A Middle-class View of German Industrial Expansion, 1853–1900

Abstract

I T is well known that German industrial expansion took place much later and more swiftly than was the case, for instance, in England or France. In the early 1840S Marx had compared the economic condition of Germany to that of France before the Revolution, yet within two generations Germany had lifted herself to the status of an economic super-power. Out of a group of independent states, with no major industrial cities and with many vestiges of the feudal system still intact-in short, out of economic backwardness-a highly industrialized state had emerged: with a speed which, even in the steam age, was remarkable. Historians, notably Helmut Plessner, have examined the political effects of Germany's belated and rapid emergence as an industrialized power. The social and economic evolution of Germany in this century has also revealed the deep scars inflicted by the years of sudden advance.! We wish in this essay, however, to concentrate upon the impact of rapid industrial and technical progress on the German middle classes and in particular to examine-through the medium of one of their most representative journals, Die Gartenlaube-the ideological framework within which they responded to the sweeping changes going on inside Germany in the years after 1850. There were many reasons why the middle classes in Germany should not have welcomed the advent of industrialization. It threatened to end the predominantly rural way of life of the nation, and to replace the relaxed provincialism of Germany's small towns with a competitive spirit for which German traditions had little place. Traditional commercial ethics-in some places unchanged in statute since the Middle Ages-did not take kindly to industrial innovation. The growth of the industrial proletariat gave a new potential instability to society, while the whole orientation of industry did little to appeal to a nation which, as critics like Heine and Nietzsche never tired of pointing out, prided itself on an unreal, complacent spiritual inwardness. The response of the middle classes to the new phenomena of industrialization is important for many reasons. It is-in historical