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 Jefrey K. Wilson

Published on H-German (June, 2008)

Simon Constantine explores the rural labor Constantine methodically develops his argu‐ history of Germany's perhaps most conservative ment through fve chapters. In the frst, he out‐ region. Without signifcant urban development, lines the composition of the estate villages' popu‐ the two Mecklenburgs remained even more hide‐ lation, with attention to the various subsets of la‐ bound bastions of Junker dominance than eastern borers and the authority of the landowners. In the Prussia, with neither grand duchy having an second, he describes the conditions of dependen‐ elected, representative legislature. Consequently, cy that kept many resident laborers tied to the es‐ the position of rural laborers of all kinds--contract tates (payment in kind, especially housing), but at workers and sharecroppers resident on estates, as the same time made conditions in the Mecklen‐ well as local free laborers, migrant workers and burg countryside so unappealing to local youth penal labor not living on the estates--was that they increasingly decamped for the docks of hemmed in by restrictive and punitive laws. The Hamburg or the factories of Berlin. In the third, increasing market orientation of Mecklenburg Constantine details resident laborers' growing re‐ agriculture (particularly with the introduction of sistance to dependence, abuse, and the landown‐ the sugar beet) also led landowners to replace res‐ ers' increasing reliance on migrant labor. This re‐ ident labor, for which they were responsible to sistance found expression in unionization eforts provide insurance and poor relief, with migrant underway already before World War I, and then labor, which could be housed more cheaply in in the spread of labor militancy to the countryside barracks-style dormitories and paid less dearly. from the end of the war through the early 1920s. Despite their own nationalist rhetoric and claims Constantine explains the rise of rural socialism in to defend patriarchal social relations, Mecklen‐ the fourth chapter, in which he explores the burg landowners bent to the economic logic of world of workers commuting between the rural capital, in which cheaper labor--increasingly and urban worlds. Some made a four-hour daily drawn from abroad--meant larger profts. commute to Hamburg for higher wages (even af‐ ter deducting for train fare), while others migrat‐ H-Net Reviews ed 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 Meck‐ lenburg-Schwerin's largest political party). Finally, in the ffth chapter, Constantine examines the in‐ creasing 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 so‐ cialist Agricultural Workers' Union made great ef‐ forts to organize Polish migrant laborers, both during the war and afterwards, despite the SPD's embrace of German nationalism. At the local lev‐ el, German agricultural workers seemed to recog‐ nize their fate was inextricably interwoven with that of Polish migrant laborers, and they could of‐ ten cooperate together in defance of employers. Constantine works hard to reconstruct the world of Mecklenburg farmhands from limited sources. State records, memoirs of rural landown‐ ers, pastors, and teachers, guides for agricultural improvement, and a handful of laborers' accounts make up the bulk of his evidence. While Constan‐ tine 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 (al‐ though these themes do crop up sporadically throughout the text): continuity versus change be‐ tween 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 confnes of Mecklenburg's labor history, although its implications could be much broader.

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Citation: Jefrey 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: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14620

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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