Labour and Race in Modern German History

Labour and Race in Modern German History

Organisatoren
Birkbeck, University of London, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology; Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism; Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide
Ort
London
Land
United Kingdom
Vom - Bis
27.03.2014 - 29.03.2014
Url der Konferenzwebsite
Von
Kim Wünschmann, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

An international conference convened at Birkbeck, the University of London – and supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German History Society, the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism and the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide – brought together scholars of various disciplines to discuss concepts of ‘labour’ and ‘race’ and their interaction in modern German history. Spanning a timeframe of more than a century, papers took a wide range of methodological approaches to examine ‘labour’ and ‘race’ as mobilizing forces, as markers of social inclusion and exclusion, as criteria for norms and deviance and as analytical categories for historical research. The conference showed that by joining these two longstanding features of German historiography it is possible to gain a clearer understanding of how racist ideologies influenced the organization of labour and shaped working and living spaces. A close examination of a variety of case studies also demonstrated how economic necessities and the practical demands of labour could in turn undermine racist principles. Probing continuities and breaks between different historical periods and addressing broader questions of changing gender roles, the dynamics of migration as well as cultural representations and the memory of ‘race’ and ‘labour’, the contributions attested to the analytical potential of an approach that explores the two terms in interaction. The conference also showed that the history of labour, once promisingly pioneered by Timothy Mason and others, can now be revisited and investigated in new ways that reach beyond a traditional working class history.1 In this respect, the historiography of Nazi Germany has emerged as one of the most vibrant fields of research. With a number of new studies being undertaken on the social practices that aimed to construct a racially pure and socially homogenous Volks- and Leistungsgemeinschaft it is thus not surprising that this period of modern German history was most strongly represented at the conference.2

In his keynote lecture RICHARD OVERY (Exeter) investigated the impact of Allied bombing on German society and economy in the Third Reich. Hopes were high among the British that the bombing war would reproduce the ‘stab in the back’-situation of 1918 and stimulate resistance against the regime. However, bombing was surprisingly ineffective. Germans were disillusioned but did endure until war’s end; production was dented but not destroyed; workers did not put down their tools and the total number of hours worked in German industry even increased. Overy explained these effects by pointing to the changing relationship between the Nazi regime and the workforce. Bombing forced the regime to implement a policy designed to appease labour through welfare, compensation and rehabilitation. Furthermore, in order to keep production going, millions of foreign workers were deployed in German industries. This workforce was cheap and brutally exploitable. In many instances, foreign workers were forced to work on during air raids. Finally, the bombing war accelerated the isolation of Germany’s Jews. Coinciding with the deportations, Jews were seen as a source of additional housing and furnishing for bombed out Germans.

Arranged chronologically, conference papers started with a contribution by CHRIS MANIAS (Manchester) who discussed how questions of ‘labour’ and ‘race’ were integrated into science’s first conceptualizations of human prehistory. German-speaking prehistorians of the late 19th and early 20th century sought to clarify whether ancient people were considered to be the ancestors of modern Europeans and whether the artefacts they left behind attested to developed stages of industry and culture. Taking a broader comparative perspective, Manias showed how research on human prehistory in the German lands lagged behind but nevertheless interacted with racially more deterministic equivalents in France and Britain. SIMONE BORGSTEDE (Lüneburg) explored the role of ‘labour’ and ‘race’ in the writings and works of the antisemitic politician and colonial adventurer Ernst Henrici (1854-1915). Repeating early modern Christian conceptions of labour as a duty to society prominent in Luther’s writing, Henrici viewed both Jews and Africans as inferior races. While, in his view, the threatening influence of ‘enslaving Jewish capitalism’ could only be terminated by excluding ‘the Jews’, Henrici saw Africans as ‘educable’ to the Western way of work. This notion of labour as a civilizing and disciplining force came to feature as a much-discussed theme of the conference. FELIX AXSTER (Berlin) probed further into the relationship between antisemitism and colonial racism by focussing on labour as the defining category of social inclusion and exclusion. In both colonial regimes and National Socialism, conceptions of race were inextricably linked to notions of work, productivity and utility. In the colonial discourse difference was produced by denouncing the ‘other’s’ alleged laziness and inefficiency. But whereas the colonized people’s passivity was perceived as a state that could be overcome, Nazi antisemitism considered ‘Jewish labour’ as ‘anti-labour’ per se.

The second panel focussed on colonialism. In her paper KATHLEEN RAHN (Leipzig) addressed forced labour in the colonial prisons of German Southwest Africa. With a penal system that operated on the basis of a racist ideology, punishment played an important part in the creation of racial identities and the maintenance of a colonial order of inequality. Beyond disciplining the inmates, labour also had a clear economic function. The exploitation of the prisoner workforce for construction projects was, in turn, embedded within an ideological discourse that advocated ‘education to labour’ as an integral part of the German colonial mission. Exploring the nexus between labour, race and space BRITTA SCHILLING (Cambridge) drew the focus of attention to the everyday lives of African workers in colonial homes. Examining their very physicality she found that houses were constructed to resemble the colonial order. Servants mainly worked in areas placed away from the living spaces of the whites. Space was arranged to create distance yet also to enable surveillance, as workers were never kept far away from oversight. Tensions between the ideological desire to maintain racial segregation and the reality of running a home were observable in liminal zones like verandas.

