Liberal self-help complemented liberal professionalism. This practice was continued under the crisis circumstances of the First World War. But liberal exhortations could not prevent the emergence of a new type of professionalism, the primary motivation of which was income oriented. It emphasized closure strategies and sought permanent assistance from the state, thereby directly challenging the traditional liberal vision that had been shaped during the nineteenth century. The conflict between these contrasting types of professionalism greatly influenced the era of the Weimar Republic. The Nazis finally ended their competition by instituting authoritarian solutions to economic problems and suppressing the independence of the legal profession. National socialist policies restored the dominance of the state more brutally than ever before. VIII The professionalization of German attorneys during the nineteenth century had several origins. First, it was modeled after the traditional civil lawyers. Second, it resulted from the ambivalent relationship between attorneys and an authoritarian bureaucracy. Third, it was based on lawyer practice in professional, social, and political roles. Finally, it was guided by other Western models such as the barristers in England or the avocats in France. Domestic experiences, coupled with the awareness of foreign structures, help explain the dual professional and political strategies adopted by German attorneys in order to elevate their occupation and social status. In praising French, English, and North American barristers in the 1840s, Friedrich List argued that their exemplary prestige was typical of constitutional governments. These liberal civil societies allowed attorneys not only to offer private counsel to citizens, but also to enjoy public trust and to stand for election to offices in courts, government, and parliament. As a result, lawyers occupied leading roles in the middle class and in the political elite of those countries.34 In many respects, his vision became a reality later in the nineteenth century. But the strong bureaucratic state limited these changes and created an occupational cleavage between three clearly distinct groups of state officials, law professors, and attorneys, which were often merged elsewhere. It was not easy to alter the image that the civil service jurists were the leaders of the legal profession. Before the revolutionary year of 1848, many German lawyers considered professionalization as just one of many strategies toward winning more inde-


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pendence from the state and improving their status in the middle class. The leading alternatives under consideration involved changes in the existing political, economic, and judicial system, making of secondary interest measures that were just targeted for altering the profession or its regulations. The general liberalization of German society allowed strategies to shift toward "professionalism," thereby acknowledging professions as the most fundamental aspect of social status. This newly emerging professionalism did, however, maintain its political orientation and contain individual and collective strategies that were typical of the middle class. The professionalization of the German bar was generally determined by three influences. First, there was no strong tradition of a guildlike professional corporation as in England or Italy to influence the mentality of the later lawyers.35 Second, the political weakness of the German middle class forced attorneys to neutralize the influence of the state through the creation of strong and relatively autonomous professional associations. Third, starting in 1750 the state professionalized the German bar from above by training attorneys in the same manner as officials and their situation resembled in some respects the position of government-employed jurists. Professionalization from above is a problematic term because the normal use of the concept implies that the initiative comes from an occupational group below. In this context, the phrase refers to the eminent role of the state in the formation of the continental professions. One can of course doubt whether the professional model is appropriate for German lawyers and argue that during the early nineteenth century the attorney was largely an incomplete state official. But the bureaucratic model is misleading because it blurs the actual practice and status of the attorney, and it understates the early traces of a professional identity that later became more clearly defined. Although the rise of the German bar was initiated by the state, attorneys themselves later developed a genuine professionalization resembling the English or American practice. However, German professionalism remained ambivalent exactly because of the structural and mental legacy of the earlier phase. The constraints of the first half of the nineteenth century even influenced the professional policies that rejected them. This circumstance explains why German attorneys did not strictly follow a strategy of market closure in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The evidence of the German bar remains ambivalent regarding the theory of a particular German Sonderweg (separate path). It has already been pointed out that the older system of the state-controlled bar was merely a variation of a widespread continental pattern. The introduction of an open bar in 1878 adopted another trend that had already been established for more that ten years in Austria and for even longer in France. The Italian Lawyer Code of 1874 also went in the same direction. Though Germany followed a continental trend with respect to legal and institutional regulations of the bar, in terms of general prestige German attorneys had an inferior status in comparison with Italian or French barristers. In the late nineteenth century, German attorneys significantly improved their social and political standing, but, in a society dominated

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by civil servants, aristocrats, and entrepreneurs, their position remained uncertain. During the course of the nineteenth century, they were never quite able to achieve the importance of their counterparts in Italy, France, Switzerland, or the United States. The wide regional variations in Central Europe make statements about "the German attorneys" somewhat problematic. But once such an abstraction is made, the German development appears in some respects as one variation of a general European pattern, while it other ways it remains peculiar. Notes 1. This essay resulted from my work on the history of the European legal profession, especially attorneys and barristers, called "Advokaten und Burger." I would like to thank the Freie Universitat Berlin, the DFG, the Zip at the Universitat Bielefeld, and the European University Institute in Florence for their generous support. 2. This roster is based on T. Parsons, "Professions," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 12 (1968): 536-47; T. Johnson, Professions and Power (London, 1972); R. Dingwall and P. Lewis, eds., The Sociology of the Professions(Lotidon, 1983); M. S. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley, Calif., 1977); W. Conze and J. Kocka, eds., Bildungsbiirgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1985), part 1; and M. Burrage, K. H. Jarausch, andH. Siegrist, "An Actor-Oriented Framework for the History of the Professions: Prerequisites for a Theory," in M. Burrage and R. Torstendahl, eds., Professions in Theory and History (London, 1990). 3. A. Weissler, Geschichte der Rechtsanwaltschaft (Leipzig, 1905); F. Ostler, Die deutschen Rechtsanwdlte, 1871-1971 (Essen, 1971); and H. Huffmann, Geschichte der rheinischen Rechtsanwaltschaft (Cologne, 1969). See also D. Ruschemeyer, Lawyers and Their Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1973). 4. D. Grimm, Recht und Staat der biirgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1987);H.-U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Munich, 1987), 2: 174-240; J. Kocka, ed., Burger und Biirgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1987); and H. Siegrist, ed., Biirgerliche Berufe: Beitrage zur Sozialgeschichte der freien Berufe und Akademiker im internationalen Vergleich (Gottingen, 1988). 5. R. Gneist, Freie Advokatur, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1911). Though Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 2: 227, regards them as bureaucrats even after 1793, they actually were not full-fledged state officials. 6. H. Siegrist, "Advokaten und Burger." Whenever there are no specific references, consult the forthcoming larger study. 7. Meinel, Die Rechte der Advokaten (1827). Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Munchen (hereafter abbreviated as Bay HStA), Ministry of Justice 12792. 8. Bay HStA, Ministry of Interior 39075. Ministry of Interior to Ministry of Justice, "Die Ernennung der Anwalte betreffend," Sept. 4, 1853. 9. Bay HStA, Ministry of Interior 39080, Prince Metternich to Count von Senfft, Aug. 7, 1844. 10. G. Dilcher, "Die preussischen Juristen und die Staatspriifungen," in K. Kroeschell, ed., Festschriftfur Hans Thieme (Sigmaringen, 1986), pp. 295-305; and O. Kollmann, "Zur Entwicklung des Ausbildungs- und Priifungswesens fur Richteramt, Verwaltungsdienst, Rechtsanwaltschaft und Notarial in Bayern," in Festschrift fur Wilhelm Laforet (Munich, 1952), pp. 445-72.


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11. Gneist, Freie Advokatur, p. 58. 12. Siegrist, "Advokaten und Burger," and R. J. Evans, Death in Hamburg (Oxford, 1987), pp. 18-22. 13. H. K. F. vom Stein, Briefs und amtliche Schriften, ed. W. Hubatsch (Stuttgart, 1957-1965), 2.2: 922f. 14. Gneist, Freie Advokatur, p. 16. 15. Badisches Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe, Ministry of Justice 234/7779, "Rekurs der Rechtsanwalte Bracht und Engelhorn an das Staatsministerium," Sept. 3, 1861. 16. M. Siegel, e&.,DieGesammtenMaterialienzuderRechtsanwaltsordnungvonl.Juli 1878 (Leipzig, 1883). 17. Ibid. 18. Ostler, Deutsche Rechtsanwalte, p. 20. 19. H. Rottleuthner, "Die gebrochene Biirgerlichkeit einer Scheinprofession: Zur Situation der deutschen Richterschaft zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts," in H. Siegrist, Biirgerliche Berufe. 20. Riischemeyer, Lawyers, p. 3. 21. Regierungs-Blattfur das Konigreich Bayern, 1820, 1840; Gneist, Freie Advokatur, pp. 17-25. 22. Badisches Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe, Ministry of Justice 234/7779, "Gesuch der Rechtsanwalte Bracht und Engelhorn um Verleihung der Obergerichtsanwaltschaft," Mannheim, Oct. 23, 1860. 23. Niedersachsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, Hann 26a, 6378 I, "Rechtsanwalte nach Orten im Konigreich Hannover, 1840-1851." 24. Ostler, Deutsche Rechtsanwalte, p. 60; A. Kneer, Der Rechtsanwalt: Werden und Wesen des deutschen Sachwaltertums (Monchengladbach, 1927), p. 39. 25. T. Kollbeck, Juristenschwemmen (Frankfurt, 1978); D. K. Mttller et al., "Modellentwicklung zur Analyse von Krisenphasen im Verhaltnis von Schulsystem und staatlichem Beschaftigungssystem," in U. Herrmann, ed., Historische Padagogik (Weinheim, 1977), pp. 39-77. 26. E. Blankenburg and U. Schultz, "The Legal Profession in Germany" (Ms., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, forthcoming). 27. Gneist, Freie Advokatur, pp. 19-24; Kneer, Rechtsanwalt, p. 39. 28. See, for example, K. Steinacker, Die Aufgabe des Advokatenstandes in den constitutionellenStaaten(T$taunschweig, 1841); H. Siegrist, "Professionalization with the Brakes on," Comparative Social Research 9 (1986): 267-98. 29. See the discussions in the Deutsche Anwalt-Zeitung, 1844-1848. 30. M. Rumpf, Anwalt undAnwaltstand (Leipzig, 1926). 31. Ostler, Deutsche Rechtsanwalte, pp. 59-102. 32. For the concept of "liberal professionalism" seeK. H. Jarausch, "The Crisis of German Professions, 1918-33," Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 370-98. 33. Ostler, Deutsche Rechtsanwalte, pp. 59-103. 34. F. List, "Advocat," in C. von Rotteck and C. Welcker, eds., Staatslexikon oder Encyklopddie der Staatswissenschaften, 2nded. (Altona, 1846), 1: 363-77. 35. H. Siegrist, "Die Rechtsanwalte und das Biirgertum: Deutschland, die Schweiz und Italien im 19. Jahrhundert," in J. Kocka, ed., Biirgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1988); M. Burrage, "Unternehmer, Beamte und freie Berufe: Schliisselgruppen der biirgerlichen Mittelschichten in England, Frankreich und der Vereinigten Staaten," in Siegrist Biirgerliche Berufe.

The Making of the Modern Medical Profession, 1800-1914:

Prussian Doctors in the Nineteenth Century CLAUDIA HUERKAMP

From a highly abstract perspective, the process of professionalization in countries that industrialized during the nineteenth century followed a relatively similar course with comparable results: medical professionals established themselves as experts with extensive professional autonomy based on specialized scientific training, which had been acquired at either a university or a similar academic institution.' Other characteristics included a marked authoritarian posture toward laymen, an expanding monopoly in the health services field, influential professional organizations, and finally high social prestige and a privileged position vis-a-vis other occupational groups.2 Although the results of professionalization seem similar, closer inspection reveals significant differences, particularly regarding the course and the forces involved in the individual cases. In the Prussian example, these distinctions stem chiefly from the role played by the state, which differed fundamentally from that in England and the United States. Corresponding to the early formation of state-controlled administration, medical training occurred in institutions controlled and financed by the government even before the modernization of the traditional medical profession. By the same token, examinations were conducted by state-appointed boards. In this way, bureaucratic bodies also controlled admission to the profession and doctors themselves had at best only indirect influence. Finally, state regulation of physicians in private practice throughout Prussia, particularly in the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, was far more extensive than in the United States or England. For this reason, German doctors were more closely tied to the state than their English or American colleagues. Professional organizations played a correspondingly smaller role in Germany. They never succeeded in controlling either the content Translated by Ingrid Rehm-Richards and edited by K. H. Jarausch.

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The Making of tke Modern Medical Profession, 1800-1914

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of medical training or professional admission, as was characteristic of English and especially American professional groups. The peculiarities of the Prussian path to the modern, professionalized status of medical doctors will be examined in four areas: first, the development of medical training, second, the professional practice of private physicians, third, the expansion in demand for medical care—especially the role of insurance companies in this process—and fourth, the changing function of professional medical associations. The Development of Medical Training During the late eighteenth century, university medical school training rarely conveyed practical expertise. Rather, it served to "predestine" its graduates for a specific kind of life-style and stamp them as members of the "educated classes." Training was predominantly theoretical with scanty attention to practical bedside matters. Doctors were not interested in establishing causal links between the course of an illness and the application of particular medicines, but rather were concerned with recognizing its "essence," with classifying it according to external symptoms into families, genera, and species— establishing order, as it were, in the kingdom of diseases.3 Matters were even worse in therapy than in introductory coursework and diagnostic training. The lack of reliable laboratory results, the impossibility of giving accurate doses of largely herbal medicines, the absence of clinical experiments, and the undeveloped scientific status of auxiliary fields like chemistry meant that therapeutic success in internal medicine was largely uncertain and a matter of chance.4 Curing "internal" diseases by prescribing the proper medicines fell only into the purview of physicians who had studied at the university, the so-called educated doctors. By contrast, surgery in the broadest sense was the domain of "wound doctors" (Wundarzte) and surgeons who had normally been apprenticed with a barber or received instruction as a medic in the army. "Academic physicians" shunned manual activities such as letting blood, dressing wounds, draining abscesses, setting sprained and broken limbs, as well as operations for hernias, kidney stones, and amputations. Acquiring these skills did not belong in the university medical curriculum, although it would have been possible to make a positive therapeutic contribution in this field. As a rule, surgery was treated only theoretically in eighteenth-century universities. Hence it was not unusual even for professors of surgery, who lectured on the subject every semester, never to have carried out a single operation on a living patient.5 Hesitant efforts to change university training of physicians began to appear in the 1780s when an increasing number of universities replaced the traditional consultation for the poor with outpatient clinics. The Prussian bureaucracy heavily promoted the trend toward a more serious consideration of the practical elements of treatment by issuing a series of decrees regulating examinations in this field. In 1798, Prussian regulations required candidates to treat two patients in the Charite Hospital in Berlin for the period of one month, thereby establish-

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ing for the first time a practical component in the examination. Simultaneously, a permanent state examination commission was established and requirements were increased. These late absolutist measures fit in perfectly with other eighteenth-century policies designed to reorient universities along more utilitarian lines. The role played by the bureaucracy in reforming the medical curriculum was even more apparent during the examination reforms of 1825. These measures greatly shifted training emphasis from general cultivation in speculative theories to practical expertise by removing the separation of medicine and surgery and requiring medical students to acquire practical skills in surgery. After 1825, every would-be doctor could choose whether to be tested in medicine and surgery and enter the practice as a surgeon, or to be certified in medicine alone and be admitted as a medicuspurus. By the 1830s the overwhelming majority of medical students chose certification as medical surgeons, because the number of physicians in cities had increased sharply and young doctors thought they could better compete by offering all branches of medical services. The 1825 regulations not only enhanced the status of surgeons, but also raised certification requirements in general. If the former test had been more of a formality than a barrier to the medical profession, then the situation changed drastically in 1825 when the new regulations mandated a final examination in five parts and described for the first time in great detail the requirements under each part. 6 The "scientific transformation" of the study of medicine, which promoted a "professional" self-consciousness among physicians, nevertheless proceeded quite slowly until the middle of the century. The rapid expansion of medical knowledge, which clearly established the superiority of scientific training over lay knowledge, only became pronounced in the second half of the century. Indications for this scientific progress include first the expansion of clinical facilities and second the increase in medical fields and university chairs. For example, in 1820 the medical school of the University of Heidelberg had only 20 beds for internal medicine and surgery, which grew to 182 beds by 1865 and increased to 314 by 1878. The developments in other medical faculties were comparable.7 In 1820, there were only seventy Ordinarien (professors) for medicine at German-speaking universities. By the year 1850, their number had increased fivefold, on the average, and in the subsequent three decades it doubled again. In 1880, every medical school could boast nine separate medical fields, each represented by an Ordinarius.& As a result of the rapid changes in medical science during the second half of the century, repeated reforms of medical studies became necessary. They generally involved practical aspects as well as further specialization. Practical components came to be more carefully integrated into medical training, including an obligatory internship of one or two semesters at a series of clinics, the expansion of anatomical and specimen preservation exercises, the introduction of practical surgical courses, and finally the establishment of a residency period at a hospital between final examinations and certification. At the same time, an increasing number of special fields were added to the required canon of courses and the scientific component of medical studies became far more differentiated.

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This affected above all the clinical fields, while new emphasis was placed in the preclinical semesters on individual natural sciences. The expansion of natural scientific knowledge pertinent to medicine, particularly in chemistry, as well as the rapid development of pathological anatomy and physiology led to the replacement of the tentamen philosophicum by the tentamen physician in 1861. Logic and psychology were dropped completely, and botany, zoology, and mineralogy were sharply reduced. In their place, requirements in chemistry, anatomy, and physiology were increased. Resulting from the expansion of the natural sciences, the elimination of subjects without relevance to medicine entailed a departure from the requirement that university medical studies convey not only professional expertise but also a philosophically grounded general body of knowledge. The problems of curricular change took a somewhat different form in the clinical fields. Specialization directly concerned the interests of the classical Ordinarien and directors of the three largest traditional clinics, namely, internal medicine, surgery, and obstetrics. Whenever new specialities such as pediatrics, psychiatry, and hygiene (which had been represented in the 1870s by lower-ranked teachers, Extraordinarien, and Privatdozenten) were elevated into examination fields, the influence of the traditional clinics was reduced, and the position of their directors was weakened. Therefore, the faculty was not necessarily in favor of the modernization of the curriculum. During the discussions in the 1870s on revising examination regulations, most faculties confined themselves to demanding an increase in the length of studies (ten semesters were most frequently suggested) rather than asking for the introduction of specific, newly emerging fields. After a long debate, the examination regulations of 1883 established a minimum of nine semesters and introduced only hygiene as a new examination subject. 9 In the regulations of 1901, issued less than twenty years later, new special fields could not be avoided any longer. In the intense discussions of these regulations among state bodies, medical faculties, examining boards, and professional physicians' organizations, a consensus regarding fundamental questions of reorganization began to form. In general, the demand for extending the minimum length of study, for removing the fields of anatomy and physiology (which were to be tested during the tentamen physicum in order to give students time for their internships and examinations), and for requiring attendance at certain special clinics met with broad agreement. The 1883 regulations required attendance only at the medical, surgical, and obstetrical clinics for two semesters, and at the ophthalmology clinic for one semester, whereas the 1901 rules mandated one-semester attendance also at the medical outpatient clinic, pediatric or outpatient pediatric clinic, psychiatric clinic, otolaryngology clinic or outpatient clinic, and dermatology clinic.10 The examination reform of 1901 had a much stronger impact on the curriculum than the 1883 revision, which had established required fields of knowledge without specifying the manner of its acquisition. In 1901, the examination requirements themselves were stiffened with regard to allowing candidates to repeat certain portions of the examination; the duration of study

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was lengthened to ten semesters, and an unpaid year of residency at a hospital between the examination and certification was introduced. All of these measures were designed to reflect the scientific developments undergone by medicine. Undoubtedly, the practical and technical training of doctors improved substantially at this time, especially because of the year of residency. But the de facto extension of medical studies by eighteen months entailed a considerable increase in their costs, which were already higher than those of any other academic major. During a time when the numbers of physicians had risen sharply and when professional organizations were lamenting the "overcrowding" of their profession, this cost increase for medical training was— physicians' protests to the contrary—a welcome instrument to deter those who viewed medicine not so much as a profession as simply a quick way to earn a living.11 The Professional Practice of Private Physicians The content of medical studies and the professional competence that physicians achieved during their training were of enormous significance for their professional practice. In light of the rudimentary state of their professional knowledge and its dubious superiority vis-a-vis that of laymen, doctors during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could hardly insist on an expert status as the basis for their position. Numerous complaints from physicians regarding patients' failures to comply with their instructions, the interference of family members in the recommended therapy, and the continued use of obscure home remedies give a clear picture of the situation.12 If individual physicians, nevertheless, enjoyed high status, then they owed this not to their medical expertise but rather to their social origins, to their connections, and to their general education, which elevated them into the ranks of the "educated classes." Relations with their clients were characterized by a structural asymmetry that favored the patient. Initially, doctors were dependent for both their method of treatment and their income on their patients, who as a rule belonged to the propertied upper class. The transformation of this patronlike relationship stemmed on the one hand from medical progress and on the other hand from the expansion of the demand for medical services, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. Even though the success rate for treating diseases in fields besides surgery and pain relief lagged for a long time behind the increase in medical information, 13 the expansion of knowledge put certified physicians in a far better position than their untrained lay competitors in diagnosing and, increasingly, in treating patients more successfully with surgery and pain relief. Of course, the impact of medical progress on the physician-patient relationship took highly different forms depending on the social origins of the patient. The resulting increasingly "scientific" features of the medical profession must have greatly enhanced the authority of the physician among the educated hour-

The Making of the Modem Medical Profession, 1800-1914

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geoisie—a tendency that was strengthened by faith in the rise of the natural sciences in general. The expansion of the "market for health services" allowed physicians to loosen their ties to a socially exclusive upper-class clientele. It became increasingly an exception for doctors to find themselves in a socially inferior status in relation to their wealthy and influential clients. Moreover, the expansion of the patient market reduced physicians' economic dependence on individual clients; therefore, the more patients doctors had in their practices, the easier it was for them to deal with individual patients' discontent and loss of confidence. At the same time, the custom of physicians making house calls began to wane in favor of patients visiting the physician's office.14 If patients went to physicians, rather than vice versa—if doctors could practice in their own environment—then they could enjoy far more authority than if they found themselves in patients' homes under scrutiny by friends and relatives. That an increasing number of physicians joined professional organizations contributed ultimately to the reduction of doctors' dependence on laymen. The number of physicians' associations rose particularly in the 1860s, and starting with the 1870s associations began to codify professional behavior for their members in so-called ethics regulations, which were frequently enforced by honor courts. One of the most important rules of collegial conduct was to refrain in the presence of laymen from criticizing the medical procedures followed by a colleague.15 Thus physicians gradually succeeded in reducing the envy and quarrels that had dominated their public image in the eighteenth century. If in earlier years wealthy patients, after summoning several doctors to their bedside, had been able to play off one physician against another and perpetuate a condition that hindered the development of professional autonomy, now collegial supervision gradually replaced the kind of checks brought by the consumers of their services, the patients. As a result of these related changes, a new physician-patient relationship emerged in which the physician, rather than the patient, had the upper hand. The doctor now decided on the kind and length of treatment and determined which medicines would be taken for how long, whether bed rest was necessary, or whether the patient should be admitted to a hospital. Parallel to the development of a clearly defined hierarchy of authority was an increasing tendency on the part of physicians to abandon those diffuse duties that were essentially pastoral, and to concentrate on treating an illness in the narrower sense. In 1900 one general practitioner demanded that "the physician as physician should be nothing other than a physician, that is, an expert called in to heal the sick and injured. Within this field he is supreme; outside of it he has nothing to do. He should limit himself to the business of healing and not try to play broker, lawyer or pastor."16 This concentration of medical care in one area was particularly marked among specialists whose numbers increased sharply starting in the 1880s. By 1909, of all doctors in the Reich, 22.8 percent were specialized. The largest single group were ophthalmologists, followed by otolaryngologists, gynecolo-

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gists, dermatologists, and surgeons. Because the increase in specialists presupposes a correspondingly large and differentiated demand for their services, specialists became a typical phenomenon in large cities. In 1909, in cities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, 40.4 percent of the doctors were specialists, while in small towns and in communities with less than twenty thousand inhabitants, only 2.4 percent of the doctors had specialized. Within their limited areas, specialists could keep abreast of new developments more easily than general practitioners and pass on the benefits of the latest research to their patients. Thus the presence of specialists meant in many cases an improvement in the medical care available.17 Of course, these developments were also criticized. The immediate concern of critics was the lack of regulated training for specialists. Specialists were also criticized for their onesidedness: they saw only the organ being treated and therefore lost sight of the total patient.18 The reduction of the patient from total human being to a mere "case" for treatment was increased by the specialists' concentration predominantly on patients who came to their private practices on the basis of scheduled appointments. In the large cities, specialists had a rapid patient turnover and knew as little about their clients' private lives as the patients knew about their doctors' personal affairs. As a rule, physician and patient only came together in their roles as physician and patient and not in other situations as customer, fellow club member, neighbor, or friend. More than their generalist colleagues, specialists tended to view their activity from the standpoint of medicine as an exact natural science, supported by experimental data. Urban conditions fostered the rise of medical professionalism, as characterized by Talcott Parsons for all modern professions: universalist orientation, functional specificity, and emotional neutrality. 19 The success of Parsons' model of professionali/ation depended, however, on the specific kind of medical practice and on the class and gender of the patient. Both doctors in the countryside and house doctors (a position according to which a physician cared for an entire family for one annual lump sum) continued to exercise pastoral duties; thus they gave advice and comfort to their patients, conversed with them regularly, and took part in their joys and sorrows. Especially for the housewife, the doctor was a "scientific confidant" and counselor in all questions concerning the household, hygiene, health, and raising children.20 In such general, hygienic, and prophylactic counseling, class boundaries were at work, because the advice given was clearly sent to bourgeois addresses. The question of whether sea air or the mountains were better for the summer was as uninteresting for a worker as the issue of whether children should receive music lessons, since as a rule both were equally irrelevant. Though hardly touched by such recommendations, workers began to play an increasingly important role as patients in the everyday life of physicians in the second half of the nineteenth century. Generally, they received medical treatment as members of a health insurance scheme. Extending medical care to the lower classes brought profound changes to the physicians' sphere of activities.


