Industrial Rationalization and Workers' Culture in Weimar Germany

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This study deals first with the industrial rationalization and the workers and the trade unions, secondly with the transformation of the workers' milieu and the workers' culture and mass culture in Weimar Germany.(1) The industrial rationalization in the stabilization era changed the traditional labor in the workplace, in the Ruhr coal mines through the mechanization in the pit and the restructuring of the labor organization, and in the electro-technical and machine industry through the introduction of the mass production of the Ford system. It demolished the traditional skills and the structure of solidarity of the workers. The General Federation of German Trade Unions (ADGB) took a positive attitude toward the rationalization to raise the living standard and replaced the socialist theory of mass poverty with the theory of mass purchasing power. But the democracy in the workplace and the transformation of the workers' culture were neglected in the ADGB' theory of economic democracy.(2) In regard to the workers' milieu in the 1920' s, the investigator concentrates on the transformation of the workers' quarters and workers' culture, and on the workers' youth and the mass culture. In the metropolis Berlin, the redevelopment began in the center, the large residential estates (Siedlungen) were built in the suburbs, while the traditional workers' quarters were transformed thereby. On the other hand, in the Ruhr district the social transformations came through in the miners' colonies, but the integrated milieu of the workers' culture and the life-environments was considerably preserved, and the solidarity of miners in the colonies was rather strengthened. In the middle of these social transformations, the workers' youth lived an unstable life and had the different consciousness from their parents' generation in the Great Depression. It was they that embodied the dilemma of the labor movement culture between the workers' culture and the mass culture.