Before the educated and individualised transfuge de classe : Autobiographical narratives of social advancement in the 19th and early 20th centuries

Abstract

Research and public debate on social mobility is often based on a specific conception of social mobility. We typically think of long-distance intergenerational mobility of individuals, paradigmatically between the working class and the educated middle class. Autosociobiographies, although critical of optimistic assessments of social mobility, are based on the same paradigm. This article explores the historical diversity of understandings of social mobility, aiming to historicise our current concept. It presents a small number of typical examples drawn from a sample of 530 German-language autobiographies and life-story interviews with men and women born into the working or lower middle classes between 1830 and 1950. I analyse which concepts of social mobility these people use to narrate their social trajectories. I also ask whether they attribute social mobility more to individual effort and merit or to external factors, and how this shapes the personal identities crafted in these autobiographical accounts. This article argues that our current understanding is the result of a long-term shift: There is a trend towards individualised conceptions of social mobility. Abstract notions of achievement have replaced older morally charged concepts when it comes to explanations of social mobility. Education has only gradually come to the centre of popular ideas about social advancement.

Works of autosociobiography attract the interest of a wider readership because they seem to offer a richer picture of social mobility than the optimistic view dominating public discourse as well as the abstract notions of the social sciences (Friedman, Savage and Spoerhase, Introduction). In capitalist democracies, politicians across the political spectrum tend to treat social mobility as an answer to the problems of social inequalities. Debates on social justice often centre on questions of equality of opportunity, thereby following a meritocratic logic (e.g. Sandel, 2020).

By contrast, the authors of autosociobiography such as Didier Éribon, Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis, who can be seen as social climbers, paint an ambivalent picture of their social trajectories. They point towards the hidden costs that social climbers and their families have to pay. One of the recurring themes is the self-transformation according to the norms of the educated middle class that they had to perform. Another is the alienation from their families and from their milieu of origin. In short, autosociobiography contends that individual social mobility reproduces rather than transcends the inequalities and boundaries of class hierarchies (Friedman, Savage and Spoerhase, Introduction). Autosociobiographical works also paint a more complex picture of social inequality by pointing to the intersection of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity (Noschka, 2025).

As Sam Friedman, Mike Savage and Carlos Spoerhase (Introduction) argue, both the success of autosociobiography as a literary genre, and the resurgence of qualitative studies on social mobility, point to the urgent need to broaden our perspective on the experience of social mobility. This article aims to contribute to this endeavour from the perspective of social and cultural history. Comparing how autosociobiography narrates individual trajectories of social mobility to autobiographical writing from the 19th and early 20th centuries, it shows that in some fundamental aspects recent works of autosociobiography are based on the same paradigm of social mobility that pervades both public discourse and quantitative research in the social sciences.

This paradigm centres on the movement of individuals between income groups or between social classes defined by occupational status. Usually, this movement is understood as a linear trajectory from ‘class-of-origin’ to ‘class destination’. Education (seen as the acquisition of certificates) is considered the key for enabling social mobility. Scholars attempting to define autosociobiography as a genre point towards the protagonists’ upward social mobility by means of formal educations as a crucial feature, if not a precondition, for this type of life writing (Blome, 2020; Blome et al., 2022: 6; Spoerhase, 2022).

Historical scholarship, similar to the social sciences, has viewed social mobility largely through the lens of this paradigm (Kaelble, 2001; Maas and van Leeuwen, 2024). Quantitative research on the history of social mobility has produced important insights but needs to be supplemented by qualitative studies. Christina De Bellaigue et al. (2019: 4) argue ‘that social mobility is a historically contingent concept: how it is defined changes across time and is related to the political, economic and intellectual context’.

The currently dominant conception of social mobility needs to be historicised and relativised in several dimensions. We can scrutinise the socio-temporal space that is implied by the concept of social mobility as such. Mike Savage and Magne Flemmen (2019) question whether understanding social mobility as a linear movement between class positions – and more specifically between ‘origin’ and ‘destination’ – captures people’s conceptions of their own biographies. There has always been the urgent question – especially from the historian’s point of view – of whether the schemas of social class that we need for quantitative research actually reflect contemporary understandings of social inequalities and desirable social positions (Bertaux and Thompson, 1997: 10–11).

Christina De Bellaigue et al. (2019: 6) also stress the need to ‘de-centre the individual’ by investigation how successful upward mobility was often the result of collective efforts of families or other communities. This problem is closely linked to the gender dimension of social mobility. Defining social class primarily through occupational positions, and defining women’s class on the basis of their fathers’ or their husbands’ occupations, cannot do justice to their experience of social mobility. Women’s social mobility appears as derivative of the individual mobility of their male ‘bread-winners’ when we apply this concept to historical periods in which women had hardly any access to middle-class occupations. We can attribute women a more active part only if we acknowledge that the family or other collective entities might be considered the subject of social mobility.

