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The rise of modern learned professions and their representative organizations in Germany did not follow the same patterns as in the English-speaking world any more than German history paralleled that of England or the United States. Nor can one convincingly argue that professionalization in Germany took a “special path,” despite the clearly closer ties between professional groups and public authority (as elsewhere on the European continent). We might now reflect on comparisons and contrasts by way of conclusion. Having begun this book with questions about how modern professions come into being and develop, and having then surveyed the empirical realities of various professional groups and associations in Germany, we may now reflect further on the correspondence of that experience to, and divergence from, major social science conceptions of professionalization. A first question concerns the degree to which occupations became modern and professionalized in Germany. Certainly, by one measurement, the creation of large and powerful professional organizations, the process began in the German states only shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century but, owing to persistent government mistrust, effectively only in the 1860s and 1870s. The early bureaucratization of so many occupations, not only in administration and justice, but in medicine, teaching, and the clergy, was in some ways an alternative to modern, independent, professional organizations; certainly determining standards for recruitment and training were set principally by the state through its virtual monopoly over the educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The models of modern professionalization developed in the Anglo-American world, as discussed in the introduction, present many serious shortcomings when applied outside that world of experience. One of the untested assumptions underlying them is a degree of political, economic and social stability that allows actors to carry out their roles consistently and over protracted time periods. If, to take one example, the American Medical Association was to exploit the argument of the superiority of school medicine in obtaining monopoly status for American licensed physicians, it needed stable and effective governments to squelch the quacks. From 1918 to 1933, Germany lacked stable and effective governments comparable to those of America and Britain. The shifting multiparty coalitions of the Weimar Republic and the rapid change of cabinets implied a weak state constantly distracted by crises. Of course the old imperial administrative bureaucracy carried on, giving a certain continuity, but political imperatives from the parliament now had more weight, although they tended to cancel each other out over the long run. In the face of this weak state, many historians have suggested, the influence of the Verbände, of corporate lobbies, unions, associations, and dozens of other types of groups reached new levels during the Weimar era. The professional associations were not least among those clamoring to achieve their own aims, in this case what one might term the completion of the professionalization agenda. Did they? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LAW-BASED PROFESSIONS As we saw in Chapter 9, the market situation of attorneys by World War I was becoming sufficiently worrisome that some lawyers, although not the DAV, had begun to call for restrictions on admission to the profession. Having almost doubled (from 6,600 to 13,000) between 1899 and 1915, the number of attorneys in Germany remained relatively stable (under 13,000) until 1925, when it began to grow. By 1928 it had reached 15,500, and law enrollments were also rising, producing a pool of attorneys approaching 19,000 by 1935. Despite some population growth, this meant an increase from 19 attorneys per 100,000 in 1919 to 24 per 100,000 in 1928. At the same time, the field of activity for lawyers was being reduced by various measures, for example, by raising the income ceilings for those eligible to use the (lawyer-free) Gewerbe- und Kaufmanngerichte, special courts set up to settle disputes between employers and their employees. Similarly, new or reorganized courts such as the national Financial Court, Economic Court, and Administrative Court limited or excluded representation of parties by lawyers. The tendency in Weimar was away from the older principle of Anwaltszwang. The bureaucrats claimed such streamlined justice was cheaper and faster for the people; attorneys claimed it weakened the rights of the parties. One compulsory aspect of legal practice that remained from the old Reich was the fee schedules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fate and redefined role of learned professions under German fascism deserve a much fuller treatment than is possible in this broader history. Difficulties with sources remain formidable, although as this work goes to press there is hope that “openness” may also embrace some remaining German archives. The resurgence of autonomous professional groups and their development since the Nazi dictatorship will have to remain a topic for planned future publications by this author. Nevertheless, one cannot fail to indicate in a few broad strokes how the major German learned professions fared under the beginnings of fascist rule. After the Nazi “seizure of power” at the end of January 1933, the policy of “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) of major institutions in German society became a chief instrument of the consolidation of National Socialist control. The learned professions were also a victim (and to a certain degree the willing collaborators) in this process. It went forward at different paces, with varying degrees of thoroughness, but certainly by the end of the 1930s every last vestige of independence had, at least nominally, been stripped from the major professional groups, most already within the first year or two of the “national revolution.” Thus, the 1930s constitute a logical closing place for this book. The process of formation of autonomous national professional groups and the process of modern professionalization had, with the swift strokes of the German dictatorship, seemingly been thrown on the rubbish heap of history, along with so many other traditional institutions and ideas loathed by that professional manqué, Adolf Hitler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we saw in Chapter 8, the situation of such “free professions” as medicine, dentistry, chemistry, and engineering altered perceptibly with changes in the market for services, itself conditioned by such factors as demography, the rise of large-scale business, and social insurance legislation. The “freedom” of the “free professions,” originally conceived in the liberal thought patterns of the 1860s and 1870s as liberation from bureaucratic control, appeared to take on a different meaning in the face of unequal “clienteles” such as large industry or the health-insurance funds. Words and sometimes behavior mimetic of organized proletarian labor appeared among the otherwise genteel professional organizations. The usually staid journal of the German Medical Association admonished its members in 1900 with words echoing the Communist Manifesto: “Physicians of Germany, unite! Organize yourselves! ‘Si vis pacem para helium’ [If you desire peace, prepare for war] is also valid for us.” Yet, it was not class warfare or the overthrow of the system that such groups preached and sought; instead they wished to use labor union and cartel techniques to strengthen their own bargaining position so as then to enter into a stable and equal partnership with the representatives of their “clients.” In these struggles the state bureaucracy and legislature served more as tactical allies, at least incipiently, than as instigators of their own original programs of professionalization “from above.” Many of these generalizations hold true of the remaining professional groups in the period of 1900–18. