The employees

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The Employees (subtitle: From the newest Germany ) is a book by Siegfried Kracauer from 1930. It has been translated into many languages ​​and is one of the classic writings of sociology, although it was less received by specialist science than by the non-sociological public. In the book, Kracauer describes the proletarianization, unnoticed by those affected, and the ideological "homelessness" of the employees.

History, structure and method

Siegfried Kracauer (before 1925)

The text first appeared in serial form in 1929/30 in the features section of the Frankfurter Zeitung , for which Kracauer had been writing since 1921. At first he was a permanent freelancer, then since 1924 an editor in Frankfurt . From 1929 Kracauer stayed in Berlin and researched for his investigation. In 1930 he took over the management of the newspaper's cultural department in the capital. In October 1929 the study was completed, but resistance within the newspaper delayed its publication. The fact that printing of the text could finally begin in December 1929 was mainly due to the interventions of the features editor in the Frankfurt main editorial office, Benno Reifenberg , who wrote to the newspaper's editor, Heinrich Simon : "A sensation has been put into our hands" . The interest in the study was so great that immediately after the preprint ran out in January 1930, it was published as a book dedicated to Kracauer Reifenberg.

In addition to the evaluation of relevant publications on the employee problem, it was journalistic exploration techniques that gave the investigation its broad material basis. During his research, Kracauer examined typical places where employees live and work in Berlin and held discussions with employees and representatives of associations, companies and authorities. The book is designed as a state of affairs with a constructive intention. Theoretical knowledge should result from the material itself, i.e. from the presentation of exemplary cases.

The study is limited to the socio-economic conditions in large companies and the cultural conditions in Berlin. As a layer analysis, it is at the same time the exploration of modern city life. With his research, according to Arnold Schmieder, Kracauer was methodically, as it were, "barefoot sociologically" on a terrain that seemed more unknown to him than the life of private tribes. In doing so, he anticipated more recent studies in qualitative social research . The monograph on employees marks in Kracauer's journalistic work, according to Henri Band, "the climax of his transition from a philosophically interpreting cultural criticism to an observation and analysis of modern cultural phenomena based on everyday life and sociology, which was made in the mid-twenties."

content

The individual episodes of the newspaper series or chapters consist of a montage of scenes, conversation sequences, observations, documents, descriptions of places and critical comments.

Between the foreword and the first essay, two scenes have been inserted that outline the lifeworld poles of being an employee and the thematic tension of the work. In the first scene, a dismissed employee sued the labor court for continued employment or severance pay. The representative of the defendant company is a department head and former supervisor of the plaintiff. The dismissal is justified by the statement, among other things: "The employee did not want to be treated as an employee, but as a lady." In the second scene, an elegant gentleman, undoubtedly a high-end clothing manufacturer, enters the anteroom of a metropolitan entertainment establishment in the evening. He is accompanied by a friend who can be seen at first glance that she stands behind the counter for eight hours during the day. The cloakroom lady turns to her with the words: "Madam, don't you want to take off your coat?"

Recreational cultural “homeless asylum”: Haus Vaterland in Berlin, 1932

The following chapters exemplarily describe how the typical symbiosis of a rationalized working world, urban milieu, mass media public and staged culture of diversion is represented in the life of employees. The psychological and physical selection and standardization processes, the mechanization of employee work and its consequences, the revaluation of the social recognition of generations, the community-cultural activities of large companies, the civic striving for recognition of many employees, successful and unsuccessful attempts by employees to adapt to the demands of the economy are highlighted . According to Kracauer, the existence of white-collar workers at the end of the 1920s is characterized by a contradiction between their proletarian situation and their consciousness, which continues to be shaped by middle-class and middle-class values. The majority of them have become "spiritually homeless". This promotes an escapist attitude to which the cultural industry works by providing recreational cultural "homeless shelters".