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With this new group of patients, the doctor-patient relationship from the outset was more anonymous, and rigorously limited to the doctor's therapeutic duties. At most, only a handful of idealistic, socially committed physicians did more than simply "treat" their insurance patients and worked at preventive health care by visiting their patients regularly at home and dispensing information to them. At the same time, the responsibilities of doctors within the health insurance framework also grew. They no longer just cared for the sick; they also had an absolute monopoly in determining who was well and who was ill, and could therefore make decisions affecting the economic prospects of their patients. Clients had to be certified sick by these doctors before the insurance would pay out benefits. The position of doctors in relation to insured workers at this initial stage was not so much founded on a recognition of their professional capacity as secured by their power over the workers, because the insurance regulations granted the company physician a central position. Sick workers were required to obey immediately all their doctor's instructions—a regulation that was enforced in part by draconian penalties.21 The Expansion in the Demand for Medical Care At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the medical market was extremely limited. The family played the major role in health care and convalescence, for which women were traditionally responsible. They enjoyed a special authority in questions regarding the body because of their familiarity with biological functions gained through pregnancy and childbirth. The low demand for medical services meant that individual doctors usually had only a few patients. As a consequence, they charged high fees for their services, which in turn meant that only the propertied upper classes could afford the attention of a physician. The urban lower classes, most petit bourgeois, and the majority of the rural population summoned a physician only in the most urgent emergency. Otherwise they went to a Wundarzt (a nonlicensed healer) or were treated by relatives. Besides these economic restrictions, cultural characteristics also played a role, such as differing conceptions of illness, traditionally determined cures, and a deeply rooted distrust of academic medicine and its representatives—the licensed physicians. Apart from these social considerations, pronounced differences between city and country played an important role. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were virtually no university-trained physicians in the countryside. This situation changed gradually as an increasing number of doctors acquired broader qualifications in medicine, surgery, and midwifery, and became Medico-Chirurgen (medical surgeons), while the increasingly stiff competition in the cities forced some physicians out into smaller towns or the countryside. However, licensed medicine spread very slowly to rural areas, and a crass division in the concentration of physicians between the city and country remained constant for the entire nineteenth century. In 1898, about 61.8 percent

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of the German population lived in towns with fewer than five thousand inhabitants, but only 31.6 percent of all physicians resided in such rural communities.22 The inadequacy of medical care provided by licensed physicians is also apparent in the mortality statistics: During 1820, only 471, or 38 percent of 1,226, recorded deaths in Bonn and surroundings had received the care of a physician. Numbers in the country were even lower. From 1820 to 1824 in the rural districts outside Cologne, there was no physician in attendance in 80 percent of the recorded deaths.23 Throughout the nineteenth century, the entire population showed a marked trend toward increasing reliance on physicians, which was a development that Michel Foucault called "medicalization."24 In Germany this process was decisively promoted by state action, especially by the expansion of health care for the poor, the construction of hospitals, the introduction of smallpox vaccination, and health insurance requirements for workers. The reorganization of welfare programs in the majority of German cities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries strengthened the position of paupers' doctors and quantitatively increased their activities.25 At the same time, an increasing number of cities established public health facilities, which at this time were frequented primarily by day laborers, domestic servants, and the poor. Both developments brought an ever-widening circle into contact with the official medical establishment and its representatives: the university-trained, statecertified physicians. Vaccination against smallpox increased the medicalization of the populace even more. Although vaccinations did not become obligatory in the Reich until 1874, most South German states had already enacted laws, and even in Prussia, where vaccinations had not been required, public authorities had strongly promoted them so that the overwhelming majority of parents already had their children vaccinated before then. In this regard, parents had entrusted the lives and health of their children to the competence of a certified physician.26 Whereas smallpox vaccination involved only a one-time contact with the doctor, the situation with health insurance was quite different. The expansion of health insurance since midcentury meant that a considerable and constantly growing portion of the population became accustomed to a rational approach to illness. Earlier, disease had interrupted the everyday life of the worker with the force of a natural catastrophe. Now, with precise rules of behavior during illness, its threatening character diminished. Over the long term, the extraordinarily high "disease threshold" of the lower classes dropped, with the result that insured workers increasingly relied on physicians in all cases of illness and thus accepted them as professional experts. For physicians, the extension of health insurance meant at first a welcomed spread of their care to hitherto-remote classes and thus an increase in their income. Most health insurance plans for artisans and factory workers devised after midcentury required a doctor, in exchange for an annual fee, to care for their sick members. Even if the income it brought was not particularly high, such employment was generally quite popular among doctors, especially young


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physicians whose earnings from private practice were irregular and usually low. Since these "fixed" positions as insurance doctors were so attractive, local insurance companies could frequently choose from among many applicants and, consequently, keep the salary low. One further disadvantage of working as an insurance doctor was that the company board of directors kept a close watch on the physician's activities and, in order to keep the number of certified sick members as low as possible, often interfered in purely therapeutic matters. These two difficulties did not become general problems for all physicians until the health insurance legislation of 1883, when the number of insured and of employed physicians drastically increased. The new law insured all workers in mining, industry, and crafts who earned annually less than two thousand marks.27 Initially, this meant about 10 percent of the population, twice the proportion covered before 1883. The number of insured workers increased rapidly because of expanding industrialization and various amendments to the original health insurance legislation.28 By 1895, about 7.1 million workers, or 14.3 percent of the population, were insured (an increase largely due to health insurance for miners), and by 1905 this figure had risen to 10.9 million, or 18.1 percent. The new insurance regulations for the Reich (or Reichsversicherungsgesetz), which went into effect on 1 January 1914 and set the minimum annual wage level at twenty-five hundred marks, once more increased drastically the percentage of insured workers to 23 percent of the population. By including miners, railroad workers, postal workers, and other civil servants, as well as their family members, all together about 50 percent of the population was covered by insurance and received medical care free of charge. The rapid expansion of coverage meant that the treatment of insured patients, which had originally been more or less supplemental to physicians' actual private practice, turned into the primary source of income for an increasing number of doctors. Starting in 1883, the whole question of "insurance doctors" became the major problem discussed among physicians, as evidenced by dozens of lectures held in local associations, countless articles in their journals, and its appearance on the agenda of practically every medical convention.29 At the outset, the most pressing issue was the appropriate compensation for physicians' services, but in the 1890s the debate increasingly shifted to the demand for a so-called free choice of doctors. In 1890, an article in the official journal of the German medical association first suggested that insurance companies no longer employ their own doctors and all physicians practicing in one place be allowed to treat insurance patients. In other words, members of insurance companies should choose freely among the local doctors and no longer be restricted to an insurance physician dictated to them. This demand for a free choice of doctors, which was supported by the medical association convention of 1891, represented a significant change in perspective. For the first time, not only the physicians who earned their living as company doctors were affected but also a group of physicians who were not tied to insurance companies, and who wanted to enjoy the benefits of insurance legislation through the free choice of doctors. Physicians were distributed highly unevenly

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among the insured and uninsured sectors of the population because of the insurance company custom of hiring individual doctors to treat ill members. Given the especially high number of physicians admitted into practice every year during the early 1890s, the concentration of insurance treatment in the hands of relatively few company doctors created an explosive situation. Therefore, the concept of the free choice of doctors quickly became popular. Not surprisingly, the health insurance companies increasingly opposed this demand.30 This position is understandable because the free choice of doctors did not simply mean a more equitable distribution of patients among physicians but also the loss of company autonomy in hiring and controlling their own physicians. The establishment of a free choice of doctors entailed a large-scale shift of power from the insurance companies to the doctors. Not all physicians favored the free choice of doctors. Physicians employed by insurance companies frequently opposed this demand because they feared their income would drop if all doctors obtained the right to treat insurance patients. Medical associations employed different means to reduce the opposition within their own ranks and to present a united front in the struggle for free choice. Enacted shortly after the turn of the century, the increase in physicians' fees, which accompanied the introduction of the free choice of doctors, brought a significant rise in income for all physicians and helped change the minds of insurance doctors. Local medical associations often guaranteed comparable incomes to physicians who had hitherto received a flat fee from insurance companies, should the free choice of doctors be introduced. Finally, many insurance company doctors who were dissatisfied with their positions or resented unjustified terminations or arbitrary pay cuts supported the free choice of doctors as a means of ending their dependence on the whims of insurance companies. Yet there was not enough solidarity among physicians to force insurance companies to accept the demand for free choice of doctors. Beginning in the mid-1890s, in a number of large cities, local physicians' interest groups (either as special sections or committees of medical associations or as independent organizations for the introduction of the free choice of doctors) began to push for universal admission to insurance company practice. These groups enjoyed only limited success, since they had no means to pressure insurance companies into accepting the free choice of doctors when vacancies occurred or contracts with employed physicians expired. Even when all doctors in one locale were prepared to sign a contract under the condition that the free choice of doctors be introduced, it was quite easy for an insurance company to fill empty positions by hiring outside physicians. Above all, the glut on the medical labor market contributed to this unfavorable situation.31 A consistently large number of students during the 1880s (enrollment doubled by the end of the decade, reaching about eighty-five hundred) was followed by a steep rise in the number of licensed physicians. Whereas in 1887 there was one physician for 2,961 inhabitants, eleven years later there was one physician for 2,114 inhabitants. The number of doctors rose from 15,824 to 24,725, an increase of 56 percent, while the population grew by only 14 percent. Although the demand for medical

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care itself also increased, this expansion initially created an imbalance between supply and demand. Countless indications suggest intensified competition, because for every position as an insurance company doctor, there was always a throng of applicants. Underselling was commonplace, and bribes were frequently offered to members of the local board of directors. Physicians accused of such misconduct defended themselves in honor courts by pleading that they were placed in an untenable position because their very livelihood depended on being hired. 32 These circumstances show clearly why local medical groups were at such a tactical disadvantage in confronting the insurance companies. A wellcoordinated, nationwide organization was a precondition for any effective implementation of doctors' demands, whether for an increase in fees or for the establishment of the free choice of doctors. In 1900, the Leipzig physician Hermann Hartmann founded such an association representing the economic interests of physicians in the Leipziger Verband, later referred to as the Hartmannbund.

Professional Medical Associations During the first half of the nineteenth century, German medical associations differed fundamentally from organizations in England and the United States. In Germany, physicians were closely tied to medical regulations that precisely defined their rights and duties; even training was controlled by the state. There were no German counterparts to professional medical associations, like the Royal Colleges in London, which oversaw training, licensing, and conduct. Until the 1860s, there were purely private organizations of physicians devoted initially to social and scientific purposes. However, during the 1840s, as local groups grew in size, they became increasingly politicized. As part of the socalled medical reform movement,33 they opposed the hierarchical division of physicians into "educated doctors" and "wound doctors" and objected vehemently to state regulations and controls. These regulations were apparent in a number of ways. Doctors had the same legal liability as government officials, and under certain conditions medical officials could revoke a physician's license. Doctors were forced to take a professional oath, and were legally required to offer medical assistance (the socalled Kurierzwang). In some localities, physicians who were not civil servants were obliged to submit quarterly reports to medical authorities. The government promulgated a mandatory fee schedule that doctors were required to follow. Starting in the 1840s, this close relationship to government policies led first to the development of a liberal orientation among physicians who later campaigned for emancipation from bureaucratic controls. These goals were achieved in large measure with the inclusion of physicians in the 1869 trade ordinances issued by the North German Confederation. According to these measures, anyone could practice the "trade" of treating and healing the sick

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with or without license. Only the title of "doctor" was protected. At the same time, the professional oath, the Kurierzwang, the quarterly reports, and the disciplinary supervision by the government were abolished. Only a few years later the mood among doctors completely turned around. The trade ordinances, which had once been celebrated as the "bulwark of professional medical independence," came under sharp criticism, because they allegedly encouraged an increase in quackery and lowered the status of physicians in the public perception. In 1882, the German physicians' congress demanded for the first time the complete removal of physicians from the trade ordinances and the creation of specific regulations (Arzteordnung) to supervise medical practice.34 With these measures, physicians hoped to attain a legally protected, privileged status, without falling under state tutelage and supervision. Although this demand was not completely realized until the Nazi Reichsdrzteordmmg in 1934, the creation of medical chambers as legal corporate bodies and the creation of state honor courts were important steps in this direction. Medical chambers composed of elected physicians were first established in Baden in 1864 and in Saxony in 1865. Recognized specifically as professional representatives by the government, they were charged with providing advice for health and medical legislation. Similar bodies were established in Bavaria in 1871, in Wurttemberg in 1875, and in Hesse in 1877. In May 1887, a royal decree was issued for Prussia that provided for the creation of medical chambers in every province to which all physicians in that area automatically belonged. These chambers were charged with discussing all questions and issues concerning either the medical profession or public health. Following bitter struggles and protracted negotiations between physicians and bureaucrats, the "honor court law" of 1899 granted these chambers additional disciplinary powers over doctors. From then on, honor courts established at the headquarters of each chamber and an appeals court set up in Berlin were empowered to supervise professional behavior. These measures helped physicians to regain a substantial portion of their legal status lost in the trade ordinances of 1869. As people in the free trades, physicians had been exempted from any specific professional curbs and, like all citizens, they were subject only to criminal prosecution. By reinstituting welldefined professional duties for physicians, the "honor court law" marked a return to, but in no way a reestablishment of, the legal situation preceding 1869. Whereas at that time government officials could discipline individual doctors and even revoke their licenses, now elected professional representatives held jurisdiction over their colleagues. The introduction of honor courts with collegial enforcement of a professional code of ethics thus marked a critical step in the professionalization of physicians. In practical terms, the honor courts investigated uncollegial conduct such as underselling in job applications for insurance company doctors, false advertising, public disparagement of another colleague's abilities, and so forth. These measures improved the tactical position of physicians in their struggle with insurance companies. Starting in the 1860s, the creation of many local medical associations represented an enormous gain in overall professional organization but failed to


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resolve the question of insurance company doctors. In 1873, the German Physicians' Association was founded to serve as a central organization, clearing house, and lobby for doctors' professional demands. Membership grew from 6,165 one year after its founding to 16,693 in 1900, representing about 65 percent of all non-civil service physicians. Since this organization mostly confined itself to largely unsuccessful resolutions and petitions addressed to legislators and the public regarding, for instance, the free choice of doctors, an effective pressure group capable of implementing physicians' demands was still urgently needed. Nevertheless, the Leipziger Verband, founded in September 1900, had to struggle initially against considerable resistance from within the ranks of physicians themselves. Not until 1903, when an amendment to the Reichsversicherungsgesetz failed to take doctors' demands into account, did the physicians' association shift to the position of the Leipziger Verband, which advocated strikes and other work stoppages to strengthen the position of physicians in relation to insurance companies. During the annual congress in 1903, the Leipziger Verband was incorporated as the "economic department" of the physicians' association. Therefore, its membership, which had previously stagnated at about two thousand, rose sharply. By September 1903 there were 9,662 members, and at year's end 12,657; expressed differently, 44.7 percent of all non-civil service physicians had joined. In the following years, the membership grew continuously, until around 1910, when some three quarters of all physicians were organized.33 By using boycotts, lockouts, strikes, and other measures, the Leipziger Verband succeeded in shifting the balance of power between physicians and insurance companies in their favor. In 1903 and 1904, there were numerous widespread strikes (in Gera, Leipzig, and Cologne), during which insurance doctors as a body refused to work when their demands were not met in contract renewal negotiations. Because insurance companies were legally obligated to guarantee medical care for their members, they had to try to bring in doctors from the outside. This was difficult after a majority of physicians had joined the Leipziger Verband, which required them to refuse such positions on their honor and punished offenders with heavy fines. Other physicians, who had not signed such a pledge, were deterred from accepting such positions out of fear that they would be regarded as "strike breakers who had stabbed their colleagues in the back." When an insurance company failed to find the required number of physicians within the legally specified time, government supervisors were forced to intervene. This was the case during the physicians strike in Leipzig in 1904. Authorities delivered an ultimatum to the local company, which was the largest in the Reich, employing 233 physicians under contract. The insurance company had to verify the employment of at least 98 physicians, including 12 specialists by April 25. When it was unable to do this, the state authorities reopened negotiations with the former company doctors and signed a contract with them in which free choice was guaranteed and fees were substantially increased. After five weeks, the strike ended with a complete victory for the physicians. This development in turn attracted new members, increasing further the effectiveness of the Verband. After the first large-scale strikes, the

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threat of a strike usually sufficed to force local insurance companies into making concessions. While doctors succeeded in improving their position in relation to the insurance companies, they had to accept the tarnishing of their public image. In particular, the tactic of refusing to treat insurance patients and their dependents even privately during the strikes received little understanding. While some doctors opposed the escalation of the struggle of the Leipziger Verband, the combined efforts of local medical organizations, medical chambers, honor courts, and the Leipziger Verband itself were so successful, and the bias against failure to conform was so strong, that physicians averse to the unionlike tactics gradually capitulated. The greater the triumph of the Verband, the more internal opposition melted away. The reasons for this success lay not only in the increased economic benefits, from which almost all doctors in one way or another profited, but also in the clever tactic of the Verband of claiming that the entire corporate body of physicians was threatened. This fueled the latent anxieties of doctors about their social status and created an emotional solidarity among them. The publicity of the Verband emphasized that physicians needed to stand together "as loyal comrades in arms" against their many antagonists in government, business, insurance companies, and the public. When new Reich insurance legislation in 1911 failed to guarantee doctors' free choice, an extraordinary physicians' congress on October 26, 1913 resolved with "deafening applause" to launch a general strike on January 1, 1914. At the last minute, on December 23, 1913, a compromise was negotiated under the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior. This so-called Berlin agreement— which was signed by the physicians' association, the Leipziger Verband, and the three central insurance company organizations—worked out a new balance of power between doctors and insurance companies. Although contracts were still concluded between the insurance companies and individual doctors, their conditions were determined by a committee whose members included representatives from both sides. This compromise for all intents and purposes introduced collective bargaining for physicians. The insurance companies' autonomy in hiring was in effect abolished, because company doctors collectively participated as part of a precisely outlined admission procedure.36 Conclusion This study has departed from the basic characteristics of medical professionalization and the changing status of physicians in all nineteenth-century industrialized nations. These features include the expansion of the medical care market, the scientific transformation and standardization of training, and the achievement of as much autonomy as possible. At the same time, peculiarities in the process of medical professionalization in Prussia have become apparent. Medical training underwent a comprehensive revision during the nineteenth century. Specialized fields were developed, refined, and standardized as a result


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of the rapid expansion of knowledge. In Prussia, medical studies were comprehensively regulated by the government, while in the United States privately financed medical schools, which were independent of the government, predominated until the end of the nineteenth century. In England, medical apprenticeship with training in hospitals that were organized by physicians themselves played a much greater role. An additional Prussian peculiarity was that the bureaucracy was a major force behind the modernization of medical training, at least during the early nineteenth century. The development of physicians in private practice also shows a mixture of general professional developments with particular German patterns. The gradual emancipation of doctors from dependence on wealthy clients was no more typically German than the trend toward medical specialization, and the increasing anonymity of the doctor-patient relationship. But the expansion of the demand for medical care had several special German traits. While "medicalization" occurred everywhere with state support, nowhere did government measures to promote medicalization encroach on existing health care structures on as massive a scale as in Germany. This intervention was particularly clear in the area of health insurance, which ushered a constantly rising percentage of the population into doctors' offices. Although the reasons for the development of health insurance, its concrete forms, and rate of expansion differ greatly among countries, there were astounding similarities in the struggles between insurance companies and physicians. Everywhere doctors viewed health insurance as a threat to their autonomy in treating patients. Concerns regarding the preservation of private practice, which appeared to be the crux of doctors' freedom, blinded many to the advantages accruing for them from the health insurance system. This is particularly clear in retrospect. In the long term, physicians owed their job and income stability to the establishment and expansion of health insurance. In the area of medical organization and the legal position of doctors, German developments appear more unique. Professional associations developed very slowly and hesitantly because Prussian doctors were so strongly tied to particular government medical ordinances. Besides various scientific and social preoccupations, the struggle over state control of the profession was a primary concern of doctors. The removal of the prohibition of quackery in the trade ordinances of 1869 at the urging of physicians can only be explained by the simultaneous desire of doctors to free themselves from bureaucratic control, especially the Kurierzwang. Until their change of mind in the late 1870s, German doctors had exactly the opposite attitude of their English and American colleagues, who for generations demanded such a prohibition because they had no legal protection against nonlicensed healers. In spite of superficial resemblances, the reactions of doctors in the different countries to the establishment of health insurance systems were quite dissimilar as well. Probably for this reason, in Germany more so than anywhere else, legal health insurance led to a rigorous campaign for material and professional goals. Moreover, the struggles with insurance companies drove German physicians into isolation from other

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allies. Thereby doctors' status anxieties were promoted, which turned out to be one of the most important influences in the extraordinarily rapid political and ideological integration of physicians into the Nazi state after 1933.

Notes 1. This essay presents, in condensed form, the results of my book, DerAufstieg der Ante im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom gelehrten Stand zum professlonellen Experten: Das Beispiel Preussens (Gottingen, 1985). I have deleted references to specific chapters and have kept the notes brief. 2. The following are essential: M. S. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley, Calif., 1977); E. Freidson, The Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge (New York, 1970); T. Johnson, Professions and Power (London, 1972); R. Dingwall and P. Lewis, eds., The Sociology of the Professions: Lawyers, Doctors and Others (London, 1983); W. Conze and J. Kocka, "Einleitung," inBildungssystem und Professionalisierung in internationalen Vergleichen, ed. W. Conze and J. Kocka (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 9-26. See D. Rilschemeyer, "Professionalisierung: Theoretische Probleme fur die vergleichende Geschichtsforschung," in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 6 (1980): 311-25; G. L. Geison, "Introduction," in Professions and Professional Ideologies in America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983), pp. 2-11. 3. M. Foucault, Die Geburt der Klinik: Eine Archdologie des drztlichenBlicks (Frankfurt, 1976). 4. Recent research is almost unanimous on the therapeutic inefficiency of medical treatment until well into the nineteenth century. See T. McKeown, "A Sociological Approach to the History of Medicine," in Medical History and Medical Care: A Symposium of Perspectives, ed. T. McKeown and G. McLachlan (London, 1971), p. 6ff.; T. McKeown, Die Bedeutung der Medizin: Traum, Trugbild oder Nemesis? (Frankfurt, 1982), p. 83ff.; M. Ramsey, "Medical Power and Popular Medicine: Illegal Healers in 19th-century France," Journal of Social History 10 (1976-77): 560-87; F. B. Smith, The People's Health, 1830-1910 (London, 1979); R. Spree, Soziale Ungleichheit vor Krankheit und Tod: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Gesundheitsbereichs im Kaiserreich (Gottingen, 1981). 5. W. Ebstein, "liber die Entwicklung des klinischen Unterrichts an der Gottinger Hochschule und iiber die heutigen Aufgaben der medizinischen Klinik," Klinisches Jahrbuch 1 (1889): 72, 90. 6. H.-G. Wenig, Medizinische Ausbildung im 19. Jahrhundert (Diss., Univ. of Bonn, 1969); C. Huerkamp, "Arzte und Professionalisierung in Deutschland: Uberlegungen zum Wandel des Arztberufs im 19. Jahrhundert," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 6 (1980): 349-83, here 352-61; L. von Ronne and H. Simon, Das Medicinal-Wesen des preussischen Staates (Breslau, 1844), 1: 299-301, 349-87; J. N. Rust, Die Medicinalverfassung Preussens, wie sie war und wie sie ist (Berlin, 1838). 7. R. Riese, Die Hochschule auf dem Weg zum wissenschaftlichen Grossbetrieb: Die Universitat Heidelberg und das badische Hochschulwesen, 1860-1914 (Stuttgart, 1977), p. 240f. 8. Calculated according to figures in F. R. Pfetsch, "Die Institutionalisierung medizinischer Fachgebiete im deutschen Wissenschaftssystem," in Innovation und


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Widerstande in der Wissenschaft: Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Medizin, ed. F. R. Pfetsch and A. ZIoczower (Dusseldorf, 1973), p. 37. 9. Proposals for changes are found in "Zusammenstellung und Beleuchtung der seitens der deutschen Bundesbehorden und der von denselben ressortierenden 19 medizinischen Fakultaten gemachten Abanderungsvorschlage zu den preussischen Entwiirfen, die Prufung der Arzte und das Tentamen physicum betreffend, zugestellt dem Reichskanzleramt unter dem Datum des 19.5. 1877," Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 86 Reichsgesundheitsamt, no. 1495, vol. 1; G. Liebau, DasMedizinalpriifungswesen im Deutschen Reiche (Leipzig, 1890). 10. Examination regulations for 1901 are reprinted in Arztliches Vereinsblatt fur Deutschland, 1901, nos. 455 and 456. 11. Regarding the "overcrowding crisis" of the 1880s and 1890s, see H. Titze, "LfberfullungskriseninakademischenKarrieren,"Zefec/in/f/MrPadagog;127(1981): 187-224. 12. See S. Breinersdorf, Uber die falsche Beurteilung des Arztes vom Nichtarzte (Breslau, 1806); W. G. Ploucquet, Der Arzt, oder fiber die Ausbildung, die Studien, Pflichten, Sitten und die Klugheit des Arztes (Tubingen, 1797); J. Stieglitz, Uber das Zusammenseyn der Arzte am Krankenbett, und tiber ihre Verhdltnisse unter sich uberhaupt (Hanover, 1798). 13. E. H. Ackerknecht, Kurze Geschichte der Medizin (Stuttgart, 1959); idem, Therapie von den Primitiven bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1970); P. Diepgen, Geschichte der Medizin: Die historische Entwicklung der Heilkunde und des antlichen Lebens (Berlin, 1951-55), vol. 2, parts 1 arid 2. 14. I. Vieler, "Die deutsche Arztpraxis im 19. Jahrhundert" (Diss., Univ. of Mainz, 1958). 15. In 1890, 105 of the physicians' associations that belonged to the Union of Physicians' Associations (Arztevereinsbund) had a written code of ethics, 61 possessed an honor court, and only 53 had neither. See E. Graf, Das arztliche Vereinswesen in Deutschland und der deutsche Arztebund (Leipzig, 1890), p. 55. For the 1876 Karlsruhe regulations, see C. Marx, "Die Entwicklung des arztlichen Standes seit den ersten Dezennien des 19. Jahrhunderts" (Berlin, 1907), enclosure 5, pp. 147-53. 16. F. Scholz, VonArzten undPatienten, Plaudereien (Munich, 1900), p. 117. 17. H. H. Eulner, "Das Spezialistentum in der arztlichen Praxis," in W. Altert and W. Ruegg, eds., Der Arzt und der Kranke in der Gesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1967), pp. 17-34. The figures are taken from the official 1909 census of medical personnel: "Die Verbreitung des Heilpersonals im Deutschen Reiche am 1. 5. 1909," Medizinalstatistische Mitteilungen aus dem Kaiserlichen Gesundheitsamt (Berlin, 1912), vol. 15. 18. Bellinger, Wandlungen der Medizin und des Arztestandes seit SO Jahren (Munich, 1909), p. 32f.; A. Reibmayr, DerPraktiker (Leipzig, 1893), p. 20; H. Quincke, "Uber arztliche Spezialitaten und Spezialarzte," Miinchener Mediziner Wochenschrift 53 (1906): 1213-17, 160-64; A. Moll, Arztliche Ethik (Stuttgart, 1902), p. 145ff. 19. T. Parsons, "Social Structure and Dynamic Process: The Case of Modern Medical Practice," in Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, 111., 1951). 20. C. Basse, Aus dem arztlichen Leben, Ratgeber fur angehende und junge Arzte (Leipzig, 1899). 21. For an illustration of this phenomenon, one can look at the company insurance setup for workers in the Krupp Corporation: W. Vossiek,HundertJahreKrupp'sche Betriebskrankenkasse, 1836-1936 (Berlin, 1937), p. 26. 22. Statistics calculated according to data in "Die Verbreitung des Heilpersonals

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am 1. 4. 1898," Medizinal-statistische Mitteilungen aus dem Kaiserlichen Gesundheitsamt (Berlin, 1901), 6: 50-76. 23. O. Esser, Derpraktische Arzt im Rheinland, 1750-1850 (Bonn, 1963), p. 49. 24. M. Foucault, "Lapolitique dela santeauXVIIIe siecle," in hisLes machines a guerir: Aux origines de I'hopital moderne (Paris, 1976), pp. 11—21. 25. U. Fre.vsrt,KrankheitalspolitischesProblem, 1770-1880.-Soziale Unterschichten in Preussen zwischen medizinischer Polizei und staatlicher Sozialversicherung (Gottingen, 1984), p. 84ff. 26. C. Huerkamp, "The History of Smallpox Vaccination in Germany: A First Step in the Medicalization of the General Public," Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 617-35. 27. F. Tennstedt, Sozialgeschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutschland: Vom 18. Jahrhundert biszumErsten Weltkrieg (Gottingen, 1981), p. 135ff.; G. A. Ritter, Sozialversicherung in Deutschland und England: Entstehung undGrundziige im Vergleich (Munich, 1983), pp. 1849; D. Zollner, "Landesbericht Deutschland," in P. Kohler and H. Zacher, eds. Ein Jahrhundert Sozialversicherung in der BundesrepublikDeutschland, Frankreich, Grossbritannien, Osterreich und der Schweiz (Berlin, 1981), pp. 57-96. See also F. Kleeis, Die Geschichte der sozialen Versicherung in Deutschland (Berlin, 1928; reprinted, Berlin, 1981). 28. A. Dierks, "Entstehung und Entwicklung der deutschen Krankenversicherung bis zum Jahre 1909" (Diss., Univ. of Giessen, 1912). 29. A. Gabriel, Die kassenarztliche Frage (Leipzig, 1912). 30. For a typical example, see the statement by the chairman of the local health insurance organization: J. Frassdorf, "Arzte und Krankenkassen," Die neueZeit 22, no. 1 (1903-4): 438-45, 512-15. 31. Report of Dr. Busch to the Eighteenth Physicians' Congress, 1890 and ensuing discussion, published inArztliches Vereinsblatt (1890), pp. 359-82. See "Die Stellung der Arzte bei den Krankenkassen, Denkschrift des Arzteverbandes, den Mitgliedern des deutschen Reichstags ilberreicht am 13. 1. 1903," suppl. to Arztliches Vereinsblatt, no. 490 (1903), p. 3ff.; and Entscheidungen des preussischen Ehrengerichtshofs fur Arzte (Berlin, 1908), 1: 117-37. 32. C. Huerkamp and R. Spree, "Arbeitsmarktstrategien der deutschen Arzteschaft im spaten 19. und friihen 20. Jahrhundert: Zur Entwicklung des Marktes fiir professionelle arztlicheDienstleistungen," inHistorischeArbeitsmarktforschung, ed. T. Pierenkemper and R. Tilly (Gottingen, 1982), pp. 77-116. 33. E. H. Ackerknecht, "Beitrage zur Geschichte der Medizinalreform von 1848," Sudhoffs Archivfiir GeschichtederMedizin 25 (1932): 113-84; K. Finkenrath, Die Medizinalreform: Die Geschichte der ersten arztlichen Standesbewegung (Leipzig, 1929). 34. A Gabriel, Die staatlichen Organisationen des deutschen Arztestandes (Berlin, 1920). 35. The most comprehensive study of the policies and tactics of the Leipziger Verband remains T. Plaut, Der Gewerkschaftskampf der deutschen Arzte (1913). See also the Festschrift published to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hartmannbund: H. Schadewaldt, ed., 75 Jahre Hartmannbund: Ein Kapitel deutscher Sozialpolitik (Bonn, 1975). 36. R. Neuhaus, Arbeitskdmpfe, Arztestreiks, Sozialreformer: Sozialpolitische Konfliktregelung, 1900-1914 (Berlin, 1986), pp. 341-56.

