Workers' Culture in Imperial Germany

Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia

Lynn Abrams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415076357
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134902545
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Workers Culture in Imperial Germany represents the first alternative approach to the study of workers' culture in Imperial Germany. It is also the first comprehensive historical analysis of the emergence of Germany's modern leisure industry. The central concern of the book is the emergence of a distinct workers' culture which provided a disparate and heterogeneous working class with a focus of identity in an alien and hostile society. Lynn Abrams focuses on the leisure activities enjoyed by workers in the major cities of Bochum and Dusseldorf. She provides a comprehensive coverage of a whole range of popular amusements and recreations on offer including festivals, pubs, Tingel-Tangels, dance halls, clubs and cinema. The book is also a major contribution to the social history of working-class life in the nineteenth century, contributing to the debate over the role of a working class culture in Imperial Germany.

1

A time and place for leisure

The industrial environment

Leisure is a creation of industrial society, the result of the introduction of measured and disciplined work time. Before industrialization the proportion of time spent on work and ‘leisure’ was determined by the agricultural and religious calendar, not bv the clock. Weeks and years were punctuated by the Sabbath, holidays and festivals. With the coming of the factory system, however, sirens signalled the beginning and end of the working day. This is not to say that the working day did not have its official and impromptu breaks, but to speak of leisure in the modern sense is to talk of significant periods of time sufficient to spend in doing something.

This chapter will examine the context in which leisure for the working man and woman emerged in the period between 1871 and 1918. The geographical contours of the region will be described, sketching its transformation from a predominantly rural and handicraft economy to the industrial heart of Germany. The social, economic and political developments that shaped the region and the lives of its inhabitants and formed the backdrop to the recreations and amusements enjoyed by the working class will be discussed, and an attempt will be made to establish just how much time and money was available to the industrial working class to pursue active leisure.

The area now incorporated within the federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia was the most densely populated region of Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, with the most mobile industrial workforce and the most diverse economic infrastructure. Consequently it is probably the most researched area of Germany. Politically it belonged to Prussia. Administratively the region was divided between the governments of Arnsberg and Düsseldorf. It was confessionally mixed and remained populated by Catholics and Protestants throughout the period. It contained nationalities other than Germans: Poles, Masurians and other Europeans formed distinct communities within the towns. Economically, established commercial centres nestled against the new towns of the industrial revolution, surrounded by a rural hinterland populated by small-scale farmers and artisans. Coal and steel were king, but heavy and light industry cohabited happily. Only the region’s politics were more predictable; National Liberals and the Catholic Centre Party dominated until the turn of the century, when the Social Democrats made tentative headway.

Neither Bochum nor Düsseldorf was typical of the region, which itself was characterized more by diversity than homogeneity; however, both display characteristics of certain kinds of urban centre that emerged during the last third of the nineteenth century. Bochum, a ‘child of the industrial revolution’, situated in the Ruhr valley between Essen and Dortmund, was created by the discovery of rich coal seams and the development of the complementary steel industry. Just 50 kilometres to the southeast as the crow flies lay Düsseldorf, already a thriving commercial and industrial centre for the region by the 1860s. Resplendent on the Rhine, Düsseldorf went on to develop a diverse industrial base while continuing to flourish as a financial and service centre. The two towns could not have been more different. Bochum was part of the continuous industrial landscape of the Ruhr, dominated by ‘winding towers…and waste tips, chimneys and smoking furnaces’, all ‘enveloped and covered by a misty, gassy, dusty, dirty veil…’¹ Düsseldorf, on the other hand, promoted itself as a garden town where, it was said, one was hardly conscious of the industrial activity located on its outskirts.

Bochum and Düsseldorf had very different histories. While neighbouring towns in the Ruhr had earlier begun to industrialize on a small scale so that by the 1870s they already possessed a basic industrial infrastructure, Bochum remained a provincial market town, populated by livestock farmers, artisans and shopkeepers, until the middle of the century. Only 4,000 people lived there in 1842. Despite the opening of a number of mines in nearby Hamme during the 1840s and 1850s, it was not until the construction of a railway line connecting Bochum to Witten in 1860, and to Essen and Dortmund two years later, that Bochum’s geographical location ceased to be a disadvantage. The steelworks of the Bochumer Verein became the most important employer in the town, with a workforce of over 4,000 by 1873, the population doubled and by the 1870s the rural county town had been transformed into one of Germany’s major centres of heavy industry. In 1882 around 80 per cent of the economically active population were engaged in industry and two thirds of those were employed in mines and foundries. The rapid transformation of the town can be summed up by two contrasting descriptions. In the 1840s it was said Bochum had narrow, irregular streets and small houses and huts, and that the majority of the population were engaged in agriculture and rearing livestock. By the 1860s the local government report noted that in the past ‘one could count hardly any very large buildings. Since then only such buildings have been constructed and a far greater proportion of the present buildings are massive.²

