Gravity and the Rainbow-Makers: Some Thoughts on the Trajectory of the German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This conference is the product of high-quality research on the industry during the past twenty years, much of it engendered by a fascination with I.G. Farben's combination of corporate dominance, shadiness, and technological wonder, which struck a note with many, especially Americans, bowled over by similar sorts of issues arising from Vietnam and Watergate. The papers given during it focused on aspects of the relationship between science-based industry and state power: on inter-nationalization of the chemical industry; on management of scienceintensive industry; and on industry and ethics. Future avenues for research include attention to the environmental history of the industry and to its social history.

Raymond Stokes, Department of Economic and Social History, University of Glasgow

In this closing paper, I would like to consider three questions briefly:

• why did we have this conference?
• what do we know after it?
• what is left on the research agenda for historians of the German chemical industry in the twentieth century?

Why the conference?

Potential explanations for why this conference took place here in the past few days abound, and could range from the deeply philosophical and complex to the simple and pragmatic. Having always come down somewhere towards the latter end of those two extremes, I would emphasize the simple fact that we are here just now because of the extraordinary volume of work--much of it of high-quality--on the German chemical industry which has been done in the past fifteen to twenty years, work which has fundamentally defined much of the field. Much of it has been produced by the participants in this conference.

This in turn raises another question: why the sudden and intense interest in the chemical industry? Ulrich Marsch, after all, has underscored in his contribution to this conference the relatively modest size of the German chemical industry even on the eve of World War I, when it dominated international markets. In terms of total German exports, Marsch points out, dyestuffs and beet sugar stood at roughly similar levels in 1913. Even in the more recent period, in 1972 and 1986, the West German chemical industry accounted for around one-tenth of manufacturing, although about 14 percent of exports, ₁ which certainly indicates that the industry was important, but not overwhelmingly dominant in manufacturing and export. All of us can probably point to some other indicators of the industry's surprisingly modest role in the German economy and even in technology. Just recently, for instance, I stumbled across a figure which startled me in this regard: a 1970 OECD study of Gaps in Technology estimated that even in 1964 West Germany was able to cover just 60 percent of its imports of chemical and allied technology (i.e. patents, licenses, and know-how) with exports of the same! ₂

Such figures suggest that it's not just the role of the Ruhr in German economic and business history which perhaps has been overstated (something pointed out by Gary Herrigel, ₃ among others), but also perhaps the role of the chemical industry. Maybe it's time for a decade or two of sugar-beet research?

But seriously: as I'm sure most of you would agree, the numbers do not do justice to the industry's place in German history, and I will come back to this point.

But, if this is so, the industry was important before the 1970s, too, but a few pioneering studies notwithstanding (e.g. John Beer, Lutz Haber, and Thomas Hughes) ₄ scholars did not dwell on it. So, we're still left with the question of why interest turned at that time to the history of chemicals in Germany. Again, lots of explanations are possible.

Instead of going through a number of them, I'd like to move the discussion to a different, more personal level here in order to suggest some answers to the question. I can date fairly precisely the point at which my attention turned to the industry (or more specifically to I.G. Farben) and can identify the two works which caused that to take place.

The first was a novel published in 1973 by Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, ₅ which I read shortly after it was published and from which I get part of the title for my talk this afternoon. Even if you've read the book, you may well have forgotten the general story, so I'll go over that very briefly.

The novel begins in England during the latter part of the war as "a screaming [--the noise of an incoming V 2 rocket--]comes across the sky"(p. 3). The V 2, by the way, is the source of the metaphor portrayed in the title, i.e. the arc inscribed by the rocket as its artificial ascent is exhausted and natural law delivers the payload to its target.

We then follow the main character, Massachusetts-born Tyrone Slothrop, through his checkered past and into the Zone, post-war Germany, where normal power relationships are temporarily suspended, and marauding teams of technical investigators, strange doctors, military men on the make, and just plain chancers make up an improbably large proportion of the population.

You're probably wondering at this point where the chemical industry has gone. But it, and in particular I.G. Farben, are central to the plot. Slothrop, it turns out, has been the victim, when he was a baby during the 1920s, of medical experiments using a new drug, Imopolex G, developed by a Swiss firm which fronted for I.G. Farben. In the Zone, the company not only plays a role in trying to manipulate Slothrop; it also forms a major alternative among the systems vying to fill the power void in post-war Germany. This is prefigured in Pychon's view in a conversation held during the late 1920s between a representative of I.G. Farben called Wimpe and a Soviet, Tchitcherine:

[Wimpe:] "...we salesmen believe in real pain, real deliverance--we are knights in the service of that Ideal. It must be real, for the purposes of our market. Otherwise my employer--and our little chemical cartel is the model for the very structure of nations--becomes lost in illusion and dream, and one day vanishes into chaos. Your own employer as well."

