Hireling

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Heuerlingswesen (also Häuslingswesen ) describes in Westphalia and in north-west Germany from the 17th century to the first half of the 20th century frequent, at times and in some places defining form of the agricultural constitution, including its social, economic and settlement historical requirements and consequences. The legal basis were contracts between peasants and landless , de facto pseudo-self-employed hirers or hirers , who provided the peasant with cheap manual and clamping services as well as payments in the form of money and in kind, and the hirers a roof over their heads and a piece of farmland in exchange. These contracts were z. Can be terminated annually. The operating area of ​​the hiring centers was typically in the form of combatants around the yard. Heuerlings were not full members of the peasantry . They did not have the right to vote, did not have to pay church dues, but had to pay a fee to ring the bell. The linguistic “legacy” of this being can be found to this day in the phrase “hiring someone”, in the sense of a temporary and task-limited employment of people to manage the job.

history

The trainee system spread in Westphalia and northwestern Germany from the end of the 16th century and especially in the second half of the 17th century. On farms that u. a. had become desolate as a result of the Thirty Years' War , a new social class (new legal relationship) was “appointed” - initially in empty Spiekern , bakery houses and other auxiliary buildings: the heuerlings. They were neither full-fledged farmers nor their servants living on the farm, but rural tenants. In the county of Ravensberg , heuerling families made up two thirds of the total population by 1770.

In order to compensate for their right of residence and the use of their small arable land leased from the farmer, the hiring workers were obliged - often on demand, for wages - to give “their farmer” a hand, especially during harvest time. Their own small farms were almost never enough to secure fodder for the cattle of the many children in the heuerling families without buying anything. For many hirers and their children it was a life on the edge of existence, with revolts of industrialization and the population explosion.

Since the end of the 17th century, the men from the hiring families in the Münsterland , Emsland , Oldenburger Münsterland and Osnabrücker Land were often seasonal workers, so-called Holland - goers . In East Westphalia , the hiring families earned extra income by working from home as spinners and weavers in the publishing system .

Members of hiring families made up a large proportion of the emigrants who left their Westphalian homeland in large numbers in the 19th century in the hope of a better life (free farmland, gold rush, etc.), especially in the United States of America, but also in southern Brazil .

With the beginning of the Weimar Republic , the north-west German hirers joined together in interest groups in order to fight their social hardship politically. The Northwest German Heuerlingsverband was established for the Osnabrück area under the leadership of the later SPD member of the Reichstag Wilhelm Helling , in Emsland / Grafschaft Bentheim and parts of the Bersenbrück district the association of Christian hirers , later the association of Christian hirers, small farmers and tenants under the later provincial parliament member Heinrich Kuhr , in southern Oldenburg the Association of Small Agricultural Enterprises , founded by Anton Themann , who sat for the center in the Oldenburg state parliament from 1925 to 1933, and after 1945 for the CDU in the Lower Saxony state parliament. In Westphalia, the “Tenant and Settler Association”, which is close to the center, was established, which was renamed the “Westphalian Tenant and Small Farmers Association” and then in 1927 into the Westphalian Farmers Association . In 1925 it had around 5,000 members. Since October 1928 the priest Ferdinand Vorholt from Mecklenbeck near Munster was chairman. This revolt was ended after the National Socialists seized power by means of forced conformity and incorporation into the so-called Reichsnährstand . With the end of the Second World War, the beginning of the “ economic miracle ” in the 1950s and increasingly better earning opportunities in handicrafts and industry, the hireling disappeared almost overnight when the farmers replaced human labor with the use of machines.

example

Max Weber gives as an example for Osnabrück:

  • A garden of 1,000–1,500 m²
  • 2 hectares of arable land
  • 1/2 - 1 1/2 ha of meadow
  • The right to 1 ha for horned cattle in the Mark
  • Plague cut on up to 2 ha
  • 29 working days of tensioning support distributed among the family (a farmer in such an employment relationship had many advantages over a leasing farmer of the same size, e.g. almost half the rent, free heating, clothing, etc.)
  • 2–3 dairy and working cows, in very good locations the third cow was replaced by an ox or even a horse
  • 1–2 breeding sows, which allowed 2–5 fattening pigs per year (calf breeding rarely)
  • Few sheep
  • 10-15 chickens
  • A slaughter cattle
  • You worked for 47 weeks / year 7–12 hours per day (young people at most 6) in a family with 1.5 workers
  • There was not always enough feed for the beef cattle and had to be bought in
  • You could save up capital and give the children a dowry of up to one and a half annual salaries
  • They are extremely satisfied with their situation
  • Unlike elsewhere, the employment contract was concluded orally every 4 years
  • The landlord had to provide help in case of need