If we aim to historicise our current concept of social mobility, we need to take into account its close connection to notions of merit and achievement. Usually, upward social mobility is not considered desirable per se in public discourse, but only when it can be attributed to things such as hard work or academic achievements. Interpreted in this way, social mobility can be viewed as the sign of a just society that provides equal opportunities for everyone. Historians such as Nina Verheyen (2018), Joseph F. Kett (2013) and John Carson (2006) explore the history of concepts such as merit and achievement in the context of political discourse on equality and inequalities. Analysing public and expert discourse as well as the development of assessment practices, Kett and Verheyen show how in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries these concepts have come to signify purportedly universally applicable and measurable human capabilities or performances.

Taking into account all of these dimensions, this article seeks to offer a perspective ‘from below’ on the history of conceptions of social mobility. Instead of analysing public discourse and institutional arrangements, I will focus on narratives in autobiographical accounts by men and women originating from the working class and the lower middle class. Drawing on a large number of life stories, this article aims to offer insights into how popular notions of social mobility changed from the 19th to the 20th century.

This article is based on a sample of 530 autobiographies and pre-existing narrative interviews. ¹ The sample includes the life stories of men and women from working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds who were born mostly between 1830 and 1955 (with some early cases born before 1830) in German-speaking Central Europe. The sample includes sources from 315 men and 215 women. The gender bias is due to the fact that there are very few autobiographies from female authors who were born before the late 19th century. Most of the autobiographies were written for private purposes and have not been published. The published life stories were often written by socialists, but they also include books by authors of other political convictions as well as autobiographies with no overt political message. Men and women who experienced upward social mobility are overrepresented in the sample but still a minority of the cases.

Autobiographical writing by people originating from the working class and the lower middle class varies widely in content and form. Nevertheless, scholars who studied working-class autobiographies have established certain regularities (Burnett, 1974: xii; Gagnier, 1997). In contrast to autosociobiography, working-class autobiographies from the 19th and early 20th centuries were not intended – and indeed were not recognised – as literary works. Nevertheless, these two categories share a number of characteristics that justify a comparative study. Both are based on the autobiographical pact between author and reader. Similar to autosociobiography, many pieces of popular autobiographical writing narrate an individual life as an example of the experiences of a larger social group (Maynes, 1995: 33). This is not only the case with socialist activists but also, for example, with nostalgic reminiscences of a world that no longer exists. Faced with socio-economic conditions that largely determined their individual life course, the narrators from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds often focussed on material circumstances rather than following the model of the inward-looking autobiography of the upper middle class.

David Vincent has shown that life stories can be used as a source for people’s expectations of probable and desirable life courses. Even in the narrations of those who did not experience social advancement, past aspirations are present in the form of ‘shadow careers’, that is, as disappointed expectations and unfulfilled hopes that shape people’s perspectives on their own trajectories (Vincent, 1982, 1997). Selina Todd (2021) also shows the value of this type of sources as she draws on a broad sample of narrative interviews to elucidate the ambivalent experience of social mobility in Britain since the end of the 19th century. However, she is not concerned with historicising the concept of social mobility. Instead, she follows our contemporary paradigm of social mobility, focussing mostly on education and white-collar careers.

I analysed the autobiographical accounts based on a grounded theory approach, focussing on typical conceptions and practices of social mobility along with circumstances that might have fostered or hampered such conceptions and practices. For this purpose, I encoded the material using qualitative data analysis software.

In the following sections, I will use three autobiographies to present three typical conceptions of social mobility that repeatedly appear in these sources. I chose these three forms of social mobility because they are, on the one hand, markedly different from current notions of social mobility. On the other hand, these three examples allow me to outline some aspects of long-term change in popular conceptions of social mobility.

Analysing the autobiographical accounts, I will focus on the following four dimensions:

1. What concepts of social mobility can we find in the autobiographical narratives?

2. What is the temporal structure of social mobility in the narratives?

3. Do the narrators attribute social mobility to individual effort and merit or rather to external factors?

4. How does social mobility relate to the personal identities that the narrators construct?

In the concluding section, I will compare the historical narratives of social mobility to the patterns of autosociobiography in these dimensions.

An ‘industrious’ craftsman

The idea of establishing oneself as an independent craftsman was one of the dominant visions of social advancement in the autobiographies of men who were born in the 19th century. In contrast to modern notions of social mobility, which centre on educational credentials and professional careers, these ambitious craftsmen placed an emphasis on achieving ‘independence’ through ‘industriousness and thrift’. German Liberalism in the early and mid-19th century also focussed on this idea of ‘independence’ that connected economic, social and political status. This strand of liberalism was committed to the vision of a society of equal male citizens. Men were supposed to enjoy equal political rights only if they were not subject to the power of an employer. Only those who earned their living as producers, be it as farmers or master craftsmen, or as professionals, were thought to be ‘independent’ (Gall, 1975, 2005; Hettling, 2000; Rosanvallon, 2013). To understand this connection between economic and political status, we need to consider that in this period wage labour was often done by young men and women who, as farm servants, domestic servants, apprentices or journeymen, lived in the household and under the authority of their employers. As another consequence of this idea, women’s subordination under the male head of the household also excluded them from political participation.

