Berlin

In becoming a modern metropolis, Wilhelmian Berlin also became a Fabrikstadt

(factory city) par excellence. Walther Rathenau put it best: “What really makes [Berlin] important is our factory-district, which is perhaps the largest in the world though mainly unknown to the inhabitants of the western part of the city. To the north, south, and east the worker-city stretches out its polyp arms and grasps the Westend in an iron grip.”

Berlin’s factories came in all sizes, but the trend was toward larger and larger establishments. In 1895, 20,000 workers toiled in factories employing fifty workers or more; by 1907 that figure had risen to 70,000. The new mega-factories prided themselves on their rationalized division of labor. Whereas workers in craft shops and small factories often fabricated entire products by themselves, workers at the giant modern plants tended to specialize in one aspect of production, such as milling or lathe operations. These tasks required precision, dexterity, and discipline, and the Wilhelmian factory was a tightly controlled environment, a kind of industrial barracks. The Werkstatt-Ordnung

(operating procedure) from Siemens und Halske, one of Berlin’s largest firms, was typical in its regimentation of the workplace. It required workers to carry identification cards at all times, obey foremen without question, keep exact account of tools (and pay for any that went missing), maintain workstations in an orderly condition, leave their stations only with permission of the foremen, and receive visitors only in cases of emergency. The work itself seems to have provided little compensation for the regimentation. A 1910 survey asked metal workers in Berlin, Solingen, and Idar-Oberstein whether they found any pleasure in their work. A majority (56.9 percent) said they did not, with respondents adding comments like “Making mass-produced articles repulses me”; “I feel like a machine, forced to keep going”; and “I do my work mechanically.”

Yet in many ways the conditions of labor in Berlin’s factories had improved since the beginning of the Bismarckian era. The average workday had declined from twelve hours in 1870 to nine or ten hours in 1910. In the last years before the war, workers typically got forty-five minutes off for breakfast and about one hour off for lunch. Because employers had to help pay for the national accident-insurance program introduced by Bismarck, safety measures had been inaugurated that significantly reduced the number of industrial accidents. Some employers set up pension plans for their workers, funded awards for good work or long service, and provided employee-families with subsidized housing, schools, and holiday excursions.

One growing segment of the Berlin labor force—females—largely missed out on these benefits. This was because the majority of working women toiled as domestic servants or as seamstresses in the booming garment trade, which remained unregulated. The seamstresses often worked at home, obtaining their materials from large textile companies that provided cloth in exchange for piecework commitments. The women bought their sewing machines from unscrupulous door-to-door salesmen who prowled the proletarian districts. On average, they worked twelve-hour days for about five or six marks per week, which was less than a fourth of the average wage for male factory workers. Wages in the garment industry actually went down in the late Wilhelmian era, due largely to the huge number of women and girls willing to work for next to nothing to help support their families.

The plight of Berlin’s female garment workers was the subject of a Home-Work exhibition in 1906, organized by the Christian Home Workers’ Association. The exhibition was promoted by a Käthe Kollwitz poster showing a proletarian woman with a wan face and exhausted eyes. Empress Augusta, who was scheduled to open the show, refused to do so until the poster, which she said was depressing, was removed. Visitors who expected to find a celebration of fine handiwork discovered instead a cleverly designed protest against female exploitation. As the middle-brow magazine Die Gartenlaube reported: “Whosoever enters [the exhibition] feels at first a disappointment. The items on display suggest neither elegance nor comfort. . . . [We soon realize] that we are not meant to look at the wares but at the little tags that record how much the worker was paid for each piece.” The payments were shockingly low, a small percentage of the sums that the garments commanded in the stores. For example, an apron carrying a retail price of two marks fifty pfennigs brought the seamstress only twenty-five pfennigs.