Hometown Hamburg: Artisans and the Political Struggle for Social Order in the Weimar Republic

By Frank Domurad

‘Hometown Hamburg’ explores the problem of social order in modern German urban history. It argues that institutionalized normative structures are the bedrock of temporal continuity in German history. In an era of various linguistic and cultural ‘turns’ historians have lost the theoretical and analytical ability to explain events over the long term. Their accounts and explanations of human activity and historical processes usually rest on an unexamined behaviourist psychological model where simple instrumental self-interest drives individual decision-making. As a result they reduce communal social action to individual preferences conditioned by external contingent events.

Such an epistemological viewpoint has prevented historians from taking seriously the notion and reality of a ‘bürgerliche’ social order, not in the sense of a bourgeois-dominated class system, but in terms of what the historian Mack Walker has defined as a “hometown” conception of communal solidarity. Belief in the value of a bürgerliche social order has provided the institutionalized basis for the remarkable continuity of German and Hamburg handicraft over time. Its norms and values have been shared by forces from all strata of society, who, like artisans, were committed to a ‘rooted’ notion of local community that in Walker’s terminology preserved the ‘webs and walls’ of occupational estate cohesion and parity in the face of ‘outsiders’ (Standeslose) or ‘disturbers’ (Störer).

The corporate politics of both occupational estate and the bürgerliche social order in which it was embedded played a key role in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, and may yet endanger democracy in Germany once again. The division of Hamburg and Germany into irreconcilable social and moral trenches, to use Jürgen Kocka’s trenchant phraseology, based on adversarial images of social good and social community, produced, in the words of the sociologists Rainer C. Baum and Frank J. Lechner, a society of extreme ‘value dissensus’, whose members were essentially ‘moral strangers’ to each other. It was in this anomic context that National Socialism became an acceptable political alternative. Nazi spokesmen intrinsically understood the meaning of Walker’s ‘webs and walls’ of local community and opposed those whom they defined as disturbers of domestic peace and social harmony. National Socialism was able to offer a cross-section of social and economic groups, stretching in a city-state like Hamburg from a free trading commercial elite through the artisan master in his workshop into the ranks of the craft-trained skilled worker in the shipyard and factory, complete and comfortable integration into a very familiar hometown social order – one that they grew up with, whose logic they could understand, whose morality they could trust and whose roots reflected the continuity of history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089338

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Hometown Hamburg

Hometown Hamburg

Artisans and the Political Struggle for Social Order in the Weimar Republic

Frank Domurad

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© Frank Domurad 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-931-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-931-8 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

References

Index

TABLES

2.1Independent Artisans, Guilds and Guild Members, Hamburg, 1874–1926

2.2Hamburg Citizens, as a Percentage of Population and Reichstag Suffrage, 1860–1904

3.1Population, Business Establishments and Gainfully Employed Persons in Hamburg, 1907–25

3.2Business Establishments and Employed Persons by Economic Sector, Hamburg, 1925

3.3Business Establishments and Employed Persons by Size of Firm, Hamburg and Reich, 1925

3.4Industrial and Craft Business Establishments by Economic Sector/Group and Size, Hamburg and Reich, 1925

3.5Employed Persons in Industrial and Craft Business Establishments by Economic Sector/Group, Hamburg and Reich, 1925

3.6Increase/(Decrease) in Industrial and Craft Business Establishments and Persons Employed by Size of Firm, Hamburg 1907 and 1925

3.7Average Number of Persons Employed by Size of Industrial/Handicraft Firm, Hamburg, 1907 and 1925

3.8Handicraft Workshops and Gainfully Employed in Handicraft Economy in Hamburg and Germany, 1926

3.9Density of Artisan Concerns and Workforce, German States, 1926

3.10Density of Artisan Concerns and Workforce, Selected Urban Handicraft Chamber Districts, 1926

3.11Artisans per Workshop, German States and Selected Urban Handicraft Chamber Districts, 1926

3.12Distribution of Artisan Workshops by Number of Journeymen Employed, Selected Urban Handicraft Chamber Districts and Germany, 1926

3.13Percentage Distribution of Artisan Workshops by Number of Journeymen Employed, Selected Urban Handicraft Chamber Districts and Germany, 1926

3.14Absolute and Relative Distribution of Artisan Workforce by Position, Hamburg and Germany, 1926

3.15Handicraft Workshops, Persons Gainfully Employed and Average Size of Firm by Definition of Handicraft, Hamburg, 1925/26

3.16Percent of Independent Artisans Organized in Guilds, German States and Reich, 1926

3.17Proportion of Artisan Guild Members in Zwangs- and Freie Innungen, German States and Reich, 1919 and 1926

6.1Bürgerschaft Election Results, Hamburg State, 1927–32: Votes and Mandates

6.2Reichstag Election Results, Wahlkreis Hamburg (#34), 1928–32: Votes and Mandates

6.3Bürgerschaft/Reichstag Election Results in Percent by Party Groupings, Hamburg (H) and Germany (G), 1927–32

6.4Hamburg’s Party Rank by Percentage Vote in Thirty-Five Election Districts, Reichstag Elections 1928–32

6.5Handicraft Bürgerschaft Nominations, Hamburg State, 1927–32

6.6Handicraft Percentage of Total Handicraft Bürgerschaft Nominations by Party, Hamburg State, 1927–32

6.7Handicraft Nominations as Percentage of Total Party Bürgerschaft Nominations by Year, Hamburg State, 1927–32

6.8Handicraft Nominations as Percentage of Each Party’s Total Bürgerschaft Nominations, Hamburg State, 1927–32

6.9Handicraft Nominations as Percentage of Total Bürgerschaft Nominations by Party and Year, Hamburg State, 1927–32

6.10Handicraft Bürgerschaft Mandates, Hamburg State, 1927–32

6.11Percentage of Total Handicraft Bürgerschaft Mandates by Party, Hamburg State, 1927–32

6.12Percentage of Handicraft Candidates Elected to Bürgerschaft by Party and Year, Hamburg State, 1927–32

