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Entrepreneur Biographies As Microhistories of X

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Entrepreneur Biographies As Microhistories of X The Analysis of Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the Mirror Introduction Entrepreneurship of Biographical Analysis ENTREPRENEUR BIOGRAPHIES AS MICROHISTORIES OF X Jürgen Finger In 2009/10, I spent many weeks in a former beverage market in Bielefeld, Germany.1 The warehouse — as well as I myself — was cooled down to 60° F in order to guarantee optimal conditions for the storage and preservation of the archival and material legacy of Dr. Oetker. This well-known German consumer product brand unites under its umbrella the production of various foodstuff s — this was the origin of the company, which is well known in the U.S. and Canada as a heavyweight in the frozen pizza market — as well as beer and non-alcoholic beverages; wine, sparkling wine and spir- its; an ocean carrier (the Hamburg Süd group); a renowned private bank and luxury hotels. Together with two colleagues of mine, Sven Keller and Andreas Wirsching, I had the chance to take materials of my choosing from the long rows of shelves and to have a work station in the archival warehouse, with the most interesting sources within arm’s reach. However, in the long run 60° F proved to be way too chilly for me. Aft er numerous journeys to communal, state and private archives, we were able to write a comprehensive history of Dr. Oetker in the 1 The author gratefully ac- 2 era of the two World Wars. The book tells a company’s history. It knowledges funding by also tells the story of a family. Finally, the book tells the story of two the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) men: Rudolf-August Oetker, the third-generation heir of the family with resources of the business born in 1916; and Richard Kaselowsky, his stepfather, who European Union’s Marie Curie Actions and the replaced Oetker’s biological father not only in the family but also in Federal Ministry of Educa- tion and Research, grant the role of the — albeit temporary — patriarch of the family business. no. 605728 under FP7- Kaselowsky was a circumspect and successful entrepreneur who was PEOPLE-2013-COFUND. prepared to step aside at the moment young Rudolf-August Oetker 2 Jürgen Finger, Sven Keller, was ready to assume his inheritance. Up until then, Kaselowsky ma- and Andreas Wirsching, Dr. Oetker und der Natio- neuvered the fi rm through the hyperinfl ation, the Great Depression, nalsozialismus: Geschichte and a wartime economy. He also was a Märzgefallener, a March violet eines Familienunternehmens 1933-1945 (Munich, 2013). or March windfall, who compliantly adapted to the Nazi ideology in early 1933 and soon became an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler. Finally, 3 Jürgen Finger and Sven Keller, “Erhalt als Erfolg: he became member of the Circle of Friends of the Reichsführer SS, Richard Kaselowsky an Heinrich Himmler.3 der Spitze des Familienun- ternehmens Dr. Oetker,” in Unternehmer — Fakten These two biographies, mapped out separately in two long chapters, und Fiktionen: Historisch- are central pillars to the edifi ce of our book, supporting the business biographische Studien, ed. Werner Plumpe (Munich, story, the family story and the political story. They represent two 2014), 143–67. FINGER | MICROHISTORIES 19 sequences of life, two generational dynamics: although they are linked one to another and both to the family business, each is of individual interest with its own intrinsic value. Yet, the broad and diff erentiated research on Nazi economics and German businesses during the interwar period and World War II that already existed made us question why we should write another study.4 Was it necessary to narrate the curriculum vitae of these successful entrepreneurs and emphasize their personal “assets”; to refl ect, once again, on the politicization of business, of social and private life; to again test the limits of economic rationality in a dictatorial and hawkish political system? One strategy to cope with this problem was to expand the fi ndings of the individual case to relevant economic contexts and processes and to the concerned social groups, that is, to understand the biographies as studies of lives and times. The ascent of Dr. Oetker, for example, runs parallel to the emergence of the consumer goods industry and to the implementation of new consumer practices in the late nine- teenth and early twentieth century.5 To give a second example: By constructing Richard Kaselowsky’s life course as a form of bourgeois 4 Norbert Frei and Tim self-mobilization in favor of the Nazi regime, his biography took on Schanetzky, eds., Unternehmen scholarly relevance beyond the dealings of this medium-sized family im Nationalsozialismus: Zur 6 Historisierung einer Forschungs- business in Eastern Westphalia. konjunktur (Göttingen, 2010). As with any case study, one can question its representativeness. 