Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland 1914-1918: Studien zu Arbeitskampf und Arbeitsmarkt imErsten Weltkrieg by Gunther MaiReview by: Robert G. MoellerThe American Historical Review, Vol. 92, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), pp. 442-443Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1866714 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 15:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.223.28.76 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:35:28 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

442 Reviews of Books

until July 1919. Although Vincent discusses the entire period, his book concentrates on the last few months of the blockade, from the end of the war in November 1918 to the first deliveries of food to Germany in March 1919. The book is well written and clearly argued and is a valuable introduction to a most complex topic.

To be sure, this is by no means the definitive study of the blockade. Vincent demonstrates that the blockade was a weapon of war with profound eco- nomic, legal, diplomatic, and biological ramifica- tions. Yet his study is remarkably brief, only some one hundred thirty pages, discounting notes and bibliography. The book's sources are limited. Vin- cent notes France's key role in debates about the blockade, but he uses no French materials. German sources are cited but are used sparingly. Vincent's argument primarily rests on published Anglo- American materials. Although the study includes extensive statistics, they are used more for illustra- tive than for analytical purposes. The least convinc- ing part of the book is the author's speculation that physiological damage done to Germans during the blockade had some relationship to Weimar Germany's "irrational" politics. Like biochemical ar- guments for the fall of Rome and seventeenth- century witchcraft, this argument is worth exploring but will require much more proof than Vincent offers.

The book has two major strengths. The first is the analysis of the diplomacy of the blockade, particu- larly the debate about shipments of food to Ger- many after the armistice. Between November 1918 and March 1919, while thousands of Germans starved and tons of American food spoiled in Dutch harbors, Allied ministers debated the politics of hunger. Americans worried about farm prices back home. The British fretted about control of the German merchant fleet. Vincent's portrait of the French is especially damning. Unwilling to support free Allied food deliveries to the Germans, the French also refused to let the Germans buy food with money the French hoped to get later as repa- rations. Food was finally delivered as much for political as for humanitarian reasons. Fearful of growing German radicalism, the Allies hoped to use food as a weapon to defuse the appeal of bolshe- vism.

The second strength of the book is the discussion of the physiological impact of the blockade on the Germans. Vincent provides all of the relevant data on malnutrition, disease, and mortality. To be sure, a number of questions are left unasked. To what extent, for example, did mortality differ by gender, region, or class? How was the experience of famine portrayed in the arts? Nevertheless, Vincent pro- vides an accurate, and chilling, account of the brutal outcome of the politics of hunger.

This book is certainly not the last word on the blockade. Vincent's text is, nevertheless, a clear introduction to the problems and issues involved. It is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the social impact of World War I.

ROBERT W. WHALEN

Queens College Charlotte, North Carolina

GUNTHER MAI, editor. Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland 1914-1918: Studien zu Arbeitskampf und Arbeitsmarkt im Ersten Weltkrieg. Dusseldorf: Droste. 1985. Pp. 323. DM 58.

Twenty years after the publication of Gerald D. Feldman's Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914-1918, much remains to be said about the complex relations of businessmen, workers, and the state in World War I; the essays in this collection make that clear. Was the war fought with or against the German working class? Did the Auxiliary Ser- vice Law of 1916 provide new opportunities for the institutionalized representation of working-class in- terests, or did it legalize the subordination of work- ers to the demands of the war economy? There are no simple answers to these questions, posed by contemporaries and presented once again in this collection's introductory essay by the editor, Gun- ther Mai. Any response requires dividing the work- ing class by region, occupation, skill, and gender, and these essays offer this differentiated approach. In contrast to much of the research on workers in the war, which has focused on the heavily industrial Ruhr, the studies included here describe the expe- rience of workers in Hamburg's shipbuilding indus- try (Hans-Joachim Bieber), metalworkers in Berlin (Dirk H. Muller) and Ulm (Mai), the rapid expan- sion of the chemical industry (Gottfried Plumpe), and textile workers in Augsburg (Merith Niehuss). In addition, Dieter Kruger's contribution illumi- nates the relationship between the pre-1914 concep- tions for improving management-worker relations, proposed by middle-class social reformers, and the reforms actually introduced by the state under war- time exigencies. Finally, Ute Daniel provides a gen- eral survey of women's work and wages during the war in which she convincingly argues that the in- crease in women's participation in the labor force after 1914 reflected not the unprecedented entry of women into wage labor but, rather, the continuation of pre-1914 trends and the movement of female factory workers into war-related industries.