PREFACE

Continuity in German History

In this book I address the issue of the social structural foundations of historical continuity in modern Germany, a topic that has fallen out of favor with a large segment of our profession in recent years. In part this lack of interest in the subject is a residual effect of the Sonderweg debate from decades before. Since discussions of Germany’s special path of historical development, supposedly distinguishing it in a mostly negative fashion from the byways taken by its liberal democratic western European neighbors, were closely tied to notions of social feudalism and political authoritarianism, the concept of institutionalized social structures became linked with conservativism and anti-modernism. Any attempt to discuss the impact of the past on the present from such a perspective, especially in the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic, therefore seemed to preclude recognition of the nation’s movement into a more progressive future, especially in the realm of civil society.¹

Bolstering this empirical antipathy to social structure among modern German historians has been the so-called cultural, linguistic and post-structural turns that have rocked the discipline over the last three decades. Challenging notions of factual objectivity, scientific knowledge accumulation and the reality of social institutions, supporters of these new developments have argued for a subjective, agency-driven form of relativism when discussing historical events. They have vigorously opposed the use of so-called metanarratives or conceptual frameworks to analyze the course of German history and have opened their arms to a contingency-based descriptive practice that precludes any consideration of normative historical continuity as an element affecting the temporal course of individual and collective human behavior.²

Yet historical continuity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany did exist, and there was no greater proof of that fact than the empirical subject matter of this book, namely the millions of men and women who have made and continue to make a living in small, medium and sometimes even large artisan workshops. Most historians and social scientists interested in the subject of European handicraft in the modern era have come to agree that one salient factor has distinguished German artisans from their counterparts in other countries: the persistence and cohesion of their collective corporate traditions, normative structures and political interests over time and across a wide array of economic, social and governmental upheavals. Unfortunately, these same scholars have been inclined to explain this intriguing example of historical continuity by viewing artisanal actors as derivative bit players on a stage of larger historical forces beyond their control. They have interpreted craftsmen either as rather desperate characters seeking to turn back the economic hands of time in the face of industrialization, as pawns in someone else’s conservative or fascist political game, or as irrational respondents to a social environment changing faster than it could be comprehended.

My work rejects such derivative and passive characterizations of German handicraft as a vain effort to push artisans into explanatory schemata of modernization or class development that simply do not analytically work. Instead, I treat these men and women at their word. When they speak the language of corporate autonomy and occupational estate honor, when they talk about the preservation of a moral economy and the master’s obligation to train future generations of skilled journeymen and workers, I listen carefully. I do so, not because I believe everything that they say at face value, but because there is subjective meaning behind their statements and actions and that meaning reflects important distinctions in the structure of German society, especially in terms of images of social order and social relations.

Nowhere were craft visions of the corporate good society more on display in modern Germany than in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hamburg. Despite its much-vaunted reputation as the nation’s center of free-trade liberalism and as its fortress of Marxist socialism, the city-state was also the heartland of organized handicraft, what I will call a capital of German Handwerk. It was in Hamburg where the first revolutionary convention of North German craftsmen was held in June 1848 as a prelude to the all-German convocation in Frankfurt am Main two months later,³ and where artisanal leaders were subsequently to be the driving force behind the formation of handicraft’s first national political organization, the German Handicraft League (Deutscher Handwerkerbund), established in Weimar in 1862.⁴ It was also in Hamburg where the public law corporate representative of handicraft, the Gewerbekammer, played a key role in establishing Germany’s first Mittelstandspartei in 1878,⁵ and where, after Imperial law allowed the establishment of mandatory trade guilds in 1897, some three-quarters of its craftsmen opted to be part of such obligatory organizations by 1926.⁶ Indeed, it might be said that there were very few other places in Germany in the years leading up to the Third Reich where the three reputed major isms of the twentieth century—liberalism, Marxism and corporatism—were so starkly defined and in such evident conflict as they were in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.⁷

This book seeks to illustrate the importance of social structural continuity for understanding the course of modern German history by examining the role that artisan men and women, confident in their corporate beliefs and traditions, played in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism in the city-state of Hamburg, the nation’s largest international port and its second largest city. It defines handicraft as a corporate status group rather than simply part of a class-based petite bourgeoisie and uses this definition to reveal that corporate institutional norms and values, some with a pedigree reaching back centuries, were not just limited to members of the artisanry in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hamburg, but were shared by important segments of all social strata from the commercial elite to the working class. These collective values and norms validated a conception of social order that was bürgerlich rather than bourgeois, status-based rather than class-based and that sharply conflicted with liberal and socialist images of the good society. It was these contradictory notions of social good and social relations that were in turn incorporated into the fundamental rights of the Weimar constitution and that provided Hamburg artisans the political leverage and legitimacy necessary to pursue a politics of occupational estate parity in defense of their corporate autonomy. Such a strategy allowed artisans to survive as a collective entity within a democratic polity in the face of their numerically and financially superior liberal and socialist opponents, to justify their support for or opposition to the Republic and to seek alliances with various political parties, including the National Socialists, for the realization of their vision of a hometown community in Hamburg and in Germany as equal partners in a modern world, rather than as frightened supplicants hanging on to an outmoded past.

1. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [c. 1984]). For a recent discussion from this perspective, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Ein Demokratiedefizit? Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in vergleichender Perspective, Geschichte und Gesellschaft , 44, no. 3 (July–September 2018).

2. Gary Wilder, From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographic Turns, The American Historical Review , 117, no. 3 (June 2012).

3. Dieter Dowe and Toni Offermann, eds., Deutsche Handwerker- und Arbeiterkongresse 1848–1852: Protokolle und Materialien (Berlin: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1983), 3–41.

4. Dirk Georges, Zwischen Reaction und Liberalismus: Die Organisation handwerkspolitischer Interessen zwischen 1849 und 1869, in Bürger in der Gesellschaft der Neuzeit: Wirtschaft-Politik-Kultur , ed. Hans-Jürgen Puhle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 230–32.

5. Shulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany: The Urban Master Artisans, 1873–1896 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 212.