Between the early and the mid-19th century, legal reforms that drew on liberal economic ideas ended the exclusionary practices of the guilds and opened up opportunities for newcomers. However, in the course of the 19th century, with advancing industrialisation, this vision of a society of independent citizens became ever more unrealistic. Nevertheless, liberals maintained their position that political participation should be tied to a certain income or property. At the same time, they propagated the idea that the emerging ‘Social Question’ was to be solved not by state interventions but by ‘self-help’ (Selbsthilfe), that is, by the individual efforts of the poor. Reformist liberals established institutions such as savings banks, cooperatives and workers’ educational associations in order to foster and support individual self-help. The emergence of an independent labour movement in Germany was closely connected to the debate about whether self-help, supported by these institutions, was enough to better the conditions of the working class (Mayer, 2021).

The autobiographical sources show that the idea of rising to the status of an independent craftsman was not only a promise of liberalism serving as a legitimatory ideology of the urban middle class. It also shaped the ambitions of many men – and to a limited extent of women, too. In contrast, education was not at the centre of popular conceptions of social mobility until the early 20th century. Almost all of the autobiographers, including the cases presented in this article, attended elementary schools, even though this was often interrupted by agricultural or factory work. Compulsory schooling was enforced in most German-speaking regions during the second half of the 19th century. However, only a fraction of male adolescents were able to attend secondary schools due to considerable fees and lack of provision in rural areas (Geißler, 2023; Kaelble, 1983: 170–227). Consequently, most working-class and lower middle-class parents did not regard education as a feasible route to upward social mobility in the 19th century.

The autobiography of the master painter Christoph S., written in 1908 for his family, presents the life story of a successful artisan in the 19th century. ² Christoph S. was born in the town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Southern Germany in 1853. His father was an impoverished weaver who repeatedly suffered from periods of illness that rendered him unable to work. Christoph S. remembers that the family’s income often was not enough to save them from hunger. In retrospect, he explained his ambition for social mobility with reference to this early experience with poverty:

I went to the school of life at an early age and as I felt the burden of poverty every day, I made a firm resolution to do everything in my power to improve my lot through industriousness, eagerness to learn, and thrift, and to be able to support my poor parents one day – that was the main goal I had in mind, which I looked forward to as a boy and made proud plans for. (24)

Working-class men who were born in the 19th and early 20th centuries mostly portrayed the end of their school years (when they were 12 to 14 years old) as a decisive moment in their lives. Usually, the best they could hope for was to enter an apprenticeship. Many, however, who could not find an apprenticeship, or whose parents were not able or willing to afford an apprenticeship, had to enter agricultural labour or unskilled factory jobs. In many crafts, especially those of higher esteem, masters demanded a premium. And even if this was not the case, the parents had to forego the money their children could earn as unskilled workers. Those who were not lucky enough to enter an apprenticeship often recounted how they envied their friends and schoolmates who were allowed to enter a skilled occupation, or wrote about how they feared becoming stuck in unqualified labour for the rest of their lives.

In contrast, working-class women who were born up to the end of the 19th century narrated the end of their school years in a different way. For them there was usually no question of choosing an occupation. Often, they recounted the beginning of their working in agriculture, domestic service, or in the factory in a passive voice without any reference to possible alternatives. Only with the cohort born in the early 20th century can we find more frequent references to similar considerations to those of working-class men. These women, too, spoke about their desire to acquire some kind of skill that would save them from becoming domestic servants or unskilled workers.

Christoph S.’s parents both came from families with a tradition in the crafts which probably shaped their level of aspirations regarding their son. But they might not have been able to afford the premium for an apprenticeship in order to fulfil his desire to learn a craft. However, Christoph was lucky enough to know a pastor who offered him a meal twice a week as a measure of charity. This pastor helped him to enter a free apprenticeship at the workshop of his brother-in-law, who was a master painter. Middle-class patrons did play a considerable role in facilitating social mobility in the 19th century.

Many craftsmen’s autobiographies, and even some of those written by skilled workers, centre on anecdotes from the authors’ years as journeymen. Ambitious craftsmen tended to stress how they travelled in order to improve their skills with a variety of employers. Christoph S. also recounted how he attended the school of arts and crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule) in Stuttgart during the work-free time in winter, using his savings and profiting from a scholarship (56, 59, 66).

At the same time, these men, who aimed at establishing their own business, wrote about the need to save for a small capital sum. Some of them narrated that this also meant that they had to resist the temptations that faced them as young men earning decent wages and travelling from town to town. Christoph S. is among those who put a strong emphasis on moral integrity as a guide against these temptations:

Of course, I also got to know some colleagues who wanted to take me here and there to give me a taste of the big city air. But I was disgusted by the [illegible] and I always remembered the promise I had made to my parents to remain decent and moral. (55)

Christoph S.’s commitment to morality, industriousness and thrift also had political implications. He continued,

Once I could not help attending a Social Democratic meeting where I could hear how bad things were for the workers and how things needed to improve. The next time I did not go with them. I said [. . .] that I was very happy with my work, my pay and the way I was treated, so I could not wish for anything better for the rest of my life. (55)

Many of the men who completed an apprenticeship in the mid or late 19th century regarded this as the stepping stone into ‘independence’. Even among those who had learned crafts that were transformed in the course of industrialisation, we find the desire and ambition to establish a workshop of their own. Most of the autobiographers portrayed the step into ‘independence’ as a turning point in their lives. In these accounts, establishing oneself as an independent craftsman was closely linked to marrying. Especially in traditional crafts where journeymen continued to live in their masters’ households into the late 19th century, establishing a workshop also meant to establish a household.