literature

Monographs

  • Franz Bölsker-Schlicht: Social history of rural areas in the former administrative district of Osnabrück in the 19th and early 20th centuries with special consideration of the hiring system and individual ancillary trades , in: Westfälische Forschungen 40/1990, Münster 1990, pp. 223-250.
  • Lisa Borker: Dalum and the hiring workers . 2nd edition Sögel 1998.
  • Johannes Drees : The importance of the heuerling system within the agricultural wage system, with special consideration for the conditions in the Osnabrück district . Diploma thesis, University of Göttingen 1922.
  • Johannes Drees: Equalization of work between industry and agriculture presented in the heuerling system in the Osnabrück district , Diss.Göttingen 1924.
  • Walter D. Kamphoefner / Peter Marschalck / Birgit Nolte-Schuster: About hirers and farmers. Emigration from the Osnabrück region to North America in the 19th century (Kulturregion Osnabrück, Volume 12), Bramsche 1999.
  • Martin Meyer-Johann: Critical investigations into the heuerling system, in particular the effects of the war and post-war period on the same in Minden-Ravensberg . Diss., University of Halle-Wittenberg 1921.
  • Birgit Nolte-Schuster / Jaap Vogel / Winfried Woesler / Arno de Jonge: To work in Holland - work migration from the Osnabrück region between 1750–1850 . Osnabrück 2001.
  • Heinrich Niehaus: The hiring people system and the hiring people movement. A contribution to the solution of the labor question . Kleinert publishing house, Quakenbrück 1924.
  • Hans-Jürgen Seraphim : The Heuerlingswesen in Northwest Germany (= publication of the Provincial Institute for Westphalian Regional and Folklore, Series I: Economics and Transport Science, Volume 5). Aschendorff Verlag, Münster 1948.
  • Bernd Robben / Helmut Lensing: “When the farmer whistles, then the hirers have to come!” - Considerations and research on hiring in Northwest Germany, Haselünne, Study Society for Emsland Regional History, 2014, ISBN 978-3-981404
  • Hans Triphaus: The trainee system in the northern part of the old district of Bersenbrück in the late 19th and 20th centuries. A contribution to the economic and social history of the north of Osnabrück (= series of publications of the district home association Bersenbrück No. 19). 3rd edition. Verlag Thoben, Quakenbrück 1981, ISBN 3-921176-62-X .

Essays

  • Wilhelm Brandhorst: Heuerlings and Heuerlingshäuser in Hartum . About the trainee system in a village in the Mindener Land . Messages of the Mindener Geschichtsverein, year 51 (1979), pp. 93-100.
  • Werner Dobelmann : An old family of heuerlings . In: Heimat yesterday and today. Communications from the Bersenbrück District Home Federation , Vol. 11 (1963), ISSN  0440-6141 .
  • Josef Grave: hiring workers, West-East settlers, return migrants. In the footsteps of Emsland families in Western Pomerania and Eastern Brandenburg . In: Yearbook of the Emsländischen Heimatbund , Vol. 41 (1995), pp. 330–342, ISSN  0448-1410 .
  • Christof Haverkamp: The labor movement in the 20th century in the Osnabrück administrative district . In: Emsländische Geschichte , Vol. 6 (1997), pp. 89-107, ISSN  0947-8582 .
  • Heinrich Kuhr : The Heuerlingswesen in Emsland and in the neighboring areas . In: Yearbook of the Emsländischen Heimatverein , Vol. 12 (1965), pp. 60–72, ISSN  0448-1410 .
  • Helmut Lensing: The “Association of Christian Wage Employees” 1919 to 1933. An important interest organization of rural lower classes in the north-west of Germany . In: Yearbook of the Emsländischen Heimatbund , Vol. 53 (2006), pp. 45–90, ISSN  0448-1410 .
  • Ralf Weber: On the situation of the hiring workers in the Vechta and Cloppenburg districts in the first half of the 19th century. In: Heimatbund für das Oldenburger Münsterland (Ed.): Yearbook for the Oldenburger Münsterland 2012. Vechta 2011, pp. 115-134.
  • Adolf Wrasmann: Das Heuerlingswesen im Fürstentum Osnabrück , in: Mitteilungen des Verein für Geschichte und Landeskunde von Osnabrück, Part I, Vol. 42/1919, Osnabrück 1920, pp. 52-171 and Part II in Vol. 44/1921, Osnabrück 1922, Pp. 1-154.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Manfred Balzer: Fundamentals of the history of the settlement (800–1800) . In: Wilhelm Kohl (ed.): Westfälische Geschichte , vol. 1: From the beginnings to the end of the Old Kingdom . Schwann, Düsseldorf 1983, pp. 231-273, here p. 266.
  2. ^ Hans-Jürgen Seraphim: The Heuerlingswesen in northwestern Germany . Aschendorff, Münster 1948, p. 17.
  3. ↑ Clemens Wischermann : On the threshold of industrialization (1800-1850) . In: Wilhelm Kohl (ed.): Westphalian history , vol. 3: The 19th and 20th centuries . Schwann, Düsseldorf 1984, pp. 41-162, here pp. 61 f.
  4. ↑ Heinz-Günter Steinberg: The geographical basis . In: Wilhelm Kohl (ed.): Westfälische Geschichte , vol. 1: From the beginnings to the end of the Old Kingdom . Schwann, Düsseldorf 1983, pp. 35–53, here p. 46.
  5. ^ Walter D. Kamphoefner : Westphalia in the New World. A Social History of Emigration in the 19th Century . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, extended new edition 2006. ISBN 3-89971-206-4 . There Chapter 2: People and Regions at the Crossroads: The Influence of Regional Economic Developments on Migration Patterns in Northwest Germany and Chapter 3: Poor but Not Poor: Personal Characteristics and Motivational Factors of Northwest German Emigration .
  6. ↑ Heinrich Kleine-hook Kamp: The objectives of the Reich in Heuerling essence of Munster country . Wuerzburg 1939.
  7. ↑ Max Weber : The situation of the agricultural workers in Germany . 1882, p. a little over 2,000 .
  8. ↑ Max Weber: The Conditions of Farm Workers in Germany . 1891.

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