German Workers' Autobiographies as Social Historical Sources

In the summer of 1905, Moritz Bromme, a tubercular factory worker and devoted Social Democrat, closed his autobiography by writing that he did not regard himself "as a martyr of a special kind. I know very well that 1 have hundreds of thousands of suffering comrades who have things just as bad as 1, and that there are many hundred thousands more who have an even worse and harder struggle for existence than I." Bromme was only one of several hundred German workers who left behind autobiographical materials of various kinds during the last two centuries. They are invaluable sources of information on German working class history, and are particularly useful for the study of working class consciousness (or the lack of it). Quantitative studies can reveal a great deal about the lives of workers in the past, but autobiographies are one of the very few sources which present the workers' own perceptions of their lives, and their consciousness of themselves within society. In the following pages I will discuss briefly some of the problems of using these autobiographies, examine two recent collections of workers' life histories, and finally suggest some new uses to which they might be put by social historians. Depending upon the definition of the term, "autobiographies" of German artisans, factory, and farm laborers published since about 1750 number between 150 and 300, about fifty of which are book-length memoirs. Most of these have appeared during the last seventy-five years, and many of them were written or edited by socialists, and published under the auspices of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Only a few were written by working women. Obviously most of the authors were literate and quite articulate. All of which raises the question of how representative of the working class as a whole the authors of workers' autobiographies are. Clearly writing and publishing an autobiography was something very few German workers did, and this sets the authors apart from most of their fellows. However, worker autobiographers devote much attention to their childhood, education, religious training, descriptions of work life, pay, housing,-travel, the customs and routine of everyday life. Surely these were common concerns for most working people, and we can learn much about them from the workers' memoirs. It should be emphasized that the autobiographies can best be regarded as useful additions to, rather than substitutes for, demographic and other statistical studies of working class life.