Work, race and the transformation of industrial culture in Wilhelmine Germany

Until recently, debates over labour relations in German heavy industry have focused on the role of objective social structures, the economic imperatives of capitalist industrialization and the 'backwardness' and continuity of the authoritarian paternalist factory regime predominant in regions like the Ruhr and the Saar from the 1850s to 1945. By contrast, this article examines the representations and institutions which gave meaning and shape to the factory workplace in the heavy industrial Saar during the Wilhelmine period. In this way, it identifies a crucial socio-cultural transformation - resulting from political struggles between unions, reformers and employers - in the early twentieth-century Saar: the incipient shift from the moralizing intentions and gendered imagery of the paternalist factory regime toward new scientific and bio-racial representations of work and labour relations and forms of company social policy that focused on the worker's body, the physical health and reproduction of the working-class family and the racial fitness of the 'social body'. These changes in the Saar anticipated the ideological linkages between work, gender and race in Germany in the later 1920s and 1930s.