The contributions of the third panel moved on to the history of Nazi Germany and its origins. Looking at the interwar period, CHRISTOPH KREUTZMÜLLER (Berlin) elaborated how a utilitarian labour policy implemented in the 1920s created hostile conditions for Eastern European Jews in Berlin. With their residence depending on the ability to make a living, Jews were driven into precarious self-employment and thereby pushed to the margins of the labour market. Antisemitic stereotypes that accompanied this policy radicalized under the Nazi regime when labour lost its protective quality and East European Jews, regardless of their employment status, were among the first to be driven out of the economy and the country. JULIA HÖRATH (Berlin) focussed on the persecution of so-called ‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’ during the years 1933 to 1937-38. She detected continuities between the Third Reich and previous periods pointing to discourses on idleness, deviance and criminality in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. While repression and internment were traditional means to discipline those perceived as ‘workshy’, the Nazis defined ‘useless national comrades’ as racially inferior and used the concentration camp as an instrument of terror to forcibly exclude them from society. KIM WÜNSCHMANN (Jerusalem) illuminated the role of concentration camp terror in the persecution of Jewish so-called ‘asocials’ arrested in ‘Action Workshy Reich’ in June 1938. She demonstrated that the mass imprisonment of more than 2,200 Jews was driven by objectives different from the ones guiding the persecution of non-Jewish ‘asocials’. For the regime, camp terror served as a means to pressure Jews into emigration and oust them from German economy often through so-called ‘Aryanizations’. On an ideological level this first nationwide mass imprisonment enforced antisemitic images of ‘the workshy Jew’.

Forced labour and industry was the common theme of the fourth panel. MARC BUGGELN (Berlin) presented the results of his research on the death rates of prisoners in the subcamps of the Neuengamme concentration camp. He rejected generalizing statements that usually describe life and work in the subcamps as ‘extermination through labour’. In reality, Buggeln found that the death rate of male Jewish prisoners was high while Jewish women had good chances to survive. Furthermore, the death rate among West European prisoners was much higher than among East Europeans. As it is thus impossible to make a clear distinction between SS ideology and the rationale of labour, historians need to account for a much more complex situation in the subcamps and consider additional factors such as ‘gender’. In his case study of the AEG/Telefunken corporation THOMAS IRMER (Berlin) investigated how German industries reacted to the Nazi regime’s racist forced labour programme. He showed how the company started using forced labour as early as 1938 and how this deployment of German Jews served as a model for later stages. By 1942, more than 20 per cent of the AEG workforce comprised of foreign workers, in some Berlin factories more than 70 per cent. On the whole, Irmer detected a limited radicalization of forced labour deployment at AEG. While the company did increasingly adopt the racist Nazi order, its exploitation of foreign workers never reached the extreme dimension observable at Siemens and other companies. DANIEL UZIEL (Jerusalem) traced the development from a high-skilled industrial elite to mass slave labour in the aviation industry of the Third Reich. During the 1930s, aircraft production experienced an incomparable boom and viewed itself as the avant-garde of the Volksgemeinschaft. The ideals of its progressive labour policies did, however, quickly erode when the outbreak of the war escalated its structural shortage of manpower into a full-scale economic crisis. To man the production lines, the Reich Air Ministry first recruited large numbers of foreign workers and POWs. From 1942 onwards, cooperation with the SS led to the mass deployment of concentration camp inmates.

The panel on gender and family opened with a paper by STEFANIE COCHÉ (Cologne) who examined the role of labour for the perceptions of a healthy self and compared processes of commitment to psychiatric institutions in East and West Germany. She found that the perception that healthy selves are working selves prevailed much more strongly in the achievement-oriented West German society than in the GDR, where a system of central planning influenced career plans and work experiences. In the FRG, on the other hand, incapacity to work was more clearly judged along gender lines. Women who suffered from exhaustion were backed by their families more than men. Against the background of a growing importance of labour for women’s lives CHRISTOPHER NEUMAIER (Potsdam) analysed processes through which traditional gender roles were negotiated in West German society between the 1950s and the 1980s. While the social reality of everyday family life did not change very much, with husbands pursuing professional careers and wives taking care of the household, Neumaier nevertheless detected important shifts in the discourse on gender ideals. Concepts of equal partnerships like the civil union as well as the emerging ideal of the ‘new fathers’ impacted on both social science and politics. ASLIGÜL AYSEL (Bochum) examined processes of intergenerational transition in the context of Turkish migrant families in Duisburg and found that changes in the Lebenswelten also affected the relation to labour. The first generation had arrived in Germany as immigrant workers for low-wage occupations. Labelled ‘guest workers’ many felt they were strangers in society. The development of socio-economic advancement was passed on to the second generation which on the basis of a higher education also seeks to achieve a higher social status. But as ‘German-Turks’ they also suffer from a higher pressure to succeed and instead of being integrated they can feel lost between two cultures, Aysel explained.