Düsseldorf was a town of some 40,000 inhabitants in 1850, increasing to around 70,000 by 1871. It had been a charming, grand town with its old centre and cultural institutions, but metal and machine working altered the complexion of the town dramatically. Undoubtedly these complementary industries dominated Düsseldorf’s economy. However, located favourably on the river and connected to other towns by good roads, Düsseldorf attracted a variety of industries including a vigorous construction sector, textiles, woodworking and glass making. In this respect Düsseldorf resembled its important neighbour Cologne rather than the smaller towns in the region which tended to specialize in one type of industry. Barmen, Elberfeld, Krefeld and Mönchengladbach, for example, were all textile centres, Solingen was famous for its cutlery and Essen became dependent on Krupp steel. Düsseldorf also became the administrative centre for the region and industrial interest groups made the city their headquarters.

The demographic growth that transformed the entire region was fuelled not by natural population increase, although this was a factor, but by a massive influx of migrants attracted by employment opportunities in the mines and other rapidly expanding industries like construction, metal and woodworking. By 1871, two thirds of Bochum’s inhabitants were recent immigrants, a proportion that was not unique but typical of industrializing towns at the same stage of development. The majority of immigrants hailed from the surrounding Westphalian and Rhineland hinterland. Fifty-two per cent of the inhabitants of Bochum in 1871 were classified as immigrants from nearby districts. Migration from more distant parts of the German Empire, especially the backward east, increased during the 1880s and 1890s when the demand for labour (especially unskilled labour) could no longer be satisfied by the local supply. The percentage of non-local immigrants in the population of Bochum rose from 14.8 in 1871 to 23.7 in 1907.³ Düsseldorf too owed its remarkable economic growth to this army of immigrants. They were recruited primarily from other towns in the Rhineland and Westphalia, less so from the more distant regions of the empire, partly owing to the nature of the employment opportunities on offer. More skilled, semiskilled and white-collar jobs were to be had in the economically diverse Düsseldorf than in the Ruhr towns which recruited in the east for unskilled workers to man the mines. By 1907 no less than 58.4 per cent of Düsseldorf inhabitants were not natives of the town.⁴ The majority of these immigrants did not settle in the first town to which they moved or the first job which they took. As long as work opportunities were numerous they remained geographically mobile. In any year between 1880 and 1900 up to 20 per cent of Bochum’s inhabitants had arrived in the previous twelve months and as much as 25 per cent of the city’s population left every year.⁵ Similarly, every year in the mid-1890s up to 25,000 of the 29,000 arrivals in Düsseldorf left the town within twelve months.⁶ Labour turnover was at its highest in most towns among young, unskilled, male workers during periods of economic growth.

Owing to the availability and nature of the work on offer, the majority of immigrants were young, male and single. Three fifths of the entire working class in Düsseldorf was under the age of 30 in 1895, including 60 per cent of male employees in the major industries of mining, metalworking and construction.⁷ David Crew certifies that ‘between 1880 and 1900, unmarried immigrants, meaning for the most part men under the age of twenty-five, accounted for no less than 87 and sometimes as much as 93 per cent of the transient population’ of Bochum.⁸ There were very few work opportunities for women in towns like Bochum that were dominated by heavy industry; young women were limited to domestic service or the retail trade. Women accounted for only 12 per cent of the economically active population of the town in 1907.⁹ In Düsseldorf, with its established bourgeoisie, service positions were fairly numerous, and young, unskilled women were also able to find employment in the declining textile industry and smaller industrial enterprises, although this work was poorly paid. In 1907, women supplied almost 50 per cent of Düsseldorf’s textile workers and made up 63 per cent of those employed in the clothing trade, the only branch of industry where women outnumbered men. Even so, of the 16 per cent of women in the labour force ascribed to trades associated with the working class, 85 per cent were employed as domestics; over 3,000 women were employed in this way in 1907.¹⁰ The acute housing shortage in all industrializing towns also discriminated against women. Single men could be accommodated in specially erected lodging houses (the lodging house erected by the Bochumer Verein in 1874 housed 1,200 of its workers) or found lodgings with a resident family. Such inequality in employment and housing reflected the different demand for male and female labour, and inevitably resulted in an imbalance in favour of men in the urban population. Hickey notes that until 1905 women were in a minority in Bochum, representing only 46–8 per cent of the population.¹¹ The limited work opportunities for women in these towns meant that a sharp distinction between the roles of men and women developed. Men were forced to assume the role of breadwinner, while women played a no less important role in the management of the household budget, particularly by taking in lodgers and supplementary domestic work to boost income.

