Optimizing the German Workforce

The complex relationship between private business, labour movements and state administration in Germany across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is one of the classical issues of social history, which has led not only to the production of much historiographical material but also to a good deal of methodological controversy. In this book, David Meskill returns to this crucial aspect of German history, from the vantage point of the formation of a coherent concept of human resources. He retraces the history of a German ‘Skills Machine’ from the early days of the Kaiserreich to the economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) of the 1960s. The changes in social stratification after the first German unification are Meskill's starting point. With the decline of traditional artisanry, new ways of forming a skilled pool of labour for increasingly specialized industries became more important to the economy. But instead of making every attempt to stabilize a mobile workforce—the classic aim of paternalism—this became a question of ‘managing the flows’, and therefore of turning skill-building partly into a matter of public policy. This concept, which Meskill labels Totalerfassung, represents the strongest element of continuity until the early 1960s.

Economic growth · Economic history · Economic miracle · Economics · Economy · German · Historiography · Market economy · Miracle · Paternalism · Political science · Politics · Unification · Workforce · Economic and Business Studies · European history and politics · European Political History Analysis · History · Law

• “Reality Made Calibratable”

  Open Access•Agnes Bauer•NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte…•2025

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