Volksschullehrerinnen: Bavarian Women Defining Themselves Through Their Profession JOANNE SCHNEIDER The only proper profession for a woman is at all times that of wife and mother. She should bear children and educate them (within the confines of the house). For her family she should give freely of herself from the heart of her feeling and loving soul. She should nurture and cultivate decorum, morality, fear of God and joy of life. Heinrich von Treitschke 1

If Treitschke's views on careers for women had held true, then there would be no need to discuss the emerging professionalization of Volksschullehrerinnen (female elementary school teachers) in Germany or anyplace else.2 Fortunately, this was not the case; women have entered teaching and other professions in ever greater numbers during the past one hundred years.3 The pioneers in the effort to attain wider career opportunities for women faced great opposition. Those in the teaching field were no exception. Treitschke certainly reflected traditional nineteenth-century European opinion when he condemned those women who sought to work outside the home. However, social and economic changes experienced at that time, in part because of industrialization and urbanization, contributed to the creation of a new phenomenon: the "surplus woman problem." Hardest hit were the unmarried daughters of the middle class, who heretofore had been absorbed into work patterns around the house in the various forms of cottage and craft production that had dominated for centuries. When the locus of work went outside the home, these women did not have much to keep them busy. Working-class women, as a matter of course, took to employment in the newly created factory system, but middle-class morality forbade such activity by its daughters. Nonetheless, financial difficulties forced many unmarried women from better families to seek employment away from home. Finding their choices limited, 85

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some of these women challenged traditional beliefs about woman's proper sphere. If a woman could not marry, then she should have access to an education that would prepare her for a career that commanded respect.4 Advocates of respectable employment opportunities for women were not content to see them languish in low-status jobs. By the 1890s, frank discussions, especially among radical feminists, called for women's access to university education and professional careers. Such demands challenged the male monopoly over higher education and the professions. Although referring to the United States, this observation holds true for Europe as well: Although many ideas about men's and women's proper roles predated the rise of the modern professions, they quickly became central to the formulation of professional ideology. Not only did professionals, like other middle-class men, believe that women should stay at home, they also defined professional behavior in terms that supported and even required a division of labor by sex. Successful professionals were objective, competitive, individualistic, and predictable; they were also scornful of nurturant, expressive and familial styles of personal interaction. 5

Professions and proper professional behavior as defined by men made no allowance for women or feminine character traits. Those women who challenged this outlook had to confront the issue of being female but also aspiring to professional status. Were the two compatible? Germany's professional elite opposed any inroads by women into its ranks. In all the professions, strict standards applied, especially the required university training. Teaching was a profession that German women expected would naturally be available to them, because of its close association (especially at the primary level) with the basic responsibilities of childrearing. Such aspirations were challenged for two reasons. First, a hierarchy existed among the teachers in all German schools. Whereas instructors of the university and Gymnasium were considered professionals, those who taught at nonacademic secondary schools and primary schools were regarded as low-level bureaucrats. Second, the male teachers in the lower grades opposed the influx of women into their ranks because they were anxious about defending their status and aspirations within the profession. Mandatory school attendance laws promulgated by the German states forced the issue. By the 1880s, there were not enoughLehrer (male teachers) to fill the positions at the primary schools. With the increased number of women attending teacher-training institutes, filling teaching positions, and aspiring to administrative duties, the need for women teachers' organizations became apparent. The appearance of Lehrerinnenvereine (female teachers' associations) in the 1880s heralded the activist campaign on behalf of women teachers and their battle for recognition as professionals. Many of the Verein leaders believed that the most logical and least disruptive way for women to succeed in their goals was to follow a separate path and create a system of educational facilities for girls and women in which women would teach and administer, independent of any male supervision. 6 Yet critics of this plan feared that a separate system of

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women's schools would remain inferior to the men's institutions. The Lehrerinnenvereine struggled into the twentieth century for wider educational opportunities for women and access to the hallowed halls of higher education, the credentials from which would give women proof of their professional status. Despite the legal equality the Weimar constitution granted women, the female teachers' struggle for recognition and acceptance was by no means over. Within the framework of this overview, this discussion will now focus on the experience of Bavaria's Lehrerinnen and their organizations. The history of education in Germany traditionally has been and is written from the Prussian perspective. Nevertheless, Prussia under the Second Empire usually initiated educational reform legislation that other German states more often than not subsequently accepted. Therefore, studies of educational experiences and policy outside Prussia are needed for understanding other Germans and their concerns.7 This essay therefore discusses Bavarian Volksschullehrerinnen and their path toward professionalization. It recounts some of the unique experiences of Lehrerinnen in Bavaria, which in some ways granted the issue of professional status for women teachers greater credence than its north German neighbors. Bavaria and other Catholic regions of Germany acknowledged that women should teach in \\\& Madchenschulen (girls' schools). When these schools were not much more than elementary schools, this presented no problem. However, as Madchenschulen expanded to include middle-school (seventh and eighth grades in the American system) curriculum, the debate ensued as to whether men or women should teach the older girls. In Protestant areas, the Lehrer dominated the upper grades in the Madchenschulen, but in Bavaria greater numbers of women remained at these schools at all grade levels. By the early twentieth century, of the German states, Bavaria was only second to Alsace-Lorraine in the percentage of women teaching in its schools.8 The history of Lehrerinnen in Bavaria is long and venerable. Since the Middle Ages, as was true in other German lands, Ordensschwestern (teaching nuns) in Bavaria ran convent schools for young girls. Not all these students were bound for convent life. Many girls enrolled in a convent's "outer school" to learn the rudiments of reading and writing, with the Psalms as their text. Throughout the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, nuns dominated the ranks of women teachers. Lay females did teach in Bavaria, most notably in the Winkelschulen (corner schools), which appeared in towns and cities after the Peace of Westphalia. These were tiny private schools, often with fewer than five students. Government officials concerned with educational policy disliked the Winkelschulen, because there were too many of them and not enough inspectors to evaluate the quality of the teaching, or the credentials of the teachers.9 The accession of Max Joseph to the throne of Bavaria in 1799 brought widespread changes to the Electorate, which had been orchestrated by the Elector's chief advisor, Maximilian von Montgelas. Educated in France, Montgelas saw Bavaria as a backwater ripe for reform along rationalist lines. True to such principles, Montgelas was a convinced anticlericalist who disliked the

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omnipresence of the Catholic church in public affairs—especially education; therefore he instituted a secularization policy that called for the disbanding of Bavarian convents, monasteries, and their schools. Not trusting churchadministered schools, he and his educational policy advisor, jurist Friedrich von Zentner, were determined to establish a state-controlled education system. On December 23, 1802, Montgelas issued a decree that required school attendance by boys and girls aged six to twelve.10 The repercussions of the secularization order and the school attendance law directly affected laical women who aspired to teach. The tradition of single-sex education in Bavaria was long-standing, and even Montgelas did not go so far as to mandate the establishment of coeducational schools. As convent schools closed and nuns moved away to areas more friendly to them, a crisis arose in women's education. The state now required that girls attend school; yet there were few women available who qualified to teach at Madchenschulen and no institutions where laical women could obtain teacher training. Because the newly rationalized state was concerned with proper credentials, something had to be done to provide for adequately trained women to teach at the girls' schools. Before 1803, Bavaria had no state-sponsored institution to train male or female teacher candidates. Those laical applicants who aspired to teach could study at a convent or monastery, or privately. A 1771 law stated that all laical applicants wishing to teach had to present themselves to the local council of clergy for examination. Many Winkelschulen teachers evaded this law, which perhaps explains part of the official disdain for such schools.11 In 1803, a Lehrerbildungsanstalt (teacher-training institute for men) was opened in Munich. Initially a small number of women were allowed to study there. But their numbers could not fill the decimated ranks of the Madchenschule teachers. During the height of the secularization transition from 1803 to 1809, a young woman who wished to teach had only to complete satisfactorily the Volksschule and a Feiertagsschule (a school for children beyond mandatory school age that met on Sundays and other holidays; Munich's tuition-free Feiertagsschule for girls was a prototype for Germany).12 In response to the desperate need for qualified female teachers, theLehrerinnenbildungsansta.lt (teacher-training institute for women) opened in 1814. The school accepted women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. To enroll in the two-year course, candidates presented baptismal certificates and vaccination records, attesting to their legitimacy and good health. The young women also included with their applications a letter of introduction by a local official from their neighborhood or town, attesting to their overall moral character. They also submitted a sample of their needlework. About twelve to fifteen girls enrolled each year, and the government gave scholarships to five needy girls in each class. The institute functioned with the support of government funds from 1814 to 1820 and 1822 to 1826, but was disbanded in 1826 because of the supposed surplus of Lehrerinnen.13 This change was brought about by the new king, Ludwig I, who had encouraged Ordensschwestern to return to Bavaria in 1825 and resume teaching. Also, because Ludwig was a devout Catholic and an opponent of his father's

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secularization policies, it is logical to assume that he was not terribly concerned with a teacher-training institution for laical female teachers. Nonetheless, Bavaria was avant-garde with respect to Lehrerinnenbildung, because Munich's Feiertagsschule was uniquely state-supported until well after midcentury. 14 Bavaria did not have another state-funded Lehrerinnenbildungsanstalt until 1872. However, the government did not ignore the existence of would-be Lehrerinnen, because a ministerial decree from 1836 systematized a training program for teaching candidates into a series of three examinations. To enter the program, a girl had to be fifteen years old and have a good school record. Upon successful completion of the second examination, which had to be taken by age twenty, the woman qualified as a Lehrgehilfin (teaching aide). After three years' work as an aide, she could take the qualifying examination to become a teacher. Lay candidates could "apprentice" themselves to skilled teachers, or could attend classes in various schools in Munich as a form of preparation. With either approach, a great deal of commitment was required of these young women. Under the leadership of Minister of Culture Karl Abel (1837-47), the convents received government support and encouragement for their teacher-training programs at the expense of programs that were not sponsored by the church. 15 In 1848, Munich School Commissioner Lehner described the state of Lehrerinnenbildung in Bavaria: I am making my request to the local school commission not to suspend the course (teacher training for young women) but rather to expand it. Under its auspices, talented young women eager to learn find spiritual satisfaction and the opportunity for further education. Daughters of better families, who have taken the course, have the opportunity to earn their living in an acceptable manner and support their families, if necessary. They can escape from being mere baby-sitters or tutors to being people, strengthened in the basic principles, who can teach or oversee instruction. 16

No one listened to Lehner's pleas, and on the wider political stage of the Frankfurt Assembly, the question of training female teachers was not even raised.17 None of the German governments were pleased by the disruptive events of 1848—49 and expressed their displeasure through legislation designed to prohibit liberal tendencies among the people. In 1854, Prussia passed a law strictly defining the acceptable materials and curriculum that teacher candidates of the Volksschule should have; in 1857 Bavaria enacted a similar law. Teacher training was intended to prepare candidates for jobs at rural schools rather than urban schools. Stress was placed on the candidate's good "moral qualities" rather than on general knowledge.18 This regulation suggested the orientation of the Lehrer rather than Lehrerinnen, but female examination candidates must have had to undergo the same scrutiny in the government's screening for possible troublemakers. The next legislative pronouncement about Lehrerinnen occurred in an 1866 law, which established requirements for candidates enrolled at the newly established Lehrerbildungsanstalt. The law listed regulations that applied to

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prospective male and female teachers. The women were expected to follow the course of study through either private lessons or attendance at teacher-training courses, many of which were affiliated with private hohere Tochterschulen (schools with classes for girls beyond the Volksschule level).19 By the year 1872, three Lehrerinnenbildungsanstalten received financial support from the Bavarian government. Two were newly founded public schools in Munich and Straubing, whereas the third, the private Ludwigsseminar in Memmingen, was awarded public funding. The establishment of the schools, especially the one in Munich, was greeted with much enthusiasm. Helene Sumper, a leader in Bavaria's teachers' associations, recounted how those women who had studied privately for the teachers' examination would surely envy those candidates who could attend the Lehrerinnenseminar. The latter's lives had been made so easy.20 Public support for Lehrerinnenbildungsanstalten was only the first step in bringing Bavarian women greater educational and career opportunities. Legislation enacted in the 1880s made teacher-training programs and examination schedules for men and women almost identical. The only requirement the Lehrerinnen escaped were the periodic Konferenzen (refresher courses). Eventually these became mandatory for Lehrerinnen as well, and by 1889 there were four to six such courses offered annually in Munich.21 Between 1880 and 1904, male and female teaching candidates took virtually the same qualifying examination. For women it included the fields of religion (Catholic or Evangelical), German language and literary history, general geography, history of Bavaria and Germany from 1618 to 1870, French, English, music (vocal and instrumental), and drawing. A Volksschule candidate did not have to take the foreign language examinations. However, since instruction in the Lehrerinnenseminare did not differentiate between programs for elementary and middle-school teachers, most students took all courses of instruction.22 It was possible for a female candidate who wished to teach at a Madchenschule not to pass the foreign language examination, and still qualify to teach at a Volksschule. Much agitation on behalf of wider educational opportunities for women occurred during the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century. Across Germany, small Gymnasien for girls opened, where students prepared for the Abitur, which allowed for admission to a university. Universities in Heidelberg and Freiburg opened their doors to women in 1901, whereas the Bavarian universities (Munich, Erlangen, and Wurzburg) followed suit two years later. Other German states allowed women to enroll as full-fledged students at their universities during the course of the next five years.23 Naturally, Lehrerinnen were pleased with the university reforms that now allowed women to matriculate. But their enthusiasm was tempered by the restrictions placed on female students, depending on what preparatory school they had attended. There were four education tracks whereby a woman could gain admission to a university: by study at a Gymnasium, a Realgymnasium, an Oberrealschule, or a Lehrerinnenseminar (if she also had had two years' teaching experience). The majority of the female university students came from the ranks of those educated at the Lehrerinnenseminare. Unfortunately, such


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students had no classical language skills and were therefore restricted in terms of the academic departments in which they could enroll.24 A more immediate problem for Lehrerinnen in Bavaria was the preservation of the credibility of their Lehrerinnenseminar. In 1904, the final examinations for the teacher-training courses for men and women were changed. The women's examination requirements were reduced by a third in contrast to those demanded of the men. The government also supported the introduction of Haushaltungskunst (home economics) to the Lehrerinnenseminar. This attempt to dilute the curriculum at the school was demoralizing to the countless female teachers seeking professional recognition. Even though women were enrolling as full-time students at its universities, the Bavarian government appeared to reintroduce the notion of female academic inferiority.25 By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, women committed to a lifelong career as teachers sought means and methods by which to enhance their status. Many went so far as to describe their "calling" as a profession (Beruf) and campaigned on behalf of access to higher education and appropriate recognition from the male teachers. The means by which teachers in Bavaria, and throughout Germany, were able to articulate grievances and express aspirations was through teachers' associations.26 Male and female instructors organized in local, regional, and national groups. Initially formed as social clubs and mutual-aid societies, Lehrer(innen)vereine moved on to speak out on issues of public policy such as school reform, teachers' salaries, and the like. The older men's Vereine assumed a defensive posture with respect to the inroads women were making into teaching.27 Although the first Bavarian Lehrerinnenverein was founded in Nuremberg in 1886, the two associations of Lehrerinnen that merit closest attention are the Munchener Lehrerinnenverein (MLiV) and Bayerischer Lehrerinnenverein (BLiV), founded in 1887 and 1898, respectively, by Munich native and teacheractivist Helene Sumper.28 The MLiV organized in the spring of 1887 with seventy members. It met every other week, alternating pedagogical and recreational programs. Sumper described the goals of the Verein: 1. counsel and help improve the interests of the group 2. support professional activity 3. provide opportunities for impromptu speechmaking and regular discussions 4. care for general education 5. promote collegiality 6. provide constant support and friendly exchange of ideas 7. stimulate personal accomplishments in music, handiwork, and drawing.z' One of the important goals of the MLiV was the placement of more Lehrerinnen in the upper grades of the hohere Madchenschulen and in the lower grades of the Knabenschulen (boys' schools). This sentiment paralleled that expressed by Helene Lange and other leaders of German women's education. First, these

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women believed it was only proper and natural that women teach girls at all levels in the Madchenschulen, not just the lower grades. Second, more women should be encouraged to aspire to become directors of such schools. Third, the reformers felt that the presence of more Lehrerinnen in the Knabenschulen would have a civilizing influence on young boys.30 In 1890, Helene Sumper reported that the MLiV with its ninety-three members had done much to improve communications and morale among the Bavarian Lehrerinnen. She implored the members not to become complacent and rest on their laurels. A premier project of the MLiV was the establishment of a Fortbildungsschule (similar to an American vocational school). A common complaint raised by their social superiors was that women from the lower classes were bad housekeepers and poor mothers. Initially the Fortbildungsschule was envisioned as a means to address this problem, by providing courses for older girls in home economics, while reviewing the basics from the Volksschule. Later, Fortbildungsschulen offered vocational courses in manufacturing or retail pursuits. The MLiV was not only directly involved in the founding of a Fortbildungsschule in 1896, but its members also authored a textbook approved for use in the school by the Bavarian government.31 By its twelfth year, the MLiV had almost three hundred members. However, some of these women were from areas outside of metropolitan Munich. The problems that faced Lehrerinnen in the rural areas were numerous and quite different from those of their urban sisters. Therefore, it was decided that a Bavarian association was needed, and as a solution Helene Sumper founded the BLiV. She also passed the directorship of the MLiV to Louise Sigl. The new Verein was warmly received by the Allgemeiner deutscher Lehrerinnen Verein (ADLiV). Its leaders felt that they had to expend so much energy on problems confronting teachers throughout Germany that regional associations were necessary to deal with local issues and establish a spirit of collegiality among all Lehrerinnen through their connection with the ADLiV. Marie LoeperHousselle, a founder of the ADLiV and editor of the journal Die Lehrerin, greeted the BLiV as the group that would unite all of Bavaria's Lehrerinnen regardless of background. She was troubled by events of February 1898, when the Verein katholischer Lehrerinnen in Bayern was created. Loeper-Housselle did not want to see the Verein movement among women teachers splinter according to confessional lines or for any other reason.32 The BLiV wasted no time in compiling a list of actions it wished to see taken by the Bavarian government concerning educational reforms. In a petition addressed to the Ministry of the Interior, Department of School and Church Affairs, the BLiV called for improvements in the various levels of Madchenschulen and the creation of additional teacher-training seminars. The Verein wanted to see more women hired throughout Bavaria's school systems. Furthermore, the BLiV suggested a pay scale for the three ranks of Lehrerinnen, and in towns where the cost of living was higher, the local community should supplement the basic salary. The request did not call for equal pay with the Lehrer; rather, the salary for Lehrerinnen was to be 80 percent of that paid to the men.33

Volkischullehrerinnen

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In early August 1900, the BLiV held its first convention. Helene Sumper made the opening remarks in which she praised the Verein for its courage in taking public stands. She admitted that there were those who did not wish to see women speaking in public. But teachers were in a public profession and therefore had to be active and acknowledged by the political powers of the time. In turning to specific reforms, she addressed the problem of teaching in rural areas. Lehrerinnen in rural areas had to inculcate a love and respect for the countryside in their young students, so that they would not flee to urban centers at the first opportunity. She admonished her listeners that teachers should practice tolerance in religious matters and not try to proselytize among students34; this latter statement was not well received by the Catholic laical teachers nor Ordensschwestern. A theme that dominated Lehrerinnenvereine at the turn of the century was the Eheverbot (celibacy rule) for female teachers. All German states had laws that forbade married women from teaching, with Bavaria's Eheverbot dating from 1821.35 Some feminists argued that these rules denied the right of employment to a large segment of the female population. Yet, the majority of the leaders of the Lehrerinnenvereine supported celibacy laws. Both Marie Loeper-Housselle and Helene Sumper endorsed the Eheverbot. Why did these women and others who worked so hard to give women better educational and job opportunities support the celibacy laws? There were a wide variety of reasons. In Catholic Bavaria where the model female teacher was the Ordensschwester, there could be no rational discussion of a married woman teaching. The selflessness of the teaching nuns was regarded as a wonderful example to those laical women who taught. BLiV and MLiV reports listed the kind of social work functions that teachers were expected to perform. They were to observe students' behavior constantly, especially those young people from poor families. Lehrerinnen were expected to visit the homes of such students. It was assumed that Volksschule teachers would volunteer some time to teach at the Fortbildungsschulen. The Mutterabende (mothers' evenings) sponsored by the MLiV were another form of social work within the community. These "evenings" took place once a month and were supposed to unite teacher and mother through the common concern over the welfare of the children. Programs from a couple of the Mutterabende included a lecture on the educational value of fairy tales; this was followed by a presentation of pictures painted by Moritz von Schwind that illustrated these tales. Another program illuminated the marvels of the Kochkiste (cooking chamber), a wooden box in which pots of partially cooked food were placed for several hours, which functioned as a kind of pressure cooker or crock pot. This presentation was followed by a discussion on the nutritional value of eating warm meals.36 The time demands placed on Lehrerinnen because of social work were incredibly high. The proponents of the celibacy rule pointed to this fact and proclaimed that no married woman with the responsibilities of husband and family could adequately fill the role of a Volksschullehrerin. Marie LoeperHousselle warned that if a married woman tried to teach and run her household, eventually her husband would be neglected, causing marital problems. She

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wanted the positions and incomes of single teachers protected. Any married woman who continued to work was accused of succumbing to materialism. Finally, Loeper-Housselle and other proponents of the Eheverbot wished to see Lehrerinnen protected from accusations of being unprofessional, since it was assumed that the divided loyalties of a married woman would cause a substandard performance at her job. 37 Supporters of the demands of women to better educational and job opportunities had a right to be defensive. Hostility against these women's aspirations for careers that would offer them respect and financial independence manifested itself throughout society. The most consistent opponents of the women teachers were the Volksschullehrer, who reduced the issue to a simple gender struggle: women should not challenge men in their chosen profession. The Lehrer suffered from a two-sided identity problem. Men teaching at the Volksschulen were always considered "poor relations" to the academically trained men who taught at the boys' secondary schools. Thus Volksschullehrer continually aspired to be considered professionals and to be accepted into the prestigious educational fraternity.38 The desire of the Volksschullehrer for upward mobility collided with the demand that women be allowed greater access to teach at the elementary schools. The self-concept of the Lehrer as a professional was ostensibly threatened if women could do the same job. The Lehrer resented these women because they generally came from a higher social class. There was a general consensus that the women from the hoherer Stand (higher class) could never effectively relate to the children of the Volk (people).39 The Volksschullehrer also resented the women because they sought teaching jobs in the towns and cities. Such positions were prizes for those Lehrer who had labored long in rural schools. A teacher in such schools was poorly paid, had substandard housing, and usually had to perform menial tasks for the local parish priest. Promotion to an urban post gave the Lehrer greater status and a higher salary. But the chance for upward mobility was being undermined when urban school commissions, in the name of economy, would hire women. Communities that really sought to economize on teachers' salaries hired Ordensschwestern, whose pay was much lower than even that of lay female teachers.40 The persistent hostility of the Lehrer toward the Lehrerinnen was unmistakable in the rhetoric at the teachers' convention (Lehrertag) in Munich in early June 1906. The keynote speaker, Oberlehrer (senior teacher) Laube from Chemnitz, stated that the question of women teaching school was related to the wider issue of the greater good of the German people. Since women dominated education at home, men should teach in the schools. Reiterating the arguments about women being psychologically and physically incapable of being effective teachers, Laube accused them of being obedient creatures who were unable or unwilling to challenge traditional methods. He also repeated the accusation that because of their social origin, Lehrerinnen were incapable of effectively teaching the children of the Volk.41 The Lehrerinnen present at Laube's speech were incensed. They tried to rebut his arguments, but were only given ten minutes in which to speak. In


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response, the leaders of the ADLi V called for a protest meeting to be held on the seventh of June. At that session, men and women offered their opinions. Dr. Georg Kerschensteiner, a Munich school official, declared that during his eleven years' tenure he had observed numerous skilled women teachers. He supported the argument that women should be directors of the Madchenschulen. As the historical reason for male hostility to the Lehrerinnen, Oberlehrer Roll of Munich explained that in the 1880s, when there was a growing need for teachers, women were hired for the coveted urban jobs. Even though this preferment was no longer the case, the men were still alienated. Furthermore, because the Lehrerinnenvereine kept advocating female control of the Madchenschulen and more women teaching in the middle and upper classes of these schools, the Lehrer feared that the next demand would be female control of the Knabenschulen. Roll implored both male and female teachers to overcome their mutual hostilities and to cooperate for the benefit of their students.42 The indefatigable Helene Surnper spoke out as well: "In Bavaria, male and female teachers have to pass the same number of state examinations; the demands put forward in these examinations are basically the same, prefaced on theoretical knowledge and practical teaching experience. The results of these examinations are published each year and show that the accomplishments of the women cannot be considered inferior to those of the men."43 Although the participants at the Lehrertag did not adopt Laube's conclusions outright, the essence of what he said struck a positive note with many of the men attending the meeting. The Lehrerinnen, therefore, had to rededicate themselves to overcoming male opposition. An interesting suggestion, which was made during the protest session, called for men to involve themselves more in parenting at home. The shared duties of fathers and mothers caring for their children was to continue into the schools through the efforts of both male and female teachers.44 In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, members of the MLiV and the BLiV continued to speak out on behalf of greater opportunities for women. The MLiV demanded equal pay for Lehrerinnen who had equivalent educational and teaching experience as the Lehrer. The associations admonished the government to keep pay increases in line with inflation. The BLiV in 1910 began another campaign for improved teacher-training facilities. The plan called for a six-year Lehrerinnen seminar, in which at the end of the fifth year students would take their academic examinations. A year later, they would have to pass pedagogical examinations. The hope was that a six-year seminar would give its students a sounder background in general education. The BLiV acknowledged that Lehrerinnenbildung would fall completely under state auspices, and it was hoped that a facility to train female teachers would be established in each district (Kreis). The BLiV was also very interested in the salaries and job opportunities for female teachers. One means of creating more jobs at the level of the Volksschule was to make eight years' schooling mandatory for all children. Bavaria passed such a law before the school year of 1913-14.45 The First World War accelerated the movement toward equality and recogni-

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tion of the professional contributions women made to education. During the war, observers already commented on how the shortage of Lehrer would be filled by dedicated Lehrerinnen. Women, even married women, entered those positions left vacant when the men were drafted. The Weimar constitution granted women legal equality. Article 128 specifically stated that female civil servants could not be discriminated against because of marital status—thus the Eheverbot was rescinded.46 Legal equality did nothing to address the economic crises and unemployment problems Germans faced at the end of the war. Male and female teachers in Bavaria turned to the government with requests for financial aid, retraining opportunities, or reorganization of the school system in order to provide for more jobs. A 1919 law on the hiring of new teachers stipulated that those positions with the best living quarters (teaching posts and the housing provided were divided into three categories) were reserved for men. Those jobs with apartments at the second or third level were available to men and women. Naturally, the Lehrerinnen complained that the stipulation was unconstitutional. Another school law from 1922 established the right of women to direct Madchenschulen. Attempts by those seeking such jobs were met by outright opposition by the Lehrer and skepticism from those people in the general public who doubted the capabilities of women for such a task. Because of the extreme economic crisis that the Weimar Republic faced in 1923, it ordered the state governments to reduce expenditures. The Bavarian government in the spirit of this request announced in mid-July 1923 that all married women teachers would be dismissed as of 1 September. Those women who were forced out sued the government for their jobs, but a Bavarian Supreme Court decision in 1919 made their suit ineligible because the government could act against the civil rights of some in cases of extreme emergency.47 The experiences of Bavaria's female teachers during the latter years of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich disappear into the broader context of Germany. The Weimar government did rescind the law protecting the right of married female civil servants to job security in 1932. Under the Nazis this legislation was more thoroughly enforced. All teachers' associations were absorbed into the Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund (NSLB). This organization hoped to cultivate a militaristic discipline among the teachers. They were to be tested for political loyalty and then trained on how to inculcate their students with the correct ideas. Schools became indoctrination centers, not places to learn. Those women who rose to leadership in the NSLB adhered to the notion of a separate educational system for girls and young women.48 Lehrerinnen continued to teach at the Volksschulen during the Nazi era, but their claims for recognition of service or improved salaries were received unsympathetically. Legal equality and equal opportunity for women were incorporated into the constitutions of both Germanics after the Second World War. The battles that women fought on behalf of professional acceptance reach beyond the chronological confines of this study. Suffice it to say that women in the Federal Republic, teachers in particular, are still confronting the eternal dilemma of the


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life-style of the professional versus the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood.49 Contemporary historians have pointed out that German feminists of the late nineteenth century, many of whom were teachers, tended to be less confrontational than their British or American counterparts. Furthermore, because the pseudoscientific notions of female biological inferiority gained greater hold in the community at large, German feminists had to seek their own methods of justifying women's search for wider understanding and respect.50 One way was by stressing women's separate sphere, their nurturing qualities, and the sanctified image of motherhood. The revered picture of mother and child never departed from the rhetoric of German feminist leaders. But they had to confront the demographic problem that not all German women would find husbands. If they could not marry and bear children, then what more natural avenue to express motherly instincts than through teaching? There was also the very real economic problem that many single women needed to find adequate ways to support themselves. These women hoped to create an environment exclusively for women, in which the unmarried could experience happy and productive lives. From a contemporary perspective, this appears to be a very unliberated attitude. But it is imperative to recognize the limits placed on public action by German women at the turn of the century. Defining women's separate sphere gave feminists an arena in which to operate that ostensibly would not challenge the patriarchal political structure in Germany. Nevertheless, the calls by Lehrerinnen and their associations for access to university education and equal job opportunities threatened the male establishment. Women teachers, especially at the Volksschule level, who remained unorganized and were willing to work for little pay and no responsibility were acceptable. But woe to those who promoted the idea that women regarded teaching as more than just a job or career, but wished to see female educators accepted as professionals. Such actions threatened the social and economic status of one group of German men. The logical progression seemed to be an increasing challenge to the traditional male authority. What is ironic is that these women were often exceedingly conciliatory and nonconfrontational, ultimately to the extent of some becoming skeptical about the efficacy of legal equality granted women by the Weimar constitution. Of course that equality was more apparent than real, especially when considering the treatment of married working women or the failed attempts by Lehrerinnen to obtain posts as school principals. The experiences of the Volksschullehrerinnen in the past 175 years represent a movement toward professionalization. Certainly these women viewed their work as a profession. This was apparent when they spoke of teaching in the same vein as medicine. The Lehrerinnen shared the common goal of service to their constituency, whether this was in the classrooms, or through social work after school. Through the auspices of the Lehrerinnenvereine, the women worked on behalf of better pay and more rigorous training at either the Seminare or the universities. Teachers' salaries do not compare with those of doctors and

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lawyers, but certainly the necessity for advanced education places teachers in the professional ranks. What haunted these women and their aspirations was the socially accepted and preferable female image, that of woman as wife and mother. German women would never attack this image. For those women who could not fulfill their Godgiven responsibility to be wives and mothers, a separate niche had to be carved out. Therefore, there was continued support beginning in the late nineteenth century for the creation of separate educational facilities for girls and women to be administered by "career women." However, neither financial resources nor wider interest in the development of such institutions could be found. Creating a "separate sphere" was not going to happen. This left the aspiring professional women to deal with an environment that was hostile to their personal goals. Because they were women in a society dominated by an entrenched male power structure and given their own ambivalence as to whether their behavior was proper to females, these women fought a slow, arduous battle for recognition and acceptance as capable professionals. Recognition as professionals is especially problematic for elementary school teachers, and this is not an issue specific to Germany. There has always been a hierarchy in teaching, with those in the upper echelons, especially at the university level, looking down on teachers in primary and secondary schools. The feminization of the teaching staffs of elementary education which did not occur in Germany until after the Second World War, provokes the age-old question of whether a field dominated by women can be considered a profession. There are no easy answers. For the present, as was the case for Volksschullehrerinnen in the past, the women involved in teaching at the elementary level must continue to assert themselves in the name of their profession for the recognition of wider society. Historians must accept as their task the further study of the issue of women and the professions, not only for Germany but the other industrialized nations as well.

