Probably more than any other, the twentieth century stands for the ‘age of measurement’. The quantification and calculation of nature, the economy and ‘the social’ can be considered an important foundation of Western and Eastern economies (despite economic, cultural, and ideological differences). Official statistics and statistical techniques as instruments of government and scientific evidence were pivotal in these endeavours. After 1945, a network of transnational organisations and expertise (UN, ILO, OECD, EEC) enabled statistical facts and techniques to travel around the globe on missions to quantify and standardise.

Against this background, this session is concerned with the role of official statistics, their production and interpretation in Germany c.1930-1980. The proposal is informed by the belief that within history, geography, and the history of science and technology, scholars have only tentatively begun to assess the development of German official statistics. Scholarship has been attentive to the relationship between statistical measurement and economics (Tooze 2001), as well as to medical statistics in Imperial Germany (Schneider 2007). There are studies on punch-card systems (Heide 2009), and on demography and population census during Nazism (Mackensen et al 2009; Wietog 2001). The trajectory of individual statisticians (Bryant 2010), the history of census boycott movements in West Germany (Hannah 2010), as well as national accounting (Voy 2009) and statistical transnationalism (Ward 2004) have been studied for the post-war period.

This proposal invites papers which will further scrutinise the interactions and intersections among official statistics and the ‘three’ German states and societies. A broad understanding of statistics is adopted here, comprising different techniques and ideas, styles of reasoning, practices, technologies and institutional contexts (Desrosières 2008). Comparative studies across fascist, socialist, and capitalist experiences in Germany are particularly welcome. Issues around the co-constitution of the post-war German state administrations and official statistics are also of interest.

Papers may include themes such as:

- Germany’s ‘special path’ (Weischer 2004) in disciplinary statistics before, during, and after the Nazi rule;
- The relationship between academic and professional statisticians and its significance for the nature of German statistical discourse;
- The professional trajectory of statisticians before and after 1945;
- The relationship between official statistical discourse and emerging neighbouring disciplines and techniques such as forecasting, market research, econometrics, and applied mathematics;
- Issues around trust and credibility as ways to understand the authority and legitimacy of official statistics in different local and institutional settings;
- The symbolic power of statistics and visualisations through statistical pictures, graphs and tables;
- The role of statistical machines (punch-card equipment, electronic data processing) for the credibility and authority of official statistics;
- The interplay between international (UN, OECD, ILO, EEC) and national statistical expertise.

Please submit your abstract of 250 words (max. and including key words) to Jochen Mayer (J.Mayer@sms.ed.ac.uk) by 29 February 2012.