Abhandlungen

Ulrike Schulz und Swen Steinberg
Unternehmen im Transformationsprozess: Ostdeutsche und osteuropäische Perspektiven. Eine Einführung
317

This special issue presents East German as well as East European perspectives on the transformation phases after 1945 and 1989 and advocates the long-term analysis of corporations in the socialist planned economies as an independent research field. This includes not only economic questions but also cultural phenomena of everyday life, as well as questions of identity, milieu, confession or tradition. Ultimately, the aim is to extend this perspective to Eastern Europe. Again, the focus is not on the Comecon countries and their corporations alone. The interdependencies and interconnections between the East European and Western markets should also be taken into account.

Ulrike Schulz und Thomas Welskopp
Wieviel kapitalistisches Unternehmen steckte in den Betrieben des real existierenden Sozialismus? Konzeptionelle Überlegungen und ein Fallbeispiel
331

The article offers a new perspective on the economic and business history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It argues that the historiographical emphasis on the “failure” of the East German planned economy should be replaced by an analysis of those factors which allowed the GDR economy to exist as long as it did and the effects they had on the system as a whole. To do so, the article first provides an overview of the structural conditions that characterized the East German economy and looks at the position and role of the publically owned companies within the “Budgetverwaltungswirtschaft” (budget administration economy). To determine in which ways the East German companies functionally differed from capitalist ones, the article investigates in a second step the characteristics of capitalist economies, specifically the relevance awarded to companies and entrepreneurs as constitutive elements of the market. By distinguishing analytically the distribution of property rights bundles awarded to the different actors in the economy, the article provides a basis for comparing the functions of companies in capitalist and non-capitalist systems without assuming an essential difference between the two types of companies a priori. Finally, the article demonstrates the methodological insight gained from the comparative analysis by drawing on examples from the company Simson.

Andrew I. Port
Rethinking Regime Stability: The Life Stories of “Loyal” East German Activists in the Early German Democratic Republic
367

In the early 1950s, East German officials at the storied Maxhütte steel mill in Thuringia collected short CVs or “life stories” (Lebensläufe) written by approximately 370 blue- and white-collar workers who had recently become Stakhanovite “activists”. These documents, which all contain the same basic biographical information about the authors – from their socioeconomic background to their political activities – shed light on a group that has received little systematic scholarly attention, namely, ostensibly loyal and ordinary East Germans at the grass roots. Their early support of the SED state and its economic goals ensured the longer-term stability of a largely unloved regime. These valuable documents thus provide important clues for understanding the puzzling political and economic viability of the German Democratic Republic.

Eszter Bartha
Transforming Labour: From the Workers’ State to the Post Socialist Re-Organization of Industry and Workplace Communities. Carl Zeiss Jena (East Germany) and Rába in Győr (Hungary)
413

The article seeks to place the workers’ road from socialism to capitalism in East Germany and Hungary in a historical context. It offers an overview of the most important elements of the party’s policy towards labour in the two countries under the Honecker and the Kádár regime respectively. It examines the highly paternalistic role of the factory as a life-long employer and provider of workers’ needs for the large industrial working class which the regime considered to be its main social basis. Given that the thesis of the working class as the ruling class was central to the legitimating ideology of the state socialist regimes, dissident intellectuals challenging this thesis were effectively marginalized or forced into exile.
After the change of regimes, the “working class” again became an ideological term associated with the discredited and fallen regime. The article analyses the changes within the life-world of East German and Hungarian workers in the light of life-history interviews. It argues that in Hungary, the social and material decline of the workers – alongside the loss of the symbolic capital of the working class – reinforced ethno-centric, nationalistic narratives, which juxtaposed “globalization” and “national capitalism”, the latter supposedly protecting citizens from the exploitation by global capital. In the light of the sad reports of falling standards of living and impoverishment, the Kádár regime received an ambiguous, often nostalgic evaluation. While the East Germans were also critical of the new, capitalist society (unemployment, intensified competition for jobs, the disintegration of the old, work-based communities), they gave more credit to the post-socialist democratic institutions. They were more willing to reconcile the old socialist values which they had appreciated in the GDR with a modern left-wing critique than their Hungarian counterparts, for whom nationalism seemed to offer the only means to express social criticism.

Verena Wasmuth
Das verstaatlichte Glasgewerbe der Tschechoslowakei: Systemdefizite als Chancengeber für Qualitätssicherung und Innovationsfähigkeit
439

Following the political and territorial events of 1918, 1945, and 1989, the Czechoslovak glass industry was facing similar adversities in the search for new markets. The cooperation between industry, trade, and professional designers proved a successful way out of the crisis. A closer look at the players involved in the economic transformation reveals that the diversified promotion of design ensured the long-term survival of the manufacture and finishing of glass in the Czech Republic, and thus the traditional reputation of the industry as a whole.