Notes 1. The Treitschke quotation is cited in Karin Ehrich and Friederike Vauth, "Kampf umeinebessere Lehrerinnenausbildung," inLehrerinnen:ZurGeschichteeines Frauenberufes, ed. Use Brehmer (Munich, 1980), pp. 89-90. 2. The Germans referred to primary schools as Elementarschulen and Volksschulen, with the latter more common after 1850. The Volksschule, the people's school, was public and its goal was to bring the basics of literacy and arithmetic to ordinary Germans. Wealthier families sent their children to private or parochial schools, so that often the Volksschulen only served the children of lower-class families. 3. Historians and sociologists have debated vigorously the correct definition of profession and, secondarily, which careers should be considered professions. Teaching is a profession, whether its practitioners are called professionals, semiprofessionals, or bureaucratic professionals. Another source of confusion is the issue of whether women in any career can be considered professionals. For a discussion of


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what characteristics define a professional, consult Konrad Jarausch, "The German Professions in History and Theory," in this volume; T. Leggatt, "Teaching as a Profession," inProfessionsandProfessionalization, ed. J. A. Johnson (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), pp. 157, 160; Heinz-Elmar Thenorth, "Professionen und Professionalisierung: Bin Bezugsrahmen zur historischen Analyse des 'Lehrers und seiner Organisationen,'" in Der Lehrer und seine Organisation, ed. Mannfred Heinemann (Stuttgart, 1977), p. 469; Douglas R. Skopp, "The Elementary School Teachers in 'Revolt': Reform Proposals for Germany's Volksschulen in 1848 and 1849," History of Education Quarterly 22 (Fall 1982): 341-61. 4. M. Poehlmann, "Die Vorbildung der Frau zu hoheren Berufen," Die Lehrerin 20(1903-4): 637, 641. 5. Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890-1940 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987), pp. 13-14. 6. Glazer and Slater outline four different coping responses that professional women used to deal with discrimination. They are superperformance, subordination, innovation, and separation. The latter is the mechanism many German women used in their demand to establish a separate women's educational system with women as teachers and administrators of the schools. Ibid., p. 14. 7. For a recent essay addressing this imbalance, see Catherine Stodolosky, "Missionary of the Feminine Mystique: The Female Teacher in Bavaria and Prussia, 1880-1920" (doctoral diss., SUNY, 1987). 8. "Die prozentuale Verteilung von Lehrern und Lehrerinnen in Deutschland," Die Lehrerin 22 (1905—6): 192. The statistics quoted here are from Deutsche Schulzeitung (Sept. 14, 1905). 9. Johann Baptiste Goetz, "Aus der Geschichte des bayerischen Volksschulwesens," Die Christliche Schule 2 (1911): 143; Joanne Schneider, "An Historical Examination of Women's Education in Bavaria: Madchenschulen and Contemporary Attitudes About Them, 1799-1848" (doctoral diss., Brown University, 1977), pp. 18-28; Helene Lange, Entwicklung und Stand des hoheren Mddchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Berlin, 1893), p. 6; Helmut Beilner, Die Emanzipation der bayerischen Lehrerin— aufgezeigt an der Arbeit des bayerischen Lehrerinnenvereins (1898-1933) (Munich, 1971), pp. 26-29 and 35. 10. Eberhard Weis, Montgelas 1759—1799: Zwischen Revolution und Reform (Munich, 1971); Franz Dobmann, Georg FriedrichFreiherr vonZentner als bayerischerStaatsmann in denJahren 1799-1821 (Kallmuetz, Oberpfalz, 1963), p. 54; Nicholaus Hackl, Beitrdge zu einer Schulgeschichte des Kreises Regen (Regensburg, 1949), pp. 5-6. 11. Joseph Heigenmooser, "Geschichtliche Nachrichten fiber weltliche Lehrerinnen in Bayern," in Jahresbericht der Koniglichen Kreis-Lehrerinnenbildungsanstalt fur Oberbayern in Munchen pro 1887-1888 (Munich, 1888), p. 63. 12. Ibid. See also Beilner, Die Emanzipation, pp. 35-36. 13. Report of the local school commission under the orders of the Minister of the Interior von Zentner, regarding the Praparandinnenschule, July 19, 1813, Stadtarchiv Munchen (hereafter StAM), Schulamt 134 Lehrerbildung, Unterrichtskurse fiir Praparandinnen, Priifungsergebnisse, 1813-1833, vol. 1, no. 1327; official announcement regarding the opening of the school is found in Koniglich-Bayerisches Intelligenz Blatt fiir den Isarkreis, 1815 (Munich, 1815), p. 715. According to the list of students at the end of the first semester 1818, the candidates ranged in age from fifteen to twenty-four and their fathers' occupations were primarily that of skilled artisans and lower-level civil servants: list of students at the end of the first semester 1818 at the Praparandinnenanstalt, 1818, StAM, Schulamt 134 Lehrerbildung,

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Unterrichtskurse fur Praparandinnen, Priifungsergebnisse, 1813-1833, vol. 1, no number. See also Heigenmooser, "Geschichtliche Nachrichten," p. 66. 14. Beilner, Die Emancipation, p. 38. 15. Ministry of the Interior to the local school commission concerning requirements for students wishing to become Praparandinnen, May 28, 1836, StAM, Schulamt 151 Lehrerbildung, Richtlinien und Berichte iiber die Ausbildung der weltlichen Lehrerinnen, Verzeichnis der Kandidatinnen mit Beurteilung, 18361868, no. 11647; Joseph Heigenmooser, "Madchenschulen und weltliche Lehrerinnen in Munchen: Bin Beitrag zur Munchener Schulgeschichte," in Jahresbericht der Koniglichen Kreis-Lehrerinnenbildungsanstalt fur Oberbayern in Munchen pro 1888-1889 (Munich, 1889), pp. 75-76; Helene Sumper, "Entwicklung des bayerischen zumal Munchener Volksschulwesens," DieLehrerin 6 (1889-90): 610. 16. Report of School Commissioner Lehner about the instruction of Lehrerinnen candidates, May 22, 1848, StAM, Schulamt 151 Lehrerbildung, Richtlinien und Berichte iiber die Ausbildung der weltlichen Lehrerinnen, Verzeichnis der Kandidatinnen mit Beurteilung, 1836-1868, no number. 17. Hildegard Bogerts, Bildung und berufliches Selbstverstandnis lehrenderFrauen in derZeit 1885 bis 1920 (Frankfurt, 1977) p. 36. 18. Rainer Boelling, Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Lehrer: Bin Uberblick von 1800 bis zurGegenwart (Gottingen, 1983), pp. 57, 59. 19. Beilner, Die Emanzipation, p. 40. 20. Ibid.; Sumper, "Entwicklung," p. 611. 21. Sumper, "Entwicklung," p. 613; Beilner, Die Emanzipation, p. 85. 22. That women teacher-training candidates for either elementary or secondary schools partook of virtually the same curriculum contrasted with the experience of male candidates. Volksschulen and Knabenschulen (middle-school) teachers attended a teachers' seminar, but those aspiring to teach at the Oberrealschulen and the Gymnasien were university-trained. There was a greater status and income differential between the Lehrer than between the Lehrerinnen. Rosalie Buettner, DieLehrerinnen:Forderungen, LeistungenundAussichtenindiesemBeruf(Leip7Ag, 1900?), pp. 15-17. 23. Poehlmann, "Die Vorbildung," p. 618. Many reformers of women's education were interested in reorganizing all levels of education for girls and women. They wanted programs equivalent to those in the schools for boys and men. For further discussion see James C. Albisetti, "Could Separate Be Equal? Helene Lange and Women's Education in Germany," History of Education Quarterly 22 (Fall 1982); Judith Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau in akademischen Berufen (Leipzig, 1915), p. 30. 24. Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau, pp. 32-33. Helene Lange's specific criticisms are found in Albisetti, "Could Separate Be Equal," pp. 312-313. 25. Beilner, Die Emanzipation, p. 89. 26. Teachers, men and women, always named their organizations Vereine (associations), because they were reluctant to be associated with Gewerkschaften (unions). In the early years of the Weimar Republic, the Bayerischer Volksschullehrer Verein (B VLV) and the Bayerischer Lehrerinnen Verein (BLiV) initially refused connection with the civil servants' union. This behavior reemphasizes the teachers' mentality because they considered themselves professionals, even though they were civil servants. Beilner, Die Emanzipation, pp. 82-83. 27. The original Bavarian Lehrerverein was established in 1832, but as a result of the 1848 upheavals, the German governments banned such organizations. Prussia and Bavaria lifted these restrictions in the early 1860s. The reconstituted Bavarian


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Volksschullehrer Verein was founded in 1861. Boelling, Sozialgeschichte, pp. 80-84; Beilner, Die Emanzipation, p. 42. 28. Beilner, Die Emanzipation, p. 46. For a biographical sketch of Helene Sumper, see also Beilner, Die Emanzipation, pp. 55-57. 29. "Vereinsangelegenheiten Munchen," DieLehrerin 3 (1886-87): 380-81. 30. "Vereinsangelegenheiten Munchen," Die Lehrerin 3 (1886-87): 539-40, Helene Sumper, "Stellung des Lehrerinnen-Vereins Munchen zur Lehrerinnenfrage," Die Lehrerin 22 (1905-06): 1094. The Lehrerinnenvereine took on a variety of causes, but one that was uppermost in the minds of the leaders of associations was female control of the Madchenschulen. These women wanted to see Lehrerinnen not only as faculty in the schools, but also as administrators. Much attention has focused on Helene Lange's famous GelbeBroschure: see Monika Simmel, Erziehung mm Weibe: Mddchenbildung im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1980), p. 134; and Albisetti, "Could Separate Be Equal" pp. 302ff. Marie Loeper-Housselle avidly supported the cause. See also her articles: Marie Loeper-Housselle, "Antwort Sr. Excellenz des Herrn Ministers von Gossler auf die Petition von Berliner Frauen, betreffend die hohere Madchenschule und ihre Bestimmung," Die Lehrerin 6 (188990): 97-100, 101-4; "Die erzieherliche Wirksamkeit der Lehrerinnen im allgemeinen und der Volksschullehrerinnen im besonderen," Die Lehrerin 5 (1888-89): 644-45; "Die Verwendung von Lehrerinnen an Volks- und Fortbildungsschulen fur Madchen," Die Lehrerin 6 (1889-90): 583; "Die Erziehung derFraudurch die Frau," Die Lehrerin 1 (1890-91): 231. Emmy Beckmann took up the cause, especially that of female school directors: Emmy Beckmann, "Die gegenwartige Lage des Lehrerinnenberufs," Die Lehrerin 34 (October 15, 1919): 105, 108. 31. Helene Sumper, "Jahresberichtdes Lehrerinnenvereins Munchen, erstattetin der Generalversammlung von 19. Januar 1890," Die Lehrerin 6 (1889-90): 439-42. For a discussion of the Fortbildungsschule and the Vereins' support thereof, see Helene Sumper, "Jahresbericht des Lehrerinnenvereins Munchen, erstattet in der Vollversammlung am 18. Januar 1893," Die Lehrerin 9 (1892-93): 401-4, and "Jahresbericht des Lehrerinnenvereins Munchen," Die Lehrerin 12 (1895-96): 46365. "Die weiblichen Fortbildungsschulen in Bayern," DieLehrerin 27, suppl. B no. 23 (Feb. 4, 1911): 91-92, and 27, suppl. B no. 24 (March 4, 1911): 97-98, describes changes in mandatory school attendance laws and the Fortbildungsschulen for young women in Bavaria. On Dec. 22, 1919, the Bavarian government made attendance at the Fortbildungsschulen mandatory (Beilner, Die Emanzipation p. 246). 32. Louise Sigl, "Jahresbericht des Lehrerinnenvereins Munchen," Die Lehrerin 15 (1898-99): 731-34; Marie Loeper-Housselle, "Berichtiiberdieam 10. September 1898 zu Munchen abgehaltene Versammlung zur Griindung eines bayerischen Lehrerinnenvereins," Die Lehrerin 15 (1898-99): 52-54, 58. 33. At the turn of the century, the BLiV requested annual salaries for female teachers: 1,200 marks for Lehrerinnen, 900 marks for Verweserinnen, and 850 marks for Hilfslehrerinnen. The request further stated that the ratio of 4:5 must be kept with respect to the salaries of the Lehrer. Also, consideration must be given with respect to the local cost of living, with supplemental pay as needed. "Bayern: Eingaben des bayerischen Lehrerinnenvereins an das Konigliche Bayerische Staatsministerium des Innern fur Kirch- und Schulangelegenheiten, betreffend," Die Lehrerin 16 (18991900): 436-38. Four years later, a MLiV report incorporated the following annual salary requests: 1,800 marks for Lehrerinnen, 1,500 marks for Verweserinnen, and 1,200 marks for Hilfslehrerinnen. A schedule of increases for years of service was also included (Louise

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Sigl, "Jahresbericht des Lehrerinnenvereins Miinchen," Die Lehrerin 21 (1904—5): 888-95). The ratio of 4:5 (women to men) for salaries must have been accepted practice, but I have only been able to verify this with some statistics from a Prussian Ministerialerlass from 1885, in which the salaries for Lehrerinnen were to be 75 to 80% that of the Lehrer. Ehrich and Vauth, "Kampf," p. 103. 34. "Bayerischer Lehrerinnen-Verein 1. Hauptversammlung zu Miinchen vom 1. bis 4. August 1900," Die Lehrerin 17 (1900-1): 50, 56. 35. Beilner, Die Emanzipation, p. 243. In 1912, Bavaria enacted an Ausfiihrungsgesetz zur Reichs-Versicherungsordnung (Art. 56), which removed restrictions against married Beamtinnen. They can no longer be dismissed because they marry, nor do they lose their pension rights. Teachers were not included in this legislation. For further information, see Henry Theodor Matthias Meyer, Day Zolibat derLehrerin, Tag-Flugschriften, no. 18 (Jena, 1917), p. 19. 36. "Zweite Hauptversammlung des Bayerischen Lehrerinnen-Vereins in Nurnberg vom 18. bis zum 20. Mai 1902," Die Lehrerin 18 (1901-2): 745-47; "Munchen: Mutterabend," Die Lehrerin 21 (1904-5): 347; "Mutterabende, " Die Lehrerin 20 (1903-4): 459. 37. Marie Loeper-Housselle, "Die verheiratete Lehrerin," Die Lehrerin 21 (1904-5): 669, 671, 673-75. 38. Skopp, "Elementary School Teachers" pp. 344, 348. 39. Rainer Boelling, using statistics from Brandenburg and Baden for 18801920, describes the social origins of male and female teaching candidates. His findings confirm that on the whole the young women came from families with higher social status than that of the men. Rainer Boelling, Volksschullehrer und Politik: Der deutschen Lehrerverein, 1918-1933 (Gottingen, 1978), p. 22. For further discussion on class differences, see also Use Cablings and Elle Moering, Die Volksschullehrerin: Sozialgeschichte und Gegenwartslage (Heidelberg, 1961), pp. 45-46, 48; Beilner, Die Emanzipation, p. 44; Rosemarie Nave-Herz, "Sozialgeschichtlicher Abriss des Grund- und Hauptschullehrerinnenberufs," in Lehrerinnen: Zur Geschichte eines Frauenberufs, pp. 69-70. 40. The salaries for Lehrerinnen in Munich were 75 percent those of Lehrer. The range for women was 2,160-4,050 marks, for men 2,820-5,520 marks, depending on years of service. In Nuremberg, Lehrerinnen received 72 percent of the salary of their male colleagues. The range for women was 1,920-3,690 marks, for men 2,640-5,220 marks. "Zusammenstellung der neugeregelten Gehaltsbeziige in den zwei grossten Stadten Bayerns: Munchen und Nurnberg," Die Lehrerin 27, suppl. B no. 9 (July 23, 1910): 35. Other discussions of salary differences can be found in Ernst Cloer, "Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Solidarisierung der preussischen Volksschullehrerschaft im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik," in Der Lehrer und seine Organisation, ed. Manfred Heinemann (Stuttgart, 1977), p. 71; Karl Knabe, Deutsches Unterrichtswesen der Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1910), p. 18; Marie Calm, Die Stellung der deutschen Lehrerinnen (Berlin, 1870), P. 12; I. L. Kandel, The Training of Elementary School Teachers in Germany (New York, 1910), pp. 117-18; Beilner, Die Emanzipation, pp. 43, 111-12. 41. L. Spiessl, "Die deutsche Lehrerversammlung in Munchen und die Lehrerinnen," Die Lehrerin 22 (1905-6): 1060; Beilner, Die Emanzipation, pp. 75-6. 42. Spiessl, "Die deutsche Lehrerversammlung," pp. 1077, 1085-87. 43. Sumper's speech was quoted in Spiessl, "Die deutsche Lehrerversamm-


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lung," p. 1080. A synopsis of the Lehrertag is also found in Beilner, Die Emanzipation, pp. 75-76. 44. Spiessl, "Die deutsche Lehrerversammlung," pp. 1060-61. 45. "Vereinsangelegenheiten: Lehrerinnenverein Miinchen," Die Lehrerin 25 (1908-9): 227; "Bayerischer Lehrerinnenverein: Thesen zur Lehrerbiklung," Die Lehrerin 21, suppl. B no. 11 (Aug. 20, 1910): 43-44; Helene Sumper, "Bayerischer Lehrerinnenverein: Tatigkeitsbericht," Die Lehrerin 30, suppl. B no. 11 (Sept. 20, 1913): 49; Beilner, Die Emanzipation, p. 246. 46. With the advent of state supervision and licensing of women teachers, which occurred during the mid-nineteenth century, Lehrerinnen became civil servants, but always fell under special rules. Liese Thurmann-Hermann, "Die Wirkungen des Krieges auf die hoheren Frauenberufe," Die Lehrerin 32 (Sept. 25, 1915): 205; NaveHerz, "Sozialgeschichtlicher Abriss," p. 74; Boelling, Sozialgeschichte, p. 101. 47. Franziska Ohnesorge, "Die Berufsnot der Frauen," Die Lehrerin 35 (March 15, 1919): 193-94, Beilner, Die Emanzipation, pp. 114, 148, 173, 175-76n. The complete text of the pronouncement of the Bavarian Supreme Court cited in a footnote in Beilner, reads: "Das Gesamtministerium wacht uber die Sicherheit des Staates. Es hat bei drohender Gefahr die Massnahmen zu ergreifen, welche die Ruhe und Ordnung im Innern sichern oder gegeniiber der Gefahr eines Angriffs von aussen unmittelbar erforderlich sind. Zu diesem Zwecke kann es vorubergehend die verfassungsmassigen Grundrechte ganz oder teilweise ausser Kraft setzen. Verfassungsurkunde des Freistaats Bayern vom 14. 8. 1919, Paragraf 64, Gesetz-und Verordnungsblatt, p. 546" (Beilner, Die Emanzipation, p. 176). For a discussion of the elimination of legal limitations against women during the Weimar era, see Gahlings and Moering, Die Volksschullehrerin pp. 94-100, 107. Jill Mclntyre, "Women and the Professions in Germany, 1930—1940," in German Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler, eds. Anthony Nichols and Erich Matthias (London, 1971), p. 186. 48. Nave-Herz, "Sozialgeschichtlicher Abriss," p. 75; Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York, 1987), pp. 207-9. 49. This sweeping article on women educators in Germany includes a negative observation about the recognition (or lack thereof) accorded women teachers in the Federal Republic today. See Use Brehmer, "Women as Educators in GermanSpeaking Europe: The Middle Ages to Today," in Women Educators: Employees of Schools in Western Countries, ed. Patricia A. Schmuck (Albany, N.Y., 1987): 118-19. 50. Claudia Koonz, "Feminism in the Fatherland: Women's Rights, Gender and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany." Paper delivered at Seventh Berkshire Conference, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass., June 20, 1987.

Engineers in Wilhelmian Germany: Professionalization, Deprofessionalization, and the Development of Nonacademic Technical Education KEES GISPEN

I American engineers, in the words of Robert Perrucci and Joel Gerstl,are a "profession without community." This apt phrase applies to German engineers as well. Like their American counterparts, German engineers have always lacked the corporate solidarity one typically associates with the professions. In both the United States and Germany, moreover, changes and diversity in engineering education have been major influences in preventing the emergence of a professional community. In the American context this is perhaps not as surprising as in Germany, because the transition from a "practical art viewpoint to a science stressing research and development" is of rather recent vintage in the United States.1 It was not until the late nineteenth century that on-the-job training and what Monte Calvert has called "shop culture" began to be replaced by a "school culture" of varying degrees of sophistication. In many ways this transition is still not complete today, and the educational diversity of American engineers remains extraordinarily great.2 In contrast, Germany has had a system of science-based engineering education in government-funded technical institutes that dates back to the 1820s and 1830s and that had become fairly well standardized by the 1880s. In other words, the kind of academic "school culture" that is still a relative novelty in the United States was already an integral part of German engineering education in the early part of the nineteenth century. On the face of it, one would therefore expect the kind of educational diversity that still haunts American engineering to have been overcome in Germany a long time ago. In fact, such homogenization did not occur in the German engineering profession, which if anything was characterized by educational fissures and 104

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other cleavages that ran far deeper than those in the United States. Unlike engineers in other Western societies, German engineers became caught up in developments that left them bitterly divided, fragmented into several camps that confronted each other or the outside world with a mixture of active hostility and passive resentment. The opposing forces tended to neutralize each other, so that the outcome was superficially identical with that in the United States, which was specifically a manifest lack of professional power and solidarity for the occupation as a whole. Nothing demonstrated this condition more clearly than the history of the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (VDI; Association of German Engineers), Germany's largest, oldest, most prestigious, and comprehensive engineering association. In order to survive the conflicting pressures that buffeted it during the two and a half decades preceding the First World War, the VDI was forced to retreat to a posture of strict neutrality—and hence increasing marginality—in all the socioprofessional issues that most concerned engineers. One crucial exception was the engineering society's deep and fateful involvement in technical education. 3 The precarious equilibrium achieved by the VDI was deceptive, however, because it masked the growing power of the profession's managementdominated leadership as well as the debilitating impotence of the rank-and file members. What actually was taking place in the decades preceding the First World War was a process of simultaneous professionalization and deprofessionalization among German engineers. Professional power, solidarity, and cohesion became concentrated in the hands of a small elite of managerial and entrepreneurial engineers, who had in the 1870s already wrested control from the profession's academic and professorial leadership. At the same time that these technically trained industrialists succeeded in wrapping themselves in the mantle of professional authority, ordinary salaried engineers experienced a very different fate. They fell victim to increased educational and functional diversity, internecine feuding, career crowding, downward mobility, and stagnating or declining earnings—in short, a process they themselves described as "proletarianization."4 One crucial link in the chain of events that brought about this state of affairs was the introduction in the late nineteenth century of a new type of applied, nonacademic engineering education. Consciously modeled on the practical skills and shop training of American (and British) engineers, the new schools were designed to stimulate industrial progress by supplementing the existing system of higher technical institutes (technische Hochschulen). Ironically, this development took place at exactly the same time that the United States, emulating the German higher technical institutes, was beginning to make the transition to university-based engineering education. From a strictly economic point of view, Germany's nonacademic engineering schools were an unqualified success, as attested by the glowing comments of the American Wickenden Commission that investigated engineering education in the United States and Europe during the 1920s. "In the author's judgment," wrote William Wickenden, "nothing in the entire educational system of Central Europe has more value as an example to America than these admirable schools

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with their clear perception of practical aims, their direct methods, their efficient use of time and equipment, and their integration of teaching with industrial experience."5 From a perspective that also takes account of noneconomic characteristics, the new engineering schools were far more problematic. Their economic benefits were purchased at the cost of major social changes and disturbing realignments within the engineering profession. On the one hand, disagreements about the organization and purpose of nonacademic engineering education between 1897 and 1910 gave the profession's managerial leadership a chance to augment its power in relation to the state. In a protracted struggle with the Prussian government over such details as curriculum and admission standards, this small managerial elite usurped a significant amount of state power. Operating through the VDI, it was able to substitute exclusive government dominion over technical education with a system of corporatist codetermination, in which its own, privatized authority over public affairs figured prominently.6 On the other hand, the growth of nonacademic engineering schools wreaked havoc with the lives and careers of an entire generation of engineers, namely, those who came on the job market in the last decade or fifteen years preceding the First World War. The new institutions produced a type of inexpensive and "uncultivated" engineer who readily competed with academically trained (and, since 1899, certified) engineers, thereby destroying the tenuous educational cohesion and academic credibility that the latter had been at such pains to establish. Compounding this problem was a dramatic oversupply of technically trained personnel, which resulted from the unfortunate timing of the establishment of the nonacademic engineering schools. After long delays and a slow start, their gradually increasing popularity coincided not just with massive growth in the enrollments as the technische Hochschulen, but also with a flourishing, semilegitimate system of proprietary technical schools trying to make money. II

The need for nonacademic engineering schools in Prussia first arose in the late 1870s, when the existing system of technical education as conceived by Peter Beuth and his successors had evolved into something that no longer resembled its origins. Berlin's Industrial Academy became the technische Hochschule with new, formidable admission standards (Abitur or Primareife), while the majority of the old provincial trade schools became general, nine-year secondary schools with Latin (Oberrealschuleri). Not only had the flexibility and openness that formerly characterized Prussia's system of technical education disappeared, but so also had most of the opportunities to pursue direct training for the broad range of engineering tasks in industry. The Prussian government was slow to fill the void left by the reorganization of 1879. This was the case even though the government's own experts and organizations like the VDI pressed for action. It was not until 1890 that a beginning was made with reintroducing applied, nonacademic engineering


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education. Moreover, it was not until about 1900 that the schools that were established began to make their impact felt. The initial passivity was a consequence of several influences, centering on a mixture of unfavorable financing arrangements with the municipalities, a lack of understanding on the part of the top decision makers for the need of graduated engineering education, and disagreement among the experts about the format and organization of the prospective school.7 The first two obstacles disappeared with the passage of time. After Bismarck left the scene in 1890, the Prussian government—especially Finance Minister Johannes von Miquel and Trade Minister Hans von Berlepsch— became much more energetic with regard to supporting nonacademic engineering education. By 1912, the funding for such institutions (twenty-three Machine-Building Schools and Higher Machine-Building Schools) had increased by a factor of more than forty since 1885, from approximately 33,000 to 1.5 million marks.8 In contrast, the organizational question turned out to be more difficult to solve. The government initially opted for a relatively modest kind of school, which it called Foreman School (Werkmeister Schule)—a misnomer that was later changed to Lower Machine-Building School (LMBS)—as opposed to the plan of the VDI for a more ambitious institution, the future Higher Machine-Building School (HMBS). The differences had to do with the curriculum and, more importantly, with the amount of practical training and formal schooling required for admission, namely, four years of experience and a primary education (Volksschule) for the lower school, and two years of experience and the one-year volunteer exemption (theEinjahriges) or six years, starting at age nine or ten, at a general secondary school, for the higher one. In principle, therefore, the two schools targeted different audiences, even though both had a two-year program. The Foreman School was aimed at young men from the working class, and in school debates in the early 1880s it had been the preferred choice of heavy industry. The higher school, which would primarily attract the sons of the petite bourgeoisie, appealed more to smaller businesses, traditional sectors of the economy, and industries such as machinery and machine tools. For a variety of reasons it proved difficult to maintain this distinction in practice. The government's choice in favor of the lower school was based on a mixture of social and economic reasoning as well as practical considerations. Initially, the agency charged with nonacademic technical education lacked the jurisdiction necessary for developing the more advanced school. In terms of economic needs, the relevant government officials thought it would be possible to combine the tasks of supplying lower-grade technical personnel to heavy industry with the demands of smaller businesses, the engineering industries, and the more traditional sectors of the economy. They believed they would be able to satisfy both groups with just one institution if they created an allpurpose school with low admission standards but with a relatively advanced curriculum. Socially, the government gave priority to the Foreman Schools because it anticipated that they would reduce the growth of class tensions and promote social stability among the lower classes. As Trade Minister Reinhold

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von Sydow put it in 1910 in a twenty-five-year retrospective on nonacademic technical education, the schools in question had "opened the door for working people trying to raise themselves . . . [and] made possible their upward mobility." In so doing, the engineering schools had "contributed to the reduction of class tensions." Also, from the social vantage point, a school with low admission standards but a curriculum that trained for positions higher up the scale was desirable.9 In 1896, when the Prussian government had managed to open some six Foreman Schools in different cities and was planning to continue along this path, it ran into opposition from the VDI. In the early 1890s, the engineering society had developed its own, different plan for nonacademic technical schools, which it had begun to implement on an experimental basis in Cologne. With support from the city and contributing a subsidy of its own, the VDI in 1890-91 reorganized Cologne's municipal trade school into something approximating the HMBS. The major difference was that the VDI's school did not require the one-year volunteer certificate for admission, making up the deficit in formal education with two semesters of preparatory courses. The "Cologne model," as it became known, was inspired by the anticipation of the VDI leadership of a shortage of shop floor managers and inexpensive but highly specialized design engineers to do the routine drafting as well as detail design of machine parts, structural elements, and the like, under the supervision of a responsible senior engineer; furthermore, this concern was not unreasonable considering the drastic upgrading and shrinkage of Prussia's technical-education system undertaken in the 1870s. As the engineering society's report on nonacademic technical education had noted in 1889, "prudent frugality commands industry to limit itself with respect to the majority of its [technical] personnel to a more narrowly circumscribed, specialized occupational training [than that provided by the technische Hochschulen]."10 At the same time that it sought something simpler than an academically educated engineer, however, the VDI was also concerned that the government's Foreman Schools were not good enough. It feared that they would produce a graduate suitable only for the lowest office work and incapable of the more challenging engineering tasks for which the demand was greatest. Graduates of the government's schools, as one of the engineering society's spokesmen contended, would become "an office proletariat of technicians—and these folks very easily join the Social Democrats."11 Originally the VDI had reached the conclusion that the kind of nonacademic engineer it sought would need the one-year volunteer certificate (or Obersekundareife) as evidence of an ability to perform the functions, and occupy a middling status between lower-grade technicians and academically trained engineers. However, the VDI later decided that this admission requirement unnecessarily restricted the recruiting pool and also introduced categories from a preindustrial social hierarchy into an arena that had no room for them. The major reason for the switch had to do with concern about the international competitiveness of German technology, which had been fueled by a mixture of nationalism and business interests. In the words of Theodor Peters, the business


