Elaine Glovka Spencer

Rulers of the Ruhr: Leadership and Authority in German Big Business Before 1914

The rise of heavy industry and its managerial elite in the German Empire and in the United States provides stimuhting parallels and contrasts. Professor Spencer discusses the social constraints under which a professional management class developed in the German coal, iron, and steel industry during the generation before World War I. Ranking distinctly below the landed aristocracy and the governmental bureaucracy (both of which they would gladly have emulated), and preoccupied with the maintenance of order in the midst of rapid economic and social change, German managers used their power and influence to sustain and manipulate existing systems of authority, and came to play no broader role in the development of their commonwealth than did their American counterparts.

Regimenting Revelry: Rhenish Carnival in the Early Nineteenth Century

One consequence of the lively debates in the 1970s and 1980s centering on the concept of a peculiar German path ( Sonderweg ) to the twentieth century has been a reexamination of the nineteenth-century Burgertum , the closest Central European counterpart to the French bourgeoisie and the English and American middle and upper middle classes. The study of the educated and propertied urban dwellers who became the core constituents and leading spokesmen of the Burgertum has flourished, as historians have attempted to identify the consequences for German national development of bourgeois successes and failures. 1 Neither an estate (as determined by legal privileges) nor an economic class (as defined by common market position), the nineteenth-century Burgertum shared at least modest economic security along with overlapping clusters of values, attitudes, and goals and a sense—highly mutable and often ill-defined, to be sure—of who they were. Using moral and behavioral as much as social and economic criteria, a melange of career and property-owning-groups set itself apart from the aristocracy, the peasantry, urban laborers, and—more belatedly and less clearly—from artisans, tradesmen, and other elements of the Mittelstand and claimed in the process an enhanced social and political role as advocates of a transformed society based upon individual achievement. 2