Christoph S. first established his business in 1875 at the age of only 22. He dwelled both on the difficulties that he faced in the beginning, and on the assistance he received:

Then I remembered a promise made by my aunt [. . .] in Memmingen to lend me a small sum for my business in case of need. She also sent me an interest-free loan of 300 marks, which enabled me to become a member of the credit union and fulfil my most urgent obligations. Of course, I could not afford to reject any work and my pride as an artisan often revolted when people would ask me to do the very mean house-painting work that the bricklayers usually did.

Citing two proverbs, he continued:

But in times of need, the devil eats flies, and work does not disgrace you. [. . .] Industriousness, perseverance, virtue, and thrift alone lead to a good end. That is why I made slow but steady progress [. . .].

The local credit union was instrumental for S.’s success as an independent artisan. Liberals had propagated credit unions and other forms of cooperatives since the aftermath of the revolution of 1848 (Aldenhoff-Hübinger, 1986). They hoped that these institutions would support self-help among workers and craftsmen and enable them to establish or continue their small businesses in spite of the advancing industrialisation. Many craftsmen expected to start a small business after saving a modest capital. However, it was not uncommon for such ascents into the propertied lower middle class to be facilitated by small inheritances or, in this case, a loan. The sum S. received from his aunt was equivalent to several months’ wages for a craftsman.

Interestingly, S. did not fail to mention the support he received from his aunt and the credit union, but this did not challenge his identity as a self-made man. This self-image permeates the entire autobiography. It is most evident in the concluding paragraphs, in whiche S. recounted how he and his wife moved into the house they had bought and renovated:

On 14 July 1897, we moved into our own house and God’s blessing moved in with us. The wildest hopes of my youthful dreams and the castles in the air that I had built stood before my eyes. How often did I walk around my proud castle at night when everyone was asleep, gazing at it with pleasure and almost in love, enjoying the sight of it with the proud thought: this is your property that you have earned yourself through industriousness and thrift and God’s as well as your Father’s blessing. (96)

S.’s autobiography is not exceptional in its recurrent reference to ‘industriousness and thrift’ as the key to upward social mobility. This phrase appears in a stereotypical manner across a variety of contexts in autobiographies from the 19th up to the first half of the 20th century. Both of these concepts, as well as notions of decency and morality that were also linked to social mobility, referred less to singular achievements or objectifiable performance than to traits of character and personal attitudes.

On the one hand, the autobiographies presented this idea of rising to the status of an independent artisan as an individual achievement. But on the other hand, the concept of God’s blessing that was also mentioned in other sources made room for contingencies that were out of individual control.

Both of these characteristic modes of attribution are possibly linked to the specific circumstances and the temporality of this pattern of social mobility. Success as a craftsman was not linked to objectifying performance assessments nor were its demands as clearly defined as in educational trajectories and bureaucratic careers. Instead, aspiring craftsmen faced many uncertainties against which they could guard themselves only inadequately. They had to hope for the lucky circumstances that would enable them to successfully establish their own business. Most notably, they were never safe from illness or the accidents that often radically altered individuals’ and families’ lives.

The idea of becoming an independent craftsman was gendered. But there is evidence that the endeavour to rise into the lower middle class was in practice based on collective efforts. Even though most craftsmen’s autobiographies’ were very much focussed on the occupational lives of their male authors, some sources show that their spouses were more than housewives. Depending on the specific craft, women were also involved in production or in selling the products. Some craftsmen’s wives identified with the business of their husbands, talking about ‘our’ business. In other cases, women contributed to their family’s fortunes by running grocery stores. The sources convey the image that rising into the lower middle class was – at least in some of the cases – a collective project of married partners, even though the men tended to narrate their lives in an individualistic manner.

However, not only men were inspired by the idea of learning a craft and establishing an independent business as a way into the lower middle class. Some women also entertained similar aspirations. These ambitions were mostly confined to dressmaking and similar trades as most crafts were closed to them. However, there is no case where such a business stood at the centre of a family’s project of social mobility in the same way as men’s enterprises usually did.

A farm servant striving for property

Imaginations of social mobility in the rural context during the 19th and early 20th centuries centred on the acquisition of property. They present a stark contrast to our contemporary notions of social mobility because they did not involve certified skills, education and career progression. What is more, this type of social mobility was based on the collaborative efforts of married couples instead of the achievements of isolated individuals.