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manager of the VDI, "I am today [1898] of the opinion that in light of the exceptional difficulty of our industry's mission to emerge victorious in international competition, technical ability should be the primary consideration, and not a symbol of general education and of social status extraneous to technical education,"12 The effect of the VDI's lowering admission standards for its engineering school and the government's upgrading the curriculum of its schools was that the differences between the two institutions and their student body became negligible indeed. This did not stop the engineering society's leadership from becoming embroiled in a bitter confrontation with the government over their respective designs. The conflict soon escalated into a larger power struggle over the control of nonacademic engineering training and the right to set technicaleducation policy in general. The battle was first joined when the government announced plans to assume control of the Cologne school as part of its ongoing expansion of the Foreman Schools. The VDI responded by calling into question the adequacy of these institutions. It was able to obtain a delay by requesting time to study the problem. In an 1897 white paper, the engineering society condemned the government's schools as ill-conceived and as seducing potentially good shop floor technicians and foremen to become bad office personnel—an accusation that proved to be largely unfounded. The VDI also sought to influence the Landtag to stop funding the government's program. In 1898, it was for the first time invited to participate in a conference with government officials. This apparent step toward a consultative role for the VDI turned out to be a sham. The conference was a rigged affair, and the government, ignoring further protests from the engineering society, proceeded with its plans to establish additional Foreman Schools. In spite of this initial setback, the VDI managed to emerge victorious in the end. In 1899, it succeeded in arousing the suspicions of Finance Minister Miquel that the Ministry of Trade might be mismanaging nonacademic engineering education. It also produced a considerable amount of unfavorable publicity concerning the Foreman Schools. The consequent worries of the Bureau of Industrial Education (BIE) about budget cuts and about the damaging effects of public controversy on enrollments brought about a policy of compromise with the VDI. Negotiations between the engineering society and the Ministry of Trade were reopened later in 1899, and the former's criticisms of the Foreman Schools received a second hearing. When the VDI was unable to prove any of its allegations, the government's representatives began to realize that what was at stake was not simply a substantive disagreement but rather a power struggle posing as policy differences. The government, thought Alfons Gotte, who was then a junior analyst in the BIE, should tell the leaders of the VDI to stop interfering in the government's business, and put an end to the "crooked machinations of certain movers and shakers of the [engineering] society."13 Gotte clearly recognized that what was at stake was the principle of state sovereignty. "If the wishes of the gentlemen of the engineering society are fulfilled," he wrote, "the government would have to transfer the right to

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supervise the schools to the VDI and could limit itself to providing the necessary funds."14 Gotte's insights were to no avail. The Foreman Schools had become embroiled in controversy, and the longer this lasted the more endangered they became, risking their funding and having to compete on increasingly unfavorable terms with state schools elsewhere and with the proliferating proprietary schools. Thus, in 1901 Privy Councillor Fritz Donhoff, a senior official with the BIE, expressed great alarm at the prospect of the "old conflict between the engineering society and the government coming to life again—a conflict that would have very unpleasant consequences for the schools."15 To end the impasse, the government quietly decided to adopt some of the recommendations of the VDI. In 1901, it issued new regulations for nonacademic engineering education that clearly reflected the engineering society's imprint. The plans to establish additional Foreman Schools, now known as LMBS, were discontinued. Henceforth the government concentrated its efforts on the HMBS, although it rejected the flexible admission policy of the VDI for this institution. The government approved a special, difficult admissions examination for highly talented students who lacked the one-year volunteer exemption, but otherwise it firmly insisted on this inherited criterion of middling socioeducational status. 16 The 1901 reorganization was neither a success nor did it resolve the conflict between the engineering society and the government. The leadership of the VDI had failed to achieve its objectives of codetermination and professional power, because the government, in spite of the 1901 compromise, refused to institutionalize consultation, let alone recognize the engineering society as its equal partner in technical-education policy. The absence of collaboration was reflected in the reforms themselves, which combined the worst features of the VDFs program and that of the government. On the one hand, they reduced the LMBS, which had begun to prove itself in spite of all the criticisms of the VDI. On the other hand, the new HMBS failed to draw enough students, because of their strict discipline, rigorous program, and admission standards that were high in relation to the career goals they advertised. As a consequence, and in spite of the expenditure of a great deal of effort and money, Prussia's nonacademic engineering schools remained in limbo after 1901. The government officials in charge, who blamed their problems on the leadership of the engineering society, soon realized that additional reorganizations were needed if the system was to survive. As early as 1904, the Ministry of Trade began to formulate plans for making the MBS system more attractive to students. The students, who were seduced by a mixture of deceptive advertising and the promise of a freewheeling student life, went in massive numbers to the non-Prussian proprietary institutes. The crux of the government's plan was to lower admission standards and to raise the stated career objectives of its schools. In emulation of the proprietary schools, the stiff admission standards of the HMBS were to be deemphasized, while a fifth semester was to be added at the final year of the curriculum, in order to make possible the kind of specialization and ready skills that translated into


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engineering jobs. As the proposed new prospectus of the HMBS stated, its goal was to train "managers (Letter) of larger workshops" and "independent design engineers" (selbstandige Konstrukteure).11 To a large extent, the government had adopted the admission standards of the VDFs "Cologne model." Even so, the engineering society objected to certain aspects of the changes, in particular to the fifth semester and to the revival of the LMBS. But the government was determined to get its way, and this time without interference from the engineering society. At a pro forma, one-day conference in July 1907, Trade Minister Clemens von Delbriick duly noted the strenuous protests by Theodor Peters of the VDI and Borsig Director Max Krause, and completely ignored them. In November 1907, relaxed new admission standards, the first of a series of projected new regulations, were announced. 18 Ill

The Prussian government's carefully laid plans would almost certainly have succeeded, had it not been for the devastating oversupply of engineers and career crowding produced by all the different kinds and growing numbers of technical schools at this time. Even as the BIE was trying to save its schools by lowering admission standards to the barest minimum, the engineering profession was inundated by a flood of new and educationally highly diverse engineering graduates. They came from Prussian schools such as the LMBS and the HMBS as well as the Building Trade Schools, from non-Prussian proprietary engineering schools, which were sometimes very large (e.g., the Technikum Mittweida near Chemnitz), from state-run, nonacademic engineering schools in other parts of Germany, and from the technische Hochschulen. Especially the latter had experienced abrupt enrollment increases since the early 1890s, in part because the dramatic progress of industrialization opened up whole areas of previously nonexistent employment, in part also because nonacademic engineering education had developed so late and so slowly. To satisfy the need, the technische Hochschulen, which in 1899 had finally been granted the rank of universities and the right to bestow official academic degrees, had admitted large numbers of nonmatriculated students as auditors and "guests."19 The shortage of technical personnel anticipated in the 1880s and the excitement about industrialization during the 1890s had produced a boom in technical and engineering education that turned into a bust in the decade preceding 1914. The tremendous supply was absorbed only because large numbers of engineers and other technicians found positions for which they were overqualified, and in which they were underpaid and otherwise treated in accordance with the unmerciful logic of supply and demand. Many worked for years as menial copyists and draftsmen, being paid less than what (skilled) blue-collar workers earned.20 For the industrial employers, who in any case paid far less attention to educational distinctions than did the state or professions in which educational homogeneity determined functional or class boundaries, it was a buyers'

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market. They hired, fired, and promoted strictly on the basis of knowledge and proven ability. Academic certification, diplomas, and all the other, fine educational gradations that ordinarily mattered so much in Germany counted for almost nothing. The effect was to produce a crisis of unparalleled magnitude in the junior ranks of the engineering profession. The engineers who found themselves in this debilitating situation essentially responded in one of two ways. One was to draw the logical conclusion from their actual condition and use their shared class position as the only meaningful platform for ameliorative action. Their common fate as salaried technical employees was the basis for solidarity, which was reinforced by indiscriminate employer treatment and a legal status that handicapped all engineers—regardless of their educational background—in comparison to administrative and/or commercial employees. This choice meant ignoring the educational differences that divided academically certified, "cultivated" professionals from nonacademic engineers. It led to unionization and to an adversarial relationship with industrial management, as exemplified by the rapid growth of an aggressive engineering union, the Bund der technischindustriellen Beamten (BtiB; League of Technical and Industrial Officials). The only criterion for membership in the BtiB was the status of salaried technical employment in private industry above the rank of foreman. A willingness to strike and initiate boycotts as well as an ambitious program for legislative reforms and effective publicity were the chief weapons in the armory of the BtiB. Though a radical step for middle-class and nonproletarian Germans, especially for those who had graduated from the academic and professional technische Hochschulen, the BtiB model became increasingly popular. Formed in 1904, the engineering union on the eve of the First World War numbered roughly twenty-four thousand members, or about 16 percent of Germany's approximately one hundred fifty thousand salaried engineers. About 20 percent of the membership of the BtiB were certified Diplom-Ingenieure from the technische Hochschulen. This group played a disproportionately important role in the union's leadership. The remaining 80 percent were either graduates of nonacademic engineering schools, or self-taught engineers, or men who had attended—but not officially graduated from—a technische Hochschule, or a combination of all three.21 The other choice engineers made was to emphasize shared professional education and academic status as their principle of solidarity. This approach, as illustrated by the Verband Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure (VDDI; Association of German Certified Engineers), purposely overlooked class and functional differences. It hoped to overcome the crisis by an attitude of anticipatory socialization and by trying to monopolize the better positions in industry for certified Diplom-Ingenieure at the expense of preempted opportunities for nonacademic engineers. Only Diplom-Ingenieure, the VDDI claimed, were true engineers of managerial quality. As such they should avoid confrontation with the industrialists, regardless of how unprofessionally they were treated early in their careers. Conditions were bound to improve as they climbed up the ranks.


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The high-sounding language of the VDDI was partly intended to mask its resentment of powerful industrialists who allowed the engineers' proletarianization to continue for the sake of profits. The other major purpose was differentiation from nonacademic engineers. With rhetoric that was a curious mixture of hatred, social arrogance, and idealistic pronouncements about the unpolitical, conciliatory leadership potential of academically certified engineers who were above the classes, the VDDI emphasized the gulf that divided "cultivated" professionals from nonacademic engineers. It portrayed the latter as inferior and "uncultivated" mechanics, rapacious social climbers, and would-be engineers, who ruined the reputation of the profession and the lives of its most valuable members. It sought to exclude nonacademic engineers from the VDI, and, when this failed, threw its energies into an ill-fated effort to create new career avenues for its own kind in the civil service and in municipal administrations. The outcome of this effort was more resentment of the preexisting elites that effectively maintained the status quo and excluded the engineers. Founded in 1909, the VDDI was never as popular as the BtiB. Contemptuously known as the "title association," it only had about thirty-five hundred members in 1914. This was about 13 percent of the total number of DiplomIngenieure graduated since 1899 (estimated at twenty-five to thirty thousand), substantially fewer than the contingent of academically trained engineers of the BtiB. 22 Needless to say, the BtiB and the VDDI were bitter enemies. They fought each other every step of the way, while trying to seduce each other's academically certified members with appealing propaganda. Neither organization could vanquish the other, because the organizational principles of both showed a deficit precisely in the area in which its opponent had strength. The kind of professional cohesion they sought could succeed only if shared education (status) and occupational function (class) coincided. This was the case with neither the BtiB nor the VDDI. The former suffered from ignoring so vital a social distinction in the German context as that between individuals with Abitur and academic certification on the one hand, and, on the other hand, those who had no more than the one-year volunteer exemption or Volksschule education, practical training, perhaps self-study, and two or three years of training at a nonacademic engineering school. In contrast, the VDDI was harmed by its insistence on overlooking the crucial class and functional differences that divided technische Hochschule graduates into civil servants, salaried employees, educators, self-employed consultants, managers, entrepreneurs, and so forth—all of them with vastly different duties, social roles, economic interests, and their own group-formative powers. The animosity between the BtiB and the VDDI, and in general the cleavage between certified engineers and nonacademic ones, worked to the advantage of a third group of engineers: the technically trained managers and industrialists at the top of the profession. Understandably, these men looked with apprehension on the developments sketched above, which were in large part a direct consequence of their own educational policies. The overabundant supply and the

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profession's internal divisions, however, enabled the employers to play off one side against the other and so defeat both. In the process, they also managed to emerge victorious in their old struggle with the Prussian government over the control of technical education. On the one hand, the engineering industrialists were able to fight the BtiB in open confrontation without having to worry much about the engineering union receiving assistance from the professionalizing segment of academically certified engineers, or from other parts of the salaried-employee movement that were legally somewhat less disadvantaged than engineers. To ensure that they stayed apart, it sufficed to make frequent allegations concerning the social democratic and unpatriotic tendencies of the BtiB, to refer to its members as inferior individuals, losers, mere mechanics with proletarianizing and democratic, equalizing tendencies—in other words, the antithesis of professionalism. The VDDI and a majority of the other salaried-employee organizations were all too willing to be convinced of the accuracy of such accusations, which they themselves helped spread with great energy. From this favorable position, the industrialists fought with all the means at their disposal the engineering union's demands for a minimum salary, for salaried—employee councils, job security, legal equality with the administrative and/or commercial employees, a unified code for salaried employees, elimination of competition clauses, and for the salaried engineer's ownership rights to his inventions. They opposed the BtiB in the political and legislative arena with vigorous lobbying and with quasischolarly expositions in the press and in professional journals and meetings. In the industrial sphere, they battled the engineering union with direct action, such as dismissals of organized engineers, strike breaking, union busting, and a variety of other brutal counterattacks, all of which essentially succeeded before 1914.23 On the other hand, the engineering employers and chief managerial engineers resolutely assisted the nonacademic engineers against the efforts of professionalizing Diplom-Ingenieure to convert the open, capitalist, industrial bureaucracy into something resembling the closed, education-dependent civil service hierarchy. It was in connection with the successful defense against this challenge to their most basic managerial and entrepreneurial powers that the engineering industrialists gained control of nonacademic engineering education. They were able to do so because the professionalizing division of the Diplom-Ingenieure sought to discredit not merely the nonacademic engineers themselves, but also and primarily the nonacademic engineering schools that produced them. As Professor Alois Riedler, the most eloquent spokesman for the professionalizers' interests, put it in early 1908, "the new Higher MachineBuilding Schools . . . and the most recent reorganization of these schools [were] the largest squandering of public funds ever perpetrated."24 Their products Riedler characterized as "cheap auxiliaries" and "people with no culture at all."25 The result of this attack on the MBS system, and on a VDI leadership that encouraged nonacademic engineering education, was an immediate drawing together of the two former adversaries, the VDI leadership and the BIE, in common defense of schools in which both had a great stake.


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For the industrialists, the schools in question were crucial not only on economic grounds but also because they served to disarm the technocratic and potentially anticapitalist aspirations of the professionalizers. As Borsig's Krause put it, "only industry itself can decide which positions should be filled with engineers from the technische Hochschule and which ones with nonacademic engineers."26 The idea of prescribing to the industrialists which positions they could fill with nonacademic engineers was based on an "unwarranted overestimation of knowledge over know-how and an underestimation of the individual competence of the nonacademic engineer."27 For the Prussian government, the prospect that its nonacademic engineering schools, which served not just economic ends but also those of social mobility and social stability, might be closed down or dismantled was infinitely more threatening than the possibility of having to administer a successful system in codetermination with the VDI. Moreover, the BIE reckoned that in the crisis there was perhaps an opportunity of gaining control of the non-Prussian proprietary engineering schools that were its nemesis. These institutions, the nonexistent admission standards and high-sounding "engineer" diplomas of which did far more damage to the profession's standing than the rigorous Prussian schools, were the most formidable competitors of the MBS. By itself the Prussian government could not touch them. If it collaborated with the VDI, which had nationwide influence in matters of technical education and powerful publicity apparatus that reached beyond the Prussian borders, then there was a real chance of forcing the proprietary schools onto the defensive.28 The new constellation first emerged during stormy public debates that took place in the Berlin chapter of the VDI in late 1907 and early 1908. The professionalizers' charge was led by Riedler, who was an enormously influential engineering educator at the technische Hochschule in Berlin.29 He accused the Prussian government and the leadership of the VDI of having done irreparable harm to the profession with their promotion of the MBS system. For the sake of low labor costs and the "production of cheap auxiliary forces for industry," Riedler charged, vast sums had been invested in a worthless network of nonacademic engineering schools. Though they "trained only office technicians and draftsmen," the MBS were poorly attended, which showed they were "not urgently needed." Regardless, the government tried to make the schools viable by lowering admission standards. It had done so because nonacademic engineers were the darlings of the industrialists, who preferred them over the academically trained, but less pliable "cultured" engineers. Thus the government had a policy that "amounted to total elimination of general cultivation" and resulted in "mass production of the least educated all the way down to those of the lowest quality." Such people could later "call themselves 'engineer'—in our land of prescribed preparatory education and strict segregation of professions (Standestrennung)!" The chief culprit in all of this was the VDI itself, according to Riedler. The leadership's "democratic" rhetoric of an open profession was "entirely foolish" and, if not expressly designed to destroy the social reputation of engineers, evidence of a fateful "lingering in CloudCuckoo-Land."30

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On the receiving end of this criticism were VDI business manager Peters, Borsig's Krause, and the Prussian government's Gotte, who acted as defenders of the nonacademic engineers and their schools. Against Riedler's furious attacks they held out together on all fronts. In what proved to be a prophetic insight, Peters accused Riedler of taking a stance that was at once grossly reactionary and quasi-revolutionary Social Democratic.31 It was precisely his peculiar combination of hostility toward the industrialists, resentment of the established authorities, and fear of egalitarianism with dreams of glory and professional emancipation that would appeal to the Diplom-Ingenieure who followed in Riedler's wake. Caught in a debilitating career squeeze, threatened simultaneously from above by the power of capitalist management and the state, and from below by nonacademic interlopers, the engineers who would subsequently form the VDDI easily embraced the mixture of reaction and their own brand of Utopian socialism that Jeffrey Herf has described as "reactionary modernism."32 In the aftermath of the Riedler affair, the government and the leadership of the VDI continued their newly found partnership. The highly charged debates had made clear not only how tense the situation had become, but also that the question of nonacademic engineering education was inextricably bound up with larger problems. It touched on the numbers and the types of engineers produced by the technische Hochschulen, on managerial authority, on social mobility and stability, on economic efficiency, on the Prussian state's ability to conduct educational policies in a larger, federal setting, on the contours of the engineering profession, and on the existing power structure of the VDI. Some sort of nationwide, central coordination between the various types of technical education was desperately needed. When the VDI requested suspension of the 1907 MBS reforms in December of 1907 and asked for renewed consultation, the government granted its wish on condition that the engineering society bring representatives from other technical-industrial associations into the picture as well. When the engineering society acceded to this demand, a path had been cleared for the formation of an organization that became known as the Deutscher Ausschuss fur Technisches Schulwesen (DATSCH; German Committee on Technical Education).33 As an improvisation dictated by the immediate need of solving the MBS controversy, the DATSCH from 1908 until its demise in 1939 quickly developed into Germany's top planning and coordinating agency for all aspects of technical education.34 At its center was the VDI, which especially in the initial years of operation provided the necessary funding, staff support, and leadership. At the same time the DATSCH transcended the VDI. Its membership consisted of Germany's leading engineering and technical associations like the VDEH (Verein Deutscher Eisenhuttenleute; metallurgical engineers) and the VDE (Verband Deutscher Elektrotechniker; electrical engineers), and included the increasingly powerful business association of the engineering industry, the VDMA (Verein Deutscher Maschinenbau-Anstalten). In time, several associations of educators also joined, as did socioeconomic interest groups of engineers like the BtiB and the VDDI. The DATSCH also maintained the closest


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contacts with government. Officials of the Prussian BIE such as Gotte and Donhoff, for example, actively participated in its work, the results of which were then adopted as government decrees and regulations. Other German states soon followed the Prussian government's lead. Despite the appearance of equal participation by all member organizations, there is no question that the managers of Germany's large engineering firms and senior business-oriented engineers dominated DATSCH. This was reflected in both the nature of its recommendations and its self-styled mandate, which was "to determine the needs and requirements of industrial and business practice."35 Still, the DATSCH tried to tackle the crisis in engineering education from a comprehensive view, and by adopting a consensual style it gave at least nominal representation to those whose fate was being decided. As a private body with de facto public powers, the DATSCH was one of the first manifestations before 1914 of that "twilight of sovereignty" that Charles Maier views as a hallmark of post-First World War "corporatism."36 One of the first acts of DATSCH was to try to settle the problem of statefunded nonacademic engineering education in such a way that the uncontrollable tensions in the profession might be reduced. It changed some of the most objectionable features of the MBS reform identified by Professor Riedler and his followers insofar as it raised admission standards a bit and somewhat lowered the schools' sights. But the DATSCH emphatically refused to extend educational differentiation between nonacademic engineers and academically trained engineers to the workplace. In the words of a 1911 DATSCH study, "it must be recognized that many of the technicians who graduate from the Technical Middle School [i.e., LMBS, HMBS, and non-Prussian schools of the same type] later advance to the position of engineer."37 The DATSCH also launched an offensive against the proprietary schools, which were gradually brought under control—though not until well after the First World War.38 The steps taken by the DATSCH sufficed to secure the survival, even the growth, of the MBS. Not surprisingly, they failed to appease the professionalizers or to stem the flood of new engineers. Even as the profession's elite assumed quasi-governmental authority, the crisis in its junior ranks continued unabated. While the BtiB responded with growing militancy and direct action, the academically certified professionalizers mounted a strenuous effort to change the statutes of the VDI and expel nonacademic engineers. Their effort failed, because of the leadership's unwillingness to concede that "the gentlemen who have come out of [nonacademic engineering] schools . . . no longer belong in the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure." The directorate's "fundamental standpoint" was to "leave free where [one's] education may have come from," and that "as a matter of course we look upon these gentlemen as being part of us," so long as they did the kind of work that qualified as engineering. In impotent frustration, the hard-core professionalizers broke away to establish the VDDI.39 IV

In the end, neither the VDDI nor the BtiB could realize the promise with which they started out. The engineers of both organizations, which battled each other

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furiously and had radically different social visions, became increasingly alienated from the dominant institutions of German society and, as all their sociopolitical and legislative initiatives failed, were increasingly thrown back onto themselves. Both organizations—one vehemently and the other more hesitantly—rejected an opening to the Social Democratic Left, which constituted the ready-made and most obvious avenue of social protest. From above, they were squeezed equally between the industrialists and the old order. It was this context that enabled the engineers' disillusionment and search for alternative solutions to flourish. Preceding the year 1914, the political direction this search would take was not yet clearly defined. The BtiB remained generally in the orbit of left-wing liberalism and democratic politics, even though it was becoming increasingly more evident that this did not solve the engineers' problems. With its messianic expectations and radical-right tendencies, the VDDI more clearly foreshadowed the future, but, nonetheless, its predominant posture remained dignified—academic professionalism above the parties—as expectations of breaking into the establishment remained alive. This tone was markedly different from the excessive nationalism and volkisch sentiments the VDDI embraced after the war.40 Finally, what does all this suggest about the "peculiarities of German history?" 41 Clearly, the experience of German engineers was on one level a function of processes that have little to do with preindustrial and precapitalist traditions. The demoralizing effects of failing correspondence between demographic pulses, the development and output of educational systems, and the assimilating capacity of the labor market are too well known to the current generation of historians to allow any illusions on this score. Nor is a violent confrontation between engineering trade unions and capitalist management, or, for that matter, the aggressive pursuit of professionalism, something that is particularly unique. Finally, the massive fragmentation of engineers and their failure to develop a wider professional community were not, as noted at the outset, conditions limited to Germany. On the contrary, they were in the first place a function of industrial capitalism itself. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to conclude from such observations that the history of German engineers was nothing more than one aspect of a "crisis of a capitalist state" or a product of the irregularities of economic growth.42 Obviously, the hierarchical thinking of professionalizing DiplomIngenieure, their orientation to civil service career models—dependent on precisely defined, state-sanctioned educational credentials and monopolies— and their hatred and fear of "uncultivated" interlopers were inspired in the first instance by their own, particularly German-Prussian context. In addition, the Social Democratic labor movement's preemption of the option to express protest by decidedly moving to the left, and the deep cleavage between proletarian and bourgeois life-styles, were nowhere more strongly pronounced than in Germany. Similarly, the motivations behind establishing nonacademic engineering education as a wholly separate entity were to some extent inspired by the military division between the noncommissioned officer (NCO) and the commis-


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sioned officer (or, if that put the nonacademic engineer too far down the scale, on the more flattering distinction between subaltern officers and general staff officers that was commonly made at the time). The application of this militaristic imagery to the civilian sector was rather specifically German also. Primarily, however, the nonacademic engineering schools were established because the German technische Hochschulen, which were the envy of all other industrial societies, had been so aggressive and successful in their professionalization drive. By the 1880s, they had already become too expensive, too academic, and numerically too restrictive to fill the demand for a majority of ordinary engineering functions. This development was a direct consequence of their imitation of the German universities, which was in turn rooted in the engineering educators' envy ofBildung (cultivation), the engineers' lack of access to the higher civil service, and their lack of recognized professional standing; moreover, all of this was a direct result of the segregation of technical training from socially more legitimate types of education and of the survival and reinforcement of a preindustrial, precapitalist social hierarchy since the early nineteenth century.43 Again, this is not to say that such powerful, preindustrial residues by themselves should be blamed for the engineers' frustration and radicalization-—or for the nation's ills at large. The "old order" by itself, which had earlier managed to absorb the educated arid affluent bourgeoisie and undergone various other major changes, had been on the brink of accepting academically trained engineers as full professionals beginning in the 1880s. Their drive for recognition and social emancipation would undoubtedly have succeeded (as it generally did in neighboring countries like the Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland), if it had not been for the dilution and new waves of diversification that were only then developing. In turn, this suggests that it was not necessarily the absence of parliamentary institutions or liberal democratic values that was at the root of the engineers' problems, but Germany's historically unique, particular blend of tradition and modernity. It was this combination—and combination alone—of inherited institutions and capitalist development that whipsawed the German engineers. It was against the combination—the industrialist establishment and the preindustrial "cultured" elites—that they eventually turned their anger.

Notes 1. Robert Perrucci and Joel E. Gerstl, Profession Without Community: Engineers in American Society (New York, 1969), p. 178. 2. Perrucci and Gerstl, Profession Without Community, pp. 57-64, 175-79; Monte A. Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830-1910: Professional Cultures in Conflict (Baltimore, Md., 1967), pp. 49-104. 3. On the neutrality of the VD1, see Gerd Hortleder, Das Gesellschaftsbild des Ingenieurs: Zum politischen Verhalten der technischen Intelligent in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1970); more recently, consult Technik, Ingenieure undGesellschaft: Geschichte des Vereins

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Deutscher Ingenieure, 1856-1981, ed. Karl Heinz Ludwig and Wolfgang Konig (Diisseldorf, 1981), especially the essays by Manegold, Borchardt, and Konig (pp. 133288). 4. See, for example, Dr.-Ing. Hermann Bock, "Die vermeintliche Zurucksetzung des Ingenieurstandes," Zeitschrift des Verbandes Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure (VDDI) 4 (1913): 17-19; see also Dipl.-Ing. Dressel, "ZurLageder Diplom-Ingenieure in der Privatindustrie," Zeitschrift des VDDI 3 (1912): 351-53. 5. Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, Report of the Investigation of Engineering Education, 1923-1929, vol. I , A Comparative Study of Engineering Education in the United States and Europe, by William E. Wickenden (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1930), p. 996. 6. For recent discussions of corporatism, see Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, N. J., l975);Neokorporatismus, ed. Ulrich von Alemann (Frankfurt, 1981); Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation, ed. Philippe Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (London, 1979); See also Organisierter Kapitalismus: Voraussetzungen und Anfange, ed. Heinrich August Winkler (Gottingen, 1974). The literature on the professions is voluminous but only occasionally rewarding. For a good introduction, see Magali Sarfatti-Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, Calif., 1977); Graeme Salaman, Community and Occupation: An Exploration of Work/Leisure Relationships (Cambridge, Eng., 1974). For the notion of privatization of sovereignty and of competition between the state and professional societies, see William J. Goode, "Community within a Community: The Professions," American Sociological Review 22 (1957): 194-200; and A. L. Mok,Beroepeninakte:bijdragetoteen beroepensociologie (Meppel, The Netherlands, 1973), pp. 22-23. 7. See, for example, Denkschrift ilber die Entwicklung der Fortbildungsschulen und der gewerblichen Fachschulen in Preussen, 1891-1895 (Berlin, 1896); Verhandlungen der stdndigen Kommission fur das technische Unterrichtswesen zu Berlin am 13. und 14. Januar 1896 (Berlin, 1897), inZentrales Staatsarchiv, Historische Abteilung II, Merseburg, Ministerium fur Handel und Gewerbe, Rep. 120. E. IV. 1. no 5, vol. 2; Prussia, Landtag, Haus der Abgeordneten, Stenographische Berichte der Verhandlungen (1883), p. 1074. 8. Expenditures detailed in Prussia, Landesgewerbeamt, Verwaltungsberichte, (Berlin, 1905-14), especially the 1909 report "Ruckblick auf die Entwicklung des gewerblichen Schulwesens in Preussen von 1884-1909," pp. 1-48 and tables following p. 48. 9. The preceding and next paragraphs are a summary of the author's recent research. The citations are from Zentrales Staatsarchiv, Historische Abteilung II, Merseburg, Ministerium fur Handel und Gewerbe, Rep. 120. E. IV. 1, no. 5, vol. 4, p. 16; and ibid., Geheimes Zivil-Kabinett 2.2.1, no. 29970, pp. 217-34. 10. Bericht der Schulkommission des Vereines deutscher Ingenieure iiber die Einrichtung Technischer Mittelschulen (Berlin, 1889), p. 30 11. Verhandlungen fiber die Organisation derpreussichen Maschinenbauschulen zu Berlin am6. und7. Mai 1898 (Berlin, 1899), in Zentrales Staatsarchiv, Historische Abteilung II, Merseburg, Ministerium fur Handel und Gewerbe, Rep. 120, E. IV. 1. no. 5, vol. 2, p. 62. 12. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 221, emphasis in original. 13. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 437. 14. Ibid., p. 423. 15. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 207. 16. Ibid., pp. 300-19.