6. Wilhelm Wernet, Statistik des Handwerks 1931 (Stuttgart: C. E. Poeschel Verlag, 1934), 176.

7. Howard J. Wiarda, Corporatism and Comparative Politics: The Other Great Ism (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Any work of historical research that has stretched over 40 years, such as this book, owes a debt to more people than can be enumerated. Besides the three anonymous reviewers, whose insights and suggestions were invaluable, I want to take this opportunity to thank three persons among the many. First there is Dr. Jonathan Steinberg, my supervisor and mentor. Without his encouragement, his support and his belief in my ultimate success, I would never have stayed the course. Then there is my closest friend, Dr. Mark Gould. Mark opened up to me the world of sociological theory that provided the analytical tools for truly understanding the role of artisans in modern German history. Finally, there is my wife, Carol Roberts. As with all spouses of both genders who have the misfortune of being married to an academic, she has had to endure ill temper, constant agitation and interminable demands for peace and quiet so that I could think. Her love and understanding made it all possible. But above all else, it was her steadfast belief that I was, in my own small way, adding to our understanding of the course of modern German history and its impact on today’s political and social events that made all the difference.

ABBREVIATIONS

Chapter One

THE PECULIARITY OF GERMAN HISTORY: HANDICRAFT VERSUS HANDWERK

Most of what is called small business in other countries falls in Germany within the legal category of Handwerk […] Difficulties of translation may point to differences not just in perception but in reality, and indeed a case could be made that Handwerk is so peculiarly German that the concept is simply not translatable. (Wolfgang Streeck)¹

In other words, we must know how to label an event if we are to know how to explain it. We can only learn the nature of events as we formulate their explanations. (Mark Gould)²

It was an 80th birthday celebration, that fourth of September 1928 in Hamburg. At nine in the evening, surrounded by his family, Ehrenobermeister (honorary head master) Johann Hermann Schumacher of the Butchers Guild stepped out onto his balcony to observe the festivities his fellow artisans had prepared for him. Sparkling young ladies—the salesgirls of the butcher shops—dressed in snow-white bonnets and aprons, apprentices and journeymen, again in white with berets or black caps, and finally the masters themselves all marched past, the color of their costumes and the gold and silver guild flag fading in and out of the shadows created by the torches. From near and far the butcher’s trade had come to pay homage to their old leader with cheers, smiles and even song as the guild choir entertained the assembled throng with sentimental and joyful melodies. But soon a different chorus arose, for Master Schumacher himself had come into the midst of the crowd. Overwhelmed by emotion he expressed his great joy that on his birthday it was his colleagues who had wanted to share his happiness. Again there were congratulations and when the procession finally moved off, it was treated to a memorable sight: Papa Schumacher between two cake-eating grandchildren with their very own white aprons and striped jackets. Even the youngest members of the trade wanted to honor their aged Ehrenobermeister.³

Handicraft: A Relic of the Past or a Portent of the Future?

Although historians will never know what thoughts might have coursed through Master Schumacher’s mind during that warm, late summer’s evening, he may very well have taken the opportunity to review the course of his own illustrious career. The son of a butcher master himself, Schumacher was born in the midst of the revolution of 1848. At the age of 25 and two years after German unification, he assumed his father’s workshop, which prospered and expanded under his tutelage until 1892 with the purchase of the firm M. Witt. The consolidated enterprise of Witt & Schumacher quickly became one of the more important meat provisioners of seagoing vessels, public institutions and other large consumers in the city-state. Obviously possessing great business acumen, Schumacher diversified his economic interests to include insurance, a margarine production firm, an ice works and a banking establishment to provide his colleagues and other small businesses with badly needed capital. In 1912, two years before the Great War, he left Witt & Schumacher to become active in his son’s business, the import and export firm of Th. Schumacher & Co. He died in semiretirement on June 11, 1929, less than a year after his 80th birthday celebration.

Schumacher’s active engagement and success in the business world apparently did not dim his enthusiasm for his chosen craft and trade. Soon after taking over his father’s workshop, he joined the voluntary Corporation of Hamburg Butcher Masters and later became its president. At his instigation, in February 1885, immediately after the Imperial government had passed the first in what was to be a series of legislative measures reintroducing voluntary and mandatory guild structures in German handicraft, the Corporation dissolved and became a free guild (Freie Innung). In 1892 Schumacher assumed the post of Obermeister (head master), which he was to retain for a quarter of a century. Under his leadership the voluntary guild was transformed in 1899 into a mandatory guild (Zwangsinnung), requiring the membership of all butchers in Hamburg, including by 1908 the so-called Alleinmeister, those masters without journeymen or other assistants. The Butchers Guild rewarded Schumacher for his efforts during the First World War by naming him its Ehrenobermeister, a title he was to hold until his death. But Schumacher was obviously not ready just yet for a well-deserved rest. Having been elected in 1910 to the Bürgerschaft, Hamburg’s city-state parliament, he served first as a member of the Left-Center Fraktion prior to the revolution of 1918 and then as a representative of the conservative, business-oriented German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei—DVP) until 1924. After a four-year respite from politics he reentered the local parliament in 1928, this time under the banner of the Economic Party (Wirtschaftspartei—WP), representing the disaffected interests of his fellow artisans and other segments of the lower middle classes.⁴

Schumacher’s diverse career epitomizes the interpretive challenge that handicraft has always represented for the researcher of modern German history. By all rights, historians should be able to classify Schumacher as a proud member of the expanding capitalist business class, a representative of that prosperous segment of the bourgeoisie a rung or two below the mercantile and industrial elite that dominated and governed Hamburg. His rise from the ownership of a small butcher’s workshop, the traditional legacy of his artisan father, to the proprietor of a consolidated meat supply firm and the participant in numerous other profitable enterprises should have defined the society he kept, the interests he supported and his view of the world. He was indeed a shining example of the social mobility that often characterized Germany’s path to mature industrialization.