[Tchitcherine replies:] "My `employer' is the Soviet state."

"Yes?" Wimpe did say "is the model," not "will be." (p. 349)

As you may have guessed by now, Gravity's Rainbow, like Pynchon's other novels, is a book about paranoia. It's certainly no surprise when a book about World War II and the immediate post-war period has paranoia as its main theme that I.G. Farben is one of the main characters. The I.G., with its technical wizardry and complex web of international business relationships, lurks behind the scenes throughout the book. And it is clear that this fictional portrayal of the firm and its dealings has a certain accuracy, as the papers presented by Mira Wilkins and Catherine Steen attest.

There is no evidence that I know of that Joseph Borkin read Pynchon's novel (more probably Pynchon read some of Borkin's earlier work), but I believe he would have agreed with the general portrayal. His 1978 book, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, ₆ was the second influence on me as I cast about in early graduate school first for an MA thesis topic, and then for something to develop into a Ph.D. dissertation. You are all no doubt more familiar with the general contours of Borkin's book than with Pynchon's. The former Nuremberg prosecutor used, for the most part, documents from the 1948 Nuremberg Trials of the I.G. Farben executives to construct a case against the firm, its antecedents, and its descendants. He therefore shares a source used by many historians of the firm, as Jonathan Wiesen points out, although Borkin used them less as an historian than as a lawyer. For Borkin, the I.G. was, like the National Socialists, always bent on world domination, something he intimates German chemical industrialists in the I.G. successor firms achieved in the post-war period.

Probably I should never have admitted to either of these two works influencing my own. But now that the cat is out of the bag, I'll have to continue. What is it that they offered me, or offer us? What common themes and approaches do they sketch out? Well, I need first to get the (perhaps fairly obvious) nasty crack out of the way. Both of these books are, to a greater or lesser degree, works of fiction. Pynchon's is frankly so; those of us who have examined the primary sources would probably agree that Borkin's book is transparently so.

Yet, not only Borkin's, but also Pynchon's book has elements of non-fiction, evoking reality. I have now read no end of books on the occupation of Germany, and I think that Pynchon better than anyone else captures the sense of chaos engendered by true confusion on the one hand, and on the other hand by the fanatical clarity of a number of different actors, some corrupted by vice, but all working at cross-purposes. He also gets a lot of facts right. Borkin, for his part, gets a number of facts right, although he also leaves out some crucial information, and, relentless and blindered though he may be, takes us behind the scenes to uncover the secrecy and amorality of some aspects of life at the I.G.

Clearly, I can't speak for everyone here, but for me one of the sources of fascination of the history of the I.G. is this mixture of the known and the unknown, of truth and fiction, of fact and myth. It's there most obviously in the shadiness and conspiratorial nature of the firm's international business activities and its relationship with the Nazi regime. Just as importantly, though, it's there in the fascination engendered by the firm's--and indeed the German chemical industry's--ability to work wonders. The rainbow makers--to use Tony Travis's term-- ₇ in a way worked miracles from the beginnings of the modern organic chemical industry in the 1860s and 1870s. Their ability, having mastered the rainbow, to defy natural law by turning toxious waste into worthwhile goods like rubber and oil is, in a way, dumbfounding, and it has had a mesmerizing effect on generations of policy-makers and historians.

I would submit that it has been no accident that the German chemical industry has been studied as closely as it has been ever since the late 1970s. The combination of corporate dominance (perhaps corporate "rogue-elephant-ism"?), shadiness, and technological wonder struck a note with many of us, especially Americans, bowled over by similar sorts of issues arising from Vietnam and Watergate. The oil crises of the late 1970s sent some of us--myself and Tony Stranges included--scurrying to study the most successful synthetic fuels programme the world has known. The Zone arising in post-vietnam, post-Watergate, post-cheap oil America provided an inspiration to look for historical antecedents. Declining American competitiveness prompted attention to the successful competition, including the major successors to I.G. Farben.

I would be going a little too far in my emphasis on the paranoid view of German history ₈ to claim that we're here this week because of Watergate. But I'm here in part because of the fascination this industry--and that particular company--can exercise over a whole range of people, not just historians, but the readers of Pynchon, Borkin, and even Stephen Shagan's The Formula. The numbers showing the relatively modest role of the chemical industry in the German economy do not do justice to historical reality. The chemical industry in Germany has an important history, and forms a central part of the history of modern Germany, of the history of technology, and of the modern industrial world, as many of you have pointed out in the past couple of days.

We have been aided in our task by the thirty-year rule, which places more and more government information in our grasp every year (something especially useful for a company as closely studied by various governmental bodies as the I.G.), and by the remarkable openness and enthusiasm with which the archivists of many of the successors to the I.G. have co-operated with many of us.

What do we now know?

Where has the fascination with the chemical industry got us?

The conference ranged widely, as does work in this field. But there is in the historiography of the German chemical industry a danger that communication among those who write (or, as in the case of our colleagues from management studies and other fields, use) the history of the industry and its most prominent firm will break down along disciplinary and other fault lines. Nonetheless, there are clearly themes which interest at least sub-groups of us, and I'd like to try to identify briefly the "conversations" I've heard going on during the past few days.

One of the most prominent discussions was about science-based industry and state power, both military and economic. This was a sub-text in virtually all of the papers we heard, although many also dealt with the issue explicitly. Ulrich Marsch and Jeffrey Johnson, for instance, talked about the pronounced role of the chemical industry in military-industrial complex, something which does not get emphasized enough most of the time. There was also a group of papers--by Marsch, Steen, Wilkins, and Akira Kudo--on the recognition of this strong relationship in Germany between the chemical industry and state power and economic well-being by contemporary observers in the early part of this century from Britain, the United States, and Japan.

One thing I found curious, however, was the contention--first broached by Peter Hayes in his opening lecture and underscored by other speakers--that the German chemical industry, and especially the I.G., had reached a dead end in terms of innovation by the 1920s, and that vigorous innovation in the industry passed from the Germans to the Americans and the British. I would agree that other countries began to innovate in certain areas, but in general I think this line of argumentation is weak, for two reasons. First of all, there were clearly many areas of world-class, pioneering innovation in the German industry during the 1930s and even 1940s, including, for instance, development of color films, improvements in synthetic rubber and synthetic fuels technology with relevance to the post-war rubber and petroleum industries, and plastics and synthetic fibers development. Second, and related to this, I don't think it is possible to understand the rapid return to competitiveness of the successor firms to the I.G. after 1945 without recognizing how technologically sophisticated these firms continued to be even after the disastrous Nazi years. ₉ In other words, there may have been a relative decline in the absolute dominance of the cutting edge of the organic chemical industry by the German chemical industry because of the development of sophisticated chemical producers in other countries, but the Germans continued into the post-1945 period to be a major player in international technological markets.

The second "discussion" I'd like to emphasize is related to the first, and that centers around the process of "internationalization" of the chemical industry in the course of the twentieth century. Kudo, Marsch, Steen, and Margit Szoellosi-Janze all stressed the role of World War I in this regard, something underscored by David Hounshell in his commentary. The Great War, by exposing painfully the utter reliance of chemical producers around the world on the Germans, changed the competitive structure of the industry fundamentally. International political tensions also had an impact on management structures and practices, and Mira Wilkins suggests the importance of cloaking in this regard in her paper. Rainer Karlsch convincingly described the impact of the East German chemical industry's cut-off from international technological trends and markets on the industry's competitiveness, while Ashish Arora dealt with the counter-trend in the West towards increasing flow of technology throughout the western world. Arora underscores in particular the impact of Scientific Engineering Firms (SEF's) such as Scientific Design, UOP, and Kellogg on technology transfer from the United States to Europe, which permitted the Germans, for instance, to switch effectively from batch to high-volume, flow production of organic chemicals.

The third major area touched on by a series of papers we have heard in this conference has to do with the management problems peculiar to the high-technology sector. Arora and Gambardella have dealt with this issue most extensively. Their contention that arguments about path dependency or convergence of international industry depending upon whether one looks at the firm or the industry level strikes me as intriguing and worthy of further examination. Jeffrey Johnson's emphasis on the role of academic research as crucial to the competitiveness of science-based industry is also worthy of additional scrutiny, especially with regard to the relationships between industrialists and academic scientists. Dietrich Stoltzenberg's paper dwelt on this topic at the personal level in the relations between a businessman and an academic scientist.

The final area of discussion in a number of the papers revolved around issues related to industry and ethics, especially with regard to the Jewish question in Nazi Germany. Peter Hayes's work in general deals with this issue, as did his opening lecture. The talk by Löhnert and Gill dealt with the experiences in this regard at the local, factory level, while Jonathan Wiesen's paper deals more generally with the processing of this experience in the post-war period.

What is left to be done?

Now that so much has been done on these and other topics, what is left to do?

I'm sure that all of us have thought of other projects of various sorts and each has his or her own agenda in this regard. Peter Hayes in his opening remarks noted that he would like to see two things. First, he would like to see a deepening of ongoing trends: towards stretching the chronological coverage of the historiography of the chemical industry on either side of the NS period; towards more interest in the technical history of the industry; and towards more emphasis on individuals. Second, he also mentioned the need to explore financial aspects of the industry's history more extensively and to work on the histories of chemical firms other than I.G. Farben. I would agree with him in many ways, but I would like to suggest two additional areas which strike me as especially promising avenues of future research.

The first would be to look at environmental aspects of chemical industry and technology. Certainly Germany is (perhaps unfortunately) rich in this regard, for at least three reasons. First, the industry in Germany was quite advanced compared to other countries before sufficient awareness had dawned about the need to introduce safeguards. Second, the demands of war tended to lead to further neglect of environmental constraints on industrial development. Finally, political, economic, and ideological reality in East Germany led to more of the same. There is one work that I know of on the history of a munitions factory in the NS period, ₁₀ and there is work being done on the East German case, but more of this sort of study needs to be done.

My second major suggestion for expanding the field has to do with the social history of the chemical industry. It strikes me that the chemical industry, like the automobile industry, touches on a whole range of social problems and trends and that we historians of the chemical industry should follow the lead of those studying the automobile industry in dealing with chemicals in all their richness. ₁₁ Here I mention only two possible avenues of inquiry.

The non-business activities of businessmen would be one of those. Most biographies of businessmen dwell primarily on their business activities. Volker Berghahn's biography of Otto A. Friedrich is a major exception in this regard, but he dwells on Friedrich's political activities without looking at his business activities in any detail! My hypothesis is that businessmen saw some sort of connection between the various public activities they undertook during their lives, including business, politics, and social activities. The biographer of the chemical industrialist should therefore perhaps try to get at this unity. One approach, perhaps, is suggested by Jonathan Wiesen in his paper, which concentrates on the politics of memory in the chemical industry and therefore touches on business, political, and social motivations of businessmen.

My second suggestion would be to explore the relationship between the chemical industry on the one hand and new materials and the consumer society on the other. Mass production of plastics after World War II has literally transformed the physical world in which we, as opposed to earlier generations, live. Expanding our treatment of the industry by looking at it in relation to the consumer society would yield a richer picture of it, which would also allow us to contribute to debates in social and cultural history as well economic and business history and history of technology.

I'd just like to point out that pursuit of these themes may well lead to a different relationship between the chemical industry and its archivists on the one hand and the industry's historians on the other. Focusing on competitiveness, internationalisation, science-based industry, and so on can lead to some conflicts between scholars and industry, depending on how those topics are pursued, but direct conflict can often be avoided, and in fact the industry might enthusiastically support such research. And, as most of us can attest, it generally has. Environmental history and social history of the chemical industry may well be met with far less enthusiasm. Environmental history is likely to cause extreme embarrassment to the industry, the social history of the industry may seem of less relevance to the interests of the firm than economic and technological history. Both will require imaginative development of new source materials, either because company archives are unwilling to provide them, or because they are unable to do so.

Concluding remarks

I very much appreciate the opportunity to present my "take" on the events of the last three days and to make some comments about my view of the state of the field. Again, thanks to the organisers and participants, and to Professors Gerald Feldman and John Lesch in particular, who have been such gracious and generous hosts.

Notes

Note 1: Christopher Allen, "Political Consequence of Change: The Chemical Industry," in Peter Katzenstein, ed., Industry and Politics in West Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 161. Back.

Note 2: OECD, Gaps in Technology: Comparisons between Member Countries (Paris: OECD, 1970), pp. 201, 203. Back.

Note 3: Gary Herrigel, Industrial Constructions (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Back.

Note 4: See John Beer, The Emergence of the German Dye Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959); Lutz Haber, The Chemical Industry during the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958); Haber, The Chemical Industry 1900-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Haber, The Poisonous Cloud (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Thomas Parke Hughes, "Technological Momentum in History," Past and Present 44 (1969): 106-132. Back.

Note 5: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973). Back.

Note 6: Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben (New York: Free Press, 1978). Back.

Note 7: Anthony Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The origins of the synthetic dyestuffs industry in western Europe (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1993). Back.

Note 8: The allusion here, of course, is to Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Back.

Note 9: See my arguments in Opting for Oil: The Political Economy of Technological Change in the West German Chemical Industry, 1945-1961 (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Back.

Note 10: Wolfram König and Ulrich Schneider, Sprengstoff aus Hirschhagen. Vergangenheit und Gegenwart einer Munitionsfabrik (Kassel: Verlag Gesamthochschulbibliothek Kassel, 1985). Back.

Note 11: On the history of the automobile industry as cultural history of technology and business, see for instance Rudi Volti, "A Century of Automobility," Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 663-685; and Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, "Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States," in ibid., pp. 763-795. Back.