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Article Excerpt
0. Introduction
Four days after Hitler was made Reichskanzler, he outlined his agenda in front of military commanders: the first objective was to gain total power by abolishing democracy and "eradicating Marxism root and branch." (1) In doing so the new regime proved to be a master in political staging. Implementing an old demand of the labour movement, the government declared the first of May a holiday. Union-leaders were pleased and encouraged their members to participate in the processions during the "National Labour Day." The following day, ten o'clock a.m., SA and SS stormed the houses of the Free Unions. Soon there were no trade unions and no political parties except for the National Socialist German Worker Party (NSDAP) and the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront). The coup against the unions had been launched by Robert Ley, organizational director of the NSDAP and later also chief of the Arbeitsfront, including its organization for the leisure time, "Strength through Joy" ("Kraft durch Freude"). (2)
At the first anniversary of the coup, two luxury liners left Hamburg and Bremerhaven for the Isle of Wight. One of them had Robert Ley on board, celebrating the beginning of a "new era" of tourism: "German workers" at the Seven Seas. And again, two years later Ley held a ceremony which was to mark a "new era." On May 2nd 1936, amidst a crowd of workers and men in uniform, he laid a foundation stone at Prora Bay on the Island of Rugen. It was the start of a gigantic construction: "the most colossal seaside resort of the world." Millions of Germans were to recuperate here at the Baltic Sea and so to demonstrate the superiority of the "Socialism of Deed."
The "seaside resort of the 20,000" never went into operation. Nonetheless, the project serves as an outstanding example of the basic concepts--and ambiguities--of modernity. Linking social, political and cultural history, (3) this article (4) attempts to analyze this project in the light of a universal precondition of the consumer society: the grammar of rationalization. In linguistics a grammar is a limited set of rules which allows the production an unlimited number of sentences. The grammar of rationalization engended such inventions as different as the slaughterhouse, the computer, or mass tourism.
1. "Modern Times"
'Metropolis'--the machine-like city of the year 2000 shocked the audience. When in 1927 Fritz Lang's lavish film came to German cinemas it proved to be a financial disaster; all too hopeless was his vision of the future world as a machinelike organism. Maybe Lang was a bit ahead of his time. (5) In 1936, 'Modern Times' was released in America: the tragicomic parable about depravation through technology. Charlie Chaplin's film was a huge success. He succumbs to the rhythm of the assembly lines; the machinery runs faster and faster, culminating in an apocalypse. 'Metropolis' and 'Modern Times.' as different as they were, dealt with the same topic, a topic that was the subject of much controversy on both sides of the Atlantic: rationalization.
This controversy was not only about new forms of factory organization. 'Rationalization' had entered consciousness as something that permeated all 'spheres' of life, as Max Weber put it. The attitudes towards this phenomenon were extremely divided. Some, such as Max and his less known brother Alfred Weber, saw rationalization as a fatal destiny: "Until the last ton of fossile fuel is burned out," capitalism and bureaucracy force humanity into an "iron cage" of dependency, ushering in the "domestication of the world." However, others, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, saw rationalization as the vehicle that would transport humankind into a happy future of full department stores and order books. There is no such thing like the "terror of the machine," Ford claimed. Also, if not with even greater vigour, Communists, like Antonio Gramcsi, praised the blessings of rationalization--the Soviet science of work dreamt of transforming the whole working class into a "social machine." Thus, in Aldous Huxkey's Brave New World, there were two gods: Marx and Ford.
Heated as it was, the global discourse on rationalization was characterized by a remarkable lack of a sense of history: the structure of this controversy was anything but new. It can be traced back at least as far as Rousseau and Voltaire. It is the debate on the costs and benefits of the "civilizing process" (N. Elias). At the dawn of modernity--especially in the second half of the 18th century--the perception of an acceleratetly changing world became common among the educated classes. This gave room for both fears and hopes. "Society" in this view was the result of a growing distance from "nature." The "natural" state of mankind, however, could be conceived as hell or as paradise--just as the discoverers reported on fierce cannibals on the one hand, and on Gardens of Eden, on the other. The course of history, correspondingly, could be seen as principally good or principally bad, as "progress" or as "degeneration." Therefore it is a fallacy to regard enlightenment and romanticism as subsequent phases (as in the common periodization of philosophy and arts); rather, they represented simultaneous, opposing attitudes towards modernity--inseparable like the two sides of a coin. (6) Since then at times a modernistic, at times an anti-modernistic zeitgeist has prevailed but both of them have always been present at the same time, often mixed in ambiguous ways.