Yet Schumacher apparently rejected the role of the bourgeois capitalist that his material conditions seemingly dictated. He not only refused to turn his back on his handicraft heritage but remained a vigorous advocate for artisanal corporate institutions and endeavors. He was the prime mover for the establishment of first a voluntary and then a mandatory guild representing the entire butchers’ trade in Hamburg, including those Alleinmeister whose meager existence in many instances placed them economically among the ranks of the proletariat. Until his dying day, Schumacher, as Ehrenobermeister of his guild, defied the dictates of his own wealth and position to stand shoulder to shoulder with those colleagues whose traditions went back to the time of his father and beyond. He epitomized a handicraft that, in the puzzled words of one scholar, successfully adjusted in the economic arena, but continued to ‘ceremonially drag around and restore’ outmoded sociocultural ideals.⁵

To deal with this apparent contradiction between objective conditions and subjective attitudes many scholars and other observers of modern Germany have traditionally chosen a single and rather narrow path for conceiving and explaining the individual and collective actions of artisans such as Obermeister Schumacher and the members of the Hamburg Butchers Guild (and other segments of the lower middle class⁶). This tradition began almost a century and a half ago with the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Engels in particular set the tone for his more academic successors in his series of correspondences to the New York Tribune between September 1851 and October 1852 describing and analyzing the course of the German revolution of 1848.⁷ Clearly expressing his disdain for this small trading and shopkeeping class, he argued that its intermediate position between the class of larger capitalists, traders, and manufacturers, the bourgeoisie properly so-called, and the proletarian or industrial class, determines its character. Aspiring to the position of the first, the least adverse turn of fortune hurls the individuals of this class down into the ranks of the second. Its precarious economic position in turn resulted in a subordinate and vacillating position in politics. Humble and crouchingly submissive, it threw its support behind those forces in power, be it a powerful feudal or monarchical government or the Liberalism of an ascendant middle class, all the while living in abject fear of independent movement from the proletariat below it. Nonetheless, Engels noted somewhat confusingly, this class must be considered a most important one in every body politic, and in all modern revolutions, most of all in Germany where during the recent struggles, it generally played the decisive part.⁸

Engels’s popular depiction of the situation and role of the lower middle class in the German revolutions of 1848 highlighted the essential characteristics of this social stratum, which in the eyes of most subsequent historians have dictated its activities ever since. It was in objective material terms, above all else, a transitional class of small producers and retailers, constantly in danger of disintegrating under the steady competitive impact of industrialization and commercialization into what were essentially its component parts, capitalist businessmen and wage laborers. Its weak economic foundation prevented it from defining and asserting its own interests, developing and maintaining any type of collective or group solidarity, and becoming, to use standard Marxist terminology, a class for itself as well as in itself.⁹ Its inability to establish solid material underpinnings, required for assuming the role of an effective actor on the stage of history, drove it toward a dependent political stance for protection, prey to the threats and blandishments of superior elites or the demagoguery of populist condottieri. The lower middle class was in effect a sizeable, but frightened and confused segment of modern society without definable purpose and motive, except perhaps to protect its own survival against the threat of a rising socialist proletariat.¹⁰

Indeed it was not until the end of the Second World War that Engels’s interpretation of the revolution of 1848 and the role played by the lower middle class, and with it handicraft, began to be challenged in historical circles to any significant degree. Within two decades of the war’s close scholars such as Rudolf Stadelmann, Theodore S. Hamerow and P. H. Noyes¹¹ started to question his contention that it was ultimately the factory worker who took to the barricades in a struggle for social liberation and a democratic state. Instead they pointed to traditional artisan masters and journeymen as the shock troops¹² and soldiers¹³ of revolution. Threatened in their livelihood by the new factory and confused in their traditional status by the development of class conflict, they turned to the liberal leaders of the revolution for succor. They pressed for a return to older, more comfortable guild and corporate economic and social structures, which had been dismantled in the various German states in the drive to establish trade and occupational freedom (Gewerbefreiheit).¹⁴ When the liberal parliamentarians in Frankfurt stood by their principles of economic liberation and unfettered industrial advancement, artisans and journeymen alike transferred their allegiance to the old conservative forces of monarchy and aristocracy who openly announced their readiness to outbid parliamentarianism for the support of the lower classes.¹⁵

The gauntlet thrown down by these historians, however, was more empirical than conceptual in nature. Although they rectified the historical record of 1848 regarding the identity, motives and character of the masses of active participants, they did not confront the accepted model of the lower middle classes and handicraft as an intermediate or transitional class caught between powerful capitalist and socialist forces above and below them and driven by fear and desperation to seek political assistance in any form offered. In fact, their research strengthened the image of a declining economic and social group performing one last glorious hurrah before being shepherded off the historical stage and into the audience. For one spectacular moment craft masters and journeymen sought to juxtapose, according to these authors and those who followed their lead, socio-economically conservative and politically progressive ideas¹⁶ in a volatile, contradictory mix designed to confuse the hands of time. When their efforts failed, they began what many scholars have considered to be a long, horrible descent toward political reaction and eventually National Socialism.

The most prominent modern proponents and chroniclers of this fall from grace to the depths of 1933 and beyond have been Shulamit Volkov and Heinrich August Winkler.¹⁷ Between the two historians, Volkov stated their case most starkly. She observed that during the Great Depression of 1873 to 1896 and continuing in the relative prosperity of 1896 to 1914, a process of economic decline and internal group polarization occurred in handicraft much as Marx and Engels anticipated: Master artisans either enlarged their workshops and managed to prosper even under adverse economic circumstances, or were increasingly impoverished, and often proletarianized. Although this polarization was not powerful enough to bring about its [handicraft’s] disappearance, it weakened artisan trades, especially in urban areas, to the point where their material condition no longer coincided with their status position and their own social self-image. Artisans felt themselves increasingly left behind by events economically, pushed to the fringe of the new society socially and alienated from all the political forces in the Reich. As a result, they experienced an overall sense of isolation and lack of belonging that bred their hostility to modernity. Their solution to these ever-expanding sources of stress was to seek recourse in a mythical view of a historical period relegated to an indefinite past, the Guild Age. Alone, despondent and buffeted by economic and social conditions that they could neither comprehend nor overcome, artisan masters became increasingly more violent and emotional with the years, indicating the masters’ collective misconception of reality, and their pathological attachment to a simplified and erroneous explanation of their misfortune. By the dawn of the Weimar Republic in the second decade of the twentieth century, when a return to a Guild Age was only a distant dream, their politics of antimodernism acquired a desperate, hysterical tinge.¹⁸ Handicraft, which Engels had mocked as humble and crouchingly submissive, was from Volkov’s perspective now prepared to take its revenge in alliance with National Socialism and hurtle German society into an unimaginable abyss of destruction and horror.

Three trends in the study of the European lower middle class finally began to dislodge this interpretive edifice constructed by Marx and Engels and brought to its logical conclusion, at least for German handicraft, by scholars such as Volkov and Winkler. The first was the growing realization among researchers that the empirical evidence could no longer support the supposition of an inevitable, economic decline of craftsmen and shopkeepers, whether one assumed their clearly visible material destruction in the face of capitalist competition or their covert disappearance in a process of impoverishment and financial dependency hidden behind a veil of romantic social and political ideology.¹⁹ The second pertained to political mobilization and independence. Here scholarly investigations, especially in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, have presented a more optimistic and active role for the lower middle class in governmental affairs. Rejecting the notion of the lower middle class’ submissiveness to and manipulation by social, economic and bureaucratic elites, the authors representing this perspective claimed a much more equal balance and dialectic between those who would rule and those who refused to be ruled.²⁰ The third trend, inspired in part by the so-called cultural turn in history,²¹ interpreted handicraft’s and petit-bourgeois’ efforts at establishing an autonomous social and cultural identity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries more as an enabler for future adaptation to rapidly evolving material and political circumstances, than as some type of outmoded pabulum for preserving an unworkable past.²²

These three separate, but intertwined developments led numerous scholars to consider the construction of a new paradigm for understanding and analyzing the role of the lower middle class in the course of modern European history. Among the first to step in this direction was Arno J. Mayer, himself a historian with decided Marxist inclinations. Mayer epitomized the transition between an old and a new model of interpretation. From the old world he accepted the subordinate role of the lower middle class in the political arena. Denying it the ability to transform itself from a class in itself to one acting for itself, he asserted that politics had never been carried on for the benefit of the lower middle class, since it had never been able to mobilize and organize for independent action on its own behalf. Instead it remained a political auxiliary of superordinate elites. Nonetheless, Mayer contended, now hinting at a new framework of explanation, there were times of intense social and political tremors when the lower middle class, despite the fragility of its social and economic coherence, started to translate its remarkably stable belief system into significant elements of autonomous class consciousness. Mayer concluded,

Perhaps the time has come to stop thinking about the petite bourgeoisie primarily or even exclusively in terms of other classes. The lower middle class has been and continues to be of sufficient historical and political moment to warrant study in its own right: its economic roots, its inner structure and life, its place and role in society at large, its political behavior. Instead of ignoring, disparaging, or dismissing the world of the petite bourgeoisie as transient, insipid, and counterfeit, intellectuals should examine and understand that enigmatic universe for what it has been, for what it is, and for what it is constantly becoming. For, like the laboring class, the lower middle class generates and keeps generating a separate culture, ethos, life-style, and world view.²³

Mayer’s suggestion was rewarded with a veritable flood of intellectual attention showered on the lower middle class starting in the 1980s and continuing almost to the present day, a deluge that led one scholar to write that the petite bourgeoisie is currently enjoying a boom.²⁴ Suddenly artisans, shopkeepers and other small businesspersons were transformed from passive participants to respected players in the historical drama unfolding in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Economically, notions of adaptability and flexibility replaced concepts of backwardness and extinction.²⁵ Hans-Ulrich Wehler, referring to German handicraft in the Second Empire, pointed to an extremely flexible economic adjustment by artisan masters to changing productive and market conditions, consisting of the use of the most modern electric motors, a rationalization of business processes and entrepreneurial movement beyond the nostalgic defense of anachronistic positions.²⁶ Politically, images of deference and fear yielded to pictures of confidence and boldness. In the words of Peter Fritzsche, middle-class politics in both Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany was more purposive and rational and less fraught with anxiety than the image of ‘premodern’ protest suggests.²⁷ And socially and culturally, as Frederick McKitrick has noted, it was collaborative and collegial self-representations of handicraft as a Stand (status group), long considered by historians to be a conservative and even reactionary ideological impediment to its successful modernization in light of the reality of capitalistic class conflict and class exploitation, that accounted for its social cohesion and economic transformation in the tumult of the Weimar Republic and the cauldron of the Third Reich, as well as its subsequent integration into the modern corporate and democratic structures of the postwar Federal Republic.²⁸

Rudy Koshar, among the most vigorous advocates of such a restructured paradigm, cogently summarized the analytical consequences for comprehending the lower middle class in this new interpretive light. Arguing that these social groups are now associated by some scholars with durability, persistence, and even political innovation, he declared that prior images of economic despair and political authoritarianism, which used to dominate this field of study, must now give way to other just as legitimate perspectives. It was time to recognize that the lower middle classes had a far greater impact on the course of European history than was previously thought.²⁹

Indeed, nowhere do Koshar’s strictures strike a greater resonance, or the need to establish a revamped explanatory paradigm for the lower middle class in the modern era appear more cogent, than with respect to handicraft in modern Germany. Craftsmen such as Ehrenobermeister Schumacher and his colleagues in the butcher’s trade have clearly played a more visible, intriguing and, it might be argued, confounding role in the unfolding of Germany’s fate between the revolutions of 1848 and the National Socialist assumption of power in 1933 than was previously thought or accepted in academic circles. Unfortunately, their actions have constituted a moving target, one that historians and social scientists have only rarely been able to hit with any degree of theoretical, conceptual or analytical accuracy and consistency.