The most interesting and innovative pieces in the collection are Niehuss's analysis of the problems of female unemployment and the expansion of social welfare measures in a city dominated by the textile industry and Daniel's investigation of the clear lim-

This content downloaded from 91.223.28.76 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:35:28 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Modern Europe 443

itations set to the expansion of female employment, despite the problems of massive labor shortages after 1916. The other essays elaborate on far more familiar themes-the problems created by the cre- ation of factory-level worker representation during the war, the dimensions of working-class protest, and the dilemmas of trade union and socialist lead- ers caught between a repressive state and an increas- ingly radicalized working class. They offer little, however, in the way of methodological innovation. The efforts of such historians as Mary Nolan, David Crew, Erhard Lucas, and Klaus Tenfelde to link the structure of community life and long-term patterns of class formation to the articulation of class conflict find few parallels in these essays. Protest remains largely a product of the inadequacy of the food supply, the level of shop-floor organization, and conditions at the workplace. Several of the essays stress the changing role of women in the labor force, but they do not attempt to capture the war's impact on non-wage-earning women who daily confronted the problems of shortages and the inequities of the black market or the ways in which families and communities became involved in protests that orig- inated at the workplace.

As the editor's introduction promises, this collec- tion delivers a more diversified picture of the prob- lems of German labor in World War I, and, in this sense, it adds to our understanding of working-class experience during the war. It does not, however, offer a new methodological perspective on that experience for those already familiar with the mas- sive literature on working-class conflict in this pe- riod.

ROBERT G. MOELLER

University of California, Santa Cruz

HEINRICH AUGUST WINKLER. Der Schein derNormalitdt: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1924 bis 1930. (Geschichte der Arbeiter und der Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts.) Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz. 1985. Pp. 895.

The second volume of Heinrich August Winkler's trilogy on workers and the labor movement in the Weimar Republic opens with a lengthy discussion of the inner structure, consciousness, and culture of the working class in the 1 920s and combines a useful analysis of the occupational census of 1925 with a synthesis of the relevant literature. The census re- vealed the labor movement's demographic opti- mism of prewar days to be illusory. Manual labor had reached its numerical peak and was already beginning to decline relative to the emerging service sector. Workers were being concentrated into larger

units of production, and cartels were growing in power. Real wages-argues Winkler, taking issue with Knut Borchardt-were rising but were by no means high, either compared with those obtaining in other countries or those current in Germany before 1914. Hours and conditions of work did not, perhaps, deteriorate as severely as much of the literature on rationalization has claimed. But, all in all, the data presented by Winkler make the weak- nesses of labor's position in the Weimar era pain- fully clear, and it is a pity that he does not spell out more explicitly the implications of the evidence he has synthesized with such mastery. In general, in- deed, he misses many of the opportunities that his material provides of relating the worker's situation and consciousness to the politics of the labor move- ment. Winkler gives a superb account of workers' culture and shows that it was being undermined, or by-passed, by the use of mass communications me- dia. He describes the common values and customs shared by the adherents of both the Social Demo- crats and the Communists, but he portrays the split between the cultural and leisure institutions of the two movements as an artificial import from the political world. He thus neglects the opportunity to explore, as Dick Geary, James Wickham, and others have done, the internal origins of the fatal split in the sociocultural institutions of the Left. In view of the role that violence and crime played in the final years of the republic, Winkler's account of working- class deviance is disappointingly brief and weak.

After this opening section Winkler launches into a detailed narrative of party-political developments, elections, and cabinet politics between 1924 and 1928. His major thesis, as in the first volume, is that the Weimar Republic would have stood a better chance of surviving had the Social Democratic party (SPD) been more willing to compromise with other parties and take on governmental responsibility. This view informs virtually every aspect of his anal- ysis of the ins-and-outs of party-political negotia- tions and maneuverings in this period. In 1928 the SPD finally took the plunge and formed the Grand Coalition under Hermann Muller, and its fortunes form the subject of the third and final part of the book. Winkler is right to regard the coalition as Weimar's last chance, but the consequences he draws from this-that the SPD should have kept it going at any price-ignore the problem of whether the mass of its members, whose interests would have been to a large extent sacrificed had this course been taken, would have remained loyal. The claim that a flexible and mature attitude like that of the Labour party in England would have overcome these prob- lems was certainly not borne out by Labour's fate in 1931.

Interwoven with this narrative is a detailed ac- count of the bolshevization and then stalinization of

This content downloaded from 91.223.28.76 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:35:28 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions