German Literature, 1918–1933

This chapter charts the development of literature during the years of the Weimar Republic. Three tendencies were particularly important. (1) Literature turned towards politics with an unprecedented intensity, attempting to influence the republic’s political and social development. It became a ‘weapon’, fostering the ‘formation of a frontline’ between different political, social, and cultural camps. This included the dispute over the lost war and the revolution. (2) A broad Zeitliteratur (literature of that time) on modern life emerged—on the metropolis, the world of industrial labour, being a white-collar employee, women’s emancipation—but also on tensions between progressive and conservative forces, and between metropolis and province. (3) All three literary genres, lyric, drama, and epic, showed new approaches by productively connecting innovative and traditional creative patterns, particularly in the exemplary works of Alfred Döblin, Gottfried Benn, and Bertolt Brecht, that represented a new kind of ‘reflective modernity’.

Do White-Collar Employee Incentives Improve Firm Profitability?

ABSTRACT We use proprietary archival compensation panel data from Finnish white-collar employees (WCEs) over the period of 2002 to 2011 in order to examine the relationship between performance-based incentives for WCEs and the future profitability of the firm as well as to determine whether this association is moderated by task complexity. While many studies examine the determinants and performance effects of CEO compensation, virtually no evidence has been presented to indicate that explicit financial incentives for WCEs improve the profitability of the firm. Our empirical results show that performance-based incentives for WCEs are significantly positively related to the future return-on-assets, return-on-equity, and profit margin ratios of the firm. We also find that this effect comes from the performance-based incentives for low-level WCEs, corroborating the importance of implementing performance-based incentives also to low-task complexity jobs. JEL Classifications: M40.

Pre-1900 Industrial White Collar Employees at the Krupp Steel Casting Works: A New Occupational Category in Germany

In this article, Dr. Pierenkemper investigates a new occupational category—the industrial white collar employee—in the late-nineteenth century Krupp Steel Casting Works in Essen, Germany. In contrast to previous historians, Pierenkemper demonstrates that white collar employees were far from homogeneous: differing among themselves, they were also largely isolated from the labor market as a whole. He concludes that widespread intrafirm occupational mobility underlay this distinctive work environment, and suggests that management may have consciously encouraged such moving about to segment its work force.