The import and impact of broadening our interpretive and analytical horizons in confronting the phenomenon of handicraft in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany can best be illustrated by recognizing that artisan masters, journeymen and apprentices, as well as the guilds and other corporate organizations that represented them, stood at the crossroads of several major developmental trends on the nation’s path toward modernity, however that term might ultimately be defined.³⁰ Economically speaking, the study of artisans can throw much needed light on several continuing historical controversies. One such discussion pertains to the German transition from a precapitalist to a capitalist mode of production and distribution and the relationship of that transition to developments in other industrialized Western European countries. Clive Behagg, in his study of small producers in Birmingham, England, between 1800 and 1850, cogently argued that the artisan small master could and should not be equated to the petit-bourgeois businessman. The two belonged to sharply different and contradictory social and cultural worlds. As close as the small businessman may have been to the craftsman in terms of objective economic criteria, his social identity explicitly rejected those values of labor defining the craftsman. In fact, the petit-bourgeois producer acted as an important ideological weapon in local capitalism’s successful efforts to destroy noncapitalist, artisanal forms of manufacture.³¹ In Birmingham, and by implication throughout England, economic modernization appeared to reign victorious. By contrast, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt observed that in France prior to the First World War the march forward of capitalism came to a dramatic halt before numerous, small retail firms that continued to adhere to precapitalist business practices and processes of capital procurement and investment, apparently without serious ill-effects on their material well-being.³² Werner Conze assumed a third, almost hybrid position with reference to German artisans by contending that craftsmen primarily adapted to capitalism through a strategy of continuous transmutation from workshops into small and medium-sized business enterprises, with some maintaining a handicraft consciousness and others leaving it behind.³³

In point of fact, the answers that scholars provide to the questions of the extent and dominance of capitalist economic forms on a craft workshop and sectorial level are often closely linked to the posture that they assume toward the nature of industrial development as a whole, toward the problems of economic backwardness and partial development and their impact on modernization. Haupt, for example, contended that at any given point in time different modes of production existed in French, German or British society, with one in particular exercising a powerful but not exclusive influence.³⁴ In his research on the petite bourgeoisie in France, he concluded that the industrial landscape was thus dominated by very small and family businesses, and the country remained an Eldorado for small employers before 1914. Rather than viewing this situation as an expression of economic backwardness, he saw it as a specific French road to industrial capitalism, a road where small firms producing and exporting high-quality goods on a craft basis could survive for a long time. In his opinion such small and medium-sized craft and trade businesses, though often subject to the interests of merchant and industrial capitalists, had in their own way and in their own right a dynamic effect on French economic growth at least until 1914 and probably beyond—a conjecture that by all accounts may have been equally relevant, though under different conditions and with different consequences, to Germany during this same period.³⁵ In fact, the apparent persistence of precapitalist, corporatist economic structures in the German business world has led some researchers to contend that, in contrast to pluralist, essentially Anglo-Saxon standards, Germany’s organized species of capitalism is a more relevant model for the development of industrializing societies than was previously supposed.³⁶ Whereas the attention of most historical research was previously almost exclusively focused on the explosiveness and scale of industrial development in the German and other European economies, many authors have now acknowledged that most economic sectors expanded on the basis of small-scale production and that industrialization’s impact on handicraft was neither so rapid nor catastrophic as once thought.³⁷ As McKitrick concluded in his article on German artisans’ unexpected path to modernization, in other words, the artisanal sector in Germany has emerged from the crisis of industrialization […] economically stronger and more stable as well as politically more integrated and self-confident.³⁸

A second crossroad occupied by handicraft on the path to German modernization, and one that is logically linked to its economic counterpart, was social in character. It was the transition from an estate (ständisch) to a class society that ostensibly resulted from capitalist industrial development. In the debate over the German Sonderweg and the role of the bourgeoisie in German civil society in the Second Reich, David Blackbourn had little doubt that "inherited status or Stand began to give way to wealth and merit as criteria of social worth […]."³⁹ He rejected outright any thesis about the feudalization of the bourgeoisie or the role of precapitalist values among the lower middle classes in determining patterns of social stratification and distinction. For him Germany was, at least by the turn of the nineteenth century, essentially a class-dominated and class-riven nation, predominately divided between a capitalist bourgeoisie and a wage-earning working class.⁴⁰ Those social groupings that did not neatly fit this model, such as "that construct called the Mittelstand, paled before a real petite bourgeoisie with its ambiguous material ties and social relations both upwards and downwards. In phraseology reminiscent of Friedrich Engels from almost one-hundred-and-fifty years before, Blackbourn concluded that class divisions ran through the petite bourgeoisie and that one might look here in this dichotomy for the roots of that often-cited but seldom investigated self-hate of the class."⁴¹

Other historians, especially those focusing on handicraft and the Mittelstand, have not been so eager to share Blackbourn’s certitude about the comprehensive class nature of German social stratification. Thomas Childers, in an insightful essay on the social language of politics in the Weimar Republic, noted that for political parties from the Nazis to the left liberal German Democratic Party, it was occupational status and not class that was the defining factor for their political propaganda and mobilization and their definition of German society. He identified five occupational status groups, ranging from the Mittelstand in general through specific economic sectors, such as self-employed proprietors in handicrafts and retail trades. Childers emphasized that these were not abstract sociological terms formulated by the Reich Statistical Bureau or by the parties but terms enjoying wide public currency and conveying immediate—if not always unequivocal—social content to the public.⁴² Similarly, Werner Conze portrayed an equally strong corporative social foundation underlying the concepts of "Handwerk and Handwerker. Although the terms had essentially disappeared from the authoritative language of contemporary social and economic statistics, which had become more class-oriented in their focus, they remained in general, but especially in the consciousness of those affected, not only in use, but were placed with intensity in a program of political affirmation of the ‘productive’ or ‘old’ Mittelstand. The formerly guild-based estate honor (Standesehre) was newly programmed ideologically and in terms of social policy […].⁴³ As Lyth summarized the matter, a social order composed of estates, with its emphasis on stability and contentment with a person’s lot in life, was not only incompatible with a modern class structure, with its implication of conflict and change, but it was an incompatibility that survived right into twentieth-century Germany and the Weimar Republic, cutting across lines of conventional class conflict."⁴⁴

As in the world of economics, there is a distinct relationship between the manner in which historians interpreted the particular social attributes of handicraft and the lower middle class and their analysis of larger developmental problems, in this instance the structure and substance of social status, prestige and stratification systems in society as a whole. Jürgen Kocka’s investigations in this field form a good case in point. For Kocka, as for Blackbourn, there is little doubt that modernization in Germany entailed an identifiable movement from an estate to a class society. In contradistinction to Blackbourn, however, Kocka viewed the transition from one social formation to the other as neither seamless nor comprehensive. He emphasized that especially in Germany corporate traditions remained embodied in speech, literature, morality, symbolism, the law and numerous other institutions. Such traditions in many instances hindered and even broke the advance of emerging class structures, thereby preventing market power from being directly and ineluctably translated into status and cultural domination, right into the era of the Third Reich, where the prestige-status system continued to be deeply imprinted with pre-capitalist, corporate elements.⁴⁵