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TEACHERS: THE FIRST ORGANIZED BUREAUCRATIC PROFESSION “The Prussian schoolteacher won the battle of Sadowa,” as a widely quoted phrase went in 1866; later the French government shared a similar view regarding Sedan. As the highly centralized French education system underwent reforms in the 1870s prompted by France's defeat by Prussia, new winds also began to blow in the school corridors of Germany. Perhaps the most significant immediate result of German unification for the school lay not in structural reform, however, but in the Kulturkampf that weakened the traditionally close cooperation between church and state in educational affairs. The “battle for modern civilization” (as the Prussian professor Rudolf Virchow dubbed it) was especially acute in Prussia, which constituted roughly two-thirds of the new German Reich. The various measures passed by the Reichstag and the Prussian Diet under Adalbert Falk as Kultusminister (Minister of Cults and Education) in the 1870s rallied many of the German teachers who, since Diesterweg and the 1848 Revolution, had favored secularizing schools. In this atmosphere, attempts to found vigorous professional associations of teachers appeared to make sense again after decades of overt government hostility. German schoolteachers took advantage of the new liberal spirit in the Reich to found the Deutscher Lehrerverein (German Teachers Association, or DLV) in 1872. As will be seen below, the DLV generated at first only a modest attraction for schoolteachers. First, in the spirit of the 1848 radicals who had founded the Allgemeiner Deutscher Lehrerverein, the leaders of the DLV tended to favor reforms that would secularize and democratize the school system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the preceding chapter, frequent references were made to education, certification, examinations, and other forms of credentialing that preoccupied most of the new professional organizations in the German Reich. These issues are rarely far from the central concerns of any professional organization; but they were particularly burning ones in the Wilhelminian era. Nor did they cease to be important after the turn of the century, and we shall have to return to them in subsequent chapters. But the beginning of the twentieth century did mark a certain cesura in some ways, bringing to a climax a number of separate or intertwined debates that had been swirling for decades in the hot currents of Imperial German rhetoric. This chapter focuses upon this highly charged area of professional concern and activity separately from the others discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. In treating the disparate policies and desiderata of the German professions together and topically here, I hope to show certain patterns that they shared in their strategies for changes in educational structures, examinations, and related aspects of the complex system of credentials based on expert knowledge that is the heart of modern professional self-justification. Thus, the chapter will deal with a series of topics, ranging from preprofessional education (e.g. the debate between “humanists” and “realists” about higher schools) to the admission of women to professions. Within each topic, the positions of each major professional group will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As argued in previous chapters, some German professional groups had achieved a number of innovations and changes by the turn of the twentieth century that satisfied at least part of their professionalizing programs. At the same time, none could be described as completely satisfied with the status quo. As we shall see in this chapter, the last two decades of the German Empire brought both widening conflict and some degree of resolution for professional groups. A certain measure of discontent and instability emerged from the very dynamics of the economic, social, and cultural change in these important years. To mention one dynamic, specialization came increasingly to characterize much professional activity, not only in such science and technology-based occupations as engineering, chemistry, and medicine, but in law and teaching as well. The organizational consequences of specialization could be harmless to professionalization, as when gynecologists and physical chemists wished to found their own societies and journals; but it could also lead to fragmentation of the power and force of central professional organizations. Another centrifugal force that emerged especially strongly before World War I might be called “labor unionism.” The threat of socialist revolution and, perhaps even more concretely, of successful union agitation and strikes had haunted the sleep of the German authorities and property owners increasingly in the 1890s. By the turn of the century, bourgeois or not, some German professionals were beginning the turn to the union model of occupational organization and adapt it to professional use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists and social historians have been aware of the importance of professions for some time, at least in the English-speaking world. Some of the earliest serious studies date back to the period between the world wars. Not coincidentally, academic interest in the professions followed closely on the heels of the rise to prominence and influence of such professional bodies as the American and British Medical Associations and a parallel emergence of “professionalization” of more and more occupations. For reasons intrinsic to both modern society and sociology, furthermore, professions have come to be more and more prominent objects of social-scientific study. As one observer recently put it: How expert knowledge is deployed in different institutional forms, how it is controlled, how it is used as a resource of power and a basis of privilege, and how in turn different institutional forms of deployment, social control as well as collective and individual advantage, are affected by other and wider social structures and processes – inquiries into these questions tell us much about the structure and the dynamics of society as a whole. That, furthermore, the