Pavel Szobi
Lizenz- und Gestattungsproduktion westdeutscher Unternehmen in der ČSSR und der DDR
467

The article deals with economic relations between the Federal Republic of Germany, German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. Using the example of licensed production, its aim is to illustrate that in spite of ideological boundaries, business relations between West and East flourished in the period of the 1970s and 1980s. The author characterizes institutional conditions for this cooperation, names individual cooperation attempts, and uses the example of the well-known German brand Nivea as a symbol of the West and an example of a successful cooperation. The article reveals the intensive activities of West German companies and their investments in the GDR and Czechoslovakia long before 1989 and shows the potential of analyzing the German-German and the European transformation after 1989 more under the perspective of continuities and discontinuities.

Marcus Böick
Eine Behörde als simuliertes Unternehmen. Die Treuhandanstalt in der Unschärferelation zwischen Transformationspolitik, Wirtschaftsumbau und Umbruchsgesellschaft
489

After the fall of socialism in East Germany, a special organization known as the “Treuhandanstalt” organized the crisis-ridden transformation of about 8,000 formerly state-owned corporations from the planned to the market economy. Most of the time, this organization operated under much criticism and pressure from outside, but internal operations were also characterized by conflicts about “corporate identity”. While some saw the “Treuhand” as a politically dependent state bureaucracy, others regarded it as an autonomous corporation. This article examines this conflict zone between internal as well as external perceptions of the “nature” of the Treuhandanstalt. It concludes that this was a state organization, set up in exceptional times, as an administration simulating a corporation.

Veit Damm
„Keine Wende“?
Finanzhilfen für ostdeutsche Betriebe und Kontinuitäten der Subventions- und Strukturpolitik in der „Ära Kohl“ nach 1989
513

This article examines financial aid for companies and the guidelines of subsidy policy in East Germany after 1989 in the context of German structural policy in the “Helmut Kohl era” (1982-1998). It comes to the conclusion that – after a short period of fast structural change in East Germany – efforts increased to rescue existing businesses and industrial sites, as well as the jobs they provided after the end of 1992, primarily through the initiative of regional actors. Financial aid for companies – particularly for funding industrial investments in modernisation and new plants – played a key role in the rescuing and restructuring process. At the same time, structural policy gradually converged with the patterns that had been formed during the political management of structural change in the “former” Federal Republic. Only the short period of the postreunification years 1991 and 1992 was characterised by the steering of structural change and the redefinition of East German industry by the markets as well as by a renunciation of subsidies for the preservation of existing jobs. The temporary retreat of the state from structural policy was partly a result of the experience of the 1980s, when structural policy was criticized for slowing down German economic growth and impeding structural change.

Forschungs- und Literaturberichte

Ralf Martin König
Zwischen Ausbeutung, Förderung und Reglementierung:
Textile Kriegsheimarbeit in Deutschland 1914 bis 1918
537

This essay intends to provide an introduction into an interesting aspect of the German war economy of the First World War not previously examined in detail: home-based outwork for the production of military supplies. In particular, this type of home-based outwork enjoyed great popularity amongst women with no previous experience of this form of work, such as soldiers’ wives and war widows. They were supported by various charitable welfare societies and women’s organizations which campaigned for public welfare during the war. Their efforts included the establishment of sewing rooms in which military home-based outwork was provided as emergency work. Orders were supplied by the military procurement bodies of the German Reich. Although many potential workers were thus withheld from the armaments industry, the development was not seen as a problem by the military administration. However, it did react critically to the many cases in which particularly female home workers were duped by firms when picking up their work. Especially in the area around Berlin, the military authorities intervened vigorously to enforce standard wages for the home workers sewing military uniforms. Nevertheless, the year 1916 marks a turning point: This benevolent stance on home-based outwork changed under the pressure of new employment priorities. New contract regulations made military home-based outwork difficult for unskilled male and female workers to access. These were in theory then available to work in the armaments industry and in agriculture, areas both struggling to meet labour demands. Moreover, the changes led to an organizational separation between sandbag sewing and other home-based outwork involved in producing textiles for the military. In the case of sandbag sewing, a separate war committee was responsible for the planned distribution of sandbag orders throughout the whole Reich.

Harald Wixforth
Das Universalbanksystem – Ein Erfolgsmodell auf den Finanzmärkten?
583

The recent debate on the structure of financial systems created harsh criticism of the business policy of the great universal banks. Economists as well as prominent experts in banking demanded a strict control of their business or even their liquidation. On the other hand, the banks themselves, together with representatives of economic interest groups, defended the status quo. Their argument is that the universal banking systems created great benefits for the economy in several central European countries during the last 150 years. Historical evidence, however, reveals that this is not true. Universal banks were not an instrument to stabilize economies in times of crises. On the contrary, crises were aggravated by their business policy on several occasions. In sum, historical analysis shows that the actual business operations and influence of universal banks in modern economies have to be scrutinized closely.