Population growth in the 18th and 19th centuries had intensified the stratification of rural society in Central Europe. There was a disproportionate increase in the number of landless or land-poor families who owned no more than a cottage and small plots of land for subsistence farming (Fertig et al., 2022). These families usually had to rely on casual agricultural work or proto-industrial activities such as hand-loom weaving. The children of these poor families, as well as the children of small farmers, shared a specific experience of labour that shaped their understanding of social inequalities and their aspirations. Service was a common experience for significant parts of the rural population in large parts of Western, Northern and Central Europe from the Middle Ages until the 19th century or even the first half of the 20th century. These servants lived on the farm and were subject to the authority of their employer (Whittle, 2017). During the period considered here, farm servants were usually bound by oral contracts for 1 year. The institution of service provided farmers and estates with a permanent and dependent workforce, which was particularly important for livestock farming. In this way, farmers were able to recruit additional labour according to the life cycle of their families. But service also provided a degree of security for poor families who struggled to feed their children. Their sons and daughters were guaranteed food and shelter for the duration of the contract.

Maria Dorfmann’s autobiography can serve to illustrate the perspective of farm servants and their notions of social mobility. She was born in a village in South Tyrol in 1831, then part of the Habsburg Empire. ³ She wrote her autobiography in 1916 at the request of a middle-class man whose uncle had employed her as a servant.

The weight that property relations had on people’s lives in rural societies is evident in the first paragraph of Maria Dorfmann’s autobiography:

So, in God’s name! I was born in Barbian on 28 June 1831 as a legitimate daughter. My parents are [. . .]. They were poor people. My father had nothing, but my mother had five hundred guilders. They had no house. They lived in the [so-called] Jew cottage that belonged to the Huber farmer. (17)

Maria Dorfmann introduced herself by pointing out the socio-economic status of her parents. She emphasised that she was not born out of wedlock, although this would not have been unusual for poor people who often could not marry until their mid- or late twenties, when they had saved enough money to establish a household of their own.

Maria Dorfmann’s father died when she was 4 years old, leaving her mother with four children. As a consequence, Maria had to take up work as a farm servant at the age of 8 during the summer months when elementary school was suspended. At the age of 12, she went into farm service permanently. The way in which Maria Dorfmann recounted this transition into service is typical of the life stories of many former farm servants, especially women. She did not present it as a choice, nor did she present alternative visions for herself. On the other hand, there are hardly any writers who stated that they were content to become farm servants. It was easier for men to think of alternatives, since apprenticeships in the crafts were usually seen as a much better, even if unrealistic, route.

Many farm servants hoped to leave service behind by acquiring a small piece of land. The institution of service and the property relations in rural societies shaped the specific temporality of this type of social mobility. Quantitative historical research has shown that service was a phase in the life cycle of a significant proportion of the rural population. Most servants were between 15 and 30 years old. This means that most servants could hope to leave service in their mid- or late twenties. This decisive step was seen as the norm to which most people aspired. But success was not guaranteed. There was always a significant minority of older servants (Mitterauer, 1990; Whittle, 2017). These men and women, who never had the opportunity to start a family and depended on the charity of the farmers when their ability to work diminished, provided a cautionary tale.

Leaving farm service meant establishing a household. In some regions, most former farm servants rented accommodation either from farmers or estates, with contractual obligations to work for their landlords. The chances of buying property, which offered somewhat more independence, varied from region to region (Fertig, 2022: 273–274; Mitterauer, 1986). The prospect of buying a cottage and some land for subsistence farming was attractive for farm servants, although they often had to continue doing casual agricultural work. Sources documenting the perspective of farm servants show that these men and women had a strong desire to own property that would give them some autonomy (see also Kempf, 1918: 78; Sauermann, 1979: 13). The best that servants could hope for was to become small farmers. Over the course of the 19th century, factory work increasingly became an alternative, offering higher wages and more autonomy. But the autobiographical sources did not usually refer to this in terms of social mobility.

Rising from service was clearly a joint project of couples. Men and women shared the experience of service and developed similar aspirations. It was not uncommon for spouses to have known each other at work. Servants had to find a suitable partner and then ‘wait and save’ (Weber, 1987: 196). Women faced the risk of having children out of wedlock when men refused their responsibility. This cast doubt on the women’s ‘morality’ and reduced their chances of finding a husband (Plößl, 1993: 21). They also had to pay for their children’s upbringing, which deprived them of the opportunity to save any money.