The coexistence and intermingling of estate and class structures contributed, in Kocka’s eyes, to two lines of social differentiation, two social trenches that were much less sharply drawn in France and England than in Germany. The first encompassed the boundary between handicraft and industry, between the craft master and the businessman, which Kocka claimed collapsed in England at the latest in the eighteenth century and in France during the Great Revolution of 1789. Although there were certainly differences in interests between small and large firms in the latter two nations, they lacked the corporate depth that entrenched itself in this country [Germany] in the law, associational structures and the language that exists to this day.⁴⁶ Secondly, estate-oriented status inequalities tended to heighten, sharpen and color the emerging class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Just as many Bürger did not primarily consider themselves members of any class, but rather elements of an estate or quasi-estate, so they did not distinguish the proletarianized working class as persons located in a different market position from themselves, but as individuals who stood below and outside the accepted and acceptable corporate universe (unterständische Standeslose). Such a perspective lent class differentiation in Germany a comprehensive, multidimensional life-view, so-to-speak existential dimension, without which the fundamentalist tone of German class conflict, extending far into the twentieth century, cannot be understood.⁴⁷ In effect, the phenomenon that Blackbourn, with his rejection of the relevance of pre-industrial, feudal factors in modern German historical development, attributed solely to capitalist industrialization—namely the increasing bifurcation of society into warring classes—Kocka assigned to the survival of those very same traditions, an attribution that evolved from his willingness to accept the appropriateness of corporate, social variables in any explanation of the actions and activities of both artisans and the lower middle classes in the period from German unification to the end of the Second World War.

The insights that the study of handicraft might provide about modern Germany’s economic and social development are even more germane to a third crossroad on the way to modernization, the nation’s fateful political trajectory away from liberal democracy and toward National Socialism. At first blush it appears that the previously delineated, interpretive dissensions among historians in the economic and social arenas have abated in the political realm. There is a growing consensus among scholars of various persuasions that at least since the 1890s the lower middle classes had achieved a relatively autonomous stature in Germany’s political calculus. Instead of manipulative elites, whether on the national stage or as Honoratioren in state and local settings, pulling strings and mobilizing the petit-bourgeois masses for their own conservative or undemocratic ends, there arose a popular, if not populist, ferment from below that seemed to defy any attempt at control from above. The relationship between traditional elites and the lower middle classes that had seemed so simple and straightforward during the aristocratic and patrician era of the 1860s, 1870s and even 1880s had now become problematic and unstable. Indeed, this structural instability in the relations of power bloc to petty-bourgeoisie […] was arguably a vital condition of future possibility for the emergence of a German fascism.⁴⁸

It was at this point, however, at the point of determining the manner in which this instability between the elite and the lower middle class played itself out politically in both the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, that this apparent consensus again began to fracture along familiar fault lines. Blackbourn and Eley, for example, seemed determined simply to substitute an image of political demagoguery for that of elite manipulation in analyzing the role of artisans and small retailers on the historical stage. They contended that as the economic and social divisions resulting from industrial development became more apparent, so too did the hollow character of the universal language of class harmony put forward by the bourgeoisie. Such verbal assertions were no longer capable of integrating the nonsocialist masses into the elites’ image of an acceptable societal community. This was especially true for an ever more distressed and demoralized petty bourgeoisie whose interests, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were dramatically diverging from those of their former bourgeois allies. Since for Blackbourn and Eley petty bourgeois demands, such as subventions, a revived guild system, special taxes, laws against ‘unfair competition,’ and changes in the tender system, inherently contradicted the purported victory of bourgeois domination in the capitalist economy and societal community, the crux of their argument in the Sonderweg debate, and thus must be considered irrational in the face of ever more irresistible material conditions generated by the spread of industrialization and commercialization, any attempt by political party leaders to respond positively to the wishes of craftsmen, small retailers and peasants could only amount ipso facto to crass, calculating demagoguery. Blackbourn stated their case most boldly when he wrote that besides the forces of Conservatism and the Agrarian League in the Wilhelmine era, "leaders of the National Liberals and of the Centre Party, even the left liberals, were often startlingly demagogic in their espousal of Mittelstandspolitik. They offered panaceas which they often knew to be bogus; indeed, had the measures they affected to support been effective, they would have undermined the basis of Germany’s advanced capitalist order."⁴⁹

Stark conclusions such as these about the partisan mediation and demagogic manipulation of lower-middle-class political demands and interests can only remind the reader of Arno J. Mayer’s previously referenced statement, following the lead of a long Marxist tradition, that the petite bourgeoisie could only be a class in itself, although in rare instances of extreme crisis it was able to approach acting as a class for itself. From Blackbourn and Eley’s perspective the petite bourgeoisie of the Wilhelmine period, apparently as confused in its purpose as it was now vigorous in its anxiety, was seen as fighting a desperate rear guard action, with unscrupulous politicians more than willing to exploit this futile effort for the sake of a few votes. Blackbourn clearly reestablished the conceptual link with Engels when he wrote that the political upthrust of peasantry and petty bourgeoisie in the 1890s resembled a re-run of 1848 under new conditions. The same awkward, inchoate small-man radicalism was there, the same verbal shot-gun scatter of resentment. Commenting on the handicraft trade legislation (Gewerbenovelle) of 1897, what he considered "the great centre-piece of pro-Mittelstand policy, Blackbourn noted that there were ultimately too many interests ranged against the small man for Mittelstandspolitik to be much more than cosmetic. What thus accounted some thirty years later for the Nazi success in dealing with these small men in the last years of the Weimar Republic, for the ultimate success of bad fascist demagogues as opposed to the self-styled good conservative demagogues, was Hitler’s greater adeptness at exercising the tools of the political trade. Those who had tried to counter one sort of demagogy with a self-serving species of their own found themselves finally outbid by a party wielding the same weapon with much greater skill […] It is difficult not to feel that this dénouement had a powerful inner logic."⁵⁰