The contributors to the last panel studied ‘race’ and ‘labour’ in the context of memory and politics. ANGELIKA LAUMER (Gießen) addressed inequalities in the memorial discourse, which is centred on the commemoration of forced labour in industry and neglects the agricultural sector. Interviewing families of both local farmers and the foreign workers who stayed on in Germany after the war, Laumer found that both sides tend to downplay the repressive framework of forced labour and prefer to speak of ‘labour’ and ‘hard work’ instead. While in rural areas forced labourers came into close contact with the locals these relationships seldom developed into social networks and sometimes even remained exploitative after war’s end. DAVID SPREEN (Michigan) focussed on the Marxist-Leninist party building projects of the 1970s in which many students found a new political home after the collapse of the West German New Left. He showed how in their search for new forms of politics students abandoned their anti-authoritarianism and turned to the traditions of the Stalinist Weimar-era Communist Party. However, by adopting the political legacies of the Weimar KPD as their own, West German Marxist-Leninists also precluded an effective critique of both fascism and antisemitism, which had been central to the New Left. LAUREN STOKES (Chicago/Berlin) investigated West German city planning of the 1970s. To prevent what they perceived as a ‘ghettoization’, state officials discussed measures through which immigrants could be spread more evenly across German national space. In 1975, a policy was implemented whereby neighbourhoods with 12 per cent foreign population would be closed to further foreign settlement. As Stokes demonstrated these practices reflect deep assumptions about national and racial space. They were influenced by an American discourse of ‘urban blight’, but nevertheless continued German traditions of conceiving of racialized space (Lebensraum).

In his concluding remarks DAVID FELDMAN (London) discussed a key question that surfaced in many of the conference’s papers: to what extent was the interaction of ‘labour’ and ‘race’ in ideology and social practice unique to German history? He recalled British historiography’s proven method of bringing the two analytical categories together to investigate, for example, the emergence of a white imperial working class. Pursuing a comparative approach is thus fruitful, if only because it elaborates the distinctive features of national histories.

Conference Programme:

Keynote Lecture
Richard Overy: ‘No Stab in the Back!’: Race, Labour and the National Socialist Regime Under the Bombs, 1940-45

Panel 1: Constructions of Race and Labour

Chris Manias: The Sciences of Prehistory and the Origins of Race and Industry in German-Speaking Europe, 1880-1914

Simone Borgstede: ‘Labour’ as ‘Race’-Marker: The Work of the Militant Antisemite Ernst Henrice, 1854-1915

Felix Axster: Working on Whiteness: Notions of Productivity in German Colonialism and National Socialism

Panel 2: Colonialism

Kathleen Rahn: Racism in the Colonial Prison Service: Prisons and Forced Labour in German Southwest Africa

Britta Schilling: Colonial Encounters in the Home: Domestic Labour and German Colonialism

Panel 3: Racial Ideology and Social Practice

Christoph Kreutzmüller: Labour, Residence and Deportation in Germany, 1919-1939

Julia Hörath: At the Margins of the ‘People’s Community’. ‘Workshyness’ in the National Socialist Race Ideology and Persecution Policy

Kim Wünschmann: ‘Teaching Labour-shirking Jews How to Work’. The Antisemitic Dimension of Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich 1938

Panel 4: Forced Labour and Industry

Marc Buggeln: Labour, Race & Gender. Comparing the Living and Working Conditions in the Subcamp System of the Concentration Camp Neuengamme

Thomas Irmer: The Racist Order of Nazi Forced Labour and German Industry. A Case Study of the German Electrical Industry, 1938-1945

Daniel Uziel: From Industrial Elite to Slavery: Labour in Nazi Germany’s Aviation Industry

Panel 5: Gender and Family

Stefanie Coché: How Madness Works: Labour, Gender and Family in the Process of Psychiatric Commitment in World War II, the FRG and the GDR, 1941-1963

Christopher Neumaier: The Concept of Partnership – An Ideal Beyond Social Reality? The Negotiation of Gender Roles in West German Families, 1950s – 1980s

Asligül Aysel: Transformation of Turkish Lebenswelten: From Immigrant Workers to German-Turks in Duisburg

Panel 6: Memory and Politics

Angelika Laumer: National Socialist Forced Labour in Communicative Memory in Rural Bavaria. An Ethnographic Approach

David Spreen: ‘In the Spirit of Ernst Thälmann’. How German Students of the 1970s Became Weimar Proletarians and Rediscovered the Nation

Lauren Stokes: Reaching the Toleranzgrenze? Race and City Planning in 1970s West Germany

Concluding Remarks:
David Feldman

Notes:
1 Timothy Mason, Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft. Dokumente und Materialien zur deutschen Arbeiterpolitik 1936-1939, Opladen 1975; ders., Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich. Arbeiterklasse und Volkgemeinschaft, Opladen 1977.
2 The forthcoming anthology edited by Marc Buggeln and Michael Wildt collects many of these new histories. See Marc Buggeln / Michael Wildt (eds.), Arbeit im Nationalsozialismus, München 2014.


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