This is a study of engineers and German society in the nineteenth century, of the changes in the educational system, the social hierarchy, and the occupational structure that accompanied the emergence of this new profession. In this sense my deepest concern is not the engineers as such but the general social transformation associated with the Industrial Revolution in Germany. The engineering profession turns out – perhaps not surprisingly – to be particularly useful for understanding key aspects of this larger development. I also believe that reconstructing the engineers' trajectory to 1914 creates new insight into the dynamics of Germany's unique political culture in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Throughout, therefore, I have attempted to “lift up” seemingly minor issues to a higher level of historical significance, striving to follow the advice of my great Berkeley teacher, Hans Rosenberg. I owe gratitude and intellectual debt in the first place to him.

In addition, I want to thank all those others who helped make possible this book: Gerald Feldman, who first suggested the topic to me and then as the director of my dissertation was tolerant enough to let me venture far afield; Winthrop Jordan, Konrad Jarausch, and James Albisetti, who read the entire manuscript in a late stage and made extremely valuable comments; Reinhard Bendix, Samuel Haber, Tony LaVopa, Steven Vincent, Gary Marker, Jon Knudsen, Peter Bergmann, and Larry Dickey, who at different times helped me by reading individual chapters and discussing the ideas of this study; Hans Mommsen and his seminar group, who at an early stage encouraged me and listened to what must have been rather incoherent observations; Allan Silver, Mel van Elteren, Peter Lundgreen, Lars Scholl, Wolfgang Kӧnig, Irmgard Steinisch, and the late Hans Ebert, with whom I had stimulating discussions.

In 1914, after trying for almost a century, German engineers had achieved only modest gains in their pursuit of professional standing. In fact, as a group the engineers probably were further from their goal on the eve of World War I than they had been thirty or forty years earlier. In the throes of a deep crisis, the profession was wracked by internal conflict, fragmented into numerous subspecialties and class positions, separated by wide differences in formal education, and locked in bitter combat with industrial employers, social reformers, and the incumbents of the civil-service bureaucracy. In addition, engineers suffered from a debilitating oversupply, and their various projects for legal reform, creation of new career opportunities, and restriction of access to the profession were getting nowhere. The frustrations attendant upon this state of affairs, which carried over into the Weimar Republic, go a long way toward explaining the Utopian politics and the double-edged hostility for Germany's established elites and the proletarian left that the overwhelmingly middle-class engineering profession developed.

The massive discontent of the middle classes after World War I was arguably the single most important problem of German society between 1918 and 1933. Historians continue to debate whether this disaffection and the political crisis it produced can ultimately be explained only with reference to a long history of German exceptionalism and the survival of preindustrial traditions or whether it should be accounted for primarily in terms of industrial capitalism.