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17. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 139-83. 18. Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 273-79, 328-29. 19. In the period preceding the First World War, regular enrollments at the technische Hochschulen peaked in 1902-3 at 12,687, having jumped by almost 400 percent from their previous low of 2,549 at the bottom of the trough in 1884-85. The number of proprietary engineering schools jumped from 7 before 1890 to 38 by 1910, an increase of more than 600 percent. Combined enrollment of proprietary and government nonacademic engineering schools in 1910 was almost 11,000, which was an increase of almost 700 percent over the approximately 1,400 students at such schools in the late 1880s. It is difficult to infer oversupply from these figures alone, but when contrasted to the value of industrial production in the same period, which increased less than 200 percent between 1884-85 and 1909-10, they give at least an inkling of the discrepancy. Industrial production figures are from Gerd Hohorst, Jurgen Kocka, and Gerhard A. Ritter, SozialgeschichtlichesArbeitsbuch: Materialien zur StatistikdesKaiserreichs, 1870-1914 (Munich, 1975), pp. 78, 88-91. Enrollment figures for the technische Hochschulen are taken from Frank R. Pfetsch, Zur Entwicklung der Wissemchaftspolitik inDeutschland (Berlin, 1974), pp. 174, 186; for other engineering schools, Zentrales Staatsarchiv, Historische Abteilung II, Merseburg, Ministerium fur Handel undGewerbe, Rep. 120, E. IV, no. 2, vol. 1, pp. 83-92; no. 5, vol. 3, p. 17; ibid., Rep. 120. E. IV. 1. no. 2, vol. 2, pp. 70, 155; vol. 3, p. 182; vol. 4, pp. 272-92; vol. 5, pp. 5-6, 33, 59-61, 65, 153, 166; Martin Dosmar, Technische Mittelschulen (Berlin, 1910). 20. For the income figures of engineers see, for example, Reinhold Jaeckel, Statistik iiber die Lage der technischen Privatbeamten in Gross-Berlin (Jena, 1908), pp. 4397. 21. On the BtiB, see Deutsche Industriebeamten-Zeitung (hereafter abbreviated as DIBZ) (1904-14); for the number of Diplom-Ingenieure, DIBZ 7 (1911): 177. The number of salaried engineers is an estimate based on the 1907 census, which counted 124,577 "technical industrial salaried employees" as opposed to 231,624 foremen and 264,829 administrative employees in industry; see Steinitzer, "Die Gliederung der Angestellten," DIBZ 9 (1913): 497-98. 22. On the VDDI, see Mitteilungen (and from 1910 to 1914, Zeitschrift) des VerbandesDeutscherDiplom-Ingenieure. Membership figures from VDDI, Verzeichnis der Forderer und Mitglieder (Berlin, 1913); see also anonymous, Surgite: Worte von den Standesinteressen der deulschen akademischen Techniker (Dresden, 1909). 23. On industrial relations involving the BtiB, see especiallyD/SZvols. 4 , 5 , and 7 (1908, 1909, and 1911), which give detailed descriptions of separate conflicts with the Verband Bayerischer Metallindustrieller, with the mining firm Griesches Erben in Upper Silesia, and with the Verband Berliner Metallindustrieller and the Gute Hoffnungshiitte in Oberhausen. 24. Zeitschrift des VDI 52 (1908): 719. 25. Ibid., pp. 705-6, 718. 26. MBS, ibid., p. 716. 27. Ibid., p. 713. 28. Ibid., pp. 708, 714. 29. On Riedler, who had played a major role in the decision of William II to authorize the technische Hochschulen to start granting academic degrees in 1899, see Karl-Heinz Manegold, Universitat, Technische Hochschule, und Industrie (Berlin, 1970), pp. 249-305. 30. Zeitschrift des VDI 52 (1908): 703-6.

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31. Ibid., p. 716. 32. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the ThirdReich (Cambridge, England, 1984), but especially pp. 152-88. 33. ZeitschriftdesVDI52 (1908): 559-60, 820;Zeitschriftdes VDI53 (1909): 148384; DAJSCH,AbhandlungenundBerichte (Leipzig, 1910), 1: 1-5. 34. Gustav Griiner, Die Entwicklung der hoheren technischenFachschulen im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Brunswick, 1967), p. 59. 35. DATSCH,AbhandlungenandBerichte, 1: 10. 36. See the literature cited in note 6, above. 37. DATSCH,AbhandlungenundBerichte (Leipzig, 1911), 2: 128. 38. Griiner, Entwicklung, pp. 103-9. 39. Zeitschrift des VDI 53 (1909): 1287-88. 40. On the postwar tendencies of the VDDI, see, for example, E. H. Schulz, Der Verband Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure im heutigen Stoat (Essen, 1921), and VDDI, Dem Ziele entgegen . . . (Berlin, 1934); see also Karl-Heinz Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich (Diisseldorf, 1974), pp. 11-102. 41. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, England, 1984). 42. Geoff Eley, "What Produces Fascism: Preindustrial Traditions or a Crisis of a Capitalist State," Politics and Society 12 (1983): 53-82. 43. See the author's New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 18151914 (Cambridge, Eng., 1989).

Academic, Proletarian, . . . Professional? Shaping Professionalization for German Industrial Chemists, 1887-1920 JEFFREY A. JOHNSON The situation of the employed chemists had not improved in the course of time. . . . The leading positions in the factories and laboratories were mostly occupied by young people, making the advance of the new generation correspondingly difficult, and it was all but impossible to enter the ranks of the city and state administrators. . . . The profession of chemist was not yet recognized.'

This was how the official historian of the Verein Deutscher Chemiker (VDC; Association of German Chemists), writing in 1912, described the situation a quarter century earlier at the founding of his organization, then called the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur angewandte Chemie (DGaC; German Society for Applied Chemistry). The 1912 jubilee history maintained that the VDC had dealt with these issues through vigorous "activity in the interest of the chemical profession."2 Today one might call its policy "professionalization," despite this term's problematic nature.3 The policy of the VDC had successfully attracted a rapidly growing membership from an emerging "new middle class" of corporate technical employees, to whom it offered the professional goals of social status as well as scientific and technological expertise through imposing higher educational standards. By 1912, it was the largest organization of chemists in the world, having recently surpassed its older, academic-oriented rival, the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft (DCG; German Chemical Society), which had scarcely grown since the VDC was founded. 4 Yet opposition from status-conscious university professors and bureaucrats had brought the VDC only partial success in the introduction of an official licensing examination as a central element of its program of professional recognition. The leaders of the VDC had then confronted the threat of a growing 123

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The Nineteenth Century 5

"chemical proletariat" made up of younger German industrial chemists with relatively poor economic prospects, who might be induced to join a new and increasingly class-conscious movement of technical employees and officials led by the Bund der technisch-industriellen Beamten (BtiB; League of Technical and Industrial Officials), founded in 1904.6 The competing program of political and institutional reforms of the BtiB was aimed at bringing technical employees, including chemists, into a unionist movement that was an anathema to the leaders of the VDC. Having been partly rebuffed in their educational program, the leadership of the VDC adapted part of the socioeconomic program of the BtiB to their own purposes, thus modifying the pattern of professionalization in chemistry. This compromise in turn paved the way for the emergence of a separate "professional union" for industrial chemists in the revolutionary era immediately after the First World War. The following essay is intended to investigate professional activity in chemistry preceding the First World War and to analyze the actors and interactions that shaped it, then briefly to compare the German experience to that in other Western nations. These results may illuminate the problem of defining professionalization in general.

"Academization" in Industrial Chemistry: Origins and Policy of the Verein Deutscher Chemiker During the late nineteenth century, industrial chemistry was becoming "academized"—to borrow a term that has been used to describe how the status of German engineers changed along with changes in technological education during the same period.7 This process led to the creation of the Verein Deutscher Chemiker and shaped its professional goals until the turn of the century. Until the 1880s, the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft led the way to "academization" in industrial chemistry by fostering good relations between academic and industrial chemists and by providing the imperial German government with advice on the first imperial patent law in 1876-77. Nevertheless, the leadership and interests of the DCG remained primarily academic and scientific. Its statutes prevented it from pursuing policies that might be considered to have "professional" goals in a mainly economic or social sense. Although the natural outgrowth of the work of the DCG on the patent bill might have been the creation in it of a division of industrial chemistry, the academic leadership insisted on a separate organization. The Verein zur Wahrung der Interessen der chemischen Industrie Deutschlands (VWIcID; Association for the Protection of the Interests of the Chemical Industry of Germany), founded in 1877, became an economic-interest group dominated by the principal firms and entrepreneurs. Its major concerns lay in areas such as international trade policy; hence it was hardly a professional organization either.8 Academization entered a new phase, particularly in the coal tar dye industry during the late 1870s and early 1880s. The new patent law and the falling prices

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of many older dyes due to changes in taste or overproduction threatened some firms with disaster, offering advantages to others that could for the first time foster systematic innovation within their own establishments. While the academic chemists who had previously provided many of the new ideas for dye chemicals gradually moved into theoretical and experimental areas in which there was less direct relevance, the dye industry began to create its own research and development "laboratories" that were staffed and directed by academically trained chemists. These included a few former midranking university lecturers who had been attracted by a secure salary in industry at a time of poor science enrollments (which meant low fees) and uncertain advancement in the philosophical faculties. The new laboratories also served as pools of academically trained replacements for older, empirically or vocationally trained foremen who had previously supervised their firms' production processes.9 This was part of a larger trend that produced a separate category of "dependent technical employees" for the first time in the 1895 German occupational census. The results showed that about 3,600 employees in the new group did not yet outnumber about 3,740 "independent" directors and owners in the chemical industry. Nevertheless, at three of the largest firms, the total number of chemists had approximately quadrupled to about 250 from 1880 to 1895, as the new, "academic" approach to management and innovation was being established. By 1895, three quarters of the approximately 3,000 people who could be identified as "chemists" by the German census officials were employees, and at least 9 companies—all dye manufacturers—employed more than 20 chemists each. Most of them were apparently involved in the supervision of various phases of production, and almost a fifth were engaged in laboratory research.10 The process of industrial academization led the VWIcID to take up the problem of higher technological education in 1886. Standards for doctoral work at a few universities had fallen and training at others was too specialized, so that a university doctorate in chemistry was no guarantee of adequate preparation for a career in industry. The colleges of technology had mostly instituted a Diplom examination that covered the areas of industrial concern, but the colleges' chemistry students tended to bypass the examination, which conferred no title or social status, going on to a university to earn a doctoral title quickly. In response the colleges, often led by their chemistry departments, sought academic parity with the universities to include the right to award doctorates. The VDC pursued a different tack, however, by formally requesting the improvement of facilities for technological education at the universities, as well as a uniform German state licensing examination for all chemists, whether they had studied at the universities or at the colleges of technology.11 While the VWIcID was considering the problem of technological education from the employers' perspective, a new organization was examining it from the perspective of both the employees and teachers. The Deutsche Gesellschaft fur angewandte Chemie was founded in 1887 when a small ten-year-old association of analytical chemists decided to reorganize into a group with broader goals and membership, including industrial employees and employers as well as professors at the colleges and universities. They assumed control of the journal

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edited by Ferdinand Fischer, associate professor of technical chemistry at Gottingen, renaming it theZeitschriftfiirangewandte Chemie. Because the DGaC placed a high priority on education and on fostering technological expertise, by 1890 it had formally requested an official licensing examination as well.12 The original organization was small but grew rapidly, from 237 members in 1888 to 3,692 twenty years later, when it first outnumbered the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft. By 1896, when it was again reorganized, the new statutes limited individual membership to "chemists and other academically trained persons," but also permitted "agencies, firms, and associations with similar goals" to become corporate members.13 After this change, the main power rested with the employers and senior employees of the big corporations, who were usually able to dominate the district chapters, even though a growing majority of members were lower-ranking, dependent employees.14 One of the most active and influential members of the VDC, exemplifying the corporate presence, was Carl Duisberg, a young man of modest origins but vast energy and ambitions who in 1887 had just become director of research at Bayer and by the turn of the century was a director of the firm.15 He also rose in the DGaC, first becoming a leader of the Rhenish District Chapter in 1896, then deputy chairman of the entire organization in 1897 and again in 1902-6, finally chairman from 1907 to 1912. Duisberg particularly wanted the organization to incorporate all chemists, suggesting in 1896 that the DGaC be renamed from an association for "applied chemistry" to one for "German chemists."16 Hence arose the name "Verein Deutscher Chemiker." The principal exception to corporate control was the Frankfurt District Chapter, which was located in one of the biggest centers of the German chemical industry. No single corporation appeared able to dominate the chapter, which tended instead to elect academic chemists to its leadership. From its founding in 1893, the chapter took the lead in pressing Ferdinand Fischer and the other leaders of the DGaC to promote more of the "professional interests of the chemists" by including issues like working conditions and patent law, which Fischer preferred to leave to the VWIcID.17 To Duisberg, the calls from Frankfurt meant that chemists needed to raise their "professional consciousness" and obtain "a social status similar to that of the representatives of other academically educated occupational groups like government officials, physicians, pharmacists, attorneys, engineers, etc."18 This status would come through educational and social reform. He joined Fischer in mobilizing the growing strength of the VDC behind the proposals for a state examination and more technical chemistry courses in the universities, whereby Duisberg intended not only to promote the professional goal of raising academic standards for chemists, but also to shape their training "according to the interests of industry."19 The corporate director who most actively supported these proposals in the VWIcID was Henry T. Bottinger, Duisberg's superior at Bayer and a deputy in the Prussian legislature. Hence Duisberg's attitude was hardly surprising. To many prominent university chemists, however, a state examination would devalue the doctorate, leading to the loss of research assistants and the revenue


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they then enjoyed from dissertation fees. In 1897, these academic opponents compromised with others who were sympathetic to the idea of an official examination and formed the Verband der Laboratoriumsvorstande an Deutschen Hochschulen (VLDH; Association of Laboratory Directors at German Universities and Colleges), which was to administer its own, unofficial Verbands-Examen (association examination) as an expressly intermediate qualifying test for all potential degree candidates, including those at the colleges of technology. Although this examination went far toward ensuring that chemistry students would receive a uniform, basic knowledge of their discipline before beginning specialized research, it did not require a knowledge of technical chemistry as foreseen in the proposal of the VDC. Nevertheless, that proposal was now virtually a moot issue, its fate sealed in 1899 when the Prussian colleges of technology—soon followed by those in other states—won the right to award doctoral degrees and to confer the title Diplom-Ingenieur (certified engineer) for passing the Diplom examination. Although in this case the bureaucracy had overridden the university professors' resistance, the insistence of the VLDH on academic autonomy conversely provided a good excuse for the bureaucrats to override the more far-reaching demands of the industrial chemists. Establishing an official examination in technological chemistry would not only have necessitated making expensive additions to the teaching staffs and facilities at the universities, but it also implied a degree of official "recognition" that the bureaucrats were evidently reluctant to concede to a group that was still not as clearly "academic" as the established professions.20 Duisberg and other leaders of the VDC now turned more attention to raising standards for the secondary education of chemistry students, the only major group in the universities (outside agriculture and dentistry) who could obtain a doctorate without a secondary school Abitur (diploma). Professional recognition might not follow without higher standards. The state examination would have required an Abitur from any kind of nine-class secondary school, classical or modern; it would thus have been less restrictive than the requirements for studying most other university disciplines until after the Prussian education reforms of 1902, but it was still more restrictive than the Verbands-Examen, which required no Abitur at all. 21 The situation in chemistry seemed to be worsening. Although a survey of the mid-1890s reported that more than two thirds of all industrial chemists had their Abitur, by the turn of the century barely half of the candidates for the Verbands-Examen had it. The industrial boom of the late 1890s was apparently having a democratizing effect on the flow of students into industrial chemistry.22 Thus in 1900 the statutes of the VDC were revised again to stress that only "academically trained chemists" could be members.23 In 1902, the year Duisberg became vice-chairman, the VDC began to warn students without an Abitur against trying to get jobs in industry. In 1907, when he became chairman, the warning was repeated, with the justification that students without secondary school certificates were now disqualified from obtaining doctoral degrees at most universities, 24 for the Prussian Ministry of Education had finally decided to prohibit students without diplomas from obtaining doctorates. Evidently to satisfy the professors in the VLDH who

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feared too great a drop in enrollments and fees, exceptions could still be made for certified pharmacists studying chemistry who wrote "outstanding dissertations," but the majority of nonmatriculated students were excluded. The combined effect of these measures was that by 1911-12 more than four fifths of the VLDH candidates had their Abitur.25 In order to maintain the VDC as a central organization for all chemists regardless of specialization, a new revision of the statutes in 1907 introduced "specialty groups," which had the same rights to representation on the council of the VDC as the district chapters.26 The new groups, which were often led by academic chemists or the representatives of the principal firms in particular branches of industry, thus served to reawaken somewhat the original concern of the VDC with technological expertise and with academization in the sense originally pursued by the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft. Under Duisberg's leadership, the VDC's program of professionalization through academization by promoting educational status as well as expertise had seemingly reached a culminating point by 1907. Yet, a new aspect of the professionalizing strategy had already begun to emerge. In the summer of 1905, Emil Fischer, one of the academic chemists who had contributed most to industry, had urged Duisberg to consider the problem of the deteriorating social status of chemists; too many people were saying that it "no longer pays to become a chemist."27 In the following year, the question of patent law and the rights of employee inventors had been raised at the convention of the VDC, and Duisberg had reported anxiously to the VWIcID on growing economic worries among younger chemists, recommending that the manufacturers take steps "to head off efforts at legislation."28 Duisberg then helped to initiate and became first chairman of an Ausschuss zur Wahrung der gemeinsamen Interessen des Chemikerstandes (AWgIC; Committee for the Protection of the Common Interests of the Chemical Profession), in which the Verein Deutscher Chemiker cooperated with other chemistry organizations—even including the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft—in an effort to raise chemists' "professional consciousness" and improve relations with the state and imperial bureaucracies. Concerns of politics as well as status lay behind the goal of the AWgIC (and Duisberg) "sharply to distinguish between academically educated chemists, vocationally trained chemotechnicians, and empirically schooled Chemikanten and laboratory helpers."29 The first action of the new AWgIC was not to promote educational qualifications, however, but to survey salaries among industrial chemists and academic assistants. By this time, the assistants at the Prussian universities had collectively requested increases in their salaries,30 and the Bund der technischindustriellen Beamten had already begun to attract members among the industrial chemists by criticizing their economic conditions and demanding reforms,31 so that opposition to the new technicians' organization was already a motivating influence in the campaign to define the chemistry profession. Hence academic qualifications were now being used to draw lines against the technicians, but they would also have to be supplemented by additional measures.


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Proletarianization and Quasi- "Feudalization" in Science-Based Industries: Origins of the Bund der techiiisch-industriellen Beamten Academization was not the only process affecting the technical employees in the science-based industries of imperial Germany, nor was status professionalization the only response. "The workers, or more precisely the industrial employees, are generally divided into two groups: those who work with their hands, and those who work with their minds. But this distinction is false." Thus began the manifesto of a group of unemployed engineers in Berlin, calling for the creation of a "League of Industrial Officials." It went on to outline a socioeconomic program based on the principle that economic relationships, not social or academic criteria, should henceforth shape the loyalties of technical employees: "The conflict of interests between employers and employees is great enough to keep industrial brain workers economically divided from their employers, despite the similar social standing of the two groups, and to put all employees on one level, regardless of social distinctions. . . . Industrial brain work becomes cheaper and cheaper, despite its being more and more demanding. . . . The average earnings of the better workmen have reached and often surpassed those of the technologists."32 This argument implied that industrial employees were becoming "proletarianized," in that working conditions and opportunities for advancement in the increasingly large, bureaucratic, and monopolistic firms of the science-based industries corresponded ever less to the elevated "academic" expectations of young chemists and engineers, whose lack of organization made their economic position even weaker than the actual "proletarians," the wage earners. As technical employees felt this contradiction between academic expectation and reality, and observed the concurrent success of the workers' union movement, many became sympathetic to a strategy that would adapt the "proletarian" methods of the workers to the problems of the employees, leaving concerns with academization to groups like the Verein Deutscher Chemiker. The organization that emerged from this manifesto, the Bund der technisch-industriellen Beamten, pursued this kind of strategy. How attractive would it be to the employed industrial chemist? Imperial occupational census returns of 1907 showed that although the total number of people calling themselves chemists had nearly doubled since 1895, from about 3,000 to about 5,800, the number in independent positions increased only from about 770 to 820. Most of the new chemists were apparently employed in the chemical industry, taking positions in its fastest-growing occupational category of technical employees, where more that 8,200 members now greatly outnumbered the nearly 4,800 owners and directors.33 A small number of companies hired the majority of industrial chemists. By 1912, there were only 20 "big firms," each with more than 20 chemists, and their share of industrial chemists had risen from about one third to about 53 percent of approximately 3,000 chemists in the chemical industry (narrowly defined). On the other hand, only 20 chemists were directors of such firms. The 3 "giant" coal tar dye firms (Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst), with about 870

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chemists in 1912, alone employed perhaps one tenth of all the chemists in the country, but more than one quarter of the group narrowly defined by the surveys of the VDC; only a small number could ever emulate the rise of Carl Duisberg. According to the surveys of the Verein Deutscher Chemiker, the "big firms" by 1912 dominated the recruitment of newly graduated chemists, taking two thirds of the new doctorates and four fifths of the best-qualified group of former assistants from the academic laboratories; the rest of the industry followed an older pattern, filling nearly two thirds of its vacancies with people recruited from other firms.34 It should be added that the vast majority of these chemists were men.35 Of course the big corporations continued to hire vocationally trained people, now called "chemotechnicians," to carry out the many tasks required to operate large-scale production. As yet in the early part of the century, there were relatively few chemotechnicians in the big firms, only about a tenth as many as their chemists by 1912;36 although in some very big firms the proportion was undoubtedly much higher, the technicians were still in the minority. Bayer, for example, had 60 engineers and 90 technicians in 1909, but 240 chemists.37 Technical chemists and technicians would often work in close association, making the two groups, for all their supposed social and educational differences, seem much the same in their economic function. After the turn of the century, even industrial research was far from what an academic chemist might have expected. Since the process of inventing numerous new dyes went according to established theoretical principles and laboratory guidelines, Carl Duisberg claimed without too much exaggeration that it required "no trace" of creative thought in either chemist or technician. The status of industrial research under such conditions remained so low that some chemists were even willing to leave Bayer for the comparative poverty of academic life.38 Changes in the industry magnified discontent. The BASF in 1897 and Hoechst in 1904 began manufacturing synthetic indigo, which gave the giant firms a long-sought, mass-market dye, the production of which from coal tar chemicals could be monopolized. Indigo produced by these two firms accounted for one quarter of German dye exports (in tons) by 1910. Their rivals' fears of the costs of further competitive research on a scientific and technological problem of this magnitude helped to spark the merger movement of 1903-4, which consolidated the five biggest German dye firms into two rival coalitions led by the BASF and Hoechst.39 Given this situation, it was widely believed that the industry would limit further research, while monopolizing patents and chemists simply to entrench its world dominance. One critic, writing for the BtiB in 1907, accused the industry of using "chemists like the parts of a machine" and leaving "amass of intellects lying fallow," without the freedom to create "really useful things."40 Even a representative for the dye manufacturers themselves admitted at about the same time that "the staffs that once were active in expanding the borders of the field are now used for internal consolidation and for the improvement of what is already known." 41 The BtiB focused its criticism on the employment contract, which was the


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legal tool that the big firms used to limit the earnings and mobility of their chemists. It was an extraordinarily sensitive issue. The uniform patent law and contractual provisions known as Karenz, or the "competition clause," had made it possible to shift the balance of control from individual employees to the corporations and virtually put an end to the old practice of clever employees using their expertise in chemistry or their knowledge of trade secrets to play one company off against another.42 In most companies, employees had to renounce all patent rights to discoveries made within the firm. In return, the employee might be granted a small percentage of the profits from a discovery that the firm considered to be worth rewarding and did not claim as its own collective creation. As the scale of production grew larger, and the profits mounted, the percentages shrank (in Bayer, to 3 percent) and the corporations showed a decreasing inclination to grant any recognition at all to their employee inventors.43 Moreover, since patent royalties were tied to an employee's hiring contract, the employee would lose them if the employment was terminated. The employers justified the patent situation on the economic principle of the protection of technical innovation by patent monopolies, and on the legal principle of the employees' professional freedom to enter into individual contracts. Yet in practice the contracts may have limited innovation, and they hardly promoted freedom for the employees either. To critics in the BtiB, they represented not simply proletarianization but also "intellectual serfdom."44 The so-called competition clause or Karenz provision in employees' contracts became a second target for such criticisms. The competition clause allowed an employer legally to prevent his former technical employees from assuming positions with competing firms within specified geographic, time, and product bounds. Although imperial law limited the maximum time period to three years for commercial employees, there was no legal maximum for technical employees. Cases could be found in the chemical industry in which restriction on employment extended to as long as ten or perhaps even twenty years. Nor was there any geographic limit; thus, it was common to bar employment not just in all of Germany, but far beyond its borders. The biggest corporations had affiliates and competed with each other throughout the world, controlling some 90 percent of world dye production by 1914. Hence they reserved the right to restrict their employees' movements anywhere in the world. The only legal restraint on the operation of the competition clause was the statement in the law that restrictions could not "unjustly impede the advancement" of the employee,45 but there was no judicial agreement on what this meant. Moreover, the law did not require that the employee be compensated while on restriction, and the penalties for violation did not need to be in proportion to the employee's income. Some three quarters of those on restriction came from the big firms, of which the largest, like Bayer, could afford to compensate their chemists with annual payments equal to their last year's salary, excluding royalties; other big firms that were smaller, however, like the Weiler-ter Meer or K. Oehler dyeworks, apparently paid nothing or only a fraction of their chemists' last year's salary (a compensation "so little," as

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Duisberg noted, "that a chemist cannot live on it") but with each violation penalized by many times that salary, which could amount to thirty thousand marks.46 Under these circumstances, who would risk leaving a secure position, however unsatisfactory its prospects? The advancing monopolization and cartelization of the major firms in the technologically advanced industries also raised the threat of the so-called secret competition clause, whereby all the participating firms agreed not to hire an employee without the consent of the previous employer. This truly was "modern serfdom."47 Completing the picture of quasi-proletarian and quasi-feudal restrictions on industrial chemists is the level of their salaries and the manner in which they obtained additional compensation. The available data—collected in the course of disputes between BtiB and VDC, and thus likely to be biased—show little difference between the salaries of younger chemists and technicians. The median salary of technicians in their middle to late twenties—most without completed higher educations—was eighteen-hundred marks, which was at the low end of the starting salaries for chemists who would be finishing their doctorates at about the same age. Significant disparities arose primarily among the older employees; a few chemists seem to have had better long-term prospects.48 Even so, a contemporary factory official sympathetic to the employers' point of view about 1906 considered the salary of five thousand marks for an industrial chemist with five years' experience to be quite unusual, although in 1907 Duisberg publicly admitted that chemists' salaries were in fact "relatively low."49 Moreover, to compensate for relatively low salaries, industrial chemists obtained significant portions of their income from fringe benefits that were tied to service in a particular company.50 This was particularly true after the recession years of 1907 and 1908, as the ensuing boom raised profits to 12.3 percent of their share capital for German industry generally by 1913, but in the dye firms to 37 percent, so that they could afford an unprecedented, disproportionately high level of "social support funds." Such funds provided fringe benefits, apparently including company housing, insurance, and pension plans as well as medical and other allowances (probably including restriction payments). By the end of 1913, the amounts invested by the dye firms for these purposes rose to 46.1 million marks, nearly a third of their total share capital and more than ten times the national average. To the reporter for the Verein Deutscher Chemiker, "the size of the amounts set aside . . . provides striking evidence for the social understanding of the leaders of these firms."51 They certainly can be regarded as "enlightened entrepreneurs" from this perspective, yet there was also justice in those critics who pointed out the quasi-feudal nature of these arrangements; as with patents and the competition clause, such benefits were designed to entrench the dominant position of the leading firms by ensuring that their technical employees would remain with the company. The leaders of the Verein Deutscher Chemiker were thus building professional and academic status consciousness on an economically weak foundation. Although the average industrial chemist might have an academic education and status as well as middle-class social origins similar to those of the corporate


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directors, the actual economic position and prospects of the chemist looked increasingly "proletarian," because the larger the firm, the less the chemist's chances of ever achieving real independence. What could resolve this dilemma? BtiB Versus VDC: Competing Models of Social Action for Industrial Chemists The chemical industry was thus vulnerable to criticism from the Bund der technisch-industriellen Beamten. To prevent the industrial chemists from allying with this group, the Verein Deutscher Chemiker had to work out a socioeconomic program that could respond to the issues that the BtiB had raised. The scope and meaning of the professionalization of the VDC changed in the process. The differing attitudes and strategies of the two groups on some key issues are compared below; they constitute two competing models of collective action for technical employees in a modern, industrialized society. The BtiB advocated greater collective mobility through far-reaching socioeconomic reforms—demanding, for example, the complete abolition of the competition clause and the transfer of the basic rights to patentable inventions from the firm to the inventor, who could sell the invention back to the firm for a minimum share of one third to one half the total profits deriving from the patent52—and ultimately through collective bargaining, as opposed to the emphasis of the VDC on securing the academic status of its members and holding open considerable rewards for those few fortunate individuals who could advance up the existing corporate capitalist hierarchy. To the visionary program of the BtiB of establishing a "constitutional factory system" and participation in management by representatives of employees and workers,53 the VDC opposed a conventional view of corporate ownership and the unchallengeable authority of management. In comparison to the BtiB, the VDC was therefore conservative. Nevertheless the external challenge of the BtiB added force to the demands of groups like the Frankfurt chapter within the VDC and forced the latter's leaders into the role of moderate social reformers. When the BtiB helped to organize and lead a "Social Committee of Associations of Technical Employees," which was a coalition of technicians' groups promoting their sociopolitical reform agenda in the Reichstag, Duisberg and his colleagues in the VDC responded with an agency for legal advice (not representation) to individual chemists on issues like contracts, patent rights, and the competition clause. Then they reluctantly established a chemists' "social committee"—composed of employers and screened employees—which Duisberg later realized could serve as a "lightning rod" for the directors of the VDC by taking up and moderating requests for reforms emanating from dissatisfied members.54 The social committee developed legislative petitions for employees' insurance, patent reform, and the regulation of Karenz. In 1911, the Reichstag passed an insurance act that generally satisfied the leaders of the VDC,55 while bills in the other two areas were still pending at the outbreak of war in 1914.

