Corporatist discourse and heavy industry in Wilhelmine Germany: Factory culture and employer politics in the Saar

Abstract

During the decade before 1914, the central coordinates of factory culture and employer politics in the heavy industrial Saar entered into a process of transformation. In a marked departure from the familial metaphors and representations long associated with the paternalist factory regime in this region of coal mining and iron and steel production in southwest Germany, many Saar industrialists began to reimagine identities and the relations of factory production in distinctively corporatist terms. In their industry newspaper, journal publications, and internal reports after the turn of the century, they increasingly referred to a new social aristocracy of labor in the productive economy and a harmonious of work in the large-scale business enterprise. They also began to link these definitions of and identity to a larger imaginary that articulated a corporatist vision of a world composed of occupational estates (Berufsstande). In this new ideological idiom, Saar employers began to call for the political organization of a wider Occupational Estate of Industry and Trade (Gewerbe- und Handelsstand) and the formation of a corporative state (Standestaat). Accordingly, the language of Saar employers during the prewar years became corporatist in a dual sense: it articulated a worldview in a vocabulary that invoked forms of address, natural hierarchy, and community that seem reminiscent of the old regime corporate order; and it formed the basis of programmatic political aims calling for the direct representation of economic interests in the realm of party politics and the state. Until very recently, historians have interpreted the meaning of nineteenthand twentieth-century corporatist terminology in the context of debates about Germany's lack of modernity and the long-term origins of Nazism. Postwar in