Vom “nationalen” zum “sozialistischen” Selbst: Zur Erfahrungs-geschichte deutscher Chemiker und Ingenieure im 20. Jahrhundert (review)

Part of a series in business history and partially subsidized by a foundation devoted to the history of ideas, this history of experience (Erfahrungs-geschichte) of chemists and engineers focuses on biographical constants that informed their identity construction, occupation, and collegiality from the establishment of the Leunawerke to produce ammonia in 1916 to the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Originally, the author had planned a social history of white- and blue-collar workers in the GDR's chemical industry, but turned to chemists and engineers associated with the chemical facilities in Halle, Merseburg, Wolfen, and Auschwitz. In this revision of his postdoctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift) from 2000, Georg Wagner-Kyora investigates how members of a well-defined group constructed meaning.

The architecture of the book is such that Wagner-Kyora, after laying out the theoretical grounds for the collective biography, turns to the workplaces at the Leuna and Buna facilities in the GDR from 1958, when Walter Ul-bricht announced a new national plan for chemistry, into the 1970s. He then investigates the chemical elite during the Third Reich and returns to the postwar period. In the last section, the author surveys the construction of identity and historical memory from Auschwitz to the GDR. He seeks to produce a different approach to “societal history” (Gesellschaftsgeschichte) by investigating construction of self-concepts from the end stages of the Second Reich, through Weimar, the Third Reich, Soviet occupation, and the German Democratic Republic. The chemists and engineers made careers within significantly changing contexts. Chemists had doctorates and status and fell into the group of “discoverers” (“erfindenden Wissenschaft”), but engineers rarely held doctorates and were in the “serving” (dienende) group (p. 19). This elite—the bourgeois chemists, loyal to their class, facility, and discipline—provided leadership in a hierarchical managerial system under the Third Reich and later under the GDR. The GDR also required adjustment to claims of a classless society with its planned economy and centralized bureaucracy.

The chemists developed an authoritarian, conservative-nationalist orientation that fit well into the National Socialist system. Wagner-Kyora notes a continuity in elite, technocratic, educated-bourgeois (Bildungsbür-ger) values that provided a group loyalty in the facility hierarchy that the GDR’s party hierarchy was never quite able to overcome. Into the 1960s, the chemists and engineers circumvented the planning bureaucracy by improvising alternatives to make the chemical industry viable. Although the planning bureaucracy gained increasing control, the older value system remained. The older generation had a National Socialist orientation, but the newer generation refrained from joining the ruling party—the SED—as an expression of distance from a party apparatus that performed poorly.

Basing his history of experience on archival material from Leunawerke, Bunawerke, Agfa, IG Farben, and the security police (Stasi), among others, the author provides what once was called an “externalist” history. However, this micro-political history produces a detailed investigation of a group of chemists and engineers, their values, and their relations to each other and to members of the state hierarchy.