The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway, 1920-1932 (review)

The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway, 1920-1932. By Alfred C. Mierzejewski. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xx+482. $75.

In the late 1920s the German national railway was one of the most modern in the world. The largest railway company outside the Soviet Union, it was the single largest customer of the German Hollerith Company, rationalizing its operations on an unforeseen scale and busily developing new high-speed trains. At the same time, the Reichsbahn was regarded by many Germans as a representative of and contributor to the commonweal--a distinctly non-Western mode of organizing the economy and eliminating unnecessary competition. This tension between economic and technological performance and political rhetoric is at the heart of Alfred Mierzejewski's exhaustive study, based on a stunning array of archival sources.

Mierzejewski places the Reichsbahn at the center of political, economic, and technological battles. He analyzes the railway system as an object of desire for the central government in Berlin and the Allied victors of World War I. Reichsbahn managers sought relative autonomy for their business and technological decisions. The railway was confined by its dual mission of serving social goals and acting as an independent enterprise with private competitors. Political altercations over managerial control take center stage in this narrative, with economic performance as another main actor and technology in a supporting role.

The book opens by examining the reasoning and negotiations when the first nationwide railway company was created in 1920. The government of the new Weimar Republic regarded it as a means of unifying the country both politically and economically. Some German states promoted unification for gains of efficiency, while Bavaria steadfastly tried to halt the process on federal grounds, still seeking concessions after nationalization had become inevitable. Standardization and coordination of traffic and management were paramount goals during these years.

Much of the book is devoted to the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft, the enterprise formed in 1924 to generate reparations for the Allies. Mierzejewski argues that not only was the DRG able to write checks to the victors of World War I without substantially harming itself, but that the financial pressures had a positive result, inducing management to streamline operations by American-style scientific management and develop more efficient technologies. Ironically, the period under Allied tutelage from 1924 to 1930 was one of relative managerial freedom. The board of directors, chaired by the industrialist Carl Friedrich Siemens, tested the limits of permissible action frequently.

Repeatedly the Allies told the Germans that they regarded their accounting system as little more than window dressing. In one of the most intriguing chapters, Mierzejewski shows how the cameralistic financial procedures of the railway partially gave way to a system that seemed more comprehensible to the Allies. Many tenured officials and managers saw this new system as an encroachment of foreign ideas into a key German enterprise. They praised the mission of the Reichsbahn, which placed the commonweal before individual gain, and Mierzejewski explains the resistance to new accounting standards by pointing to "social norms that condemned profit in favor of commonweal benefit" (p. 238). As he sees it, an autonomous national culture shaped economic policies. Interestingly enough, voices inside the labor unions welcomed the infusion of a business spirit as a whiff of "fresh air" (p. 243), yet the unions still opposed the profit motive. This echoes similar contemporaneous debates about modernization and Americanization in Mary Nolan's 1994 book, Visions of Modernity (which is not cited).

Readers of this journal will appreciate Mierzejewski's discussion of efforts to increase the speed of freight trains by reorganizing marshaling yards and introducing a newer generation of air brakes. While he applauds these efforts for increasing efficiency, he criticizes engineers for sometimes designing locomotives as "ideal machines at the expense of customer demand and...