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The Business Elites of Hamburg and Berlin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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In many respects, Hamburg and Berlin represent two societal models at work in Wilhelmian Germany. Hamburg and the other Hanseatic cities, Lübeck and Bremen, have traditionally been thought to represent bourgeois society as it might have been in Germany as a whole: self-assured, liberal, and antiaristocratic. Historians are generally in agreement with Richard J. Evans in his assertion that “neither the economic activity nor the social world nor finally the political beliefs and actions of the Hamburg merchants corresponded to anything that has ever been defined, however remotely, as ‘feudal.’” Berlin, on the other hand, was dominated by the imperial court and the aristocracy, which, it is said, seduced and fatally weakened not only the business elite of the capital, but in fact the most influential segment of the German bourgeoisie as a whole.
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References
This essay is a revised version of a talk given at the American Historical Association convention in December 1990. It summarizes parts of Dolores L. Augustine, “Die wilhelminische Wirtschaftselite. Sozialverhalten, soziales Selbstbewusstsein und Familie” (Ph.D. diss., Free University of Berlin, 1991). Research for this paper was supported in part by a grant from the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United States Information Agency. None of these organizations are responsible for the views expressed.
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