The "employee culture" is a culture of maintaining the appearance of an intact middle class or the adoption of value and lifestyle patterns of the upper classes. The culture and sports activities enable people to escape from everyday life and lead to the suppression of an awareness that recognizes reality. The emergence of a collective identity that aims to reshape social conditions is blocked. The collective of employees is a bad construction. The final sentence of the book reads: "It does not matter that the institutions are changed, it matters that people change the institutions."

reception

The contemporary response to the employee book was particularly great in the non-academic public. According to Henri Band, this has remained the case to the present day. As the undisputed classic of employee sociology , the book is now only considered by non-sociologists. Sometimes the study was completely denied its scientific character. The sociology of employees, which emerged again in Germany after the Second World War, completely ignored the book; Kracauer's statements were at odds with the thesis of a leveled middle class society ( Schelsky ) at the time. In a strange contrast to this, there was a new edition of the book in 1959 as Volume I of the series "Classics of Survey Research" by Allensbacher Verlag für Demoskopie. Band thinks the categorization is inconsistent, but it is the first time that the classicity of the investigation has been officially certified.

Schmieder emphasizes the ongoing topicality of the study on the topics already dealt with in it, overqualification with correspondingly low professional status and earnings; Sneaked into the leadership under the pretext that everything was done for their benefit; interpersonal behavior that is now called bullying ; the lack of prospects for older, laid-off employees; the privileges of higher, mostly male employees, who are secured by long-term contracts and high severance payments; circumventing and dismantling welfare state safeguards and collective agreements .

Soon after the book was published, Walter Benjamin commented on the study under the heading “Politicization of the Intelligence” and said: “Reality is so badly affected that it has to show its colors and name”. Kracauer no longer plays along, unmasking has become his passion. He is not a practical agitator, but one who has dialectically penetrated the existence of the employees. The question “How does the contradictions of an economic situation develop into an inadequate awareness?” Pervades the work and is at the same time a “milestone on the path to the politicization of the intelligentsia”.

The book was among the writings that were publicly burned in 1933 .

expenditure

  • The employees. From the newest Germany . Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, Frankfurt am Main 1930.
  • The employees. A writing from the end of the Weimar Republic. With a foreword by Everett C. Hughes , 3rd unaltered edition, Verlag für Demoskopie, Allensbach / Bonn 1959.
  • The employees. From the newest Germany . With a review by Walter Benjamin , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1971, ISBN 978-3-518-06513-6 (6th edition 1993, ISBN 978-3-518-36513-7 ).
    • Italian edition: Gli impiegati . Translated by Luciano Gallino, Einaudi, Turin 1980.
    • GDR edition: The employees. Cultural critical essay . Kiepenheuer, Leipzig / Weimar 1981 (licensed edition by Suhrkamp-Verlag).
    • English edition: The salaried masses. Duty and distraction in Weimar Germany . Translated by Quintin Hoare, Verso, London / New York 1998, ISBN 1-85984-187-2 .
    • Spanish edition: Los empleados. One aspect of the Alemania more than ever . Translated by Miguel Vedda, Gedisa Ed., Barcelona 2008, ISBN 978-84-9784-128-3 .
    • French edition: Les Employés . Translated by Claude Orsini, Les Belles lettres, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2251200170 .
    • Romanian edition: Salariații. Din Germania cea mai recentă . Translated by Maria-Magdalena Anghelescu, Tact Ed., Cluj-Napoca 2012, ISBN 978-606-92978-3-4 .
    • Slovenian edition: Uslužbenci. Poročilo iz najnovejše Nemčije . Translated by Anja Naglič, Založba, Ljubljana 2013, ISBN 978-961-257-057-6 .
    • Russian edition: Služaščie. Iz žizni sovremennoj Germanii . Kabinetnyj yčenyj, Ekaterinburg 2015, ISBN 978-5-7525-2978-8 .
    • Portuguese edition: Os empregados . Translated by Manuela Gomes, Antígona, Lisbon 2015, ISBN 978-972-608-266-8 .
    • Bulgarian edition: Detektivskijat roman / Služitelite . Translated by Stilijan Jotov, Agata, Sofia 2016, ISBN 978-954-540-111-4 (together with the translation of The Detective Novel ).
    • Chinese edition: 雇员 们: 来自 最新 德国 ( Gu yuan men. Lai zi zui xin de guo ), translated by Jing Li, Peking University Press, Beijing 2017, ISBN 978-7-301-28248-9 .