At the age of 27, Maria Dorfmann married a man who worked at a local smelting plant. She wrote of her first serious conversation with her future husband:

Then I told him that I own nothing and that I would inherit nothing but my hands to work with. – Yes, he said, I have nothing either. We just have to work and save money. And if God gives us health and helps us, then it will be fine. The most important thing is that we get along well with each other, and that I hope. My parents also had nothing but work and thrift. (50)

It took Maria Dorfmann and her husband several years to buy a house. Similar to Christoph S. and other autobiographers, Maria Dorfmann and her husband profited from financial support and inheritances within kinship networks:

Then we bought the Teiser cottage below the castle Koburg in Gufidaun. We had no money, but my mother lent me 300 guilders. She inherited a thousand guilders from her brother, otherwise she would not have had so much. The Teiser cottage cost 816 guilders and we did not have any money. There was a piece of meadow and a field, too. Then we first bought three goats, later gave them away and bought a cow. Now we really started working and saving so that we could pay our creditors the interest. But still it was nice. We had milk and lard and we were alone in the house and that was what mattered most to us. (24–5)

Similar to craftsmen, farm servants aspiring to own property perceived wage labour as a phase during which they had to accumulate capital through continuous work and thrift. This temporal pattern of social mobility, combined with the absence of formalised assessments of merit or performance, explains why they, too, put an emphasis on personal traits such as industriousness and thrift.

Even if former servants did not climb further up the social ladder than their parents, from their point of view their property and status were earned, not inherited. Their efforts to achieve intragenerational social mobility, rather than the absence of intergenerational mobility, shaped their identities and values. In narratives such as that of Maria Dorfmann, the acquisition of small property is often linked to ‘industriousness and thrift’ and thus attributed to personal effort. Competence in agricultural tasks also played an important role, both for advancement in the hierarchies of farm service and for finding a spouse. Maria Dorfmann was proud of her farming skills. Like other former farm servants, she mentioned how satisfied her employers were with her work. Alongside this emphasis on individual effort, there are frequent references to God’s will, as a way of making room for the contingencies of life.

Religion also helped to avoid interpreting setbacks as individual failures. Maria Dorfmann had to give up the house in the 1870s when her husband lost his job and they were forced to move elsewhere. They never bought another house. Her husband died in 1884. Despite her best efforts, Maria Dorfmann shared the lot of old servants. She ended up lonely, without a home of her own, and continued to work into her late seventies despite her failing health. Her resignation, couched in religious phrases, is typical:

If only I do not get to suffer much more in the other world, then I will suffer with some patience here and accept all that God sends me as He will. All for the greater glory of God! Praised be Jesus Christ. (33)

The military, the civil service and social mobility

The expansion of white-collar occupations as a result of industrialisation drastically changed the routes and conceptions of social mobility. Before secondary education and white-collar careers opened up to large sections of society, the military of the German states and the Habsburg Empire provided a path into the civil service for men without a secondary education. This type of social advancement followed a peculiar temporal pattern that contrasts both with the cases presented so far and with current notions of social mobility, which link the acquisition of consecutive educational credentials with professional careers. At the same time, this type of social mobility shows how social advancement often went hand in hand with conservative – and in this specific case, fascist – political attitudes. This contrasts with works of autosociobiography that use narratives of upward social mobility to question meritocratic ideologies and to highlight social inequalities.

Wilhelm N. ⁴ was born in 1880 as the son of a tenant farmer in North-West Germany. He attended a rural elementary school and received no vocational training because he had to work on the farm. In 1900, he volunteered for military service. N. owed his upward social mobility to the institution of Zivilversorgung ⁵ , which provided civil service employment for former non-commanding officers. The German states and the Habsburg Empire developed this institution in the course of the first half of the 19th century. These states had conscript armies but needed large numbers of long-serving non-commissioned officers. In order to motivate men to take up these poorly paid and little respected positions, the state offered them employment in the civil service. In the second half of the 19th century, most of the lower and a considerable part of mid-level civil service positions were reserved for former non-commanding officers who had completed 12 years of military service (Melichar and Mejstrik, 2010: 1311–1312; Wilson, 2023: 512–513; Wunder, 1986: 58–59).

N.’s autobiography does not mention any thoughts about his occupational future. But other cases in the sample show that the military as a route to social mobility was especially attractive to the sons of farmers who could not expect to inherit their parents’ farms, and to craftsmen who saw no future in their occupation. In effect, these men traded 12 years of their lives for the prospect of a secure position in the civil service and an old-age pension. This, combined with the widespread respect for civil servants, meant that the lower ranks of the civil service appeared as social mobility to men from working- and even lower middle-class backgrounds.

This path followed a peculiar temporal order. Most men who were born in the 19th and early 20th centuries presented the end of their school years as the point in their lives when the most consequential decisions about their occupational trajectories were made. Either they had to enter unskilled agricultural or factory work, or they had the chance to complete an apprenticeship that might enable them to rise to the position of master craftsman, or at least promised a decent job in industrial firms. In contrast, social mobility through the military came as an intervention in the normal life course of men. In most cases in the sample, these men did not think about advancing through the military before they were conscripted for their 3-year compulsory service in their early twenties. The opportunity usually only arose during their service, when their superiors offered them promotion to the rank of non-commissioned officer with the option of extended voluntary service.