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The social committee of the VDC also prepared a standard hiring contract to be voluntarily introduced by the leading firms in the chemical industry. It incorporated provisions to which the VWIcID had already agreed as a basis for preempting more far-reaching legislation or collective bargaining. The contract established that Karenz must be paid (minimum levels were not set), and that the maximum standard fine for breach of contract was set at three times the employee's last salary.56 Otherwise, however, as the BtiB correctly noted, it hardly advanced the employees' interests except where required by law. But was the BtiB right to add that by accepting such terms, the chemists exhibited a "very limited social understanding"?57 Demanding more on an issue like the competition clause would have placed the VDC in opposition to the employers' groups, whereas Duisberg had insisted on a strategy of cooperation.58 The BtiB, of course, envisioned a very different strategy. To promote their opposing visions, the VDC and BtiB waged a lively propaganda war of half-truths and exaggerations. In trying to "bring about a revolution in the heads of our technicians," as one leader put it,59 the BtiB exaggerated the exploitation of employees by employers. From the beginning it employed socialist-style rhetoric, speaking, for example, of the "technical proletariat, . . . a reserve army of industrial officials" that had been created by the economic system.60 Yet the BtiB was politically neutral, expelling one avowed Social Democrat from its directorate in 1909 for openly advocating alliance with that party.61 Nevertheless, the leaders of the VDC joined other opponents among the manufacturers in labeling the BtiB "socialist" and its members inferior. In Duisberg's first speech as chairman in 1907, he scorned the "trade union" methods of the BtiB and called instead for the professional unity of all "chemists with a higher education . . . against all outsiders. There is no need to let economic reasons separate us into two enemy camps, employers and employees. . . . As educated men we abhor an approach which works with the meanest and lowest of all drives, envy and class hatred, whereby salvation is sought in struggle."62 To forestall potential rebellions by junior-ranking chemists on the floor of the annual convention of the VDC, Duisberg's revision of the statutes in 1907 solidified the control of the directorate of the VDC over the agenda. Even the "neutral" specialty groups established at this time helped to dilute the already weak voices of protest on the administrative council of the VDC, a majority of the older chapter representatives.63 The first two years of the existence of the BtiB were also the slowest years of the growth of the VDC during the entire 1900-14 period; it added fewer than two hundred new members, which was a rate of only 5 percent for the years of 1904 to 1906. However, in 1907, while an unprecedented number of members left the VDC, more than twice as many new members also joined; despite the recession, it grew by more than four hundred members overall in the years of 1906 to 1908, for a two-year growth rate of about 12 percent, which it maintained until 1914.64 Duisberg's social measures may well account for the turnaround. The further growth and diversification of the chemical industry


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before 1914 put to rest many of the fears of stagnation that had existed in 1906-7. Nevertheless, even with an expanded socioeconomic program, the leaders of the VDC continued to view the securing of social and educational status as their fundamental goal during this period. Ultimately, "professional consciousness" had to rest on a sense of unique status, which remained the principal justification for refusing to associate with the technicians and for pursuing a different set of policies from those of groups like the BtiB. 65 The decision of the VDC to emphasize educational status, by eliminating the poorer students who could not afford to complete a secondary education, evidently helped to widen the social gap between chemists and technicians. One contemporary observer saw the academic status consciousness of many technical employees with upper-middle-class origins as a way to deny that their career was actually "a step down on the social ladder,"66 which could also be true of many chemists. About 90 percent of Prussian university chemistry students' fathers were financially independent, which was an unusually high proportion even for those times, while an almost equally high proportion of chemists ended up in dependent positions, that is, "a step down." Thus, an organization like the Verein Deutscher Chemiker had a sociopsychological advantage over one like the BtiB, even if the latter's economic program promised more concrete advantages. Moreover, because those promises could not be immediately fulfilled in the context of resistance by the government and the employers, the rate of growth of the BtiB began to slow and in the last year of peace even fell below that of the Verein Deutscher Chemiker.67 The accent of the VDC on status in professionalization meanwhile appeared in another professional organization, the Verband Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure (Association of German Certified Engineers), organized in 1909. It, too, pursued a "professional policy" based on educational status and moderate socioeconomic reform in direct opposition to the radical "class policy" of the Bund der technisch-industriellen Beamten.68 Concluding Observations: Professionalization Among Industrial Chemists in Germany and Elsewhere What light does the foregoing shed on the process of professionalization in industrial chemistry, particularly in Imperial Germany? Sociologists have frequently attempted to create a universal definition of "professional" and of the process that creates it. A historian might better proceed by determining what historical actors meant by such terms, and what their actual strategies were in a given context like imperial Germany. The following is the working definition given by a leader of the Verein Deutscher Chemiker in 1910: "One can only speak of a profession when all members are equal to one another in education and social position. The income level and economic position, whether dependent or independent, make no difference in this respect."69 Was

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chemistry a profession by this definition? Not yet, according to the same source, nor would it be until it met the criterion of uniform educational status—in both secondary and higher education—purportedly set by the established professions such as law and medicine. This belief legitimized the educational measures proposed by the VDC. As noted, the strategy of the VDC required but failed to obtain full cooperation from the state bureaucracies and the professors. It may seem paradoxical that those who created the Verband der Laboratoriumsvorstande an Deutschen Hochschulen operated in the name of professional autonomy to rebuff proposals that were supposed to raise the status of their profession; clearly, however, the professors acted more out of their interests as directors of academic laboratories than as "chemists," a term that was conspicuously absent from the name of the VLDH. An analogous conflict of interests can be seen in the motivations of the businessmen in the VDC, who like Duisberg had loyalties divided between firms on the one hand, and their professional colleagues on the other. Therefore, the educational proposals of the VDC served dual purposes, which its leaders tried to unify by identifying the interests of a firm with the interests of a chemist, and by admitting firms to membership in the professional organization. That, however, produced difficulties; for how could a firm by itself be a "professional" according to the educational and status criteria that the VDC upheld, particularly in that no more than one fifth of directors identified in the census data in 1895 or 1907 called themselves "chemists"? Therefore, most employers could not be considered members of the chemical profession by educational and social criteria. These difficulties have led some German analysts to speak of two parallel and interacting processes, "professionalization" andBerufskonstruktion (construction of an occupation), whereby the former applies only to strategies pursued by insiders, while the latter involves influences exerted by outsiders.70 Such an analysis seems particularly apt for the VDC, especially given the dual roles played in it by men like Duisberg. With the BtiB emerged a clear alternative strategy that, despite omitting the promotion of education and expertise in traditional professionalization, nevertheless did promise to advance the collective socioeconomic interests of the technical employees in areas in which they had serious problems, and it avoided the conflicts of interest that were characteristic of the VDC. The challenge of the BtiB led the leaders of the VDC to expand their strategy of professionalization by including such socioeconomic reform measures as could obtain cooperation from the employers. One characteristic difference between this expanded strategy and those followed in other professional contexts was the absence in the VDC of any effort to prepare a code of ethics for industrial chemists. For individual chemists, matters like fees (i.e., salaries), altruism (i.e., the giving up of patent rights or the working of overtime), or discretion in client relationships (assuming an employer to be a client) were regulated by their contracts of employment, not by any code. Yet the standard hiring contract of the VDC introduced in 1912 performed some of the functions of a uniform, professional code of ethics, although the wide discretion it gave to employers (except for provisions already


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in the law) could not wholly satisfy employees who sought professional autonomy. The Verein Deutscher Chemiker before 1914 thus exemplifies the leading organization of a science-based industrial profession in the making, its professionalization strategy shaped by the cross-directed pressures of academic status consciousness in the highly stratified society of imperial Germany on the one side, and the politicoeconomic changes and conflicts that were sweeping German industry on the other. The German case was unique for the industrial chemistry of its time. No other country had as effectively integrated academic science and industrial innovation, particularly in organic chemistry. Indeed, with the possible exception of the United States, no other country had as many chemists; but the average German chemist was much better educated than the average American counterpart. Compared to their colleagues abroad, the German industrial chemists on the eve of the First World War therefore had the strongest claim to be considered an academic profession, yet for that very reason suffered perhaps the most from the contrasts between this ideal status and their actual occupational situation. The greater uniformity and high quality of scientific education in the German system, particularly after the reforms at the turn of the century, and the general identification of specific educational attainments with a specific social status, had considerably simplified the problem of defining who was to be considered a "professional." Having proved their practical worth to industry from an early stage, academically trained German chemists could relatively easily equate academic status with occupational qualifications, drawing lines of academic status between insiders who could be admitted to a professional organization like the VDC and outsiders who could not. The Germans thus did not have to develop the complex, hierarchical system of grades of membership that the British and Americans established in their professional organizations.71 Instead of creating an artificial hierarchy, the leading German chemists simply adapted themselves to the stratification that already existed in their society.

Epilogue: A Professional Union in Industrial Chemistry, 1920 The democratic tendencies temporarily encouraged after the war in the chemical profession, as elsewhere in German society, brought a reaction against the leadership of the Verein Deutscher Chemiker. In 1919, a Bund angestellter Chemiker und Ingenieure (BaCI; League of Employed Chemists and Engineers) was organized as an alternative to both the VDC and the older BtiB, which about the same time merged with another technicians' group and allied itself to the proletarian free trade unions.72 Without denying the VDC ideal regarding academic status, the new chemists' BaCI adopted a trade unionist approach excluding professors and employers, who accepted it as the economic voice of the employees. The VDC continued to act as the professional organization for all chemists, but the new group took up its prewar socioeconomic agenda. In

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1920, the BaCI compiled a national standard contract for the chemical industry that regulated patent fees, working hours, and other issues, including guidelines for salaries in the first five years. This contract appears to have been generally accepted throughout the industry, and its provisions were even integrated into the national socialist labor law of 1937.73 The new BaCI thus exemplified both the "academic" tendencies represented by the VDC and the "proletarian" tendencies represented by the old BtiB, producing what neither could have become before the war: a "professional union" for industrial chemists. This development was paralleled in at least one other Western nation, Great Britain, which also had a strong labor movement and in which the chemical industry was greatly stimulated by the war.74 Although the economic problems they faced worsened in many respects during the next decade, the professional unions did seem to have solved the old problem of finding the appropriate professional organization for industrial chemists. Of course, that solution was incomplete. Under national socialism, German industrial chemists were to experience yet another strategy, the party-controlled professional organization, with effects that have yet to be fully investigated.

Notes 1. B. Rassow, Geschichte des Vereins Deutscher Chemiker in den erstenfiinfundzwanzig Jahren seines Bestehens (Leipzig, 1912), p. 4; literally, "estate of chemist" (Stand der Chemiker). Except as noted later, Stand will refer to "profession" in contexts like this and in compound words like Chemikerstand, Berufsstand, and the like, indicating an occupational group. Caution is needed, because Stand could mean different things to different groups; see Michael Burrage, Konrad Jarausch, and Hannes Siegrist, "An Actor-Oriented Framework for the History of the Professions: Prerequisites for a Theory" in M. Burrage et al., eds., Professions in Theory and History (London, 1990). 2. Rassow, Geschichte, pp. 72-92. 3. See Eliot Freidson, "The Theory of Professions: State of the Art," in The Sociology of the Professions .-Lawyers, Doctors and Others, ed. Robert Dingwall and Philip Lewis (New York, 1983), pp. 19-37, especially 36; Burrage et al., "Framework," pp. 4-6; Charles E. McClelland, "Toward an Historical Theory of Professionalization" (Unpubl. Ms., 1983); for the German chemists see Lothar Burchardt, "Professionalisierung oder Berufskonstruktion? Das Beispiel des Chemikers im wilhelminischenDeutschland," inProfessionalisierunginhistorischerPerspektive, ed. HansUlrich Wehler, no. 3 of Geschichte und Gesellschaft 6 (1980): 326-48. 4. On the DCG see B. Lepsius, Festschrift zur Feier des SOjahrigen Bestehens der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft und des 100. Geburtstages ihres Begriinders August Wilhelm vonHofinann (Berlin, 1918), and Walter Ruske, 100 Jahre Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft (Weinheim, 1967). On the VDC see Ruske, but especially Rassow's Geschichte and minutes and surveys in the Zeitschriftfiir angewandte Chemie of the VDC (hereafter abbreviated asZtsch. angew. Ch.). 5. Rassow, Geschichte, p. 76. 6. The best available sources: Bund der technischen Angestellten und Beamten, 25 Jahre Technikergewerkschaft—10 Jahre Butab (Berlin [?], 1929), pp. 24-51; see also


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Wilhelm Mertens, "ZurBewegung dertechnischen Privatbeamten," ArchivfiirSozialwissenschaft undSozialpolitik 25 (1907): 649-713; Emil Lederer, Die Privatangestellten in dermodernenWirtschaftsentwicklung (Tubingen, 1912), especially pp. 181-223; annual reports and minutes in the BtiB Schriften; and its Deutsche Industriebeamten-Zeitung (hereafter abbreviated asDt. Indb.-Ztg.). Angestellter andBeamter will be "employee" and "official," respectively; both connote salaried, white-collar workers rather than Arbeiter, who are blue-collar wage earners. 7. See Karl-Heinz Manegold, "Technology Academised: Education and Training of the Engineer in the Nineteenth Century," in The Dynamics of Science and Technology, vol. 2, The Sociology of the Sciences ed. W. Krohn, Edwin Layton, and Peter Weingart (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1978), pp. 137-58; JargenKocka, Die Angestellten in der deutschen Geschichte, 1850-1980: Vom Privatbeamten zum angestellten Arbeitnehmer (Gottingen, 1981), pp. 94-98. 8. "Fiinfundzwanzig Jahre unseres Vereinslebens," Die chemische Industrie (henceforth abbreviated as Chem. Ind.) 25 (1902): 405-17, here 406; Verein zur Wahrung der Interessen der chemischen Industrie Deutschlands (C. Ungewitter), Ausgewahlte Kapitelaus derchemisch-industriellenWirtschaftspolitik (Berlin, 1927), p. 5; Ruske, 100 Jahre, pp. 26, 43-44, 109, 124, 131; Lepsius, Festschrift, p. 179. 9. Georg Meyer-Thurow, "The Industrialization of Invention: A Case Study from the German Chemical Industry," Isis 73 (1982): 363-81; August Bernthsen, Fiinfzig Jahre Tatigkeit in chemischer Wissenschaft und Industrie: Einige Lebenserinnerungen (Heidelberg: Privately printed, 1925), pp. 35-39. 10. Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, N.S. (hereafter abbreviated as Statist. Dt. R.) 103 (1897): 366; ibid., 203 (1910): 255; ibid., 221 (Zusammenfassende Ubersichtenfur die Gewerbliche Betriebszdhlung von 1907): 130-31; Beer, The Emergence of the German Dye Industry, ed. B. I. Cohen (Salem, N.H., 1981), pp. 83-84, 134; Meyer-Thurow, "Industrialization," pp. 368, 371; Ludwig F. Haber, The Chemical Industry in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1958), p. 133; Ferdinand Fischer, Das Studium der technischen Chemie (Brunswick, 1957), p. 45. 11. Lothar Burchardt, "Wissenschaft und Wirtschaftswachstum: Industrielle Einflussnahmen auf die Wissenschaftspolitik im Wilhelminischen Deutschland," in Soziale Bewegung undpolitische Verfassung: Beitrdge zur Geschichte der modernen Welt, ed. Ulrich Engelhardt (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 776-77; Karl-Heinz Manegold, Universitdt, Technische Hochschule und Industrie: Bin Beitrag (Berlin, 1970), pp. 249-305; Chem. Ind. 17 (1894): 263; ibid., 29 (1896): 401-2. 12. "Zur Geschichte der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur angewandte Chemie," Ztsch. angew.Ch. 6 (1893): 555. 13. New statutes of the newly renamed Verein Deutscher Chemiker: Ztsch. angew. Ch. 9 (1896): 391-94; membership: ibid. (1914): essay section, 586. 14. A complete list of members is unavailable, but it seems that the proportion of dependent employees rose during 1896-1909 from about two thirds to nearly 90 percent: Ztsch. angew. Ch. 9 (1896): 113; ibid., 22 (1909): 2541. 15. Carl Duisberg, Meine Lebenserinnerungen (Leipzig, 1933), virtually ignores the VDC, but see Hans-Joachim Flechtner, Carl Duisberg: Vom Chemiker zum Wirtschaftsfuhrer (Diisseldorf, 1959; 2nd ed., 1961 [annotations in following paper come from the first edition]), based on papers in the Bayer corporate archives but unfortunately not annotated. 16. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 9 (1896): 155-56. 17. O. Wentzki, "Bezirksverein Frankfurt von 1893-1911," in Rassow, Geschichte, pp. 218-26, here 219.

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18. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 9 (1896): 155-56. 19. Carl Duisberg, "Uber die Ausbildung der technischen Chemiker und das zu erstrebende Staatsexamen fur dieselben," ibid., pp. 97-111, here 107-8. 20. Jeffrey A. Johnson, "Academic Self-Regulation and the Chemical Profession in Imperial Germany," Minerva 23 (1985): 241-71, here 250-57, 262-63. 21. Ibid., p. 266. 22. Duisberg, "Ausbildung," p. l06;Ztsch. angew. Ch. 22 (1909): 1846; Hartmut Titze, "Enrollment Expansion and Academic Overcrowding in Germany," in The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860-1930: Expansion, Diversification, Social Opening, and Professionalization in England, Germany, Russia, and the United States, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 57-88, here 65. 23. Old and new statutes, Ztsch. angew. Ch. 20 (1907): 392-99, here 393. 24. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 15 (1902): 990-93; ibid., 20 (1907): 1477; Rassow,Geschichte, p. 76. 25. Johnson, "Academic Self-Regulation," pp. 266-67. 26. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 20 (1907): 399, 1457-58. 27. Fischer to Duisberg, July 31, 1905, Emil Fischer Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 28. Chem. Ind. 29 (1906): 536-37. 29. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 20 (1907): 513-14, 1512-13. "Chemikant" apparently means semiskilled laboratory and production workers. 30. Burchardt, "Professionalisierung," p. 338. 31. Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 2 (1906): 56-57. 32. Bund der technischen Angestellten und Beamten, 25 Jahre, pp. 24-25. 33. Statist. Dt. R. 203 (1910): 255; ibid., 221: 130-31. 34. Annual surveys began in 1907 but did not subdivide by big and small firms until l910:Ztsch. angew. Ch. 26 (1913): 757, gives 1910-12results;Ztsch. angew. Ch. 27 (1914): essay section 598, gives 1911-13 results, and so on; chemists in giant firms: Beer,Emergence, pp. 83-84, 134; Meyer-Thurow, "Industrialization," pp. 368, 371; Haber, Chemical Industry, p. 133. 35. A few women were trained as chemists before 1909, the year of their first official matriculation at Prussian universities, but they tended to find poorly paid positions like sugar refining (compare Dr. S., "Die Lage der deutschen Zuckertechniket,"Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 2 [1906]: 317, 340-42, here 340). For their first mention in a VDC survey: Ztsch. angew. Ch. 26 (1913): 757. 36. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 25 (1912): 1816-17. 37. Carl Duisberg, "Die Angestelltenerfindung in der chemischen Industrie," Ztsch. angew. Ch. 22 (1909): 1665-70, here 1667. 38. Ibid.; Meyer-Thurow, "Industrialization," pp. 375-80. 39. Flechtner, CarlDuisberg, pp. 192-93; on the export of indigo, seeZtsch. angew. Ch. 25(1912): 257,2116. 40. R. Leimbach, "Deutsche Chemiker und Deutsche Industrie, II," Dt. Indb.Ztg. 3 (1907): 225-29, here 226-27. 41. Chem. Ind. 29 (1906): 530-31. 42. On the patent issue and competition clause in general: Weinberg, "Die rechtliche Stellung der technischen Angestellten,"Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 1 (1904-5): 192-94; Mertens, "Bewegung," pp. 672-96; "Etablissementserfindung," Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 9 (1913): 389-92, 399-401, 411-13; in the chemical industry: Dr. H., "Zur Lage der technischen Chemiker," Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 3 (1907): 120-21; Leimbach, "Deutsche Chemiker," pp. 227-29; Max Buchner, "Die Konkurrenzklausel und die chemische


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Technik," Ztsch. angew. Ch. 21 (1908): 1297-1304, and reports by E. Haagn and F. Raschig of the social committee of the VDC inZtsch. angew. Ch. 22 (1909): 1797804; Duisberg, "Angestelltenerfindung," pp. 1665-70, and related articles inZtsch. angew. Ch. 22 (1909); "Entwurf des neuen Patentgesetzes," Ztsch. angew. Ch. 37 (1914): essay section, 137-43, and subsequent related articles. 43. Meyer-Thurow, "Industrialization," p. 378. 44. Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 1 (1904-5): 161-62; Ztsch. angew. Ch. 22 (1909): 2566; Chem. Ind. 29 (1906): 536. 45. Cited in Mertens, "Bewegung," p. 672. 46. Carl Duisberg to Emil Fischer, August 19, 1905, Fischer Papers, with enclosed copy of an extract from a chemist's contract with the Oehler company, paragraph 2, specifying penalty. Numbers going into Karenz from Verein Deutscher Chemiker surveys, 1910-12. 47. Mertens, "Bewegung," p. 680n. 48. Der Techniker im Tarifvertrag (Berlin, 1924), pp. 1-3 (in Bund der technischen Angestellten und Beamten, ScAn/ten, no. 23);Ztsch. angew. Ch. 21 (1908): 1943;Cfe>m. Ind. 31 (1908): 399. 49. L. Max Wohlgemuth, Der Fabrikchemiker: Seine Ausbildung und Stellung (Halle, 1906), cited in "DerFabrikchemiker," Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 2 (1906): 300-3, here 302;Ztsch. angew. Ch. 20(1907): 1469. 50. Comments in Bund der technisch-industriellen Beamten (henceforth abbreviated as BtiB), Bericht tiberden 8. ordentlichen Bundestag . . . 1912, in BtiB, Schriften, no. 25 (Berlin, 1912), pp. 22, 25. 51. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 27 (1914): economics section, 746. 52. Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 1 (1904-5): 161-62. 53. Mertens, "Bewegung," pp. 697-98. 54. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 25(1912): 1786; ibid., 20 (1907): 1522-27, 1439; ibid., 21 (1908): 1891. 55. Mertens, "Bewegung," pp. 698-705; Ztsch. angew. Ch. 24 (1911): 1710-14; ibid., 25(1912): 1824. 56. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 25 (1912): 2817-21; C. Duisberg, "Der gewerbliche Arbeitsvertrag der kaufmannischen und der technischen Angestellten," Chem. Ind. 30 (1907): 484; Ztsch. angew. Ch. 20 (1907): 1464-65 and 1471. 57. Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 9 (1913): 51-52. 58. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 20 (1907): 1468, 1522. 59. BtiB, Bericht iiber den 5. ordentlichen Bundestag . . . 1910, in BtiB, Schriften, no. 18 (Berlin, 1910), p. 30. 60. Dt. Indb.-Ztg. 1 (1904-5): 2. 61. BtiB, Bericht fiber den 3. ordentlichen Bundestag der technisch-industriellen Beamten ... 1909, in BtiB, Schriften, no. 14 (Berlin, 1909): 179, only one of the conflicts that cost the BtiB talented leaders. 62. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 20 (1907): 1497-98. 63. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 22 (1909): 2542; ibid., 20 (1907): 395-96. 64. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 27 (1914): essay section, 586. 65. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 23 (1910): 658-59. 66. Mertens, "Bewegung," pp. 656-57. 67. See Bund der technischen Angestellten und Beamten, 25 Jahre, p. 50. 68. See the Gispen chapter in this volume. 69. Ztsch. angew. Ch. 23 (1910): 658. 70. H. A. Hesse, Berufe imWandel (Stuttgart, 1972), pp. 85-89, 131, 173, cited by

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Burchardt, "Professionalisierung," pp. 326n., 348n; Statist. Dt. R. 103 (1897): 366; ibid., 203 (1910): 255; ibid., 221: 130-31. 71. Colin A. Russell with Noel G. Coley and Gerrylynn K. Roberts, Chemists by Profession: The Origins and Rise of the Royal Institute of Chemistry (Milton Keynes, England, 1977), pp. 158-85 and Figures 6-7; Edwin T. Layton, Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore, Md., 1986), pp. 79-108; Arnold Thackray et al., Chemistry in America, 1876-1976: Historical Indicators (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1985), pp. 22-54. 72. Bund der technischen Angestellten und Beamten, 25 Jahre, p. 5Iff. 73. Heiner Ramstetter, "Der deutsche Chemiker im Krieg und Frieden (191445)," in E. Schmauderer, Der Chemiker im Wandel der Zeiten (Weinheim, 1973), pp. 311-23, here 319-20; "Bund angestellter Akademiker technisch-naturwissenschaftlicher Berufe E. V.," Ztsch. angew. Ch. 45 (1932): 337. 74. Russell, Chemists, pp. 193-94, 212-17; Roy and Kay MacLeod, "The Contradictions of Professionalism: Scientists, Trade Unionism and the First World War," Social Studies of Science 9 (1979): 1-32.

