Elektrizitatswirtschaft zwischen Umwelt, Technik und Politik: Aspekte aus 100 Jahren RWE-Geschichte, 1898-1998 (review)

Elektrizitätswirtschaft zwischen Umwelt, Technik und Politik: Aspekte aus 100 Jahren RWE-Geschichte, 1898-1998. Edited by Helmut Maier. Freiberg: Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, 1999. Pp. vi+285.

The giant German energy concern known as RWE celebrated its centenary in 1998. As part of the celebration, it published a beautiful volume, Der gläserne Riese: RWE, Ein Konzern wird transparent, edited by Dieter Schweer and Wolf Thieme. Although this book included a few essays by professional historians, its primary purpose was not so much scholarship as public relations. The much more modestly produced collection of essays under consideration here also considers RWE's "career" over its first hundred years, but it makes an attempt to present alternative visions of that history. The essays focus on RWE's role in electricity production and distribution and explore the intersections among technology, management, politics, and society. The combination of emphasis on historical alternatives and exploration of "socio-technical landscapes" (as exemplified in the contribution by Ed Todd) lends the collection an unusually high degree of coherence.

The first four essays cover the history of the firm from its beginnings in the 1890s through the National Socialist period. RWE started off as a local power producer, gradually extending its control both geographically and in terms of the mixture of means used to generate electrical power. By the late 1920s it commanded a massive, integrated, far-flung system of electrical generation and distribution--in the German term, a Großraumverbundwirtschaft. Theoretically, such a system was highly desirable in a capital-intensive industry such as this because it would permit the firm to maximize its load factor; emphasis on "internal technical logic" of the Verbundwirtschaft has been one of the key themes of writing about RWE since the 1940s at least. But, as Norbert Gilson indicates in his contribution to this book, during the early part of the twentieth century the benefits of the Verbundwirtschaft were more an article of faith than of cool, rational, theoretical deliberation. It gradually became clear that large investments were necessary in order for a company to be able to make profits in the long run, but it was by no means clear in the 1920s when--or even if--these profits would actually come about.

Actually, in the short term, pursuit of Verbundwirtschaft led to overcapacity that both exacerbated and was exacerbated by the Great Depression. And, as editor Helmut Maier points out here, this overcapacity through the early 1930s led in turn to a situation in which RWE could not even begin to anticipate the rise in demand that preparations for, and conduct of, war would bring--so much so that the firm was in a persistent state of crisis in terms of undercapacity from the late 1930s onward.

By bringing out the extent to which the unanticipated and the frankly wrongheaded can influence a firm's history, these essays indicate that things might well have turned out otherwise. Some of them explore other dimensions of historical alternatives and alternative histories. For instance, Norbert Fuchsloch provides an interesting essay on the technology and politics of air pollution at one of RWE's biggest facilities through the 1990s. Matthias Heymann looks at RWE's stance with regard to wind power during the post-World War II period. And Siegfried Buchhaupt explores the RWE model as a contrast to alternative forms of ownership and governance of power systems.

Maier's collection thus makes a major contribution to the literature on the history of German business and technology. Still, much remains to be done. Maier was the only contributor to be able to use the recently opened RWE archives, and it would appear that these new sources will fill gaps and add new dimensions to existing scholarship. Maier also points to a large number of questions regarding the Nazi period, which he was not able to...