The interwar period gave new vigour to this old and lasting controversy; 'rationalization' dominated thought with tremendous force. A typical quality of such terms, however, is their vagueness. Instead of compiling the innumerable connotations, let me distinguish four levels of meaning according to the range they cover, to the degree of abstraction:
1. A logical meaning referring to the basics, the universal principles of efficiency; this was a topic of mathematics and logic, partly of economic theory and philosophy. Though rarely speaking of a process (i.e. rationalization), the first level provided the others with criteria of an ideal state of a system (i.e. rationality).
2. A historical-philosophical meaning referring to the interpretation of the long-term processes of "Occidental rationalization" (M. Weber), or--hardly less far-reaching--to the emergence and structure of capitalism. This was a field especially of sociologists and politico-economists (from Comte to Marx, Durkheim and Weber).
3. A technological or economical meaning referring to the most recent stage in this process, in particular in respect of the organization of factory work and human engineering. This was the field of engineers, scientists, psychologists, and economists who formed the emerging science of work (Taylor, Munsterberg, Ford, Gilbreth, Bedeaux, Mayo and others).
4. Finally, a psychological meaning, namely the use of pseudo-rational justifications for irrational behaviour as defined by Freud (in a wider sense also the substitution of supernatural explanations by scientific ones).
Admittedly, these levels were often interwoven in many ways; it is just this hidden unison which makes a discourse. But although used in so many venues, ranging from arts to arithmetic, the public debate mainly referred to the third level, meaning mass production and assembly lines. Rationalization, in this sense, was just another word for 'Taylorism' and 'Fordism.' (7) While Taylorism was associated with inhuman (and on the long run contraproductive) restraint in the factories and used mostly in a disparaging intention, the broader term of Fordism made a brilliant, though also controversial career. Its meaning was twofold: the rationalization of production and its economic and social results--be it levelling, alienation and unemployment or be it good profits, high wages and cheap products; in this positive sense, moreover, Fordism comprised a whole ideology of mass consumption and of social engineering: the "white revolution." In this connection 'rationalization' was the catch word which stirred up the public, frightened the workers, inspired the managers and divided political parties and trade unions. The underlying principle, however, did not move the masses (except for the scandals that art exhibitions of the avantgarde provoked). But it proved to be highly universal--the grammar of rationalization became visible.
This grammar is based on the idea of decontextualization and of disassembling and recombining: Isolating complex processes from their context, breaking them down into their individual components, then combining them again to form a new structure. That which is superficial can be discarded; that which is mixed can be separated. The processes, laden with significance, with meaning and morality, with traditions and arbitrariness, can be melted down to the pure scaffolding of relations--as translucent as crystal and as unsurprising as doubleentry bookkeeping. This grammar, as everybody knows, provided for the victory of capitalism, step by step conquering science, technology and economy, judicial systems and management, the arts and philosophy. (8)
Fundamental aspects of this grammer had been formulated during the 19th century. Although a blind rationality obviously is something instrinsic to nature--and as such has always been a characteristic of humankind, as well--it now reached a new quality of man-made control. (9) Analyzing the change from craft to industry, none other than Karl Marx had perceptively revealed the principles. (10) The only element still missing to make the factory a single "mechanical monster," he concluded, was the "constant transport of the work-piece." Indeed, the practical application also requires internal transport systems and a "central clock" which coordinates the machinery. What Marx did not knew was that in America this problem was already about to be solved: assambly line work was introduced in gun factories and in Cincinnati's and Chicago's slaughterhouses--it started in association with killing. Then, in 1913, this principle was implemented in Henry Ford's car works in Detroit. Coincidentally, (11) Frank and Lilian Gilbreth decomposed the human movements into single "units" (they isolated exactly seventeen), and arts and architecture decomposed space and colour. Walter Gropius--founder of the Bauhaus--praised the industrial construction: "exact forms, devoid of any randomness. (...) Lining up identical parts." Ford's assembly line was neither an application of avantgarde aesthestics nor of scholary theories; but in turn, it inspired the attempts to automate not only production, but also thinking: in 1936 the computer was born, the universal calculating machine. Simultaneously, Turing, Post and Zuse designed their computer theories (12) (and thus the basics of our computers). All three had the radical division of labour in the factories in mind when they were in search of the smallest, irreducable steps of arithmetic operations--like Taylor or Gilbreth who identified the atoms of movements, like Feininger or Mondrian who identified the atoms of forms, they identified the atoms of thought. Rationalization had exeeded a crucial boundary: proof was furnished that its principles are potentially boundless.