subject is closely related to a – perhaps the – central theme of classical sociology, the emergence of modern society and culture, becomes clear once we identify increased rationality in the pursuit of pragmatic goals as one of the major characteristics of that process. Although Max Weber had little directly to say about professionalization or the Berufsstände organizing in Germany during his lifetime, he did point to the rationalization of life and the demystification of the world as signs of modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unification of the German Empire in 1871 not only opened a new era in European history; it created radically new conditions for the German professions as well. Under these conditions the professions were able to organize and find their own voices as never before. The contemporaneous rapid transformation of Germany into an industrialized, urbanized country with a rapidly growing population (and an even more rapidly growing cadre of professionals) brought ineluctable forces of change to bear on the professions, too, in the decades following the Reichsgründung. Quantitative changes, such as the growth of employment possibilities for professionals, were often accompanied by qualitative changes, such as heightened competition within the professions, new types of professional working conditions, and nagging concern about the status of professionals in the rapidly shifting structure of German society. It should be recalled at the outset that the German Empire created in 1871 was hardly a monolithic new nation-state, but initially an extension of the North German Confederation of 1867 to include the three South German states of Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden. It was not entirely German, because large ethnic minorities lived within its frontiers – notably French in the west, Danes in the north, and Poles in the east. It was an empire in that it had a hereditary emperor in the House of Hohenzollern. But it also remained a confederation of kings and other princes, with three ancient urban republics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There were professions in eighteenth-century Europe, as there had been for centuries. There were also learned people – savants, Gelehrten – a few of them professionally engaged in learning and science, but most of them not. Training for a profession, as the Germans and French called it, had little direct connection with advanced knowledge of a theoretical kind. Because Professionen were in fact trades, some of them skilled, education for them was readily carried out by the venerable system of apprenticeship or some other form of what today is called on-the-job training. The connection of high theoretical knowledge with practical occupations, a hallmark of modern professions, had not yet been made. There were, to be sure, a few occupations that required higher education, but they were not easily classified as economically productive. Religion, law, and medicine were the three traditional callings requiring higher education. But there are two significant points about these three ancient professions. First, their objects were not of a concrete but rather of a highly abstract nature. Second, although higher education was a prerequisite, it did not necessarily prepare the professionals for the practice of their art. Eighteenth-century England illustrates this paradox. So far ahead of the rest of Europe in commerce and empire-building, the English still maintained very varied and ad hoc methods for creating professionals. With the exception of the clergy, for which universities had been in large part created in the Middle Ages, practitioners of learned professions (e.g. law and medicine) got further training in extrauniversity institutions, such as the Inns of Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the upheavals of 1848, the Berlin doctor and reformer Rudolf Virchow wrote in his new weekly publication that “medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine writ large.” Many doctors may have disagreed, but Virchow's statement captures something of the engagement of professionals in the efforts to cure the German body politic of its long-standing illnesses. At the same time, they tried to exploit the mood of change to bring about reforms closer to their immediate interests and to found organizations to formulate their demands. It could hardly be expected that professionals as badly splintered and unhomogeneous as those of the German states could, in a bare few months, smoothly bring together unified organizations capable of presenting unanimous sets of demands to state and society, and of course they were unable to do so. But the demands of disparate groups do adumbrate, in their aggregate, some of the issues that would recur constantly in the rest of the century and beyond. For this reason alone they deserve some attention in this chapter. No matter how interesting regional and local professional organizations might be for the development of individual disciplinary professions (showing as they do tendencies toward individuation and interest-group conflict), the former are difficult to use for generalizations about the German professions as a whole. For these, only the arguments and resolutions of national organizations will serve fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is an analysis of the creation and development of modern learned professions in Germany. It includes most, but not all, occupations requiring some kind of special or higher theoretical training (as opposed to the kind of training needed for manual labor, crafts, and trades). Specifically, such professions include “old” ones as physician, lawyer, and clergyman, as well as “new” ones such as engineer, teacher, and chemist. It seeks not only to show how such training came about, but also how the recipients of that training organized themselves into modern national professional groups to attempt to influence the conditions of professional life. It also seeks to gauge the successes and failures of those attempts. The chronological boundaries of this work were chosen for two reasons. First, German learned professions were able to take on the contours of modernity only by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Like most other occupations, the traditional professions were not free. The weakening and widespread elimination of guild privileges by the first half of the nineteenth century had their counterpart in the opening of more scope for professional autonomy at the same time, but throughout most of the preceding centuries professions had been regulated from without. The conditions allowing for the creation of specifically modern learned professions will be explored in Chapter 2. Second, the opportunity of professionals themselves to associate, organize, and attempt to shape the conditions of their occupations was severely restricted, if not made impossible, by the conservative German governments prior to the mid-nineteenth century and by the National Socialist regime beginning in 1933. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]