5 Finger, Keller and Wirsching, Dr. Oetker, 17–18. More generally speaking, one can challenge the epistemological modus through which entrepreneur biographies — as well as stud- 6 Ibid., 411–15. ies on individual fi rms — get linked to more general questions of 7 I would like to thank Sven Keller (Institute of Contempo- scholarly interest. This challenge can be described in various ways: rary History in Munich/Berlin), the problem of representativeness, the quest for generalization or the who is a veteran discussion partner of mine for problems establishment of a link between micro and macrolevels. This problem of economic and business his- inspired the present paper, which attempts to conceptualize the link tory. The second part of this paper is partially indebted to a between the individual biographical case and more general questions piece we wrote for a conference via the concept of microhistory.7 on Bavarian honorary council- ors of commerce. It covers the range of biographical topics in I will not give an account of the suspicions voiced by academic a similar yet not identical way: historians towards the genre of biography. This reluctance today is Jürgen Finger and Sven Keller, “Erfolgsgeschichten? Über das particularly widespread in the economic and business history com- Schreiben von Unternehmer- munity, where many scholars are eager to renounce naïve heroic biographien,” in Die bayerischen Kommerzienräte: Eine deutsche legends of self-made men (rarely self-made women). They favor Wirtschaft selite von 1880 bis model-based approaches and a thorough theoretical foundation for 1928, ed. Marita Krauss (Munich, 2016). their work, allowing them to cozy up to either economics or general 20 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 12 (2016) The Analysis of Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the Mirror Introduction Entrepreneurship of Biographical Analysis historiography.8 Furthermore, I will not deliver a recipe or assembly instructions for writing an entrepreneur biography with scholarly validity. Microhistory does not present a solution to the micro/ macro-link problem, because microhistorians themselves have not found a universal answer to this question in the last fi ft y years. 8 Simone Lässig, “Biography in Modern History — Rather, I want to use microhistorical concepts to generate sensitiv- Modern Historiography ity for the epistemological problems and narrative pitfalls of the in Biography,” in Biogra- phy between Structure and biographical genre, and, in a second step, to give an introduction to Agency: Central European the broad spectrum of research questions that may go way beyond Lives in International Historiography, ed. the chronological sequence of a biographical subject’s life course. Simone Lässig and Volker R. Berghahn (New York, Oxford, 2008), 1–26, 1–7 Aft er presenting a brief overview of the methodological foundations for general remarks on of microhistory, in this paper I evaluate publications on German historians’ widespread skepticism towards biog- sweets manufacturer Gebrüder Stollwerck AG as examples of micro- raphies. The almost natu- histories of globalization and of kinship in entrepreneurial families. ral certainty of Wilhelm Treue, who without much In a third step, I examine the specifi cs of entrepreneur biographies, ado associated business paying particular attention to their narrative structure, as they tend history and the biographi- cal method, seems lost to explain developments from within the black box of the entrepre- today: Wilhelm Treue, “A neur or his family. I suggest avoiding such pitfalls of the biographi- Journal for Company His- tories and Entrepreneurial cal method by linking the life of the subject to a reference value, Biography,” Business to a research question that, in the best case, provides an experi- History Review 31 (1957): 323–36. Even those who mental cardinal point outside of the object of study. In this sense, prefer not to refl ect too biographies — as well as case studies on companies — can be un- deeply about the nature of scholarly biography do derstood as microhistories of X. at least advocate an align- ment of business his- tory in general and the biographical method in Microhistory, an Approximation particular as a means of What is microhistory? The pioneer of microhistory Giovanni Levi providing empirical data for economics: Thomas A. once avoided giving a clear-cut defi nition or developing a manifesto. Corley, “Historical Biogra- 9 phies of Entrepreneurs,” He claimed that microhistory was a “historiographical practice.” in The Oxford Handbook In a sort of circular reasoning, one could state that microhistori- of Entrepreneurship, ed. Marc Casson, Bernard ans know they are microhistorians if they do microhistory. In fact, Yeung and Anuradha a uniform theoretical and conceptual basis was never developed Basu (Oxford, New York, 2008), 138–60, 151–52. for microhistory. As it favored individual research, institution- For current considerations alization was limited. Researchers and projects oft en coalesced on the problem, see Uwe Spiekermann’s paper around periodicals such as the Italian Quaderni storici or the German “Why Biographies” in this Historische Anthropologie. volume. 9 Giovanni Levi, “On Micro- As a general rule, the foundations were laid in the 1970s and 1980s history,” in New Perspectives by studies on premodern and early modern European history.
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