This picture of an indecisive, backward-looking, anxiety-ridden lower middle class, capable of upsetting many an aristocratic and bourgeois apple cart but in the end completely at the mercy of the enticements of the highest and most unscrupulous demagogic bidder for the realization of its political aims, precluded any consideration of these social groups as potentially positive forces in Germany’s political modernization, forces that might have tapped into wellsprings of national development leading away from rather than toward National Socialism, though not necessarily to liberal parliamentary democracy. Carl Strikwerda, in his study of the lower middle classes in interwar Belgium, offered a political alternative well worth consideration by historians of twentieth-century Germany. Strikwerda observed that in Belgium, unlike its Teutonic neighbor, the lower middle class first turned to the Right, then rejected it when the democratic government responded with remedial measures. Although he attributed a large part of this developmental distinction to much different contingent economic circumstances between the two nations, he also noted that Belgium was as equally industrialized as Germany. Yet, its government and liberal bourgeois parties, contrary to the predictions that might be made on the basis of Blackbourn and Eley’s suppositions about the demagogic political mediation of lower-middle-class interests in advanced capitalist societies, apparently were able to accommodate themselves to the demands of artisans, small retailers and white-collar workers without directly contradicting the institutional fundaments of capitalism, whether liberal, organized or corporate in nature. As Strikwerda trenchantly commented, perhaps the governments in countries such as Germany could have similarly addressed the grievances of the lower middle class, thereby preventing a radicalization that in his eyes was due to the failure of the political system itself as much as to any other cause. Indeed, as he enticingly concluded, much of the analysis of the interwar political systems overlooked the role of the lower middle class in developing the interest-group or corporate welfare state […] In Belgium, the lower middle class […] played a key role in ensuring that neither a fascist, nor a socialist, but a corporatist welfare state, under democratic Catholic influence, would emerge.⁵¹

Strikwerda’s findings raise the intriguing possibility that the lower middle class may have been as much a factor of political modernity as a force for political reaction and that those liberal and moderate social democratic governments adjusting to this opportunity, especially in the interwar years, had a better chance of survival in the face of fascist onslaughts than those that did not.⁵² His conclusions also remind us that despite the dedicated efforts of some scholars to rectify the traditional image of handicraft and the lower middle class, the discussion of these social strata still remains entrapped in a dialectic of polar opposites. Handicraft continues to be categorized, among other things, as either traditional or modern, feudal or bourgeois, preindustrial or industrial, proletarian or capitalist. While each of these dichotomies is certainly relevant to any understanding of the history of modern German artisans, they effectively represent ideational constructs that were developed in other empirical contexts and that have been blithely imposed on the craft phenomenon. The result has been a distorted and confused interpretation of men such as Obermeister Schumacher and his guild compatriots, of their values, beliefs and motivations, of the meaning of their actions in economics, politics and the social community. It has led to a futile effort to place craftsmen in analytical boxes that do not fit, to a denial that they might have straddled many different worlds at once or, as artisan leaders themselves were fond of saying, participated in a third way into the future.⁵³

In their important critique of the so-called new orthodoxy among German historians and its notion of a German Sonderweg, Blackbourn and Eley complained about the imposition of a rigid, even teleological, model of modernization on the interpretation of events in Imperial Germany. They argued that although such a developmental paradigm had never been actually realized in fact in any Western industrial nation, including England,⁵⁴ which was supposedly its crowning achievement, it had become the standard according to which the success or failure, the particularity or peculiarity of the course of German history had come to be gauged. In reaction to this analytical straitjacket, their goal was to rescue Imperial Germany from the tyranny of hindsight and to look at what did happen in Germany history rather than at what did not.⁵⁵ Such should be the principles that guide any discussion of handicraft (and the lower middle class) either in the Second Empire or in the Weimar Republic. Artisans must be understood in their own terms in order for historians to measure accurately their role in and impact on the events that led from German unification to the Machtergreifung.⁵⁶

What is required is the development of a conceptual and theoretical framework that transcends the normal analytical dichotomies imposed on this segment of productive society, dichotomies that, starting with Marx and Engels, have heretofore forced the historian and other observers either to trivialize craftsmen as relics of the past or to lionize them as portents of the future, with few options in between. In this respect, an important goal of this book, which focuses on Hamburg craftsmen in the late Weimar Republic, is to contribute to the scholarly construction of a viable paradigm for understanding handicraft. Such an approach, it is hoped, will not only help to restore to artisans—be they masters, journeymen or apprentices—their long-lost voice and appropriate (one is tempted to say, rightful) place on the stage of German history, but also contribute to our understanding of the paths taken and not taken by the German nation at the various economic, social and political crossroads leading to National Socialism and beyond. As one social theorist, writing in another context, summarized our problematic, we must know how to label an event if we are to know how to explain it. We can only learn the nature of events as we formulate their explanations.⁵⁷

Defining Handicraft: Three Options

In 1926, as part of a larger project to study the problems plaguing the national economy, the German Reichstag appointed a working group of experts and practitioners to investigate and examine the role and function of handicraft. One of its first tasks was to address the vexatious question of definition. For nearly half a century scholars, politicians, bureaucrats and leaders of artisanal organizations had sought in vain to draw a definitive conceptual and empirical boundary between the factory and the workshop. After much research, untold interviews and due consideration of the facts, the working group concluded that it was impossible to specify in any reliable manner the meaning of the term Handwerk. The best that could be done was to follow common language usage that referred to handicraft in three different, though not necessarily reconcilable, ways: (1) as an occupation (Beruf) of relative complexity and skill requiring extensive training for its conduct, (2) as a type of business enterprise (Betriebsform) within which the occupation was practiced and (3) as an occupational status group (Berufsstand) whose members usually belonged to the occupation but need not execute their craft in an artisan’s workshop.⁵⁸

Of the three options outlined by the working group for the Reichstag, the most prevalent among historians and social scientists has always been the structural characteristics of the artisan business itself (Betriebsform). Here it became almost axiomatic that handicraft consists of a small or simple mode of production and service provision, where the master owns the tools of his/her trade and combines