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Poems in Steel: National Socialism and the Politics of Inventing from Weimar to Bonn (review)

By the 1930s, the frustration of many German engineers led them into the ken of right-wing intellectuals who glorified inventing not as a rational, economic pursuit but as the manifestation of spirit and Volk. It was but a short step from there to the Nazi Party, which mixed romanticism and engineering in a heady brew of “reactionary modernism.” This epithet, coined by Jeffrey Herf, has become a handy oxymoron, for it associates disreputable aspects of German industrial modernity with Nazism without acknowledging Nazi Germany as part of the shared history of Western modernity; that is, as a state wedded to “reactionary” modernity, the Third Reich remains unique, outside of “real” modernity. In Poems in Steel, Kees Gispen argues that this only obscures how much German engineers as well as National Socialists were up in arms against the policies of a German legal system dating back to the Empire, which was itself both repressive and modern. Werner von Siemens is commonly acknowledged as the architect of Germany’s first patent law, in 1877. Siemens rightly noted that many inventions depend not so much on lone genius as on the resources of companies. Unsurprisingly, he was partial to the interests of organized capital over independent inventors or employees. The 1877 patent law defined three grades of inventions: the free invention, owing solely to the individual; the “service invention,” dependent upon the effort of the individual employee but directed toward the concerns of the employer; and, last, the “company invention,” understood as a purely corporate effort deserving neither individual recognition nor compensation. Siemens favored the latter, and legal revisions in 1891 strengthened emphasis upon company invention still further. Here, ironically, corporate executives made common cause with socialists, who also wished to downplay the role of bourgeois individualism. The head of Bayer, Carl Duisberg, remarked that “the inventor has done nothing more than routinely follow a path prescribed by the factory’s method” (p. 41). The socialist newspaper Vorwärts concurred, dismissing individual creativity as a “bourgeois conception” of history; “Progress does not depend on the genius and creative powers of individual human beings, but on industrious collaboration” (pp. 43–44). The result was an emphasis upon what economic historians like Joel Mokyr or social constructivists like Wiebe Bijker label conservative “innovation” rather than radical “invention.” It had its advantages. Legal bias accorded to “service” and “company” inventions, progressive fees, and a “first to file” rather than a “first to invent” standard for patents favored large corporations. These were most likely to T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E