Simon Constantine. Social Relations in the Estate Villages of Mecklenburg, c.1880-1924. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 163 pp. £55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7546-5503-9.
Reviewed by Jeffrey K. Wilson (Department of History, University of New Orleans)
Published on H-German (June, 2008)
The Social and Political World of Mecklenburg Farmhands
Simon Constantine explores the rural labor history of Germany's perhaps most conservative region. Without significant urban development, the two Mecklenburgs remained even more hidebound bastions of Junker dominance than eastern Prussia, with neither grand duchy having an elected, representative legislature. Consequently, the position of rural laborers of all kinds--contract workers and sharecroppers resident on estates, as well as local free laborers, migrant workers and penal labor not living on the estates--was hemmed in by restrictive and punitive laws. The increasing market orientation of Mecklenburg agriculture (particularly with the introduction of the sugar beet) also led landowners to replace resident labor, for which they were responsible to provide insurance and poor relief, with migrant labor, which could be housed more cheaply in barracks-style dormitories and paid less dearly. Despite their own nationalist rhetoric and claims to defend patriarchal social relations, Mecklenburg landowners bent to the economic logic of capital, in which cheaper labor--increasingly drawn from abroad--meant larger profits.
Constantine methodically develops his argument through five chapters. In the first, he outlines the composition of the estate villages' population, with attention to the various subsets of laborers and the authority of the landowners. In the second, he describes the conditions of dependency that kept many resident laborers tied to the estates (payment in kind, especially housing), but at the same time made conditions in the Mecklenburg countryside so unappealing to local youth that they increasingly decamped for the docks of Hamburg or the factories of Berlin. In the third, Constantine details resident laborers' growing resistance to dependence, abuse, and the landowners' increasing reliance on migrant labor. This resistance found expression in unionization efforts underway already before World War I, and then in the spread of labor militancy to the countryside from the end of the war through the early 1920s. Constantine explains the rise of rural socialism in the fourth chapter, in which he explores the world of workers commuting between the rural and urban worlds. Some made a four-hour daily commute to Hamburg for higher wages (even after deducting for train fare), while others migrated seasonally. Many, however, brought back with them new socialist ideals that made Mecklenburg one of the SPD's few rural strongholds before the war (in the 1898 Reichstag elections, the SPD picked up 38 percent of the vote, making it Mecklenburg-Schwerin's largest political party). Finally, in the fifth chapter, Constantine examines the increasing reliance on Polish laborers (from both within the Reich and abroad), culminating in forced labor during the war. Perhaps one of the more surprising claims of the book is that the socialist Agricultural Workers' Union made great efforts to organize Polish migrant laborers, both during the war and afterwards, despite the SPD's embrace of German nationalism. At the local level, German agricultural workers seemed to recognize their fate was inextricably interwoven with that of Polish migrant laborers, and they could often cooperate together in defiance of employers.
Constantine works hard to reconstruct the world of Mecklenburg farmhands from limited sources. State records, memoirs of rural landowners, pastors, and teachers, guides for agricultural improvement, and a handful of laborers' accounts make up the bulk of his evidence. While Constantine succeeds in presenting the reader with a solid portrait of working and living conditions on Mecklenburg's estates, he fails to place his picture within a larger historiography. Indeed, only three paragraphs of the introduction are given over to historiography, none of which seek to link this study to the "big questions" of German history (although these themes do crop up sporadically throughout the text): continuity versus change between the Kaiserreich and Weimar; aristocratic landowners' hold on economic, social, cultural, and political power; the construction of national identity vis-à-vis others. Instead, Constantine has conceived of the work within the fairly narrow confines of Mecklenburg's labor history, although its implications could be much broader.
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Citation:
Jeffrey K. Wilson. Review of Constantine, Simon, Social Relations in the Estate Villages of Mecklenburg, c.1880-1924.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14620
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