Once Wilhelm N. had entered the civil service, his further life followed a new temporal pattern, that of the modern career. This logic of advancement within a formalised hierarchy of professional positions had spread from the military to civil service bureaucracies, including the railways and the postal service, and to the expanding organisational structures of private enterprises (Brown et al., 2004; Miles and Savage, 2004). In 1912, Wilhelm N. took up a position in the middle ranks of the civil service and, after further training, he joined the prison administration. Normally, such mid-level positions were only open to men with a secondary school education, which was beyond the means of most families. N.’s first promotions came during the Weimar Republic. But it was with the rise of the Nazi Party that his career took an upward turn. He had become politically active during the November Revolution and joined an extreme right-wing organisation in 1918. In 1933, he became a member of the NSDAP, which probably helped his career. In the following years he headed two prisons.

In his autobiography, written for his family, Wilhelm N. presented himself as a social climber who had made his way mainly through personal effort:

I am writing these lines only to show the extraordinary path of a man who rose from a pupil of a one-class elementary school to the rank of Regierungsrat. I want to show my children and descendants how, without money, with an iron will, industriousness, and perseverance, one can not only prevail in the fight with life, but also rise to the highest positions. (23)

Wilhelm N.’s autobiography echoes Nazi propaganda with its emphasis on will and determination. He often used the term ‘tüchtig’, which means to be proficient at a certain type of work, when writing about his own successes or the achievements of others. In fact, this is almost the only positive quality he attributes to other people. Wilhelm N.’s view of society was Social Darwinist. He explained his success mainly in terms of his individual efforts and personality traits. Like other social climbers who made their careers in the Third Reich, he did not mention the exclusion of political opponents and Jews, or his membership in the NSDAP, as factors that might have benefitted him. He only recognised the work of his primary school teacher, and the education as well as the ‘valuable genetic material’ (8) he received from his parents. Looking back, he praised his parents for being ‘strict and tough’ and for making their children ‘capable and tough men and women’ (6). He also attributed his ‘leadership qualities’ (Führereigenschaft), which he believed were crucial to his success, to his upbringing (17).

The autobiographical accounts of other men who had careers in the civil service or white-collar occupations suggest that the logic of the modern career, which promotes individuals on the basis of performance assessments by superiors or formalised examinations, encourages both an individualistic perception of social trajectories and abstract notions of achievement. References to moral values and religion are less frequent in these sources than in autobiographies such as those presented above. Support from superiors did play a role in this type of social mobility. However, kinship networks were far less important than in the cases examined above.

Men who pursued modern careers made few connections between their professional development and their family lives. In this, they prefigured the completely individualised trajectories of autosociobiography’s protagonists. The narrations of men like Wilhelm N. reproduced the gender ideology of the upper middle class, which made a categorical distinction between the sphere of work and the domestic sphere (Hausen, 1993). This distinction, which concealed female care work as a prerequisite for male careers, enabled narratives of individual advancement. The ideology of separate spheres was less suited to the situation of the families of craftsmen where at least in some cases women contributed to the business. This was even more the case in agriculture, where male and female labourers were not considered to have different levels of occupational skill, and where both spouses could contribute financially to the acquisition of property.

Nazi ideology served the purpose of enabling Wilhelm N. to make sense of his individual trajectory. In fact, Nazism succeeded in mobilising individual ambitions for upward social mobility. It drew on older debates about opportunities for upward social mobility. The regime promised new opportunities to those who were not excluded on political, anti-Semitic or racist grounds. At the same time, Nazism sought to redefine what counted as ‘achievement’ or merit. It condemned individualistic striving, which was portrayed as a product of liberalism. Instead, Germans were expected to devote their efforts to the collective interests of the ‘national community’. The regime created a wide range of symbolic and material incentives, new hierarchies and competitive practices. Nazism proclaimed that it valued all types of work, not just those based on academic merit. It sought to establish physical fitness, strength of ‘character’ and devotion to the Nazi cause as performance criteria (Hau, 2017; Roche, 2022; Thießen, 2020).

Interestingly, there is hardly a passage in the autobiography in which Wilhelm N. referred to his service for the national community in order to legitimise his personal career. On the contrary, he boasted about his individual success and achievements. The case of Wilhelm N. confirms the argument of the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler (2003: 142, 435), that the Nazi regime fostered a kind of ‘performance fanaticism’ and competitive striving.

Wilhelm N.’s autobiography also illustrates how the regime created space for ambitious individuals to prove themselves by putting vague ideological goals into practice. Historians have identified this as one of the peculiar mechanisms of Nazi rule that contributed to the radicalisation of the regime’s policies (Kershaw, 1998: 665–667). Despite his devotion to military values, Wilhelm N. did not present himself as a mere recipient of orders:

In Hagen, where I served as an independent director of the prison, there were no longer any limits to my work. I no longer had to ask anyone, I could decide for myself as far as the regulations allowed and no longer had to be considerate in my decisions. I was not content with eliminating unemployment in the prison and the low wages paid to prisoners, I went from employing prisoners to putting them to work. I strived for and achieved an income from the prisoners’ labour that was considerably higher than the costs the prisoners caused the state. The prison was painstakingly clean and had the reputation of being a model institution. (21–2)

After the war, former political prisoners accused Wilhelm N. of brutality against the inmates. These witnesses stated that the prison changed considerably under his authority. N. radically intensified prison work and punished those who could not keep up. He transferred a number of prisoners to concentration camps and used this as a threat, showing that he knew what awaited them. ⁶

Conclusion

This article aimed to historicise the concept of social mobility by presenting a variety of historical notions of social advancement that contrast with our current understanding. The three cases presented here illustrate typical notions of social mobility that circulated within the working class and the lower middle class during the 19th and early 20th centuries. These historical sources can also be used to reconstruct the socio-economic, cultural and political transformations that produced the paradigm of the educated and individualised transfuge de classe that is central to recent works of autosociobiography.

In the introduction I outlined four dimensions as an analytical framework for comparing the historical accounts of social mobility with recent works of autosociobiography: the underlying concepts of social mobility, the temporal structure of the movement through social space, the attribution of success and failure, and the personal identities constructed by the narrators.

The protagonists of autosociobiography are usually men and women who have experienced significant social mobility, rising from the working class to the educated middle class. This movement is presented as a linear progress through educational institutions. Autosociobiography offers a critical counter-narrative to meritocratic ideologies that emphasise academic achievement as the key to social advancement. The authors focus on the gradual personal transformations that they have undergone during their educational careers, often drawing on sociological theory to elucidate this process. The identities that these works construct are those of seemingly successful social climbers who are nevertheless torn between their social origins and the dominant culture that forces them to reject these origins.

In contrast, a majority of the narrators of life stories who were born before the middle of the 20th century did not aspire to secondary or higher education. Their aspirations were more modest than the trajectories of autosociobiography’s protagonists. For most of the 19th century, these aspirations often centred on the idea of leaving wage labour for a position of independence based on property and skilled work. Those who achieved such a position in the propertied lower middle class did not leave behind their milieu of origin. Instead, social mobility was associated with values that were shared by many working-class families, such as skilful manual labour, industriousness and thrift. In addition, families and kinship networks sometimes provided instrumental support.

In contrast to autosociobiography, 19th-century conceptions of social mobility did not necessarily focus on the isolated individual and his or her personal achievements. Instead, men and women often considered social advancement to be a family project. This changed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when desirable social positions in the middle class came to depend less on small-scale production based on property than on formalised credentials and individual employment by organisations. This shift also changed the gender relations around social mobility. To be sure, the older understandings of social advancement were gendered, too. But they often centred on the joint projects of married couples, with both partners involved in the economic activities of the family (albeit under patriarchal authority). In contrast, conceptions of social mobility that focussed on organisational careers and secondary or higher education appeared to be based exclusively on the achievements of the male individual.

Rather than presenting a continuous progression through educational institutions, the historical sources narrated social mobility according to different temporal patterns. They usually presented the end of elementary school as the first crucial juncture. Whether or not the narrators entered an apprenticeship at this point was important for their social trajectories. From the perspective of ambitious agricultural servants as well as craftsmen, their early years of adulthood in wage labour were destined to involve accumulating a small capital sum until they could seize the opportunity to buy a house and land, or establish a workshop. This step into ‘independence’ was closely linked to marriage. In contrast, the military, as a possible agency of social mobility, intervened in the lives of some men only after crucial decisions had already been taken. As a result, they could see military service as a way of readjusting their destinies.

The specific experience of social mobility shaped the way that people attributed successful social mobility. Those who aspired to a position in the propertied lower middle class perceived ‘industriousness and thrift’ as the key to success, but made room for contingency by referring to God’s will. The concepts of industriousness and thrift had moral connotations and applied to character traits rather than specific achievements. In the 20th century, as credentials, quantifying assessments of performance and formal career structures became more important for upward social mobility, such notions of merit were replaced by more abstract and objectifying notions of performance. On a more general level, however, the emphasis on individual effort and dedication has persisted since the 19th century.

The themes central to autosociobiography – habitus transformation and alienation – were absent from the accounts of those who aspired to the position of a master craftsman or to agricultural property. The aspirations of these men and women were widely shared in their class of origin. While the authors of autosociobiography often pursue the political goal of reminding their readers of the persistence of class distinctions (Twellmann and Lammers, 2023), historically, aspirations for social mobility often went hand in hand with conservative attitudes towards social hierarchies. Successful social climbers usually did not reflect critically on the conditions of their advancement. Instead, it was often men and women whose personal aspirations had been frustrated by the socio-economic conditions who turned their biographies into arguments for socialism (Gagnier, 1997). In this respect, the success of autosociobiography as a genre may be characteristic of a period in which educational mobility as a widespread experience coexists with persisting and increasing social inequalities (Friedman, Savage and Spoerhase, Introduction).

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-ecs-10.1177_13675494251398110 – Supplemental material for Before the educated and individualised transfuge de classe: Autobiographical narratives of social advancement in the 19th and early 20th centuries

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ecs-10.1177_13675494251398110 for Before the educated and individualised transfuge de classe: Autobiographical narratives of social advancement in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Alexander Mayer in European Journal of Cultural Studies