The influx of immigrants was also the primary reason for shifts in confessional allegiances in the two towns. Düsseldorf was formerly a predominantly Catholic town: just over 80 per cent of the population declared themselves members of the Catholic church in 1861. By 1890, however, the dominance of Catholics had been slightly eroded (to 72.8 per cent) by the significant Protestant proportion of the new inhabitants. In 1910 Catholics numbered just over 67 per cent in Düsseldorf.¹² Bochum had been fairly evenly balanced in confessional terms before industrialization: in 1858 the Catholic-Protestant split was 59 per cent to 39 per cent. By 1895 this had changed only slightly, to 54 per cent Catholic and 43 per cent Protestant.¹³ But confessional shifts were more dramatic in some individual parishes, especially in those to which large numbers of Catholic workers from the east had migrated. Moreover, there were structural differences within the two confessions. Catholic migrants were more likely to be unskilled workers and the large employers in both towns were disproportionately Protestant.

Included among the Catholics in the region was a significant number of Poles. As members of the Catholic faith they were classified along with German Catholics, but the two branches of the religion were quite separate. Almost 5 per cent of Bochum’s inhabitants were Polish-speaking in 1910, compared with only 0.6 per cent in Düsseldorf.¹⁴ The main wave of Polish migrants arrived in the 1880s and 1890s, encouraged by the recruitment policies of mine owners when demand for unskilled labour outstripped local supply; indeed, 81 per cent of Bochum’s Poles were employed in mining, construction and other heavy industries in 1882. Distinct Polish communities grew up around mines and factories, sometimes encouraged by employers keen to establish settled communities of reliable workers. In Gerthe, a typical mining community near Bochum, the 1,555 Poles accounted for almost 20 per cent of the population in 1910.¹⁵ Masurians similarly strived to maintain a separate identity, largely by means of a strong allegiance to their form of Protestantism.

In its social profile, the working class that was ‘created’ in the industrial towns of the Rhineland and Westphalia during the final third of the nineteenth century was extremely heterogeneous. ‘There was no typical Düsseldorf worker’, writes Mary Nolan:

Metal was the largest industry, but its workforce ranged from artisanal smiths through unskilled helpers and semi-skilled machine operators to skilled factory turners and boilermakers. Migrant Protestant carpenters and joiners, native Düsseldorf painters, and unskilled, staunchly Catholic migrants all worked in the booming construction business. Woodworkers and printers were highly skilled, well paid, and had strong traditions, stable family lives and firm roots in Düsseldorf; whereas textile, chemical and paper workers were transient, semi-skilled and badly paid…Although most workers were migrants that fact did not overcome differences in occupation, religion, place of birth and length of stay. Neither culture nor community nor economic condition united Düsseldorf’s proletariat.¹⁶

By the 1890s, 28 per cent of Düsseldorf’s labour force were employed in the metal industry. The construction industry was the next largest employer, providing jobs for around 15 per cent of the working class in 1895, followed by the textile sector. Despite the greater dominance of heavy industry in Bochum—mining and the metal industry employed two thirds of the workforce in 1882—the working class in Bochum was similarly ‘socially fragmented without any broad historical or cultural experience in common’, according to Hickey. ‘The working-class [in the Ruhr]…was not an established, settled cohesive community; instead we see a class numerically strong but socially disoriented, geographically unsettled, and culturally diffuse.’¹⁷ Even at the turn of the century this was...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: A time and place for leisure
• 2: The industrialization of popular culture
• 3: The lubricant of leisure
• 4: From the street to the stage
• 5: The organization of leisure
• 6: The struggle for control
• 7: From control to commercialization
• 8: Conclusions: a working-class leisure culture?
• Bibliography