A Struggle for Existence: The Proiessionalization of German Architects VINCENT CLARK

In the forty or fifty years since scholars began studying the professions, they have employed two basic approaches. One academic approach considered professions in an ethical perspective; thus, for these scholars, professions were distinguished from other occupations by higher ethical considerations, which they believed motivated professional practice.1 The other approach, which has been dominant perhaps since the late 1960s, has emphasized professionalization as a means of achieving domination over a particular area of work and its economic rewards.2 The study of German private architects, however, suggests a third view. It reveals the profession as the stepchild of capitalist industrialism. In this case, the professional occupation, as the product of industrialization, came into a world filled with uncertainties and dangers. The situation of the private architect is difficult and survival techniques were only gradually discovered. Eventually, private architects turned to state licensing and full professionalization, but they did so slowly and indecisively. Furthermore, in doing so, private architects sought not to fortify an already strong position, but to defend themselves against perceived enemies, many of which seemed of superior strength. The terms "profession" and "professionalization" have been the subject of intense debate and frequent disagreement. However, despite these disagreements almost all definitions have identified the profession as an intellectual service occupation having a body of specialized knowledge and skill, long and difficult training, a prestigious social position, and some legal mechanism to enforce its monopoly over the provision of its service and use of its title. This generally accepted description will serve here as a working definition, with particular emphasis on its monopoly. Professionalization will likewise mean the process by which occupations acquire these characteristics. Since during the nineteenth century, architects, like several similar occupations, were in the process of adding the missing qualifications to those they had already acquired, 143

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we will focus particular attention here on the process.3 Because this process (especially the eventual acquisition of architectural licensing, or chambers [Kammern]) was exceptionally long and contentious, the term "full professionalization" will be used to emphasize the securing of this monopoly. The history of architectural occupations in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is characterized by several key developments, many of which it shared with those of other academic occupations. In brief, architecture assumed its modern occupational structure as a result of industrialization. Like other occupations, it then engaged in campaigns to raise the standards and prestige of its training institutions, organize associations, achieve equality with other occupations, and control the number of students trained for its ranks. Eventually, for reasons of self-protection, private architects began their own movement toward licensing and the exclusion of those they deemed unqualified, often portraying themselves in a desperate situation—in their own Darwinian terms, "a struggle for existence." During the first half of the nineteenth century, architectural occupations underwent a fundamental reorganization. In the eighteenth century, members of at least three occupations, or subdivisions within occupations, had performed architectural tasks as a part of their work. The first were the private Baumeister, artisans trained as carpenters or masons, who both designed and constructed buildings, primarily for private clients.4 Second were the court architects, who included most of the famous baroque and neoclassical masters like Balthasar Neumann in Wiirzburg and Andreas Schliitter in Berlin. Court architects were generally involved not only in architecture but in military and other kinds of engineering as well.5 A third type of preindustrial building designer consisted of state building officials, the Baubeamten, who emerged during the bureaucratization of building and other state activities in the eighteenth century.6 In the course of the nineteenth century, this structure of architectural occupations changed. By the third quarter of the century, the continuing bureaucratization of state building activities transformed court architects from the princes' personal servants to bureaucratic officeholders. This bureaucratization also affected ordinary building officials. The building departments were responsible for the provision of city planning, street construction, and water and sewer systems. They also designed, supervised, and maintained the interurban transportation infrastructure of highways, railroads, canals, river navigation projects, and port facilities. As a result of industrialization and urbanization, these departments rapidly expanded,7 putting new demands on building officials' training, increasing their numbers, and leading to a new occupational self-consciousness. The decline of the private Baumeister who was replaced by modern contractors on one side and private architects on the other, also took place during the nineteenth century. Contractors emerged with industrialization, some as Baumeister, who by enlarging their operations transformed themselves from artisan masters into capitalist employers; this tendency accelerated in subsequent decades. Modern private architects also appeared in this period as practitioners

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who restricted their work to client consultation, building design, and construction supervision,8 differing from Baumeister and contractors in their avoidance of involvement in construction. Their emergence was also a result of industrialization, which began in many regions in the 1830s. In Berlin, for example, the architectural community identified Eduard Knoblauch, who began practice during this decade, as the first of this type.9 As industrialization accelerated, the number of private architects also increased. (My prosopography of leading German architects shows this clearly.) Among architects who began practice before 1840, for example, only 15 percent were in private practice. In the next twenty years, during which there was slow acceleration of industrialization, the proportion of private to state-employed architects slowly increased. Of the total number of architects who began work during this period, private architects totaled 20 percent. Then during the industrial boom of the 1860s and early 1870s, the proportion of private architects soared. Of the architects who began careers between 1860 and 1880, the number in private practice reached 42 percent.10 The development of a private market for architecture was crucial for this change. This resulted from industrialization and urbanization, which expanded the demand for private buildings of all types, including factories, warehouses, department stores, apartment buildings, and private houses. It also enlarged and enriched the middle classes, who wanted buildings and could afford to have them architecturally designed.11 The preindustrial court architect, state architect, and private Baumeister yielded to the modern state architect, modern private architect, and contractor during the first half of the nineteenth century. l2 A second occupational development was the rise of technical education. During the nineteenth century a new institution, the higher technical school, assumed the dominant role in architectural education and resembled the university in both rigor and prestige. Its dominance contrasted with the situation in preindustrial Germany, where no unified system of architectural training had existed above the apprenticeship level. During that century, a variety of institutions had offered varying amounts of architectural instruction. These had included military schools, knights' academies, art academies, and the first Prussian Realschuk (modern school).13 In 1799, Prussia took the first step toward the system that finally emerged when it founded the Berlin Academy of Building (Berliner Bau-Akademie). The second step was the development of the German poly technical school, which was the prototype for all German higher-level technical schools. Early polytechnical schools were established in Prague, Vienna, and Karlsruhe. Founded in 1825, the Karlsruhe school consisted of departments of mathematics, engineering, and architecture, and, in the early days, preparatory and commercial departments. After 1832 the school had the right of self-government, which it exercised through large and small councils and a director, chosen for a oneyear term by senior faculty members and subject to confirmation by the minister of the interior.14 The polytechnical school, therefore, combined instruction in

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all the then-existing technical disciplines with a large measure of selfgovernment. Outside Prussia, most German states established such schools— for example, Wurttemberg in 1831 and Hanover in 1847, when it converted its advanced commercial school (hohere Gewerbeschule) into a polytechnical school. In 1849, Prussia reorganized the Berlin Building Academy and brought it closer to this model. It gave salaries and tenure to instructors who had been previously paid by the hour, and it created new faculty councils, which discussed curriculum and instructional methods. The final step toward modern technical education came with the formation of institutes of technology (technische Hochschulen, or THs) in the 1860s and 1870s. In such an institute, departments were organized as self-governing faculties, and the entire institution enjoyed self-government exercised through a faculty senate and director, which were elected by the professors. Most of the institutes also required students to have a school-leaving certificate from a Gymnasium (the university-preparatory school) or equivalent as a prerequisite for admission. The goal, according to Hans Grashof, director of the Karlsruhe Polytechnical School and leading proponent of the institutes, was the creation of "true institutes of technology, of no less rank and character than the universities . . ."15 The government of Baden gave Grashof's school a charter with these provisions in 1865,16 and other states followed suit, with schools at Munich in 1868, Stuttgart in 1876, and Darmstadt and Braunschweig in 1877.17 In 1870 Prussia created a TH in Aachen, while upgrading the Hanover polytechnical school, acquired in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. In 1876, its parliament approved a ministerial plan to unite the Berlin Building and Commercial Academies into a single institute of technology, and an 1879 ministerial decree made the changes official, with a new charter following in 1882. The Berlin school was typical of these institutes. It consisted of the five departments of architecture, structural engineering, machine engineering (including naval architecture), chemistry and metallurgy, and general studies (mostly mathematics and natural sciences). Each department was selfgoverning with a departmental "college" and chairman. The institute as a whole was also self-governing under a rector chosen by the departments, and a senate composed of the rector, prorector, department chairmen, and additional department representatives.18 Most departments offered their own separate career-oriented curricula. Since 1876, for example, architecture and engineering had provided separate four-year courses of study.19 The institutes of technology maintained this basic structure until their reorganization as technical universities in the second half of the twentieth century. Although both architects and engineers were involved in these developments, engineering was important from the very beginning and sometimes seemed to overshadow architecture. The founders of the Berlin Building Academy, for example, aimed to combine instruction in architecture, engineering, and other technical disciplines to provide, according to its charter, "the theoretical and practical education of proficient surveyors [and] land and water building officials."20 This was hardly objectionable because, until much later in


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the century, Prussian district building officials (Land-Baumeister) had both engineering and architectural responsibilities. In doing so, however, its founders sought—and achieved—a substantial increase in engineering instruction, as the Prussian building official Genelli urged in a 1799 memorandum supporting the school's establishment: "In the [art] academy, architecture itself can be accepted only as a fine art, and this [principle] excludes, therefore, every branch of this wide-ranging discipline from its circle which does not have this character. Machine and mill construction, water control, fortification construction, and naval architecture remain consequently excluded."21 Once the building academy was in operation, engineering remained important. 22 In 1823, the school was divided into an engineering department, which was placed under the Board of Trade, and a department of architecture, which remained under the Academy of Art. The engineering department prospered, while the department of architecture suffered from low enrollment and was later closed.23 Architecture was soon revived and reunited with engineering, but in the Academy of Building the engineering emphasis remained. This eventually provoked a reaction. In 1847 August Stuler, a prominent Prussian architect and instructor in the building academy, argued that "the Building School does not sufficiently train the artistic capacities and subordinates [them] to scientific and theoretical abilities. The emphasis is explained, to be sure, primarily by the requirement placed upon the school to train building officials for the building administration. But it is not sufficient for the education of architects."24 Other instructors offered reform proposals, and in 1848 the students themselves complained that the curriculum prevented personal and artistic development. The Architects' Association of Berlin also recommended a thorough reformation of the curriculum and of the state examinations for which it provided the primary preparation.25 These complaints led to far-reaching reforms. Among them was a curriculum reorganization that allowed prospective state building officials to specialize in either architecture (Land- und Schonbau) or civil engineering (Wege- und Wasserbau). Previous regulations had required a course covering both.26 This answered many of the architects' complaints and it represented a significant responsiveness to architects' desires that had previously been less evident. The primary inspiration for polytechnical schools was the French Ecole polytechnique, which emphasized mathematics and technology. Although it was a preparatory rather than a higher-level school like the German polytechnical schools, it was more closely related to the elite engineering academy, the Ecole des Fonts et Chaussees, for which it prepared students, than the Ecole des BeauxArts, which taught architecture.27 In fact, most early polytechnical school supporters were interested primarily in engineering. In 1818, for example, the Archivfilr die Baukunst und ihre Hulfswissenschaften (archives for architecture and its auxiliary sciences), which supported the new schools, contended that they should exclude architecture as a fine art. Those students interested in architecture as art, it was argued, should go to art academies and conclude their educations with the traditional Italian study tour.28 As for architects, many were unenthusiastic about these schools and their

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engineering emphasis. In 1819, when the Prussian Ministry of Culture proposed converting the Dusseldorf Academy of Art into a poly technical school, Karl Friedrich Schinkel opposed the plan, arguing that technology should not be mixed with art.29 In Karlsruhe, Friedrich Weinbrenner, who was Schinkel's counterpart and Baden's master of the neoclassical style, opposed attempts to attract architecture students to engineering and mathematics lectures, contending that "the architect, in his work, needs no great mathematical calculations based upon integral and differential calculus, since he already has so much to learn that he cannot make this science his chief study."30 Throughout the century, architectural dissatisfaction with technical schools occasionally surfaced, but these schools remained the dominant architectural training grounds from the 1830s to the present, and almost all architects received their training there. Two influences contributed to this situation. First, and most important, these schools trained future officials for the state building services, which were the largest employers of architectural personnel. Second, within the technical schools, as we have seen, architecture and other disciplines were eventually organized into self-governing departments with their own curricula. This, understandably, defused most opposition. Another development in the history of modern architectural occupations was the formation of associations, a feature that was common to other nineteenthcentury German academic occupations as well.31 The first association was the Architects' Society of Berlin (Architektenverein zu Berlin), founded in 1824.32 Subsequently, more that twenty years elapsed before regional organizations emerged. The first were the traveling conventions, or Wanderversammlungen, initially held in Leipzig in 1842 and subsequently convened every year or two in a different city. With no permanent organization (the architects of the host city handled all arrangements), the traveling conventions reflected the tenuousness of extraregional connections during the Vormdrz period.33 Permanent provincial associations emerged in the 1850s and 1860s. The first was the Architects' and Engineers' Society for the Kingdom of Hanover, which was founded in 1851 and was followed by similar organizations in other states. With national unification in 1871, an association that was empirewide emerged.34 This was the Union of German Architects' and Engineers' Societies (Verband deutscher Architekten- und Ingenieur-Vereine, or VDAIV),35 a federation of regional societies, which remained the architects' primary national organization for the next thirty years.36 Like other academic occupations,37 architects tried to limit the number of students admitted to training. These numbers fluctuated from one extreme to another, and architects became particularly concerned in periods of apparent student oversupply. During the Grunderzeit, a period of entrepreneurial fever during the late 1860s and early 1870s, students flooded in. While the student onrush affected all disciplines in both universities and technical schools, economic trends made it boil over in architecture and engineering. During these years, both private and government construction boomed. A major influence


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was railroad building, which included the laying of an extensive track network as well as the construction of numerous passenger, freight, administrative, maintenance, and other types of buildings. Enrollment figures reflected these trends. For example, at the beginning of the boom, in the winter semester 1866-67, the Karlsruhe Polytechnical School had 87 students in architecture. Ten years later, in the 1876-77 winter semester, the number had risen to 121. The increase was even more dramatic in Berlin, where numbers more than doubled in this ten-year period.38 Unfortunately, just as this oversupply reached its peak, a shortage of jobs developed. In the late 1870s, the building boom turned into depression, severely reducing private construction and causing even prominent firms to fail. Many private architects now sought state positions. They were often disappointed. The railroad network was practically complete. The newly expanded state bureaucracy was filled, mostly with recently hired young employees. The German Journal of Building viewed the situation as extremely bleak. "No one . . . can doubt . . . that [of the] many young architects and engineers who wish to dedicate themselves to careers as Prussian building officials, the greater share will have to contend with severe disappointment, perhaps even with need and poverty . . ,"39 In the succeeding two decades, the flood of students declined to a trickle, as those preparing for careers realized the prospects. By the 1886-87 winter semester, the number of architecture students at Karlsruhe had declined to 24.40 The pendulum, however, continued to swing. With the resurgence of building in the last half of the 1880s and first half of the 1890s, jobs became more plentiful again. By the first decade of the twentieth century, however, the pendulum had swung back, and positions were scarce once again.41 Throughout these cycles, however, architects and their associations were able to do little more than lament. Their efforts to control student numbers were as ineffectual as those of most other academic occupations.42 Architects also struggled for equality with other occupations, especially law.43 They saw two areas of inequality: in social position and within the bureaucracies, where they often clashed with the lawyers. Feelings of social inferiority were widespread and led to frequent complaints in the leading technical journals about the "relatively retarded position which the occupational class of architects and engineers (Techniker) occupies in Germany in comparison with France and England . . ."44 At times this sense of inferiority seemed to preoccupy occupational organizations and periodicals;45 an original goal, for example, of the Union of German Architects' and Engineers' Societies, which represented the mainstream of architecture and engineering, was the advancement of the occupation's social interests.46 The other area of dissatisfaction was with the building services. Throughout the nineteenth century, most states viewed law as the only proper training for administration, which meant that legally trained officials held influential jobs in all government departments, including building, and were involved in almost all major decisions. In most departments, moreover, they were exclusively eligible to head ministries, even those administering building affairs. Those

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without legal training like architects and engineers were ineligible. The resulting friction became notorious by the 1870s.47 Building officials complained that lawyers attempted to control their work,48 and eventually demanded control over the entire building service. This situation led to a demand for the autonomous control of work, which scholars have frequently identified as an objective of professionalization.49 Furthermore, by the end of the nineteenth century, building officials also demanded eligibility for all positions in the entire state administration, whether related to building or not.50 Another struggle involved education, in which, until the twentieth century, technical schools enjoyed less prestige than universities.51 To remedy this situation, technical-school interests sought for their schools the same requirements for admission that existed at the universities: the completion of a humanistic studies program at the Gymnasium. In 1855, Prussian regulations fulfilled these desires, though later allowing graduates of both Gymnasien and first-class modern schools (Realschulen 1. Ordnung) admission to both universities and higher technical schools.52 Other proposals for increasing social status included more literary and philosophical study in secondary school and internships without compensation for state building officials, like those served by legal officials as Referendare (junior lawyers).53 These proposals, however, received more discussion than support. In the long run, the equality that architects and engineers did achieve resulted mostly from the states' elevation of the status of the institutes of technology at the end of the century. In 1891, the Prussian government conferred a golden chain as a symbol of office on the rector of the Berlin Institute of Technology—a privilege that was later extended to rectors of the other Prussian institutes in Hanover and Aachen.54 In 1892, Prussian regulations made institute of technology faculty members equal to those at universities.55 In 1899, the rectors received the title of "magnificence," the same appellation as their university counterparts.56 Furthermore, in 1899 the Prussian state gave its institutes the right of conferring doctoral degrees, a step that was quickly followed by the other states.57 These measures provided technical education an official near equality with that of the universities. The final trend was the growing belief by private architects that their interests diverged from those of other architects, which led to their eventual decision to seek licensing. It is noteworthy that the rise of private architects coincided with the abolition of government restrictions on design and building occupations. By the 1860s, when the private practice of architecture was a well-established type of work, legal limitations—apart from building codes—had been mostly abolished. With the repeal of the guild laws, anyone, regardless of training or lack of it, could legally work as an architect. German private architects eventually sought and much later gained a state-enforced monopoly over the remunerated practice of architecture and title of "architect." They adopted this goal, however, as a defensive strategy to escape competition and did so with reluctance.

The Professionalization yf German Architects

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The path from this condition of untrammeled competition to state licensing and full professionalization was long and uncertain. It was several years before private architects expressed any desire for such a remedy or even a sense of interests that were different from those of their colleagues. No private architects' organizations existed until 1876, and the first—the Alliance of Berlin Architects, founded in 1876-77—was local and largely ineffective.58 Even more time elapsed before such organizations appeared in other cities. Not until 1889 did private architects in Cologne form an association (the "Cologne Architects").59 Another twelve years passed before a similar group was formed in Hanover.60 Only in 1903 was a national organization, the Federation of German Architects (Bund Deutscher Architekten, or BDA), formed. The BDA itself moved slowly and with great caution in the direction of licensing and full professionalization. It indicated its indecision in the proclamation issued at its founding, noting that "under the present conditions, protection of the [architect's] title by the state seems difficult to achieve" and "it is feared in many circles [among architects] that [state licensing] would at best [bring] disadvantages to our free artistic calling."61 The political weakness of private architects and disagreements among them prevented any action for more than a decade. As the proclamation indicated, many architects were ambivalent about licensing. They were not convinced that professionalization would improve artistic quality, and they were afraid that the state, through licensing boards, might limit their freedom of design. Economic weakness also impeded the movement toward licensing—and paradoxically provided its major motivation. In fact, weakness best describes private architects' perception of their situation in imperial Germany. The 1903 proclamation of the BDA expressed this clearly: The greatest danger to our artistic life, the worst enemy to our own endeavors is the ruthless commercialism, which, without ideals and governed only by the desire for profit, exploits our otherwise beneficial commercial freedom. In the wide new districts of our cities, one encounters only a cold commercial sense, the withered spiritual poverty of building speculation. . . . The creative architect has long ago lost any influence on the construction of the streets of our new districts; here is the realm of the contractor, trained in the lower trade schools, who has given himself the name of "architect," because this title seemed advantageous to him; and the pitiful members of our calling who are driven by necessity to work for these people must be satisfied with the scantiest of wages.62

Eight years later the New German Building Journal (Neudeutsche Bauzeitung), which supported the private architects' cause, repeated the indictment. The predominant forces in building, it charged, work "to the detriment of art" and were "on one side, the building industry and the building contractors; on the other, the state officials." The private architect had little opportunity to secure commissions because "the private person goes to . . . a building contractor as soon as he decides to have a building constructed." The private architect has even less

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chance of designing public buildings because "the state and municipal authorities" take care of "public buildings with a staff of permanently employed state architects."63 Although it is hard to be certain about whether these views represented all economic levels within private architecture, some evidence suggests that some of the most successful private architects took exception, or were at least less emphatic about them. During the period 1909-16, when the BDA was debating licensing proposals, the chapter from Hamburg, where private architects appear to have been strong, sharply attacked these proposals. Nonetheless, many private architects—perhaps the majority—believed themselves to be in a precarious position, since only a small market for private design had been created. Contractors rather than architects "designed" most private buildings, and the public—and state building officials—assumed that this was normal.64 In 1906, one expert estimated that nonarchitects designed 90 percent of all agricultural and commercial buildings.65 Furthermore, in 1913, the director of a building-trades school (Baugewerkschule) claimed that 75 percent of all buildings were designed by craftsmen and contractors.66 Architects had difficulty competing with contractors, particularly in the area of price. A 1906 Prussian ministerial report noted that most people believed they could build cheaper without an architect.67 Contractors were cheaper because their profit came mostly from construction, not design, which meant that, unlike architects, they could reduce prices on design without affecting their main source of income. They also used the same plans repeatedly, making only slight modifications to suit each customer, while the architect's primary task was the production of fresh and creative designs for each new project. Contractors could also offer package prices for whole projects, including both design and construction. They could offer reduced construction prices at the crucial moment to get a job—often, architects complained, just when they were negotiating with potential clients.68 If architects could not compete on price, then they had to compete on quality. However, this had limited effectiveness because it appealed only to the small number already inclined to use an architect's services. The problem, as architects saw it, was to "awaken an understanding of [their] activity [and] . . . profession in the widest circles of the population."69 The other competitors were state officials. Although the most important state commissions (e.g., for large churches, railroad stations in major cities, important university buildings) were usually awarded in open competitions, permanently employed state building officials designed all other government buildings, including schools, parsonages, post offices, courthouses, office buildings, and all except the largest railroad stations. This amounted to a great deal of construction. For example, Prussian state architect Paul Thoemer (1851-1918) was responsible for the design of three hundred small and medium-sized buildings with a value of fifty-two million marks, plus fifty-one large courthouses with a total value of seventy-six million marks.70 Obviously, the use of Baubeamten on such a scale limited the commissions available to private architects.


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Occasionally the bureaucracies threatened to expand their activities. In 1907, for example, a Prussian agency provoked a BDA protest by providing design help for farmers.71 In 1915 the Westphalia Building Advisory Office in Miinster designed a nursing home in a nearby town, which led to an objection from the German Building Journal.12 In addition to their official duties, many state architects conducted private practices on the side. In 1914, private architects attempted to prohibit Prussian officials from offering private services.73 About the same time, a Hanover private architects' association, the German Private Architects, petitioned the Prussian House of Representatives to prohibit building-trades school teachers from engaging in private practice. A year later, in 1915, the Palatine Private Architects' Association of Kaiserslautern complained in a petition to the Bavarian government about the damage to their practices caused by state officials' private work. One military architect in Kaiserslautern, they contended, carried on a practice worth millions of marks per year. They also requested that a local building-trades school teacher be prohibited from private practice.74 A final cause of weakness was the instability of the building industry, which was subject to far greater and more sudden movements—both up and down— than the economy as a whole. For example, in 1872—one of the most expansive years of the Grunderzeh—while the general category of "industry," including construction, grew an impressive 17 percent, construction alone increased by 52 percent. On the other hand, in 1879—a year of general contraction when industrial production as a whole fell 1.4 percent—the construction industry declined by 17.8 percent.75 Architects were thus particularly vulnerable to economic swings. Their vulnerability was heightened by the small scale of most architectural practices, which limited their resources and resilience. In bad years, such as the late 1870s and early 1880s, even major firms were hard hit. In 1881, for example, the prominent Frankfurt partnership of Mylius and Bluntschli, which had been famous for designing the Hotel zum Frankfurter Hof in Frankfurt, was forced out of business.76 The architects' weakness resulted, therefore, from their economic situation. While industrialization had created a market for private architectural services, it was neither large nor stable enough to provide the economic security and social position desired by the large numbers of architects it attracted. Economic weakness influenced professionalization. On one hand, it impelled private architects toward organization to improve their situation. On the other, it prevented market control and caused disagreement about the desirability of professionalization. Both the political weakness and internal disagreement mentioned by the founding proclamation of the BDA impeded the movement toward licensing. Initially, some private architects explored other means of controlling competition: one was litigation. In 1907, three private architects sued a large Berlin contracting firm for using the title "architect." However, the suit failed to resolve the issue; the trial court ruled against the architects, while the appeals

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court equivocated, allowing the firm to keep the title "architect" on signs on current projects, but not to use it in the future.77 Licensing was also discussed during this time, but in a desultory and indecisive fashion. In 1905, for example, an article in the German Building Journal urged that the titles "engineer" and "architect" be defined by law and restricted to qualified persons. A 1909 article repeated the recommendation.78 Despite the attention these articles received, the BDA made no definite movement toward licensing; furthermore, hesitancy and disagreement characterized discussion of the subject. At the 1909 and 1910 BDA conventions, the Bremen delegation introduced licensing motions.79 These, however, ran into heavy opposition and were referred to a committee for study.80 While the committee was studying, architects were discussing, and continued to do so for the next six years.81 The committee did not report until 1912. When it did, it recommended that the BDA adopt licensing as a goal. The organization, however, took no action. Instead, it continued to debate, taking four more years to arrive at a decision. In 1916, it finally voted; however, this time it asked a committee to "prepare guidelines as soon as possible for the creation of architectural chambers."82 The private architects' decision to seek full professionalization and licensing, therefore, was taken reluctantly, and because they saw no other way of protecting their weak economic and social position. Even this decision, however, did not end the hesitation and indecision. Although during the Weimar era the BDA continued fitfully to support licensing, prominent architects raised concern about what they saw as its dangers to artistic freedom. The debate ended temporarily in 1933 with the Nazis' Gleichschaltung (coordination) of the BDA and other professional and artistic organizations. Yet even after the Second World War, architects' ambivalence continued. It was not until 1959 that architects' chambers came into existence in the states of Baden-Wiirttemberg, Saarland, and Rhineland-Palatinate. Even then, however, private architects' reservations became evident in the 1959 Report of Activities of the BDA, which, far from exulting in these developments, merely mentioned the chambers' existence. In addition, although the BDA continued to work for licensing laws in the remaining states, as soon as they passed, it again expressed doubts.83 In the 1978 edition of the official journal of the BDA commemorating its seventy-fifth anniversary, an article launched a sweeping attack on the entire struggle for licensing, reaching back to 1907. "The barely founded BDA," it asserted, "already suffered then from the leading German vice, which in our day is part of the general paralysis, the desire to have the state regulate everything . . ,"84 Whether or not this is the leading—or even a distinctly German—vice is open to debate. Nevertheless, the inclusion of such an attack in the anniversary issue reveals architects' ambivalence about the course they had followed. The history of German architects reveals a pattern of development that scholars have previously identified in other academic occupations. Architects, however, particularly in the final stage of their professionalization, acted


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primarily—if not exclusively—out of self-perceived weakness rather than strength. The history of professionalization has thus far paid relatively little attention to defensiveness in this process.85 The history of German architects suggests, however, that weakness—at least perceived weakness—could play an important role in the drama of professionalization. Notes 1. For example, Leopold von Wiese, System der allgemeinen Soziologie, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1955); Schelsky, "Die Zukunft des Menschen in der industriellen Arbeitswelt," Soziale Welt 14 (1962): 97-108; Rene Konig, "Die Berufsmoglichkeiten des Soziologen," Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (1962): 286-314; idem, "Der Beruf als Indiz sozialer Integration," Berufsberatung undBerufsbildung 47 (1962): 12-23; Horst Reimann and Klaus Kiefer, Soziologie als Beruf, 2nd ed. (Tubingen, 1969); Wolfgang Siebel, "Soziale Funktion und soziale Stellung des Ingenieurs," JahrbuchfiirSozialwissenschaften 13 (1962): 61—78; Hans Jiirgen Daheim, "Berufliche Intergenerationen-Mobilitat in der komplexen Gesellschaft," Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 16 (1964): 92-124; Theodor Scharmann, "Die Konzentration der Berufe und ihre Bedeutung fur die Berufspadagogik," Soziale Welt 14 (1964): 71-76; Ranier Lepsius, "Kritik als Beruf—zur Soziologie der Intellektuellen," Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 16 (1964): 7591; Hans P. Dreitzel, "Beruf, Arbeit, Eigentum,"Atomzeita/?er (1965): 53-58; Erwin K. Scheuch, "Sozialer Wandel und Sozialforschung," Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 17 (1965): 1-48; Hans Gerd Schutte, "Der Beruf des Drogisten," in Soziologische Probleme mittelstandischer Berufe: Abhandlungen zur Mittelstandsforschung, no. 1, ed. Institut fur Mittelstandsforschung Koln (Cologne, 1962), pp. 57-93 ;Rolff Ziegler, "Der Beruf des Textilingenieurs," in Soziologische Probleme mittelstandischer Berufe, pp. 139-95; Heinrich Abel, Das Berufsproblem im gewerblichen Ausbildungs- undSchulwesenDeutschlands (BRD) (Braunschweig, 1963); Johann Jiirgen Rohde, "Der Arztim SpannungsfeldderGegenwart,"Soz('afe Wfe/f 12(1961): 356-69; Ralf Dahrendorf, "Betrachtungen zu einigen Aspekten der deutschen Soziologie," Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 11 (1959): 132-53. 2. Eliot Freidson, "Professions in the Class Systems of Present-day Societies," Current Sociology 12, no. 3 (1963-64); idem, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge (New York, 1970); idem, Professional Dominance: The Structure of Medical Care (New York, 1970); idem, The Professions and their Prospects (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1973); and idem, "The Future of Professionalization," in Health and the Division of Labour, ed. M. Stacey (London, 1977); T. Johnson, "Professions and Power," American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977): 1-25; and idem, "The Professions in the Class Structure," in Industrial Society: Class, Cleavage and Control, ed. R. Skase (London, 1977); pp. 93-110; Dietrich Ruschemeyer, "Doctors and Lawyers: A Comment on the Theory of Professions," Canadian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 1 (1964): 17-30; idem, "Professions: Historisch und kulturell vergleichende Uberlegungen," in Soziologie: Rene Konig zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. G. Albrecht (Opladen, 1973), pp. 250-60; M. Friedmann and S. Kuznets,/«c

German Professions, 1800-1950

The Unfree Professions: German Lawyers, Teachers, and Engineers, 1900-1950

Regulating the Health Professions

Faith and the Professions

Sociology Of The Caring Professions

Introduction to the health professions

Medical Terminology for Health Professions

Writing for the Technical Professions

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Psychology for Nurses and the Caring Professions 2nd Edition (Social Science for Nurses Caring Professions)

Pharmacology for the Health Care Professions

Professions in Contemporary Drama (Theatre Studies)

Issues and Ethics in the Helping Professions

Identity and Status in the Translational Professions

Basic law for the allied health professions

Occupational Stress in the Service Professions

Introduction to the Library and Information Professions

The Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions (The Caring Professions)

Introduction to the Health Professions, Fourth Edition (INTRODUCTION TO THE HEALTH PROFESSIONS ( STANFIELD))

Psychology for Nurses and the Caring Professions (Social Science for Nurses and the Caring Professions)

Power and Professions in Britain, 1700-1850

Crisis and Opportunity in the Professions

Introduction to the Health Professions, Fourth Edition

Social Policy for Nurses and the Helping Professions (Social Science for Nurses and the Caring Professions)

Venturing into the Bioeconomy: Professions, Innovation, Identity

Health Professions and the State in Europe

Redesigning Continuing Education in the Health Professions

Venturing into the Bioeconomy: Professions, Innovation, Identity

German Professions, 1800-1950

The Unfree Professions: German Lawyers, Teachers, and Engineers, 1900-1950

Regulating the Health Professions

Faith and the Professions

Sociology Of The Caring Professions

Introduction to the health professions

Medical Terminology for Health Professions

Writing for the Technical Professions

German

German

Psychology for Nurses and the Caring Professions 2nd Edition (Social Science for Nurses Caring Professions)

Pharmacology for the Health Care Professions

Professions in Contemporary Drama (Theatre Studies)

Issues and Ethics in the Helping Professions

Identity and Status in the Translational Professions

Basic law for the allied health professions

Occupational Stress in the Service Professions

Introduction to the Library and Information Professions

The Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions (The Caring Professions)

Introduction to the Health Professions, Fourth Edition (INTRODUCTION TO THE HEALTH PROFESSIONS ( STANFIELD))

Psychology for Nurses and the Caring Professions (Social Science for Nurses and the Caring Professions)

Power and Professions in Britain, 1700-1850

Crisis and Opportunity in the Professions

Introduction to the Health Professions, Fourth Edition

Social Policy for Nurses and the Helping Professions (Social Science for Nurses and the Caring Professions)

Venturing into the Bioeconomy: Professions, Innovation, Identity

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