literature

  • Henri Band: Middle Classes and Mass Culture. Siegfried Kracauer's journalistic examination of popular culture and the culture of the middle classes in the Weimar Republic . Lukas Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-931836-25-8
  • Henri Band: Siegfried Kracauer. The employees . In: Dirk Kaesler and Ludgera Vogt : Major works of sociology . Kröner, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 978-3-520-39601-3 , pp. 230-233.
  • Ulf Eisele: Kracauer, Siegfried: The employees. From the newest Germany . In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . 3rd, completely revised edition. JB Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung and CE Poeschel Verlag GmbH, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009 (online edition).
  • Inka Mülder-Bach: Sociology as Ethnography. Siegfried Kracauer's study "The Employees" . In: Vittoria Borsò u. a. (Ed.): Writing memory - writing cultures . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 978-3-476-45279-5 , pp. 279-298
  • Arnold Schmieder: The employees. From the newest Germany . In: Sven Papcke , Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff (Ed.): Key works of sociology . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2001, ISBN 978-3-531-13235-8 , pp. 248-250.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Inka Mülder-Bach, Sociology as Ethnography. Siegfried Kracauer's study "The Employees" . In: Vittoria Borsò u. a. (Ed.), Script memory - script cultures . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 978-3-476-45279-5 , pp. 279-298, here p. 279.
  2. ^ Henri Band, Siegfried Kracauer. The employees . In: Dirk Kaesler and Ludgera Vogt , major works in sociology . Kröner, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 978-3-520-39601-3 , pp. 230-233, here p. 230.
  3. ^ A b Henri Band, Siegfried Kracauer. The employees . In: Dirk Kaesler and Ludgera Vogt, major works in sociology . Kröner, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 230-233, here p. 231.
  4. ^ A b Arnold Schmieder, The Employees. From the newest Germany . In: Sven Papcke , Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff (eds.), Key works in sociology . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2001, ISBN 978-3-531-13235-8 , pp. 248-250, here p. 249.
  5. ^ Henri Volume: Middle Classes and Mass Culture. Siegfried Kracauer's journalistic examination of popular culture and the culture of the middle classes in the Weimar Republic . Lukas Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-931836-25-8 , p. 219.
  6. ^ Henri Band, Siegfried Kracauer. The employees . In: Dirk Kaesler and Ludgera Vogt , major works in sociology . Kröner, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 978-3-520-39601-3 , pp. 230-233, here p. 230 f.
  7. ^ Henri Volume: Middle Classes and Mass Culture. Siegfried Kracauer's journalistic examination of popular culture and the culture of the middle classes in the Weimar Republic . Lukas Verlag, Berlin 1999, p. 151.
  8. ^ Siegfried Kracauer: The employees. From the newest Germany . With a review by Walter Benjamin, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 9.
  9. ^ A b Henri Band, Siegfried Kracauer. The employees . In: Dirk Kaesler and Ludgera Vogt, major works in sociology . Kröner, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 230-233, here p. 232.
  10. ^ Siegfried Kracauer: The employees. From the newest Germany . With a review by Walter Benjamin, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 115.
  11. ^ Walter Benjamin , Politicization of the Intelligence . As an appendix in: Siegfried Kracauer The Employees. From the newest Germany . With a review by Walter Benjamin, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1971, pp. 116–123; also in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften , Volume 3 under the title: An outsider makes himself noticeable .
  12. ^ Walter Benjamin, Politicization of the Intelligence . As an appendix in: Siegfried Kracauer The Employees. From the newest Germany . With a review by Walter Benjamin, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1971, pp. 116–123, here p. 118.
  13. ^ Arnold Schmieder, The Employees. From the newest Germany . In: Sven Papcke, Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff (eds.), Key works in sociology . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2001, pp. 248-250, here p. 249 f.