Thus, in this connection a further invention is associated with the year 1936: the holiday machine. The "seaside resort of the 20,000" was a project as modern as the computer. Such a task had nothing to do with the nostalgic ideology of "blood and soil." It required cold-blooded, highly universal solutions--it required a holiday from the assembly line.
2. "Strength through Joy"
The project was to be a center piece of Nazi social and tourism politics. (13) In February 1934 the travel activities of "Strength through Joy" had a dramatic start. Special trains had rolled all through Germany, with flags, flowers and cheering masses at the stations. Within a week, ten thousand "worker-vacationers" were taken from the grey cities to the clear mountain air. This cheap travel was accompanied by an unbelievable torrent of propaganda and made the leisure organization popular within no time.
Under the bombastic name Nationalsozialistische Gemeinschaft "Kraft durch Freude" (NSG "KdF") it had been founded as a department of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF) in November 1933. This marked the provisional end of the harsh internal fights on the role of the Labour Front (although they lasted until 1935). Taking over the lower staff of the Social Democrat Free Unions and treating the Christian Unions gently, the DAF at first could appear as an overdue step towards a unified trade union. Social-revolutionary circles indeed had tried to from a Nazi union out of the small "Works Cell Organization" (NSBO), while others had aimed at corporative structures, similar to Italian and Austrian Fascism, which would have vested Ley with an enormous power. But these plans were thwarted. By no means did Hitler and his allies from big business want to allow a "second revolution." Thus, the Arbeitsfront had to unite "all working Germans" in order to "guarantee the establishment of absolute economical peace." (14) Although soon the biggest and wealthiest organization in the "new state," the DAF was reduced to a mere Party's instrument and a means for controlling the workplace. On the other hand, it had to "win the hearts of the workers"--a difficult task without supporting their interests. For it had to keep out of the industrial disputes, so the Labour Front looked for another sphere of activity--and found leisure time. So Ley was not responsible for the bread but for the games.
Of course, Ley did not admit his defeat when he held his speech at the KdF's founding congress. (15) Instead, he opened the prospect of a "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft), where all Germans would have equal access to the cultural assets which still were in the hands of the bourgoisie. In his speech, Ley drew a line between the justified "envy" and the "inferiority complex" of the workers, fueled by "Marxist" ideology, on the one hand, and the ongoing debates on the perils of rationalization, on the other. Rationalization was a global, irreversible process that in future would even speed up--resulting in the loss of "joy" at work, in the "ruin" of physical and mental health, in the increase in "nervousness." Remedies were to expand leisure time and to care for its proper use. Already in 19th century England, "rational recreation" had been a favorite idea of social reformers. (16) Now, by offering the masses all sorts of once privileged leisure activities, Ley announced, KdF would become a decisive tool for overcoming class struggle as well as for improving health and performance.
Initially, holiday trips ranked low among the planned activities. (17) KdF was primarily designed to fill and control the evening and weekend leisure time. Ley worried that otherwise "boredom" would emerge, leading to "stupid, rabble-rousing, if not criminal ideas." In order to fight this dangerous "boredom"--in other words: to offer the "homeless" workers a substitute for their smashed organizations--a whole array of activities was launched: sports, theater, movies, cabaret, classical and popular music, folk-dance, evening classes etc. The intentions were ambitious. In particular, the head of KdF, Reichsleiter Horst Dressler-Andress, saw himself on a "mission" of bringing "culture" to the workers. KdF arranged highcarat concerts and exhibitions: Paul Hindemith conducted in factory halls and even works of "degenerated" painters like Emil Nolde were presented. However, the focus of the activities was...
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